EasyStreet Business Blog

Google Challenges Microsoft SharePoint with Nifty New Service

Day Tooley — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 17:47:59 +0000

Small businesses who have attempted to create an internal Intranet know how daunting it is to set up and maintain. Google announced a new service today that makes it pretty easy. The service is called Google Apps Team Edition.

Company documents, spreadsheets, presentations and company calendar all are wrapped up in a tidy package for you. I tried it out. It took only about 5 minutes to create an account. By default the start page includes email and calendar with the ability to add/edit/share documents. Access can be limited to your company account holders or any/all can be made public.

Putting company information in a central location where it can be accessed by employees from wherever they are (work, home, travel) has the potential of enhancing the efficiency of a small business.

Take a look at my test site that I set up this morning.

You can create your own account at sites.google.com. Do you think this can be useful in your business?

PowerPoint - “Bullets are for the NRA”

Day Tooley — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 05:30:03 +0000

Please, no more boring PowerPoint presentations!

My mentor Seth Godin has been crying in the business meeting wilderness for 4 years about this. Part of what he advises:

Here are the five rules you need to remember to create amazing PowerPoint presentations:

No more than six words on a slide. EVER. There is no presentation so complex that this rule needs to be broken.
No cheesy images. Use professional stock photo images.
No dissolves, spins or other transitions.
Sound effects can be used a few times per presentation, but never use the sound effects that are built in to the program. Instead, rip sounds and music from CDs and leverage the Proustian effect this can have. If people start bouncing up and down to the Grateful Dead, you’ve kept them from falling asleep, and you’ve reminded them that this isn’t a typical meeting you’re running.
Don’t hand out print-outs of your slides. They don’t work without you there.

If you hope to have effective presentations as part of a successful business, read Godin’s entire post.

Sustainability - Being In Business For The Long Term

Day Tooley — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 16:53:19 +0000

Where does your company get its personality, its values, its integrity? I have found that every organization seems to reflect the personality of a dominant individual in the company. Sometimes it’s the CEO, but often it is a department manager or some other person with a strong presence. Identify that person, and you will understand how to do business with that organization. Or maybe, you will decide not to waste your time and seek a more dependable partner to befriend.

One of the pleasures of doing business in the northwest is the recognition of the importance of reputation and relationships. Throughout my 30+ year business career in Portland, I continued doing business with individuals that I had known during several generations of employment and job titles. There is a lot of talk about companies, but the bottom line is that people do business with people.

In a world where marketing spin attempts to overcome sub-par products and services, it is refreshing to see how some companies take the principled approach and reject the “quick buck.” This morning’s Business Section of the Oregonian featured Rich Bader in an article by Mike Rogoway that recognized EasyStreet as an important business citizen in Portland.

Sustainable businesses are very much like sustainable friendships. They thrive on shared values for the long term.

Back In Kindergarten - A Business Refresher Course

Day Tooley — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 04:35:46 +0000

After a hiatus of more than 6 decades, I found myself back in kindergarten this week. It was my first full week as a ParaEducator substitute for Portland Public Schools at Meriwether Lewis Elementary, Room 1, where Mrs. Parks was called 'Teacher'. I was the other adult present. The children called me 'Day.'

It might be more accurate to say that there were 25 five-year-old teachers channeling wisdom to 2 adults.

My primary responsibility was to help a sweet but disruptive little girl stay on track and get through her day. She had a 4-syllable name which took some effort for her to write at the top of each paper. I will honor her privacy by using an alias of 'Dulcinea' (from Man of La Mancha ). Sometimes Dulcinea believed she was more of an 'Aldonza.'

Being there was both fun and profound. The classroom landscape was rich in possibility and unpredictable. I hadn't realized that a return to the basics would be so refreshing. Remember Robert Fulghum's 1990 book All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten? His top 10 things were all there:

Share everything.
Play fair.
Don't hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don't take things that aren't yours.
Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat.
Flush.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.

Pretty good reminders for those of us in business too.

Pssst. Wanna Thwart Spam, Telemarketers and Junk Mail?

Day Tooley — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 00:00:14 +0000

Remember the frenzy in January, 2003 when the National Do Not Call Registry promised to block unwanted phone solicitors from calling us at home? Your phone-free dinners may come to an end soon.

Stop Telemarketing Calls - Unless you opt-out again before December 1st, you’ll have to put up with 31 days of telesales calls while your new request goes active. Telesales companies are gearing up to make your life a living hell for those 31 days.
Stop eMail Spam - Stopping it at the source is better than blocking it at your computer. I don’t have big hopes on this one.
Stop Junk Mail - Trees are disappearing by the millions and showing up in our mailboxes in the form of junk mail catalogs. I carefully remove the label from soup cans and put it in the paper recycle box before smashing the can for its recycle box. A years worth of can labels don’t weigh as much as 1-day’s worth of holiday catalogs.

Today, I spent 20 minutes and $2.64 (4 postage stamps and $1 Visa charge) to eliminate part of this avalanche of unwanted marketing junk. And I did it at a new one-stop website: ProQuo.com. Here are the 16 bad actors responsible for a ton of cr*p that I hope I stopped:

Four of these global-warming marketing mills required me to print out a letter and mail a signed copy. The Credit Card, Mortgage & Insurance Offers service (OptOutPrescreen.com) asked for my Social Security Number (I gave it) and charged me a dollar on my credit card so I won’t get offers for more credit cards.

The National Do Not Call Registry required an email confirmation but was really quick (30 seconds total). Here’s the success confirmation screen:

Now to sit and wait for the storm to pass. You might want to give ProQuo.com a visit.

My Daughter, Cisco And Now Microsoft Is On Board

Day Tooley — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 15:29:57 +0000

Unified messaging is finally official. Business communication will catch up.

My “non-technical” 13-year-old 7th grader was collaborating with classmates on her Mac the other night as she was doing her homework. Others were being contacted and added to the conversation. Emails and files were being exchanged. And, of course, some music was playing. These kids had their new school-issued iBooks for 2 weeks and were masters of them already.

Yesterday Bill Gates took the pulpit at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco to announce that Microsoft was committing to take the parents of these kids into “unified communications,” a term that refers to combining voice calls, e-mail, instant messaging and videoconferencing into one application.

Here’s the deal: In three years Microsoft believes there will be 100 million users of unified communications, which should provide companies with a 50 percent reduction in communications costs. It represents a $45 billion annual market opportunity (and that’s not counting the kids).

This is good news for businesses and for parents. In three years we can be buying stuff from Microsoft so that we can save some money on communication costs and understand what our kids already do today for free.

Does Your Website Make The Grade? Try Website Grader.

Day Tooley — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 16:55:55 +0000

As any parent knows, it takes more than good looks to make good grades. And good grades have proven to be critical indicators of future success.

School is now in session for your website. Website Grader is a tool that helps measure the effectiveness of your website from a marketing perspective. The resulting score is based on a variety of data points about a website including the structure of the site, popularity, traffic, search engine optimization, marketing features and a slew of other things.

Does this EasyStreet Business Blog make the grade? Well, everything’s relative. Here’s our grade as of today:

Website Grade: 71 (70% of websites scored lower)
Google Indexed Pages: 240
Readability Level: 7th Grade

Putting ego on the line, I compared this blog to a couple of larger efforts:

The New York Times website
Website Grade: 99 (highest possible)
Google Indexed Pages: 1,360,000
Readability Level: 7th Grade (ideal)

The Oregonian website
Website Grade: 81
Google Indexed Pages: 565,000
Readability Level: 9th Grade

The reports include analysis and suggestions for improvement. You can try it for free (for now). It just takes a couple of minutes. Go to WebsiteGrader.com and see if your website makes the grade.

Companies Outsourcing IT Services To umm… Portland, Oregon

Day Tooley — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 16:37:31 +0000

Tracing the Internet equivalent of a great circle route from New York to Bangalore, India, the New York Times noticed that many outsourcers were landing in Portland, Oregon. A leak in the Internet pipeline? Nope.

As we hire more engineers and scope further expansion of our data center, a Times article "Outsourcing I.T. To Unlikely Places, Like America" singled out EasyStreet as a Managed Server Provider who is helping other companies keep up. Among the quotes from our Rich Bader:

“We have four upstream Internet providers coming into our place,” said Rich Bader, the chief executive of EasyStreet Online Services in Beaverton, Ore., outside Portland. Among the three very high-speed lines, he said, usually one goes down once a month. “The trick is that we have enough spare bandwidth on the other lines to handle any outage.”

Click on the link to read the entire September 12th article.

Business Common Sense Is A Click Away

Day Tooley — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 19:06:16 +0000

There are few blogs that I subscribe to and read regularly. But some individuals are worth listening to and share insights that are very much worth my time as a businessman. An example is Seth Godin's Blog (which is a permanent link in the right column on this page).

Seth is a guru of marketing in the best sense of the word. He seems to understand motivation to action based on perception. He holds an MBA from Stanford, and was called "the Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age" by Business Week.

Yesterday (9/11/07), for example, Seth posted 3 short articles. All seemed to be on-target to me and worth pointing out to business owners and managers. Dip your toe into Godin's mind with the Big Ideas article. My guess is that you will want to hear more from him.

Who are your business mentors?

Older People Are Sticky

Day Tooley — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 17:25:20 +0000

It's been more than a decade since AARP aggressively attempted to recruit me for membership. And nobody ever asks for my ID anymore to see if I qualify for the coveted Senior Discount. But this morning's Wall Street Journal article New Social Sites Cater to People of a Certain Age led with the announcement that "Older people are sticky." That caught my eye.

Referrals and testimonials have been the mother's milk of doing business forever. The Internet has added powerful tools that many business people are using. My first one was LinkedIn. It continues to be a good way to keep connected to a sphere of people who can help one another in business. Young people continue to mob MySpace until they go to college and graduate to FaceBook, which is considered more adult. (OK, I have a FaceBook account too.)

Responsible adults now have some new places to hang out with their peers and share experience. These sites with names like Eons, ReZoom, Multiply, Maya’s Mom, Boomj, and BoomerTown, look like FaceBook — with wrinkles. All are free to join but require some time and involvement to be useful.

I took a look at Multiply which would appeal to those who want to be known in the community. Good choice for sharing with friends and family. But I really liked TeeBeeDee (their theme is "Sharing Experience to Thrive") as a place to connect based on personal interests. TeeBeeDee is new and has just received $4.8 million in venture capital.

Social networking in business is a 2-way street. While you can learn about others, others can also research and learn about you. For example, before we interview a potential employee, it is common to do a Google search on them as well as to look for their Internet footprints on the social networking sites.

Of course, you can share your networking experience on this blog as well by leaving a comment. What is working for you?