Jason's shared items
Todd Blome, partner in BMG CPAs of Lincoln, NE has announced the introduction of iDonatedIt, an iPhone / iTouch application designed specifically for use at the client level. Blome says “There’s obviously lots of apps on the iTunes store, but there are almost none related to income tax preparation, and there certainly aren't many, if any, created by a CPA firm. We think this app could really add value to iPhone using taxpayers. Additionally, we think the timing is good because tax time is almost upon us and because this is the time of year when many people are thinking about donating items to charity.”
iDonatedIt, which sells for $2.99 in the iTunes App Store, tracks the date you donated non-cash items to a charity, the charity you donated the items to, and the fair market value of those items. The applications builds lists and maintains full records (including photos) and allows the end user to email that report to their accountant.
Hmmmm …. I can think of a few clients that I’ll be recommending THIS to!!
gll
"Social data" is the buzzword that describes sharing aggregate or summarized data collected from or contributed by large numbers of users.
A good example of social data is Intuit Trends, an early alpha product available on Intuit Labs. Trends uses aggregated company financial data collected from the online version of the accounting package Quickbooks.
The application lets small business owners, managers and their advisers explore industry financial trends, share observations, and compare their performance with their peers and/or competitors.
Social data applications only work if data specific to individuals or companies is kept private and secure. Intuit Trends and other social data applications accomplish this by only providing access to aggregate or summary data, thus protecting the privacy of the data sources.
While the buzzword is new, the concept is not. Industrial companies have long provided product service and performance data based on information collected from their customers. But this has been expensive and hard to do.
The Internet in general - and cloud computing in particular - has changed this. With data rapidly moving from individual PCs and servers to the cloud, social data applications are much cheaper and easier to develop and deliver.
We've recently been briefed on over a dozen social data applications currently under development. These applications target a range of industrial and consumer markets.
Social data will be a hot field in the coming years and we expect substantial growth in the number, range and power of these applications.
Disclosure: Emergent Research has done work for Intuit in the past year.
For example, in college, to train for a 1500-meter race, we would train 40-50 miles per week. Two days we would race 20 laps around a 400-meter track; alternating one lap in 60-62 seconds and one lap jog. On the off-days, we would run 5-8 miles with a long run on the weekends. The goal is to peak on race day and acheive maximum performance. All that training would peak on race day when one has just over four minutes to shine, to run a personal best, and win the race.
How does that apply to business? We make decisons everyday and each decision has an underlying process. Understanding and applying that process daily prepares us for the big decisions. Good leaders practice and perfect decision-making and are prepared when on race day to make really difficult and far-reaching judgment calls. Good leaders consistently apply the same principles with all decisions. If one is inconsistent in the minor decisions, one will be inconsistent on the big decisions. If one makes poor decisions on the little matters, one will make poor decisions on the big matters.
The book Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls
states it much better than I and goes into greater detail about how great leaders make great decisions:"In short, people who make good judgment calls are hailed as good leaders. People who excercise poor judgment are considered poor leaders. It's that simple.
Throughout our lives, each of us makes thousands of judgment calls. Some are trivial... others are monumental... The measure of our success in life is the sum of all these judgment calls...
But what really matters is not just how many good judgment calls a leader made. Rather, it is how many of the important one he or she gets right. Good leaders not only make better calls, but they are able to discern the really important ones and get a higher percentage of them right. They are better at a whole process [of decision making].
Confused about how to use Google Wave, the new Google product that combines messaging, wiki-like features and group collaboration into a single app? You’re not alone.
To clear up the confusion, we recently published Google Wave: A Complete Guide, a feature-length article that explains Wave in plain English.
Now Gina Trapani and Adam Pash have gone a step further, releasing The Complete Guide to Google Wave. The book, which is available for free online, details all of Wave’s features – and some use cases – in 8 chapters. It’s a super-handy reference if you’re still stuck on how to get the most out of Wave. Recommended!
Tags: Google Wave, trending
Marketers rarely think about choosing customers... like a sailor on shore leave, we're not so picky. Huge mistake.
Your customers define what you make, how you make it, where you sell it, what you charge, who you hire and even how you fund your business. If your customer base changes over time but you fail to make changes in the rest of your organization, stress and failure will follow.
Sell to angry cheapskates and your business will reflect that. On the other hand, when you find great customers, they will eagerly co-create with you. They will engage and invent and spread the word.
It takes vision and guts to turn someone down and focus on a different segment, on people who might be more difficult to sell at first, but will lead you where you want to go over time.
Thoughts on Personal Branding
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Marketing podcast with Dan Schawbel (Click to listen, right click and Save As to download – subscribe now via iTunes
Dan Schawbel has turned himself into the leading voice on personal branding for Gen-Y. Want to know how a guy, while at the time still in college, took on and seemingly won such an important marketing niche? (Think there aren’t lots of brands that want to own some 20 something mind share?) He did it with, duh, personal branding, and a ton of persistence and willingness to work his tail off. The guy gets what is to me the supreme compliment a marketer can receive – “I see him everywhere.” But, it’s not just being there, it’s being there on message, on brand, day in and day out. Anyone wanting to understand how to build a brand, personal or otherwise, could learn a thing of two from Dan.
For this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, Dan joins me to talk about Personal Branding and his very successful book – Me 2.0.
In this podcast we cover:
- What personal branding is
- Important elements for personal branding
- Ways to differentiate yourself
- Who needs Personal Branding
- If your business brand can be too personal?
- Social media and personal branding
- Steps to implement personal branding
I’ve expressed some of my own opinions about personal brand vs. business brand in the past, (business isn’t personal) and while I fall towards more of the business brand as a long term entrepreneurial play, there is no question that you can more easily achieve many of your personal and professional objectives by focusing on building a strong personal brand.
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David Allen on Getting It All Done
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Marketing podcast with David Allen (Click to listen, right click and Save As to download – subscribe now via iTunes
Getting all the stuff you’ve got to manage done as a business owner, might be the greatest challenge of all. Then of course all the new social media stuff comes along and the job of managing it all just got tougher. It seems, to some at least, that monitoring, managing, engaging and following is a full time job.
I’ve always been a big fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD), but I think we may need his simple system for collecting, doing, delegating and deferring more than ever.
I spent a few minutes chatting with David for this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and if you’re one of those feeling a little overwhelmed these days I suggest you start with by grabbing Getting Things Done and then work your way up to his latest – Making It All Work. You can get David’s products and books at his Davidco site
There are so many layers to David’s work that I have found people who have changed their lives by adhering to the “2 minutes or less” principle while others have developed a deep sense of vision for their business because they’ve cleared the clutter for the first time.
In this podcast we cover:
- Components of the GTD system
- Tools for GTD
- Using the GTD system in an organization
- De-cluttering to move forward
- About Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life
- How to get involved with GTD
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Last night I bought the 27-inch iMac. Sitting next to it is a 24-inch screen. It is totally amazing how freeing this much screen real estate is.
The new iMac? You can’t even tell it’s not just a monitor. It is just barely thicker than my 24-inch monitor. It is faster than my MacBook and it automatically imported all my items from my MacBook. All without hooking up any wires. It’s nice to see how much better the setup process is on these new computers.
The engineering that’s gone into this is just totally amazing. It’s an “all in screen” computer and it sure makes my desk look cool and clean. It’ll be the centerpiece of my home studio as I build that out. The new mouse is actually my favorite thing. It has no buttons. You just touch it to scroll or click on things. It takes a few minutes to get used to it, the same way that it took a few minutes to get used to the iPhone but now I’m already tired of my old mouse on my Dell.
I also have a pretty new Dell laptop that I loaded Windows 7 on. Both computers are so much better than the previous generations it isn’t even funny. If you are running older Windows I HIGHLY recommend getting the new Windows. It is much nicer than either XP or Vista and runs faster and hasn’t crashed in two days, either (my Vista used to crash every few hours). Congrats to Microsoft.
Anyway, in previous years I wouldn’t have considered an all-in-one computer like the iMac but this one gets me totally over that fear. It’s fast, quiet, and looks ultra sexy.
One thing I’d recommend, though, for the iMac, is to get an Ergotron arm for it so you can position it higher on your desk. Or, do what we did at Microsoft: get a few reams of paper and put the monitor on those (the Ergotron arms look a lot nicer and free up your desk space).
I got the dual core version of the iMac. The quad core will be out in six weeks (my boss has ordered one of those). This one is pretty speedy, though.
Have you ever found that you’ve been leaving money on the table? It’s a frustrating feeling and one that many of us can relate to. I discovered that I’ve been doing it for the last few months – here’s my story.
I run Chitika Premium ad units on some parts of my blogs – particularly at my photography site on single pages. One ad unit that I’d had running for a while now was one that appeared above posts whenever anyone from the US arrives at my site from a search engine.
I like these ads because they don’t appear to regular readers arriving from RSS feeds, newsletters or other sites – just those people coming in from Google – PLUS the ads that show are contextual ads to the search that the person has just performed.
I’ve always found that the ads convert pretty well – but this week I realised that for months now they could have been converted ALOT better.
I made this realisation by making one simple change to one ad unit – here’s what happened to my earnings on that ad unit when I made the change.
Yep – the ad unit had been averaging around $37 a day – but in the few since making the change it’s earned around $108 a day on average – around 3 times as much!
Considering I’ve had the ad running for quite a few months now – I’ve been leaving money on the table.
OK before I tell you what change I made (and it’s so simple that I’ve been kicking myself for a week now) I want to really emphasise the take home message here – even though it is so very obviously – test your ad units!
Here’s the thing – the chitika ad that I did have in this ad position used to perform to the best of its ability. I’d previously tested it and made sure it was working well. However Chitika added a new option to their premium ads – an option that I ignored. In actual fact someone from Chitika told me to make this change months back – I got distracted (life’s busy) and never got around to doing it.
While I feel pretty stupid and am completely aware that I’ve cost myself thousands by not making this change earlier – I know I’m not alone.
Many bloggers are in the same boat. We put ads on our blogs, get them to a point where we think they’re well optimised and then move on to work on other aspects of our blog without ever coming back to make sure things are still performing at their highest potential. Ad networks change their offerings, add features and sometimes blogs just change and things that used to work well no longer do.
The lesson here is to revisit your ad units and to test if there might be someway to increase their performance. You might not see the tweaks you make bring in $70 a day like my one did – but over time the small tweaks add up!
What was the change I made?
The change was so simple – I just made the Chitika ad unit bigger. The ad unit I used to have on there was a 468×180 pixel sized ad. The new one is a 550×250 pixel ad unit. It’s considerably wider (it now takes up almost the whole width of my content area) and a little deeper.
It does push the content down the page a little but as it’s only impacting search refferal traffic and the content is still above the fold user experience isn’t impacted that much – but the ad performance is so much better (with 3-4 times the click through rate depending upon the day).
Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.
Learn From My Mistake – Don’t Leave Money on the Table!
