A Blog About Accessibility, Digital, Marketing, and AI
Stan is a seasoned digital strategist professional with broad Fortune 1000 and financial services sector experience. His specializations include accessibility, digital strategy and product roadmaps, large-scale digital projects, complex web redesigns, and enterprise website governance. Stan is also a published author and active innovator.
Want to send an alert to someone in a meeting when you know they can't conveniently answer a phone call? Send an SMS message.
Google Send to Phone for Firefox is an extension that enables you to send short text messages of web page content to your mobile phone. For example, you might text message yourself a phone number, an address, or directions that you find on the Web.
Get the plugin here: Google Send to Phone for Firefox
Just when I was beginning to think my FireFox popup blocker was broken, Pete Bevin pointed out that some clever sites are getting around the Firefox default settings by launching popups from Flash. The good news is you can hack FireFox to prevent these new-fangled popups. To do this:
Fortunately, you can get around it:
Original article at petebevin.com
Having trouble with employee productivity? Read this article:
It's frustrating, isn't it? You define tasks that you need your subordinate(s) to do, provide them the resources they need, and send them on their way to get it done. You wait. You notice it's not getting done. You wait some more. It still isn't getting done. You call in your subordinates and inquire about the task. You get an ambiguous answer. You send the employees back out to perform the task. You wait even more. It still doesn't get done. What's going on here? According to Ferdinand Fournies, author of Why Employees Don't Do What They're Supposed To Do and What To Do About It, there are 16 specific reasons why.
Full Text: 16 Reasons Managers Can't Get Employees to Perform
This very cool mini-app for Mac OS X will help clean up your open windows without you needing to do anything!
Spirited Away is very simple utility for MacOSX. You just start it up and let it run in the background. Spirited Away checks each running application's activity, and if an application isn't active for a certain fixed time, Spirited Away hides the application automatically. It is, in effect, Spirited Away 🙂
I am playing with the settings, but right now setting it to hide unused apps after three minutes seems about right for me.
Get it here: SpiritedAway
Looking for a good domain name? Here are some helpful resources:
A very nice article just posted by J. Mark Bertrand that gives five excellent steps every serious writer should consider to improve their craft. My favorite:
Start reading books the way an architect looks at buildings
Read full article: The Master's Artist
Industry pundits are pondering the scalability limits of enterprise applications delivered on-demand.
Case in point is Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com has had great success in small to medium sized business (93 percent of Salesforce.com customers had fewer than 500 users). But can they scale to 10,000?
... in a May report based on data from 29 Salesforce.com customers, Nucleus Research raised questions about whether the vendor could support enterprises with more than 2,000 users. Noting that many large companies are Salesforce.com reference customers, the report found that most use the vendor "on a divisional or regional basis and did not have more than 1,000 users.
Cisco plans to scale to 10,000 Salesforce.com seats, but currently only has about 1,000 user live on the CRM.
Technology at that scale is one limiting factor:
Wettemann says it remains to be seen whether on-demand software is scalable enough for large customers. One issue, she says, is bandwidth, a concern when you have "lots of users hitting a remote database somewhere."
Perhaps even more challenging than the technical scalability challenges are the end user conversion issues. Change comes hard to many people. In Cisco's case:
...many sales people are simply reverting to their legacy nonhosted CRM applications, to which they still have access...
Read full article at C|Net: On-demand applications face growing pains
MySQL makes some commercial inroads this week:
At the LinuxWorld conference this week in San Francisco, MySQL signed partners Novell and Dell to resell the upstart company's database and support service, making the product easier to procure. MySQL is also readying a release of its namesake database with features including stored procedures and distributed transactions, which large corporations often use.
Read more: Database start-ups bet on open source
Saying “No!” can be hard. Ramona Creel at OnlineOrganizing.com published a list of 20 different ways you can say no. A couple of favorites:
Read the complete list at onlineorganizing.com
Online ad sales to double in the next five years!
Another sign that e-commerce has come of age appeared yesterday as JupiterResearch predicted online advertising would reach US$18.9 billion by 2010 -- almost double last year's gross of $9.6 billion.
Much of that revenue growth will be stoked by search engine advertising, which garnered 40 percent of online ad sales in 2004...
Read full article at the eCommerce Times.