Google Wave is Making Waves!

Posted on August 26th, 2009

I was reading my eWeek this week and I read an article for a new product from Google called Google Wave.

After reading the article, I was confused.  What was it supposed to do?  It looked like an email system with extra features.

After sitting through the demo, I finally got the concept.  Google Wave is a new service that blends email, instant messaging, file sharing, and software collaboration into one giant messaging center.

In other words, this is Google’s vision of what collaboration should look like in 2009.  And I must say, im pleasantly impressed.  From a single application, all of your daily communication tools are combined into conversations called “waves”.  You can even have your own “wave” server because Google has made the technology open-sourced.

I believe this will be the future of collaboration as we know it.

Google Wave Screenshot

Google Wave Screenshot

Hiring Crunch in Beta Testing

Posted on August 23rd, 2009

Wonderful news from Mega Input Data Services, Inc.  A product that we have been working on for some time now is in its Beta stages.  That product is named Hiring Crunch!  Hiring Crunch was designed to fill a need in the marketplace for placing an inexpensive job board on company websites.  If you would like to be a beta tester, please visit Hiring Crunch.com and register.

Battle of the Python Frameworks

Posted on February 28th, 2009

Over the next week, I will be designing a workorder management system system that will be used by my application development business, Mega Input Data Services, Inc., in order to track projects done on retainer with our clients.

As many of you may know from reading my posts here lately, ive become an avid fan of Python and have been testing its many frameworks to decide on which one I like the best.  With that being said, here are the frameworks that I will be utilizing for my test:

  1. Django – Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.
  2. webpy – web.py is a web framework for python that is as simple as it is powerful. web.py is in the public domain; you can use it for whatever purpose with absolutely no restrictions.
  3. web2py – Free and open source full-stack enterprise framework for agile development of fast, secure and portable database-driven web-based applications.
  4. CherryPy – CherryPy allows developers to build web applications in much the same way they would build any other object-oriented Python program. This results in smaller source code developed in less time.

Each system will utilize the same web template and will be judged on the following criteria:

The last point is pretty subjective, however, it will allow for my point of view to be expressed on the use of the framework.

As a baseline, I will develop the application in PHP to which the Python equivalents will be judged.  Let the games begin!!!!

Happy New Year 2009 and Management Planning

Posted on January 1st, 2009

This is my first blog post of what should prove to be an EXCITING New Year!

Well, as customary for most people, I do have some New Years resolutions.  All of them are not related to me personally but are for business reasons as well.  I believe that just as an individual has some things about them that they would like to change, a business may as well.  To accomplish this, for business purposes, I and my management team, sit down right before the new year and make a management plan, budget, and monthly task list for the year.

The Management Plan consists of six parts: Executive Summary, Focus (products and/or Service Offering), New Innitiatives, Yearly Recap, Milestones, and Finances.  In the Executive Summary, as in most business plans, we summarize our management plan.  It is a good idea to keep this section to at least a page but no more than 2 pages.  As this is an internal document, you want to have this section setup in bulletted form so that it is easily read by your management staff.  For me, I can take the executive summary alone and keep myself on track; using it for a refresher of activities.

Secondly, in the body of the plan, we target our Focus.  Being in business, it is easy to stray off course as many new ideas come crashing into our business lives.  However, as in the business plan, you want to have a CLEAR focus on what you want to accomplish for the upcoming year.  I tend to, in this section, discuss new web applications to be built, service offerings, and if we are keeping or removing previous business interests.

New Intitiatives make up the third section.  As in the previous section, we take all of our new inititiatives and flesh them out as much as possible.  Whether they are simply new ideas or have full blown components, the idea here here is to place everything on paper so that it may be voted and decided upon whether or not it is worth your time doing.

In the next section, I always perform a Yearly Recap.  This section is used to document successes and to setup next years milestones.  We place financials (balance sheet and P&L) and milestones in this section and rate our performance.  Finally, we conclude this section with a SWOT analysis (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats).  Your question at this point is “Why are we doing a SWOT analysis in this section and not earlier in our plan?”  Great question.  Ill answer it in closing of this article.

Based upon information gathered in previous sections, we place our Milestones in the plan.  These are short, sentence based, date driven (month or month and day are fine) action items.  We place dates on them to help us track if we were successful or not in getting our milestones completed on time and if not, what items hindered us from doing so.

Finally, we conclude with our financial plans for the year.  This includes a budget, projected balance sheet, and projected P&L.

So, to answer the question of why we have a SWOT analysis in our Recap section and not one in the beginning of the plan is because the entire management plan, in my view, is the SWOT analysis.  In the recap section, I like to note for historical purposes what are SWOT analysis looked like for the year and how we overcame opportunities and threats and improved on our weaknesses by making them strengths (if possible).  Basically a scorecard.

To assist in your planning you can utilize either a paper based plan or an electronic version like the one at PlanHQ.  At MIDS, we will be launching our take on business planning and scorecard software in the first quarter of the New Year so please stay on the lookout for it.

In closing, a management plan is a great way to keep your business focused for the upcoming year and keep your business ideas fresh.  I wish you all a Happy and Prosperous NEW YEAR 2009!

The importance of a mentor

Posted on December 15th, 2008

You have finally took the “big step” and started your own business. No more worrying about cutbacks, bonus checks, your ex-boss looking over your shoulder, co-workers trying to keep you from getting a promotion, and the other daily corporate politics. You are your own boss. With that, comes a lot of responsibility. Now, you sign the checks, handle legal issues, write the budgets, watch the balance sheets, become the focal point, set the tone, and the other hundreds of tasks the entrepreneur handles on a daily basis. To many, this can be overwhelming. Running a business is more than just the skill that you may have; its all of the tangible items as well.

Considering you no longer have a boss to guide you, one way to get a feel of the business side of things is to obtain a mentor. A mentor is someone who, generally free of charge, serves as your confidante and offers you advice on an ongoing basis. Your mentor should have more experience than you both in the area that you are pursuing your business AND has been successful in that area for some time. They have gained a great deal of entrepreneurial experience over the years due to their business dealings and relationships with other professionals in the industry.  They can also assist you in making the difficult transition from employee to employer.

I will be dedicating a few posts centered around the importance of a mentor in the life of an entrepreneur over the next couple of days and weeks.

Turnkey Linux Appliances

Posted on December 5th, 2008

After visiting FreshMeat.net today, I stumbled across Turnkey Linux.  From their website, Turnkey Linux is an opensource project that aims to develop high quality softare applicances that are easy to use, easy to deploy, and free.

They offer a wide variety of packages/appliances from PostgreSQL database appliances to Joomla Appliances.    All of the appliances are based on ubuntu 8.04 LTS.  You can also use the ISO images and run them under VMWare or other solutions or install as a standalone package.

I have installed the PostegreSQL package on a test server and I must say that the installation was painless and extremely simple.  The server is up and running in my test environment and is accessible (with a few tweaks of the firewall) to other servers on my network.  It comes with an easy to use Webmin web based interface.

If you are interested in testing various products on a Linux platform and want a stable system to utilize, give Turnkey Linux a shot!

Use of Patient Focused Social Networks

Posted on November 30th, 2008

As many of you may or may not know, one of my long term interests for many years has been to write a software application that will allow patients to manage their own healthcare record. The product to do so has been namely called, PatientAssist.

Today, I was reading an article on Manhattan Research, which concluded that more than 60 million Americans are using Health 2.0 type applications. For myself, this is absolutely perfect timing. With the new healthcare agenda for President Elect Obama, and general social trends, I feel that this is a great opportunity to release PatientAssist formally to my readers. Its ability to allow patients to communicate to several outlets makes it a truly innovative platform. Ill be posting more information here as well as the PatientAssist website.

Password Protection

Posted on October 21st, 2008

Ever wanted to know how easily your password can be cracked?  With fraud on the rise, the need to keep strong passwords on your valuable accounts is imperative.  VIsit this website to see how strong your password combination is.

Assisting Entrepreneurs to become Real Executives

Posted on May 31st, 2008

As im sure many entreprenuers would attest to, starting a business is much like life in general. You must “grow up” and you learn best from your own experiences and the experiences of others. As you may have read in my previous post on the importance of a good mentor, often good mentors are hard to find and looking for that needle in the haystack is often very time consuming.

There are many websites that help the young business professional gain exposure, such as LinkedIn, and many others. However, where would a young professional go to gain valuable knowledge and and share that knowledge with others? This need has led me to create StartUp Endeavors.

The concept behind StartUp Endeavors.com is to provide entrepreneurs their own personal portal designed to harnest information from multiple sources and place them on one easy to use platform. Its more than just a forum, its more than just another bloggers website; its a place where entrepreneurs get things done.

Effective Powerpoint Presentations

Posted on May 25th, 2008

Throughout my college, including MBA, and professional career, I have come across a great deal of PowerPoint presentations. For those who may not know, or use them, Microsoft PowerPoint is the standard for providing presentations to an audience.  In most business settings, if not using Flash Based Presentations, presenters utilize PowerPoint to help them deliver a message to their audience.

However, during these presentations, there are common mistakes that individuals make when presenting to an audience.  I have identified some of them below:

  1. Too much wording on the page – It is a known fact that humans can read faster than one could speak.  Thus, in a presentation, many people make the mistake of putting what their entire message for that slide on the page.  By the time you have completed reading your text on the slide, your audience has started thinking about dinner plans and the reports they have to do for tomorrow.
  2. Using Different Types of Transitions – PowerPoint includes over 40 transitions.  Many people utilize all of them.  After a while, they become distracting to the audience.  In some cases, I have been told that the audience begins to guess which transition is coming next and not caring about your message.
  3. Too many slides – Many people, especially executives, like you to stick to the point.  Many people make their PowerPoint Presentations as long as book reports.  Once again, longer is not better.

Ways to make your presentations better:

  1. Think about what you want to say and convey it using bullet points.
  2. Decide on one transition and stick with it.
  3. Add subtle humor.
  4. Keep your slides to under 15 total.

Preparing for the Worst – A Disaster Recovery Plan

Posted on April 18th, 2008

Very early this morning, as I lay awake in bed, I felt a tremble for about one minute. During this time, it felt as if someone was hitting the outer wall of my house. Considering large vehicles come down my street, I didnt think anything of it for the first 20 seconds, but after that, i figured that this couldnt be a dream I was having. Then suddenly, it all stopped.

Arriving at a customers location a few hours later, I got the news of a 5.2 scaled earthquake that hit the midwest. After the initial shock set in, and thinking the world was coming to an end, I went about my day as usual. Around 11am today, for about 40 seconds, there were some aftershocks experienced. After this experience, I thought about my data. As the manager of a massive amount of data, including (but not limited to) source code, software applications, employee information, documents, etc, it would be a tremendous loss for me on a personal level, business level, and for our customers, a nightmare!!

However, it was a comfort to know that we have a disaster recovery plan in place. Since I started Mega Input Data Services, Inc. back in 2001, my second order of business was to establish a well thoughtout, disaster recovery plan. The plan included items such as

  1. Locating Servers in various parts of the country
  2. Performing Regular Backups
  3. Establishing “Hot Spots” in each region of the country so that we could re-establish business communications quickly
  4. Using a Hosted Phone system
  5. and many other items.

There are some steps that you can utilize to ensure that your data kept safe in the case of a disaster, whether natural or otherwise. I will publish this information in a detailed article shortly, but for more information, until then, please visit Mega Input Data Services, Inc.

Making good from the bad . . .

Posted on March 4th, 2008

Thank you all for your patience as I have reupdated my blog after its unfortunate mishap.

However, the downtime wasnt all bad. It allowed me to take some time to create this new website design and rearrange my priorities. With that said, I will do a better job of doing the following:

With that said, I would like to welcome you to the New Willie Pritchetts WebBlog!!!

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