How Commercial Printing Can Save You Money

Printing business cards, ads, posters, and mailers is part and parcel of operating a small business. In fact, around 85% of small- and medium-sized businesses with annual sales of not more than $3 million turn to small commercial printers for their printing needs. Commercial printing can not only be an expensive business cost, but it is also an essential part of product or service marketing. If one would look at the larger scheme of things, using the services of commercial printers can be budget-friendly in the long run.

Hitatchi Hard Drives

The Global Storage Technologies department of Hitachi (Hitachi GST) is pushing the limits with hard disk drive technology. Hitachi has developed a new technology that will allow the company to create 4-Terabyte drives that are expected to be put in production in 2014.

Hitachi drives utilize magnetism to read and write data to their drives. Their breakthrough technology for the new recording head is called “current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magneto-resistive (CPP-GMR).” On Monday, this new technology was unveiled during the 8thPerpendicular Magnetic Recording Conferencewhile at the Tokyo International Forum in Japan.

Hitachi will accomplish this by reducing the recording head size of the hard drives. Some of you might not understand completely how this works: if you compare the size of a big Sharpie marker to a freshly sharpened pencil, you quickly realize that the marker will take up a much bigger area when compared to a pencil while writing. This would mean that the new pencil (recording head) has an ultra-fine tip, and this results in allowing the writing and reading of more data on the same surface area.

The risk for data failure is potentially higher than with drives available today. If any of you have had the painful experience of a HDD failure, then you would quickly realize why this could be a double-edged sword. The good coming from all this is that other companies like Western Digital and Seagate are likely to develop new technologies to rival that of Hitachi, and will drive prices down further in the future.

The bottom line: this is good for consumers in the future, and for driving down the prices of current hard drives.

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Miro

Miro, one of the best applications and multimedia players combined for downloading and managing online video, is being prepped for an official Miro 1.0 release. The Participatory Culture Foundation is also in the hunt for a good PR consultant; this is clearly to provide as much good exposure for their big release happening within the next few weeks.

Miro, which was formally called Democracy, has been going strong with over 200,000 downloads in the last month alone. The application could use some great PR as the non-profit company which supports it is in need of donations to keep the project maintained well.

Both new and returning users will hope to see many improvements and features to entice new users. My primary complaint is the fact that there is no way to throttle your download speed within the application. This ranks as a significant problem for me, and possibly for others who need to use their computer while Miro is working.  However, that does not take away from the greatness of this application.

That one issue aside, Miro is a wonderful project that everyone should try. No other project gives you the ability to find, download, and manage video content so easily. I wish great things for Miro and the Participatory Culture Foundation. For now, you can check out the 2nd public preview which is completely free and available for most operating systems today.

When I get my hands on the final release I will be sure to break down the new features, and possibly even give it a review.

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How Managed Telecom Services Can Save You Money

Telecom (Photo credit: yum9me)

When it comes to your business, it is very important to save money whenever possible. This money you can reinvest into the company in order to expand your operation and to help it grow. There are many different ways to go about decreasing your expenses and to save money, and one method is through managed telecom services. Telecommunications is probably an expensive service you need to provide for your clients, in order to answer necessary questions and respond to issues customers are having with services and products.

Chances are you just don't have the time to answer all of these questions and you probably want to give the questions your attrition, but with so many other services in the office you need to focus on you probably just don't have the time. Paying individuals to come in and answer phones all day is expensive, as then you have to give them a full time hourly, or even salary based wage, and this is going to prove expensive. Instead, you need to instead look to outsource this kind of service. Outsourcing allows you to service the customers all while saving a considerable amount of money.

When you outsource the services you do not need to pay the full price for workers, which you would normally pay inside the United States. This saving along is going to give you more money to reinvest back into the business. Depending on how large your company is the more money you are going to save. Having the same number of operators in a foreign country is considerably less expensive than what you'd pay in the states, so this is a no brainer solution and capable of saving you tens of thousands of dollars per year.

You don't have to worry about the quality of the services for these individuals who will be answering the phones for you. You are able to provide all the necessary information to the telecom service provider you are going to use, and this is the same information those who are answering the phones have access to. Plus, all of the individuals are fluent in English, so you don't have to worry about clients calling and having to speak with someone who barely speaks English. This ensures you have high quality standards and are able to save money.

Related articles

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Firefox Extension: QuickProxy

This extension allows you to enable and disable the proxyserver settings quickly in Firefox.

This extension will be useful for those who either have a direct connection and need a proxy connection to access a private LAN....or people who use anonymous proxyservers.  ;-)

The great advantage with this extension is that it places an icon in the status bar which can be clicked to switch the proxy settings on and off. The settings are pretty much simple, "Manual", "Automatic" and "Auto-detect".

Related tools: Multiproxy.org

The manual setting allows you to set the proxy server in the options screen of Firefox and automatic uses the proxy server whose values are already entered.

Googling Logistics – What Are People Searching For?

If you begin typing in a Google search box you get a handful of suggestions with each keystroke as Google tries to guess your intent. There are many instances where Google does a fabulous job of virtually reading a user’s mind, and other times when the failures are so comical they end up as screen captures bouncing around the world of social media. But for our purposes today, we decided to look deeper into what users actually do end up searching when they search for logistic related terms and see what we can take away from the results.

Popularity

Utilizing Google’s keyword research tools and looking at exact match search queries (which limits Google’s tool to only exact instances of a keyword) we collected and parsed through hundreds of queries and assembled listings for only the most popular terms. The table below shows the estimated annual search volume on Google for these terms.

The more general the term the larger the larger the volume seems to be the rule of thumb when looking at the numbers from Google.  The most popular logistics related search is obviously the general term “logistics”. This, while not surprising, explains a truth that search marketing professionals have known for many years – volume of search does not necessarily equate to quality of visit.

For example, a logistics management company may see the volume for the term logistics and decide they should invest substantial time and resources into trying to rank out for the term “logistics” given the attractive volume. However, this term is likely very difficult to rank out for given the volume of content on the subject that already exists. Additionally, the term is so broad that it’s likely someone searching for the term “logistics” could well be doing research on the subject, seeking a definition for the term, or even looking for a job or a University with a logistics program. This is not only broad, but likely exploratory. Search professionals would look at the research above and look for opportunity that meets the criteria of 1) Likelihood to convert into a customer – and 2) Volume of search. Based on the particular company’s capabilities, the list above offers a multitude of high volume relevant options (“logistic companies”, “logistic(s) management”) as well as some high volume terms that likely will not lead to new business (“global logistics”, “what is logistics management”).

As logistics professionals, understanding how people search and the optimizing for those terms and offering content that aligns with their search intentions is vital for using the web as a tool to grow business. To do your own research, try Google’s free keyword tool here or use Bing’s comprehensive add on for Excel called Microsoft Advertising Intelligence which provides projected search volumes as well as demographic information for search terms.


About the Author
The author of this article is a contributor to viastore systems, a manufacturer of AS/RS systems, warehouse management software and conveyor systems.

How to Deal with Anxiety

Throughout my life I have had anxiety. Sometimes this anxiety has been a hindrance to achieving my desires in life, and sometimes it hasn't. Sometimes I have sought medication to break the cycle of anxiety, but most times in my life I have chosen to live without taking medicine for it. But since I choose to mostly live without medication, I do have an interest in behavioral modification methods for minimizing the impact of my anxiety. And one of those methods I have often seen is the idea that for 5 or 10 minutes per day, you should worry. About everything and anything that might be possible to worry. 

And then..... move on. And so I tend to do this. Whether by expressing worries about things, or complaining about things, I spend a short amount of time, most days but not all, worrying and/or complaining. Getting it out of my system, so to speak.

One of the most difficult things about the "Stay-at-home-Dad" job, for me, has been the social isolation. I have no close friends, and no close family members. I have nobody to enjoy a morning coffee with. When my daughters were younger, we didn't have any regular play groups, once my wife uprooted us for the first of two job relocations. Not having an office to work at, there is no equivalent, for me, of the water cooler.

And so I've found the practice of blogging to be my replacement water cooler. And I apologize to those that read this thinking I spend my days complaining. Because I don't, really. There are certainly some things that bother me, sometimes more so than other times. But I don't think that's abnormal. And that is something that I have learned through blogging, and reading the website blogs of others.