LinkedIn - Reminder about your invitation from

I received reminders from LinkedIn from a business I know. I let them know that I don’t use LinkedIn but more than happy to keep in contact. What was interesting is the person is skilled with computers but they’d ended up sending invitations to their entire contact list without meaning to. The person said they’d select just the six people they wanted invitations to be sent to and LinkedIn ended up sending invitations to everyone in their mailing list. If this can happen to this person then it can happen to a lot of people.

LinkedIn was a bit annoying because after the first email on the 14^th of July it then sent a reminder on the 18^th at 7:39pm and another on the 18^th at 10:41pm. A few days later on the 25^th of July at 5:30pm and at 6:39pm reminders were sent. To me this is a bit over the top. I have to say a bit annoying. I did let the person know and they felt LinkedIn and high jacked their account so they weren’t happy. A few days later they felt LinkedIn tried to do it again to one of their colleagues. I don’t know if this was a design fault of LinkedIn or a user issue.

I really don’t think this is good enough. If people are sending out invitations inadvertently then it may be an issue with the user interface. On the reminder front a single reminder should be sufficient. This is simply over the top marketing by LinkedIn. I don’t use LinkedIn. I gave it a go for over a year but felt it offered no value to me so I made to effort to cancel the account. I certainly don’t want to be nagged into opening another account.

My suggestion is if you are going to use one of the social networking sites avoid giving the site access to your contact list. Invite your contacts yourself. That way you stay in control of who you invite and your complete contact list doesn’t end up in the hands of the social networking site.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au

Why do people keep putting a J on the end of their emails?

I thought this was really interesting. People keep sending me emails and at the end of the email there is the letter J. I had no idea why they did that or what it meant. One person said it is the way they write a smile at the end. Now why they picked a J I had no idea. But since they did it I thought OK, use the convention and write a J at the end of my emails to them.

As it turned out there was something more interesting happening. People are sending emails with the smiley face at the end of the message and some email clients convert the smiley face to a J.

For example in the email client (Outlook) I can insert the smiley face by selecting Insert -> Symbol and then selecting the smiley face from the characters presented. If I type :-) in Outlook this is automatically converted to a smiley. If I send the email to a person who has an Apple iPhone the smiley appears as a J.

What is then quite funny is because people see others sending them a J they like myself start adding a J to indicate a smiley and we start having a trend.

So next time you receive an email with a J at the end you won’t be confused. You’ll simply know the person is sending you a smiley. It may be a smiley or it may simply be a J. If you really want your smiley to appear as you send it, then you may have to resort to the less graphical smiley which uses the characters colon, dash and curved bracket :-)

If you’re using Outlook the character sequence will automatically convert to the smiley symbol so press Control+Z and undo the automatic substitution.

At last the mystery of the J has been solved.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au

MyAnswers has now been updated for Virtual Profit Sharing

MyAnswers has now been updated to be compatible with Virtual Profit Sharing.

Virtual Profit Sharing is the Online Connections loyalty reward program for customers of Online Connections and JustLocal. Virtual Profit Sharing or VPS for short, is our way of saying thank you to clients for referring others to our services. VPS is based on two principles. It is generous and when we benefit so do our customers.

You can check out MyAnswers at www.MyAnswers.biz and using your VPS member code you can now let others know of the solutions available.

Thank you for your support.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
www.JustLocal.com.au

Aluminium can recycling

I’ve often read that recycling saves around 95% of the energy required to manufacture an aluminium can from bauxite. I became curious as to how much energy that really was. As it turns out, each aluminium can our family recycles saves the equivalent of around 5% of our daily electricity usage. So next time you’re putting your recycle bin out you can feel pleased you really are making a difference to the world. Perhaps next time you see that thoughtlessly discarded drink can in the street put it in your recycle bin. The person’s thoughtlessness is your energy offset.

Aluminium Cans - Liquid Energy... Read More

- Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au

Apple iCloud should really be called Apple iSync.

There is a lot of talk about “The Cloud” and it can get pretty confusing to many people. Think of The Cloud as a push by computer companies to get people to run their services from centralised machines rather than on your local computer. This enables software providers to provide software as a service rather than a product for you to install on your computer. Many people already use services in The Cloud. If you use Hotmail, Yahoo mail or Gmail you’re using “The Cloud”. So really it is no big deal. Services were already being delivered via the internet before “The Cloud” came along.

In September Apple will be making its iCloud service available. But really, can this be considered a Cloud service? Not really. It is simply using the internet to provide centralised storage and then to enable attached devices to synchronise the data across devices. Thus my reasoning behind why iCloud should really be called iSync. Apple is about providing devices you carry around with you and from what I can see, they want you to have your data and applications installed on your devices. Nothing wrong with that approach at all. It has many advantages such as local performance is often better than services running on the internet and if you have no connection to the internet you can continue to work offline.

The problem with calling the service iCloud is people will be looking for the Cloud based services which are typical of how others are marketing “The Cloud”. This will confuse people. Of course calling it iSync is really not modern or trendy so let’s just put this down to marketers having poetic licence.

Hopefully that makes it easier for you to see the term Cloud will be used by many organisations in different ways. “The Cloud” sounds far sexier than “The Internet”, but what people really need to do is work out what services are being made available and how they can take advantage of those services. Whether it is called iCloud or iSync doesn’t really matter. It is about what the service will do for you.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au

Power usage calculator and power usage of various household appliances

Using the power meter I sell on the Energy Cost Calculator page I decided to collect the power usage for a number of devices around people’s homes and home offices. The aim is to assist people in determining the amount of electricity appliances use. By our family changing some simple habits we’ve been able to reduce our electricity to under half the average for our size of family. I’d estimate about a $500 a year saving for us, but if we were using the average the saving would be closer to $1,000. I know I’d prefer that money in my pocket each year and all done with very little outlay involved.

This level of saving far exceeds the savings made by installing expensive solar systems so anyone can do it. The best part is there is no up keep, almost nothing to be spent and you’ll achieve more than the government aims to with its carbon tax. Really if everyone just looked at their usage and changed their behaviour a little we could avoid the carbon tax and that would save us all a lot of money in the future. I’m pretty sure by now those who have installed solar systems have realised they’re not saving anywhere near what they expected.

The following are the items that I’ve measured and make available in MyAnswers solution 2112. The solution is available free of charge to those purchasing one of the devices on the Energy Cost Calculator page.

Telstra F2300 Answering Machine
Rank Arena LCD TV/DVD TL1951-BDTP
Acer Aspire One Series Netbook AV10
Toshiba Satellite Pro A120 Notebook PSAC1A-0QV03J
Epson Aculaser C1100 Colour Laser
Compaq 7500 17" monitor PE1163
Acer AL1715 17" LCD monitor ET-L2102.216
Epson Stylus TX210 All-in-one
Panasonic DVD Recorder DMR-XW300
LG Plasma TV 50" 50PS30FD-AA.AAULLH
Netgear Wireless Cable Modem Gateway CG814WG v3 (Optus)
Tefal Avanti Deluxe Toaster
TinyPro LED Projector 2009199
TEAC Std Set Top Box SDR161T
Kye Systems Corp. Multimedia Hi-Fi Speaker Systems SP-G10
JVC Television 25" AV-25LS
LG 6H Hi-Fi Stereo VHS/DVD player V782W
Ozito ECO 320 Lawnmower
Telstra Pre-paid mobile wi-fi
Sanyo Clock Radio RM399
Apple iPad 2
Panasonic 5.8Ghz Digital Answering Machine KX-TG4391AL
Target King Size Electric Blanket GW281

Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au

What is Office 365?

I've now had the chance to quickly review Office 365 and I can see some areas where I feel it could be better and some areas where I think it could really benefit micro and small businesses.

In a nutshell, Office 365 is Microsoft's attempt at providing software as an online service. You get access to Office web apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote), Email, Calendar, web site, collaboration, instant messaging and online meetings.

My focus is reviewing Office 365 for micro and small business users. It is important to review Office 365 against your needs. The plan marketed by Microsoft to this group of businesses is "Microsoft Office 365 for professionals and small business". The plan is designed for up to 25 users.

To quote from the Microsoft site you receive:

- A solution without dedicated IT staff
- Essential email, calendar and web site services
- Free online community support
- Month-to-month subscription

If I look at this list it really doesn't impress me that much. Most small businesses I know don't have dedicated IT staff, they already have email, calendar and in quite a few cases web site services, can already get free online community support (which I think is a poor substitute for decent support) and even though it is a month-to-month subscription, as a business you need to make a decision that will last you for some time.

I should explain why I think community support is often a poor option for users. First I find there are quite a few members on community support forums who are rude and obnoxious. Whilst most are pretty good, the few spoil it for everyone. My experience is you will be offended by these people at some point in time. I don't like putting my clients in a position where they can get offended. I've found some of the advice to be substandard (from well meaning people) to the point where users would damage their computer should they take the advice. Since free support is just that, if a problem is hard and requires some effort that is where a quality paid support person will make sure the client is looked after. The other aspect is I find those putting a lot of energy into forums tend to become blinkered to other options, often obsessively pushing their cause. Users may not get a balanced opinion when there may be better options. Users can make better decisions if they're assisted and provided with options and information in a relatively unbiased manner. I don't generally find that on community support forums. It is simply the way forums work.

My initial impression is the sign up is cumbersome for Australians with Telstra being positioned between users and Microsoft. For some this will create confusion and means they will need IT support for the sign up, which really shouldn't be the case. If you're not the type of person who can set up your own email then you will need assistance. I felt a number of the features such as SharePoint will probably not be used by micro and small businesses and the web site tool is very limited in what it offers.

I looked at the needs of a few of my clients (micro and small business) and in each case it would be hard for them to justify moving to Office 365. Office 365 does offer some good new features for them, but at the same time they lose features they need.

If you have a business that doesn't have a web presence, you are using your Internet Service Provider's email address, or worse, Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo mail for your business, and would like to be more mobile, then Office 365 could be a very good match for you. But do make sure you take into account what you'd like to do in the future so you don't outgrow Microsoft's service.

My aim is to assist clients by providing them with advice and guidance as to whether Office 365 can be used as a tool in their business. I know of at least two businesses who could potentially benefit from moving to Office 365.

The funny thing is if Microsoft had simply provided the option for people to upload their own html or PHP based site rather than their restrictive canned approach, I'd have quite a few more clients. There are some real benefits to be had from using Office 365, but the restrictions make migrating to Office 365 much harder to justify.

It really is a case of reviewing the client's needs and then seeing if Office 365 can match those needs, or whether a different solution is required.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au