The post also examines what the authors believe will be the next wave of technological innovation (and thus, opportunity for entrepreneurs), the “Hypernet”. They discuss why it’s too late to start a meaningful social networking company (I agree), and that even the space for creating social networking apps is quite crowded.

I found it to be an interesting, informative article and highly recommend giving it a read. You can read it here.

(Reprinted with permission from FilesDIRECT)

Image Source BYU Idaho

While this is most obvious (and easily calculated) in terms of the production of goods, the concept comes into play any time you or your organization need to make a decision among two or more mutually exclusive choices. For example, time management: let’s say your company has 10 employees, each of whom works roughly 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Thus, your company can do roughly 400 hours or work (give or take, depending on overtime taken, whether or not anybody is home sick, etc.) a week. How will you use that time? Remember: any time spent doing a particular task is time that cannot be spent doing anything else.

We were reminded about this recently by one of our clients, a company that specializes in pipeline and compressor analysis (and related work) for the natural gas industry. Most of the staff are programmers and engineers that design and work with the software used in this work. Recently, however, several staff members had been directed to do other work – set up and maintain the company website, etc.

“What’s the big deal?” you might ask. “So they’re expanding their capabilities and responsibilities. Is that a bad thing?” In many ways it’s not, except for our new friend “opportunity cost” rearing his head. In this case, the cost is two-fold:

1. Any time staff members use to work on the website, perform marketing or sales duties, etc., is time not spent programming.

2. These new tasks are outside of the staff’s skillset, thus, they will probably take more time to perform these tasks (and do them poorly) compared to someone who specializes in them.

This means your company is not doing what it does best, and employees may well be getting frustrated to boot.

The solution?

OUTSOURCE.

Long used in business and recently made accessible to small businesses by Tim Ferriss in his seminal work The Four Hour Work Week, outsourcing lets you (and your company) focus on what you do best (in our client’s case, pipeline and compressor analysis) and hire someone else to handle other tasks, thus allowing you to concentrate on working ON your business, rather than IN your business. In other words: do what you do best and hire others to take care of the rest. While there is a (measurable) dollar cost to this solution, it is generally lower than the (sometimes measurable, sometimes not) opportunity cost created by a lack of focus and misdirected efforts.

One of the worst culprits in in advertising; especially online. With the wide spread of education in the West and the invention of the “spellcheck” function in Word (and its spread to many other software platforms – including WordPress) there are only 2 reasons for something to be spelled incorrectly:

1. The writer is not a native English speaker: this, to me, is understandable. Even with tools like Google Translate you are probably going to make a mistake when it comes to either spelling, grammar or both. I don’t hold this against someone in a direct communication (an email, a support request, etc.). But it is still not an acceptable excuse in sales and marketing. Whatever your native tongue, if you can’t be bothered to check your work before you release it to the public, I am not interested in doing business with you – especially if you offer a service like SEO or SEM! If you can’t write well when you advertise to me, then I KNOW you won’t write well when you advertise FOR me. Which brings me to my next point…

2. Lack of attention: there are any number of reasons why a spelling mistake may have crept into some copy…perhaps the writer is a solo operator who doesn’t have someone to review their work, or the spellchecker said it was OK. Now, we all have bad days, and writing for the web has the advantage that we can often go back and remove or correct our work later (assuming it hasn’t been shared). But it all boils down to a lack of attention. That kind of sloppiness (over and above my personal dislike of poor spelling and grammar) always makes me wonder if the company’s sloppiness extends past their advertising to the rest of their work.

Unless it’s a brand I already know and trust, my default answer is “yes”.

SO! In the interest of helping my fellow advertisers and copywriters, allow me to refer you all to an excellent comic from theoatmeal.com called “10 Words You Need to Stop Misspelling“. It’s “edutainment” (apparently that’s a real word now) of the highest calibre – informative and funny.

Take a peek and let us know what you think.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

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I found the value of the predictions to be a little mixed, however…several predictions were repeated (which is probably a sign, I suppose, of the likely of the predictions coming to pass) and many weren’t so much predictions as descriptions of the actual, current state of online marketing (like “Regularly Creating Unique Content Becomes Essential”).

Several of the predictions, though, seemed (to me) to be worth paying attention to – here are my top picks:

1. The increasing importance and impact of YouTube (predictions # 13, 14 and, to a degree, 12)

2. More “Do It All” services become available (prediction # 20)

3. Increasing integration / use of mobile media (predictions # 21 and 22)

While some of the predictions don’t seem very predictive (like those fortune cookies that tell you you’re a likable fellow), I found a good amount of interesting “heads up” from industry insiders.

Overall, well worth a look. You can check out the original post here.

The continuing increase in computer processing power (as per Moore’s Law) is helping propel greater and greater scientific and technological advances, many of which are projected to be available to consumers by 2020. So, let’s take a look at the top 10 pieces of tech the near future will hold (thanks, Jordan Lejuwaan!):

10. Nanotechnology in Clothing

Engineers are working on ways to make clothing out of nanofibers. This will not only make clothes much more comfortable and durable, but will allow for the creation of completely waterproof clothes. Not only that, but a group of scientists is working to create fiber-based nanogenerators, which will generate electrical energy in your clothes from a variety of sources, such as movement, ultrasonic waves, and blood flow(!). Imagine being able to power your smartphone by moving around!

9. Robotics

Opinions vary among the geek community as to whether robots are awesome (think Rosie from the Jetsons) or terrible (think The Terminator. Or The Matrix). But clearly there are scientists who fall into the “robots are awesome” category, because they keep on improving them. Like this robot that can walk:

Or this robot that is teaching itself human facial expressions (can you say Uncanny Valley?)

In case it wasn’t clear, I’m in the “Intelligent Robots are Terrible” camp. Beware the robot apocalypse!

8. Getting Famous

This isn’t a technology of it’s own, but thanks to the Internet, and the popularity of blogging, ad networks (like Google’s AdSense) and video sites like YouTube, you no longer need to find millions of dollars in investment capital to get your work, ideas or business known around the world. Thanks to YouTube, for instance, even little kids can make thousands of dollars by advertising on videos where they show off their talents, like this guy here:

Almost anyone can start a website and create and market their business for a little (or no!) money and some hard work. The Internet has definitely leveled the playing field in business and, to quote Jordan Lejuwaan “…is the perfect tool for capitalism, entrepreneurship, and dreaming.”

7. Being Healthy

An American company has developed a commercial 3-D printer with a difference – it prints organs.

That’s right: this device will make medical transplants (a regrettably necessary procedure with the major disadvantage of requiring the organ to come from someone else) a thing of the past by building organs cell by cell, one layer at a time. Sample cells are taken from the customer, and then the machine uses them to build the new organ on a “scaffold”. Apparently they will be ready to print veins and arteries (for bypass surgery) in the next five years or so, with more complex organs like hearts or livers in 10.

And of course there’s nanotechnology – robots so small they can actually alter our genetic coding. Combine that with a greater understanding of which genes cause which illnesses, and many medical issues (from diabetes to aging) may soon be a thing of the past.

6. Generating Energy

While photovoltaic (solar) power is currently inefficient (especially compared to fossil fuels), new developments will soon mean that solar is not only the way of the future, but the accepted standard in power generation. According to noted futurist Ray Kurzweil, “the cost per watt of solar energy is coming down rapidly and the total amount of solar energy is growing exponentially. It has in fact been doubling every two years for the past 20 years and is now only eight doublings away from meeting all of the world’s energy needs.” Justin Hall-Tipping is the CEO of Nanoholdings and in his TedTalk discusses some of his team’s recent advances in nanoscale energy technologies, including a transparent film that can be stuck most anywhere (your roof, your windows, your cellphone, etc.) and will generate solar power much more efficiently than today’s solar cells. As he says in the video: “The power plant of tomorrow…is no power plant.”

5. Interacting

Augmented Reality is being touted as the younger, more useful brother of Virtual Reality – using a portable electronic device (like, say, your iPhone) to see information about a building, place, person or product just by pointing it’s camera at them (check out the Urbanspoon app for a neat example – just use the “Scope” feature in the “Nearby” section of the app). Kurzweil posits that one day, advances in cybertechnology will allow us to directly access the Internet through our brain, and will be able to have information about the people, places and items around us pop directly up into our visual field.

4. Getting Around

Hybrid cars are becoming more popular. Tesla is manufacturing luxury electric cars. Virgin Atlantic will use green fuels for their jets. However you cut it, oil and gas are on their way out, and alternate fuel sources are on their way in. Cool.

3. Computing

Let’s take a look at the progress of computers in the last 40 years:

Pretty much says it all, doesn’t it? Seriously, though, if you’re not familiar with it, I suggest you pop over to Wikipedia and take a look on the post about Moore’s Law. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Now, apparently, Moore himself said that his rule will no longer apply round about 2020, when it will no longer be possible to cram any more transistors onto microchips (thanks, Laws of Physics. Geez.) Does this mean our forward progress is going to slow to an Industrial Revolution level crawl once again?

Jim Tully at Gartner says no. The Chief of Research for semiconductors at the leading IT research and development company says the next step is to assemble chips molecule-by-molecule thanks to (you guessed it) nanotechnolgy. And apparently companies like Intel are researching ways to control your computer not with a mouse and keyboard, but with your mind.

2. Architecture

Architects and builders are definitely getting into the “Green” thing, finding new methods of designing and building structures that save energy (or generate it), reduce buildings carbon footprints and generally making them more livable – all of which are both excellent and commendable. A particularly interesting example is being built in Dubai – a revolving building with wind turbines between each independently-spinning floor, which will not only power the building but several surrounding buildings too.

1. Prosthetics

Did you know that “cyborg” is a synonym for “awesome”? Here’s proof: this newly-developed bionic hand allows those who have lost fingers (or entire hands) to pick up and handle delicate items…AND it’s controlled by the brain…AND it doesn’t require surgery…AND it comes with plastic, simulated skin!

So there you go – the future isn’t that far away, and it looks pretty cool.

During the winter, we spend a lot of money to heat our building.  At the same time, we spend a lot of money to cool our server room.  We got our furnace going strong and our air-con going full blast 24/7.  What a waste of energy!

We implemented a couple of unique ideas.

1) When the outdoor temperature is below 5 degrees celcius, we open a vent and turn on a fan that blows outside air directly into our server room.  The cold air from outside allows our air-con to take some rest during the winter.

2) When the furnace is on to heat our building, we open another vent that brings the hot air from the server room directly into the return air of the ducting system.  We are essentially using the hot air from the server room to partially heat our building.

After implementing these 2 ideas, we were able to save on average of $300 per month on our utility bills!

Sometimes it pays to go green!

Eric Sit

Like all of Common Craft’s videos, it is short, sweet and informative, using a metaphor many people understand to describe search engines, and then working from there to explain (in very broad strokes, of course) the basics of Search Engine Optimization. I’ve embedded the video here for your viewing pleasure. Let us know what you think about it in the comments!

As you can see from the chart above, both B2B and B2C marketers have found that SEO has the most impact on lead generation (though by a narrow margin in B2C’s case).

The report often focuses on budget allocation, and notes that most (60 percent) of survey respondents plan to increase spending on social media marketing  in the next year, which is easy to understand if you look at some of the study’s other findings: 68 percent of marketers surveyed have generated leads from one of the “Big Three” social media sites (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn), while 55 percent claim to have closed deals on leads from social media.

You can download the full report for free at Webmarketing123′s website. In the meantime, why not enjoy a handy infograph to summarize the data for you?

Here’s an article related to this:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/a-teenage-question-a-car-or-a-smartphone/

Eric