AfterTheDotNet

Get yourself bookmarked with Socialmatic

There are a plethora of social bookmarking services available and anyone who has experience would tell you that these services are a good source of traffic to your website or blog if you have one. The second question is how to get bookmarked? There are a lot of services which allow you to bookmark yourself through one click on multiple social bookmark services. Some of the services that I find interesting are

1. Onlywire
2. Social marker
3. Social Poster
4. Get Bookmarked

Another service that has been launched by and online marketer Alvin Phang is called Socialmatic. The service is new and therefore is in Beta. One has to register before one can start using the service. There are a lot of features available which make the service interesting. Some of the interesting features are

• Automatic screen shot of the website bookmarked.
• Recently bookmarked websites on the front page of the Socialmatic website.
• A history log of the websites submitted. The logs also allow you to see if the website submission was successful or not.
• Integration with Firefox.
• Bookmarks are sent randomly to the bookmarking websites making websites less suspicious.

Personally I have not had a great amount of success with automatic social bookmarking and would like to know the  experience others have had. I will be using socialmatic and would provide updates on my experience.

Tags: blog, bookmark, community, IM, marketing, online, social, style, web

Increase your willpower by practicing it

Lifehacker is one of the website which I consider a treasure of knowledge. What makes Lifehacker so good is that the tips and tricks that are blogged are useful for all kinds of people. Gina does a great job.

Recently I came across an article called Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind - New York Times on Lifehacker which reviews the article of the same name on New York times. The article in New York Times has been written by Sandra Aamodt, the editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, and Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton, and shares results of various studies done on willpower. The article discussed various studies though it is not mentioned who undertook the studies and neither the detailed findings are shared. In the studies it has been observed that if a person uses will power when doing a particular task and does not exercise his will power on other tasks he might be involved in while doing the primary task, a person would be able to exercise self control better. For example if you do not want to drink too much at a party, then on the way to the festivities, you should not deplete your willpower by window shopping for items you cannot afford. Taking an alternative route to avoid passing the store would be a better strategy.

Willpower grows like muscles. The more you practice higher the success in exercising will power. It is not known whey willpower grows when one exercises willpower more, though the trick is to exercise willpower in the long run to grow your willpower.

[From Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind at NY Times]

Tags: blog, edit, IM, style, web

Saas in 2008 and beyond

Though Phil Wainewright predicted last year (2007) that 2007 would be year for SaaS. Though SaaS did gain momentum but it did not penetrate enough so that one could say that there has been a major shift. At the start of this year (2800) Phil Wainewright predicted a huge surge in the SaaS industry. I agree with him.

Phil observes that the main reasons for the surge are

1. SaaS is a service based industry. SaaS makes it easy for teams that are spread apart to work together without huge setup costs as web allows you to do that. Over the years the SaaS detractors have decreased because SaaS model is making sense.
2. Software vendors are shifting to SaaS. Software vendors are adopting SaaS. SAP and Oracle are one of the few software vendors who have shown keen interest in the SaaS model.
3. Economic conditions. With the fears of recession plaguing the world organizations are switching are looking for cheaper options for the expensive software they use. Since SaaS is a pay as you go model it seems like a good alternative as long as ISV’s can deliver.
4. Growth of SaaS platforms. There is a race for SaaS platforms. Earlier this year Genesis was launched as a platform for SaaS at the SaaS week. Companies like Oracle and Microsoft are in the process of making their products SaaS compatible which suggests that they also see a growth potential in this field.
5. Growth of virtual working. Increasingly people are working from different locations which will help boost SaaS development as it provides a cheap way to work from different locations.

Phil Wainewright’s article which has greater detail can be found at http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/wp-trackback.php?p=432. Another respected commentator on IT trends Jeff Kaplan has another post which outlines the reasons why SaaS can be successful which makes interesting reading.

Tags: blog, blogs, IM, style, trend, trends, web

Powerpoint cheats, tips and tricks

Some of the cheats (tips and tricks) for Powerpoint

1. Do not use bullet points
   More  information is at http://lifehacker.com/software/presentations/take-your-powerpoint-slides-beyond-bullet-points-266156.php
2. Zoom and Call Out Sections of Your Screen 
   You can use a third party application like Zoomit.
3. Dim the clutter
   If you want the viewer to focus on one thing dim out the other things on that slide. If you want to go further  then you can use clutter cloak for windows to highlight portions of a screen.
4. Screenshots with bigger fonts
   If any screenshots have to be added to slides then bigger fonts should be used in the screenshots to make them legible.
5. Do not embed too many objects
   Too much of anything is bad!
6. Spell Check
   Use it - it is a helpful!
7. Use color sensibly
   This is web 2.0. Use color where it is understated.
8. When presenting concentrate on your computer’s screen
   Do not look up to confirm what is shown on your computer is being shown on the screen. Technology and history tells us that it will be the same.
9. Turn off the screensaver on the computer you are using to project
   Unless a developer of a screensaver pays you for advertising his screensaver make sure you switch off the screensaver you are using to project your presentation.
10. Using Powerpoint at all
    A lot of people believe that presentations can be more interesting without Powerpoint. If you have  a strong reason to do that then go ahead.

 

The presentation on slideshare by ham which can act as quick reference.

If you are interested in enhancing your Powerpoint skills here are some helpful links

Presentation Zen - A resource for building professional presentations.

Powerful Pointers for Presenters : A great article and reference to online resources for building Powerpoint presentations.

Beyond Bullet Points - Link to the blog of Cliff Atkinson who is the author of "Beyond Bullet Points", a book on how to develop powerful presentations.

Really Bad Powerpoint - A PDF by Seth Godin talks about Powerpoint mistakes and how to fix them.

Garr Reynolds - The person behind Presentation Zen.

If you have some tips on Powerpoint presentations please share them.

Tags: annotation, blog, IM, online, style, web, web 2.0

Free online and secure spreadsheets at spreadsheets.com

The collaboration industry has grown over the years. Quite a few people find these application useful because they make working on the same document by different teams easy. Google Docs and now Windows Live are common examples.

More collaboration services have evolved which provide one service (Editor, spreadsheet and presentation) only. One such service is Spreadsheets at Spreadsheets.com. Spreadsheets is touted as "the easiest, fastest way to get things done. It functions like your online assistant, keeping track of all tasks, responsibilities and documents. With Smartsheet, you control the work, it doesn’t control you." Smartsheets provide solutions for a variety of industries, companies ranging from small business to Fortune 500, with a strong base of marketing and human resource professionals.

Some of the advantages of using Smartsheets are

• You can create, schedule, collaborate and assign tasks to others.
• The dashboard can be used to manage and view multiple sheet views at once.
• Collaboration: Real-time and scheduled collaboration (via e-mail).
• Set-up automated alerts and memos.
• Compatible with Microsoft Excel.
• Powerful reporting features.

Pricing

There are a number of account types to suit everyone. The free account allows you to create five spreadsheets, can have unlimited number of collaborators, can ue 10 MB of space with SSL encryption and free templates. The other versions are smart, brilliant, genius and Einstein with more space and branding thrown in.

The best way to try Smartsheets is to use the free account and test it to see if it suits your work style.

Tags: edit, Google, IM, manage, marketing, online, style

Ajax based website in 10 minutes!

Max Kiesler has developed a code that can be used to create a Ajax based page quickly - infact 10 seconds! It is interesting code and can be downloaded at http://twinhelix.com/javascript/htmlhttprequest/. It can be used as a start to your own rich client-side web applications that send and retrieve data to/from a server. On his website Max has some tutorials and examples for the same.

This code supports all browsers. Since the code has been created using the best practices therefore meets all the standards for accessibility. The code is easy to implement and demo page can be viewed here.

Tags: IM, style, web

Development platforms for SaaS (Software as a Service)

Force.com has been marketed as a platform for services for those who want to provide software as a solution. With the backing and experience of Salesforce.com, force.com is attracting a lot of attention.

The question as to why people believe that force.com has the probability of success as a development platform for SaaS as compared to others? Industry experts believe that force.com will succeed as a lot of internal team is big organizations and corporates are using Salesforce.com which is a CRM solution built by force.com. Over the years Salesforce has evolved into a trusted CRM solution specially for small and medium businesses because of its ease to user, scale and monitoring ability. The Salesforce.com development has also managed to build addons for different businesses which has kept the interest alive.

Success of Salesforce.com has ensured that SaaS based CRM’s for different verticals are likely to use Force.com as a development platform. This has been proven by launch of  VBioPharma Primary Care Edition CRM application which is targeted at the Life Sciences organizations. Every SaaS based CRM developers dream is to replicate Salesforce.com’s success even though it might be unintentional. 

There are others who have a different view on this. Renee Boucher Ferguson who is a senior writer at Ziff Davis Media, reports that ISV’s (independent Software Vendors) have snubbed Salesforce as a development platform. She refers to a situation which developed after the Open Source SaaS summit 2008 when Znet’s SaaS blogger Phil Wainewright conducted an impromptu poll where 250 ISV’s respondents were asked the following questions

1. How many people were considering building a SaaS offering using their own development tools and having it hosted by a 3rd party?

2. How many people were looking at a software+services approach?

3. How many people were considering Salesforce’s Force.com (this is the fun one)?

The results were surprising. Only 2 respondents said that they are looking at force.com. 40 respondents said that they would develop their own development platform and 10 respondents were thinking about using another developer platform. This is not good news for force.com given the fact that this poll was conducted by someone who is a known person in the SaaS vertical and the fact that it has been reported across the Internet does not help force.com. The main reasons why people do not use force.com is that it is expensive, not a true platform and the vendor lock in.

In the end one can say that there is great potential in development platform services as the development platforms would be used by SaaS developers based on the functions of the service.

Tags: blog, blogs, edit, IM, Internet, manage, style

Software as a Service - The fundamentals

Ever since online software like Google Docs and Zoho have been introduced the threat to Microsoft and other developers of office suite software has increased. In fact the IT world has coined an new phrase for the online software which is "Software as a Service". According to Wikipedia "Software as a service (SaaS) is a software application delivery model where a software vendor develops a web-native software application and hosts and operates (either independently or through a third-party) the application for use by its customers over the Internet. Customers do not pay for owning the software itself but rather for using it"

SaaS was initially thought of as a low cost alternative for a business to gain access to commercially licensed software. However, that is not the case anymore and this amply clear from the launch and success of Windows live page and Office Live Free Website. Some of the areas where SaaS has been effective is Customer relationship management, Video Conferencing, Human Resources, Accounting and Email. SaaS is different than ASP (Application Service Provider) as in SaaS the focus is on what the customer wants and not what the application developer can deliver.The success of Salesforce.com, which started in 1999, and has 390,000 subscribers has proven that SaaS can be a successful model. In fact nearly all the major IT companies have staked claim to the space as observed by Rick McGee, vice president of SaaS strategy for IBM Global Services.

There are many reasons why SaaS model is a popular one. One of them is the cost and work associated with deploying a SaaS model software. The cost of migration to a new version of a Software is a big cost for corporates and usually results in delay of work. This is not the case in SaaS. In case of SaaS model the burden of software deployment, maintenance, and availability is that of the service provider which makes it easy for the company deploying it.

There is criticism of SaaS model and there are some rightful concerns. The biggest one being data security. A post at Rocket Matter does deal with these questions. In the end you have to careful as to who is offering the service and how secure is your data with them before subscribing to any given software.

Software as a Service model has caught my fancy for sure. It seems SaaS is practical as it has a strong revenue model. In days to come I will be writing more on SaaS. If you have any thoughts please share it with me.

Tags: blog, email, Google, IM, Internet, manage, online, style, video, web