A Geek in Politics???

Congressman Bill Foster is a geek. Foster, a physicist with a PhD from Havard won the 14th Congressional District of Illinois this passed week. People were surprised to find out that he enjoys to program. Read the full article at CNet.

Just a shame he is not republican...

HowTo: Marketing Efforts of a Startup -- Part I

Ok, so Property Stampede LLC is still in its infancy. We don't have a finished product nor an office. We are working on setting up the mail server and have not decided on a design for our business cards. And yet, we already have users signing up for our early beta. We must be doing something right...

Before I go on with this post I would like to tell you a bit about my experience and knowledge in marketing. I have been self employed for 3 years. Being self employed I have learned a great deal about word of mouth marketing and first appearances. I have learned that customer service far surpasses technical expertise. Not to say that anyone can be an IT Consultant, but what I am saying is that by no means am I the most decorated consultant out there. I have no formal training, I have meet people that blow my mind away when it comes to technical expertise, but I have been extremely successful with my clients.

I have had my blog for almost 4 years, actively writing for almost 1 year. I have learned a great deal about online and offline social networking through my involvement in BNI, local chambers, linkedin and others. Building networks is important and essential to marketing a product, services or yourself.

The two things that I have learned is that great customer service and strong relationships with friends, family, colleagues and other complimentary professionals will build a great foundation towards a successful marketing campaign.

Now to our marketing efforts for the soon to be #1 Property Management Application on the web.

Step 1: Tell Everyone
Hey we are starting a company! Tell everyone! Tell family, friends, co-workers / colleagues, and clients. You may be surprised who is and who isn't interested.

Step 2: Get Domain Names
Its hard to find a good domain name... but guess what? You have to. You have to find a domain name that makes sense but contains at least one of your top keywords. Once you find a domain name, find one for your blog. Once you have those two, think about if your business is one that will go global in the future, if so register those domain names in the countries you think you would expand to first.

Step 3: Update Social Networking Profiles
For those of you who are knee deep in social networking sites, this is a no brainer. But for those of you who are just getting your toes wet, go sign up with linkedin, facebook, myspace and twitter just to name a few. There are hundreds more, many that surround specific industries. Pick the best ones to match your startup and be thorough. Fill out the entire profile and begin networking. If there is a Q n A section, join in the discussions and share your expertise. Don't be a slouch and don't just spam plugs of your startup the whole time. Provide valuable information and people will learn about your startup.

Step 4: Focus on Your Easiest & Cheapest PR, Your Blog
Be transparent. Tell your audience how your progress is going. Tell them what you are trying to do and your planned time line on completing it. Remember proof read and stay professional... but keep it personal.

Step 5: Tell Everyone! Again...
Tell everyone again. Point them to your blog. If you wish you could select the people who you think would be genuinely interested in your startup and sign them up for email subscription to your blog. Let them know that you signed them up and that they could unsubscribe at any time. Get traffic to your blog.

Listed above is just some of the things that we have done up to this point. I will post part two sometime next week.

Chris

The US Navy Makes a Much Needed Move

The US Navy announced this passed week that they are no longer going to purchase non-open systems and technologies for their IT infrastructure. This is a bold move, and one that I think is long overdue. I think tax payers deserve to have government agencies make purchasing decisions based on what is best for there agency and its customers, not because of the perks and free meals the sales rep from Microsoft provides you.

I commend government agencies that force users to use office solutions like OpenOffice, StarOffice or google apps. I commend government agencies for building their own servers and workstations and taking the time to load them with FREE Linux / Unix based operating systems.

I hope that more agencies follow in the Navy's lead, its about time that revenue from our hard earned tax dollars is spent more effectively.

You can read the full article at FCW.com.

Chris

New Google Product: Google Ad Manager

With Google's recent approval by the EU to acquire DoubleClick, there are combining their efforts to provide publishers with more advanced and intuitive tools to manage the sale of ad space. Google announced the beta of Google Ad Manager. Google Ad Manager will be a tool to manage small sales teams that focus on selling ad space on websites. This is really being created as a new feature from within Google Adsense and will be accessible from within the setup tab of your Google AdSense account. I am interested to see what power this feature will offer and will post more as I get to see the tool myself. The full announcement can be found at Google's Official Blog.

Chris

New Startup: Property Stampede LLC

I realize that I have not been the most consistent blog author lately and I am sorry, but I have an excuse.  So here it is...I have been secretly been involved in a startup, Property Stampede LLC.

Property Stampede LLC will be operating PropertyStampede.com which will be the first website of its kind, where property management software is joined at the hip with a rentable real estate search engine. Property Stampede's goal is to solve two problems, one for property managers and one for users looking to rent real estate.

Problem 1:
There are many many applications out there that claim to be a complete solution for a property management firm, but few really are. Very few offer the ability for the property manager to maintain complete accounting records. Even fewer offer online transactions allowing tenants to pay rent electronically. But most importantly, none of them allow a property manager to simply click a button and have their vacancies immediately marketed to the public. Not one!

Problem 2:
There are many websites out there where a user can search for an apartment or office space. Very few allow that user to compare the rent of a specific unit to comparable units in the neighborhood. Even fewer allow that user to look up neighborhood amenities, such as parks, hospitols, places of worship or airports from within that site. But most importantly not one of them allow that user to fill out an application for residency online. Not one!

Solution:
By combining these two services into one application, we can solve both of these problems. We can provide a property manager with a much more feature rich, cost effective and complete industry solution. Allowing the property manager to increase their appearance of profesionalism to the property owners and tenants. It also allows us to offer an improved method of locating rentable real estate by having a more complete listing service and as well as offer more advanced features that our competition can not. Creating a much more powerful feed of prospective tenants to property managers for no additional cost, allowing property managers to keep marketing costs down.

So if you are a property manager or real estate investor who is currently dissatisfied with your methods of tracking real estate and are fed up overpaying for marketing, I challenge you to learn more about our product by visiting our blog at www.stampedeblog.com.

Chris

Apple Macbook Power Supply

Ok, I am slightly embarrased to write this post seeing as I claim to be a computer technician, but I must. I recently had a problem attempting to charge my laptop with my power supply. The LED would no longer light up, my Macbook Pro would recognize the AC supply but would not charge.

So I went online and signed up on Apple's concierge to meet with a Apple Genius. He diagnosed it, verified that it was not working properly, and then notified me of my blunder...

The powersupply that I had brought in, which I thought was mine was a 60W AC Power Supply. A Macbook Pro uses an 85W. My wife and I bought our laptops at the same time, hers a Macbook, and at some point we swapped power supply's. My laptop burnt out her power supply.

Here is the problem, Apple should not have made the power supplies identical. They should have had some type of differentiation on them other than the fine print on the side that says 60W and 85W. Luckilly they replaced it under warranty, but man I feel embarrased.

Chris

Google Blacklist

Most likely a highly debateable topic is the mysterious 'Google Blacklist'. For the less familiar Google's Blacklist is a list of websites who have either violated Google's Terms of Service or have manipulated the system to get high rankings on their search engine. In short, Google's goal is to have the most relevant search results for its users and ad buyers. They do this by analyzing the links in and out of a website as well as the content on the website. The more relevant the content and the links in and out of the website the higher in the ranks your site will sit.

The blacklist is for websites that cheat or try to manipulate the system. There is a good article that goes in depth about one specific website that was ranked 1st, but is now blacklisted and finds itself on the seventh page of Google's search results. To read the full article go to BMighty.com.

I will later post how you can protect yourself from angering the Google gods so to speak and find your site on the black list.

Chris

Mac OS X: Cannot change volume

My wife recently had an issue where she could not change the volume on her laptop. When she turned it on, she would here the chime from the operating system as it shows the mac boot screen, but when in itunes, she could not get any sound from the laptop. I asked her some questions and did some research using Google and found out what had happened.

A few days ago she used her headphones to listen to some music without disturbing our napping infant. Well ever since then this problem has existed. I found out on the mac forums that someone else had a similar issue. When they plugged in their headphones they could hear sounds but when their headphones were pulled out there was no sound. The solution is to plug a pair of headphones into the headphone jack and unplug them repeatedly. For the guy in the forum it took 9 cycles of this to get his sound back, for my wife it took approximately 8. Strange but it worked.

Hope this helps.

Chris