If you have looked through the portal, you will have noticed a whole bunch of little orange icon. These are RSS feeds. We use these for our blogs, groups, forums and uploaded materials.

If you click on the icon, it brings you to a page that you can use to grab the latest items for that category. You can use that page to have other programs and services such as Outlook, My Yahoo and Google reader automatically fetch these for you. This allows you to get feeds from multiple sources and keep updated on all of them in one place.

This video gives a brief description of what RSS is and how you can use it.

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Do you backup your computers?

You have a lot of valuable data on your notebook, home computer and office systems. If you do not have a backup strategy, you should get one. If you are simply backing up to drives that are within your office, what happens if you have a fire? That is why Online backup solutions have become prevelant.

Today I saw a unique software package that I wanted to share with you. It is called Cucku. OK, funny name, but a very cool idea.

What if you could backup to other computers that are either in your building or across the internet? What if those backups were secured in such a way that you could backup onto a buddy's computer and they couldn't access your data. Would you let your buddy backup to your system as well?

It's Social Networking to a whole new level. You can find out more information at http://www.cucku.com/

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I thought this was interesting

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So which comes first?

It really depends on what kind of company are you building.

There are a lot of great companies that provide a lot of great technologies that can be leveraged across multiple business applications. Look at Microsoft, Oracle, Linux, Sun, Apple, etc, etc. 

There are other great companies that use or create technologies to grow their business. Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, UPS, etc. 

BTW, when I use the word great, I know that is subjective ;-)

I would argue that companies like Google are transitional. They started as a Technology Business, licensing their new fangled search methodology to other companies. Their current prominent business model is all about selling advertisements. They build great technologies and GIVE THEM AWAY. They create their own Business Technologies. This is all about getting people to see their advertisements. And their business is much more robust than if they were still a Technology Business.

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I have been burning the midnight oil for the last week or so getting a new design and some new social networking features ready for the American Agent Network portal site.

Social networking is something that has become extremely important for businesses in today’s world. It is THE new way to do business.

Sure great sales people always did this. It's called their sphere of influence. With the tools available on the Internet today, it becomes much easier to expose yourself to not just your immediate sphere of influence, but your second and third generation spheres of influence. What I mean by that is that with the technologies and ever growing set of communication tools available today your sphere of influence can deliver your credentials easier to their sphere who can then deliver out agin to their sphere.

Think of moons revolving around planets which revolve around stars which revolve around galaxies.

You are the galaxy.

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I got to play with Surface when I was at Microsoft last year. It looked really cool and was fun to play with, but when I would talk to people about it, it was hard to explain why it was so compelling.

The following demo gives you an idea in 3 different scenarios how this can become a very useful technology.

Since I am now spending more time in the Real Estate space, it sets my mind to thinking about the great possibilities for a real estate office and mini conference rooms.

Take a look and let me know what kind of ideas it generates for you.

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I spent some time a few months back building an application that converts PowerPoint slide shows into Silverlight applications. I was very excited about it at the time and I think it has great future potential.

Working with Silverlight 2.0 I could see how far it had come since 1.0. The difference between the two was night and day. Silverlight 1.0 was really focused on animation and a pretty GUI versus real applications. Silverlight 2.0 is much more robust and provides a substantial subset of the .Net CLR functionality. It enables real business applications.

With Mix09 coming up, I am also seeing a lot of new stuff about Silverlight 3.0 already. There are a couple of great videos that demonstrate Microsoft’s intent to make this a real player in the business application space. Check out http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/03/10/silverlight-line-of-business-made-easier-with-ideablade.aspx and http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2009/03/09/the-knowledge-chamber-silverlight-3-0-for-great-business-apps.aspx .

So when I needed to take a piece of business logic that I had written in C# and move it to a Rich Internet Application, my first thought was to drop it into a Silverlight 2.0 app. I created the app and it was pretty straight forward adding the video portion, the branching and the business logic. It worked great.

Then I dropped it into the web page where I intended to run it. It looked great. Next I went to a business associate to show it to them. And of course what I saw was the beautiful Install Silverlight button. And when I went to install it, it wouldn’t install. Eventually I got the player to install on their system, but it took some time and a little bit of frustration.

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I have been away from the Real Estate industry for the past 11 years. I was raised in the industry (my parents owned a CENTURY 21 franchise), I spent a few years selling houses and Mortgages,  and my formative technology years were spent working with CENTURY 21. I was Director of IT for Century 21 of New England and Century 21 of the Southeast. When Cendant acquired  Century 21, I was moved up to Parsippany as the Director of Product Development for IT where my team delivered 18 products and systems in 18 months.

When I left in 1997 to open my own company, I was ready to see how the rest of the world used technology and how I could bring value to that world. Since then my company has provided services to Coca-Cola, Invesco Retirement and McKesson Corporation to name a few. But my heart has always remained with the real estate industry.

Real Estate is the profession that helps most people find not only the home in which to raise their family, but also the largest financial investment most people will ever make. It is an extremely honorable profession that has been much maligned.

A friend of mine, Don Martin, and I have known each other for 15+ years now. When he came to me and told me his idea about an opportunity to revolutionize the real estate industry (the American Agent Network) I wasn't too sure about it. I wanted to work with Don again, but I didn’t get the concept at first. As we started to explore the concept, I could clearly see how this was different. In fact the deeper we got into it, the more I could see how this really will revolutionize the Real Estate industry.

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I have worked with technology for over 20 years now and I am constantly amazed at the evolution of computer technologies and their application.

I originally opened my company eWise Corporation over 12 years ago and was focused on building Joint Ventures with businesses that had content but didn't have the knowhow to deliver it in the new world of the Internet and the Web. I began consulting as a way to fund these ventures. Those ventures never seemed to get off the ground because the businesses never really had enough skin in the game and didn't understand how valuable that part of their business could be. So my business for the most part of the last 12 years has been consulting. 

As I said, the world has changed. Smart businesses today understand that delivering product, content and services through the web is an essential business strategy. And some companies have used that strategy to deliver services in a high quality way that would be impossible without it. 

During the involvement with two recent joint ventures, I could see where it was time again for me to refocus away from consulting and back to my first love of product development. I decided that this required a change in my company's strategy and branding. That is to say: I actually should start branding my company :-) 

Since I saw several eWise names in the market, it seemed like I needed a name and identity change. So first I went looking for a name. I wanted something that was eWise(ish). I wanted something that communicated not just knowledge, intelligence and experience, but the mixture of these into something greater - wisdom. Since we are now living in a networked age, nSage was born with this inspiration.

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