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 outhttp://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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