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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