10:30 pm | 2 recommendations | 1 comment

Dimdim... odd name...great product!

I have been a huge fan of FreeConference.com for quite a while now. Making it another tool in my arsnel has become a great way to increase communication while lowering costs.

What has been missing is a "Live Meeting/Centra" type product of the same caliber, that is free as well. Well, I finally got my wish. Dimdim.com.

Dimdim is a free web conferencing service where you can share your desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam with absolutely no download required for attendees.

It is available in a free open source version and in a commercial enterprise edition which is capable of supporting thousands of attendees. These versions are available in both an onsite version (you host locally on your own server) and hosted (Dimdim hosted) configuration.

The main features:

• Built In VoIP capability
• Free version supports up to 20 users
• Supports PPT and PDF files for presentations
• Video Share Support
• Private Chat
• Annotations and Markup Tools
• Outlook and iCal Integration
• Shared Whiteboard
• Screen Share.

They are working on a Linux/Mac supported version as well as a Recording and Archiving feature as well. They should be available sometime this summer.

Downsides?

• The free version has ads and does not support corporate branding. If you would like to upgrade to a non ad/branded version, the cost for 20 user seats, unlimited use is only $99 a year. Considering Microsoft's live meeting costs over $800.00 for 15 users per month, this a excellent value.
• No application share. This is a feature I recommend they work on for future versions.

Visit them at www.dimdim.com

07:07 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

Contingency Plans

There are lots of options when it comes to uploading video to the internet. You can use your own server or any number of hosting services like blip, revver, youtube, veoh, vimeo, viddler, etc.

There are pros and cons to either DiY hosting or using a service. Either way, the result is the same. Your videos play on your site, and there are some kind of sharing or downloading options. However, it might make a difference where you put your videos...

We're starting to see some video hosts fold or focus on other areas of business. Off-Hand, I can think of http://videoegg.com and http://www.stage6.com . Here's what Stage6 has to say:

Stage6.com has been shut down. Thank you for supporting the service.

It's been a
wild ride, and none of it would have been possible without the support
of our users. Thank you for making Stage6 everything that it was.

So... what's your plan in case your chosen host veers away from serving your videos to your site?

Do you have one?.....

If you have one, how easy is it to implement?

Even if you hyperdistribute with a service like Tubemogul, if the host that you use to embed videos to your site folds, you're going to have to re-link every single video you ever posted. The quality might not be the same. The sharing and embedding features might not be the same. Worst-Case, you might end up needing to download all of your videos from the closing site and re-encode or re-upload them all to the new destination.

Either way, it's a hassle. Your best bet is to keep harcopies all the videos you upload so that you can "break glass in case of emergency".

11:18 pm | 0 recommendations | 2 comments

Twitter...my secret weapon in business...

I am the first to try anything new out there. Problem is I usually I find that I am bored with whatever the TechCrunch flavor of the week is pretty quickly. Twitter was one of these tools.

Microbloging (the act of blogging simple acts and thoughts from your phone as they happen throughout the day) was something that didn’t really appeal to me. I can barely find enough time to blog for Fast Company and my MVP Blog site. But I noticed something interesting. Many of my business contacts were updating their Facebook status via Twitter. I started following some of their exploits. Samples of some of their Twitters included:

·         SEA to SAN going home and escaping the rain!·         Headed to dbacks game with wife and friends. Go dbacks!·         In HI... Trying to get to Wikiki Beach...share a cab·         hard disk recovery complete. couldn't copy some files, but old enough they are in last backup. archive.pst completely gone though·         reading a good computerworld article about vista

What I realized was I was getting insight into these people daily lives and I had a new weapon to use when I ran into them, relevant yet personal information.

One colleague I ran into was amazed when I asked him very specific questions in regards to a trip to Egypt he had just returned from. Another friend was in Twittering that he was in Chicago so I pulled out my phone and sent him a list of must visit restaurants in the Loop (my old stomping grounds) that he should not miss. He was quite thankful but surprised at how quick my response to him was. I had now found my edge in the social ring.

My business partner asked how I knew who was where and what they were up to? I explained my use of Twitter (a product he also signed up for and quickly disregarded) and how I was using it to track friends and see what everyone was up to. He is now an addict and is using that edge to further his foothold with clients.

His latest message,  “On way to lax....to Hawaii”…hmmm...I will have to ask him to bring back some Kona Coffee while he is there. Good thing I knew where he was.

08:43 pm | 1 recommendation | Be the first to comment

Invitation to a Party

Many of my colleagues recently attended the Web2.0Expo in San Francisco. From over 2K miles away I followed those twittering the fine details, longing for a way to easily get to the West Coast. This expo captivated my attention because the world live web, by its very nature, invites each of us to learn.

Watching party2.0 unfold from afar reminded me of work on invitation leadership from William Purkey, Betty Siegel and John Novak who identify four ways people attend to life.

No Party People

Some people go through life telling anyone who listens, "There is no party." At work they say things like, "I know how this will play out. Why bother?" At home they nod in agreement to the awfulizing spewed on around-the-clock newsTV. They brighten a room when they leave it. Their words and actions intentionally disinvite others, implying people are irresponsible and incapable, while demeaning, diminishing, and devalueing the human spirit. In a live web world, they are static pages without even a contact_us link.

Parties Not For Me

A second group of people mope, "There is a party, but I can tell I'm not invited." While often hard on themselves, they are frequently harder on others: obsessed with policies and unaware of people's feelings, disorganized, boring, and busy. At work they spend more time on us than them. At home the neighborhood Jones' are eternally out of reach. In tech-terms, they're frenetic mailinglists you didn't sign on to receive.

Not Going to the Party

A third group announces, "There's a party, I'm invited, and I'm not going." They think, "I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough. I'm not interesting enough to go the party." Although it may seem counterintuitive, I know several charismatic leaders (and parents) who can only unintentionally invite others. Underneath their confident demeanors, they're uncertain and afraid because when whatever accounts for their success fails them, they don't know how to proceed. If they were software they'd be promising fantastical upgrade flops.

Party Time

The fourth group of people know, "There's a party and I'm invited, and I'm going. I may not be good enough but I might, I may not be with-it enough but I might, I may not be smart enough, but I might." People who intentionally invite themselves and others risk going to life's party. They are the ones who show up time and again; persistent, imaginative, resourceful, and courageous even when the going get tough. They are firm, flexible, and friendly, deliberately choosing fairness over equality and mindfully working toward the big picture rather than swatting at this moment's gnats. At home they are raising adults, not children. At work they appreciate relationships and value divergent perspective. Think social networks at their best.

Leading and learning in this evolving world requires us to personally invite ourselves, personality invite others, professionally invite ourselves, and professionally invite others. We do that through optimism, respect, trust, care, and intentionality.

From this will emerge a fifth group: those who see, "There's a party I can't attend physically, yet people will participate with me as if I were these." Let the cognitive surplus party commence.

----------

Marcia Conner >> www.marciaconner.com

07:25 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

EXCLUSIVE: Video of RZA Announcing Wuchess.com

Never say Adisa Banjoko didn't hook you up!

Wuchess is history: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pphl9CFwHMY

NBC 11 coverage of HHCF:  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VH8kBM2YDS8

 www.wuchess.com

-Adisa Banjoko

11:43 am | 0 recommendations | 1 comment

CIOs Decide: Is Flexibility “Naïve” or a Reality That Can’t Be Ignored?

Business leaders, whether they know it or not, are making important strategic decisions about workplace flexibility that will affect their ability to compete and thrive in the future.  And in my opinion, a number of them are not making the right choice.  Here’s what happened during a speech I gave recently to a group of CIOs…

While the majority of leaders in the room were genuinely interested in about how to develop an innovative flexibility strategy, one person raised his hand and said, “Come on, this is naïve.  Maybe flexibility will work someday when I can have monitors in everyone’s home so I know they are working.  Plus, I like everyone in the office at the same time.  I just don’t think you can get the job done as well any other way. You are talking about something that’s going to work for maybe 5% of my employees.  The rest just can’t be trusted to do their job.”  I could see a few heads nodding in support. 

As I thought about how to respond, another CIO raised her hand and said, “You know, I understand your concern about people abusing flexibility and the work not getting done; however, I will tell you that I have a son in college, and he lives his life completely differently than I did at his age.  Everything is virtual.  He has great “friends” in other countries that he’s never met before.  I do think we need to recognize this reality and begin adapting our organizations accordingly.”  I also saw a number of heads nodding in support.of her observation. 

There it was, as plain as day: flexibility was either “naïve,” or it was a reality that couldn’t be ignored.  I felt as if I were watching the broader cultural struggle between “the way we’ve always done things,” and “the way we need to start doing things” play out in real time. 

Which CIOs are positioning their organizations to adapt and grow in the future?  In case you missed the video “Shift Happens” (which I mentioned in an earlier blog) a report on the future of work by the UK-based management think tank Chartered Management Institute makes the answer pretty clear.  And it’s not the group who think strategic workplace flexibility is naïve.  

The report is titled, “Management Futures—The World in 2018,” and urges businesses to prepare for 16 “surprise scenarios that could change their future,” that include (synopsis from guardian.co.uk article):

• “An exodus from the traditional workplace caused partly by environmental pressure to reduce the carbon footprint or commuting and partly by demographic pressures of an aging population…leading to a blurring of the boundaries between family and career,”

• “A proliferation of ‘virtual’ companies, often small community-based enterprises without conventional business premises…(they) would have to compete for employees, who will become more footloose and less inclined to work for an organization that does not allow individuals to tailor the working day to meet their personal requirements..” 

What do you believe?  Is greater flexibility in how, where, and when the work is done and resources managed “naïve?”  Or is it a reality can’t be ignored?  

10:39 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment

Watch the Skies

In the Howard Hawks sci-fi classic about a UFO that lands in the
open skies of the North Pole, reporter Ned "Scotty" Scott warns the
audience, "Watch the skies, everywhere!"

Open Skies of another sort is under greater scrutiny than ever as a
consequence of the recent agreement between the European Union and the
U.S. that takes effect March 30. The agreement is a catalyst for change
in the way airlines do business and where they do business.

Open Skies opens up airport hubs between Europe and the U.S. to different airlines. Well, at least theoretically.

The immediate problem keeping more airlines from reorganizing their
take-off and landing slots to better serve passengers is the
incipient lack of slots. As a recent Financial Times article by
Roger Bray reported, "With runway capacity effectively exhausted,
something has to give. For each flight added, another less lucrative
service invariably has to be sold, scrapped or moved."

Apparently, the airlines and airports still need to figure out how to
open up Open Skies. Also hindering full exploitation of the new
agreement is the still-open question of when the second phase of Open
Skies will be adopted. The second phase calls for a relaxation of
restrictions on European airlines' investment in U.S. carriers, which
is a step Congress has been loathe to permit.

Meantime, Open Skies opens up a whole domino effect scenario in which
change could sweep right down the "travel chain" of not just airport
slots but luggage handling, airport operations, flight operations,
ground transportation, airline amenities, even loyalty programs.

I think Scotty Scott had it right when he said, "Keep looking. Keep watching the skies! "

Airline Futurist • Miami • www.amadeus.com

06:07 pm | 0 recommendations | 1 comment

Work/Life: Will the real Turbotax please stand up?

April 9: See UPDATE at the end of this article.

+++

With tax time approaching, spammers, scammers and phishermen are kicking it up a notch - with kid leather toecaps. Not only are their fake phishing sites getting slicker and sexier, they've even got customer service departments to respond to your cries for help.

Recently I looked up from wherever I had my head buried to note the looming tax return D-Day. Despite attempting each year to do my own taxes, I've caved in to H&R Block, running to sit beside one of their certified caftan wearing grandmothers or MG restoration experts, leaving relieved that someone with a certificate ok'd my number crunching. This year I thought, if millions of others can do it themselves, why not save my $300 and do likewise?

Of course, the task sank immediately to the bottom of my to-do tray.

No problem, just file an extension, right? Except that I'm on the road Downunder.

Well, surely I can do the modern thing and file this unremarkable form online?

Googling about suggests no – one needs to print it out and mail it in. Wait, the IRS says yes … via some "partner" sites. I find it a little disturbing that more and more sites, including the IRS, are directing you away to someone else's cyber-backyard – feels a bit like pulling away from the mother ship in a patched rubber dinghy with the mist closing in …

I thus landed on (what I thought was) the Intuit TurboTax site

http://turbotax.intuit.com/support/kb/general-program-issues/tax-essentials/605.html

which seemed to offer what I was looking for - "TurboTax Extension Express" .

Clicking on the rather obscure link leads you to a promising page:

http://turbotax.intuit.com/lp/ty07/extensionexpress/

then to a page with a strange, lonely box, asking for your login and user id.

https://www.turbotax-extension.com/ExtensionExpress/extFiling.html?prioritycode=4510900000

Something doesn't seem right. The license agreement and privacy policy links didn't work. All headers are missing. You can't even mail the page contents to yourself, the contents disappear in an email. Hmmmmm.

Like a fool I soldiered on, not thinking for a moment that perhaps, being Downunder, someone might have gotten in between me and the real Intuit. The technical term for this is "link-jacking".

I filled out the form.

It asked me for my social security number, which doh! I duly supplied.

I submitted the form, and soon received a suspicious "receipt" in my junk mailbox.

Who was this LYNETTE CHIANG, living in 1000 Main Street San Diego, a few thousand miles from where I live in the USA? Here's the receipt.

The system told me the request had been submitted, but strangely, I wasn't asked for any money. I rationalized they'd get me when I resumed my online filing.

On attempting to save the receipt as a PDF, I ended up with a blank page. I got uncomfortable, and wrote to Intuit via their Contact screen.

At least I thought it was Intuit.

From: support@turbotax.com
Subject: RE: Customer Service (#6565-98874206-9263)
Date: April 7, 2008 9:22:27 PM GMT+10:00
To: lynchiang@yahoo.com
Reply-To: support@turbotax.com

Have a great day!

Here's what it looked like

Oh woe is me. The above email raises several flags, for sloppy language, punctuation and the fact that the email comes from "turbotax" rather than Intuit - they say in several places on their site, "all our correcpondence will come from Intuit". But since I've been on the line for three days to a fairly helpful Call Center in India about a separate problem - trying to get my wireless USB modem working - how can I say anything negative about Geetha and not sound xenophobic?

Net scammers could well be rejoicing that their giveaway bad spelling and grammar might now be their best weapon, given that customer service is increasingly farmed out to foreign language call centers.

Feeling concerned, I told Geetha that I was going to report this to the IRS, but … the email bounced.

Slightly panicking, I decided to try and place a 90 day fraud alert on my credit report.

Via the (hopefully) trustworthy Federal Trade Commission Site, I navigated over to Equifax.com, one of the three credit reporting agencies.

Lo and behold, another online link, with a smiling woman also asking you for your social security number. Doggedly I filled it in and was dismayed when "nothing happened" on hitting enter – another telltale sign of something phishy.

https://www.alerts.equifax.com/AutoFraud_Online/jsp/fraudAlert.jsp#

I tried to call Equifax but was led around a phone labyrinth – the kind that say "good bye" at the end and hangs up.

Even the FTC site looked suspicious, asking for a barrage of info to be typed into a rather rudimentary HTML page:

https://rn.ftc.gov/pls/dod/widtpubl$.startup?Z_ORG_CODE=PU03

And then I read with dismay that fake credit card agencies are now the vogue:

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/alerts/fakealrt.shtm

Not to mention Turbotax admitting to being a target itself for internet fraud:

http://turbotax.intuit.com/support/kb/tax-content/tax-tips/6113.html

Now why didn't they tell me this is big bold letters on their homepage?

Finally, I thought I'd appeal to the Intuit/Turbotax community. I tried to go onto the TurboTax forum and ask the rabble for their smarts, but despite being logged in, it kept asking me to log in.

There was nothing about any of this under www.snopes.com either.

I really don't know what to do or what make of all this – calling anyone leads to endless phone menus. I've either been phished, scammed and spammed, or web designers are just getting sloppy – I'd normally berate them for that crime, but they'll get a stay of execution this one time.

Exhuming my long lost skills as a former software tester, I went back into the extension request site to repeat the steps using dummy data, and this time a brand new screen popped up asking me to pay $9.95 and enter credit card details. Hello Intuit, is that you?

I'll be damned if I'm going to stick in any more personal data!

Now if Intuit had a Customer Evangelist she'd be on the phone calling me right now on my Australian mobile 0420 968 967 or emailing me at my address lynettec at bikefriday dot com to solve my problem before I did any more PR damage – rather than have me scrambling about trying to contact them with no success. And the whole tax community would rise up and squash the scammers, like when our community recovered a stolen Bike Friday in Berkeley last year.

Remember, a community needs to be fed and watered – a slew of forums full of unanswered pleas does not a community make.

I really hope, for my sake, that Intuit/Turbotax Extension Express page is no more sinister than a bit of sloppy programming and mismanaged feature release. I've already experienced this in Australia lsat week - Vodafone's "check your balance" number simply told you to hang up and call that number. What ever happened to system testing?

I'm a child of the electronic age, but after this, I'm going to start championing pencil and paper again. Make that a wax pencil, the kind the Russian astronauts adopted – rather one that writes upside down in a vat of honey

Bike Friday Customer Evangelist the Galfromdownunder hopes she's utterly misguided on this and welcomes opinions from others. Now, is the H&R Block granny in the caftan available this afternoon?

+++

UPDATE April 9: After 2 days of frustration, I was rescued by some tech-savvy and CPA customers in the Bike Friday community who jumped onto this and the end result, after Intuit initially thought it was a scam, is daft but innocent. Thank you to Fred W in California and Bjorn in Seattle for the sleuthing:

Lynette,

Fred.

Later, after customers fingered Intuit's location, office, and helplines using whois.com and gethuman.com, I received a note from a human being called Glee, who sounded a little like Intuit's cyber-brunette:

I accept this message on behalf of Intuit. You will receive additional information directly from Intuit’s TurboTax Support. (Twice)

Before softening up:

Well, Lynette, we are indeed human. Some times we are so fast we trip over our own feet. J I’ve sent your note on to our wonderful director of Assisted Support and you will no doubt hear from him soon.
Good luck with your taxes and hope your time down under is fun.

/glee

Well, Glee it hasn't been fun thanks to you folks, but it brings a little smile to my face: Big Corp brought down a few notches to sit eye to eye with our fallible selves. It does make Intuit seem human, something I've been championing all along in this Work/Life blog. Now if they could just do it without frustrating their entrepreneurial staff and scaring the hell out of us. Consider this a case study in the dire importance of clear and present customer communication, from web to woe.

Later ... I still haven't heard from their director of Assisted Support, and my one remaining concern: has my application for extension to do my taxes been received by the IRS, or hasn't it? I did not sign up to be your beta tester, Intuit!

I guess it's time to take a trip to the post office with an airmail envelope and a stamp ... - LC

07:50 pm | 1 recommendation | Be the first to comment

Socially Awkward Networks

A woman, who as a girl in gradeschool taunted me enthusiastically, contacted me through a social network site asking if I planned to attend an upcoming reunion.

At first I didn't think much about it. I assumed she was on some committee for the gathering of once inelegant adolescents and she was contacting me as part of her new do-good campaign.

I replied in a perfunctory noncommittal way, and tucked her married name into my mental rolodex of people to avoid calls from if they appear on callerID.

She wrote again, reporting I looked healthy in my miniature photo and that I must be happy, how did I do it? Then she asked if we could connect directly on the site so we could correspond again.

When I mentioned to a colleague her reappearance in my life, he asked if I planned to tell her off. And what, explain I'm not keen to chitchat with someone who went out of her way to torment me for a decade and whose young face flashed before my eyes when Mean Girls debuted?

Clearly she’s unaware I harbor less-than-friendly memories of her, and in hindsight I can see her inhospitability was probably not aimed at me alone. But bam here she is.

This uncomfortable modern scenario raises an important question.

Should our social networks include only people we like, those we want to socialize with, and as my friend Jimm says, "Those we’d agree to take camping"? I don't believe they were designed to be personal discomfort-free zones. Do you?

Although nobody chooses to spend precious time with overtly unlikable people, part of the power from loose and tight ties, is the depth and breadth of our networks: who we know who knows others and so on. The people just beyond our close ties' collective intelligence represents our potential for connective intelligence.

If this former mean-girl (who has been nothing but sweet and cheerful in our recent communiqué) has a relationship with someone who can help me close an important deal or land a dream assignment, it should not matter she invited my friends to a slumber party in fifth grade while stridently leaving me out. However, what about announcing to everyone in the junior high cafeteria I'd sneezed peas out my nose (which I hadn't, it was mustard)?!

All social situations offer us the opportunity to be uncomfortable in unexpected ways. We shouldn't expect online social networks to be any different. It just seems easier to avoid the awkwardness when there's no auto-reminder in seven days you haven’t yet engaged.

---------------------

Marcia Conner > www.marciaconner.com