In a new report issued on the first of the month, Forrester Research has asserted the importance of enterprise platforms for governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC). Pointing to big name corporate failures in the last decade, they argue that the value proposition for GRC software is clear, and they identified leaders in this growing market.
The open question from the research is whether enterprises will really see the need as being so desperate. Fear may be a great motivator, but GRC platforms have yet to prove that they're a piece of IT that businesses require to succeed.
Sponsor
GR What?
Governance, risk management and compliance platforms take a broad and complex series of business tasks and whittle them down to a central point of focus for the enterprise.
Basically, they're a technological solution for keeping track of programs of corporate governance, managing known and potential risks for a business, and staying in compliance with regulatory requirements. All these platforms incorporate varying degrees of workflow management, data visualization, content management, and reporting on related performance metrics.
It might surprise you that GRC platforms from enterprise software giants like SAP have been beaten out by much smaller vendors. But in an emerging market, it makes perfect sense that agile young companies can dominate big players who have come late to the game.
Close, But No Cigar
Integrated governance, risk management and compliance platforms present a new way to handle these business processes. Forrester itself published a report that predicted GRC would first "hit the big time" just this year. All the leaders in the market thus far have sold a respectable amount of customers on the notion that they decrease risk, boost overall efficiency, and make strategy and decision making easier.
But platforms for governance, risk and compliance still come off as a specialist product for large enterprises in volatile markets, rather than a core business tool. The ever-growing pack of GRC vendors have clearly defined the value they deliver, but not that they're something the enterprise cannot do without during a period of belt tightening.
Three months ago we reported that Ads Had Come to Twitter and it was a pretty big deal - until Twitter promptly said the word "sponsored" was only appearing on the site in error. Now the "sponsored definitions" of certain Twitter "concepts" have appeared on the site again - and they sure look legit this time.
These first ads probably aren't going to bring in enough cash to fuel a micro-app acquisition spree by Twitter, but this is the first clear public indication of one way the company is bringing in revenue. It's funny - the ads have been live for about a week now and no one but a fewsmall, alertblogs has written about them. It was big news three months ago and we believe it's still important.
Sponsor
So far the only two sponsored links we've seen cycle through our sidebars have been to the ad network Federated Media's Microsoft microsite ExecTweets.com (aggregating Twitter messages from corporate executives) and Universal Studios' CinemaTweets.com, promoting the allegedly offensive forthcoming gay-face movie Bruno. The ads only appear on the home page of Twitter when a user is logged in, not when looking at another user's profile page. Also included in the cycle is a link to a joint Twitter and Threadless.com microsite where visitors can buy Threadless t-shirts about Twitter. Apparently that doesn't constitute a sponsored link, but presumably money is changing hands somewhere. The whole world of Twitter is a green-field when it comes to rules of disclosure.
Perhaps these sources of revenue will help Twitter remain a viable company long enough for all kinds of questions about this brand new medium to be explored.
Dave Winer argued this Spring that people want to know how Twitter is going to make money because they might not like it. He told a story about learning while in college that Domino's Pizza used profits to fight Planned Parenthood. With all the time, energy and content people are investing in Twitter - many want to know how the company will monetize so they can decide whether it's an organization they want to continue investing in.
And so it has begun. There are ads on Twitter. What do you think?
Disclosure: Federated Media is also the ad network for ReadWriteWeb.
Peachtree Media Advisors has just released their latest report on digital media mergers and acquisitions. We posted their 2008 report back in January, and this is a mid-year 2009 update to that. According to Peachtree, there were 342 digital media transactions in the first half of
2009, which was 12.3% below the number of transactions in the same period for 2008. More notably, the total value of transactions was much less than a year ago. In the first six months of 2009,
there were $4.2 billion in digital media transactions - a whopping 61% decrease from the same period in 2008. And that $4.2B figure includes $2.5B from the Live Nation - Ticketmaster merger this year.
Sponsor
Despite the reduction in value of digital media deals, a couple of market sectors showed solid growth: Mobile and Enabling, Analytics and Ad Serving. However, the Social Media sector had the biggest drop, with blog/user generated and social networking deal values down.
You know that scene in Alice in Wonderland where Alice is tumbling down the rabbit hole past all those miscellaneous chairs and birds? That same feeling of confused dread is often how users feel when they're attempting to navigate a site that has never been tested. We know that developers pour their souls into their projects. But that's also why it's sometimes difficult (and even personal) to point out the flaws. A developer has to ask, "Do I want it built my way without compromise or do I want users?" If you want to run a business, rather than spending months speculating on what you think users might want, it's sometimes best to simply ask them.
Launchly is a web application review site where developers can upload screen shots and links and ask for user advice and feedback. Released this past week, Launchly appears to be a beefier version of Feedback Army with the additional abilities to track changes and request multiple rounds of recommendations.
Sponsor
The site allows developers to submit and resubmit their projects in iterations. Each iteration must be at least a week from the last one and new iterations are bumped to the top of the "New Launches" section. This placement in the "New Launches" section prompts user responses via Twitter and RSS. From here, developers gain a new round of suggestions, traffic data and social buzz aggregation. Older iterations are then stored in the "Iteration Archives" for review.
Says Minnesota-based Launchly founder Brian MacManus, "When my own launch day came, I did the typical submissions and SEO stuff but still found myself wondering what people thought of the idea and site in general. I turned to HackerNews and requested feedback there."
MacManus was thrilled with his feedback but unfortunately his post was shortly buried below a slew of other posts. He could resubmit for further discussion, but he'd lose the thread of suggestions he'd already received. In order to track his site changes and show the evolution of his own work, he created Launchly. MacManus is currently charging $40 dollars for the standard launch package and he plans to roll out two additional tiers to incorporate the added features of polls, custom sub-domains and usability testing.
The truly interesting part about this service is that it allows reviewers to see sites evolve as per their suggestions. In essence, Launchly creates a sense of ownership and site-loyalty for those who've contributed feedback. While it's too soon to say if the site will take off, it's a great way for developers to gain new insight into the projects they're often too close to. It's also a non-violent and civil way to settle team disputes and make a case for changes to stubborn executives.
If you were a little blue bird, with a good pile of money and a whole lot of hype, what would you buy to spice up your nest? There are so many little services being built on top of Twitter that we wouldn't be surprised to see some more of them acquired by the company soon. That would mean more features for everyday users and more usefulness for features loved by loyal early adopters.
Twitter has acquired two other companies so far, that we know of. Search engine and sentiment analysis service Summize became Twitter's own search engine and Values of N sold its assets so engineer Rael Dornfest could be brought into the company. Here are ten other startups we think that Twitter should consider acquiring next. Which kind of company would you most like to see become part of Twitter itself? We've got a poll below.
Sponsor
Is Twitter in a position to make more acquisitions? We suspect so. It has cash but more importantly it has stock. Think of it this way: Google is afraid of Facebook and Facebook is afraid of Twitter. Would startups bend over backwards to become a part of Twitter? We suspect most would.
Some of these we think are likely acquisitions, some less so. In making this list we considered both functionality that would be helpful to have added to Twitter's own site and technology that would be worth buying instead of just building in-house. Whenever a platform company builds technology that a number of other startups offer, there is a risk of scaring other people away from investing in development that the platform could just reproduce. Acquisitions of startups on a platform probably increase the appeal of development though, as it's a chance to get in on the game.
Quite Likely, if It Hasn't Happened Already
Bit.ly is the most full-featured and popular URL shortener on the market right now and was recently selected as Twitter's own shortener of choice, dethroning TinyURL. Bit.ly offers all kinds of smart analytics, from real time click tracking to semantic analysis for topic keywords from the links that people tweet.
One trusted industry source speaking on the condition of anonymity told us that Bit.ly servers "were moved into Twitter's racks months ago in preparation for this change." [Becoming the default shortener.] Bit.ly is becoming too important to Twitter to keep that functionality outside the company's own shop and the two companies share some investors. We will not be surprised at all if a Bit.ly acquisition by Twitter is announced sometime in the near future.
Could Happen...
Tweetmeme is another fast growing Twitter analytics services that tracks sharing on the service. With another chunk of new features just added today, the service is looking a whole lot like "Feedburner for Twitter" but with even more viral distribution possibilities. The Tweetmeme API is quite interesting and could compliment Bit.ly quite well.
Twitpic is a popular way to share images on Twitter. The site faces a strong challenge from ImageShack's YFrog, but independent Twitpic would be a cheaper acquisition and is already well known among Twitter users. (Twitter should probably look at Enjoysthin.gs, it's got the best user experience.) An increase in imagery on Twitter would probably offer the company a lot more advertising real-estate.
Tweepz is a fascinating Twitter search engine that acts like a directory that lets you parse your results using various metrics gleaned from Twitter. Check out this search, for example. Twitter could benefit from making this kind of search available to users, advertisers and researchers - and Tweepz has already built it. See also Twazzup, another company doing interesting things with Twitter data.
Longer Shots
An iPhone app company could be a good buy for Twitter, there's certainly plenty of options. M.Twitter.com is a good mobile service already but someone specializing in super high-quality Twitter apps for the iPhone, Android and Pre could be good to bring in house. It could be AteBits, makers of Tweetie. There may not be enough reason for Twitter to buy one of these companies, though.
A desktop Twitter app company could help Twitter increase user engagement. Many of the most serious Twitter users (though not all) swear by desktop access. Twitter could acquire the most popular and arguably most innovative desktop app, Tweetdeck, or it could bring Seesmic in house. Tweetdeck would be cheap and shares investors with Twitter. Desktop apps may be too limited in appeal to be a compelling acquisition target.
Geo-location could be a good feature to add to Twitter. Search by user location could be made much more meaningful and the list of things that could be done with it is very long. Brightkite is popular and well developed, Shizzow is pretty and wouldn't be expensive. On the other hand, browsers themselves will likely all become more location aware in the near future and Twitter may be satisfied with its current location data.
A semantics company could bring structure to the Tweets, making them more useful and easier to advertise against. Right now links Tweeted are semantically analyzed by Reuters' Calais and sent to Bit.ly, but we wouldn't be surprised if Twitter was interested in scooping up a small semantics shop and helping it scale so that analysis was being done in house. Twitter may feel like semantics don't need to get that close to consumer users, though. (Disclosure, Calais is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor.)
Topify is a widely loved service that intercepts your new Twitter follower notification emails and sends you much more useful ones. It's great but probably too easy for Twitter to just reproduce itself.
FriendFeed plus Twitter would be a match made in heaven. It would be an engineering powerhouse. It would be a step towards mainstream user adoption of FriendFeed, a service that can't make up its mind which end of the sophistication spectrum it's targeting. It's also quite unlikely to happen. If there's one related startup we can imagine turning down a Twitter acquisition offer, it's probably FriendFeed. (Though the investment laden and highly ambitious OneRiot is a close second.) None the less, it would be awesome if FriendFeed's cross-network aggregation, threaded conversations, groups, media support, search and more joined forces with Twitter.
Ultimately, it may be most likely that Twitter's next acquisition will be something vapid. A service that aggregates shopping Tweets, or celebrity Tweets, or something else that will fall short of taking advantage of the Twitter platform's huge potential to change the world. Twitter staff makes relatively simple use of its own service, so hoping that it will acquire companies that make it all the more powerfully sophisticated may be an early adopter's pipe dream.
Maybe not, though. We wouldn't be shocked to see Twitter pick up at least a few of the companies above. What do you think? Are there other services you'd like to see become part of the Twitter team even more than the above? It's a wild and woolly micro-content ecosystem out there - anything could happen.
If you're a developer, you're probably already running the version of Chrome released to the Dev channel, but many "regular folks" are hesitant to make this switch because moving from the stable release to the beta or from the beta to the dev release is a one-way conversion. You can't go back to an earlier build without re-installing Chrome. So how's another ordinary techie supposed to play around with all the cool new stuff coming to Chrome? The easiest way is to install a build of the Chromium browser side-by-side with your (stable) version of Google Chrome.
How to Install Chromium and Chrome on Your PC
First thing's first, if you haven't already installed a copy of Google Chrome on your PC, you should do so now. This new browser built on WebKit is winning converts right-and-left among the early adopter set these days, mainly for its blazing speed. From google.com/chrome you can grab the latest release or, if you're a little more daring, you can click the link to download the public beta version instead.
That was the easy part - the trickier part is installing Chromium, the open-source project that powers Google Chrome. You may have already visited the Chromium site over on Google Code in search of the download only to be confused when no obvious download link jumped out at you. Home, Docs, FAQ, Blog, Group, Terms - but no "Download." In fact, the only download link on the main page points you back to the stable version of Google Chrome. What gives?
They're probably not trying to hide the download from you, it's just a matter of knowing where to look. Developers get this but us "ordinary" tech enthusiasts may need a little assistance. You see, all the Chromium builds are all stored online at build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots. If you're a Mac or Linux user, this is where you can grab your copy, by the way.
To get the most recent one, scroll to the bottom of the page and click through to the files listed. The easiest way to install Chromium is to download the "mini_installer.exe" file. This is a simple executable that installs Chromium on your PC.
Make Chromium Extension-Ready
Once installed, there's one more step before you can begin playing around with extensions in Chromium - you need to enable them. To do so, you're either going to need to modify the Chromium shortcut or create your own new shortcut.
Windows XP
On a Windows XP computer, you can just modify the "Target" field in the file properties. To do so:
Go to C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Local Settings\Application Data\Chromium\Application\ and locate the file called "chrome.exe."
Right-click on the file and choose "Properties." Click the "Shortcut" tab.
In the field labeled "Target" change the text to read (and yes, you need the quotes): "C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Local Settings\Application Data\Chromium\Application\chrome.exe" -enable-extensions
Click "OK" when you're done.
Make sure this modified shortcut is the one you use to launch Chromium from now on. You may want to copy it to your desktop to be sure.
Windows Vista/Windows 7
On Windows Vista or Windows 7, you can't simply modify the "Target," you have to create a new shortcut instead. To do so:
Go to C:\Users\[User Name]\AppData\Local\Chromium\Application
Right-click in the white space of that folder somewhere and click "New" on the menu that appears.
Choose "Shortcut" from the menu to launch the Create Shortcut wizard.
In the window that appears, enter in the following where it asks you for the location of the item: C:\Users\[User Name]\AppData\Local\Chromium\Application\chrome.exe -enable-extensions
Click "Next" then "Finish"
A new shortcut will appear in the folder. Make sure this shortcut is the one you use to launch Chromium from now on. You may want to copy it to your desktop to be sure.
Launch Chromium and Install Extensions
Now that you have Chromium installed and modified, you can play with extensions. To install an extension, you simply click on the hyperlink for the extension which is usually labeled "extension_name.crx." A box will pop-up asking you to confirm, just click "OK."
Here are some extensions you can try now:
AdSweep: an add-on that hides advertising on web page you visit similar to how AdBlock works. It uses JavaScript to adjust the CSS of a page and is also available as a user script.
PageRank checker: a simple extension that shows the Google PageRank for the current web site.
Gmail Checker: One of the Chromium sample extensions that displays a toolstrip that shows how many messages are in your Gmail inbox.
Subscribe in Google Reader: Another sample extension which adds a button to the URL bar when a page has a feed that can be subscribed to. Clicking the button takes you to Google Reader.
BuildBot Monitor: A third sample extension which shows the current status of the Chromium Build Bot.
Chritter: a Chrome Twitter notifier that shows recent tweets in the tooltip
Delicious: the official alpha version of the social bookmarking extension. (Note: you may have to save the file on disk and then drag on Chrome window to trigger the install instead of just clicking on the link).
Final Note
Keep in mind that Chromium isn't going to give you the same everyday experience of using the stable version of Chrome. While playing around with it, the browser actually crashed on me a couple of times - two times too many to make it worth switching over to permanently. This may just be an issue with the particular build I installed and will be corrected in a future version, but that's what you get when you're playing with cutting-edge tech.
At least I was finally able to get my hands on the extensions and really see what they were all about. And for that, it was well worth the headaches. Extensions are incredible!
Has Twitter spam gotten a little out of hand? According to today's top story on Techmeme, it has. Apparently, marketers are calling for Twitter to filter out spam and other adult content from the microblogging service. You know, so their all-important tweets about the products and services they're pushing don't have to share the same web space as that other nasty stuff. But fighting actual spammers is still relatively easy for an end-user: it's called the "unfollow" button.
Ironically, if anyone's to blame for spamming our Twitter timelines, it's the marketers themselves. They've managed to trick our friends into spamming us with their messages instead.
Sponsor
If You're Getting Real Spam, Blame Yourself
We're not sure where anyone, marketer or not, gets off telling Twitter that it's their responsibility to filter the content that flows through their service mainly because Twitter is already doing so. The company itself currently addresses the spam issue by providing an @spamaccount where you can report spammers and other abusers in the Twittersphere. If the account in question is indeed a spammer, Twitter boots them from the service. That sounds good to us. Simple and effective...at least for the end user. (It's probably a nightmare to deal with at Twitter HQ).
Of course, Twitter doesn't want their service overrun by spammers - no one would. However, they're probably more concerned with wasting their resources to support these fake accounts than they are with the annoyance it causes for their users. But do they have it under control? Perhaps not - fighting spam is sort of like fighting computer viruses. You block one and someone makes a new one. The same goes for spammers - kill one spammer and another appears to take his place. It's an ongoing fight, not a plague that can be wiped out overnight through some magic filter.
Besides, what you consider spam, I may consider "valuable information about a product." Probably not, but there is a gray area there that has to be taken into consideration. Some spam is out-and-out spam, but other stuff may just be "hot deals" from a legitimate company. However, if you didn't want to see said hot deals, you might consider them spam. Still, how would you see them unless you actually followed that account to begin with? Or maybe you turned on auto-follow using a service like SocialToo? If that's the case, it's a little ridiculous for you to get annoyed when half your timeline turns into a slew of "buy this" messages - you only have yourself to blame for that.
Where Actual Spam Hurts Us
The only place that honest-to-goodness spam can really affect you on an everyday basis is not in your own personal timeline of friends' tweets, but when viewing a trending topic's stream or when doing a keyword search. In these cases, spammers hijacking a currently popular hashtag may show up in the timeline, potentially diluting the results with irrelevant information. For this reason alone, we support Twitter's spam-fighting efforts.
Even More Dangerous? "Tweet to Win"
What's actually more concerning than spam, however, is the new trend we'll call "tweet to win." Legitimate companies have begun using Twitter to promote a message - essentially an advertisement about their business' offerings. To cajole twitizens into "spamming" their followers in this way, they're offering prizes or the chance to win prizes in return. (Full disclosure: this author did this once and still regrets it).
This situation hasn't gotten out of hand just yet, but it seems like it's only a matter of time before it does. Because really, how many of you could resist yourselves if all of a sudden a company started giving away free Macbook Pros? Oh, apparently not too many of you because you've already spammed up trending topics today with #moonfruit. What's Moonfruit? Why, it's a company that's giving away a free Macbook Pro every day for 10 days. Is this a brilliant social media promotion (as Adam Ostrow of Mashable claims) or just a new, inventive way to junk up the twitterstream with advertisements? We think it's closer to the latter.
The only consolation in this particular case is that Moonfruit doesn't care what your tweet says, so it can just be appended to any ordinary tweet. That's not usually the case - most companies provide a message for you to re-tweet.
What's frightening about this "it's not spam, it's a message from your friend" is that it's really not. My friend isn't actually telling me that Moonfruit is this great new company they have just heard about and that I really have to check out. This isn't a word-of-mouth recommendation - my friend just wants to win a new laptop. They know this, I know this, and the company knows this. And that makes the message just as spammy to me as any other in-stream tweet from an actual spammer.
So, what can be done? Well sure, I could unfollow that so-called friend, but why would I? It's not like they do this regularly and 99% of the time, I like what they have to say. But while one day that friend is tweeting to win a Macbook, another may be tweeting to win something else. Even if only a small percentage of an ever-shifting group of my friends tweeted a promotional message every day, it would be enough to junk up my timeline.
Sadly, that's one kind of spam that Twitter can't really block. And neither can I.
Although I am a professional writer and blogger, although I keep up with the latest tech trends, although I am, might I say, something of a geek, I do not iPod. I don’t even iPhone. This is not a political nor even a religious position, it is simply the Way That It Is.
When Microsoft released the Zune, I scoffed. Until one day, I sauntered past the Zune display at a local Mega-Duper-Mart and, out of the corner of my eye, caught a glimpse of a sight so hideously ugly, so repulsive in all its aspects, that I stopped dead in my tracks. The Brown Zune. Truly glorious in its ugliness, the Brown Zune features design that puts Soviet prison designers to shame – a squat, brick-like shape sheathed in a brown exterior whose ugliness is only increased by the green highlights when the light hits the device just so.
I had to have one. And that dream came true one happy Christmas morn when I opened my present from my then-girlfriend – pure Brown Zuney goodness.
To be honest, it’s not at all a bad media player. The desktop software is pretty good, if a little resource-hungry; the sound and video are great; the device’s interface is at least as good as any other media player’s interface (yes, including iPod’s) – all in all, I’m happy with my Zune.
Except for one big thing. Although a firmware update some time ago added audiobook functionality to the Zune, in its infinite wisdom Microsoft decided they wouldn’t add it to the desktop software. Instead, Zune users need to use third-party software – Audible’s for Audible audiobooks, Overdrive for everything else – to transfer audiobooks onto the Zune. I am not an Audible member, so I haven’t really used their audiobook manager, but I do use Overdrive quite a bit. Unfortunately, it’s a little weird, especially when it comes to deleting audiobooks from your Zune.
One thing neither Microsoft nor anyone else has seen fit to make easy, though, is how to get audiobooks from non-Audible and non–Overdrive sources onto your Zune. Maybe you have an audiobook on CD that you’ve checked out of your library, or one that you own. Because of licensing issues, it can be difficult and in some cases impossible to find those files online – and in any case, why should you re-purchase an audiobook you already have in your possession, just for the “privilege” of listening to it on your Zune instead of on 18 CDs?
Now, you can rip the files and install them like any other music file, but you’d better listen straight through, because you won’t be able to resume playing from wherever you left off. You can also rip the files and edit the ID3 tags, setting the genre as”Podcast”, which will put all the files onto your Zune as a podcast, allowing you to stop and resume – but in my tests of this technique, the files came out in a random order that was useless. Since many audiobooks have tracks every 2 or 3 minutes, you can end up with hundreds of files for a long book, and searching every few minutes for the next one when you’re barreling down the freeway isn’t exactly a relaxing way to enjoy a book.
Fortunately, there is a way to make the Overdrive audiobook manager work for you and, with a little work (not a lot) you can rip audiobooks to your Zune, and remove them, quite easily. Here’s how.
Using Overdrive with Overdrive Audiobooks
The Overdrive Media Console is used most often by libraries for handling DRM’ed, time-limited audiobook downloads for their clients. My library, for instance, offers audiobooks for a three-week “Checkout”, during which the title is unavailable to other patrons. It’s not the greatest thing ever, but it’s a fair-enough compromise between publishers and rights-holders who would prefer people buy books and libraries and their patrons who are committed to the free exchange of information.
When you check out an Overdrive book, you download an ODM file to your hard drive which is opened by default with the Overdrive Media Console, which will download the actual book. Once it’s on your computer, you can listen to it in Overdrive, or transfer it to a device. To install it on your Zune, connect your Zune and then close the Zune software (which will probably open when your PC detects that the Zune is present). Now, simply select the book you want to transfer (unfortunately, Overdrive Manager cannot transfer multiple titles at the same time) and hit the “Transfer” button, which will open the Overdrive Transfer Wizard. The Transfer Wizard will find the Zune, then ask you which parts you want to transfer over—usually, you’ll select “All”, hit “Next”, and wait; when the files are all transferred over, click “Finish” to return to the Overdrive Manager.
Deleting audiobooks you’ve already put on your Zune is… well, it’s weird. If you delete the book from the Overdrive Media Console window, it deletes it from your hard drive, but not from your Zune. So don’t do that. Instead, you want to select the book and, in a stunning break with intuition, click “Transfer” as if you were going to put the book on your Zune. Wait for the Zune to be detected, then deselect all of the parts of the audiobook in the Transfer Wizard. Hit “Next” and wait for the Transfer Wizard to do it’s thing – think of it as replacing the files that are on their with the no files you want. Hit “Finish” and the audiobook is gone from your Zune.
Creating Audiobooks from Your Own Mp3s
If you have your own audiobooks that you’d like to listen to on your Zune, you’re going to have to do a little prep-work, essentially fooling Overdrive into thinking you have an “official” Overdrive audiobook. You’ll use a couple of pieces of free third-party software to make this all work.
1. Rip the Audiobook
First of all, if the audiobook isn’t already converted to mp3, you need to rip the audiobook. I use CDex for this, although you can use any ripper, even the one built into Zune. To save space on your Zune, you can greatly reduce the bitrate from what you’d use for music – the spoken voice simply isn’t all that complex. 128k is more than adequate for most audiobooks – 64k will sound perfectly good, even. You can also rip in mono, cutting the file size in half. If your mp3 convertor has a setting to optimize for speech, use it – it will make sure that the least data loss occurs in the richest parts of the human voice.
2. Merge the Files into One Big File
This step is not strictly necessary, but when it comes time to delete files (see below) you’ll be glad you did it. Use an mp3 merging program – I like mergemp3, which is free and easy to use – to combine all of the files in your audiobook into one giant mp3 file. This is much easier to work with – some long books take up 25 or more CDs, each with 10, 20, or more tracks – that’s a lot to keep track of! Using mergemp3, you just select the folder where your files are, hit “merge”, select a file name and a place to save the file, and wait a few minutes. Make sure you save the file to its own folder – this will be important in step 3.
3. Create the Guide File and Transfer with Overdrive
Now you have a great big mp3, but you don’t quite have something the Zune will recognize as an audiobook. What you need is a WAX file, which is basically the meta-information that defines the mp3 (or mp3s if you did not merge them) as an audiobook. To create this, download the Zune Overdrive Wax Creator. Before you run it, tough, go online and find a picture of your book’s cover and save it in the same folder as your ripped audiobook (make sure it’s in JPG format).
When you run the Wax Creator, it will immediately ask you to choose the folder where your audiobook’s files are stored. Find it, click next, and wait – the program will scan the folder, create a file listing all the mp3 files in the folder (which is why you want just the audiobook and the cover image in the folder), add the cover image, and open the Overdrive Transfer Wizard. Now, you can transfer the file just as you would any normal Overdrive audiobook.
Delete Audiobooks with Overdrive
What you’ll notice when you make your own audiobooks is that they don’t show up in the Overdrive Manager like “proper” Overdrive audiobooks do. And if you try to delete them the same way – by running the Transfer Wizard and opening the Wax file for your audiobook, then deselecting the files associated with it – the Transfer Wizard will give you an error.
So how do you delete your audiobooks? If you haven’t updated to version 3 of the Zune firmware, there’s a registry hack you an use to mount your Zune as a hard drive, allowing you to browse the directory structure and manually delete the files. This doesn’t work for people with up-to-date Zunes, though.
All is not lost, however – you can still fairly easily remove your audiobook files from your Zune, using Overdrive. To do so, initiate a transfer and click the “Advanced” on the screen that pops up after it’s detected your Zune. In the new screen, click the “Browse” button, which will open a new window allowing you to examine the contents of the Audiobooks folder on your Zune. Drill down to the folder containing the book you want to delete and right-click it – there’s only one option in the right-click menu, and that’s “Delete”. Select it, cancel out of the Advanced options, cancel out of the Transfer Wizard, and you’re done.
Hopefully Microsoft will add better support for audiobooks in the next version of the Zune Desktop – ripping audiobooks and listening to them on your Zune should be at least as easy as ripping music CDs to your Zune, which the Zune desktop software does automatically (it will even set that as the default action to take when you insert a CD, if you let it). Until Microsoft comes to its senses, though, it’s nice to know that you don’t have to carry a box of 26 discs and a CD player to listen to your latest audiobook. Like me, you can fly your Ugly Brown Zune with pride!
How many times have you heard stories of people who hired web firms to design and develop their web sites and either got substandard sites or the developer ran off with their money? Or what about the entrepreneur who “hired” his nephew/friend/daughter to design the site for free, and the results were disasterous and this small business owner didn’t feel comfortable offering much constructive criticism on a job done for free?
As a small business consultant, I’ve heard these stories so many times. And I go back and forth between feeling heartbroken and really angry on behalf of my clients, for what they endured before finally seeking help. That is why I decided to write this series of four articles on web sites for small business. Today, in the third article in this series, I’ll share with you my best tips for hiring a web design firm. Continue reading →
This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please click here.
First-time entrepreneurs are usually also first-time CEOs. When you look at your first business card that says CEO, don't forget that it is not necessarily telling the truth. You earn the title of CEO through your actions and your results. You still have your training wheels on.
Fortunately, there is probably more advice available on how to be an effective CEO than on almost any other subject. This chapter gives you a quick guide, but do invest the time to read the classics, particularly:
Sponsor
"The Effective Executive," by Peter Drucker,
"The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People," by Stephen Covey.
These are timeless classics. Their authors do not attempt to create any modern theory or expound on any particular business or market trend. The books work because they are based on observation. The authors observed effective people to find out what they did right.
The Effective Executive
Peter Drucker's "Effective Executive" was written in 1966. It is a slim tome and easy to read, even if the language is a bit dated. Drucker focuses on how to allocate time, because you can get more of almost any resource except time. His advice to find time for uninterrupted work is particularly relevant to today's multi-tasking world. He is also very clear about the need to allocate enough time for people. If you need an hour with someone, don't think you are being efficient by rushing through the meeting in 15 minutes.
CEOs allocate resources. The first resource they need to allocate is their own time.
One popular book today is "Now, Discover Your Strengths," by Marcus Buckingham. Drucker was a big proponent of accentuating a person's strengths rather than managing their weaknesses.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
"The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People," first published in 1989, is a self-help book written by Stephen R. Covey. It has sold over 15 million copies. Drucker observes the following habits in effective people:
Habit 1: Be proactive.
Change starts from within. Most people react to external forces. To lead effectively, you have to overcome that natural tendency.
Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind.
You cannot lead unless you know where you want to get to.
Habit 3: Put first things first.
This is similar to what Drucker recommends. You need to have a very clear view of what is important, so that you know what to spend time on. Note that this often means leaving your comfort zone by acting on tasks that you don't naturally like or feel competent in performing.
Habit 4: Think win/win.
Seek agreement and relationships that are mutually beneficial. In cases in which a win/win deal cannot be achieved, accept that agreeing on "no deal" may be the best alternative. In developing an organizational culture, be sure to reward win/win behavior among employees, and avoid inadvertently rewarding win/lose behavior.
Habit 5: Seek first to understand, then to be understood.
First seek to understand the other person, and only then try to be understood. Stephen Covey presents this habit as the most important principle of inter-personal relations. Effective listening is not simply echoing what the other person has said through the lens of your own experience. Rather, it is putting yourself in the mindset of the other person, listening empathetically for both feeling and meaning.
Habit 6: Synergize.
Through trustful communication, find ways to leverage individual differences to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Through mutual trust and understanding, people can often solve conflicts and find better solutions than would have been obtained through either person's own solution.
Habit 7: Sharpen the saw.
Take time out from production to build production capacity through personal renewal of the physical, mental, social/emotional, and spiritual dimensions. Maintain a balance among these dimensions.
Three Things a CEO Has to Do Well
This is all you need to do as a CEO:
Set direction and milestones (resisting the tempting distraction of juicy diversification). The ability to clearly say, "No, we are not doing that," is very important.
Allocate resources (both financial and human, starting with your time).
Hire and fire the top team (we have devoted a separate chapter to hiring an A-Team because this is much harder to say than do).
Making the Transition from Entrepreneur to CEO
Your average entrepreneur would probably say, "Yeah, right!" if told that they have to do only three things. The reality of a startup is that you usually have to do a bit of everything. You have to be product manager, if not the actual coder and designer. You become the chief marketing officer, chief financial officer, chief of just about anything that needs to get done.
This, of course, is unsustainable. You have to work out a transition plan that allows you to hire people to take over all the jobs that you currently do except the three CEO jobs.
Here are five tips for managing that transition:
Record how much time you spend on these tasks. Understand the process. You cannot hire for, outsource, or automate a task unless you understand it yourself. Look at this "chief of everything" phase as your chance to learn.
Recognize the reality that you are not an expert in these tasks. So K.I.S.S.
Understand the difference between "core" and "context" in your business. Core is what you have to do really well and do in-house. Everything else you can and should outsource.
Hire, outsource, and automate in proportion to the growth of your business. If you can manage five clients with everything else you are doing, and your two-year plan calls for 20 clients, hire someone who knows how to win and manage 20 clients (not someone who managed 1,000 clients at their last job). When you finally get the resources, there is a huge temptation to over-engineer.
Pay particular attention to hiring someone to do the one job that you love and could continue doing very competently (whether that is coding, design, marketing, sales, or finance). Holding on to this one job, your comfort zone, is hugely tempting. But it is a huge mistake that will prevent you from becoming an effective CEO.
In a new report issued on the first of the month, Forrester Research has asserted the importance of enterprise platforms for governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC). Pointing to big name corporate failures in the last decade, they argue that the value proposition for GRC software is clear, and they identified leaders in this growing market. -thumb-550x357-6363.jpg)
Three months ago we reported that 
So far the only two sponsored links we've seen cycle through our sidebars have been to the ad network Federated Media's Microsoft microsite ExecTweets.com (aggregating Twitter messages from corporate executives) and Universal Studios' CinemaTweets.com, promoting the 
You know that scene in Alice in Wonderland where Alice is tumbling down the rabbit hole past all those miscellaneous chairs and birds? That same feeling of confused dread is often how users feel when they're attempting to navigate a site that has never been tested. We know that developers pour their souls into their projects. But that's also why it's sometimes difficult (and even personal) to point out the flaws. A developer has to ask, "Do I want it built my way without compromise or do I want users?" If you want to run a business, rather than spending months speculating on what you think users might want, it's sometimes best to simply ask them. 
If you were a little blue bird, with a good pile of money and a whole lot of hype, what would you buy to spice up your nest? There are so many little services being built on top of Twitter that we wouldn't be surprised to see some more of them acquired by the company soon. That would mean more features for everyday users and more usefulness for features loved by loyal early adopters.
We're sure by now you've heard about the upcoming extensions that will 
Has Twitter spam gotten a little out of hand? According to today's top story on 
This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please