New domain names

From January 2012 companies will be able to utilize their website domain name as a marketing tool after new suffixes have been approved by the Internet regulator ICANN.

Companies will be able to apply for any domain name in any language for a fee of $185,000.

At the moment there are 22 Internet domain name suffixes; including .com, .co.uk, .org, .net.

With this announcement companies can select their preference, potentially any word in any language, including .cisco, .apple, .coke, .hp.

This will appeal to not only companies but also regions, cities and destinations.

These generic top-level domain names will change the way people find information on the Internet and how businesses plan and structure their online presence.

The Internet will dramatically change as a result; ensuring an opportunity for innovation and creativity.

Hardware.com

Innovate for success

There are not many people who are so closely associated with innovation and success as Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple.

He built a company that reinvented not only personal computing but also music, mobile telecommunications and entertainment.

Steve Jobs built the Apple brand and his personal brand on a number of principles that are responsible for his success, and they can be applied to reinvent you, your company, your products or services.

These are Steve Jobs’s drivers:

• Be passionate and do what you love, follow your heart and intuition and this will lead to perseverance and the will to succeed. Passions are the hopes, dreams and possibilities that consume your thoughts.
• Share an inspiring vision – be bold, specific, concise and ensure it is consistently communicated. “Passion fuels the rocket, vision points the rocket to its ultimate destination”.
• Innovation requires creativity, and that requires you to think differently by seeking out diverse experiences. Look outside your industry for inspiration.
• Sell dreams, not products. Nobody cares about your company or product. They care about themsleves, their dreams and goals. Help them achieve their aspirations and you’ll win them over.
• Simplicity and clarity. Eliminate anything that clutters the user experience whether in product design, website navigation, network infrastructure or applications.
• Enrich people’s lives in the workplace or otherwise. Creating solutions about what they can do and not just moving product – will see sales soar.
• Tell a compelling story; inform, educate and entertain. Often you are judged on your ability to communicate what you do and get people excited about it.

Search Engines and Business

Google remains the dominant search engine by a very long way, accounting for 80% plus searches in North America and Europe, however second place has now been taken by YouTube’s search engine, overtaking Yahoo! and Bing.

The increasing popularity of video has become such a phenomenon that Netflix’s video streaming service consumes over 20% of the Internet bandwidth in the USA between the peak times of 8pm to 10pm.

For the business world producing videos to communicate processes, relationships, brand personality and inspiring participation has become a real engagement tool.

In the US we have produced a video to engage with and inform our customers – have a look.

Hardware.com is actively engaging in video and our YouTube channel is located here.

Mark Cadbury, Marketing Director

Video explaining what we do

Hardware.com USA has just commissioned and published a video as an introduction to what we do.

It’s about choices, offering a real alternative, based on what you need not on a particular manufacturer’s agenda.

We bring an independent view of maintenance and of the products whether they be Cisco, Juniper Networks or Force10 Networks; delivering the most cost effective solution.

Hardware.com offers new, refurbished, custom configured as well as independent maintenance services.

Overall, you get a reduced total cost of ownership and assured quality.

Check out the video today.

Science Fiction and IT

The science fiction genre is a favourite of almost all who work in IT.

Sci-fi is about the impact of imagined innovations in science and technology that are real possibilities – futuristic ideas.

When looking after networks and managing pieces of network hardware that make businesses run it puts the IT Manager/Network Manager in a place where there are an infinite number of possibilities.

Here are a dozen rather random but interesting sci-fi ideas/phrases from literature:

1. Absolute black – so dark you cannot see it.
2. Architectural coral – structures grown to a specific shape using living coral-like organisms.
3. Bedog – a living creature designed to be a bed.
4. Blacknet – an antisocial networking site.
5. Cephalic sniffer – device that locates someone using their brain patterns.
6. Cortical stack – implanted hardware that backs-up a copy of your mental self.
7. Dustmice – tiny robot detectives that look for tiny clues at a crime scene.
8. Filtered reality – Internet results but you only see what you want to see.
9. Moddy – a plug-in personality in the brain.
10. Odalarm – an alarm clock that wakes you with a selected smell.
11. ParanoidLinux – an operating system that deliberately obscures the user’s activities.
12. Websight – visualising the Internet in your brain.

Mark Cadbury, Marketing Director

Cloud Computing v. Personalized Information

Computer use has come a long way since the days of dumb terminals linked to a mainframe, then personal standalone PCs and now software in the cloud.

The problem that people have always feared with cloud computing is that a few large corporations (including Google and Facebook) have access to our digital goings-on; emails, website visits, social media interactions and so on.

Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia University, described the new cloud computing world as “the architecture of catastrophe”.

He maintains that the recent shut down of services by corporations (regarding WikiLeaks) and governments (regarding Internet and cellphone access in Libya and Egypt) demonstrates that we could be in a deadly embrace.

The answer, Professor Moglen said was to have a web server in your pocket, so that you could link up to all your needs, which then encrypts the information. There are some hard drives available at the moment but they require development and a friendly front-end user interface to circumvent the privacy/security issues of cloud computing.

The cloud versus keeping digital activity personal will be a constant battle over the next few years.

Something to consider

In the scheme of things, we carry on as usual, however the world is changing so rapidly – faster than ever before  – so much so that sometimes our best laid plans end up in the trash.

The basics have always been and will always remain important. Take for example analysis of recent world events in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia and other parts of the Middle East –  difficult to predict but they do revolve around that essential external analysis – PEST: Political, Economic, Social and Technological factors.

With the current revolution in the world today – we need to reassess our businesses with regard to that PEST analysis.

Often we spend our time fiddling with the details, being introspective and not looking at the bigger picture - with the world changing so fast we need to reflect sometimes.