Tip of the Month: Are your emails considered SPAM?

Swiftpage Email offers a free service to check your email. The Swiftpage Spam Check will read and scan your email message just as a spam filter would. It will evaluate your message for possible spam infractions and then send back a response to your email address. A score based on the possible spam infractions along with a description of each spam infraction will be assigned to your email. The Spam Check classifies your emails into these four categories: safe, questionable, high risk, and spammy.

Use it at http://www.swiftpage.com/support/spamcheck.htm

Tip of the month: Technology Tips for Small Business from HP

I love: Technology Tips for Small Business, a new free resource offered in the HP Total Care portfolio, features influential insiders discussing how people can green, mobilize and grow their small businesses.

Think of “Entertainment Tonight” for the technology tips for business. The free site offers white papers and videos. The Videos are fast moving and professional.

The 15 min video on getting your business online included an interesting interview with Peter Shankman, who runs Help a Reporter Out, HARO, a website designed to connect journalists and sources. He has created a significant presence using online and social media tools. technology expert Jim Louderback does the interview and has 4 other videos at the same location.

The 5 current videos are
* “Green Your Business” by Anita Campbell, editor in chief of Small Business Trends, an award-winning, comprehensive online publication for small business owners, entrepreneurs and the people who interact with them.
* “Mobilize Your Business” by Ramon Ray, who blogs on the popular SmallBizTechnology.com site and is the author of the book “Technology Solutions for Growing Businesses.”
* “Get Your Business Online” by Peter Shankman, who runs Help a Reporter Out, a website designed to connect journalists and sources. He has created a significant presence using online and social media tools.
* “Back Up Your Business” by James Gaskin, a leading voice for the small business market.
* “Grow Your Business” by Rieva Lesonsky, who runs askrieva.com, a website designed to help people start and grow their small businesses. She is also chief executive officer of GrowBiz Media, a former editorial director of Entrepreneur Magazine and a nationally recognized expert on social networking for business.

HP Technology Tips for Small Business

Tip of the Month: Zoom keys in your internet browser

The Zoom in capability of modern web browsers is often overlooked by users. When you are on a site and want to zoom in to make a portion larger, just press the CTRL + key to zoom in and the CTRL – key to zoom back out. If you Zoom way out, you can see the web pages layout without having to scroll.

This is very helpful when you are projecting the image onto a screen. Imagine you are in a meeting and showing some info from a web site. Your could Zoom in to one area to focus on it!

This works in Microsoft IE and FireFox. Look in the View menu for more options. FireFox can reset with CTRL 0

Here are 3 partial screen shots; Normal, Zoomed In, and Zoomed Out.

Tip of the Month: TweetDeck

Once you start following a lot of people on twitter, you need to filter all the Tweets you receive. I send a few people to my phone so i get text messages as they come in. Most of the people I follow I review on my PC. The tool I recommend to organize all those inbound messages is TweetDeck.

It gives you many filtered views/columns to review based on your criteria: names, people, keywords, etc… It is also nice to help send your messages/Tweets.

It is free and a great Twitter tool. check out/ download at

TweetDeck

Tip of the Month: Searching Twitter to get started

If you are not using Twitter to send updates to your followers, then check out what others are “Tweeting” about right now; do a seach on Twitter at search.twitter.com/

Twitter is a micro blogging site answering the question” What are you doing?”

When it is done, phone to phone via text messages, more possibilities

Search Twitter for a Phrase you are interested in

open up for useful exchnage of information. You can check it out without joining by reading some Tweets on a topic you are interested in.

Using Quotes around your words make it into a search phrase.

Tip of the Month: XOBNI

“Bill Gates called Xobni the next generation of
social networking.”
-Newsweek

I have been using XOBNI for a month and find it quite useful.  The info is displayed as i go through my inbox.  I use it to find emails, attachments, and remember peoples faces.   I love that it pulls up photos from LinkedIn as I read my email. The seach tool is fast and seems to work better for my searches than the built in windows search.

It is Free and works great.  Get more info at www.XOBNI.COM.     It is for Outlook only right now,  but it did just index my yahoo email account to….   and what is a XOBNI ???  it is INBOX  backwards of course!

Alan

xobni Outlook Add-in Tool Screen Shot

Tip of the Month: Business card scanner with online database

I have used and recommended several business card scanners in the past.   The one I am using and recommend now is the Executive Business Card scanner from CardScan.  It does color scans in only 3 sec,  has no extra power cords, and a great new feature is it backs up the scans to an off site database for free.  The off site backup and on-line service can also be accessed from any PC with an intertet connection as long as you have the user ID and password. This gives you access to your scanned cards and data from anywhere anytime.

This will be helpful if you are not in your office and need to search for that one person in a hurry…

My routine use now is to collect cards at meetings, then scan them in, do a group update with info on the date and event, then merge them into my CRM system of choice for this batch.  Outlook, ACT, Infusion…  You can send the data as a CSV to any CRM or Accounting system.  THEN I THROW THEM AWAY!   That is the hard part for a pack  rat like me, but the more I do it,  the more I like it!

Check out  www.cardscan.com

Executive Business Card Scanner and Software

Tip of the Month: sandboxie.com

Surfing the internet can be dangerous to your PC.  I am very happy with the protection sandboxie gives me.  It is sort of like a virtual machine without the overhead.  It is great for running a web browser.  It protects your PC by keeping any changes to your PC in a special file, so it can be easily rolled back.

Www.sandboxie.com lists these benefits:

Benefits of the Isolated Sandbox

• Secure Web Browsing: Running your Web browser under the protection of Sandboxie means that all malicious software downloaded by the browser is trapped in the sandbox and can be discarded trivially.

• Enhanced Privacy: Browsing history, cookies, and cached temporary files collected while Web browsing stay in the sandbox and don’t leak into Windows.

• Secure E-mail: Viruses and other malicious software that might be hiding in your email can’t break out of the sandbox and can’t infect your real system.

• Windows Stays Lean: Prevent wear-and-tear in Windows by installing software into an isolated sandbox.

Sandboxie FAQ Image

Tip of the Month: Google Reader

Google Reader is a great great tool for gathering, reading, and sharing all the interesting blogs and websites you read on the web.   You can subscribe to a variety of sources of free information you are interested in.  The info is automatically gathered and listed for you to scan the headlines or read the details.   You can mark interesting info for others,  if you share your reader recommendations.

For example, you can subscribe to this blog by clicking on the RSS “FEED on posts”  in the upper right of your screen.   This sets up an  automatic feed from the blog to your reader of all new posts.

RSS Feed to Subscribe to Alans Tips and Tricks

The Google reader is accessible from the Other menu or inside GMAIL.

Google Reader for RSS Feeds

Tip of the Month: Reading Lists- what books do you like?

Keeping up with books you have read, want to read and sharing that with your colleagues is a lot easier using one of the popular book tracking web sites.  I use  www.shelfari.com in the past and now have started experimenting with Reading List by  AMAZON.  Reading list by AMAZON is integrated with LinkedIn.  I like being able to recommend a book on my Amazon reading list and have my LinkedIN connections read my comments on the book.   I can see what they recommend.

Check out http://www.shelfari.com/   It looks like a book shelf where you see the covers. 

shelfari web site

or  inside LinkedIN,  check out

Reading List by AMAZON

Reading List in LinkedIN by AMAZON