Recently in Business Category

Whether there's an "economic downturn" or not you'll always find people who simply don't "get" the concept of paying for stuff.

I mentioned this issue on Twitter earlier today and a couple of people sent me links to these absolutely hilarious videos. Apologies if the display is a bit odd - width may be a problem:



Of course if someone owes you money they really need to pay you .. Stewie's take on this is .. well .. em .. violent?



And the followup ...

Today was a reasonably productive day...

No day is every really as productive as I'd like it to be, but today was pretty good!

To start with I finally had a few quiet minutes to myself and was able to book my flights to Sydney for the ICANN meeting. I had tried to book it online, but I couldn't make sense of the times / dates ie. if you leave Dublin on Friday, which day would you arrive in Sydney. Solution was to just ring Trailfinders and let them worry about it. They also gave me a better rate on the ticket than I'd found online, so it was a "win win" situation. Now all I have to do is either persuade the Hilton to give me a better rate or else find a different hotel....

The other bit of progress today was that we finally launched Windows 2008 with IIS7 on our shared hosting platform. We're giving the first 100 signups for a Windows 2008 Minimus plan a massive 20 euro off, so you can get your site hosted on the latest Microsoft server platform for a mere 29.95 for the first year!! (More details here)

Now if only I could work my way through the rest of my todo list...

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If you want to run your own business then you need to work at it.

You cannot expect your business to run itself.

You cannot expect to work "normal" hours.

You cannot expect to work a "normal" working week

If you can't deal with any of the above then simply give up now.

Sure, everyone needs to strike the balance between work and their private life

However, if you're running your own business you need to realise that you cannot think like an employee (conversely your employees won't think like you do either, but that's another discussion)

I'm overjoyed about this one ...

Full details over on the company blog

When you run your own business you can end up becoming heavily invested in your business' success and failure. Comments and feedback, both positive and negative, might affect you more than you would like to admit.

Over the last few years the company I founded has grown from operating out of a bedroom (or two) to having a fulltime staff of close to 20.

Over the years we've improved some things, made a total mess of others, delighted some people and really annoyed others. (In many instances the "love" and "hate" is directed at me personally, as I am the most visible person associated with the company).

The harsh reality is that no matter what you do you cannot and will not please everyone all of the time.

Since I'm interested in my industry I track certain keywords on Twitter, so watching people talking about some of our competitors can be very enlightening.
 GoDaddy, which is simply massive in terms of its customer base, proves my point.
Just watch how people react to them over a 24 hour period.
You will see both ends of the scale.
They're all talking about the same company during the same time period, so it's really fascinating (to me at least) to watch.

When I got my Nokia E71 back before Christmas I immediately fell in love with the device.
One of the options that we setup was MFE (Mail for Exchange) which was pretty functional, although a bit limited.

However while we were working on our Hosted Exchange service launch Paul came across a really nice bit of software that takes the E71 and Microsoft Exchange 2007 to a whole new level.

The software - RoadSync - is really cool and makes full use of ActiveSync on Exchange server 2007. Basically it means that you can get "email push" without having to spend a fortune on expensive addons for your Exchange server.

Configuring RoadSync is pretty easy. You just enter your login details on the device you're using and off you go.

If you're connecting into an Exchange Server 2007 setup, like we are, then you can turn the synchronisation to use ActiveSync, which means that you'll get your email on your phone almost instantly.

The other features that give RoadSync that extra "edge" are its support for HTML emails (MFE simply can't handle them) and sub-folder support. Since I get so much email every day I have a rather complex set of rules to filter emails off to different folders depending on subject lines, senders and addressees. MFE simply cannot deal with the subfolders, whereas RoadSync does a reasonable job of it.

All in all moving my business email onto my phone has made things a lot easier. I don't feel as "tied" to my desktop / laptop as before and can receive emails easily while on the move. While admittedly a lot of this would have been possible on my N95 the full keyboard on the E71 takes "possible" to "comfortable", which in my mind is a pretty important difference.

The only problem with any of the mobile email software seems to be an inability to handle multiple Exchange accounts, which is understandable. Unfortunately it means that I can't move my personal email onto our Hosted Exchange cluster, which I wouldn't mind doing ...

Sick of paying over the odds for IE domains?

How about getting them for a tenner?

Check out the latest Blacknight deal valid for 1 day only!!

We've dropped the price on IE domains for the month of January to €19.95 / year ex-vat

Find out more here

Trying to get sites to display identically across multiple browsers and multiple operating systems is awkward. This site probably doesn't display particularly well on all browsers, but I'm not a professional web designer / developer, so you'll have to excuse me. It's also not a corporate / business website trying to sell products or services to the public.

Screenclick, however, is a business website.

Earlier this evening I decided to visit it on my Mac using Firefox. Apart from the really annoying splash page, which doesn't do anything useful, the main page does not load correctly in Firefox 3 on the Mac:


Now if you open the same page in Safari you seem something totally different:
Why?

Seemingly somebody decided to use Microsoft's Silverlight, but didn't bother to do a simple plugin check that would either prompt the user to install the plugin or gracefully degrade.

I won't be able to view their site on my Linux desktop either, as Silverlight isn't available for Linux (there is a port, but last time I checked there wasn't a native Debian / Ubuntu version available)

UPDATE: I've now moved to my Ubuntu Linux desktop and this is what I get:

The wonderfully helpful splash page (do they honestly expect me to continue browsing after seeing that?)



and the inner page (for some odd reason it's actually telling me that I need Silverlight now, whereas it wasn't on my Mac!)