In through the outfield

Check your name on the Web with namechk

Thanks to Sarah Lane a guest on net@night with Amber and Leo for recommending namechk.

This is a ‘one stop shop’ for seeing if your personal or company identity is available at dozens of Social Networking and Social Bookmarking websites, such as Twitter and Facebook. It enables you to be consistent with your brand or identity wherever it appears on the Internet.

Business tips from the experts

I spent a bit of time today exploring our collection of videos on the Business & IP Centre Inspiring Entrepreneurs YouTube Channel.

We now have 71 videos to choose from with ex-Dragon Doug Richard the most popular with over 9,000 views.

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I decided to have a look at those videos which languish at the other end of the viewing spectrum and came across some pearls of wisdom from the late Anita Roddick.

Her talk was part of our Commerce with a Conscience event from January 2007, and although I was fortunate enough to be present that evening, I had forgotten what an amazing (and unpredictable) speaker she was.

Here are a few quotes to indicate what I mean:

“As entrepreneurs you are incredibly creative, you vomit ideas.”

“What you are lousy at is management, I couldn’t manage my way out of a paper bag.”

“Successful social entrepreneurs are pathologically optimistic.”

Here are just a few of her ideas from the evening:

1. You need to find people who can expedite your ideas, as you won’t have the skills.

2. Set clear goals. Napoleon Hill author of Think and Grow Rich. interviewed some of the richest people in the world in the 1920’s, and distilled their views. The key point was to be so clear of your objective you can visualise it. My subsequent experience as a business advisor has reinforced this view. Only those entrepreneurs who really see where they are going with their business or their idea will succeed in the long run.

3. Learn what you need to know, then network with people who have expertise and knowledge and ask them questions. It seem women entrepreneurs a much better at this than their male counterparts.

4. Copy other people’s ideas if they are great ones. Anita learnt about using tours as a way of inspiring staff and customers from Ben & Jerry’s.

5. Enthusiasm can overcome almost all barriers.

6. Don’t borrow money from close friends or family, as it can lead to control issues.

7. Find your area of excellence.

Will Spotify kill iTunes?

This is the heading for an intriguing article in the latest issue of gadget obsessed Stuff magazine.

I have to admit that I only heard about Spotify for the first time two weeks ago on Leo Laporte’s net@night 91.

However, since then the mainstream press has started to pick up on it as a potential iTunes killer - Spotify declares war on iTunes.

It seems hard to believe that Spotify can already have six million tracks (including the very latest albums in full) and over a million members signed up to either its’ free advert supported service, or the ad-free subscription of £9.99 per month. Although the fact I am listening for free to the brand new album from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs as I write, proves the case.

Now it has gone one stage further by linking up with London-based online music store, 7Digital which has four million individual tracks.

This is yet another indication of just how revolutionary the Internet can be when it comes to both established and even novel business models. It took iTunes just six years to become the dominant player in music sales, currently accounting for 70 per cent of all online music sales, and selling six billion songs along the way.

However, Spotify was only launched in the UK in October last year and already has more than a million customers.

The lesson, is that if you are going to operate a web based business you can’t afford to stand still for a moment.

PitchTV - your chance to make your pitch to Richard Branson

 

Perhaps not surprisingly in these YouTube obsessed times, there has been something of a rash of video-pitching websites. A friendly version of Dragon’s Den? and See my pitch are just two that I have covered previously.

However, when Richard Branson of Virgin fame gets involved you just know there will be a lot of interest.

PitchTV gives you the “chance to pitch your business idea directly to people who could make your ambition a reality.”

Once a month we’ll pick out a selection of the best video pitches and then let everyone vote for their favourite. Each month the five most popular video pitches will make it on to the PitchTV show which will premiere on Virgin Atlantic’s in-flight entertainment – to be seen by top business professionals from around the world.

So if you think you have the media friendly features to make it through to the final round, then why not give it a go.

http://entrepreneur.virgin.com/pitchtv/

Today my bins are ‘wheelie’ clean

It is becoming a common complaint that too many of us are bringing work home (the almost ubiquitous spread of Blackberry devices is a factor in this).

However, this took an unexpected turn for me this weekend, as I ended up cleaning my two large local authority wheelie bins as a result showing a colleague around the Business & IP Centre on Friday.

I was demonstrating the brilliant Cobra database and the thousands of Business Opportunity Profiles it contains. As I mentioned in a previous blog (Wheelie cleaning up in business), I like to surprise my visitors by pulling up the Wheelie Bin Cleaner report.

So when emptying my re-cycling boxes into the wheelie bins I realised today was the day to clean them out.

On the topic of unusual business opportunities, one of my colleagues stumbled across a Business Opportunity Profile for Life Model, but I have no plans following up on the advice in this guide at home.

I was an April fool, but it’s no joke for SlideShare

I have always been a fan of April fool stories. My previous job included producing a daily press cuttings service for my organisation, and I used to look forward to trying to find all the April 1  ‘news stories’ for inclusion. One of my all time favourites was from the Daily Mirror announcing that the Channel tunnel diggers had struck gold half-way to France.

The big ’story’ from today has been the Guardian newspaper letting its loyal readers know that it would shortly be giving up on old fashioned ink and paper. Instead they would switch to Twitter for all future news coverage. The Twitter switch for Guardian article has some lovely touches about the benefits of reducing all news to 140 characters. Even going back intto their archives to ‘re-write’ history;

Major stories already completed include:

“1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!”;

“OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5×6e for more”;

and “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?”

On a less amusing note I received an email today from SlideShare (a free service I blogged about in 2007).

Hi infield,
We’ve noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job … you must be doing something right.
Why don’t you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we can track the conversation.
Congratulations,  SlideShare Team

I checked my three presentations and sure enough one of them had rocketed to 751 views. This was something of a surprise and perhaps I should have been suspicious. However, it took a blog post from Phil Bradley (Slideshare April Fool joke goes disastrously wrong), before I realised I had been conned.

As Phil points out, SlideShare have made ,”a huge error”;
I don’t appreciate anyone manipulating data on my content. That SlideShare are so relaxed about this, and feel they can do what they like is really sending entirely the wrong message about how they view users and content.

To be fair to the authors of this ‘prank’ have confessed their sins on Phil’s blog, and apologised to their customers;

Phil,
My sincere, personal apologies. Its just an April Fool’s prank. I understand why you are upset, however, we did not mean to offend our users who we love. But I can see your perspective.
Rashmi, CEO & Cofounder, SlideShare

I think I can  forgive them this time, but fear many of their customers may move to rival services as a result.

The British Library is all a twitter about Yammer

Although I like to think I have my finger on the pulse of Social Media, it took a colleague in our marketing department to introduce me to our Yammer page.

After a very short space of time we have 97 members and several hundred messages.

For those of you who are also new to Yammer, it is a micro-blogging tool for the enterprise, launched in September last year, and has already been nominated for the CNET Webware 100.

Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: ‘What are you working on?’

As employees answer that question, a feed is created in one central location enabling co-workers to discuss ideas, post news, ask questions, and share links and other information. Yammer also serves as a company directory in which every employee has a profile and as a knowledge base where past conversations can be easily accessed and referenced.

Anyone in a company can start their Yammer network and begin inviting colleagues. The privacy of each network is ensured by limiting access to those with a valid company email address. Information is never shared with third parties.

The basic Yammer service is free. Companies can pay to claim and administer their networks.

Yammer was founded by former executives and early employees of PayPal, eGroups, eBay, and Tribe. It is backed by venture capital firms Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures.

We have all worked at companies and understand the needs of companies to share information within a private network. We built the solution that we would want to use ourselves.