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Technology News You Can UseSeptember 2009 – Issue XLVIIIn This Newsletter
Comments from the EditorsWe hope you’ve had a relaxing and enjoyable summer and are now back at work learning about and using technology to improve your business. This month’s Technology News You Can Use includes a wide range of (hopefully) useful articles including such timely topics as wireless security, social media marketing & blogs, cyber security developments, and yes, even typos. Our North Chamber Tech Committee members want to provide valuable information for you in a concise and easy-to-read form, so please let us know how we are doing. And if you are interested in learning more about a particular technology-related subject that we haven’t covered lately, feel free to email us and we’ll get right on it. Finally, make plans now to attend our upcoming Technology Speaker Series on IT Governance – Aligning IT with Business Strategy. This information-packed event on Brent Daugherty and Matt Reedy Social Media Marketing and Blogs, Lee NcNeil, Parscale MediaIf your website’s traffic is below par and you are unsatisfied with your search engine rankings, I would recommend using Social Media Marketing (SMM) and blogs. Although these are two different web marketing strategies, they tend to benefit each other in the long run. Blogs create new content on your website and Social Media Marketing helps you distribute that content throughout the web. This type of promotion eventually creates and increases search engine results for your website. For example, I wrote a blog on “Increasing Online Sales and Conversions” and if you do a search on that exact phrase in Google, which you can find here, you will see that the blog is around the first result on Google. Additionally, if you look under my blog ranking, you will see which social media websites I have promoted my blog on, such as Sphinn.com. So not only do you increase your website results with blogs, but by promoting them on social media websites, you generate multiple search results that will lead the search engine visitor to your website. Please keep in mind that most social media websites don’t like self promotion. So don’t always blog about why the consumer needs to purchase your product or service. Try to be creative and blog about your industry and updates on your products or services. You can even ask a satisfied customer to write a blog about their experience with your product or service. Blogging and Social Media Marketing are great ways to communicate with your current and future customers, increase search engine rankings and promote your products and services online. If you don’t use either of these strategies I would highly recommend it. Roving Reporter Matt Reedy: San Antonio – Cyber City, USA,Is a vision of the future like this truly possible?
That group has continued its work recently in creating and vetting a Cyber Action Plan for the city in which they detail missions, goals and objectives for fulfilling the vision stated above. Even before the Air Force announcement, The goals of the Cyber Action Plan are divided into several focus areas, some of which are detailed here. In cyber education, the plan calls for expanding the number of cyber-accredited schools in
If you would like to participate in the ongoing development and realization of this vision of
“Metiocrity” and Typos, Jay Fraser, Tracer DetectionIf I have one pet peeve, it is typos. It’s a remnant of my training almost 40 years ago. But it never ceases to amaze how many people post things on the Internet, often on their blogs or corporate websites, and yes, on LinkedIn and Twitter and other social media sites, that contain embarrassing and dastardly typos. There are so many of them, one wonders if these people are purposely using this website to provide them with extra help to produce that extra special word blunder. On the night of the Little League World Series U.S. Championship (the one in which the team from San Antonio lost to Chula Vista California), while monitoring the events in Williamsport Pa., none other than @mySA (the tweeting/blogging component of mySA.com, the home of the San Antonio Express-News) posted this on Twitter: San Antonio loses to Chula Vista 12-2 in the Little League World Series, but will face Reynosa, Mexico, in a consilation game at 11 a.m. Sun. At the very same time, a well-known blogger and lecturer from South Texas Tweeted this: metiocre networking is a waste of my time and yours. Jump in and really give a darn about people. Have GUSTO So, getting to the heart of it, spelling counts people! On your website, on your blog, on your LinkedIn profile, in your profile updates, on your Tweets, and especially in your resume. In her article, Tiny Typos Can Add Up To a Big X On Your Résumé, Michelle Singletary discussed how typos impact a job candidate’s chances: In interviews with 150 senior executives from the nation's 1,000 largest companies, 40 percent of the respondents said that just one typo on a résumé would kick a job candidate out of the queue for consideration. Thirty percent said it would take just two mistakes before the résumé was discarded. Surprisingly lenient I would say. These mistakes are far from funny, even though some of the written malapropisms can make you laugh. There are far too many candidates out there looking for the same job that you seek. Typos suggest mediocrity or sloppiness. It doesn’t present you in the best light no matter how widely known your reputation seems to have taken you.
Wireless Security and You, Ben Beckwith, Flat Rate Computer GuyIn today’s world with wireless internet or Wi-Fi being ever more popular, you have to ask, “How safe am I from outside vulnerabilities or hackers?” Most people think it is OK to go to your favorite electronics store, buy a wireless router, plug it in, and like magic you have a wireless internet connection. Unfortunately in doing this, you can become vulnerable to an outside attack. The recommendations below will summarize some basic steps you should take to improve the security of your home or small business wireless network. The steps necessary to complete these processes can be found in the user manual of the wireless router, or on the manufacturer’s website. The first step you should take is to change the default user name and password that is used to login to your wireless router. These defaults are widely known to hackers on the internet. To do this, open Internet Explorer, Mozilla or Safari and log into your wireless router using the default address, user name and password. These can be found in the user manual that came with the device. Once logged into the device navigate to the page that allows you to change the username and password to one of your choice. Keep in mind that the best password you can make is a complete sentence, to include punctuation and spaces. Step two is to encrypt or secure your wireless router. There are two forms of encryption that can be used: WEP and WPA. WEP (Wired Equivalency Privacy) was the first form of encryption to become available to a Wi-Fi connection. This type of encryption is quickly being phased out for two reasons. One is that WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access), a much more secure technique, is now available and two, the vulnerabilities of WEP are widely known in the hacker community. In fact, the WEP form of encryption can be cracked in about 15 minutes by any intelligent hacker. What this means to you is that WEP is better than nothing at all, but it is still not good security to use solely by itself. If WPA is available with your device, use it with a strong password key. Step three, enable MAC address filtering. A MAC (Media Access Control) address is a unique identifier assigned to most network adapters, i.e. your NIC (Network Interface Card) which is where your internet device physically connects to your PC, or your wireless card inside your laptop. These identifiers are like a license plate on a car, they identify a machine that is connected to your network. By enabling MAC address filtering on your wireless adapter, you are telling it to only allow specific PC’s access to it. Now if someone were to get your wireless password, their PC would not be allowed access to your network because it is not on your approved MAC address list. Finally, change the default SSID of your wireless router. The SSID (Service Set Identifier) is the network name that is broadcast over the air by your wireless router. This is the name you see in the list of available wireless networks on your PC. Manufacturers of wireless routers set a default name to each device before being packaged at the factory. By keeping this set to default, hackers know that there will most likely be minimal or no security on this device, and will attack this device first. These four simple things are important first steps in having a secured home or small business wireless network. By using such simple tools as “Google” and other search engines, you can find more advanced steps to securing your wireless network. I hope that by reading this article you take these steps seriously, and use them in your current and future wireless use. Telecom Tips -- Cheaper Rates not always lower bills, Jeremy Kerth, Wired NetworksWhether it’s local, long distance or even wide-area network (WAN) services, carriers all have different ways to contract with and bill you. In a perfect world, this would be standardized across carriers and predictable, but if that happened, it would unfortunately hurt the carriers’ profits. Following is a list of topics to examine very carefully when evaluating telecom carrier services and agreements. Surcharges/Fees This may come as a surprise, but not all fees and surcharges are local, state and/or federal. Some of them are simply to help the carriers keep the lights on and/or pay for CEO bonuses. Some examples of these are recovery fees, regulatory compliance fee, access recovery, federal access reform and a dozen others. The truth is you may be quoted a local PRI at $450 per month, but by the end of all the additional fees it really costs you $650 per month and more. This is true for internet services, long distance and WAN services; really no telecom services are immune. This is a practice that most providers employ; the question to ask is to what degree do they participate? Ask the carriers to outline all the charges you can expect, or even better, ask your agent to find out for you. Auto-Renewals When signing a telecom agreement there a few basic terms that are involved regarding the business components: the rate, the commitment and the term. The first two are relatively cut and dry, so we will focus on the third….’the term’. When it comes to ‘the term’ of an agreement, the devil is in the details. Most agreements have a primary term of one, two or three years with a subsequent renewal term that can be auto-renewed on a month to month basis, annually or worst case,equal to the primary term. Most telecom agreements have clauses that require prior written notice of 30, 60 or even 90 days to the primary terms expiration or the customer will be auto-renewed for an additional renewal term. This auto-renewal clause is an additional means for the carriers to lock-in customers for a subsequent term if the customer is not on-top of their agreement renewal dates. It has been our experience that most customers have IT departments with enough on their plate that managing carrier agreement auto-renew clauses is quite difficult. Whenever possible, we recommend that a client have this language removed from the agreement prior to signature. This allows the customer the ability to negotiate or change providers at the time of renewal. The bottom line: this important component gives the customer a position to negotiate terms or seek a new vendor at the time of contract expiration. In the case that an agreement auto-renews, most clients have no position and are at the mercy of the current carrier. Don’t be that customer; it can be a frustrating situation!!!!
Guaranteed discounts instead of guaranteed rates I will leave names out, but some providers will guarantee a discount in the agreement. They won’t guarantee a rate, just a discount. Do you see the problem with that? They will even go so far as to tell you that the underlying rate will change, but the discount will remain the same. Make sure your agreements always guarantee a rate and not a discount. Inbound 8xx service charges Another widely adopted carrier practice is to charge for features related to toll-free (8xx) inbound services, especially on dedicated services that would allow for time of day/week/hour routing, percent allocation, geo-routing, super trunking, etc. Be careful because these charges are often associated per number, which can be quite costly for call centers with hundreds or even thousands of 8xx numbers. If, for example, you have 50 - 8xx’s and you are routing to separate facilities using percent allocation, you could pay $100, or even more, per 8xx to use this feature. In this example, the company would pay $5000 per month for this service. It’s a feature they need and they will use, but all of these fees can and should be negotiated up front, so you’re not at the carrier’s mercy when you need them. 8xx Resporg charges Carriers have a monthly charge that is billed by the entity that provides the national 8xx database. You may be surprised to learn that they charge the carriers $0.01049 cents per 8xx in order to route in the 8xx SMS database. Most carriers charge between $1/month and $5/month for each 8xx. This is generally a negotiable charge especially when you are dealing with hundreds or even thousands of 8xx’s. These are just a few examples of what to watch for if you decide to go it alone on your next telecom carrier agreement. Contact Us
Technology Chair: Chuck Weisbrich Co-Editors: Matt Reedy, Matt Reedy & Assoc and Brent Daugherty, Time Warner Cable North Chamber Contact: Debby Zucker
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