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The Write Stuff - Blogging for Fun & Profit

By Carl Weiss

Image courtesy of hotfrog.ca

When it comes to generating results online, most people still act as though a website is the be-all, end-all of Internet marketing. That kind of thinking is so 20^th Century. Sure, before the year 2000, there were only two things you needed to succeed online: a website and a search engine. Fifteen years later, not only is this clearly not the case, in some cases you don’t need a website to generate results at all.

Since it can take from 4-6 months on average for a website to work its way up the food change onto the first page of the major search engines, this isn’t always the best route to success for many businesses. Sad to say it, but 99% of websites never make it onto page one. In the first place, a website only represents 25% of the criteria that search engines use to determine ranking. The other 75% consists of off-page media, including blogs, social networks, and videos. Unless you have the time or money to post relevant content to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Blogger and YouTube on a regular basis, then your chances of making it to the top of the search engines is slim to none.

However, that doesn’t mean you should throw in the towel. Especially if your resources are limited, it is sometimes a better course of action to choose your battles and start growing your web presence on the installment basis. One of the quickest ways you can create a growing audience that you can sell to is by blogging.

This Ain’t Your Daddy’s Blog

Started on August 23, Blogger was originally created in San Francisco by three contract programmers during the dot-com boom. When dot-com became dot-bomb, Blogger barely survived the shake out. Then Google came calling in 2003 and bought Blogger. Since that time, Blogger has seen quite a few changes. Today’s platform allows users to do much more than merely post blogs. Fully fledged, a writer can do everything with Blogger that they can do with a website, including:

· Post text

· Embed videos

· Include banner ads

· Host forms

· Create subsidiary pages

· Add backlinks

· Automatically resize to any platform

· Generate a loyal following

Even more important is the fact that as soon as you click on the submit button, the Googlebots will spider your blog. This means that a properly optimized blogpost could wind up on page one of Google in as little as a few hours. Try doing that with a website.

We Don’t Need No Stinking Website!

wikipedia.com

Face it, the reason anyone builds a website is to generate exposure. The problem with that idea is that the current monopoly exerted by Google, Yahoo and Bing means it’s their way or the highway when it comes to what generates top ranking. That makes trying to getting on page 1 very hard to do. (This is especially true when the search engines “Tweak” their algorithms on an almost daily basis.)

But what if there was a way to generate the same or even better exposure for your business without having to rely on search engines at all. In fact, what if I could show you a way to generate a bigger, more targeted audience while at the same time increasing conversion without the use of a website? Would that interest you?

Before I do that, let’s take a look at the best case search engine scenario. Let’s say for the sake of argument that you woke up one morning to find your website in position 1, page 1 on Google. Let’s also assume that it was for a highly coveted keyword or phrase that produces 10,000 relevant searches per month. Sounds good doesn’t it? Well, it should, because on average the top organic listing on Google generates nearly two thirds of the clicks that land on that search. So your website would receive around 6,500 clicks that month.

That’s the good news. The bad news is just because your site generated a few thousand clicks doesn’t necessarily mean that it will generate a lead, much less a registration or a sale. That’s because on average a visitor to your site from a search engine is going to spend less than two minutes on-site before they either take action or click back to search. After all, there are upwards of twenty listings on page 1 of Google search from which to choose. Unless your website fulfills a need, or contains an irresistible offer that compels the visitor to act, odds are they are going to peruse several sites other than yours. That’s the main reason people “Google it” in the first place, to comparison shop.

Blog readers are a different breed of cat. In the first place, blog readers spend on average twice the

Courtesy of bytecubed.com

amount of time on a blog as a visitor does when they visit a website. Secondly, a well-written blog can not only make an impact on the reader, but it can also elevate the writer to the level of expert. That’s right, it raises your credibility! Since it is important that a visitor know, like and trust you before they make a buying decision, you can convey much more authority with a timely blog than you can with even a highly focused website. Best of all, once immersed in your blog, the only subsidiary clicks available are not to competing bloggers, but to the other content contained on your site. Just like your website, Blogger comes complete with analytics that can help you adjust your message, your subsidiary content and your offers. (Take a look at a snapshot of our readership below.)

Currently, our blog is being read by almost 50,000 people per month. This figure far exceeds the 6,500 clicks per month that our mythical website above achieved during the same period. These blogs are well-read and our offers and ads produce results nearly every day. This blog’s readership was generated by writing an average of 1 post every week for the past three years. So this is something that anybody can do as long as they follow the ABC’s of successful blog writing.

A - Always intrigue the reader. The last thing anyone wants to read is about your last board meeting or ad copy. To create a following you need to answer a question, fulfill a need, or provide real value. A catchy title and lead paragraph are also a plus. The objective is to inform and entertain at the same time. (We refer to this as Infotainment.)

B – Bring your readers a great read. We have found that the minimum copy for a great blog is 1,200 words or more. Don’t short sheet your readers by penning only a few paragraphs. Think magazine article as opposed to a tweet. Your readers will thank you.

C – Create a sharing atmosphere. Provide your audience with information that they can’t find anywhere else and they will treat you like an authority figure. Also make it easy to share your blog with others. Post it to your social nets daily so that your current following can stay current.

A few other must haves are:

1. Keywords embedded in the title and text

2. Backlinks to your website (if you have one)

3. Brief bio of the writer at the end of the blog

4. Appropriate images and/or videos embedded in the copy

5. A clear offer or call to action

Then there is just one more task and that is to distribute your blog. The problem is if you write the world’s best blogs and no one reads them what you have created is a billboard in the desert. While there are a number of ways to create an audience, the most popular way to promote a post is via pay-per-click advertising. And that can get expensive.

From ihatepresentations.com

However, that isn’t the only way to generate an audience. The two best organic ways to get the word out are by posting to your social nets and by working with other successful bloggers. If you already have a substantial amount of followers on Facebook, Twitter, Pintrest and/or Google+, pushing your blogposts couldn’t be simpler. That’s because at the bottom of every Blogger blog is the F, T, P and G that were created for you to do just that. Simply point and click to push your blog to your followers.

An even better way to generate a following is to pool your resources with fellow bloggers. One of the services that we offer to clients is called Team Tech. This is a peer-to-peer blogging club where members are matched with five bloggers from non-competing businesses. Every week these blog buddies are tasked with reading each other’s blog, adding an appropriate comment and then pushing member blogs to their respective social nets. This creates instant readership, since their blogs are seen every week by thousands of readers who would otherwise have no way of receiving their blog. This has literally allowed us to help bloggers generate thousands of readers in less than a year for participating club members. (If you would like to learn more about this service, call Carl or Hector at 904-410-2091.)

On top of that, we coach each team to make sure they are optimizing their blogs and acting in each other’s best interest. As part of the service we also share their blog post to our 65,000+ followers and groups we belong to. This gives each of the team tech members an additional bump each week and really kick start their readership.

The important thing is that with a little imagination, you can create an audience without having to duke it out on the search engines. If you do have a website, adding a blog is a great source of Google Juice, since the world’s most popular search engine puts a high value on blogs that generate a substantial following. You can also use these blogs to bolster your social networks as well, in essence killing two birds with one stone. All you have to do to succeed is apply the write stuff.

Carl Weiss is president of Working the Web to Win, an award-winning digital marketing agency based in Jacksonville, Florida. You can listen to Carl live every Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern on BlogTalkRadio

That Drone You Hear is the FAA Sleeping at the Switch

By Carl Weiss

From bits.blogs.nytimes.com

Everybody these days seems to be getting into the drone craze. The military has thousands of them, Amazon covets them and millions of civilians own them. Otherwise known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), not since the dawn of manned flight more than 100 years ago, has a topic so enthralled the public and worried the federal government. This leads us to a very real fly in the drone ointment...that of regulation, or the lack thereof. The FAA currently has its hands full trying to manage the booming airline industry where 21^st century jumbo jets are still being vectored to all the cardinal points of the compass by 1970’s technology. The last thing the FAA wants to have to wrestle with are potentially tens of thousands of UAVs crisscrossing the friendly skies. It’s one of the things that give bureaucrats indigestion.

Could Bureaucratic Bungling Bring Down the Civilian Drone Industry?

Believe it or not, it was a bureaucrat by the name of William P. McCracken, Jr. that received the first pilot’s license in the US on April 6, 1927. (To put this date into perspective, that was only a month and two weeks before Charles Lindbergh made the first solo crossing of the Atlantic on May 21.) As assistant Secretary of Commerce for Aeronautics, McCracken had initially offered the honor of the first pilot’s license to none other than Orville Wright. Oville declined being that by the latter part of the 20's he no longer flew. McCracken, who had earned his wings flying in the Army Air Corps during WWI, followed by a stint flying the mail, was tasked with enforcing the Air Commerce Act of 1926. This legislation not only regulated the training and licensing of pilots, but it helped establish and manage airports, navigation aids, issue airworthiness certificates for aircraft and investigate accidents. In short, it established the framework for the agency that would start off as the CAA and eventually evolve into the FAA we know to this day.

Fast forward nearly ninety years and we have come to the dawn of a new age of aviation, brought about by the same military that introduced aviation to the masses way back when. While relatively a recent innovation in the eyes of the public, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have been around for nearly as long as have been aircraft. The first pilotless aircraft were constructed from surplus military aircraft fitted with radio controls and packed with high explosives. Kind of a poor man’s cruise missile, these flying bombs were designed to be piloted to altitude where the pilot would engage the radio-controlled autopilot before bailing out. Then the plane would be flown by a pilot in a second nearby aircraft. It was this pilot's job to guide the plane to the target. While initial tests were carried out during the First World War, it wasn’t until WWII that the technology was deemed flight worthy. Even then there were a number of accidents, such as the one that famously claimed the life of Joe Kennedy Jr. when his B-17 loaded with Torpex detonated prematurely, killing Kennedy and his copilot, Lieutenant Wilford John Willy.

Courtesy en.wikipedia.com

After the Second World War, UAVs saw use as everything from pilotless target drones to the first fledgling reconnaissance drones. These spies in the sky were used extensively during the Vietnam War, with the USAF 100^th Strategic Reconnaissance wing launching nearly 3,500 Ryan Lightning Bugs for use as aerial scouts. (554 of these were lost during the war in Southeast Asia from a combination of enemy action and mechanical problems.) But it wasn’t until the 1980’s that the military had an epiphany that gave them a whole new mindset when it came to embracing the true capabilities that UAVs represented.

It was the Israeli Air Force that first saw the possibilities that drones represented, by using a fleet of Ryan Firebee drones they had purchased from the US to trick Egypt into firing off all their surface-to-air missiles at these UAVs at the outset of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. This made routing the defenseless Egyptian Air Force child’s play. In 1982, the Israeli's soundly defeated the Syrian Air Force by once again using UAVs in a number of tactical roles, including being deployed as decoys, aerial jammers and surveillance birds. Their Scout UAV was the first to transmit live video with a 360-degree view of the terrain below.

During the first Gulf War, the US used Pioneer UAVs developed by Israel to observe Iraqi troop deployments. In one famous incident, a Pioneer launched from the deck of the battleship USS Wisconsin, observed Iraqi troops surrendering following the bombardment of their trenches by the ship. This led the US to develop a new class of military UAV starting with the Predator. At first used exclusively as an observation platform, it didn’t take the military long to figure out that the Predator was a platform big enough to handle ordinance. An armed and beefed-up version of the Predator, which can carry two Hellfire Missiles, was eventually designated the Reaper.

Take me to your leader

Suddenly all kinds of military contractors were creating all manner of UAVs from vertical takeoff quadcopters, to drones that could be carried onto the battlefield in a backpack by troops, to miniature bugbots that could stealthily infiltrate buildings, to world traveling autonomous UAVs that can stay

Image from nbcnews.com

airborne for days or even weeks at a time and that could be mistaken for a UFO if spotted by the public. Ever since the 1950’s, UFOs had become common fodder in newspapers, on TV and in the movies. In more than one motion picture, alien lifeforms descend from their spaceship only to demand, “Take me to your leader.” While this alien invasion never happened in real life, it was only last month when our current Commander in Chief got a taste of what this scenario could be like when a UFO landed on the White House lawn. That’s because on February 2, a DJI Phantom quadcopter, owned and operated by a US intelligence agency employee, crash landed in front of the White House. The employee later said that the UAV in question purportedly malfunctioned. The President, not to mention the Secret Service, was not amused.

Better Late Than Never?

With everyone from businessmen and women to kids having access to an ever growing armada of consumer UAVs, you would think that the federal government would be rushing to legislate the training, operation and regulation of drones. And you would be wrong. The FAA’s rules for the operation and certification of drones are at present four years late. Originally the federal aviation authority had set a date of March 10, 2011 as the inception date for the establishment of regulations that among other things, would designate where, when and how high drones could fly. But as of the date of this publication, the FAA is still asleep at the controls.

Sad to say it, but as drones of all shapes and sizes continue to proliferate, there is no way for a US citizen to obtain either a private or commercial drone pilot’s license. Meanwhile the skies are quite literally abuzz with consumer drones. Aside from rankling the President, there are clear safety issues associated with fleets of unregulated UAVs. While military UAVs such as the predator are responsible for an increasing number of deaths, it is only a matter of time before a consumer drone causes, either intentionally or unintentionally, a fatality.

Image courtesy of msnbc.com

Unregulated drones being flown by untrained pilots can easily come into conflict with civilian and commercial aircraft. A number of consumer drones have the ability to fly hundreds or even more than a thousand feet high. Everything from helicopters to aircraft taking off and landing could be damaged or even brought down should a drone inadvertently stray into their flight path. (Everyone remembers how US Airways Flight 1549 was forced to ditch in the Hudson River in January 2009 when it crossed paths with a flock of geese.)

A blog from qz.com sums up public opinion best:

“As the delays have mounted, drone enthusiasts have grown increasingly frustrated with the FAA. In a press conference this morning, transportation secretary Anthony Foxx and FAA administrator Michael Huerta both refused to say when they thought the new proposed rules might actually be implemented–probably because it could take years. Foxx and Huerta also dodged questions about how the FAA would even be able to know if rules are being violated. Huerta said the FAA’s first focus is on ensuring people know what the rules are.”

In the meantime, commercial drone operators have been flying on the edge of lawlessness. To fly a UAV legally in this country currently requires a commercial operator to apply for and receive an exemption. Since September 2014 the FAA has issued a grand total of two dozen exemptions to commercial operators. This is a fraction of the 342 applications received. Even more bizarre is the government’s current requirement that every applicant have a private pilot’s license. Since there is a huge difference between flying a light plane and a drone, this is just another clear cut case of bureaucracy run amok.

Far from being stymied by the Herculean task of studying the myriad of applications in which commercial operators could employ UAVs, an internal FAA cost-benefit study recently leaked to the press only considered four uses for civilian aerial drones: aerial photography, search/rescue, bridge inspection and precision agriculture. While anything that saves lives or helps feed the world is a good thing, this particular study only covers the tip of the UAV iceberg. It just goes to show how ill-equipped the federal government is when it comes to dealing with the biggest innovation in civilian aviation since the Wright Brothers first flight.

From suasnews.com

While civilian drones continue to literally fly off the shelves, the FAA effort at regulating them seems to be all but grounded. Two weeks ago, the agency proposed that commercial operators pass a written test every two years. They also proposed restricting that commercial operators always maintain eye contact with their aircraft and that drones be restricted to an altitude of no more than 500 feet and a speed of no more than 100 mph. On top of that, they want to restrict drones to flying only during daylight hours and they want to restrict drones from flying over anyone not involved in their use. This means that commercial operators would literally be precluded from flying over any place that crowds gathered, which would mean that you can forget about using drones as delivery vehicles. (Sorry Amazon.)

When it comes to enforcing the rules, that is another matter. A recent article from the NY Times stated that, “Regardless of what the final rule says, the F.A.A. could find it difficult to enforce the regulation. It will have to rely on complaints from the public and local law enforcement. Also, the agency, which is in the middle of a major upgrade to the nation’s air traffic system to reduce congestion, may not have enough resources to monitor the thousands of drones that could take to the sky once this rule is finalized in the coming months. The agency has about 7,200 employees in its aviation safety division, a number that has not increased much in recent years.”

Is anyone awake in the halls of Congress? (or the FAA?) Thousands of unregulated drones are already taking to the skies with unlicensed pilots at the controls. That there needs to be rules and regulations is obvious. Civilian drones are here to stay. As their prices continue to fall and their flight capabilities continue to climb it is clear that doing an ostrich impersonation is hardly going to make the problems inherent in the growing fleet of civilian drones go away. All it makes you want to do is shake your head wonder what Orville and Wilbur would have made of it.

You Only Hack the Ones You Love - A cyberstalking primer

By Carl Weiss

Image courtesy of thebusinessofme.com

With Valentine’s Day right around the corner I thought I’d take the time to give all of our readers a little lesson on what can happen when that long lost love refuses to get lost. What I am referring to is the all-too-common practice of cyberstalking. Along with hacking, this technocrime is on the rise worldwide. If you want to avoid being your significant other’s online punching bag, you need to take precautions before the bloom is off the rose if you hope to have a moment’s peace when your relationship hits the rocks.

If you perform a search of the newsfeeds you will find that cyberstalking is performed by all ages, races, sexes and economic brackets. An equal opportunity nuisance, everyone from grade schoolers to senior citizens have been accused of the crime. And let there be no doubt that since 1999 the act of cyberstalking has been considered a crime. That was the year that California became the first state in the Union to pass a law specifically addressing cyberstalking. The law itself was an outgrowth of legislation that has been on the books since 1913 that addressed harassment via telephone. The chief difference between that and cyberstalking laws enacted since 200 is that it makes it illegal to use email or any form of electronic communication to threaten, abuse, annoy, embarrass or terrify another person. These laws were further beefed up in 2009 with the passage of a cyberbullying law that protects minors from online harassment and intimidation.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the successful prosecution and conviction of cyberstalking cases has been less than stellar. That’s largely due to the fact that conviction requires proving intent to do harm which is often nearly impossible to prove in a court of law. What can make prosecution of this cybercrime even more difficult is the fact that it is child’s play to use a false name or anonymous email address to mask a stalker’s true identity. So even if you know who it is that is harassing you, good luck proving it.

How Do I Hack Thee? Let me Count the Ways

Even worse is the fact that with the advent of technology, harassing texts and emails are only the tip of the iceberg. Off the shelf software can provide an obsessed cyberstalker with the means to quite literally track your every move.

A recent study from NPR stated that more than 85 percent of domestic violence shelters surveyed had victims who were tracked using GPS.

I Smell a RAT! An even more insidious form of cyberstalking is referred to as ratting, where perpetrators use a Remote Access Trojan to commandeer the webcam on a laptop, tablet or cellphone in order to become an electronic peeping Tom.

A newsfeed from express.uco.uk stated that “Rachel Hyndman, a 21-year-old student from Glasgow, who discovered she was being spied on in her home by an online Peeping Tom. She noticed her webcam had switched itself on while she was in the bath. A hacker had accessed her computer via a RAT (Remote Access Trojan) virus which often appears in an email as an advertising mailout. However, once downloaded it gives the sender control of the infected computer. If a digital stalker like Rachel’s has access to your computer they have the power to switch on your webcam to spy on you, operate your keyboard, view emails and access your personal files.”

http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/science-technology/412370/Is-someone-watching-you-on-the-web

While the article goes onto state that Rachel contacted an IT professional that helped her track the perpetrator down and scare him off, what most people don’t understand is that this is not a crime that is limited to male stalkers. Far from it.

From gov.mb.ca

In a news story a little closer to home, ABC News posted a video that featured a St. Augustine, Florida resident Joe Goode whose life was turned upside down when he tried to break up with his fiancé. After hacking her way into his social nets and email accounts, she proceeded to send pornographic photos of Joe to his employers. But that was only the start of the harassment. Next she had him arrested not once but three times by doing everything from telling the cops that Joe was making harassing calls to using a voice morph app to record calls that purportedly came from him. (This cyberstalking trick is referred to as spoofing in the industry.)

Later Joe’s cyberstalker expanded her scope to include his new girlfriend (who was accused of child pornography) and even Joe’s landlord. Coming back into the US after a brief vacation, Joe even gotdetained by US Customs after they receive an “anonymous tip” that he was smuggling drugs.

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/video/2020-mans-cyberstalking-rampage-breakup-28638438

In a blog post on psychcentral.com entitled Cyberstalking Worse Than Stalking, mental health researchers compared people who had been victims of stalking and those who had been victims of cyberstalking. Their findings were surprising to say the least.

· Victims of cyberstalking had to engage in more ‘self-protective’ behaviors, pay higher out-of-pocket costs to combat the problem, and experienced greater fear over time than traditional stalking victims.

· Technology has changed what they call the ‘risk/exposure’ profiles for victims, making stalking easier and self-protection harder.

· Technology in cyberstalking cases may be more harmful to the victim’s psychological well-being and reputation, thus more decisive in spurring quicker self-protective action,” said the researchers.

· The study also revealed differences between age and gender of victims. In cases of stalking, approximately 70 percent of the victims were women, while female victims only represented 58 percent in cyberstalking cases. The average age for stalking victims in the sample was 40.8 years old, while cyberstalking victims averaged 38.4 years old.

The Best Defense

cybbullying.wikispaces.com

While many anti-stalking resources caution the public to avoid revealing too much of their personal lives online, this is not always a practical solution to someone whom you formerly knew and loved. Let’s face it folks, lovers are way too far inside the wire for you to successfully employ passive defense measures. Sad to say, but the minute you pull the plug on a love interest if you want to have some measure of cybersecurity, you need to initiate the following damage control sooner rather than later.

1. Change your passwords on all your social nets and email accounts.

2. Consider changing your phone number.

3. Do not accept any emails or texts from a jilted lover.

4. Do not open any attachment from anyone you do not know.

5. Add additional security to your computer, tablet and smartphone.

While these measures are in and of themselves no guarantee that a scorned lover will simply walk away from a relationship, short of packing up and moving to another state, it is about as good as it gets. Because like it or not, in this technological age many people only hack the ones they love.

Below are some other resources you should check out if you think you are a victim of cyberstalking”

http://quitstalkingme.com/

http://www.victimsofcrime.org/our-programs/stalking-resource-center

https://www.ncjrs.gov/internetsafety/cyber.html

http://www.haltabuse.org/resources/stats/

Honey, I shrunk the PC

By Hector Cisneros

Being a sci-fi buff, I'm into technology. I imagine how it will affect our lives, what will it

Image courtesy of fanpop.com

mean for business, commerce, education, travel and yes watching your favorite sci-fi video episode. Recently my eye caught a headline that read, “HP Launches Stream Mini and Pavilion Mini Affordable Compact PCs”. These computers fit on the palm of your hand. After sending a picture of the computer to my business partner telling him that soon we will be able to make anything a smart device, he wrote me back saying he’s got Tupperware bigger than this new PC. Now keep in mind, we don’t sell any kind of hardware, but we love technology. And this brings up my most important question. Just how low can computers go in the next five years? Matchbox size? In this article I will explore the ever shrinking personal computer, how they will be used and where they will take us. So strap yourself in and turn on “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” so that you can find the limits (if any) to the ever shrinking personal computer.

I have been involved with personal computers since the very beginning. I purchased my very first Apple II in 1979. I had already owned several special purpose computers before (chess computer, etc…) and was stoked at what the future would bring.

From androidwaypoint.com

In the beginning, personal computers actually got bigger. As functionality was added (like floppy drives, hard drives, more memory, faster processor and so on) the PC physical size went up. Portable

devices came into being around 1983 with the Osborne One and soon to follow, Compaq computer. By the end of the eighties the size trend began to splinter with high powered computers getting somewhat larger and regular small business and personal systems shrinking in size by a marginal amount. The 90’s saw this trend continue with the overall size really starting to accelerate with the widespread acceptance of laptop and notebook computers. The early 2000’s saw the domination of laptop over desktops and the emergence of tablets, smart phones and even phablets. Recently we have seen the emergence of Chromebooks and Apple and Android tablets of varying size. Until recently, there were only a few mini size PCs that could actually run full blown Windows 8.1. Most had a foot print of say 10 inches by 6 inches or so and had very specific limits on processing power, memory and storage. With HP’s launch of their new mini’s, we see the emergence of full powered small footprint computers today.

What many people do not realize is that our high tech world has already spawned dozens, if not hundreds of miniature and micro computing devices that are smaller than the HP Stream. Early smartphones (PDA) have been around since the early 1990. Today, many smartphones have more computing power than the computers used in the moon mission space crafts. Today smartphones run the gamut from ultra-portable, super thin do everything devices to large format phablets that act as tablet substitutes. Speaking of tablets, these devices have made huge inroads towards replacing laptop computer systems.

Another area of small smart devices can be found in the medical industry. For example, blood

Courtesy of buffalonews.com

glucose meters have been shrinking in size for years. Ingestible video cameras with tracking devices have been around for quite some time. There is a whole horde of medical devices that use smartphones as the smarts in the system where the smartphone is used to record and store the measured biological function from a micro transmitter measuring device. Today health tracker wearables are all the rage.

In modern terms, when you think of smart devices you can include everything from watches to clothing, drones, small robots, even smart prosthetics come to mind. Let’s face it, miniaturization of transistors, CPUs, memory, storage and other computing devices have always been the norm. But how many are actually full blown computers that include everything you expect in a desktop or laptop system that you’d buy today.

Hewlett Packard was not the first to produce small foot print personal computers. A number of them have been around for several years. A quick internet search reviles small footprint PC from companies like ASUS, MSI, Acer, Lenovo, Zotac and many more. Some of these are even smaller that the newly announced HP Mini’s. The smallest of these are still full featured and come in with dimensions as small as 4 inches by 6 inches by 1 inches and can run Windows 7 or 8. Most of these small footprint computers have been used in specialty/vertical markets, which is why most consumers haven’t yet seen them. It usually takes a company like Apple or HP to push a new technology to the consumer market.

Having said that, the new HP Stream sets a new standard for low price & features while at the same time being one of the smallest new PCs for sure. It includes a powerful Intel Celeron CPU, 2 gigs of RAM memory, 32 gig SATA solid state drive, Intel graphics, support for two displays, four USB 3.0 ports, Wireless integrated Bluetooth 4.0, wireless LAN, wired Ethernet port, HDMI out, headphone out, built in power supply and comes with a wireless keyboard and mouse. Plus, it comes with windows 8.1 and a stack of software apps. The dimensions are approximately 5.7 inches square and 2 inches thick. Price tag – around $179.

If you need a little more power, upgrade to the HP Pavilion which comes with a faster processor, twice the RAM (4 gigs), 3-n-1 card reader, 500 gig hard drive (up to a 1 terabyte in top model), and more s/w. Both come with antivirus s/w and cloud services. Price tag – starting at around $319

Now before you think this is an HP commercial, understand HP was not the first to offer a small footprint PCs. There have been many white label small footprint systems running Android and chrome. Also Apple beat HP to the punch with its 2014 October 16^th release of its own Mac Mini. The Mac Mini is a tad more expensive (starting at around $499) is a full powered, full featured and comes with Apple’s latest IOS. Its footprint is around 7.7 inches square by and inch and half or so. Any Mac user will love this mini Mac because it's essentially a “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” version of a Mac system.

How Low Can You Go?

How small can these devices really get? The actual limit is the size of the connected port you need. You need physical space for video, audio, network etc… ports. However the more we move to higher speed wireless devices the less you need physical connected ports. One day we will easily have match box sized PC’s. Some futurists have even predicted nano-sized computing devices. I don’t know about nano- sized devices, but they would be cool because you could attach them to most anything which is where this article started.

Image courtesy of tomsguide.com

So what's the point of all these small footprint systems. These new small footprint, full featured personal computer systems will allow us to upgrade the smarts of many of our personal devices we currently have at home or in our offices. Want a smart TV? Just plug in a small footprint PC. Want to have your own steaming music or video service, just plug in a small footprint PC and add software for your specific needs. Need to clear up desk space. These little devils are a pint sized godsend for saving space and removing clutter. I don’t know about other people, but I really like the idea of connecting one of these devices to my large flat panel TV. The idea that I can have two full screens on my desk with “virtually no desktop PC” is very appealing. So the next time you go shopping for a new desktop PC, think small, Tupperware small and save all your desktop space for important things like pictures of your family, your lunch or other necessities of life.

Hector Cisneros is CFO of Working the Web to Win, an award-winning digital marketing agency based in Jacksonville, Florida. You can listen to Carl live every Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern on BlogTalkRadio

To the Moon

By Carl Weiss

Nearly everyone on the planet has heard of the XPrize, which has spawned hi-tech competitions with multi-million dollar prizes for everything from fuel efficient vehicles to sub-orbital spacecraft. However, in what must be the XPrize that is by far the most "Out There," the race is on as three-dozen teams are vying to become the first private enterprises to land a rover on the moon. The winner takes home $30 million. In fact, the Google Lunar XPrize competition has recently heated up with one competitor, Team Astrobotic collecting a three quarters of a million dollar "Milestone Prize" for overcoming key technical risks in the areas of imaging and mobility. XPrize may announce more Milestone winners in the coming weeks, if other teams can prove their rovers are on track to land on the moon by December 31, 2016.

To Go Where No XPrize has Gone Before

Image courtesy of deviantart.com

To understand the sheer audacity of the current prize, you need to understand those that came before it. The XPrize Foundation was founded in 1995 by entrepreneur Peter Diamandis who offered a $10 million prize to the first privately financed team that could construct and fly a three place vehicle 100 kilometers into the stratosphere. The contest, which later morphed into the Ansari XPrize eventually involved 26 teams whose combined expenditures topped $100 million. Won by Burt Rutan and his Mojave Aerospace Ventures team who flew SpaceShipOne into space and back, the XPrize did not end there.

In fact the inspiration for the XPrize did not get its start in the space age, but the Roaring Twenties when French Hotelier Raymond Orteig offered a $25,000 prize for the first person to fly nonstop between New York City and Paris. That’s right, this is the very prize that inspired Charles Lindbergh to work with the Ryan Aircraft Company to construct the Spirit of St. Louis. While Lucky Lindy won this prize in 1927, what most people forget is that he was not the first, nor the only person to attempt the feat.

The same year that the Orteig Prize was announced, the Daily Mail offered a 10,000 pound prize for any airplane or airship that crossed the Atlantic Ocean in either direction between the British Isles and the US or Canada. Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten-Brown of the RAF accomplished this feat in a WWI Vickers-Vimy bomber, making the prizewinning flight from Newfoundland to in a little more than 16 hours.

They weren’t alone. According to thestraightdope.com, “Major George Herbert Scott of the RAF and the crew of the British dirigible R.34 in July 1919 flew from East Fortune, Scotland, to Mineola, Long Island, New York, a distance of almost 3,000 miles, in about four and a half days. Also on board were a stowaway (William Ballantyne), a stowaway cat (Whoopsie or Wopsie) and two homing pigeons. The R.34 made the return flight to Pulham, England, a few days later, marking the first round trip transatlantic flight.”

While 10,000 Pounds Sterling or $25,000 American sounds like a paltry amount today, as well as a flight from Europe to the US or vice versa, when taken into context both the prizes offered and the lofty goals put forth were staggering for their time. It also goes to show that cash prizes are an incredible way to galvanize the creative spirit and spur competition.

While the Ansari XPrize was the most newsworthy, it was not the only competition to bear that moniker. In 2007, Progressive Insurance threw its hat into the ring b announcing the Automotive XPrize whose goal was to design, build and race vehicles that could achieve 100 MPG that were capable of being mass produced. On September 16, 2010 three winning teams were announced:

Courtesy of inhabitat.com

1. Team Edison2 won the $5 million mainstream competition with its 4-passenger Very Light Car that achieved 102.5 MPG.

2. Team Li-Ion Motors won the $2.5 million Alternative competition with their Wave-II electric vehicle that achieved 187 MPG.

3. Team x-Tracer Switzerland won the $2.5 million Alternative Tandem competition with an electric motorcycle that clocked in at 205.3 MPG

On July 29, 2010, the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup XCHALLENGE was introduced that offered a $1 million prize that inspired a new generation of innovative solutions that will speed the pace of cleaning up seawater surface oil resulting from spillage from ocean platforms, tankers, and other sources. The team of Elastec/American Marine won the challenge by developing a device that skims oil off of water three times faster than previously existing technology.

A Clear Cut Case of Lunacy

This brings us to the Google Lunar XPrize introduced in September 2007. The goal of the prize is for teams to launch, land and operate a rover on the lunar surface. Offering $20 million to the first team that successfully roves more than 500 meters and transmits back high definition video, the competition also offers a $5 million second prize as well as millions in bonuses by being the first to achieve specific goals.

According to Wikipedia, “As of June 2014, 18 GLXP teams remain in the competition, and five of those are thought to be making good progress. However, none of the GLXP teams have announced firm launch dates to attempt the prize. The prize expires at the end of 2016 and launch service providers typically require launch vehicle reservation 24 months prior to the date of the launch.^[4] Also in June, one GLXP team is scouting co-competitors to travel with it on a common launch vehicle and lunar transit satellite. Astrobotic announced it would be willing to share a single "ride" to the Moon with up to four competitors. The shared transporter, including a shared Lunar landing, would result in a common start time for a race to achieve the 500 m lunar-surface distance-traveled objective. However, Astrobotic had not yet lined up its own launch arrangements with 18 months left in the competition.^[^5]”

Image courtesy astrobotic.com

That’s not to say that several teams haven’t made significant progress. Several teams, including Carnegie Mellon University have already completed rovers. Astrobotics Griffin Lander is well under way. https://www.astrobotic.com/griffin Whether any of the teams will be able to snatch the prize before the clocks runs down is anybody’s guess. But if Lucky Lindy hadn’t risked his life to make the first solo transatlantic crossing by airplane, think of how different the world might be today.

But Wait, there’s More

If a trip to the Moon isn’t far out enough for you there is yet another XPrize that’s even more out there. In 2011 Qualcomm sponsored a Tricorder XPrize with the goal of creating a mobile device that can deliver medical diagnosis, better than or equal to a panel of board certified physicians. Inspired from the Tricorder device from the series Star Trek, this prize has yet to be won. With $10 million in prizes on the line all I can say is, “get cracking all you Trekkies out there”.

Carl Weiss is president of Working the Web to Win, an award-winning digital marketing agency based in Jacksonville, Florida. You can listen to Carl live every Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern on BlogTalkRadio

Greatest Garage Gurus

When it comes to the Internet everyone is familiar with the three letters WWW. Well today we are going to talk about the three G’s, since if it weren’t for the Greatest Garage Gurus there would never have been an Internet in the first place. A number of startups from Apple to HP got their start in the humble garage. Some of these made their owners billionaires. All of them changed the ways in which the world works. Let’s take a look at the top five garage businesses:

#1 – Amazon

What sounded like a South American River turned into a waterfall of profit for Jeff Bezos who founded Amazon.com in 1994 as an online bookstore in his garage in Bellevue, Washington. While it took Jeff until 1995 to sell his first book online, he made it book by being one of the quickest online businesses to go IPO in 1997. Today, this online e-tail powerhouse has one of the most automated shipping systems in the business with more than 40,000 robots employed to help take products to market. Amazon has also been flirting with using delivery drones to enable them to compete with retailers who can offer products on the spot. 2015 is shaping up to be the start of the shipping wars as e-tailers and major retailers duke it out for dominance.

#2 – Apple

image courtesy of http://commons.wikimedia.org

Started in the year of our Bicentennial, 1976, two Steves by the name of Jobs and Wozniak started a revolution by bringing personal computing to the masses. One of their first major orders for 50 Apple I Computers was constructed in Job’s parents garage in Cupertino, California. Although they had their battles with everyone from Bill Gates to the Beatles over the Apple trademark name, the rest is history being that today Apple is the most valuable tech company in the world.

#3 – Disney

While not technically a tech company, although their current crop of animated feature films are produced on computers, the Walt Disney Studio got its start in Walt Disney’s uncle’s one-car garage in Anaheim, California. Started with a mouse named Mickey, today Disney is no Mickey Mouse operation, being the highest-grossing media conglomerate in the world.

#4 – Google

We couldn’t talk tech without mentioning the 800-pound gorilla in the room named Google. Started by Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin in Susan Wojcicky’s garage in September 1998, they unsuccessfully tried to sell the search engine to Excite for $1 million a year later. Excite’s loss was the college student’s gain as the company went public in 2001, raising $2.7 billion. Today, Google is the most trafficked search engine online garnering 80% of all web searches. During the intervening 14 years, Google has diversified itself into everything from medical research to robotics. It has also bought or developed dozens of other tech businesses since going public.

#5 – Hewlett Packard

http://commons.wikimedia.org

An oldie but a goodie, HP got its start in 1939 when Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard invested $535 in order to start building audio oscillators in a garage in Palo Alto, California. One

of their first customers was the Walt Disney Studios, which purchased eight oscillators in order to augment the sound system for its animated feature film, “Fantasia.” Widely regarded as the birthplace of Silicon Valley, Hewlett Packard is today one of the largest and most respected tech companies in the world.

Making Something from Nothing

Like the story “Stone Soup,” where an itinerant stranger tricks the town folk into sharing their food, all of these people literally made something out of nothing. Think about it. When Jeff Bezos started Amazon, major booksellers didn’t regard him as a threat. Heck, it took him almost a year to sell his first book. When Jobs and Wozniak tried to sell the Apple 1, it was little more than a computer kit that sold for $666.66 ($2,763 in 2015 dollars.)

What turned these businesses from a curiosity to an industry were several things, including a little bit of luck and a ton of pluck. Part businessmen, part showmen, each and every one of these individuals ― while regarded as genius innovators today ― had to suffer the slings and arrows not only of their competitors, but of their peers as well. (“Go on, get out of here boy, yer botherin’ me!”) Yet persist they did to become icons of industry, proving the old saw that success is “10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.”

Today this trend continues as other tinkerers piece together hardware and software in their garages,

Courtesy alibabagroup.com

hoping to be the next tech sensation. While many of these future Garage Gurus will be products of universities, others can come out of the blue. Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba in China, founded his company in his apartment in 1999. He claims to have coined the name while sitting in a San Francisco coffee shop. On September 5, 2014 the company went public, raising more then $20 billion making it the largest IPO in history.

Industries to keep an eye on in 2015 are offering such inventions as 3D Printing, Personal Robotics and Drones, Wearable Computing, Battery & Power Technology and Cybersecurity and Robotic Exoskeletons. While the next wave of Garage Gurus could come from one of these areas, or from some other innovation such as nanotechnology is anybody’s guess. What is certain is that some of the most profound changes to society will almost certainly have its start in the most humble of beginnings … the garage.