Entries Tagged 'Business' ↓

Amazon Sponsored Content Local Seminars

Amazon has a new feature on the checkout page, local recommendations. In the example screenshot above, seminars.

Amazon has this to say under What’s This.

LEADERSHIP AND BUSINESS SEMINARS
These ads feature third-party offers that complement the products you’re shopping for on Amazon.com. They are shown on relevant product pages and are always clearly labeled. When you click on an ad, we get revenue. Generating additional revenue from advertising allows us to offer lower prices to you — something we are dedicated to doing in every way we can.

These advertisements are provided by Clickriver Ads. Clickriver is offered by A9.com, a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com.

A9 is part of Amazon. The question is whether Clickserver retains any user information or if Amazon is just passing anonymous location information. Is it a privacy risk?

Admittedly, most Amazon users might be interested in targeted ads instead of random ones. Some users are very open about their address information. The flip side is likely true of most users, they don’t want anyone they don’t explicitly allow having access to their information.

This particular ad shows up on a page only visible to the customer and not visible on the users profile page.

What’s your take?

Danyelle of The Cubicle Chick hosted another great social networking event. Jilly’s Cupcake Bar & Cafe provided the perfect place for A Sweet Affair.

Beyond further cementing Danyelle’s The Cubicle Chick brand this event gave St. Louis chance to network at a local small business. Jilly’s was a great way to follow through on Danyelle’s promise to support locally owned businesses.

This social networking event succeeded as a tweetup, a foodie gathering, and more. I’ll be frank and say this is my first networking event with so many of our Black St. Louisans and Twitter peeps.

So often at events I’ve attended the mix is very Caucasian heavy. Oh there are a few people of different races mixed in but not near representative of the melting pot that St. Louis is. The metro area is not only home to a good mix of whites and blacks, but has a large mix of Asians, middle-easterners, and more.

St. Louis has one of the largest Bosnian enclaves in the US. The Korean community here has founded many churches and businesses. The list is endless of contributions by all races in our area.

It’s a blessing to see more diversity in local St. Louis events. I grew up here when forced segregation was still going on.  I think this is a sign that things are finally moving along in our culture.

Danyelle is building her brand; if she’s willing, she can be an ambassador of change as well. I’m throwing down the gauntlet for my fellow St. Louisans to step up, bring it big, and get all of our citizens in the game.

The Cubicle Chick’s A Sweet Affair

Jilly’s Cupcake Bar & Cafe

Glamazini #159: The Cubicle Chick’s St. Louis Tweet Up!

St. Louis is home to some interesting people, not the least of which also blog. Each week I’ll highlight a few of our metro area bloggers. You’ll find the serious, the fancy, and the fun, and hopefully you’ll find a connection with them.

Zoe Feast, @stlwebdesign, founded the company Indigo Image in 2000, to ‘provide “Grade A” design solutions at affordable prices complemented with excellent customer service.’ Their blog, Indigo Thoughts, shares how Indigo Image brings positive impact to their customers. A recent post, A ROI Website Success Story, talks about a before and after story of Ruth Hasser, a St Louis wedding Officiant. Great story that takes place in St. Louis by St. Louisans.

Melody Meiners, @CosmosGirl, not only blogs but heads up the team of writers for Girls Guide to the Galaxy™. The team of St. Louis ladies blogs on every topic from fashion to fun. A recent article, The Good Buy Girl’s Guide to Surviving A Sick Day, covers the agony and the essentials of taking a sick day.

Steve Patterson, @urbanreviewstl, blogs at Urban Review STL. The site takes a close look at the City of St. Louis and the entire St. Louis region. Recent weather sparked this informative recent article, Lingering snow creates accessibility issues. Steve and other contributors to Urban Review STL don’t shy away from the issues.

These blogs were all spotlighted by recommendation of their fellow St. Louisans. Here’s a round up of those links again:

Indigo Thoughts

Girls Guide to the Galaxy

Urban Review STL

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Cool video created by The Wonderfactory and Time, Inc. Consider it the Sports Illustrated view of tablet PC meets the Times Inc magazine.

There’s even a glimpse of what the Swimsuit Issue would look like on a tablet. Makes me want to run out and buy an Apple iPad.

Chris aka @RizzoTees on Twitter by Tojosan, on Flickr

Chris Reimer introduces us to his new blog, The Basement Entrepreneur, with this statement:

My name is Chris Reimer, and in a mad fit of personal branding hubris, I dubbed myself “The Basement Entrepreneur.”

So what is a basement entrepreneur? In Chris’ words:

• We’re the guys and gals starting Internet-based businesses in our basements.
• We saved and borrowed almost enough money to actually start the business of our dreams.
• We run our businesses off Macbook Pros in coffee shops. (or a PC if you’re a big baby about Apples.)
• As David Siteman Garland once told me, we “MacGyver” everything in our businesses just to get by.
• We “get” Social Media, and how it’s disrupting everything you think you knew about finding new customers and taking care of the ones you have.
• We band together to help each other, instead of building insular walls around our businesses.
• We work our f**king face off, as @garyvee would say, because we love what we do, not because someone tells us to.

Chris isn’t some guy you’ve read about in Millionaire or on the cover of Cigar Aficionado, there’s no GQ cover yet either. Chris is a real guy, a husband, father, working class guy and he works his tail off.

Rizzo Tees is a his personal business and has become synonymous with Chris himself. It’s a bit edgy and yet a hit with real people. I’ve purchased a few tees there already. Let me say he’s quick and friendly on customer service, getting the goods out, and engaging with those that show some interest.

Engagement. Big word but Chris isn’t that type of guy. He’s the type that swaps stories with you, asks about your kids, and buzzes your news out to the world. Along the way he might recruit you to model one of his tee designs.  Heck, he’s followed the Threadless model and begun outsourcing his new tee ideas to the world. A bold move for a small businesses man.

Social networking doesn’t scare Chris. He’s not afraid to make conversation on and off the net, attending and participating in social media and networking events around St. Louis. He’s a strong contributor to the St. Louis Social Media Club.  His take on things, coming not from a marketing and PR background, brings fresh insight to social networking and business.

I tip my hat to Chris aka RizzoTees. Bring it on bud!

Visit The Basement Entrepreneur today and see what an up and coming success looks like.

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Keith shares his perspective on focus in social networking and media.  Are you just spinning your wheels? Is your company?

Successful information work requires the following:
1.Generalization. Finding opportunities comes from examining information from across a wide range of sources and disciplines.
2.Humanization. Opportunities, by their nature, involve seeing the world in new ways and making connections that we didn’t think of before. This requires human imagination, creativity and intuition.
3.Decentralization. Cross-disciplinary, creative work gains strength from greater diversity and more points of view. To manage this kind of activity requires collaboration rather than control.

With those words, Dave Gray sums up what’s important about Information Work.

Dave defines Information Work for us:

Information work transforms raw data into information which improves our lives. Its focus is not on things but what they mean. In peace and in war, in work and in life, better information leads to more opportunities, better decisions and better results. The primary method of information work is not efficiency of production, but rather, proficiency of induction – the ability to find patterns and imagine possibilities. A valuable information worker is one who can find or create meaning that was previously unseen.

Dave writes in Creativity in the Classroom, how the Industrial revolution covertly shaped the educational system. He then follows up with showing the depth of that influence and where the shortfalls are for our modern society, a society of Information Workers.

I highlighted the ‘requirements’ above because those skills are the ones I see sorely lacking and hardly encouraged in my work experiences. My civilian career as a System Analyst is where I see this most often, the challenge of Industrial versus Information structures and rewards.

The one management fails on most is number 3, Decentralization. Often managers don’t see the need for cross-displine training or work, or even cross-team.  Until recently, our AS/400 programmers on two closely related teams where under two different senior directors and rarely coordinated well or worked cross-team easily.  Sadly it took real life consequences to bring about change, but the change is happening.

That’s where the workers become just as much a problem. Typical Industrial mind set is to go to work, learn a skill, master it, keep doing it, retire.  That works great if you can keep making the same tire for 30 years or cutting out the same pre-fab part. It doesn’t work for crap in a quick paced business with lots of Information Work.

Fellow workers, much like me, were brought up in that old style mind set.  It’s hard to shake. You see this in cases where as soon as something is in a gray area between teams people are quick to shove it to the ‘other’ team.  They are also not anxious to pick up work that is overflow from ‘other’ teams. Heck, not only are folks resistant, I’ve seen out right hostility. I don’t fault them though. It’s in our blood.

Dave Gray’s article, Creativity in the Classroom, recommends tackling the ongoing problem at its source, our education system. I couldn’t agree more.  An immediate change is called for and in my opinion I see no reason teachers couldn’t start down this path today.

Sure, all of these testing requirements present a wall to change as they reward memorization over thinking skills. Still, I’d encourage educators to begin incorporating work on Generalization and Humanization.  Beyond that, we often talk about well rounded but what we do in practice is round out what we memorize with number facts, historic dates, and the rules of participles. How often do we focus on diversifying creative activities and focus on learning a variety of skill sets.

I’ll give up on my mini-rant here. Do me a favor, go read Dave Gray’s Creativity in the Classroom today.

Today I posed this question to Twitter:

If you were Yellowpages, what would you do instead of send out 5 lb phone books? How would go greener/friendlier.

Pretty straightforward and I honestly expected more slamming on Yellowpages than actual  answers. Color me surprised by my first three replies:

SgtHotpants – There should be an opt in/out for Yellowpages

TeriLussier – I’d have an opt out. saw the dumbest news story about an opt in, in SF. The folks who don’t want it should do the opting.

SuperMedia_Help – To opt out visithttp://bit.ly/a0TECO. Use Superpages.comhttp://bit.ly/bS7QV3 for online search – it has the SuperGuarantee!

Opt-out is the winner. But notice the third reply, it’s from SuperMedia_Help. These are the folks behind SuperMedia.com. Their reply is actually spot on topic.

The first link goes to Yellowpagesoptout.com. The site prompts for your zip code. It returns information for contacting your local yellow page directories.  Spot on listing for my area.

Beyond opting out, the site provides information about recycling your yellow pages.

In the comments, please tell me if you’ve opted out, recycle, keeping the world’s largest yellow pages pile or what.  Also what you’d see Yellowpages doing as a best path going forward.

The event that’s kickstarted companies across the US comes to St. Louis. St. Louis Startup Weekend begins March 26th, 2010, 5:30 PM.

So what is a Startup Weekend? Ripping right from the About page:

Startup Weekend recruits a highly motivated group of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more to a 54 hour event that builds communities, companies and projects.

Founded in 2007 by Andrew Hyde, the weekend is a concept of a conference focusing on learning by creating. It is known for its quick decisions, ‘out of the box’ thinking (oh no, the buzzwords are attacking!), unique facilitation technique and letting the founders show what they can do. The program has already met with success in Boulder, Toronto, New York, Hamburg, Houston, West Lafayette, Boston, DC and more.

The participants that attend a Startup Weekend decide what they want to tackle over the weekend and come out at the end with several developed companies or projects. Attendees are responsible for bringing the same desire and passion to the project and walk out of the room with the task at hand, in a short 54 hours. Sound intense? It is.

Each weekend event is like a melting pot, bringing together all sorts of talent and resources. Several companies have received venture capital funding at startup weekends.

So what role will you play at the weekend? A variety exists, and you can fill one or many. A full list of those, along with a lot of first timer questions are answered.

There’s a ton of information on the St. Louis Startup Weekend site. I recommend getting registered and your ticket picked. Of course they recommend  bringing some things, but the biggest is enthusiasm.

Note: One of the local organizers is Joshua Jeffryes. Joshua’s blog.

SPACE Architectural Design Studio is bringing a whole new side to architecture.  An innovative website, a focus on people, and engaging the community. The last they are doing via Twitter and more.

The title, Watching Concrete, doesn’t do the video below justice.  SPACE has been sharing videos and photos of their works in progress, as well as doing interviews about their design philosophy and their people.  Please enjoy the video and then I encourage you to visit the SPACE site.

Courtesy of Vidly and SPACE.