iPhone 4

FaceTime is Apple’s buzz word for video calling.  This feature became available with the new iPhone.  For a detailed description of this feature, head on over to Apple’s official page about FaceTime.  For a good video showing FaceTime in action, go here.

Mic and I both have the new iPhone and we have been using FaceTime for a week now.  It has been great.  When you are talking to someone over the phone, a lot is lost in translation because you can’t see their face or body language.  With FaceTime, you can see the person as you talk to them.  Even better, you can switch between the cameras on the iPhone.  There is a camera on the front as well as a camera on the back.  So during a FaceTime call, you can toggle between your face and other visuals.  For example, if you see a building or sign that you would normally describe over the phone, you simply hit the toggle button and show the building or sign for a few seconds and then toggle back to your face.  Sounds simple, but the effect is dramatic.  It allows more interactive and meaningful communication.

One down side to the current implementation of FaceTime is that it only works over a WiFi connection (for now).  It does not work over the 3G cellular network, so you have to be in range of a wireless access point.  Fring is an application for the iPhone that supposedly supports video calls over 3G and we will be trying that out.  For more info on Fring, go here.  Be sure to read the reviews before deciding if it is worth downloading.

On the positive side, FaceTime video calls do not count towards your cellular minutes because they are sent over the WiFi network, not the 3G network.

Mic and I have weekly team meetings and we do these via FaceTime now.  It has improved the flow of our conversations dramatically.  It makes the process more enjoyable.  This has been a glimpse of things to come and it is a good thing.  In 2 years we will all be looking back at the announcement of FaceTime and wonder how we got by without video calling using our mobile phones.

A template file is basically a starting point for a new document.  For instructions on creating .DOTX files, visit this online tutorial provided by Microsoft.

Once you have created a .DOTX file, all you have to do is double click it in File Explorer to start a new document that uses the template as a starting point.  When you make changes and click “Save”, you won’t be saving your changes to the template file, but to a new Word Document (.DOCX)  This stops you from accidentally writing over your template file!  It also makes sure that you give your document a useful name because you can’t save it without naming it.

For more advanced users, you can implement form fields on your Word Templates.  What this looks like for your end user is that the fields that need to be filled out can simply be clicked on and typed into without having to mess with annoying underlines!  You can also place checkboxes next to appropriate choices in your content.  It makes your forms more professional looking, more consistent and easier to put data into them.  What a great tradeoff… better looking forms that are easier to use!  (Click here for instructions on turning on the Developer menu option that gives you access to placing these controls.)

This is a good concept to apply to your sales contracts, standard forms or any other document that you regularly fill out in your day to day processing of data.

If you are like me, you have laughed and rolled your eyes at “those” people that spend their time playing social games like Farmville and the most recently launched Frontierville.  If you haven’t heard of these games (gasp!), they are the creation of a company named Zynga.  (Valued at over $1 Billion…)  They build Flash based games that plug in to the Facebook social media network.  In the majority of PC based games, you play against the computer.  The twist on “social gaming” is that you play online with or against your friends.  Also, the people playing don’t have to be playing at the same time.  One person does something in the game in the morning, and their friend can respond when they have time to play that evening.  In other words, it is closer to turn-based games like Risk.

The title of this article is “Frontierville – Waste of Time?”.  I have assumed the answer is YES for so long and realized that I needed to at least play one of these games so that I could have an opinion based on experience.  This hit my radar when my brother Mike asked me to be his Frontierville friend when he was at my house 2 weeks ago.  Apparently, he and his wife Elizabeth both play the game and they were looking for “neighbors”.  The concept is that the more people you invite to be neighbors of the Frontier that you are building, the more perks, resources and awards you get in the game.  So basically they didn’t care if I played or not, they just wanted me to sign up to be a neighbor.  <grin>

Nostalgic Interlude
When I was growing up, I remember that we would get together to play board games for entertainment.  Life, Scrabble and Parcheesi were fun nights for the Terry family.  (I know, might not be the most exciting, but it allowed our family to spend time together.)  I will come back to this…

Back to Today
So here is the deal.  I signed up and learned how to play the game Frontierville.  The game starts with you being plunked down in the middle of a forested area with a wagon, some chickens and a few planted crops.  That’s it.  From then on, you have to chop down trees, clear grass and rocks and work on building a homestead.  I made some progress and was able to build a cabin.  Then my brother Mike and his wife Liz connected to my homestead as neighbors.  They started randomly showing up in the game to help me with my land.  This gave them “points” for helping me and gave me points as well for accepting their help.  So that’s where this game got me.  It was actually a lot of fun to compare homesteads with Mike and Liz.  The whole “Jonesing” for things played itself out virtually as I realized that my homestead wasn’t as nice as Mike and Liz’s.  It made me want to work on it more.  And I did.  It kinda feels like the family playing board games again.  I have enjoyed this little experiment and realized that I was hasty to judge social games as a waste of time.

My Opinion
So my answer to the question of whether Frontierville is a waste of time, I say no.  It is a fun way to stay in touch with my family more frequently.  It doesn’t take a lot of time to “get in and get out” for 10 minutes as a distraction during a busy day.  I enjoy building things, and watching my virtual homestead coming together has been surprisingly rewarding.  My recommendation is that you give Frontierville or something similar a chance before blindly scoffing at the concept.  That said, if you get addicted to things and can’t keep balance in your life, then stay away from Frontierville!

How many of you have ever sent or received a LinkedIn invitation that says “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn”?

What did you think about it?

We can tell you what we think about it….DON’T DO IT!

We tend to cringe any time we see the standard default message pop up in our LinkedIn inboxes from someone that wants to connect. In fact, we often joke that the default message might as well be: “Hello. I’m lazy. This invitation isn’t important enough for me to spend the 15-20 seconds it would take to write a personal message telling you who I am, how we know each other, and why I want to connect.”

That said, we understand that there are a lot of people that are new to LinkedIn and are learning the “do’s and dont’s” around using the tool. As we work with clients throughout Kansas City, we’re making sure that people personalize their invitations and stop using the standard default invitation.

Think about it in conversational terms. When you meet someone in person or are talking on the phone, do you use stuffy, boring, impersonal language like “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn?”

Of course you don’t! (At least we hope you don’t!)

So, going forward, when sending LinkedIn invitations, do yourself, the Blue Gurus, and the recipient of your invitation a favor: PERSONALIZE IT!

We would love to hear your horror stories, so feel free to comment!

iPhone 4

You are probably seeing all kinds of press related to the Apple iPhone and the Sprint HTC EVO.  For a good comparison chart of technical specs, check out this article at Wired.com. I think they are both great phones and it is amazing to me how much we are able to do with them.  (Don’t forget that texting while driving is now banned in Kansas.)

HTC EVO (link to Sprint’s site)
I was recently in New York with Trista for our Honeymoon.  We were waiting in line to get into Carlo’s Bakery, home of the reality TV show Cake Boss.  The guy ahead of us had the HTC EVO and I was able to play around with it for a few minutes.  It is a GREAT phone and definitely worth looking at if you are not already drinking the iPhone cool aid like I am.  We are going to get Trista the EVO when it is not such a pain in the rear to actually find one in stock. 

Apple iPhone 4 (link to Apple’s site)
I went into the AT&T store today to figure out what the process is going to look like to upgrade to the newest iPhone.  They have closed all pre-orders due to overwhelming response and the breakdown of the pre-order system.  Thursday, June 24th at 7am is the first opportunity you will have to walk into an AT&T or Apple store to order your shiny new iPhone 4.  I am waiting until Saturday.  <grin>  Mic and I will both have iPhones and we will do a follow up hands on about the new phones from our perspective in July.

Quick Tip: I currently have our business lines under my personal social security number. The sales people at the AT&T store suggested that I combine our 3 business lines into a small business plan using the Blue Gurus EIN with AT&T so that we could receive an 8% discount on service.  After an hour on the phone with 3 different people, I find out that you have to have at least 5 (five) lines to get the 8% discount.  Come on people, train your sales staff!  Anyway, if you have 5 or more lines with AT&T, you should be on a small business plan!

Useful Links

We spoke at the ACA Professionals Club meeting this morning and one of the important conversations was around just knowing what web sites to pay attention to.  Here is a typical list of the web sites/tools that we use on a regular basis related to social media.

HootSuite.com – This is a social media status aggregator.  You can plug in your credentials for each of the supported sites and update your status in one place that then broadcasts out to all of your sites… specifically LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

NameChk.com – This is a site where you can see where your “name is claimed” on the popular social media sites.  Type in your company name or personal name to see what may already be taken.  If available, we strongly recommend you visit the site and “claim your name” by creating a free account and following whatever process each site has you go through to claim your name.

MailChimp.com – A competitor of Constant Contact (email newsletter delivery system).  We like the price, the features, the integration with Survey Monkey and the professional free templates.

WordPress.org – One of the best web site Content Management Solutions.  Did we mention the code is free?  For a showcase of sites using the WordPress system, go here.

RocketTheme.com – One of our favorite web sites to purchase WordPress themes.  The dynamic menus, layouts and straight forward implementation are strong points to the RocketTheme WordPress themes.

Delicious.com – Save your favorite web bookmarks using this site.  They go with you where you go.  The social component is that you can easily share your sites with others, tag the links for relevance and more.  To see Jason Terry’s list of links, go here.

We would love to hear about your favorite social media sites and tools, so be sure to comment us back on this post for the world to see!

iPad

We wrote a few weeks ago that we have adopted the iPad and love it, but wanted to give you an update.  Apple has sold more than 2 million iPads in 2 months.  There is talk that the iPad will outpace Mac laptops in terms of sales volumes.  Why does this matter?  We consult with many small business owners, and after giving our iPads a whirl, they go out and buy one themselves.  It is that simple.  The user experience is fantastic.  It is just easy to use.  Couple that with the reasonable price tag and we will continue to see the iPad fly off of the Apple retail shelves.  They are still having problems keeping them in stock at certain locations.

The other thing that we really like about the iPad is how well it can be used to do the things that you need to do as you run your business.  Email, calendar, contacts, reading books, checking the weather, using the Safari browser to hit all the web sites you would normally check out on a given day… it is all right at your fingertips.  The most important part of the iPad is that it was built for touch interface.  No external wireless mouse.  You can use a bluetooth enabled keyboard with it if you want to (and we have them but never use them).  It is a different way of consuming content on the move and it just feels right.

Don’t forget that June 7th is the assumed date that Apple will announce the next version of the iPhone.  We are going to be buying them as soon as they are available!  And if you have always wanted to be able to get insurance for your phone, prepare yourself to shell out $14/month.

WordPress

We have talked about WordPress before, but it comes up so often that we needed to mention it again.  In the past month, we have had 5 companies hire us to help them create new web sites to replace their dated and static web sites.  (Before and after case studies will be on the web site in the coming months.  For now, visit the official WordPress Showcase.)  Our social media clients are doing this because they see and hear about how we use WordPress and professionally designed themes to create fantastic looking web sites without the equally fantastic price tag.  WordPress is a FREE content management system for creating web sites with a ton of functionality including Blogs, Image Galleries, Polls, SEO Optimization and more.

In an environment where a typical web design proposal weighs in at $5,000 as a starting point, a WordPress based site can be implemented for half that.  Another incredibly important benefit for using WordPress is that someone on your staff can easily update the content on your web site regularly with the built-in Content Management System. All without having to pay someone hourly fees to create a news article or updated staff profile.

Version 3.0 of the WordPress system is due out this month and there are a TON of great new features.  The current Blue Gurus Web Site uses a theme from RocketTheme.com that cost $50.  It took 2 hours to switch from our old WordPress theme to the new one, completely changing and updating the look and feel of our site for the better.  And if we didn’t like it, we could have switched back to the previous theme with the click of a button.

We often buy templates for our clients from ThemeForest.net and RocketTheme.com.  The previous Blue Gurus web site theme was called Display and we bought it at ThemeForest.net for $42.  We would love to hear from you (go ahead and COMMENT!) if you have other WordPress Theme sites that you like.  We have been pleasantly surprised with the developer support of these themes.  The theme sites we use support the ability for you to ask the developers of the themes questions if something isn’t working quite right.  Sometimes, the problem has been on our end.  Sometimes, it was a flaw in the design that the developers fix and update for all to take advantage of.  Either way, getting that support from the theme developer is worth so much more than the cost of the theme itself!

If you have been sitting on a web site for more than 3 or 4 years and you know it is time to create a new site, be sure to give us a call to discuss WordPress options!  We would love to show you the power of this community based content management system that powers hundreds of thousands of web sites!

(WordPress Dashboard Backend)

RSS Feeds

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. (Wikipedia definition and more details)  It is a way for web sites and bloggers to publish their content in a standard format.  The nice thing about the standard is that there are hundreds of different “feed readers” including Microsoft Outlook, Google Reader and more.  What we like most about RSS is that you can have access to breaking news on whatever subject interests you, and because the media is not printed, it is environmentally friendly.  For a list of great RSS feed readers, check out this Mashable article.

We stumbled on an amazing RSS reader with a unique twist in an iPad application called Early Edition.  (Review by CNET.com)  This reader allows you to specify the various RSS feeds that you want to consume (list of feeds we like later…).  It then grabs all of the recent articles from those feeds, mixes them up, and presents them in a newspaper looking format that works very well.  After a week of consuming RSS feeds using Early Edition, we can honestly say that it is the best feed reader we have used.  We especially love how various topics are mixed together, making it more interesting to read.  Highly recommended.

Here is a list of feeds that the Blue Gurus pay close attention to, in case you want to add them to your list!  If you aren’t reading RSS feeds yet, it is worth your time to check out what it is all about!

Mashable.com (RSS)
Slashdot (RSS)
Engadget (RSS)
MacRumors (RSS)
USA Today Top Headlines (RSS)
CNN Top Headlines (RSS)
BlueGurus.com (shameless RSS)

Screenshot of Early Edition RSS Reader for the iPad:

MacRumors.com

If you are a follower or fan of Apple products, you should be sure to check out MacRumors.com.  This site is dedicated to all things Apple.  In the past 2 years, we have read about late breaking stories like new iPhone features and early product pictures, iPad release information, the oh-so-funny story about how an Apple employee lost their development iPhone at a bar and more.

We really like hearing about things that are coming our way from Apple before they hit prime time because we are fans of the iPhone and iPad.  We can’t wait until June 2010 for the next version of the iPhone called the 4G or HD depending on who you ask, more on that here.  Our goal at Blue Gurus is to make things work better for our customers.  One of the reasons we enjoy recommending Apple products is because they just work well.  And you don’t have to have an engineering degree to use the products.

Enjoy MacRumors.com!