Category Archives: Business

twitter – the new chat system

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So i’ve been thinking about twitter recently and have pretty much come to the conclusion that twitter is/will be the new form of chat going forward.  In it’s current incarnation, i think mostly because of celebrities, it’s become generally a one way ‘status update’ system.  While it can still be used this way, many users are using it as way to have conversations with new people (@signsomeone), and have conversation around general topics (#hash).

If you think about it, it’s pretty much similar to the way chat used to be: IRC (internet relay chat, go look it up).  On IRC you could congregate around a specific topic (#hash) and talk to random people.  The benefit of twitter compared to IRC is that the topic chats have no formal rooms and everything is public.  Information around topics are also available to more people because of its public nature and are archived which oddly, allows for asynchronous communication, or better,  real-time (synchronous) communication.

I’ve found that the brands who use it best are the ones who use it as a form of this one-to-one real-time communication.  They are able to see what people are saying about them, since there are no “formal rooms” and are able to address them directly.  This provides a valuable source of what people are saying about them, and allows them to join in on the conversation about themselves.

Oddly, most brands however just use twitter as a form of one-way communication, broadcasting out “updates” to their ‘users’, which I believe is just a lack of understanding on their part of the medium.  Think about it this way… If I don’t care to visit your site, or follow your RSS feed, why would I care to follow your twitter feed?  It really makes no sense.

Going forward what I believe we’ll really start to see is more focus on grouping people together, which they’ve started with the #hash feature and the new lists feature.  I also believe the hashing and the lists can be a potential revenue model, similar to what youtube has done with their brand pages.    I may throw up a demo site to feature this thought in the future.  I’ve been already thinking of possible funny branding opportunities around #hash marks.

Anyway, anyone have any thoughts about this?

apps on my mac

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I thought i’d outline the apps that I run on my mac, since im in the middle of formatting my hard drive because Adobe doesn’t run on case-sensitive drives (who knew!).  Anyway here they are in no specific  order:

- Office 2008 – for my standard editing, spreadsheets, work email (entourage)

- iLife – primarily for iphoto – i tried picasa and hated it.  i tried aperature, loved it until i found out the full cost

- Adobe CS3 – primarily for photoshop and flash

- textmate – for my quick editing of files – word is just too clunky for this

- eclipse – for my java/php/js/html/css editing

- adium – for my chatting – (gmail, yahoo, msn, aol)

- tweetdeck – for twitter + facebook (hey add 4sq!)

- omnigraffle – for my IA work that i need to do

- quickbooks – for my accounting

- quicksilver – this is probably increases my efficiency on a mac by 10%.  if you don’t use it, you should look into it.

- transmit – my ftp program

What apps do you use?  I’d like to hear!

edit : ooops forgot about couple of thinigs: Firefox (with web developer and firebug plugins) and Charles my proxy to help debug transmissions between applications

Excel v. Quickbooks and my thoughts for SMB accounting

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If you’re just starting off and you are just a sole proprietor, that does not have an LLC, S-Corp, or Corp (a business entity), then you probably don’t really need to use QuickBooks.  Stick with Excel.  You probably don’t have that much to deal with in expenses, accounts receivables, accounts payables, and most importantly payroll.  You can probably just track everything with one spreadsheet with multiple tabs.

However, once you start entering a stage where you need payroll, (where you pay yourself or other ppl), your totally and utterly fubar’d.  All of a sudden you need to constantly check your bank account balance and make sure you have the funds necessary to pay your taxes.  Scheduling the payments that you need to make for state and local taxes is an utter nightmare as well.  I tried doing this with excel for about 6 months, and ended up being late on payments, and never knowing how much I really had in my account.  QuickBooks helps with managing this chaos.   With its payroll features, it tells you when payments are due, what taxes you will owe and whens the best time to pay them.  In addition, with the payroll feature I can direct deposit my checks to myself and schedule out my payments.

The best feature I think, (which has been a life saver for me in this down economy) is tracking partial payments.  Several of my clients haven’t been able to pay full payments and i’ve been having to figure out what is owed to me.  With an excel spreadsheet, you need to be able to track your Net Accounts Receivables and what’s still owed.  This is no small feat for an excel spreadshee.  With QuickBooks, this is handled for you and you can also see all the receivables that have been over due for a month.

Finally, QuickBooks allows you to track time and create invoices.  Tracking time has been a great help to me to track my work on specific projects and determining whether or not I under bid or over bid my project.  I can run a report that shows me the extact time allocation per project for a specific period of time.  QuickBooks also allows this time to be added to an invoice, which you can print out as a pdf.  It even allows you to customize what the pdf looks like!

All in all, looking back I wish I used QuickBooks much earlier when I started my business.  It would have saved me a lot of heartache and pain.  I strongly recommend purchasing it, if you have a business entity.