Firefox 3 Release set for June 17

(TheForceField.Net ) June 13, 2008 — Firefox 3.0, the next incarnation of the popular and powerful web browser from The Mozilla Foundation, is scheduled for official release Tuesday, June 17, 2008. According to Mike Beltzner, Mozilla user experience lead, the new browser is ready for prime time.

 "Whenever we’re asked 'when is Firefox going to be released' we endeavor to answer to the best of our abilities, but the truth of the matter is that we’ll only ever ship 'when it's ready', Beltzner wrote on the developer blog Wednesday. "After more than 34 months of active development, and with the contributions of thousands, we’re proud to announce that we’re ready."

New features of the browser will include more secure browsing, simplified and easy to use features and improved performance. The new version is based on Gecko 1.9, a web rendering platform that has been in development for 34 months.

To celebrate the release of Firefox 3, Mozilla announced  Firefox Download Day 2008, an effort set a Guinness World Record for the most downloads of a software application in 24 hours. A web site was created to host the event and encourage participation on a local level. As of Friday, over one million pledges across the world were recorded.

The Force Field will participate in Firefox Download Day 2008 with a launch party. A page and forum will be available at TheForceField.net to download and discuss the new browser the day before the launch. 

 

 

Download Day 2008

 

 

Electronic Products Magazine

 

Open Office Releases Patch to fix critical security vulnerability

Open Office released a patch to fix a critical security vulnerability. It affects versions 2.0 through 2.4.
The patch fixes a vulnerability in the heap flow. The patch can be obtained at http://www.openoffice.org .
There hasn't been any reports of a working exploit.
The full article can be read here http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20080611/tc_pcworld/146970

Twitter – a serious marketing tool?

Recently I was surfing around the various tech forums and noticed the same question posted everywhere asking what is quickly becoming an almost universal catch phrase. “Do you Twitter?” Not surprisingly, one of the first responses is invariably an almost classic one. “What’s a Twitter?”

If you are one of those respondents, don’t be ashamed. Twitter is a fairly recent phenomenon in the social networking space. It is a free “microblogging” service that allows mobile users and others to connect with one another in quick text message blasts consisting of 140 characters or less. Twitter was officially launched in October 2006 and quickly grew in popularity among the social networking crowd. More recently, however, Twitter has enjoyed a surge in popularity and growth. It is so popular, in fact, that it suffers from periodic glitches and down times from overload, or “too many tweets.” One such outage occurred as recently as this morning.

With this surge in popularity comes potential opportunity. Where there are people, there is an audience. Where there is an audience, there is a potential market. Where there is a market, there are potential customers for your products and services. There is potential here.

I first found Twitter within the podcast community while searching for new ways to promote The Force Field. I admit I thought it rather juvenile at first and was actually astonished to find so many other people and organizations who were already connected to hundreds, and in some cases thousands of other people – often complete strangers – who were sending messages to each other. I thought it was completely bizarre, but immediately realized how powerful the concept was, considering that these social connections were virally stimulating even more connections.

I believe it helped fuel the growth of both the podcast and the web site in recent weeks.

I also discovered that many other companies and organizations have already realized the marketing potential of Twitter and are using it to promote their products and services to an entirely new space. They are using it to advertise and communicate with their customers and potential customers in a more interactive and personal way than with traditional media. Building relationships with customers in this way can potentially have a great impact on brand awareness, customer loyalty and, ultimately, the bottom line.

Best of all, it’s free, and you can’t beat free.

A couple of weeks ago I polled the Providers in the OnForce forums to find out if anyone else was thinking about using Twitter as a marketing tool for their business. Interestingly enough,  75% of those polled chose “What the heck is a Twitter?” These are folks in the IT industry, the ones who are supposedly on the cusp of technology, new forms of communication and new trends. Strange.

I view this as a potentially powerful tool for communication, marketing and support. Imagine setting up a Twitter account for your business and telling your customers about it. Suddenly they have an instant line to you when they need you – then you answer when you are ready for them. You have an instant line to them when you have a new ad or coupon to deliver or a special to promote. You and your customer have an instant line for support in a pinch.

Likewise, imagine if techs were connected to each other this way, they could support one another when in the field when a peer is in a pinch.

There likely other uses for Twitter as well that are yet to be developed. For now, the marketing potential alone is sufficient to justify an account. The question is, if it can be used as a tool to market your business, would you utilize it?

You can Twitter me @theforcefield.

http://www.twitter.com/theforcefield

 

 

Systems Management News

 

Want to learn the business? Read the trades

When I started selling computers as a business in 1997 I had aspirations of building a business empire. I had no plans to spend the rest of my career as a tech. I wanted to run a tech business. I wanted to be, first and foremost, an entrepreneur. Selling and repairing computers was not my primary goal. Building a business was the main objective. My position as a tech was intended only as a temporary one until I could afford to hire someone to take my place. Years later, I was still waiting.

I knew how to build and repair computers, but I didn’t know much about the computer business. My competitors were certainly not willing to help me and there were few resources available at the time that I could turn to in order to educate myself. I learned it all the hard way, by making business mistakes. And I made a lot of them.

When I joined  ComputerRepair.com in 2004 (now known as OnForce ) and Yahoo! newsgroups such as computerbusiness@yahoo.com in 2005 I found that I was not alone. There were a lot of other techs who jumped into it the same way I did, dealt with the same problems and made the same mistakes.

One of the problems I had with running my business was keeping up with all the new technologies and all the industry “buzz” words. Acronyms like “NAS” and “SAN” were thrown around in the field and terms such as Software as a Service, Web 2.0 and,more recently, Managed Services  were freely exchanged during phone discussions and seminars at trade shows. It’s a dirty little secret in this business that when two or more IT professionals meet and such terms are interjected in the discussion, the heads nod silently and at least someone becomes a deer in the headlights but no one asks what they mean because no one wants to come across as out of touch or less informed about the business than their peers. It’s kind of a geek ego thing.

So some in business run around and say things like “the vertical systems market is opening new opportunities for resellers in the channel” and  “we just tapped into selling Managed Services to our SMB clients and we’re looking to expand into the enterprise by Q1 of 09” and the rest have no idea what these individuals are talking about. Well, you can. You just have to keep up with the latest news and industry trends.

One of the best ways to do this is by reading industry trade publications .

Every industry has at least one trade magazine that the professionals subscribe to and follow to keep up with what is going on in their industry. The IT industry is no different; in fact, our industry has one of the largest – if not the largest – collections of trade magazines, white papers and web based content  on the entire planet. There is a plethora of them covering every niche and sub-niche in the IT marketplace.

These publications- the magazines, white papers, multimedia webinars, etc. are rich with news and content about products, services, issues and trends in the industry. Some of it is self-promotion, some objective. It can be analytical, speculative, dry or entertaining – but it’s all readily available to everyone who needs or wants to know more about what is happening in the IT industry and how they can leverage that knowledge to start and grow their own businesses.

If you want to learn and keep up with the latest “buzz” words in the industry, reading trade publications is a must, since some of the terms are created, coined or spread in these publications. In other words, you will learn about them right from the source.

These magazines are a great way to educate yourself because you can read them at your leisure, you can subscribe to as many as you need or want or you can focus on the ones that are specific to your area of the business. 

The best thing about these publications is that nearly all of them are FREE. Of course, you need to work in the industry. All you have to do is fill out a qualifying form to show that you are an industry professional.

Understand that these publications are not aimed at laypeople or the general public, so the form is necessary to filter out those who are not qualified. It takes a few minutes to fill out the form, but once you do and are approved, you are in. Overall, it is well worth the investment. After all, they are free, and you can’t beat free.

The goal of The Force Field portal is to help IT pros who are in business or want to be in business equip themselves with the information and knowledge they need to be successful. One of the paths to that goal is to provide access to the latest news and trends in the industry to help entreprenurial techs educate themselves and understand how to do business with the rest of the players in their field.

When we first launched the portal in beta form late last year I painstakingly collected a personal list of trade magazines that I felt were useful and relevant to my peers and posted them in both the FF forums and the IT Business Resource Directory . Many of these are publications I actively subscribe to and learn from. In the last few years I have learned a lot about running an IT business from reading these periodicals. I posted the list so you can subscribe to them and learn from them as well. 

To make it all easier for you to browse the list and subscribe to them, we recently launched theforcefield.tradepub.com , a collection of leading industry trade magazines from respected publishers. Instead of sorting through the original list in the forums or in the directory and going through the time consuming task of contacting the subscription department of each publication, I felt it would be better to display them all on the site and make it as easy and convenient as possible to sign up.

In addition to the magazines you can download white papers, webinars and podcasts across 34 industry sectors. It is a one-stop shop for the leading trades in the IT industry and I think it is well worth it.

Sign up for a few today and the next time you meet up with other IT business pros at a trade show, forum or meeting and someone mentions a new buzz word, you’ll be able to tell them what it means. 

 

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