Mike Schorah

I was excited when I woke at 5:30 this morning to get on the road for a client meeting: almost as soon as I awoke, an article from Inc. arrived in my Inbox. I sat reading http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/48317/13-Ways-To-Pull-Of-A-Killer-Demo-Day-Presentation in the client's car park and I'm glad I did, though the article is more relevant to anyone seeking investment funds near the start of a business. I've done so many product and technology demos since my first days in IBM. One thing that always amazed me was how the tech seemed to know a customer was near so what had worked perfectly minutes before stopped mysteriously when the prospect arrived! I'd add a greater emphasis on tech backup plans to Jason's list in his article. But for me the bottom line is to remember that the people I'm meeting with usually only have one question on their mind: "What's in it for me?" Remember to see life from others' perspective and meet their needs.

Recently we've explored how relatively cheap and easy it is to start a business with new tools that are available . But it's not just $$ cost that can be reduced: time can be cut also, bringing savings and benefits in more or less equal measure. We're intentionally splitting various functional roles across multiple timezones, using the tools that we wrote about to ensure that everyone is coordinated and everything documented for now and the future. Here's how it works in practice: Yesterday I happened to wake at 5am and pick up where colleagues further West were finishing up and falling asleep after midnight. We didn't really stop! Yesterday evening, while I was sleeping, one of my colleagues put out two software development releases in quick succession, documenting what he'd done in our internal systems. I was able to read what he'd written on my smartphone while still in bed when I woke today ... And I could think about it over a leisurely breakfast ...

I had my own little "James Bond" moment today as, daunted by my PC's increasingly long boot-up time, I went off to make breakfast. I returned to find my security software counting down the seconds before it locked me out of the machine and I had to calmly enter the password against the pressure of seconds ticking away. Very ' Goldfinger ' or ' GoldenEye. ' Managing passwords is an increasingly hard problem: according to the book and movie about Facebook, ' The Social Network ' founder Mark Zuckerberg used the system's record of failed login attempts to guess users' passwords for other systems. I think of that each time I login. But, even more bizarrely, there was breaking news last week that the French government intends to make it law for ISPs to store users' passwords in the clear. I haven't seen confirmation of the in the clear  bit, but just mandating easy access to users' passwords is an invitation to fraud, identity th...

your data: gain control Today a couple of us were talking about the need we now have to manage the impression we leave behind for Google and others to discover... I've written on this general area before , but here's what I noticed today when I looked at my Foursquare statistics - my "Most Explored Categories:" Food and Drink Shop Pub Coffee Shop Park Bar What is Zapoint going to make of that if it forms part of my profile prepared for my employer?! Get more like this

The many automation tools available to us create a double-edged sword that's difficult to wield safely. When I first engaged with Twitter, I found a tool that would automatically follow-back those who follow me. Combined with another tool that followed followers of my followers, it was set up in minutes. I could sit back and watch my community of followers grow steadily as my 'bot' found others using the same tools and we'd increase mutual following in a kind of ratchet effect. The trouble is, no one was actually reading the content being produced and, it seemed, no one had anything useful to say. I'm still getting Twitter accounts following me, sometimes with thousands of apparent followers, but no tweets, and no relationship with me. This past week I've seen two further problems: I follow a man I've met in real life, a clear thinker about the future, who communicates frequently with interesting things to say. The trouble is, several times I've ...

Last night at #4sq4m I met @LeightonEvans , a PhD student studying "Philosophy of Technology" - reminded me of @EvgenyMorozov , though the latter has more of a focus on what's technically called 'dystopia,' what happens when the technology nirvana becomes a nightmare! Leighton's thesis sounds interesting as he's exploring the relationships we're forming with our gadgets. Shame I have to wait until the end of the year before it's published and I can read it! Update:  Strange how often I find the BBC reporting the same thing I write about each day - I know they're not reading me! Today I've just found this . "Friends, family and birthdays top the list of things that UK children say make them happy, a survey suggests. Computer games came in above chocolate, while social networking websites languished below both..." So, for Leighton and all the others watching unfolding changes on a daily basis, I spotted this in this week'...

Some time ago I committed personal " Facebook suicide " but now am forced back into engaging with the social network, simply because I've started to create a business page there . Please join my fragile ego in ' Liking ' the business page by clicking the button shown here to the left! Here's a great list of five mistakes that many businesses make with Facebook marketing. As I start to experiment, I'll be sure to try to avoid them! Broadcasting instead of conversing It's true that most of our engagement will be via Twitter , but fans still want the ability to interact and get relevant news from Facebook. The business needs to be on Facebook, simply because that's where customers are. Taking the time Setting up the Facebook page and then forgetting about it will be a recipe for failure: we have a daily routine of working through various social media properties to try to keep relevant content - and because we know that fans will want ti...

LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to promote your company, and its products and services, as well as your own professional profile. I've been putting the lessons from a  great article at Inc.  in to practice: Click on the links to see some examples: Company presence  - Please ' follow ' the company! Products or Services  - Please register for the beta! Professional profile As Inc. says, "Your LinkedIn profile is at 100%. You know how to make connections. You belong to groups. But, if you don’t have a company page on LinkedIn, you’re not taking full advantage of all that LinkedIn can do for you and your business. With over 100 million members, LinkedIn is the top business social networking site. Your LinkedIn company page gets listed in Google’s and LinkedIn’s search engines, allows others to follow your company’s updates, gives you a place to promote services and products and even reports analytics." Rather than reproduce the excellent tips blow by blo...

Notes from a meeting yesterday about the implications of new GeoSocial apps like Foursquare: (Relatively) few businesses are using the capabilities; which is a great opportunity for those who move first into this space. They're mostly of use if your business has bricks-and-mortar outlets and physical product to sell: great for Starbucks and local small stores; less relevant for Amazon and iTunes! It's more obvious how to use GeoSocial to benefit B2C businesses rather than B2B, but even in the latter case there are opportunities, as some clients are discovering. We're seeing objective evidence of increases in footfall, traffic coming to businesses as a result of B2C GeoSocial promotions. And product sales increasing as a result. For some businesses in difficult times this is an opportunity not to be squandered. Even a drinks machine vendor can benefit from implementing GeoSocial: at the moment, that vendor has got zero knowledge about the consumer who buys from the mac...

Last week I noted a number of different free or low-cost tools that help a new business to get started at minimal cost. Here's another that should be on the list: online backup and file sharing tools. The idea is to store some of your information in the 'cloud' so that it's backed-up off your local machine; you can get to your stuff from other machines when travelling if you can get to a web browser; and you can potentially share your files with other collaborators. Useful. Possibly the best-recognised name in the business is Dropbox : simple to set up and to invite others to access your shared files and the 2Gb storage space option is free of charge. However, I'm concerned that insecurity is built in to its design. Anyone can potentially access your Dropbox files; you won't know they're doing it; and you can't stop them, even if you change your password. Update:  There is further confirmation here that Dropbox is insecure . (Dropbox uses a ...

Who knew before Facebook, Flickr and similar just how widely people wanted to share photos of what a great time they're having? You can opt out of Facebook Places (for now); you don't have to sign up to Foursquare, Gowalla or turn on the geo-location of your Tweets. Last month's news was of a German politician's movements tracked through his cell phone . The map was only produced after he got the data from his mobile phone service provider, hardly something most of us can do. But every photo you take on a smartphone and publish with services like Twitpic or Yfrog or Facebook has the location of the photo stored as part of the image data. Your locations are out there, for others to discover. An individual Tweet or a single photo or 'check-in' doesn't reveal much; but try viewing your Foursquare travel history on a ' heat map .' Or learn about an app suitably called ' Creepy .' These tools will reveal clusters of your presence around home...

I got a shock today when I visited a company's website. Not only did the banner headline there scream at me, " Like It Or Not, We're Going To Profile You " but it was clear that they're using tracking techniques to identify my visit to their web site. Graphics on their website are almost inspired by a horror movie! (Jagged blood-drip writing for their '300' Project; sinister eyes on a shadowy figure). Clicking the image here will let you navigate to the website of Zapoint to find out more. But if you browse there with Chrome or Internet Explorer then you'll get a pop-up warning that the website is requesting a certificate to identify you by name. (Firefox didn't warn me.) And they're using services from Hubspot that help companies to "generate traffic and leads through their websites, and convert more of those leads into customers." So, what's The 300 Project about? Over the next year, Zapoint will process publicly accessibl...

Tom Peters wrote The Brand Called You  in Fast Company in 1997. Few of us read the print edition back then, but thanks to the Internet you can still read the article ; and it's probably so much more relevant now than when he wrote it with such prophetic foresight before the turn of the Millennium. (And, thanks to the Internet, Fast Company is still earning ad revenue off the article; but that's another story!) Bottom line: take control of your life and career; treat yourself as your own enterprise. So for some years I've organized everything I do, whether for the companies that pay me a salary or my own initiatives, according to some basic principles. I think it was Peter Russell in The Brain Book  who claimed that our brains can manage to hold an overview of up to nine things at once. Trying to handle more increases our stress. Combined with Peter Drucker's insight that the only things that matter in business are the innovation (R&D) that meets the needs of...

OK, this is uncanny: I come to write today's blog post on some of the tools we're using to support a business startup and find that the BBC is covering a similar story on the same day! Bizarre. The key point, as the BBC says it, is the quote that "It's never been cheaper to start a business," according to Bindi Karia from Microsoft. Firstly, make selective  use of cloud computing: there are dangers as well as benefits in having all of your eggs in the cloud basket. We are careful about which of our business assets we entrust to others. Next, use GoDaddy or 1&1 or one of their very many competitors: with simple tools from them you can set up a basic website and email hosting and more (e.g. hosted custom databases) and have most of the complexity handled for you quite easily. This week I'd planned to push a web re-design tender out to suppliers for proposals; but I realised that with a bit of investment of time I could achieve what the business...

CIA's 'Facebook' Program Dramatically Cut Agency's Costs   A bit of light relief today as I finally have room in my publication schedule to refer readers to a fabulously ironic production by US satirical comedy site The Onion  about Facebook and other social networking sites as extensions of CIA surveillance projects. Look out for lots of additional side-swipes such as the one about Foursquare users. The extraordinary thing is that a quick Google search reveals that there's quite a history to this whole Facebook CIA conspiracy theory! Get more like this

In a Wiki-fuelled march towards collaborative intelligence expect customers increasingly to want control of the information their suppliers hold about them. Think Amazon - As their customer, I make sure that my name and address(es) information is correct; I input my various credit card details; and I can self-serve not just the placing of the order, but the packaging and delivery options ... and I can track the parcel all the way to my door; and more. This is Version 1.0 and Amazon loves it: there's huge brand loyalty as customers find it easier to go back to place an order than to enter details afresh in a competitor site; and the customers are bearing the cost of data entry and checking for Amazon. By giving them tools to self-serve Amazon reduces costs, retains customers, and locks out competitors. And the database helps them cross-sell or upsell products to increase revenue. However, in early signs of customer demands evolving, expect customers to want still greater contr...