by Andy Brudtkuhl on August 22, 2007
Google Released a sweet new feature today to their Maps application. In the same manner as you embed videos from YouTube you can embed maps on your webpage without knowing any programming – just copy and paste. There are a lot of cool things you can do with this, including adding maps to events, your business, delivery routes, bike routes, and much more.
As an example I’ve mapped out all the Central Iowa Bloggers‘ offices using the My Maps feature (if you weren’t included it’s because I couldn’t find your address).
View Larger Map
If you want to link or embed this map yourself, here’s the link.
This is pretty cool. If you want to know how to embed maps on your page the Google Maps blog has a great how-to post.
Tags: Google Maps, Embedded Maps, Central Iowa Bloggers, Iowa, Des Moines
by Andy Brudtkuhl on August 20, 2007
From the Sydney Morning Herald…
Richard Cullen of SurfControl, an internet filtering company, estimates the site may be costing Australian businesses $5 billion a year. “Our analysis shows that Facebook is the new, and costly, time-waster,” he said.
The report calculates that if an employee spends an hour each day on Facebook, it costs the company more than $6200 a year. There are about 800,000 workplaces in Australia.
How accurate is this? Probably not the most accurate since it’s a PR trick by company who makes a surfing control product.
But the concept is right on. With 34 million users one can guess at least 1 million of those are employed knowledge works with access to a computer / internet. Now consider a $40k / year average salary (arbitrary, but useful for my point) for those knowledge workers. If you consider an hour of Facebook time a day there is a loss of just over $10mil, daily, with just under 3% of Facebook’s user base.
Expensive waste of time? Sure. But if they weren’t on Facebook they’d just be somewhere else.
Tags: Facebook, Expensive Waste of Time
by Andy Brudtkuhl on August 20, 2007
In the Skype board room late last week…
Skype CTO: “I’m sorry mister CEO, our entire network went down. We’re working to get it back up but everyone is getting really upset with us.”
Skype CEO: “How soon until we are back up?”
Skype CTO: “I’m not sure. I called in all our top engineers – they are working night and day until it is fixed.”
Skype CEO: “Any idea what happened?”
Skype CTO: “No, not a clue. All I can tell you at this point is it was a massive outage.”
Skype CEO: “Is there any way to salvage our reputation? Can we blame it on anyone else?”
Skype CTO: “Well, Microsoft releases patches through Windows Update every month and earlier this week they pushed the new updates to their users. Maybe we can say that was the cause?”
Skype CEO: “Okay, we have a solution. Blame Microsoft. Marketing Director – get us some copy from PR so we can get this to the people as fast as possible. Once everyone starts following along they’ll forget about what really happened and by that time we’ll have it fixed. Everyone, to your battle stations.”
—-
From The Register article…
Skype has blamed last week’s prolonged outage on the effects of Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday.
The latest security update from Microsoft required a system reboot. The effect of so many machines rebooting and subsequently trying to log onto the Skype VoIP network triggered system instability and a prolonged outage of almost two days starting on Thursday1. Services have now being restored.
The Register – Patch Tuesday update triggered Skype outage
Techmeme is all over it. It is sounding like most people aren’t buying into the excuse.
Official “Press Release”
Tags: Skype, Outage, Microsoft
by tjmapes on August 20, 2007
by Andy Brudtkuhl on August 17, 2007
I left a comment on Zane’s Facebook post that sparked some thoughts which leads to this post.
Is there a measurable ROI for businesses adopting social networks?
I would think this would be something somewhat easy to measure. As an entrepreneur in the web world my currency is not dollars – it is time. This is especially the case for those of us entrepreneurs who have mortgage payments and thus are forced to maintain their cubicle dwellings.
As a result I look into the adoption of new technologies from the eyes of a CIO – using ROI. In my case the investment is rarely money. As a webpreneur (yes, I made up a word) I measure ROI in time as the investment rather than capital. Could the hours it takes to manage the vast array of social networks be better spent in product development, blogging, or managing my brand?
Basically to break it down – I could build a web application in the time many people spend managing Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Blogs, etc, etc in a single week. In that I can see a measurable ROI.
So my question to businesses (mostly entrepreneurs) is – Can you provide me with tangible, measurable ROI from your social networking activities?
If you can prove it to me than I may jump on board. Until then I’ll watch the fads from the sideline while I’m building something tangible. And I know most of the responses will be “it’s about networking”. I’m still an active networker without Facebook and Twitter. I have a phone, email, IM and monthly meetings with the brightest people around.
Tags: ROI, Business, Social Networking, Facebook, MySpace
