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Top Tips for Entrepreneurs
Featuring our own Kathy Labozzetta.
i3 Business Solutions #1 in Sales for Microsoft’s Cloud Champions for SMB’s
i3 Business Solutions, llc announced today it won first place in a Microsoft national contest by selling the greatest number of Office 365 SMB seats by program tier.
Microsoft’s award to i3 Business Solutions recognizes its leadership in the SMB Tier.
“This award validates our commitment to delivering the right solutions for our clients,” said Mike Ritsema, president of i3 Business Solutions. “Microsoft Office 365 Cloud solution, security and continuous process improvement are our focus for 2012. We refuse to lock our customers into traditional and expensive on premise solutions,” he continued.
The Demise of Guys
The TED conference is one of the most exclusive conferences in technology. Their web site: “TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. The two annual TED conferences, in Long Beach/Palm Springs and Edinburgh, Scotland, bring together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes or less).” Check them out atwww.TED.com.
I don’t know how I got on Clare De Graaf’s mailing list – but I’m glad I did or am. This 4 minute video says a lot about our changing culture – our children, you & me. Technology, smart phones, online games and social media are changing all of us – especially the millennial generation. I challenge all of us to 1.] be aware of what’s happening 2.] resist the change – organize our lives around the important – not the urgent.
They say, and I am saying, five years from now you will become the sum of who you associate with and the books you read. Who are you hanging around with and what books are you reading? I’m a slow reader and it takes work and discipline to plow through books. That’s why I’ve consumed hundreds of books on tape and CD in my car in the last 30 years. I’m considering subscribing towww.audible.com to accelerate my reading results. I challenge each of us to picture the three feet of books we’ve read that will define us five years from now. Commit now to reading a book a month – minimum! And for 2012 reflect on who we’re hanging around with. If I want to change or improve any area of my life – who might I associate with that could change or improve that area of my life? I choose intentional results in all areas of my life. Um, yes, this video has serious implications for our children and may require specific action … and also causes me to reflect on my own life, habits and direction.
Dr. Philip Zimbardo is a world-renown psychiatrist and he’s speaking at the 2011 TED Conference. This conference is held once a year and features short presentations by the foremost leaders and thinkers in the world in every possible field. Whether Dr. Zimbardo is a Christian or not, his observation are worthy of our attention. It’s obvious that experts of every stripe are now recognizing the damage both porn and video gaming are doing to men and ultimately to the woman they hope to marry.
The ideas presented below come from my friend, Don Pearson, a Pastor of Student Ministries at Blythefield Hills Baptist Church. Don has amazing insights into the world of teens and young adults and you’ll do well to listen. www.facebook.com/iparented
So what can you do?
Rather than simply whine about the problem, Don offers three specific steps you can take to address the issue of the demise of guys.
- Get a copy of iParent, written by Don Pearson. I was stunned when I read the short but powerful book that centers on how young people are being shaped by social media in ways I’d have never guessed!
- Plan on attending the iParent discussion on Monday, January 30, 2012. (Click here for details or put in the web address.)
- Read Don’s blog this week. Boys to Men, 10 great alternatives to shape real men. (Click here or put in the web address.)
Please check these resources out and then forward this email to everyone you know.
Clare De Graaf
Author of The 10 Second Rule
Even security companies have security problems – are you protected?
Symantec servers were breached six years ago, and source code to several of its security products was stolen. What’s more, the company is just now discovering the fact.
Symantec has admitted that unknown perpetrators had breached its servers and stolen source code to a number of its security products despite previous claims to the contrary.
Read the full article, click here.
Zappos Breach Affects 24M, Opens Door For More Attacks.
Hackers breached a server belonging to online retailer Zappos, allowing them access to the personal information of more than 24 million customers, the company announced.
In an email letter sent Sunday, CEO Tony Hsieh advised users to change their passwords after intruders gained access to parts of the company’s internal network through one of its servers in Kentucky. He did not indicate when or how the incursion occurred or when it was detected.
Investigators believe the hackers harvested names, email addresses, billing and shipping addresses, phone numbers and the last four digits of credit card numbers.
Click here to continue reading.
Social Media Is Changing Our Relationship With Others … And With Ourselves!
(via MLive)
Why Sherry Turkle, MIT Prof, Author of ‘Alone Together’ thinks we must discuss technology’s hidden costs :
GRAND RAPIDS — These days, everybody and their brother carries a mobile device allowing them to text a friend, “tweet the deets” or post their location for the world to see.
For Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Sherry Turkle, there’s a fundamental paradox in that social norm, whereby folks have become so busy communicating with each other that many of us have lost the ability to connect in a meaningful way.
“People are comforted by being in touch with a lot of people who they are also keeping at bay,” said Turkle, a technology and society professor, licensed psychologist and author of “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.”
Speaking to a standing room-only crowd in the Covenant Fine Arts Center at Calvin College, Turkle, the kick-off speaker for the college’s January Series, highlighted the hidden costs of being able to “bail out” of the real world at any moment on an iPhone or Blackberry.
Being able to connect with anyone, instantly, on social networks like Twitter or Facebook, creates the “illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship,” something she calls the “Goldilocks Effect” — connection made to measure; the ability to hide at will.
This cultural shift is becoming evident in people who would rather text than talk to one another, such as teens who find a phone call “too real time” for them.
The pressure to respond to text messages or emails immediately is resulting in shorter, simplistic bursts of communication, which is poor training for people growing up in a world that’s become increasingly complex. “It’s like we’re putting ourselves all on cable news,” she said.
Moreover, people are so compelled by the blinking light on their phone that they’ll rudely interrupt a meeting or disregard their safety to check it while driving, because, she says, “their mobile device feels like the place of hope in their life — the place where something good will come.”
In teens, feelings of isolation are an important part of learning to cope with emotions, but young people nowadays are losing comfort with being alone, which Turkle said allows someone gather themselves in a kind of refreshing solitude that can become the wellspring for creativity.
As result, a kind of “I share, therefore I am” ideal has developed, whereby the validation of a feeling becomes part of establishing it, she said.
“Your contact list becomes like a list of spare parts to support a fragile adolescent or adult self. You almost don’t feel you had the feeling until you had it validated by sharing it,” she said.
“There is a great psychological truth: if you don’t teach your children to be alone, they will only know how to be lonely.”
Turkle hopes to spark a cultural conversation about the effects of “inappropriate fantasies of substitution” for real life inherent in certain technologies, but counsels that framing the in terms of an addiction is self-defeating because the only remedy becomes to “quit cold-turkey.”
Instead, she suggested that rather than shun someone critical of our technological trajectory as a “Luddite,” we should consider them to be someone who knows that “just because we’ve grown up with the Internet, doesn’t mean the Internet is grown up.”
Calvin’s January Series continues Thursday with John Varineau, associate conductor with the Grand Rapids Symphony, who will discuss the uses and misuses of music.
The award-winning afternoon lecture series also features presidential adviser David Gergen and runs through Jan. 24.
E-mail Garret Ellison: localnews@grpress.com, or follow him on Twitter.
