Web 2.0 for business and Educators

Started Wednesday 30th March 2011
Words 423
S.I.= 85%
Digital Revolution hiccups and Digital leaps
Have not really had as much time as I thought this last week.  I have stepped back into the Worlds of teaching at a School in Ely and been progressing my own business and a project for AN Other.

Last week saw the fifth Birthday of Twitter.  Yesterday saw a major glitch in the BBC Website which apparently was due to a faulty, mechanical, optical or software controlled it certainly revealed the problems for business continuity.  More on this later.

 Another special event happening is that Freeview Digital TV is starting for some people today on the Suffolk/Essex Border if their transmitter is turned towards Sandy Heath.  If your analogue signal (ordinary BBC 1, 2, ITV 1, Channel 4 and Five)  works now try scanning with Freeview box or Freeview TV.  Best position for aerial 12 m above ground apparently with no obstruction (does work with roof aerials if close to transmitter)

Friday sees the upgrade  of the Business functionality on Facebook.  This will give same types of activities you can do with a personal profile.  Business pages are still within your Facebook registration, you are not supposed top have more than one account.  In fact you can be deFacebooked if you are in this state of duplicity.  Recently there have been groups removed from Facebook for extreme political views reported in the press so they are monitoring.

The Business continuity issue highlighted by both recent natural disasters and the outage of the BBC Website. The e-commerce end was affected as well as the News feeds.  The BBC was no longer the most up to date news source at that time.  The possibility exists that further outages may happen since the components, if it was a switch, may all have been put in at the same time.  Buy a brand new house and you will usually most of the light bulbs fail at roughly the same time.  The local Business Continuity Network to West Suffolk and South Cambridgeshire has gone live with its' website Business Continuity Network .  Time to integrate my own survey of my practices if the worst comes to the worst and I loose my main desktop.

I attended a meeting last week in Ipswich where the focus was sustainable workplaces.  I am developing my areas of Business interest to enhance the skills to go with this and also the Web 2.0 and cloud implications that go with this.  I will be blogging on my WordPress sites about this over the next few days. 

Wellbeing on a Thursday

Started Thursday 24th February 2011
Words 479
S.I.= 95.8 %

A small business person but part of a  a big organisation


A Thursday yet again.  As now a small business person I am taking today to reflect and assess my own wellbeing.  Three weeks since lighting the blue touch paper is the rocket still rising?

A big part of the overall consideration of starting your own business is whether you have the resilelnce and the motivation to succeed.  There was an old advert put out by one of the banks in the eighties showing a happy confident individual walking into the house swinging his briefcase.  He announced to his spouse (people did tend to be married in the eighties) that he had the bank on board, he had his backers etc while the being watched adoringly by the home maker.  The reality is and always has been not quite like the advert.

The reason to start your own business are often personal circumstances owing to career change due to redundancy rather than something that is planned.  A good way of assessing your readiness and suitability to a life where you are the boss is a new pack  Working from Home from Law Packs written by Shirley Borret the development director of the  Teleworking Association.  Advice on how to go about being self-employed and the considerations that have to be taken regarding Wellbeing are covered.

One of the biggest problems with being self-employed is the potential to be isolated and feel isolated.  A good way of avoiding this is to be a member of a local group such as a chamber of commerce.  I attended Haverhill Chamber of Commerce's  (part of the Suffolk Chamber of Commerce) informal evening last night at the Sturmer Red Lion (a village that has featured in a few blog posts previously).  I met very interesting people all committed to what they were doing.  There was Elaine who runs Best of Haverhill and has a number of projects on the go that I found refreshing to hear about and recognise as to how her skills complemented the aims of her customers.   I talked to Chris who had just started his own courier business that is now Defra registered to be able to transport birds and animals to shows.  I must though remember where I put the business cards in the many pockets in my jacket, though as we are all Haverhill Chamber of Commerce members it will be easy to get in contact.

The benefit of networking as a small business of events like this extend to Wellbeing .  We met in a friendly atmosphere, people may have been sometimes working in the same market area but it was not like a convention of double double glazing salesmen thrusting a card in your pocket as you shook hands. An opportunity to recognise that all small businesses do experience that fundamental work-life balance dilemma, but can still be smiling.