Inspirational new view on FREE business.. Yes, FREE   - http://tinyurl.com/ybjbp4d

In the days of ** extra charges and the large corporation and banks doing everything they can to consume every cent we have, FREE feels fresh and new yet an old idea for business.

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Do to the present Denver Snowglobe effect Indy Media Group will be taking a snow day……. first winter storm of winter 2009-10 .

from 9news.com

“Many Colorado areas measuring snow in feet

DENVER – The Denver area is buried in white because of the first major snowstorm of the season as snow spreads over the mountains, urban corridor and Eastern Plains.”

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IMG has just launched http://www.flowerworksbotanicals.com :

A little about the site:

FlowerWorks Botanicals blends of oils and essences have been lovingly hand-crafted to help you achieve a desired mental, emotional, spiritual and/or physical state of being.

Go check it out……

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The Internet Corporation ICANN that Assigned Names and Numbers and oversees domain names is holding a meeting this week.
With domain names being such a valued commodity in the last 15 years this will open up an entirely new market for online real-estate.  ICANN’s non-profit board will be examining whether to allow for the first time entire Internet addresses to be in scripts that are not based on Latin letter.

This would bring many cultures that do not use Latin letters as a base to their language a new outlook to the ease of the web, as early as the middle of next year you could be seeing URL’s in the characters from Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic which Russian is written in.

“This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago,” Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, told reporters, calling it a “fantastically complicated technical feature.” He said he expects the board to grant approval on Friday, the conference’s final day.

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The Book  “Free” by Chris Anderson is available at http://www.audible.com for free download when you create and account of have an existing account.  For anyone with a web business or with the intention of venturing into to web based world this book has the essence of being a handy little guide book as the 4 hour work week by Tim Ferriss was for small business owners.

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Showing a series of inspiring, unusual and playful products, British branding and design guru Paul Bennett explains that design doesn’t have to be about grand gestures, but can solve small, universal and overlooked problems.

As creative director at the influential design and innovation company Ideo, Paul Bennett manages to keep his eye on the little things that matter, though his clients are among the biggest in the world (Procter & Gamble and Pepsi, to name but two). “Small is the new big,”Bennett says. And his design approach reflects this philosophy. For often, it’s not the biggest ideas that have the most impact, but the small, the personal, and the intimate.

Trained as a graphic designer, Bennett is a pragmatic design evangelist, preaching fervently that design can make the world a better place, and providing playful, inspired examples of how it does.

“Paul has run many large branding programs, all from the same basic premise: that great design springs from singularity of vision, courage and collaboration.”

Advertising Age

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So I just jumped (unexpectedly) into the land of the laptop. A phone call informed me that a new laptop would be this years birthday present. Okay, this is good but… Research. I’m the type of guy that does copious amounts of intensely focused research. It doesn’t take me six months to make a decision. If there is anything to learn, I want to know NOW. Invariably, this leads to more questions. Six months from now, two months from now, will necessitate a whole different set of questions. Technology changes fast, man. It was time to strap on the oxygen tank, I wasn’t coming up for air for awhile…

First thought: Keep this in a budget. True, this was a gift, but I had given leeway to choose the laptop that would become mine. The budget issue really defines the whole process of buying a laptop. The item that kicked this adventure off was a $399,99 Toshiba that my family saw in an Officemax ad. I did my research. The prognosis was not good. The question is: How do I get what I want without breaking the bank?

Being a believer in you-get-what-you-pay-for but also knowing that there are diamonds in the rough to be had, I saw that it was time to go hunting…

I used to work at Circuit City. This put me in touch with the gamut of problems that a laptop owner can face. Laptops are not inexpensive items, but they have come to increasingly dominate the computer market. At Circuit City we sold many more laptops than desktops; someone told me that the ratio was near 8 laptops for every desktop sold.  I’d been holding off buying a laptop but I knew that somewhere along the line I would get one.

I made a decision to buy a Toshiba for $469.00 with an AMD Athlon QL-64 processor, ATI Radeon x3100 graphics card, 3 GB ram, and a 15.4 inch screen.  This would suit my needs. My desktop has an AMD Athlon  processor, no problems there. A brand name graphics card is always nice to have. 3 GB of memory would do just fine for now. The intention was always to kick it up to 4 GB, especially since you can get an upgrade to Windows 7 with most new computer purchases right now. (I am dying to try out a 64-bit operating system.) It came with a heavy duty bag and, more importantly, it came from Costco. This gave me two valuable advantages: A 90-day return policy and an additional year of warranty coverage. All was well.

But….

I liked the Toshiba a lot. It looked great, it felt great. but there were two problems. The first thing I noticed was that the battery life absolutely sucked. Even after adjusting the power settings and making a few other minor tweeks, I would be very lucky to get an hour and a half out of the battery before it died. Okay. That’s a problem.

The rumor was that AMD processors were more power hungry. Couple that with a name-brand (ATI or Nvidia) graphics card and you should expect less battery life.  I’m not a gamer, I wouldn’t be doing anything that required more power. I figured I could get at least two hours out of my new laptop. After all, what’s the point of going mobile if you are going to have to look for a wall outlet all the time?

The second and bigger problem was this: After I rationalized the battery life problem to a manageable nuisance, I come to find that the CD/DVD burner does not work.

Back to the drawing board.

Where did I go wrong? Luckily, the aforementioned Costco policies allowed me to return the defective unit. It was time to step back and re-access the situation. Toshiba was a solid choice back when I worked at Circuit City. My decision was based on old data. More research told me that  maybe I should consider another brand, most notably HP. This was also a good choice back in the day, but now I had more recent data to back any decision up. With technology, there is always new data and it is wise to know it before you lay money down.

The second thing to be considered was the processor.  AMD makes good processors, but what about the other dog in the room, the bigger dog? Intel would have been my first choice, but tend to be more expensive. I was trying to keep it in a reasonable budget. Again turning to the internet, I found that not only did Intel’s mobile processors run faster, they also had a more positive effect on battery life.

Now I had to think about the graphics card. There is a premium to pay when you get a name brand graphics card. I’m not a gamer, I have a PS3 for that if I want it. Did I need to spend the extra money to have a laptop capable of gaming?

No, I did not. From my research I learned that the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500hd (today’s reasonable equivalent of a bare-bones graphics card) will handle video and streaming media just fine.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the battery life issue was the one thing I had to accentuate in my new hunt for a laptop. One piece of research caught my attention: An LED screen can signifigantly improve battery life because it uses less power than an LCD and has the capability of delivering a crisper, brighter picture.

Costco.com allowed me to build an HP to my liking. Her’s what I came up with:

Hp G60t  with a 15.6″ LED screen

Intel Core 2 Duo T6500 processor

Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500hd

3 GB ram

250 GB hard drive

The price came in at $569.00. A little more than I was planing to spend, but I want something that will last me awhile. The experience also reinforced something that I had ignored: Get the right thing the first time or you’ll end up paying for it later anyway. My new laptop gets delivered next Wednesday. I let you know how it all turns out then.

I’m a computer guy. I love playing with these things but keeping up with the technology is ridiculous. There are new models introduced every month-and-a-half. I know what I want in a laptop. The  processor i

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You can check your keyword rankings for free with the Rank Checker extension in Firefox.  For download and instructions, go here: http://tinyurl.com/lreqws

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Go to the link below for some info on the importance of geo-targeting your marketing efforts online:

http://www.examiner.com/x-5623-Denver-Internet-Business-Examiner~y2009m5d27-Geotargeting-your-search-marketing

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