One thing I’ve found is that even though I thought I knew what the right keywords were – I had no idea how competitive those keywords might be and how easy (or difficult) it would be for me to effectively use those keywords to get strong organic search results.  This is where the Market Samurai Keyword Tool came into play.  I found out about this tool over a year ago and after I tried it out I had to buy it as it immediately helped me out with my keyword research.

Market Samurai will integrate with your Google Adwords account and help you find out which keywords are the best ones for you to target to get front page rankings in Google and other search engines.  It’s easy to pay for keywords using Adwords, but why not find keywords that you can get great organic search results from!

Market Samurai usually costs $149 and they are currently having a half price sale – so you can get in at only $75 but only for the next 10 days.  You can access the half price sale by clicking on this link (http://marketsamurai.com/a/full/c/HalfPriceWarriorSpecialOffer).

I wanted to pass on this deal as it really is a fantastic product that I personally own and use regularly.  Please email me, or leave a comment if you have any questions about Market Samurai and I’d be happy to help out!

My entire career to the point about 12 months ago was focused on working in technology for various sized companies, driving IT innovation in an effort to make the company more efficient, profitable and technologically progressive. I had climbed the corporate ladder from the Helpdesk through to Executive IT roles – aggressively staking my claim to these roles with the dream of some day… I guess doing the same thing.

I was losing my drive and feeling unsatisfied with my day to day life. Various new technologies would momentarily tickle my interest and I’d pursue them with vigor and excitement only to get back to this general feeling of dissatisfaction. Luckily I identified this and begun my journey to establish what I needed to do to get the drive back in my life. I say luckily because many people keep trucking through that feeling of dissatisfaction – going through the motions each day without that drive that keeps you challenging yourself.

I went back to basics in an effort to establish what it is I wanted out of life. I’m not just talking about my work life, but my complete life. I’ve got this one shot at life on Earth and it was time for me to time life by the horns and start creating my own destiny.

Through a long and varied process (which I would love to tell anyone that has interest about), I determined I did not want to be bound by an IT Executive role where I was living and working in a major city and spending hours each day commuting. Rather, I wanted to be in a small city – where community was important and I could make an impact.

Luckily, the other significant finding on my journey was that I wanted to be a small business owner. I wanted to create something, to spend my time working on something that I was personally invested in – something that was going to be around for a long time.

Fast forward one year, and here I am. I own and run two businesses and am living in a small community. This is only the very beginning of the journey, but I feel like I am finally on the track I was intended to be on. My experiences working for corporations has been extremely valuable and I learned a lot about what it takes to run a business from my interactions with executive teams.

Now I’m my own executive team and am excited about all the different roles I get to play. Obviously, there is so much to learn and not being in a big corporate office, surrounded by incredibly talented individuals is challenging – but it’s the new challenges that grow you as a person and I’m so excited about the future.

My blog will be taking a new direction now – I’m still a technologist and will always be, but I plan to start writing more about my adventures about running small businesses and how best to leverage technology in that role.

I’m very excited about where things are going and I hope that I can help out future small business owners, especially those making the migration from the big corporate world, to that of the isolated small business!

Phase 1 – Create VPC and VPN to a Single External Site
In order to create a VPC that connects to an external (non-Amazon) IPSEC device follow the steps below

1. Log onto the AWS Console and Click on the VPC tab
2. Click the ‘Get started creating a VPC’ button (make sure you have selected the correct region to create the VPC in)
3. You’ll be presented with a number of options to select the type of VPC you’d like to create. I chose the VPC with Public and Private subnets and Hardware VPN access. This will create a VPC for the EC2 instances to be created in with 2 subnets (public and private) that can be connected to an external IPSEC VPN device. The public subnet is a subnet that can be made available publically, while the private subnet is only connected to your VPN device and is not available to the public Internet.
4. The next screen asks you to specify the IP address of your VPN Gateway (ie the VPN device that you will use to create a VPN connection to AWS with)
5. The final screen is the confirmation screen.  From here you can edit any of the information collected in the wizard.  When you’re happy with the configuration click the Create VPN button
6. The next screen will confirm the VPC has been created and will give you the option to download a preconfigured VPN configuration for your VPN device.  As of the time of writing this only Cisco ISR (IOS 12.4+), Juniper (JunOS 9.5+, ScreenOS 6.1+), Yamaha (RTX 10.01.16+) and a Generic (Vendor Agnostic) configurations are available.
7. Use the configuration you have downloaded to configure your VPN device.
1. One caveat to note: The configuration you downloaded will use BGP to advertise the routes from your VPN device to the VPC. I don’t recommend using the default BGP configuration as it will inject a default route (0.0.0.0/24) to the routing table in the VPC which is fine if you are just connecting one site up to the VPC, but in the case you have multiple sites and want to create multiple VPN connections this will cause routing problems.
2. My recommendation is to use BGP to specify the exact networks you’d like to advertise via BGP. In the case you use multiple VPN connections to connect multiple sites to the VPC you will want to make sure you use separate AS numbers for each BGP session. I’ll get into this a little later in this document.
8. Click on the VPN Connections menu on the left side menu to see the status of the VPN connection you’ve just created. For me it took about 5 minutes for the VPN connection to be established, so don’t panic if the tunnel doesn’t come up straight away. This window will also show you the current status of the VPN connections as well as any potential error messages (like phase 1 proposal failed, preshared key failures etc).
9. Once the tunnels are green your VPC and VPN connection to AWS are created and functioning. The next step is to launch EC2 instances into the newly created VPC. Please note you cannot move any of your existing EC2 instances into the VPC. To launch an EC2 instance into the VPC, click the Launch EC2 Instance button and when prompted for the Instance Details make sure you select the ‘Launch Instance Into Your Virtual Private Cloud’ option. You will also need to select which Subnet (public or private) you want to launch the EC2 instance into.
1. Note: At the time of writing, I could not launch a micro instance into the VPC so the ‘Launch Instance Into Your Virtual Private Cloud’ option was greyed out, so make sure you change the Instance Type to a type that is supported inside the VPC.
10. Once you’ve launched your instance, it will be given an IP address in the Subnet you selected and will not have a Public address (eg: ec2-xx-xx-xx-xx.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com)

Phase 2 – Extend VPC by adding a VPN to a Second External Site

1. Follow the instructions above to create a VPC and a VPN to a Single Site
2. IMPORTANT – DO NOT USE THE ‘Add VPN Connection’ button on the VPC Homepage to add a second VPN connection. If you do this, you will create a VPN that will use the default AS 65000 for BGP routing. To add a second (or third etc) site you will need to manually create the VPN and assign it a unique AS number (in the private 65000+ range)
3. Create a new Customer Gateway – click Create Customer Gateway button and add the IP address of your second VPN gateway. MAKE SURE YOU USE A UNIQUE BGP ASN NUMBER
4. Create a new VPN Connection. Click the Create VPN Connection button in the VPN Connections window. Make sure you select the Customer Gateway you just created in the step above.
5. Download the configuration for your VPN device and use it to create the tunnel.
1. One caveat to note: The configuration you downloaded will use BGP to advertise the routes from your VPN device to the VPC. I don’t recommend using the default BGP configuration as it will inject a default route (0.0.0.0/24) to the routing table in the VPC which is fine if you are just connecting one site up to the VPC, but in the case you have multiple sites and want to create multiple VPN connections this will cause routing problems.
6. You will then see your second VPN tunnel come up and you will be able to access the VPC from your 2nd site.

Repeat these steps for any other sites you want to connect to the VPC.

The error looked like this:

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home8/xxx/public_html/ciosteve/wp-settings.php:340) in /home8/xxx/public_html/ciosteve/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 934

While the main site worked, I couldn’t get to my RSS feed or the WordPress Admin interface.  In fact, when I tried this on all the other blog sites I run on Bluehost I got the same error!  Perplexed, I thought it was time to get my technical brain working and resolve this issue!

I downloaded the wp-settings.php file and there were about 12 empty lines at the end of the file.  I simply deleted those empty lines, reuploaded the wp-settings.php file and was back in business.

I had to do this on all my WordPress sites, but they are all functioning again now. Hope this helps someone else!

Let’s get down to the meat and veggies and look at some of my favorite new features!

1) Notifications

This HAS got to be the one feature I have been waiting for. As an avid checker of all things on my iPhone (email, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc) it always irked me that I had to unlock my phone, and then check the apps to see if anything new had come in!

Those frustrations are now all gone!! There are a number of notification types and a number of ways notifications are displayed! When my iPhone is locked and an application triggers a notification it will be displayed on the Lock Screen. You can select which applications are displayed on the lock screen and how those notification are displayed.

Another frustration I had using the iPhone with iOS 4 (and before) was that if I was using an application and a notification was triggered, the notification pop up would take over the screen and I’d have to stop what I was doing to acknowledge the notification and then move on. With iOS 5, the notification is displayed in a little bar at the top of the iPhone screen and does not interrupt what you are doing. I had turned off all Skype notifications because if someone was sending me Skype messages, my iPhone would constantly ding and display pop ups! Drove me CRAZY!

The new Notification Center is another nice feature, but not really one I use that frequently. It will be interesting to see what comes of that but you can see a picture of it below.

2) Over The Air (OTA) iOS Upgrade

I LOVE this feature and I love the fact that Apple is moving away from requiring you to be connected to your computer in order to do anything with your iPhone. When Apple releases a new version of iOS you can download the upgrade to your phone by the push of a button. The phone will upgrade and reboot into the new iOS without ever having to connect to your computer. I upgraded from Beta 3 to Beta 4 this way without a hitch. Well, I was required to connect to my WiFi network and my phone had less than 50% battery life left which meant I had to connect it to a power supply! You don’t want your phone running out of battery while it’s upgrade, so that’s probably a good thing!

3) iTunes Wi-Fi Sync

This feature is in line with the comment above regarding Apple moving away from requiring you to be connected to your computer for upgrade – and is another feature I’m a huge fan of! When both your phone and your computer (running iTunes) are connected to the same WiFi network, you can perform a wireless sync! That means you can update apps, copy new music and podcasts over, sync photos etc all without having to connect up your phone!

4) Photo Button on Lock Screen

I haven’t really used this a lot, but it’s a handy feature. If you see something exciting and need to get to the camera quickly before you miss the moment, you just double click the home button and bingo there’s a spot you can click on the screen that takes your over to the camera pronto! I also noticed that you can take a photo now with the Volume button! A nice feature rather than having to find that spot on the screen to take your pic!

5) Mark As

I use the Mark As Unread function a lot in my email because I file my active todo emails as Unread. In iOS5 there is now a Mark button – when you click it you get the option to Flag the email or Mark as Unread. So for me, I never flag anything, just leave them as unread. So one extra step now.

I would also love the ability to delete an email and then return to the message list rather than automatically going to the next message, especially now that I have to Mark As Unread.

6) iCloud

iCloud looks very interesting too although at this time it hasn’t really been made available. I am able to sync all my data to the cloud as well as backup my data to the cloud. I like the ability to backup my photos etc to the cloud, but I’m not sure about how viable the iWork feature of iCloud is. I’ll report back more on this one as Apple give us more of a look into iCloud.

Conclusion

Overall, I am very impressed with the new features and functionality of the iOS 5 Beta – even though they broke with Internet Tethering in Beta 4! I find myself eagerly awaiting the next version and using the OTA Update Checker to see if something new is available. Bring on iOS5 and the new iPhone! Can’t wait to get my hands on them!

For those who don’t know about Office 365, it is a subscription based service that combines the following Microsoft Products and Services:

• Microsoft Exchange Online
• Microsoft SharePoint Online
• Microsoft Lync Online
• Office Professional Plus (client based software)
• Office Web Apps (web based versions of Excel, Word and PowerPoint)

Microsoft plans to transition BPOS clients to the Office 365 service at some point as well. The transition has to follow certain rules and protocols.  BPOS users will be given a choice as to what plan they intend to migrate to Office 365 but eventually (even if they do not chose) they will automatically be shifted to the most basic enterprise plan E1.

A great benefit of Office 365 is that you will always enjoy the latest technology from Microsoft and won’t be stuck using an old version of Office or Exchange.  For those migrating to Office 365 they will notice that Office 2010 will be offered as a SaaS based Web App. You can install Office 2010 on 5 different devices thus allowing mobility and flexibility.

Office 365 has also the advantage over BPOS when we talk about the size of the Exchange mailboxes. Office 365 will also include Microsoft Lync Online and will include Microsoft Office Professional Plus (depending upon the subscription level). Lync replaces the Microsoft Office Live Meeting and Office Communicator which are part of the BPOS suite.

This is going to be a very interesting product release and will make Microsoft competitive with the Google Apps product offering.

Your company needs to be on Facebook and this presence has become a necessity rather than a choice.  If your business/company needs to be successful, first it has to be visible to all its potential customers, many of which can be found as active users on Facebook. Facebook provides the option of making a fan page for your product or a business page for your company.

When someone ‘likes’ that page and become a fan, all the updates from that page by your company would be visible on their Facebook profile. This way a company can engage and interact with the potential customers and the consumers on a real time basis along with feedback as well. People can comment on the posts and share their thoughts as to what they actually think about your product or a service. These comments are usually honest as people tell you straight up via comments whether they like your product or not. You can thus gather all these responses and strategically analyze what the company can do to further build good will and reputation for your brand.

Having a Facebook page is different from having a company website but you definitely need both. People won’t visit your website everyday but by making people like your fan page you can actually stay connected with them and they’ll receive your updates on their Facebook whenever they login to their profiles. The company can inform the people about new product launches, any changes to the current product and share all kinds of necessary information to promote their brand.

Here are some other interesting facts about a Facebook Business (or Fan) Page:

• A user does not have to be a member of Facebook either to see your Facebook page.
• Your Facebook page will show up in search results via search engines.  So remember SEM techniques when setting your page up.
• You can have unlimited number of fans on Facebook while a Facebook personal profile limits friends to only 5000.
• Facebook provides analytics like the number of visitors, their age, gender etc for your Business page, which gives you extremely valuable marketing data.
• Facebook sells advertising which you can use to target other Facebook users and drive them to your Fan page based on their likes and demographic information.

With all these benefits I believe having a presence on Facebook and really work wonders for the company.  No matter how big or small you might be, why haven’t you done this yet?!

Samsung claims that Galaxy S II is the slimmest phone to hit the smart phone market measuring in at a very slim 8.49mm and weight of 117g while the iPhone is 137g and 9.3mm but we’re only talking very small differences here!

In terms of display the iPhone has a 3.5 inch retina display while Samsung S II has a 4.27 inch Super AMOLED plus display giving S II the edge over here over iPhone 4. The video resolution of the iPhone 4 is 960×640-pixel resolution vs the Galaxy S II which is reported to support only 800×480.  I’d have say (without seeing the Galaxy S II) that the iPhone 4 would have the better display.

When we talk about the processor of both these smartphone Samsung S II wins the battle over this feature. It has 1GB Ram and a 1Ghz dual core processor while the iPhone has 512 MB Ram and Apple A4 processor which means Samsung S II essentially has double the memory and more processing power as compared to its rival.

Samsung S II beats its rival iPhone 4 when we compare the cameras of both. Apple iPhone 4 has a 5megapixel rear camera along with a VGA front camera with 720p video capture. Samsung S II has an 8 megapixel rear camera and 2 megapixel front camera along with 1080p video capture. The numbers clearly show which Smart phone has a better camera feature.

Samsung S II comes with microSD storage while this is lacking in the iPhone 4. In terms of connectivity the Samsung Galaxy S II has more options as compared to the iPhone 4 again giving S II an edge over its rival. Samsung has 4G technology and an advanced version of Bluetooth as compared to iPhone 4. When speaking of the software the iPhone uses iOS which cannot be customized while S II used Android which can be customized. However the iPhone 4 is better when it comes to running applications. The iPhone is also more expensive and indeed the most expensive smart phone in market giving Galaxy S II an edge since many consumers are price conscious.

After reading this article you can decide for yourself which one is a better option. I believe the Samsung Galaxy S II will give the Apple iPhone 4 very serious competition, but as we know Apple enjoys competition and there are already rumors of the iPhone 5!

Applications and software need not to be installed on every single computer; instead the application is installed and configured at the host data center (or centers) and the management of that application and infrastructure is the responsibility of the Cloud Computing provider.  Users (or subscribers) no longer run all the CPU or memory heavy applications on their local computers and as a result  you can achieve significant savings in CPU and Memory allocation and utilization.

To illustrate how cloud computing can help your company consider this simple example. Let’s suppose your company has 150 employees and every person requires a computer to work on. If they need to access multiple applications while working this means installing software on every machine. Purchasing software with a legal license and a valid key is quite expensive and could be a huge investment if you consider installing it on every pc for every employee.  As a smart business person your key objective should be to minimize cost while enhancing productivity levels. This is where you could leverage the power of cloud computing. All your employees can log on to the cloud to access the remote application and all its functionality.

Now talking in terms of the technicalities of cloud computing, the cloud computing architecture consists of a frond end and a back end. Both the front and the back end connect to each other via a network, the Internet in most cases. The front end is the client side of the system i.e.  your user’s computer. The back end consists of the servers and storage devices which constitute the ‘Cloud’.  Another major benefit of using Cloud Computing applications is that you no longer need to purchase and manage complex applications.  This saves significantly in personnel and management costs.

When using cloud computing, all applications can be run from anywhere you have an Internet connection. It helps you to reduce your hardware and software costs and can really help your business achieve economies of scale.

I had provisioned my EC2 server in the US West region as it provided the least latency but when I went to fire up the Amazon VPN I found out it was only currently being offered to the US East and EU regions.  Now I had to find a Plan B!

I’ve had some experience with OpenVPN in the past and thought that would be a good place to start. I setup an OpenVPN server on the LAN and set up a OpenVPN client in the EC2 environment.  This worked pretty well and I was able to join the EC2 machine to the Corporate AD domain and work as though I was on the LAN from that machine.  However, I wasn’t convinced this was the most robust solution for a production environment!  It was time to keep looking!

A large number of companies are springing up and building tools that snap on to Cloud Environments and through some investigation found a company called CohesiveFT that have packaged a VPN product for Cloud Environments.  They have a number of products and but solution that seemed best for me was their VPN-Cubed 2.0 Datacenter Connect.

Quite simply the idea is that you:

1. install an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) that acts are a VPN head device at the EC2 environment
2. create an IPSEC tunnel between your firewall and the AMI machine
3. utilize OpenVPN to create a VPN session between your EC2 machines and the AMI

Once that’s all done you’ve got yourself a nice VPN cloud of EC2 machines that connect up to your corporate LAN!

So far this solution has been extremely robust and I would definitely consider this ‘production ready’.  The VPN-Cubed solution was fairly complicated to setup, but luckily I was a network & security engineer in my early career, so used my knowledge of building IPSEC tunnels to my advantage.

Now I have secure connectivity, it’s time to load up some apps and see how they respond working in the Cloud Environment.  I have to say that so far I am very impressed and quite excited about the viability of this solutions as a replacement for my IT Infrastructure!