There is an interesting article on Small Business Branding blog – “10 Critical Questions To Ask A Web Designer”. The post is wrong on so many accounts, it’s would have been easier to ignore it altogether. However, being a lead to a Zealus web design studio for so many years I can’t help but notice how irrelevant most of these questions are – and here’s why:

1. What skills do you or your team posses? HTML, CSS, Drupal, WordPress, MySQL, PHP, CGI, Ruby on Rails? – author argues that by listening to the white noise the project lead makes while trying to answer your question you will be able to pick something useful. Wrong – you won’t. If he’s technically savvy he (or she, doesn’t matter) will sink you in the sea of gibberish technology talk, and if he’s not – he will sink you even deeper in semi-technology blabber. Point is – you will leave thinking that you have talked to a smart guy while in reality you have learned nothing.
What you should be asking – what’s the technology called, how widespread is it, how mature is it. These are the things you can understand, remember and cross-check after the conversation. What’s important – you will be able to make a business decision based on things you can comprehend.

2. How quickly can you provide a first draft of the site and how long does a job like this normally take? – author argues that such preliminary estimates can help you manage your schedule. Wrong – before signing the contract all dates are so grossly underestimated that you really have to live outside of the reality to base anything but future negotiations on those dates.
What you should be asking – how long projects like these take typically? What are the pitfalls, what could drag the project, how to prevent dragging from happening.

3. What is your working procedure and how will you communicate your progress? – if you are working with freelancers they most likely have no procedure in place and if you have with some established group they will tell you about project status reports even before you have to ask. The reason being that people who’s been around long enough know that if they fail to communicate properly they fail to get paid. So they will make damn sure their client knows all the hard work they put in, they will create a dashboard with tasks, timelines, heck, you might even see Gantt chart!
What you should be asking – what is the phone number of the person responsible for the project. One single person has to be responsible, if there is more than one – walk away.

4. How much support comes with this package deal? – obvious statement that no one works for free is obvious. Make sure you ask this question before negotiations begin, otherwise you can negotiate that sweet low price only to find out that support costs painfully extra. Unless you’re dealing with “Cheap web sites for r$499 per 5 pages” type of designers – there is no point in asking this question aside from the other negotiations.

5. What kind of after support do you offer? – same thing. Best thing to do is negotiate a support contract for some period immediately after launch so you will be covered in case something comes out immediately after your web project is live. In addition to that you might want to get a per-incident support after initial support contract is expired.
What to ask – nothing, keep negotiating.

6. What is your normal procedure if the job does not turn out satisfactorily? – author is then ventures on a journey of how everyone is spoiled by generous refund policies. Well, you just go and try to get a refund from anyone, I just want to watch how easy it would be. Speaking of service contracts, I may not live long enough to see the end of it anyway.
What you should be asking – nothing, just get a copy of the contract BEFORE you sign in and show it to your lawyer. It just another one of those things you want to negotiate as hard as you can. We have actually dropped a number of contracts because we could not successfully negotiate this single point. Everything else was set, but because client wanted a full refund or had some other crazy idea about how he gets all of his money back at the end when he tells us he doesn’t like it – it was dropped. It’s cheaper than a lawsuit anyway.

7. What software or technology will you be using to build my site and will I be able to use and update it myself? – the tragic story of a person who was asking for white noise in question #1 and ended up with useless application without anyone around to support it. That’s the illustration right there why pretty much everything that post is telling you is wrong.
What you should be asking – see question number 1: how widespread this technology, how mature is it. Is is Open Source or is it proprietary (former is better than the latter, unless you’re talking about Flash which is a whole another can of worms altogether).

8. Does it cost extra for this software or does anything you recommend to build this site going to require additional license purchased? – this is the only sane question in the whole ten, however, the justification is flawed nonetheless. As with any contractor, he brings his own tools. If your project lead is a geek he will force you into buying the top-notch hardware and software so that he could play with new shiny toys that he otherwise could not afford. If your project lead is a sales agent she will sell you whatever she will make the most of. Either case – you loose.
What you should be asking – is for a detailed chart of costs, including anything and everything your project needs to be completed successfully. Let your future contractors know that you have such and such assets and if anything needs to be purchased – it has to be put on that chart. Time, licenses, hardware, image and sound rights and royalties – everything goes there. This way you can cross-check with other contractors and actual vendors to see who’s charging you and for what. It’s your money, don’t waste it.

9. We would like the domain name administrator to be in our representative’s name and email. Can you arrange that? – unless you trust your contractor sleep in the bed with your husband (or wife) – never ever even mention this to them. Spend as much time as it requires, but BUY THE DOMAIN YOURSELF! Do not give access to your domain to anyone else, if there are any modifications – learn how to do them yourself or register a domain with registrar who has telephone support – like GoDaddy. You can rebuild the site in months, but rebuilding a reputable brand name, replacing domain that all your customers know can take years.
What should I ask – can you develop on test platform and them move the site to our domain? But any decent developer should do that anyway.

10. Can I see a portfolio of previous sites built. Or is there a demo of a site similar to what you will be building us? – this should be first question that you ask a contractor (designer, programmer or whatnot). Why is it #10 – I have no idea, I guess just to reiterate how much wrong is with initial post. In addition to portfolio (if there is any) you should briefly explain what you are trying to do and how does the designer see it solved. That should be the first thing – before you put anything else on the table.

There are hundreds of accounts of fraudsters using various scam methods for credit card stealing, making fraudulent purchases or selling goods that never arrive at their intended destination. So much so that small businesses were literally forced to incorporate those fraud transactions into cost of doing their business online. Here are a few tips that should help a small business sustain some of the most often tried transactions – purchase with fraudulent credit cards. Some small businesses have this reason alone to choose more expensive credit card processor, like PayPal,  in order to not to deal with fraud themselves, potentially loosing thousands of dollars in revenue. These simple steps may help recover that money given that small business processes credit cards through its own merchant account.

1. Verify shipping vs. billing address. Some web sites even refuse to ship to an address that is different from billing, but that is really up to the business owner. If you sell something that could potentially be a gift, so that one relative can order it for another – pass it on, but if you sell something that people mostly order for themselves, like gadgets or novelties, then shipping address way off from billing might suggest something fishy.

2. Ask yourself – does the order make sense? If you are selling expensive merchandise that people are most likely to buy once in a while – would the order for five items make sense? Call the billing phone number to verify the purchase – it will cost you 2 minutes, but potentially can save you hundreds of dollars.

3. Have the payment cleared yet? Institute shipping and handling policies that will cover your bases while you wait for payment to clear. Sometimes it may take a day or two for payment to go through all the hoops of your payment system, be patient and wait out the whole thing. It may bounce off for a number of reasons, first of which is stolen credit card.

4. Verify the IP address‘s geographic location vs. both shipping and billing. It sounds a bit nerdy at first, but any online shopping cart can be tweaked to display originating IP address along with the order information. The task is to see if the IP address belongs to the same region as the two addresses. An order originating from Eastern Europe’s IP address that has billing address in Connecticut and shipping destination in California is hardly legit. In some cases you won’t be able to tell if the IP address is or is not located where the billing or shipping addresses are, in these cases just move on to #5.

5. Never hesitate to call the bank that have issued credit card. Have your clients enter the 800 number on the back of the credit card along with their billing information. In any doubt – call the bank and have them verify that name, billing and shipping addresses are legit. Some banks even have that option on their initial menu.

As we hear more and more about Apple selling 2 million iPads during first 60 days more and more companies are placing their bets on tablet computers. So far we’ve heard about HP Slate (canceled though) and a lot of other devices. Most of them should have been running some flavor of Windows. Some are heard to be running Android. With the demise of Palm and HP’s taking over there’s hope that WebOS will pop its head some time later.

Here’s the deal. Tablet computer isn’t a real personal computer – the way we understand the meaning of the word. Even though it may feel like one. We don’t perceive our cars’ computerized inner workings as personal computer – although it sports same kind of CPU-chipset-memory-output paradigm as any other computer does. We don’t think of doing any real work on XBox gaming console, even though it has been demonstrated to be able to do such things with ease on older models and – with some extra effort – on current ones.

In similar fashion the tablet computers are more narrow-tasked devices. They won’t replace your main computer if you are doing any kind of serious work. You can, of course, go to some lengths to push through some productivity, but slate devices aren’t quite fit for it by design. This is similar to how some people write software on their iPhones or Andriod devices (and I knew quite a lot of people who were writing some Java code on their Palm devices 10 -12 years ago). While I respect the effort, I believe there are more comfortable ways to code.

From the way the device is used stems the general idea of what operating system should be running on the device. It may seem to make logical sense to try and stuff fully featured Windows onto a slate to take advantage of already created applications. However, I cannot imagine anyone using Adobe Photoshop or AutoCAD on a tablet. Nor can I imagine someone typing up a huge report in MS Word, using Excel charts or creating PowerPoint presentations. You should be able to view them, no doubt about it, but imagine working with a 500MB Excel file that’s ridden with formulas and macros on a significantly underpowered CPU and screen that is smaller than one you had 10 years ago. It may be possible, of course, but why suffer? I’ve seen people creating a simple PowerPoint presentation on a netbook with a 10″ screen, working with more or less simple Excel tables and there was much pain and suffering. Now remove the physical keyboard…

In addition to that – think about the battery life. All those full-featured application are optimized (if at all) to run as fast as possible, utilizing the most of CPU and memory made available, effectively draining as much power as they want. This isn’t an issue on a power-connected machine, but on a device that is mostly battery-powered it is hardly an advantage. That’s why most of tablets running Windows are only capable of doing 2 – 3 hours on a battery. Compare that with 10 hours of iPad and you will understand the difference.

Since this post is named “Crystal Ball”, I’d go ahead and make a prediction for the next 5 years. Tablet devices running some sort of mobile operating system (Android, WebOS, OSX, maybe even some flavor of stripped-down Windows) will gradually replace any other portable computing devices – e-book readers, netbooks and some of the smaller laptops. The smallest size of the laptop to survive would be something along the lines of MacBook Air. Anything smaller is a torture to use for any serious work, so tablets will be used instead for reading, web/e-mail and some light work – document reviews, notes, memos, as well as entertainment – movies, games, music. They will complement smartphones rather than replacing them. With proliferation of cloud-storage and applications that are capable of taking advantage of that storage, tablet computers will become mainstream, ubiquitous consumer devices – much like walkmans were back in nineties.

Quite often I see the same issue repeating itself over and over again. There’s a small business which operates almost on a shoestring budget. Then there’s a business owner who, out of all things, afraid to move in either direction because it is quite clear to him – one wrong move and he’s out of the money and out of the business. Then employees come into picture and start pressuring business owner for raise, more perks or simply new equipment.

If he concedes – he’s back to the same issue of money shortage. If he refuses – employees become less and less motivated, until it gets to the point where no work is done. Then the business owner has to go through a whole round of cycling the workforce which is as expensive as it is exhausting.

Every small business, once in a while, hits this rock. Almost every business addresses the issue – one way or another. Some survive. Some – not so much. However, the question remains the same – how to keep employees motivated to work on a lower wage than they could have gotten if they looked hard and long enough? How to deter the motivation degradation, that eventually becomes sand in the gears, fifth wheel in the cart and whatever else you can think of that doesn’t help business moving forward.

First thing any business owner should understand is that no matter what is said and done in the company, unless the employee is a managing partner – he would never care about the business as much as the owner. Even more so, any small business that treats its workers with little respect is doomed to have a low motivation problem. Whatever can be stolen – will be stolen. Whatever can be neglected (even at the risk of having an argument with the boss) will be neglected. Employees will constantly be late, leave early, or, if that’s somehow restricted, will slack off during the day.

As an example I will tell the story about one IT department I used to work for some years ago. The company had pretty much any internet activity restricted and forbidden. There were no Facebook back then, but there were chat rooms, dating sites, discussion forums and other perfect methods of spending a day at work without doing any actual work. As any strong medicine this had its side effects. People were unable to find the information they needed. There were no blogs, but there was some technical documentation, newsgroups and forums, where actual meaningful discussion ensued. Ah, those were the good old days. It turned out, IT people spent enormous amounts of time carving multiple workarounds to access the sites they needed. Sites they needed to do their work, mind you, but once you’re breathing the freedom – you want to fully explore it. Having those boundaries not be in place – any worker could have the information he or she needs in minutes and would go back to work. But creating walls around people to make them work harder achieves only one thing – making sure these people will try to traverse these walls as hard as possible – work or no work.

So what does this has to do with motivation? Everything! Given the right motivation people would be willing to sacrifice other things. As an example – the organization above had one of the fastest internet connections at that time, so for any IT geek it was obviously a better place to work. I know, sounds funny, but that was the case.

Many small business owners are too afraid to look deep into their employees. Everybody’s got their reasons, of course, but generally they’re afraid to be met with ignorance. However the case may be, business owners should still try and understand – what drives this person? Why did they choose to work for me? What’s in it for them? Maybe it sounds like a too much of a job – to look into that $10/hour kid, but it may bring back a lot more value. Maybe your business could become a major stepping stone in this kid’s career, so he will be willing to go an extra mile or two for a good reference and valuable experience.

An extra mile or two from every employee in a company totals for a good deal of distance these people are willing to carry your business for free. It isn’t something a business owner should easily overlook – especially one with strained budget.

As you may have already noticed, I always was a ThinkPad junkie. This year I did a very extensive research, having that Lenovo was one of the last manufacturers to add Core i7-based laptops to their inventory. None of the laptops appealed as a worthy replacement, so as soon as W701 model was up on Lenovo’s site I had it ordered.

The specs aren’t beefed up as much as I would want them to be, but 8GB of RAM (with ability to upgrade to 16GB) and Core i7 were a must. While I was at it, for some reason, I decided to go with 17 inch screen option – which clearly was a mistake. The laptop came out to be extremely bulky and heavy – which sort of defies the whole purpose of having a laptop as a mobile (as in – you will be able to move with it) computer. On a bright side – the system can host 2 hard drives (with option for RAID) and an optical drive, something that had cost me a USB slot before.

The screen option, since I was going with 17 inches, is the WUXGA (1920×1200) RGB-LED-BL with hueyPro color calibrator. Since I do a lot of photography this turned out to be a good idea, having right colors and all. Of course, I did calibrate all my previous screens, but having a combo of a high-quality screen and color calibrator tailored for that specific screen is definitely a better approach.

Next big thing for any laptop is the keyboard. You think having laptops so many years around most manufacturers would have that part figured out, but it’s not the case. Most of them, following Apple’s lead, have attempted to create those “island” keys. They might look good, but hardly useful, especially for people who alternate between different keyboards all the time. Lenovo, while also following the trend with such keyboard on ThinkPad Edge systems, have made yet another improvement to the “real” ThinkPad keyboards. Just as I fell in love with my T42 keyboard and somewhat disliked T60′s, the keyboard on W701 is a step above all. Typing is a pure pleasure I haven’t experienced anywhere else. Since the size of the laptop allows it (it’s a beast) Lenovo has a numeric keypad included as well. Not that I personally has any use for it, but I’m sure I will – now that I have it available.

Perks of the system, aside from 5 USB ports, CompactFlahs and SD card slots, color calibration, web cam, fingerprint reader and both DVI and VGA connectors include small Wacom tablet with Wacom pen (which even has its own storage in the right side of the frame). While ordering I thought of this as of purely waste of money (there is no way to skip it if you order color calibrator option), but surprisingly I had immediately found the pen option very useful. Some of my mail (the one that comes in paper form) was stolen and some bank statements with it. Obviously I had to close the account and move all the automatic payments to new one, which – in some cases – requires sending a voided check with account number. So I scanned the check, voided it by simply writing over it with Wacom pen, signed all the required forms using the same pen and e-mailed everything back within minutes. Once I’ve realized what just happened I thought that such option might have some merit not only for artists, but even for ordinary people like me.

Overall build of the laptop feels bulky, old and excessive. I am used to thin boundaries of the screen, so the W701′s full inch (or more – on the top and bottom) frame around 17″ screen looks ancient. I am sure there are perfectly justifiable technology reasons behind it, like wireless antennas, web cam and so on, but I’m a consumer and I don’t care – I want the frame around my screen to be as thin as possible.

Speaking of bulky – the power supply issue is one of my major points of despair. Lenovo has changed the power connector YET AGAIN! Older power supplies from T60 and X60 series are not compatible – just like they weren’t between T40 and T60. But more to that – the power supply falls a few inches short of the size of my X61s. Yes, it’s that large. Surely, you need a lot of juice to power this laptop, but the power brick the size of another laptop itself – that’s something.

The battery is located underneath the front edge, below the keyboard, and there is no room for a larger battery, like in case of IBM/Lenovo T series. I realize that this is a desktop replacement, not really a portable solution, but it is still a laptop, so some effort should have been made to make larger batteries available. Given that 9 cell can only drive this powerhorse for less than 2 hours, I want more options.

The W line of ThinkPads is a newer addition to the growing inventory of Lenovo laptops. The T series is no longer a top level in terms of performance. Lenovo seem to be bringing the best from A, R and T series into the W line, but there’s definitely a room for improvement. We all used to having limited options for our hardware configurations, but given the size and capabilities of Lenovo’s T and W series, I would expect a lot more options in the next iterations.

The overall experience (I am using W701 for two weeks now) is very positive. Of course, there are couple of drawbacks, but in general I am very happy about the purchase – it provides me with all the features I need to get current and most of the future things done.

Since I have covered this business in three posts already it would have been worth it to post an update as events unfold. If you’ve missed it here’s the required reading – Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 respectively.

The way thing were unfolding the business was supposed to crumble in 6 to 7 months. At least that was the term I have predicted based on all the issues I had uncovered back in March. So overall-  from my point of view at the moment – this company has got until about August to shut its doors. When I communicated this to the business’ manager he, obviously, didn’t quite trust me. We haven’t built that trust yet, as I was only doing initial assessment. Turned out I should have been paying more attention to the depth of the problems. But before we get to the conclusion – here’s issue #4 – problems with sales and marketing.

Although I’ve covered marketing somewhat in previous posts, I completely skipped on the way the pricing was made. As you may already know (and if you don’t – read on with more attention) the initial pricing is build based upon your cost of running business plus the margin. In other words, if the cost of doing business (CODB) per client is $100 and your margin is 20% (all numbers are not real and are just for example’s sake) then your minimum price of service per client should be $120. If you go lower than that then there is no point to be in business at all. You may slightly deviate in one way or another, based on market conditions, your own value proposition and competitive advantages you possess, but that’s how you determine the initial pricing. Once you’re ON the market – you can (and you must) take steps to reduce CODB and increase margins. Market won’t let you go far off the median – unless, of course, you’re government-mandated monopoly, like AT&T or cable companies.

So for this company in question the pricing structure was determined at the whim of the managing partner. Employees’ salaries tied in directly as a percentage of the price of service and, therefore, are also at the same whim. Having heard about so many promotions and sales event but having absolutely zero knowledge of how these things worked this partner distributed flyers and promo cards with 10, 20, 30 or – the latest – a 50% discount. Funny part is that his two employees who actually performed the services and collected the money found out about promotions from clients who showed up with promo materials. Of course with rates already lowest on the market their salaries were discounted into ranges of minimum wages or less. From previous experience I can attest that sometimes expensive places do these kinds of promotions for a very limited time to get new clients in. Experienced sales people pitch more expensive services that span longer periods of time, so overall this tactic is very successful. But just discounting your service by 50% out of nowhere is a message to the employees “we’re going out of business, grab what have left before we close our doors“. To the clients it reads like “we’re so cheap that McDonald’s looks like 5-star restaurant compared to us“.

As you may have imagined already the employees’ outrage resulting from latest 50% pricing cut was on par with recent volcano eruption. Both employees have quit on the spot. There wasn’t much of quitting involved though – the volume of clients only allowed for one and a half day of work per week.

Having said all that I must admin – I was (again!) being overly optimistic about those 6 to 7 months, it all fell down in less than three. In my defense I can only say that I based those assumptions on brief initial analysis.

The small business owners just don’t get it. We, the technical types, can hype ourselves about HTML5, Flash, patterns, interactivity, social features, geolocation and other cool buzzwords, but regular small shop owner couldn’t care less. They have enough on their hands to worry about, so why should they care about brand new web site if they already have “a web site”? Just because you want their money it doesn’t mean they are willing to give it to you.

Here’s what you can you, as a small business owner, should know about the web site and his business. First of all – even though you may not realize it, people are talking about your business. With the proliferation of the web sites like Yelp, Kirtsy and omnipresent Craigslist, there’s always somebody talking. As an example, let me tell you a little story of one of my remote relatives who owns a shoe repair business in Williamsburg.

One day he came back from work and told his family that one of his clients told him that someone somewhere on the internet posted that his business has closed. Family council have decided to take immediate measures and my number was dialed. I was told to fix the internet or whatever was saying that his business is closed. As you can imagine – I was thrilled at the task of fixing the whole internet on such a short notice. As it turned out – it was nothing more than some weird check box on Yelp’s web site that anyone can tick signifying that business has closed. Of course, there’s no way for Yelp to verify that, so they have just gladly accepted it – just like they did accept my correction of this. In just a click of the mouse the internet was repaired and continued to go on as usual.

As I have read, with much amusement, the business already had quite a few reviews. Most of them discussed the pricing structure – or rather a lack of one. A few more things here and there that I thought my relative should have known about – and I was ready to bring the happy news back to him.

What this boils down to is this – now matter how small your business are, in this day and age, there’s something online about your business. If it’s not your web site – then it’s someone else’s rant about your business (not necessarily a happy one). If, after such a rant, your potential client will see a web site that was designed by an 8-year old, that potential client will never become a real one. A few years ago you only competed for customers’ attention amongst your competition, but you always were. Now you’re competing against a number of sites that hold numerous reviews and ratings, people’s blogs and tweets and whatever else. Keeping up with all that flow of information with old and antiquated web site is just impossible.

With all the features, bells and whistles being added to Gmail recently I look at yet another Google’s failing project – Picasa. This piece of software hasn’t been updated for God knows how long. Yes, they’ve added a few nifty things here and there but these little perks can’t make up for core features that users have been begging for. In order to assist Picasa’s developers team I have jotted down a short list of thing we, users, needed as of 2008, so you, guys, are, like, 2 years already late. Pay attention!

1. Folders and Sub-folders. Seriously, one level structure is so very CP/M-86 that only very old people like myself can remember the days when we DIDN’T have folders. My regular structure of storing photos – and I have found it to be very simple, most people got it even more complicated – is as follows:

/2010-01-01.New_Year_Celebration
      /All
      /Good_Originals
      /Bad
      /Edited_Large
      /Edited_Small

Why in the world would you deprive me of having folders? Yes, I want to maintain that structure on my web albums as well, where some people get to see Edited_Large folder and others are only allowed to see Small_Images_For_Web folder. It could be photos, it could be web design mock-ups – anything. Not having sub-folders is a usability killer.

2. Storing Raw Images. I hope you are aware of the idea of Picasa being a photo management tool. I would also fancy a wild guess and say that photographers would be interested in it, especially with such a good pricing on storage. In case no one told you before most photographers – even amateurs like me – like to shoot RAW images, the so-called “digital negatives”. They also would love to store them – UNCHANGED! When I upload RAW file (it’s a .NEF file, since I shoot with Nikon) to Picasa it gets crap-converted to JPEG and there is no way to get the original back. The whole point of my purchasing a 200GB space chunk is to be able to store RAW files. Look at your own support forums, there are people who did the same. There will be more people doing the same if you let them do the thing they want the most – back up their work “in the cloud”. I am not a professional and I’ve got 100GB of photos to store, think of all the money you are missing from true professional photographers.

3. Web Albums Usability. Did you know you have to make 5 clicks to delete a photo, counting from your albums home page? Did you know it takes the same 5 clicks just to get the link to the image if I want to embed it somewhere in my blog? Isn’t there anyone who could just go through the Picasa Web Albums once or twice and point to obvious usability flaws like these? Did you know there’s sorting by folder/album name pretty much everywhere except Picasa? Also, have you ever seen the how long the URL for RSS feed is for album? Can we make it user-friendly? Can we make it sorted with latest picture on top? Also, how long since anyone clicked on that “Share” button – where’s Buzz, Facebook, Twitter links? E-mailing people a whole album of images in 2010? Seriously?

4. Picasa Software Usability Flaws. I will not complain about lack of sub-folders again, because this it seem to be a feature rather than a bug. Since Web Albums lack sub-folders it is only natural that this inconvenience is propagated down to the desktop app. My biggest gripes are the Web Albums synchronization (or rather lack of thereof) and lack of mass-editing features. I have Picasa installed on 2 PCs and want certain folders to be synchronized. I can easily do it in DropBox, but for some reason Picasa can’t seem to understand how it’s done. Every time I try to sync a folder with Web Albums Picasa creates a new album. Why? I have no idea. As to the mass-editing features – it would be nice if I could assign tags in Picasa to bunch of images at the same time. You know, like – select them and tag all selected. If iTunes can do that to mp3 files I don’t know what the problem is with images.

5. Things That Will Make Picasa Better. These are not things that make Picasa completely unusable, these are things that – if implemented – could give Picasa a significant advantage over other services.

• E-mail to a specific album – since I can already e-mail photos to a specific address that will place picture into a “dropbox” folder, I see no reason why you couldn’t make a next step with this and actually allow using different aliases for different folders. No one else does it – as far as I know.
• Google Analytics for Picasa – let me use my Analytics account to see who’s looking at my photos. This would be incredible.
• Group Photos or Lists or Streams – let me combine photos from different albums into groups or lists. Think Gmail Labels feature. BTW, did you know Gmail allows nested labels now? Oh, and customizable RSS feeds for these lists, too?
• Different picture sizes links and feeds – how about being able to get direct links to various sizes of a picture? Can we also get an album’s custom RSS feed to be able to pull images of various sizes? Flickr had it for ages.
• Versioning – let me keep different versions of the same picture. I know it’s rare and far-fetched, but it’s a surefire hit with professionals – and who else would buy hundreds of gigabytes of space?

Still not convinced? How about open sourcing the Picasa, so that someone else picks up the ball you’ve dropped awhile ago?

P.S. I find it interesting that Picasa blog has comments turned off. So I cannot even tell them their ten times more albums feature is just another lousy workaround of not having sub-folders in albums.

Today in college (I do this two nights every week, remember?) we had a guest speaker. She was telling us about a failed 20-year old family business that served big-name clients. There was a CEO, his niece – a brilliant sales person who worked there for 10 years and CEO’s 20-something son with MBA and lots of ambitions. The niece was asked for Excel spreadsheets with her sales numbers, but she wasn’t too bright about that. Her specialty was selling – not spreasheeting. Eventually, the pressure from stiff CFO, the MBA-flaunting kid and her CEO uncle for those damn spreadsheets and numbers got so heavy that she left the company and took half of their clients with her. Rule number one – don’t mess with your sales people.

I call this a Five Dollar Problem, and here’s why. I happen to know just this type of sales person – bright, ambitious and persuasive. As I say – she can sell you snow in a winter and you gonna come back with your whole family asking for more. But she’s not good with anything that has to do with numbers, including computers. In fact – she doesn’t know how to use one. Trust me on this one for I tried so many times – and as many times I’ve failed. Her usual response is: “I don’t need to know computers, I have my husband for that” (yes, I’m talking about my wife). So when she was working in one elaborate place she (along with other workers) had to punch in her time sheets, how much time did she spent with each clients and what procedure she performed, what product she sold and so on. The regular spreadsheeting, you know. While being the most computer illiterate lady in New York save Statue of Liberty, she immediately figured out the solution to her problem. She was paying 5 dollars every week to their receptionist – a really nice college girl, who did my wife’s time sheet in less than 5 minutes.

Business owner was happy – she got the numbers she needed. My wife was happy – she didn’t have to struggle with those “complicated computers” every weekend and could get home earlier. And the receptionist girl was happy – she got every Saturday lunch for free. All it took to solve this problem is 5 dollars. Thus a name – a Five Dollar Problem. Meaning – the cost of solving this problem is exactly five dollars.

It is exactly the same problem as our guest speaker had presented. The problem that delivered one of the major cracks in the foundation of a 20-year old business. But rather than being demotivated, as we all get when we ask to submit to spreadsheeting, she solved the problem in a classic win-win scenario. It definitely didn’t break a business, it didn’t cost the business half of the clients, it was just that – a Five Dollar Problem.

Honestly, I am surprised I have never wrote about DropBox. Why? Perhaps I was so excited when I started using it so I completely forgot to share. Now that I have two accounts running on the same laptop I am twice excited. I even missed it from my Decade Technology Roundup!

I will assume everyone and their mothers are now know what DropBox is: it is a drop-dead solution to share your files between all your computers (Windows, Linux and MacOS are supported) without even thinking about it. Free account allots you 2GB of space. Additionally, there’s a free iPhone app to dig into your DropBox. It actually is very cool, you can stream music from it and do other fun stuff – within the limits of iPhone, of course. For those of us who crave Android app – it’s in the works already.

The good news this week is that DropBox, who also has a referral program (just like everyone else these days) has allowed to earn up to 8GB of free space for referrals in total – it used to be 3GB only. Since I almost maxed out my own referrals before – this was a welcome change. For those who will register using this link I will send a direct link to download a DropBox Portable, developed by one of the DropBox fans. Saves you a bit of time searching for the latest version yourself – a kind of a thank-you from me. The Portable DropBox runs alongside as many copies of itself as you want, so if you got friends and colleagues in separate boxes – you can stay updated with both.

If you haven’t yet used DropBox – go ahead, try it – you will be surprised how easy it is.