It is a beautiful spring day in Southern
New Jersey and I’m taking it all in, the red Petunias, the
Cardinals, the blue sky and the vivid green of my backyard. I’m working too,
writing, sending e-mails, doing research and networking online.

Does this sound too frivolous to you? Work doesn’t have to
be a chore, done from an office from 9 to 5. We can do it productively from
anywhere, thanks to some fabulous web tools.

Here are a few in my arsenal:

GoToMyPC
and LogMeIn: These two
programs allow you to access your desktop using your web browser or wireless
device. GoToMyPC has a very easy interface; LogMeIn has an excellent price,
free!

With GoToMeeting
you can have a conference call and share your desktop with up to ten people or
you can give a seminar over the web for up to 1000 people. It lets you record
the seminar too so you can offer it later as a downloadable product in your
website.

Skype and Vonage give free or cheap internet
calls. Skype also allows conference calls for up to 10 people, chat, send files
and send SMS messages

What happens if you don’t want to carry your laptop with
you? No problem, upload your files to DesktopTwo.
This company provides you with a desktop in cyberspace that mimics your
computer. As long as you have internet access and a computer in place you can get to your files.

ThinkFree
and Google Docs and Spreadsheets have
similar offerings.

These tools are wonderful for collaboration too. For example
if you are working in a document that needs to be revised and refined by
several members of your team, instead of sending countless e-mail and
attachments, uploaded the file to one of these sites, work in the document
online and download it to your computer when it is done.

I believe there is time in life for everything, to work and
enjoy the garden or our family and now thanks to these great tools we can do it
from everywhere!

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I laughed, of course, because he truly believes that one hour playing video games is the best gift he can give me and well, maybe he is right. But then, I laughed at myself, because how many times do I offer my prospects or my clients what I like and not what they need.

We hear it so often from marketing gurus, “talk about benefits, not features”, but it doesn’t come easy to us. Thinking about what we like and what we want is ingrained in our genes, part of that survival instinct I think that made us believe that the Earth was the center of the universe.

To think about our clients needs require much thought, reading time, questions and research. I had a difficult time defining my markets and speaking to my prospects needs until I read Ram Charan’s book, Profitable Growth is Everyone’s business.10 Tools you can use Monday Morning.

The issue he tell us is that we are in business to “help our customers find new opportunities to grow” whether we sell a pen, insurance, graphic design or research. Therefore the question is not what do my clients need, but what do their clients need and how can I help them satisfy their clients so that they can grow and I can grow along with them. In essence who buys what and why do they buy it?

Thus if I want sell a pen, my immediate client is the office supply store, but his client may be a school kid, her mother, the husband buying a mother’s day gift or the office assistant buying a gift for his boss, so the question is what kind of pens will my client need to satisfy his customers and can I provide it?

There are several tools that can help on this such as market mapping which Ram Charan describes in some depth. I’m interested in reading more about market mapping so if you know of any good book on the topic, please let me know.

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Soon I realized that we don’t build a business by ourselves, we need people that are willing to trust us and become our clients, we need mentors to teach us, employees to help us, collaborators to grow, friends to give us a shoulder to cry and family to support us and to forgive our folly of daring to think we can go at it alone.

And so I opened myself to those relationships and found that my life is busier, exciting, at times scary and aggravating, but all the time richer.

Of all those relationships, collaborations seem to me the more daunting and rewarding. They allow me to go places I can go by myself, but at times it truly feels like walking off a cliff hoping that I have had the good judgment of surrounding myself with good people that would not let me fall.

At the recent AIIP conference, one of the speakers, Ann Potter from Ann Potter & Associates, told us about her experiences with alliances. In a funny, eloquent and the uniquely analytical way of a business researcher she produced a Matrix of Alliances Types. I thought you would appreciate it.

So, here is to true love!!

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Since information is power, Minneapolis must be overflowing
with it this week, because a group of independent information professionals has
descended on this beautiful and sunny city as part of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP)
national conference. This a group of business owners that use their skills in
finding and analyzing information to solve their client’s problems. They are in
fact my secret weapon. If you allow me to brag a bit, I will tell you that you
can ask any question to a group of AIIP members and no matter how obscure the
subject, someone will either know the answer or will know how to find it, and so
I’m honored to be a member.

There is the member that using demographic information
can tell a school district the best place to build schools, someone has a
database of “green” companies, the environmental friendly variety, and someone
can help you find your ancestors or find information about your competitors or
your market or help you expand your business by going international (oh, wait I
am one of them, I can help you with that), and on and on and on.

In the words of Tim Sanders, the author of one of my favorite
books “Love is the Killer App. How to win Business and Influence friends”, they
are “knowledge-throwing lovecats” because they “intelligently and sensible share
their intangibles (knowledge, network and compassion) with their
bizpartners”.

When I leave Minneapolis, I will be overflowing with
information which I will be relentlessly throwing at you here or in my blog. Be
prepared!

Until then I wish you a great weekend from sunny Minneapolis!

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Did you know that in 2004 McDonalds opened 36.2 new restaurants for every million people in the U.S, 2.9 in South America and 1.0 in the Middle East?

No, this is not the beginning of a Trivial Pursuit game, it is just a bit of information I found at an interesting site called Worldmapper.

As a researcher I am constantly looking for ways to present information to my busy clients in an easy to grasp format. I have found that information is more useful and better understood when compared to something.
That is why I think maps are so fascinating. They offer new insights and make a difficult concept easy to understand.

The web has made maps part of our everyday life, most of us, start our trips with a search engine map or a GPS in our hands or waste a few minutes every now and then traveling with Google Earth.

But what if we could use those maps for something more than finding an address? For example overlying a list of our clients address on a Google map will let us see which areas we have penetrated with our products or services and allow us to plan future expansions, or target advertising campaigns. That is exactly what Google mash-ups let us do and with a new service
called My Maps, Google has made it easy even for someone with no coding experience to add layers of data to maps.

I decided to try just that the other day. I grabbed the Forbes list of best small companies and created a Google mash-up for the Philadelphia region (click here to see map). Some facts that jumped at me immediately was that none of the companies were located in Delaware, there were only two companies in South Jersey and most of the companies were located in Northern New Jersey.

People have been creating thousands of those Google mash-ups. Here are a few of my favorites:

Find a world port, provide maps, satellite image and contact information of ports in 181 countries, housing maps, gives you houses for sale and rent as posted in Craig list Google-Yahoo Traffic Weather Map, gives you current traffic
information in your area, Whoissick let you see how many people are sick in your neighborhood and if you are planning to market your services to Martians any time soon this mash-up of UFO sightings could be quite useful.

You can find more mash-ups at Google Mania Maps Blog and Programmableweb and if you decide to create your own, go to My
Maps in Google and let me know. I would love to see them.

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Every now and then when my mind needs to rest, I close my eyes and travel to my sister’s porch in the north coast of Honduras. I sit alone, with a cup of coffee at six in the morning and enjoy the crisp air that comes after the fearsome storm of the night before. In front of me stands a dark blue looming mountain and next to the porch is my mother’s garden.

It is always summer in my mothers’ garden.

That is all I could think of the other day as I sat in a Philadelphia restaurant talking to a gentleman interested in introducing garden products to Central America.

The questions kept coming; I need the names of distributors, do you have a list? Should I translate the labels to Spanish? What about government regulations?

And all I could think of was, it is always summer in my mother’s garden.

Everything in life I believe can be reduced to asking the right question at the right time.
Maybe the question was not what are the names of distribution companies? But rather, do people in Honduras buy plants in nurseries? Do they buy mulch? How many times a year do they visit a garden store?

It is always summer in my mother’s garden. The flowers are blooming in January and it is green and lush year round. I’m sure my sisters buy plants once in a while, but more often than not they ask their neighbors for a cutting. Their thumbs are always green. Until I moved to the U.S., I lived under the illusion that I had a green thumb, not realizing that it was nature’s gift to my home not to me.

Can such an environment sustain a large nursery business?
Sadly, I didn’t find out. Sometimes people feel the only answer they need is in a list of names.

So tell me what do you think? I’m curious.

My Latin American friends, Is your mother’s garden always green? How many times do you buy plants from a nursery?

My friends from the north, how much do you spend in garden supplies every year?

Is your green thumb nature’s gift to you or to your place in the world? Or perhaps it is due to your garden center’s beautiful nurseries?

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Have you ever wished that your email program had an unsent button? As the sender of more than a few embarrassing e-mails, I sometimes wish just that. Folks at Bigstring expect that many people wish the same as well.

Today at the New Jersey Technology Council Venture Conference, the company’s CEO gave a presentation on their self-destruct, Mission Impossible style e-mail. The service allows you to recall, modify or set an expiration date on e-mails. I confess I had a mixed reaction to this service. Yes; it would save me some mortification, and jail time for a few CEO’s, but as someone who finds a treasure trove of information even in the junk mail folder, the idea of self destruct e-mails is distressing. I don’t know about you, but once that message hits my inbox, it is mine and I want it!

I heard a lot of presentations today on many fascinating technologies, but I was especially interested on those services that allow you to distribute content over the web.

There was emusicblast.com, an online community and digital music distribution site. Artists can upload their music, sell it at the music store and send it to music labels executives. Users can rank the songs, post messages, events, photos and of course buy the
songs.

Viddler is a service that allows you to upload, edit, tag and share video with whomever you chose. You could create a training video or sales presentation, upload it, add comments and then send an e-mail to your clients with the link to the site. No self destruct e-mails please.

Now, even if you don’t care to use a computer, you can still send an e-mail with Celery.com. I don’t get the name, but this is an e-mail by fax service. Using a fax you can send a hand written note or a picture to the Celery site where it is transcribed to e-mail using hand writing recognition software and then transmitted to its destination.

I like this idea, but found the Indian government version more remarkable. According to a recent article in FastMagazine, India has E-post gram, a service that allows people to send e-mails to friends or family members that have never seen a computer, may not even know how to read and live in remote areas with no phone or internet connection. The e-mail is sent to the nearest post office where it is transcribed and hand delivered.

Imagine spam can now reach you even in the farthest corners of the world. A flat
world indeed!

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In a recent trip Professor Joshua Kaplan gave me a lecture on Political
Theory. In the first few minutes, he relates a passage from Oedipus the King,
in which a blind prophet, Theresias, reminds the king that “Wisdom is a curse
when wisdom does nothing for the one who has it”.

I’m sure philosophers can find profound meaning in those
words, but for me, a child of the information age, they spoke of the curse of
information overflow, of millions of Google links, hundreds of e-mails,
reports, audio books, videos and junk e-mail folders. They spoke of the difficulty of extracting knowledge from that constant stream of data so that I can use it to serve my clients, improve my business and my life.

Companies spend millions in data mining programs, but whether you have a company with a large budget or a one person business with a tiny budget, the answer is the same and as old as time, just ask why, what, when, who, where and how.

Why you need that information, what is the answer going to do for you, how are you going to use the data. Thus, instead of trying to find a list of all the small business in the east coast of the U.S. you may want to consider why you need such a list, are you trying to sell them something? What are you selling them and how are you going to sell it to them.

The answers to those questions tell us where to search, how long to search and how much time and money should we spend searching. Once we have those answers the information will be easier to find, and you may find that it is already in your own files or even in your junk e-mail folder.

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