Koka Sexton dot Com

I Fell In Love With My Roku

Koka Sexton — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 03:47:57 +0000

I got a Roku from a special someone after visiting their house and being in complete amazement over the technology. I’ve had a Netflix account for several years. First I was crazy and would get 3 movies at a time, rush to watch them all and mail them back to get three more new movies in the mail. I even started adding movies still in the theater in my queue just to get the DVD once it was released. I don’t get to the theater very often so DVDs were the only way to stay on top of the best flix out there.

Netflix has had the “Watch Instantly” feature online for a while. When I would be working late into the night, I would use it to have a movie playing on one monitor while I slaved away on the others gettting work done. It was a great feature from Netflix to use for a guy that is glued to a desk 10+ hrs a day.

The only problem I had with the Netflix ‘watch instantly’ feature was that there were only s a few dozen movies to watch online. Most of them were old and rarely any TV series that I could catch up on. That’s when I started spending my time on the awesomeness called Hulu.

All that has changed now. With Roku, I may never need Hulu again. (OK I’ll still need you Hulu.)

Like Having Thousands of Movies at Home

The Roku player is like having your own video library at home with over 50,000 choices – from the best movies, TV shows and sports. The Roku player is the simplest (and cheapest) way to watch anything and everything from – Netflix, Amazon Video On Demand, and MLB.com instantly on your TV. You never have to wait for a DVD in the mail or pay late fees ever again.

Three Great Channels From Three Great Partners

Over 17,000 Choices Instantly from Netflix

Watch as much as you want on Netflix— watching instantly is already included in your Netflix unlimited membership for no additional cost. You still get all your DVDs by mail, but now you’ll also get over 17,000 movies & TV shows streamed instantly to your TV with the Roku player. There are no ads or trailers, and you can pause, rewind and fast-forward all you like.

As I mentioned, it has been a long time since I have looked at the Netflix online movie selection. I was bored with it. In a way I am glad I missed all of the new additions they have made. It makes the Roku that much more exciting. Now I log into Netflix and add whatever I want to my Watch Instantly queue and then when I sit infront of my TV, I can watch anything from my playlist on the TV just as if I had the DVD delivered. If I don’t like the movie, there is NO mailing back, I just start something new off of the playlist. AWESOME!!!!

If you love movies and can’t wait for DVDs to be mailed to you, add the Roku to you Christmas list and let Santa bring you a treat.

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Concordian Interview

Koka Sexton — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 06:39:07 +0000

Last month I met with a writer for a local Concord Ca. paper called the Concordian. The Concordian has been around a really long time. I should have asked the date they started. I couldn’t find it on the website.The paper was mailed to everyone in the city. It was a free monthly newspaper that talked just about our not-so-little city. Not to be confused with the local blogs like Mayor of Concord or Claycord that fill the internets with news. Recently the paper has had to stop the mailings but still prints thousands of copies and places them in Concord, Pleasant Hill and surrounding area.

The writer André Gensburger who is also the co-publisher for the paper first entertained the idea of talking with me a few months ago. He said my background would be something interesting that the community may want to read about. The topic of the article was to talk about how I have adjusted post Iraq. I agreed and thought this would be a nice thing to talk about. The last time I was interviewed by the media for Iraq was after coming home and talking to reporters that had read my Last Letter From Iraq.

The email letter was written about 30 minutes after being extended again and was sent to my family as a way to vent. It was forwarded around and I started getting email responses from complete strangers showing their support. It made its way onto a reporters desk and then the requests to talk started. Only so much could be explained while I was still deployed, but once I got home I got my 5 minutes of fame. I was on the news and written about in the SF Chronicle. It was nice to see my name in the paper and my face on the TV. My family got a kick out of it also.

I met André at the local Starbucks, sat down with my iced venti quad mocha and waited for him to pull out a pad of paper. I figured he was going to take notes because any other interview I have ever given that’s what the reporter did. Even when I was being video taped for the CBS News, the reporter had a note pad. André pulled out a tape recorder and asked if that would be cool. Sure. I thought “what could it harm?”. Other than the fact that I may run off on a tangent or say something I shouldn’t, there was nothing to fear. Sorry André, I was a bit intimidated by the recorder but I thought I was a good sport about it.

Instead of taking notes, trying to catch quotes or other information. Why not just have a conversation, see where it goes and then pull from it for the piece. It actually makes a whole lot more sense that way. Again I was concerned I was about to foot my foot in my mouth. As my wife can attest, I have a tendency to do this often. André made it clear that if there was something I didn’t want in the article after I say it, just ask for it to be removed. I have seen this play out on TV more than once. “oh…Ya…off the record…”. Then only the stuff you wanted stricken from the interview is published. Thankfully there were only a couple episodes of ‘foot in mouth‘ and nothing all that bad, just not something I wanted printed for complete strangers to read.

We spoke for about an hour and the entire process was almost too easy. We started talking about Iraq then moved into some background about me and my family. We covered a lot of ground in an hour and at the end he turned off the tape recorder. By the end I had completely forgot he put the recorder on the table. I really started wondering if I had commented on something I should have redacted. Too late now.

Andre sent me a copy of the article that was sent for print. I was more than a little excited to see how the entire piece turned out. He had asked for some pictures for the article and I pointed him to my online photo Flickr account and told him to use what he wanted and pointed him to some of my favorites. He got a picture of me and Grayson in the article. That made me smile. I read through the entire document a couple times. Sure, it’s all about me but considering Andre and I spoke for about an hour, he pulled pieces from the conversation that were scattered through the time line and wrote them all out as if in a chronological order. He did a great job. Andre mentioned he would get me a nice copy not on newsprint that I can put away for safekeeping. I still plan on getting copies of the Concordian around Concord just for family. The print version isnt released for a few more days so I’ll wait to post the entire article.

If you happen to get a copy and read the article, leave me a comment. I’m excited to hear what anyone thinks.

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60 Days at Paragon Software

Koka Sexton — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 20:46:29 +0000

After starting with Paragon Software Group in June I have been able to gain a lot of traction internally with my coworkers as well as build on the momentum of creating a better more efficient channel sales experience.Using the principles I developed while writing the Channel Sales Playbook, I have been able to hit the ground running with the new company. In fact, I may be updating the Channel Sales Playbook or putting together a new one just to give a more detailed set of actions that I have tested with positive results. (In my non-existent spare time)

Besides the channel stuff, I also have the responsibility to work with the developers and the product managers in Europe to generate documents and product copy that will be used for the company website and be distributed internally and externally for customers. This is a new role for me. I did something like this in my last position and I obviously like to write so it seemed like a good fit. Writing product documentation is not as easy as writing a blog post about a shiny new desk or Twitter tips 101. In the latter, I am writing for myself and can be as creative as I want. For product documents there is a much tighter timeline and content focus that needs to be covered. It’s an adjustment but I’m submitting good stuff that is getting approved by the team so I guess I am doing something right.

Paragon even has user created videos on YouTube where people are showing off the software. I really should have looked into this before getting hired. Either way when I stumbled across these, I was excited.

This video is of Partition Manager along with an excellent music track.

I love user generated videos for products. I think Paragon should hold a contest or something with a giveaway for the best user generated video showing the Paragon Software products. They don’t seem to think it would be worth the effort but I see what other brands like Mozy, Carls Jr. and Pepsi are doing and figure Paragon could get into the user content arena also.

The company has a great team of sales, marketing and support people. After the first week getting my head wrapped around the products and what was already being done, I realized everyone is pretty much running on all cylinders making things happen.

Initially there was talk about having a press release done about me joining the company and explaining what my plans were for the Paragon Partner Network. I have never had a press release written about me let alone ever been mentioned in one. I was always the guy in the background making things happen for the people who were getting written up in the media. As the saying goes “Always the bridesmaid never the bride” or something like that.

It took a couple weeks to get used to the software. Drive Backup is a really good backup software. I installed it on my three machines at home and have not had any issues yet. Even my laptop has a scheduled backup run once a week now. Since I’ve been playing around with the product, I feel completely comfortable telling anyone how great it is.

Press Release

The company decided it would be a good thing to have this done. To get the word out to the vast number of VARs we would like to work with and even to the competitive solutions we come up against. Paragon software is going to start popping up on some radars soon and our products are going to start showing up in more and more

Here is what the final result was for the Paragon Software Channel Press Release.

Partner Training is the Key

My plan for building the companies channel sales group is all about getting the right training to the partners. Sure I can recruit reseller all day long but unless they feel comfortable talking about and implementing the disaster recovery software, they never will.

Instead of flying all over the U.S. doing trainings, I got very intimate with WebEx. What I didn’t expect was the desire of the Paragon partners to want this training so quickly. I’ve been averaging about 6-10 trainings a week for new and existing partners so far and more scheduled through the month. I explain more about using WebEx for sales here.

Paragon Software Sales Tools

One of the few things the company lacked was a standard template for demonstrations, trainings and partner recruitment. They were so busy making money no one got around to it. I took on the task since I was already working on other company documentation and created these. After a couple trainings and recruitment calls, I had some adjustments to make based on what partners were responding well too and now I have something I can bring to the masses.

60 Days at Paragon Software Group

In the past 2 months I have been doing a lot. Honestly I cant remember when I have been this busy before. Between putting together the structure and executing on the plans I made, I have been running nonstop. I expected this to be a quick post as an update but I guess I did a little more than that.

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5 of the Best Twitter Apps I Can’t Live Without

Koka Sexton — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:42:55 +0000

After my initial addiction to Twitter, I started becoming fascinated by the growing amount of Twitter applications that were being developed. One of the suggestions I had made about how Twitter can make money was that they charge a fee for validated API applications. I don’t know if they started charging but the recent ‘validation’ of Twitter applications makes me feel much better about using services that I have to identify my credentials through.

Between getting my breaking news updates and talking to friends, Twitter has become a staple in my life. I want to share some of the best Twitter applications that I use on a regular basis.

TwitterFon
TwitterFon is a simple, clean, easy to use, and is a superfast Twitter client for your iPhone and iPod Touch.

TwitterFon is focused on ease of use and 80% of your daily Twitter tasks, such as see your friends/replies/messages timeline, see favorites, and send/reply a tweet. You can also search tweets, get twitter trends, upload photos to twitpic.com, and update your location information.

TwitterFon is my primary iPhone Twitter application.

Monitter

Monitter is one of my favorite voyeuristic Twitter applications. So simple that a 5 yr old can use it and yet powerful enough to show me who is talking about any topic anywhere in the world. I use Monitter to see what is being said in my city by specifying the distance of search and I open it up for every conversation when I look for information about news topics or when i want to see what is being said about the company I work for.

Twirl

I have a few different Twitter profiles. Instead of signing into each one individually online, I use Twhirl by Seesmic as a desktop application that can bring up all of the profiles in their own little windows. twhirl is a desktop client for the Twitter microblogging service. Most of the features available on the Twitter website are accessible through twhirl, too.

Twitter Karma

Keeping an eye on your Twitter Karma is a must for anyone that takes Twitter seriously. Twitter Karma is another very simple site that really hasn’t changed much since I first started using it over a year ago. The interface is easy to use and can perform some basic functions.

See everyone you are following and who follows you. More importantly see who you are following that is not following you back or people that follow you and you have not started tracking their updates. With just these few slices of visibility you can select individuals or groups that you can bulk follow or unfollow. This lets you keep a good Twitter follow ratio.

Last but not least by far is Twitter Feed.

Twitter feed serves a very simple task. Any RSS feed can be ported into a Twitter stream. An example of this is any new posts to my blog (like this one) will automatically be added to Twitter. This saves me from having to log into Twiter and post the link myself. sure that’s a very simple process but when you look at other Twitter profiles that update hourly with links or other information you can see where the automation becomes very helpful. Some examples are the Mayor of Concord and HyperLocal Edge Twitter profiles.

What are your favorite Twitter apps?

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Ohhh…Shiny! My new desk is ready

Koka Sexton — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 06:52:01 +0000

I have been wanting a new desk for a long time. I have been using my wife’s desk that she had in college ever since I got back from Iraq. Do to the nature of my work and the fact I’m addicted to my computers, I spend more time than I care to admit at my desk working, writing or playing Bejeweled.

When we moved out of SF and into the burbs, I wanted to throw out the old one and start in the new place with a new shiny desk. The old desk was nice but it was small and didn’t have a lot of storage options. I wanted something bigger but we had said that when I got a new desk it had to be better than the particle board one we had. We were looking for something that looked like a piece of furniture and most desks we found were too expensive at the time. It also had to be long enough to cover the long wall of the room under the window.

For Fathers day my gift for being a new dad was a new desk. We ended up getting a modular system from JC Penny of all places. I had gone to the store and looked at the floor model a few weeks ago and after doing some measurements of the walls in the office it seemed to be the best fit of all the other desks we had seen.

I would have enough space to hold my multiple computers, monitors and other gadgets and still have work space all over that I could use.

To have the desk delivered it was going to cost some ungodly amount of money so we opted to have the desk shipped to the nearest store and I’d pick it up. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. When it was time to get the desk, it was more of a mission than an errand. I figured it would take a couple trips and it ended up being three.

Once I got to the store and saw the pieces that had to be picked up I knew it was in for some work. Although there were only 8 pieces, each one was massive and heavy. The file drawers took up a lot of room and I could only get 3 at a time. I had to take the corner desk top on its own which really sucked.

http://twitpic.com/8j6o4

The next process is the one I hated the most. I had to clean off my old desk and move it to make room for the beast I had stacked in the garage. I cleared off the old desk and was reminded about how dirty it can get under there. Really I didnt know it was that bad.

After a long day I had the new desk up and I started putting the components back in place.

After another round of sweeping and tieing the cables out of the way. I think the hard part is over. Now its just a matter of making sure it doesn’t turn out to become a mess like the old desk.

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My Computer Caught the Swine Flu

Koka Sexton — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:02:19 +0000

As if I didn’t already have enough to get done, I found out last night that I somehow got a computer swine flu virus. Well, that’s what I’m calling it anyways. Now it doesn’t look like my computer is going to die but it’s definitely not doing well. I realized I had a virus/malware/rootkit when I typed something into Google and when I clicked a link, Firefox sent me to some completely different site. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t smoking crack so I did this a few more times. Yes, I was infected. The worst part is that the virus is completely random.

Now this virus is not just related to Google searches. I am infected with Bing, Yahoo and any other search engine I try to use.

As I said the browser redirect virus is random so there is a chance I get to the site I wanted to look at. But in this case when I am doing a search for Spyware tools and click on Major Geeks link, I get directed to Stopzilla’s website.

If I go back and click the same link again, I get sent to a completely different site.

When I click the link from the search engine, I am not sent directly to the site I want. The browser hijacks the link and puts me through a secondary domain called appropriateplacefind.info.The domain is held by proxy through Go Daddy and is located in Scottsdale AZ.

http://www.networksolutions.com/whois-search/appropriateplacefind.info

There is also a reference to a domain called overclick.cn but that doesnt seem to be legit.

Luckily, I have a super tech support team online and after posting an update on Twitter and Facebook, I started getting some help. I’ve downloaded MalwareBytes, I’ve run th ESET online tool and each have found more than my original AVG virus scan did. I think I’m going to ditch AVG antivirus for good.

So I’ve identified and removed 3 triojans and 2 other viruses from my computer and followed some additional instructions from a techy friends and restarted my machine.

For now everything looks alright. I can search and be fairly certain I am going to go to the page where I intended but I don’t feel safe yet. I want to know how I got the virus in the first place. Sure it could have been from downloading crap online, which is probably exactly how I got it but I download a lot of stuff all the time and usually I get alerted before the install that there is a virus detected. Whatever this nasty bug is, it beat my defenses and I don’t really like that.

Thank you Shaun for staying up late and helping me out online with this. I’m going to look into buying a better antivirus app with some malware and rootkit detection tools.

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Paragon Software - My New Disaster Recovery Software Gig

Koka Sexton — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 05:15:58 +0000

Early in March, I was let go from Acronis software. Probably for the best because I got hired to build their Channel Program but the company had so much channel sales conflict I wanted to puke. I fought the good fight despite the company selling their product direct. Being out of a job is not very fun. Especially for a guy who has been working in some aspect since he was 15 yrs old. I kept myself busy redesigning some of my other sites, working with some companies on a project basis and most importantly, I got to spend a lot of quality time with my new boy.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do next. Thankfully between savings and a little money coming in from other places, we didn’t become homeless in the process of me finding a new job. I looked far and wide. The economy sucks and I knew that finding a place to work was going to be difficult. The unemployment rate just kept going up and with that, my chances of standing out from the crowd was getting slimmer and slimmer.

Then came along Paragon Software. The company has a global presence in disaster recovery and disk maintenance. The great part about the company is the technologies are very similar to the company I previously worked for.

Paragon Software Group has been providing cost effective solutions for hard drive management, storage management and data protection since its inception. Known internationally for its innovative Partition Manager provides proven, full featured solutions for storage lifecycle management. Paragon enables midrange enterprises to effectively and efficiently manage, deploy and protect server and desktop storage resources.

I am driving the company’s Channel Business Development as well as working with the development team and marketing groups as a Product Manager. I will be using most of the same sales skills I have been using for a long time and I will be building on them by participating in the overall product strategies, industry research, analysis, requirements, and software development for new and emerging products.

I am excited for this position, not just because I was out of work but because this is a great place for me to actually use the information I have collected over the years. The company here in the US is small enough that I won’t have to deal with a bunch of legacy BS that typically does nothing more than cause distractions and create roadblocks in a company.

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Super Geek Land - My Geeky Passion

Koka Sexton — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 05:00:46 +0000

I’ve owned the domain for a couple years and couldn’t find myself to let it go. The idea for the name came from a drunken night with some friends where the conversation of Geek Porn came up. Maybe you had to be there but the idea was that geeks didn’t watch or look at conventional porn, they like to check out motherboards and computer components. Something about Super Geek Land just seemed like gold.

Without any ads or push on my part the site was actually generating a small amount of money on it’s own. All from organic search traffic. Can you guess what the search term was? “Super Geek” and Geek Porn”. People actually search these terms. While I was in my unemployed status I did some work on the site and got it to a place where it looks a lot more like I had envisioned.

It’s basically website that pulls deals for computers, gadgets and other geek stuff from all over the internet and uts it in a single page. Yes, before anyone chimes in, I know there are a few dozen other sites like this. Super Geek Land was more of a project for me to experiment with some additional code and see what would happen.

I am still working on it and it, like many of my sites are a work in progress. I have to work out a few bugs and build in some functionality but all in al, I’m happy with how it’s turning out. There is a Super Geek Twitter profile also and I’m working on the Facebook page.

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FriendFeed Explosion

Koka Sexton — Fri, 08 May 2009 17:04:23 +0000

Whats going on with FriendFeed? FriendFeed is a service which, instead of layering a meta-network on top of all your other social networks, will create a news feed incorporating them all much like the Facebook news feed. It’s an idea that isn’t too difficult or bothersome for social network users to adopt. The site has been around for a while but in recent weeks I have been seeing a lot of activity on my profile that I hadn’t seen before.

FriendFeed aims to be a one stop shop for all your social networking updates and news items. The four founders were all team members at Google and helped to launch such products as Google Maps, Adsense, GMail and Google Groups. They’ve brought their expertise to a slightly different area: social network aggregating.

Users tell the feed which networks they belong to (Facebook, Digg, Last.fm etc) and FriendFeed personalizes your data feed with info from each of the sites.

I’ve had an account for a while and never use it actively. I signed up for the FriendFeed account and plugged in all of my feeds and then left it alone. There were other features such as the ability to comment and share links but I never used them. I started following some other social media icons like mashable, l0ckergn0me, Jason Calacanis, Chris Brogan, Leo Laporte, and justine, but I never looked at it. If I wanted to leave a comment, I would do it on the same platform the feed came from and not an aggregator. There wasn’t a whole lot of activity from other people and it looked like most people did the same as me. Set it and forget it.

Looks like things are changing though. Once a dormant social site that I used only for aggregating my rss feeds has now become a full fledged community. In the past few weeks I have gotten a lot of emails of people subscribing to my feed. Really I think I had 5 people following me last month and now I get comments on my links. Now I find myself digging through FriendFeed profiles the way I do with Twitter.

Do you have a FriendFeed profile? If not and you have more than one social media profile, you should really take 3 minutes and sign up for one. Then add me as a friend there and let me follow your online stream.

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SOCOM Sales Redesign

Koka Sexton — Fri, 01 May 2009 04:02:41 +0000

Tweaking my websites and blogs is actually really fun for me. I love finding a new theme and getting into the code to make it my own. Since my online sales tips blog hasn’t had a real refresh since February 08, I spent some time making it look a bit more clean. I used the same theme as HyperLocal Edge since it seems to be my new favorite.

SOCOM Sales started off as a way for me to blog about my journey as a sales person and has morphed into a blog that covers a bunch of different topics. I was getting such a great responce to the site through comments and emails that I even wrote a Channel Sales Playbook to explain how to run a channel sales team. The e-book is free and there are plans to put together a more detailed and expansive e-book covering channel sales in a very simple format.

SOCOM Sales was my first professional applicationof using social media. Besides having a blog with over 300 posts on sales tips and selling skills, I manage a Twitter profile called Sales tools that has grown to a following over 1000.

Most of that growth has been in the past month. I was happy with the followers before but I figured since I am currently out of work I would spend more time building my sales tools network and using social media to fill my time looking for a new place to work. Getting to know more of my sales tools network has been fun and I have met some very professional sales people through Twitter I never would have known before.

I put together a Facebook page for the site as well. Really I just wanted another Facebook page to test my skills on. Since this is in a different niche that the HyperLocal marketing site, there will be a seperate set of tabs and information that will be broadcast on the SOCOM Sales Facebook page. I need to do some more customization to the fan page but I am gad that I have gotten a few fans already even though a few of them are collegues of mine from work.