make custom gifts at Zazzle

Social Network Arizona and seenBEST Web Design have launched a new Arizona based community poll where locals can vote on their favorite local businesses. The contest is titled the Social Choice Award.

The latest poll asks Arizonans a question, "What's the best family attraction in Arizona"? Facebook fans from Phoenix, Tucson, Flagstaff, Tempe, Ahwatukee, Scottsdale, and more are voting and adding choices every day for you to select from.

Want to vote? Click here:

Linking to a resource where you can learn about website design, including industry news and related information!
http://www.websitedesign-phoenix.com

Social Network Arizona and seenBEST Web Design have launched a new Arizona based community poll where locals can vote on their favorite local businesses. The contest is titled the Social Choice Award.

From July through August, 2012, they are running a poll asking Arizonans a question, "What's the best pizza in Arizona"? Facebook fans have already added over 65 various pizza restaurants to the list from Phoenix, Tucson, Flagstaff, Tempe, Ahwatukee, Scottsdale, and more. More choices are being added every day for you to select from.

Want to vote? Click here:

Video from the Phoenix, Arizona Social Media Marketing and Business Social Networking Seminar. May 17, 2012 From the Social Network Princess.

Video was captured of the solar eclipse in May from Arizona. The HD video was taken during the sunset and you can clearly see the eclipse while the sun is going down - super cool! Click on the picture below to watch the video:

Solar Eclipse 2012

Take a look at this cool application on Facebook. Like the page, then refer your friends using the app. Every friend you refer to the energy savings program will earn you a cool $50! Be sure you enter my name into the 'who referred YOU' box!

CLICK HERE: http://www.facebook.com/energysavingaudit/app_369491899737901

Capturing HD video of a hail storm in Phoenix, AZ on March 18, 2012. The storm came as part of a big cold front as temperatures dropped by 20 degrees overnight.

Hi, I’m the Social Network Princess with seenBEST and today we’re going to answer the question:

What is the Benefit of a Custom Website Design?

A custom website, unlike a do-it-yourself-website, is a website that has been created by a professional team.

As a business owner, you want to have the best website to represent your brand. That’s what you’ll get when you hire experts who have dedicated their lives to helping businesses successfully advertise online.

By hiring an expert team, you’ll be able to focus on managing your business instead of stumbling through the complicated process of website design and internet marketing.

Bring in more customers! Having a professional website gives you the competitive edge, and will convince potential buyers to choose you over the competition.

Getting a custom website for your business is as simple as meeting with seenBEST to discuss your ideas. We handle everything from start to finish, all you have to worry about is taking care of your customers.

seenBEST provides comprehensive website design, web development, and internet marketing solutions. If you have any questions about how we can help you get your business found online, call us at (480) 256-9010 to schedule a free consultation.

Would you like to connect with me in Social Media? Visit The Social Network Princess website, +1 seenBEST on Google+ at plus.google.com/117422698423525327567/posts and Like us on Facebook, www.facebook.com/seenBEST.Web.Design. Thank you so much for watching, see you next time!

Technology is everywhere: At home and work, when playing and shopping, sitting down and on the go.

Companies that are slow to embrace new technologies and continue to focus their advertising budgets on methods that worked decades ago are being quickly outpaced by more modern competitors. As a result, they are losing potential customers every day. A business with outdated advertising practices that wishes to remain competitive must modernize and optimize their advertising strategies to eliminate ineffective marketing methods. In most industries, increasing the effectiveness of marketing investments means embracing the digital era and moving their advertising efforts to the internet.

How can a business, currently entrenched in marketing methods that worked a decade ago, take advantage of the upgraded advertising opportunities available to them and get ahead digital era? This article is designed to detail four obsolete business marketing methods, why not to use them for your modern business, and how to replace them with more effective advertising technologies. Stop wasting your money on advertising that simply does not work. Abandoning these four obsolete methods of traditional business promotion can lead to an increased return on investment when they are switched to more cost-effective methods online.

Telemarketing

Telemarketing, or cold calling, was a popular form of marketing for many years. The concept works similar to door-to-door sales, only over the phone. Simply obtain a list of potential clients, call them at their home or business, and read a professionally written script. Ideally, the phone calls are made quickly with minimal talk time, with an attempt to talk to as many people as possible while minimizing rejections.

Why not?

This may sound like a great marketing strategy, however, there is a major downside. People generally have become annoyed with these types of calls. When the concept was fresh, people happily answered their phones and many of them would listen to what you had to say. In today’s world, people are used to communicating quickly and have access to a wealth of information digitally, eliminating the need to learn about products or services over a forced and disruptive telephone call.

 

In addition, call screening and gatekeepers have become common. Digital telephone systems exist that screen out calls from unwanted parties. With the increased use of smartphones, many people have downloaded apps specifically designed to identify and block telemarketing calls. Because of all these factors, it is unlikely that your target audience will be reachable by phone, making telemarketing obsolete.

 

What’s better?

Use social media to your advantage for a much improved, non-intrusive way of reaching potential customers. A professional marketing campaign on sites such as LinkedIn or Facebook can help your business target and reach out directly to people who have already expressed interest in or a need for your services. With the use of marketing content such as website landing pages, infographics, and videos, you are able to provide useful information and advertise your business to potential clients. In general, people are more receptive to companies they find via their favorite social websites, especially when they recognize one of their friends as having ‘liked’ or endorsed your business in the past. This form of promotion is inexpensive for the value and, when done correctly, can produce a much higher return on investment than telemarketing.

Direct Mail

Direct mail is one of the oldest forms of promoting products or services. Businesses gather a mailing list of potential clients, usually tens of thousands, and put together a clever letter or post card. This method is most commonly used for coupons, store newsletters, or as a way to inform people about new products. The material is then mailed to the target client’s home or business address. Often times a single ad from one company is combined with dozens of ads from multiple companies, resulting in a single mailer of ads sent via bulk mail to the advertiser’s targeted list.

Why not?

Direct mail has another term associated with it: “junk mail.” These mailings often go directly into the trash can and are often not read. This creates an inconvenience to the client and is a waste to businesses. It can become expensive to print and distribute high color advertisements via mail, so it is important to see a high return when using them. Unfortunately, “Junk mail” does not usually result in a high sales return.

 

In addition, the United States Postal Service has begun to limit its services, offering limited services on Saturday and no service on Sunday. In recent years, the mail industry has seen a seen a heavy decline is overall sales. Businesses are now limited to advertising via this method Monday through Friday, the busiest days of the week for most people and the days where they are least likely to have time to sift through disruptive advertisements. Plus, if addresses are written incorrectly or the client has moved, it is even less likely they will see the advisement. High cost, poor targeting availability, and low return on investment has made advertising by direct mail obsolete.

 

What’s better?

The better solution to reach tens of thousands of people in a cost-effective way is by building an internet marketing strategy using video and social media advertising campaigns on popular sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and YouTube. Advertising via social media allows your businesses to reach targets based on highly specialized criteria, narrowing down your targeting to people who are specifically interested in your message. This form of business promotion is far less limiting than a piece of paper, giving you the opportunity to present your potential client with videos, long pieces of information, images, or interactive content. This can be used to create an overall deeper relationship with the client, giving them a greater sense of loyalty to your brand. “Going Green” with your advertising will not only result in less wasted paper and an overall better outlook for the environment, it will also result in lower marketing cost with a much higher return. And, unlike sending “junk mail” with the USPS, there’s nothing to print, no postage to buy, and you can reach people any time day or night, seven days a week.

Yellow Pages

The yellow pages within a phone book are a listing of all the businesses in a particular area organized by category and name. Businesses can buy ad space for their respected categories, up to a full page, in hopes they will catch the eye of the person seeking the type of service or product the company offers. Phone books with yellow pages are often dropped off at a telephone customer’s home or business address, usually in a bag on the ground near the door.

Why not?

People readily access most information online or on the go with a cell phone, making an advertisement in the phone book yellow pages rather ineffective. The printed copies of business directories often make their way into the trash bin immediately upon delivery. While many yellow page directory services have created online versions to go along with the printed book, these are equally as ineffective. No one uses business directories to locate information on products or services, preferring instead to directly search for information on a search engine such as Google or Bing, or via social search in Facebook. Due to the high cost of advertising in yellow page and directory services, and the dwindling number of people looking to them for answers, the Yellow Pages are obsolete when it comes to advertising your business.

 

What’s better?

People go directly to search engines to search for service providers in their area, and use search engine relating mapping services provided by Google or Bing to locate products or services nearby. Creating search engine listings and having a modern website listed in online search is vastly superior to yellow page advertising. With search marketing, instead of a small, single advertisement on a piece of paper, you are able to drive interested customers to a website full of robust pages of information, contact forms, interactive media, videos, and integrated social media components unique to your business. As a bonus, search engines are available on the go, so potential clients can find you while on the road and away from home. In addition, these searches are conducted using keywords typed in to a search box, allowing you to laser focus your advertising to only those people who are most likely to need your products or services. Search engine marketing provides your business with a quick, accurate, round-the-clock advertising method, helping you drive interested clients straight to your location or website.

Newspaper and Magazine Ads

Newspapers and magazines are a common place for advertisements, especially for local products or services. Each newspaper or magazine is printed and distributed to thousands of client’s doorsteps on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. The ads can be placed in a number of different sizes ranging from as little as one forty-eighth of a page to a two page ad, depending on the paper.

Why not?

Print newspapers and magazines are becoming less and less common. It’s a dying industry with rapidly shrinking readership. This is due to the ease of finding information, including news, online. Many traditional newspapers are no longer existent or have moved their operations online in the form of dedicated blogs or E-newspapers. Most magazines have replaced printing in favor of digital copies that incorporate video as well as images.

 

Traditional newspaper ads can also get quite costly depending on the size of the ad and the following the newspaper has. While small ads are often available at a reduced cost, they may be overlooked by readers depending on the placement. The traditional paper size is 15 by 22 and a half inches, and one forty-eighth of that amounts to a tiny ad space, a little over an inch. The fact that readership of printed magazines and newspapers has declined, and your tiny ad often blends in with the page and is seldom seen, makes advertising in paper newspapers and magazines obsolete.

 

What’s better?

Online display advertising allows you to publish high quality color advertising images and online videos to targeted websites at a fraction of the cost of a printed ad in a newspaper or magazine. Many of these websites are visited on a regular basis by your ideal customers, so a steady flow of potential clients will see your ad. In addition, online display ads can link those viewers directly to your website, putting them just a click away from a wealth of information about your products or services. Display advertising allows you to target readers with a particular focus, making it possible to specialize further and show your ad only to people who are likely interested in what you offer.

 

From a creative standpoint, this type of promotion is far less limiting. It is possible to have full color, beautiful ads for your business, where as a traditional newspaper will usually limit the ads to black and white or low-quality color ink. This means that not only are you targeting potential clients effectively, but you are creating more interactive ads that allow you to engage your target audience in meaningful ways. Display advertising ultimately provides a higher return on investment than printed newspapers and magazines, allowing you to provide more relative, higher performing ads for less.

In addition to all of the benefits outlined above, there are several additional reasons why digital advertising methods via search engines, websites, and social media far outpace telemarketing, direct mail, yellow pages, or newspapers and magazines:

• Advertisement Performance Tracking and Analytics: Internet advertising provides the ability to measure advertising effectiveness. You can quickly compare cost vs. performance via mechanisms that track the number of times your ads were viewed and the number of times they were acted upon. Detailed performance tracking makes it easy to determine if your advertising is working or needs to be adjusted.
• Advertising Campaign Scheduling: Online ads can be scheduled to run according to your precise needs. You can run ads at only certain times of the day, certain days of the week, or start and stop advertising as necessary based on the needs of your business.
• Detailed Control Over Budget: With internet advertising, you are not trapped into a pre-determined set price for your ads. You can allocate the budget that’s right for your business at the time, and increase or decrease your advertising budget as your goals change.

This is the dawn of the digital age. Looking at your business advertising plan and reallocating it now is a wise decision. While finding the most effective marketing strategy for your business can be a difficult task, eliminating useless business advertising methods is a good first step towards that goal. If your business is investing in any one of the aforementioned methods, you are probably wasting your money that could be better invested online. Add up how much you are spending monthly and yearly on useless business advertisements and write that number down. That’s the amount of money you should be investing into high impact internet advertising instead.

It’s common sense to advertise where your potential clients are, and chances are good that most of them are online. Roughly 80% of Americans use the internet for an extended period of time on a daily basis, and that number continues to grow each year. Compare to the only 23% that read printed newspapers on a semi-frequent basis. Because internet advertising is significantly less expensive than traditional marketing methods, and most of your competitors haven’t yet figured this out, promoting your business digitally will yield higher results. Get started now to help establish your company early on and gain the competitive edge.

So, what’s the next best step after making the decision to replace outdated advertising with digital marketing? If you want quick and reliable results, find an expert internet marketing company in your area that is knowledgeable in the pros and cons of marketing your business online. These firms can help you create a new, custom marketing strategy based on a professional website, content marketing, display advertising, social media ads, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and interactive online videos. The right company can help your stand out from the competition, allowing you to grow in a modern and highly-effective way.

Hi, I’m the Social Network Princess with seenBEST and today we’re going to answer the question:
What is… SIXTY-FOUR THOUSAND?

Sixty-four thousand is the number of monthly searches for Auto Mechanics in the Phoenix area. That’s a lot of people who are searching for someone to fix their car. If you own an auto repair shop, and you’re not marketing to those sixty four thousand searches per month, you’re losing potential customers to your competition.

This high volume of searches for local businesses happens in every industry. For example, each month in the Phoenix area:

• 34,000 people are searching for Realtors
• 52,000 people are searching for Dentists
• 47,000 people are searching for Lawyers
• and 5,400 people are searching for a Landscaper

Whatever your industry, thousands of people are searching for you every month. We can help you capture that business.

We build you the best website, enhance it with calls to action, optimize for search, and employ expert search engine marketing techniques that place you on top of the competition. Get found when customers search for your products or services, get seenBEST.

seenBEST provides comprehensive website design, web development, and internet marketing solutions. If you have any questions about how we can help you get your business found online, call us at (480) 256-9010 to schedule a free consultation.

Would you like to connect with me in Social Media? Visit The Social Network Princess website, +1 seenBEST on Google+ at plus.google.com/117422698423525327567/posts and Like us on Facebook, www.facebook.com/seenBEST.Web.Design. Thank you so much for watching, see you next time!

Did you know that a combination of social media and video is a great way to get your business seen online? Let seenBEST help you put together the perfect strategy of video marketing combined with social marketing to educate and entertain YOUR target market.

Don’t let past marketing efforts that failed to produce new clients lead to a fear of failure, or convince you to abandon advertising completely. It takes money to make money, all successful business owners and managers embrace this fact. New clients are a necessity for any business to grow and remain strong, without them your business will fail. So, the question is not whether you should market your business, the question is how can you best market your business? Yes it takes money to make money, but that money needs to work smart to make an impact. You need to find out how to allocate the money you do have into advertising methods that guarantee higher margins of profitability, and invest your advertising budget in new lead generation techniques that result in a measurable increase in new clients.

How could a profitable advertising campaign help your business grow? Visualize the success you want, and then focus your resources on the positive to make it happen. A positive outlook could provide the spark you need to evaluate and learn from negative advertising experiences, and create a successful marketing plan from past failures. Here’s how:

• Go back and make note of every advertising method you have ever tried in the past
• Now examine and make note of all of the current ways you are spending money to advertise your business
• List each marketing type above in a spreadsheet
• For each method in the list, write down the total amount of money spent on that advertising method to date
• You should also calculate in the cost of time allocated by staff members to the total amount spent for each
• Now add up how much projected revenue you’ve gained from each of those methods to date
• Including recurring revenue from clients who found you via that one method but used your services multiple times

Your list may resemble the following, an example marketing analysis data provided by a Phoenix area IT firm:

How can you take a list like this one, built with data from your own business, and focus on the positive to turn around negative advertising adventures? To start, look at your list as a framework to learn from and build upon. The first step is to identify which advertising methods work and discard all others. It’s important to avoid wasting marketing budget if you want your business to grow. See the following graphic, we went through our sample list and crossed out all forms of marketing that resulted in wasted budget:

The above methods, crossed out in red, cost a total of $142,112 but only resulted in a total of $12,224 in revenues. That’s a total loss of $129,888. The first step towards success in marketing is eliminating those methods that fail to generate more revenue than they expend. If you are losing money, consider another medium. Your most important resource as a business owner is time, so don’t wait forever to take action. Reallocate your budget immediately by eliminating every advertising method you’re spending money on that isn’t working (those items in red above). Once you free up this money, you can either move those funds to advertising methods on your list that are proven to be profitable, or try new marketing avenues that you haven’t yet explored.

Focus on the Positive to Improve Your Advertising

To improve on advertising methods that are not as profitable as they could be, the solution is to focus on the positive. The return for methods on your list that are close to break-even can usually be improved by making a few adjustments. In our example above, the question was how can we improve our video ads to make them more profitable? For your list, evaluate your products and services from the your customer’s point of view. What service or product are you currently providing that existing clients really like? Think about all the positive qualities of your product, service, and offer, and hone in on what your customers are looking for. Next, change up the message in your lower performing advertising methods to better deliver on the needs and wants of your ideal client. It doesn’t matter if you’re creating articles for content marketing or producing videos for social media sites. Pour your enthusiasm and pack value into what you’re doing, the main idea here is to focus on the positive. In our case, for a recent video content marketing campaign, we re-thought the entire campaign to come up with ways we could produce higher quality videos that were more engaging, entertaining, and useful for our target clients.

Whatever you do, keep a positive mindset and don’t be afraid to invest in your business. Remember, it takes money to make money. While you should definitely try new things, you should also keep a watchful eye on your investments and tend to them on a regular basis to maximize results. Doing so will allow you to eliminate obstacles and negative investments, focus in on those things that are working well, and create powerful new marketing messages to attract new customers.

Thank you for your interest in seenBEST. If you are looking for the best website design, affordable advertising solutions that will help you increase sales, or intelligent social media and web application development…

seenBEST will amaze you!

We are locally owned and operated, and dedicated to providing you with high quality service at competitive prices. Unlike most unreliable internet marketing companies out there, we never trap you in lengthy contracts with cookie cutter solutions that don’t work. At seenBEST, a web expert meets with you to learn details about your business, goals, unique challenges and expectations.

Our professional team then uses this knowledge to provide custom, high impact solutions perfectly designed for your specific needs and budget.

Get seen BEST and gain the competitive edge online. To find out why we are the BEST choice when you need to get seen online, submit the form on our homepage for a free copy of our book @ www.seenbest-web-design.com

Then make your next web project as simple as a free consultation with our expert team.

Call now to schedule, (480) 256-9010

Thank you!

Did you know that a combination of social media and video is a great way to get your business seen online? Let seenBEST help you put together the perfect strategy of video marketing combined with social marketing to educate and entertain YOUR target market.

Did you know that a combination of social media and video is a great way to get your business seen online? Let seenBEST help you put together the perfect strategy of video marketing combined with social marketing to educate and entertain YOUR target market.

Pay Per Click Advertising, otherwise known as PPC, is a modern internet advertising method used to drive targeted traffic to a website.

Businesses most commonly utilize PPC advertising to buy listings on Google and Bing. These paid ads then appear in the search engine alongside other non-paid search results. Since ads are sold at auction, your individual bid determines how high your listing appears on the page. The cost you pay per click varies greatly depending on your industry and other factors, such as the quality of your website and advertising copy.

Any time a potential customer clicks on your PPC ad while searching, they are sent to your website and arrive on what’s called a “landing page”. This is a page that is relevant to your visitor’s interests and helps convert those visitors into a lead or sale. Some of the many advantages of pay per click, when done correctly, are:

• You can begin to generate new customers almost immediately
• You have complete control over the days or hours your ads are displayed
• You can use a vast array of media to market your business including videos, images, custom website pages, and online stores
• It is possible to track the effectiveness of your ads in detail
• PPC ads costs a fraction of what you’d pay with other forms of paid advertising
• Since your marketing budget is delivered to a highly targeted group, your return on investment is much higher than with other forms of paid advertising

The goal of PPC campaigns is to attract better qualified visitors to your website who are more likely to buy. Through the use of keyword phrases, PPC campaigns limit the visibility of your ads to only those customers in your target market who are searching for your products or services.

Working with an experienced internet marketing firm to build your next pay per click campaign can maximize your return on investment and stretch your marketing budget further. When using the right combination of complex Google Adwords configurations, keyword strategies, advertising copy, and website design techniques, a PPC advertising campaign can be an extremely powerful and cost effective way to increase profits.

Search Engine Optimization, commonly referred to as SEO, is an internet marketing strategy that will make it easier to find information about your business online. SEO serves as the backbone of every successful internet marketing campaign you run and can help to increase website traffic and sales.

In order to create a powerful SEO campaign, an SEO team will determine the composition of your industry, the makeup of your customer, search statistics, and the advertising media that you plan to target such as Google Search or Facebook.

Next, the SEO team will analyze your domain name and server, advertising copy, website content, code, and structure. Good SEO will improve the appeal of your website on search engines, making it easier to match what you do with the customers who are searching for you.

An effective SEO team consists of a professional website designer, developer, internet marketing expert, and content writer. These professionals create articles, videos, and other interesting content to increase lead generation.

The quality of your SEO has a profound impact on the success of all of your paid search engine marketing campaigns. If your goal is to attract more customers from the internet, having better SEO than your industry competitors and maintaining your SEO campaign on a regular basis is crucial.

Our new page features an animated cover image. If you like it, take a look at our quick tutorial explaining how to create your own:

The reason for this urgent warning is due to the extreme nature of the threat. CryptoLocker encrypts and “locks” all of your personal computer files in a way that makes it impossible to recover them via normal methods. The virus also reaches out over a network to attack other nearby computers, and can easily take down an entire office of computers if left to run free.

You will only regain access to the locked files after paying a $300 ransom per computer to the criminals who wrote the virus.

We encourage you to immediately perform the following steps to help protect your family and business computers:

1. Call a meeting with everyone in your company and speak with all family members in your home. Remind them to never open an email attachment unless they are expecting the attachment in advance.
2. Even if they are expecting an attachment, double check the attachment very carefully before clicking on it. The virus is usually disguised as a file inside of a .zip file sent via email. The virus will come with a normal looking icon such as a Word Doc or a PDF file, but the file extension of the attachment will be an .exe file or something else that you don’t recognize instead.
3. Make sure you have anti-virus software that is up to date and functioning properly.
4. You should also be running the Professional (purchased) version of MalwareBytes.
5. Use Chrome or Firefox (not Internet Explorer) to browse the internet and, if possible, enable script blocking in your browser.
6. Double check that you have a good backup plan for all of your important data. You should have multiple copies of recent backups for all files on all computers. At least one copy of your backups should be stored away in a safe place (not connected to your computer).

As always, the instant you suspect that your computer has been infected by a virus you should immediately turn off your computer and contact a technology professional for assistance. DO NOT turn your computer back on until the threat has been evaluated! If you leave your computer turned on after a virus infection, you are giving the virus more time to damage your data.

If you have any questions at all about this new threat or would like some additional help securing your data, please don’t hesitate to give us a call. We’re here to help.

PS: Please share this warning with anyone you know who may be vulnerable to this virus. The frequency of the attacks appears to be accelerating.

As part of the my PC Techs family, you will have the opportunity to apply innovative business computer repair and IT support solutions to a wide variety of different technology challenges on a daily basis. You will serve as an IT Manager, Sever Administrator, Computer Consultant, and Computer Repair Technician for multiple Phoenix area companies. Each day, you will help support a complex network of diverse business IT environments and will install, maintain, troubleshoot, repair, upgrade, and provide training for a hundreds of types of systems and software installations.

As an on-site technician and IT support representative, you will maintain, repair, and support business information technology systems throughout Phoenix, Scottsdale, Chandler, and surrounding Arizona cities. You will troubleshoot and repair desktop computers, servers, point of sale systems, tablets, smartphones, and laptop systems and work with PC and MAC, as well as Android and iOS devices. Finally, you will interface directly with administrative and executive level staff at local businesses as a technology consultant, while reporting directly to the my PC Techs offices.

If you have a strong desire to expand your knowledge of business technology and enjoy a challenging career, apply for this job and submit your resume on Indeed.com: http://www.indeed.com/job/computer-support-it-consultant-92ec288ca7a654ab

 
How frustrating is it to be at your computer, just trying to get your work done, when all of a sudden you’re attacked by intrusive pop-ups? Sure, you might learn about the next big deal on hair removal products, but these distracting windows can prevent you from getting the job done.

If you are getting annoying little popups while you work there’s a good chance your computer has a virus or malware. This intrusive and often dangerous software should be removed by a computer expert. Like the ones at my PC Techs.

We provide Expert Technology Solutions You Can Trust.

You don’t have to know much about computers, all you need is our number. We can help!

Call my PC Techs at 602.456.0150 and get your work done faster.
 
 
 
 
 

All kinds of bad things happen to a laptop or desktop when a system fan stops spinning. Here, without air circulation the CPU (processor) became so hot that the CPU’s metal fused to the metal on the heat sink. As you can see in the image below, there’s actually a strip of metal from the CPU melted on to the heat sink itself.

Click to See a Larger Version

Unfortunately, this is a costly repair requiring a replacement of the fan, heat sink, and CPU. It’s not as bad as it could be, however. The system board itself didn’t melt. We’ve seen that happen on some systems in a similar situation where the system fan had failed.

This failure could have been prevented with regular maintenance. Dusting out your laptop and desktop fans and cases with compressed air will prevent heat and dust from killing them. Heat and dust are the #1 killers of computer systems and electronics! Just like your car, your computers need regular care too if you want them to last longer. Extend the life of your computers, let my PC Techs help you maintain them with regular visits. Give us a call, (602) 456-0150.

You MUST have 5+ years of hands-on PC troubleshooting, hardware and software. Good people skills are required, Macintosh A+. Pay DOE.

Send detailed resume to jobs@mypctechs.com.

Signal Flare is just one of the many new cool features in the redesign of Lookout’s app. The redesign also includes a new Activity Feed that lists recent activity, such as app scans, data backup and even warnings of suspicious activity. There is also Safe Dialer, a feature that aims to prevent unwanted dialer attacks. This feature scans phone numbers before completing a call. Abheek Gupta, the product manager for the Lookout app, describes this feature as protection against a new kind of mobile malware referred to as dialer-based threats. It prevents malware from running up very high phone bills by automatically dialing premium-rate numbers or code based numbers that performs unauthorized actions.

Launched over 3 years ago, Lookout has been downloaded by over 25 million people and offers both a free and paid version. Both the free and paid for version app perform a scan of all the apps on your phone to detect any database malware and security threats. The paid version offers extras such as additional web browsing, backup features, and privacy-protection.

According to Lookout, 30 percent of lost phones are not recovered due to a dead battery on the device. The ability to see your phone on a map at the last known location before the phone died should improve the odds of recovery. Keep in mind, Signal Flare does not log a device’s location if the phone is simply turned off.  It will record the location of a device only when the low battery alert goes off, so this feature is probably not useful when it comes to trying to track down a phone thief. You can however, as long as the phone is still on, log into Lookout.com and send out a signal manually to locate your phone even if your device is not low on battery.

Do you already have Lookout Mobile Security app installed on your device? Make sure to update ASAP to get all of the great new features!

Device Dangers
Giving the kids free reign of tablets or Android phones opens the door for them to access inappropriate web content, rack up accidental credit card charges and possibly even damage your device. Before letting your child play, it’s important to take precautions to ensure that both they and your Smartphone or Android tablet stay safe.

Always Monitor
The most obvious way to prevent youngsters from doing or seeing something they shouldn’t is to keep an eye on them. You never want to put your child in front of any electronic device without supervision, be it the television, the computer or your Android tablet. Monitoring your son or daughter’s activity lets you catch problems before they happen and gives you opportunities to teach them what is and isn’t acceptable when it comes to technology.

Keep Content Kid-Friendly
There’s a lot of content out there that you don’t want your children seeing. Fortunately there are many apps available to help you filter out anything objectionable. Mobicip is a kid-friendly browser that uses the same standards that schools do to filter out inappropriate web content. Norton Safety Minder lets you keep an eye on web activity as well as block certain sites. Other apps such as PlaySafe, Kids Place and ChildrenTV give you various tools to manage which apps, games and other content your children are allowed to access when they use your Samsung tablet or other device.

Lock Down Purchases
Accidental purchases, both of full apps and of items within apps, can result in credit card charges that you aren’t prepared for. iPhones include a setting that allows you to turn off in-app purchases, but currently the only way to prevent accidental charges on an Android phone is to block access to apps that may include them. The Famigo Sandbox app gives you a way to do this by allowing you to control which apps your youngsters use as well as minimizing access to other device functions such as text messaging.

Get a Protective Case
Whether it’s grippy or squishy, chunky or sleek, padded or gel-like, get a case for your device before handing it off to your child. Protection is more important than style. Little hands often lack coordination and are therefore more apt to drop things, including expensive electronics. Cases can even become part of the fun. Make your device look like a little person, wrap it in a high-density foam grip or nest it inside a squashy pillow. Whatever type of case you choose, you’ll know your Smartphone or Android tablet is safe and sound.

Before you let your little ones use your Android phone, Samsung tablet or other mobile device, make sure that you’ve taken the appropriate steps to make it safe. Cushion it with a case, install kid-friendly apps and keep an eye on your children as they play to ensure that they have a positive, fun experience.

With a little preparation, it is possible to move to the new phone and minimize troubles. My goal is to help eliminate some of the worries you might have about transitioning to a new phone by sharing my recent experience.

The day when my new phone arrived, I took it out of the box and plugged it in to complete the charge on the battery. I figure by the time I’m ready, I’ll have a full charge on my new phone.

In the meantime, I looked at the installed applications on my old now old phone. I mostly used my home screens to first write down the names of the critical apps that were being used on a regular basis. My goal was to back up the settings and data for those apps so I could easily move them to the new phone. My list of critical apps included applications such as Car Expense tracking, Notetaking, Email, and Maps. Then there was a second list for the apps I use occasionally, which I made in order to determine if I could eliminate any apps that I no longer needed. Finally, I made a list of the apps I’ve paid for. I wanted to make sure I was able to get these applications activated on the new phone without any hassles.

It is crucial to know your email address, password and server connection settings if you have company or other email you access aside from Gmail. You’ll also want to make sure you have your Gmail account usernames and passwords before you continue. I went through the settings menu of my old phone and recorded the details for any accounts that I found listed. For any accounts that were shown, I double checked all of my notes to make sure I had to correct passwords. Of critical importance is the primary Google account registered on the phone. If you don’t know what the password is on this account you’ll want to try recovery methods before transitioning to the new phone.

Next, I wanted to get a complete backup of my data. The first thing I did was go through my critical apps and looked in the settings for each one to see if any had a built in export function, some of these apps did provide a way to export data from the app to a file on the SD card. Next, I wanted to backup my contacts. Most phones store contacts not only in Gmail and Hotmail, but also on the phone itself. To make sure I had all my contacts stored, I used the app Backup Assistant Plus to perform a backup of the local contacts on my phone.

I then took a USB cable and attached the cable to my phone and to a computer. With the old phone in data transfer mode, I was able to access the contents of the internal phone memory and the SD card from my computer. Via the USB connection from my PC I selected all of the files and folders from the phone’s memory and copied them to a temporary directory on my computer.

With a complete list of email accounts, passwords for apps, registration codes, and a backup of my contacts and data in hand I phoned Verizon to activate my new phone. Give yourself some time for this part since customer service can be a lengthy process. In my case, it took about half an hour on the phone with them before everything was finalized. The time of day you call will greatly determine your wait time for a representative to assist.

Finally, the new phone had been activated and restarted. At this point I successfully activated my Gmail using the same primary username and password as was used on the old phone. Next, after activation I launched to the desktop of my new phone and opened Google Play from the settings menu. Depending on your phone, you may see the same app named Android Market or Google Play. Here, you can select which Account to sync with. This is usually your primary Google account. You then select” My Apps” and then reveal “ALL”. This list has everything you’ve installed on your phone, including free and paid apps. It should now be possible to re-download and install apps that you previously paid for.

Once I re-installed all my paid apps, the final challenge was determining how to restore my data. I attached the new phone to my computer with a USB cable and placed it into the correct mode to communicate with my PC. Once again I could see drives mapped for my phone’s memory and SD card. This step required a little creativity because I had to determine on a case by case basis which apps I needed to migrate data for and how I could import the data to my phone. Once I identified what I needed to transfer, I copied over to the SD card on the new phone data from the temporary directory I made earlier. For apps that previously allowed me to export data on my old phone, I imported the data from within the app using the file that was created from the export operation.

My next step was to restore my contacts which I did using the features of Backup Assistant Pus. And finally, I double checked that my new phone and all apps on the phone were running the latest versions. While not the easiest process in the world, I was up and running in less than two hours. Not bad for a fast new phone with all of the same programs and features I’d come to enjoy.

So, don’t be fearful of getting that upgrade! If you find yourself needing to replace your next smart device it’s possible to do it yourself. Just be sure to take down as much information as you can and make a good backup copy of everything using several methods. Alternatively, if you would like help from someone experienced or would like someone to do it for you, please feel free to give me a call.

GoDaddy is currently the largest domain registrant in the world, and is four times the size of its nearest competitor. GoDaddy reportedly manages more than 48 million domain names and serves more than 9.3 million customers. The outage affected not only those sites hosted by GoDaddy, but also those registered with the company which includes thousands of websites, big and small. Reports also show the FBI and DOJ, the Recording Industry of America, Motion Picture Association of America, Universal Music and BMI.com websites were also attacked by this movement. The hacking group is trying to claim retribution for anti-piracy efforts by both the government and the entertainment industry.

Who is Anonymous you might ask…..
Anonymous is a loosely associated hacktivist group. It originated in 2003 on the website 4chan.com, an image sharing website where a large number of online community users simultaneously exist as a “digitized global brain”. It is also generally considered a term used for members of certain Internet subcultures, where their actual identities are not known. In its early phase, the concept had been adopted by a spread out online community acting anonymously in a coordinated manner against a loosely self-agreed goal, and was primarily focused on entertainment. In 2008, they began increasingly associating with collaborative, international hacktivism. Although it’s not necessarily tied to a single online entity, many websites are strongly associated with Anonymous. This includes popular imageboards such as 4chan, their associated wikis, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and a number of other forums.

Anonymous has claimed involvement in a number of cyber-attacks in the past including attacks against the Pentagon, News Corp, Monsanto, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, GM, and other Government websites. They have even threatened to destroy Facebook. Their coordinated community is not only involved in cyber-attacks, it has also partly organized activist movements such as Occupy Wallstreet, and have been responsible for tracking down wanted criminals that lead police to an arrest.

A recent statement by Anonymous read: “We will continue to attack those who embrace censorship. You will not be able to hide your ludicrous ways to control us”. So now the question is: Who will be the next target of Anonymous, and how long before we see another attack?

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