Collaboration software has been getting a darned good airing over the past few years and, to listen to the enthusiasts, it’s this massive new wave that’s crashing over businesses and transforming them in hitherto unforseen ways.

And, in a few cases, it’s true. I’ve recently written elsewhere about GE (General Electric Company) and Wachovia Bank (just being largely taken over by Citigroup as a result of the recent turmoil). Links here and here. Both companies have put a lot of effort into building collaboration software systems. The sort of effort that smaller businesses could only dream of. If we wanted to collaborate, we’d have to use readily-available software or online services.

Recently Freeform Dynamics (disclosure: which buys most of my time) and Macehiter Ward-Dutton did some telephone research to investigate the take-up of collaborative software inside large European organisations. (From 1000 employees upwards.) I realise this is a bit off your patch, but I think you might find some of the results of two particular questions quite interesting.

The first one related to the popularity of officially sanctioned social software. The second related to the take up of the same software unofficially.

You can see that the relative popularity of the various tools is identical, with one exception. The new social media stuff shoots from third to first place in the ‘unofficial use’ chart. And the difference in the ‘broad adoption’ versus ‘partial adoption’ is particularly marked. It does suggest that many staff yearn for this sort of thing and, if the company doesn’t provide it, then they will sign up for it themselves.

This presents multiple dangers. At one level, you can end up with a rag bag of incompatible software and services. At the recent Office 2.0 conference, ‘tool fragmentation’ came up frequently as a theme. At another level, you have no idea what’s going on in your own organisation. If challenged by a regulator, say, would you be able to provide a comprehensive account of your dealings with a particular client? Probably not. It would either be lost in the ether or require a huge amount of expensive digging.

One of the things that GE and Wachovia realised is that real corporate value emerges from collaboration as long as it is business-focused. This is why they unashamedly put it behind the firewall, even though outsiders (business partners and the like) can be invited to participate. In their systems everyone is accountable, nothing is anonymous and everything is stored in perpetuity. If it sounds a bit strong-arm, it’s not really. Users are given the freedom to communicate, coalesce into communities and share information. For the so-called knowledge workers, it acts as a lubricant to their activities.

Whether social software will be right for you depends on the nature of your business. If you have people scattered but having to sustain contact and share information regularly, then it is highly likely you’d benefit. If you have people working as individuals or in non-information roles, then the benefits will be low to non-existent.

Best to keep your ear to the ground and if you find people using Facebook, wikis, blogs and the like in the course of their working day, get them to explain how they see these things benefit the business. If it makes sense, check out the many business-focused and professional offerings and switch social collaboration from skunk works to official policy.

And as well as spending that time contemplating my navel, I’ve also been giving the whole practice of marketing some serious thought. . . .

And my conclusions are:

- At best marketing (and brand) plays a significant role in underpinning (and in some cases sense checking) business success. (’Cos if it’s not about the customer guys. . .then what is it about??)

- At worst marketing is rightly labeled the authority on hyperbole. A function designed to over promise and then wag a smug finger when the business (whatever it may be) under delivers.

The latter is the kind of flimsy, fluffy and downright dishonest kind of practice that gets marketeers a bad name.

OK. Rant over. What does this mean in practice if you are a small business, contemplating your own navel and suspecting (or firmly believing) that marketing has to be part of your arsenal to grow your business?

First of all it means that marketing is probably going to be part of a five spoke strategy to small business success (the other four spokes being 1) the entrepreneurial idea and leadership, 2) the operational infrastructure to make it happen, 3) smart financial mangement to make sure it pays, 4) technology in some shape or form to underpin delivery). 

So marketing (and the ability to sell) as number 5 are integral to the start-up equation. But the key to successful marketing is to actively take your message out to the market.  Marketing as an internalised function of business is a nonsense.  And in many cases, for small businesses, that means marketing involves hitting the road or picking up the phone and having a well thought out and engaging story to tell.

Second it means that whatever your marketing strategy is or does, it has to be based on truth.  It can paint a picture of a perfect truth that your business has yet to aspire to.  But it should not take a step too far. 

Because if your product or service repeatedly falls short of your own marketing benchmark, your business is living on borrowed time.  And these days with lending at an all time low, your borrowed time is bound to be very, very short.

And that’s been just one day in a shocking few weeks when banks have been collapsing or being swallowed up by new super-banks, while governments around the world are bailing out the financial sector … or not. It could hardly be called a good month for money!

With everyone clamping down at the moment and trying to keep on top of their cashflow, big businesses are not playing fair. Small businesses are being held to ransom as those higher up the food chain delay payments by as much as two months to maintain their own cash-flow.

With Boots leading the way earlier this year announcing it would now pay on 75 days and not the previous 30 days, it’s the small business that’s feeling it most.

So what can be done about it then?

Have you thought about tightening up your credit control? Do you have terms that you send out stating payment dates? Do you have procedures in place to make sure you keep on top of your debts?

Most people don’t enjoy chasing debts, but if you don’t, then it’s you and your business that suffers, so get a procedure in place.

Issue the invoice then make contact several days later to see if your customer has firstly received it, and secondly make sure it’s correct and they are aware of payment terms.

Then don’t fail to chase it two days after it’s due, if it’s not already been paid. You might find this approach uncomfortable, but if cash flow dries up it’s death for your business.

There is no need to be rude or aggressive. Polite and friendly will often get you further. Should a customer be having problems paying, work out a repayment schedule with them. Remember, something is better than nothing in this instance!

OK, so you have your credit control working for you, but still face the possibility of cashflow shortages. Well perhaps this is the time to go and talk to your friendly business banking manager.

Just think, if you are still solvent and moving forwards, you are more likely, even with the current climate, to get a positive response, even if it’s just arranging a small overdraft facility or loan. Don’t forget that even with controls tightening, banks still have products to sell and profits to make.

You don’t like surprises and neither do the banks (oh, how they must be suffering right now!), so a decent business bank manager is much more likely to be open to your requests before you find yourself in desperate financial straits.

Most of the spying was conducted last year, so this year’s results are likely to be different but the underlying conclusions from the results are unlikely to change much.

As I was reading the report, I imagined technical information security measures as a low circular wall. Inside are all the users and the data. All they have to do to defeat the security is to grab the information and either throw it over the wall, or hop over with it themselves.

The report talks about the vectors along which your sensitive data will find its way to the outside world. And, by heck, there’s a lot of them. Last year it was printers, PDAs, MP3 players, USB flash drives, instant messaging (IM), Skype, Facebook, Bluetooth, Wireless and Infrared. Next year it will be different as the company closes old vectors and new ones appear. It’s best to imagine information security as a balloon - you can squeeze one part, but another part will instantly expand.

It’s not necessarily that the users are malicious. They are frequently driven by the need to get work done quickly or conveniently. They might want to get something important on to their laptops to work on at the weekend and, if conventional routes are blocked, they’ll find another one.

Apart from the ‘traditional’ leakage methods of file copying, removable media and corporate email, the three communications applications most likely to carry sensitive information were web mail, instant messaging and social networking websites.

These days, it will often be an online (Web 2.0) service which promises secure data transfer. But what happens at the other end? Does it sit on the remote server unencrypted? Once you’ve downloaded it at home and deleted the online version, does it really disappear or is it part of some humungous database in the sky?

By now, it’s becoming clear that the main issue is a human one. In fact, the report states that, “trusted authorised users are most likely to be the source of information leaks.” You can, and should, throw technologies at securing your information but, in the end, it’s mainly the insiders who are the causes of leaks.

The Orthus report highlights the customer service and IT departments as the most likely sources of leaks. And, furthermore, laptop and notebook computers, were twice as likely to be associated with a leakage event than a desktop computer. The company speculates that this may be something to do with the fact that users treat notebooks more as personal devices. (If true, this does not bode well for the explosion of PDA devices such as the BlackBerry and iPhone that is currently taking place.)

Finally, you might be interested to know that, when it comes to time of day for breaches, 81 percent is during the extended working day of 7am to 7pm but the incidents between 7pm and 6am were all classified as ‘High Severity’.

Never mind all the headline-grabbing stuff about cyber criminals, how certain are you that your own users are handling your information safely? Orthus will happily check you out. But, with the above warnings, I suspect it’s done more than enough to alert you to the issues.

What’s more I reckon both events will appeal to the startups and small business owners amongst you.

The first is Small Business 2.0, a one day conference for anyone who wants to get more from the web for their business, whether you’re a home worker, ebay trader or owner/manager of a small business.  It takes place in London on Saturday 11 October and if you’re quick I’ve got 10 tickets to give away.  Email me and it’ll cost you nowt.

The other conference is a must attend event, if you’re planning or running a web-based startup or want a deeper insight into current and future trends on the web from a social, business or technology perspective. It’s the original conference and expo for all things 2.0 and it’s taking place in Berlin, which is a great city I last visited in 1991.

The Web 2.0 Expo takes place on 21-23 October and promises to be one of the web events of the year in Europe.  I’m hoping to be there and it would be great to meet up with any of you guys who can make it.

I’ll post about some of the sessions I reckon will be a must visit for you business savvy web entrepreneurs a little later.

In the meantime SmallBizPod readers or listeners can get 35% off when you register for the conference using the code webeu08gr10. (You will need to sign up for a user on the website. During the registration you can enter the code and see the discount applied).

What is it? Another web conferencing service. Or you can buy it for in-house installation. We were using the hosted service. It uses the idea of meeting rooms to which different groups of people belong and in which various resources are shared.

You can share your whole computer screen or, if you have two, choose which to share. Or you can share a window or an application. Control can be passed back and forth between participants, depending on their authority level. They can be Hosts, Presenters or Participants. A chat window allows you to type little messages to each other IM-style. You can also hold your hand up to attract the host’s attention.

You can also share a variety of documents - PowerPoint, JPEG, Flash and Flash Video, MP3 and Zip. Mostly people use PowerPoint. Connect crushes large files to a fraction of their original size when saving them to the room. This makes for rapid playback, especially useful for complex graphics or video.

Whiteboarding is possible - this is a markup system using highlighters and drawing tools. If you want to make a permanent copy of the markup, you have to print it to an Acrobat (pdf) file or to paper. Shame you can’t just save it. Oh well.

Colour depth can be varied. Some people are happy with 256 colours, others want millions. For radiological scans, for example, the highest possible resolution would be required. It would, of course take longer to transmit.

When you return to a room, it’s exactly as you left it, a bit like a real room. Unless, of course, someone with the necessary authority has been in and changed it. But you’d never get the equivalent of a cleaner walking in and throwing precious files in the bin.

Adobe has 3000 customers using the service and they’re racking up something like 47 million minutes a month at the moment. Although it can use the computer for voice communications (VoIP), our session was run over the telephone, using local call numbers. This was apparently to keep the call quality up. VoIP tends to be used when the sessions are less interactive, more one way, as in a broadcast webinar. (You may remember that Citrix Online had some pretty decent VoIP in its GoToMeeting service, so it’s not impossible.)

You might want to take a look at this page to see the options available. I tried to get some sense out of Adobe on pricing. It was late in the afternoon for the local office and, despite having various people running around, I was unable to come up with any numbers.

Let’s hope they add something in the comments below before too long.

Mad or masterly, that’s exactly what PropertyIndex.com, founded by internet dating tycoon, Darren Richards, has done this week by creating a UK version of a year old site that originally targetted the overseas property market exclusively.

The new site faces some stiff and well established competition in the form of rightmove.co.uk, findaproperty.com, propertyfinder.com and primelocation.com, the big four in a crowded category.

Nevertheless, PropertyIndex.com believes its results based payment model provides an alternative approach that will appeal to estate agents as the market slows to a crawl and they look to cut costs associated with monthly subscription sites.  Agents listing with PropertyIndex.com pay £10 per qualified lead.

Lee Bramzell, managing director, says that it was always in the business plan to launch in the UK:

So we’ve proved our pay per results model for overseas property, cut our teeth, learned about the market and are now bringing those learnings back to the UK.

In one year the site has over 150,000 international properties listed.  As of beta launch this week the new site appears to include around 5,000 properties for sale or rent in the UK, although Lee claims nearly 2,000 UK estate agents have already signed up.

Funding for this particular startup hasn’t been a problem. Founder Darren Richards sold DatingDirect.com, one of the UK’s most popular dating sites, last year for £27.7 million.  Many of the 45 strong team including Lee Bramzell were involved in some way with that venture.

Being self-funded with a team that has a wealth of online business and marketing experience puts PropertyIndex.com in an enviable position.  Perhaps its weakness in the current market is also what it sees as its USP - the results based model.

This approach puts the onus on volume of qualified leads in order to generate any income, when other sites will have the advantage of up front cash.  This at a time when buyers are finding it hard to find banks to lend them money to buy.

The most recent Comscore figures for UK property portals show year-on-year traffic down by nearly 20% in August.  As Lee admits:

We can’t magic more transactions into the market, but can try to help agents generate leads in a more sustainable way.

He also hints that he hopes to leverage the collaborative nature of the web and create a whole raft of affiliate partners.

In essence PropertyIndex.com may create a kind of property version of adwords that lets even the smallest personal websites make money from generating leads for local estate agents.

But scaling up the UK properties on the site will be a first priority over the coming months.  Right now a casual search shows plenty of areas with few if any properties listed.

Search also seems less intuitive and simple to use than what’s available on the other relative newcomer and rising star of the online property market nestoria.co.uk.

Nestoria appears to have a similar business model, but automates its aggregation avoiding having to do deals with individual estate agents.

Still, with a strong team, a war chest and no VCs looking for an early exit, you wouldn’t want to bet against Lee and his team riding out a property slump in good shape and stealing market share from the big beasts like Rightmove along the way.

Businesses will fail today due to the economy, due to disaster, due to health issues, due to mistakes, and due to a myriad of other reasons. The question is, what will those business owners do? In the USA, the odds are high that the entrepreneur in question will be back to start another business in the future. It has to do with our attitude towards failure.

I’m a big fan of failure. Why would anyone be a fan of failure? Because failure is a necessary part of learning, of activity, of business. If you are not experiencing any failures, you probably aren’t moving.

Barry Moltz wrote a whole book on failure, called Bounce! He points out that the American attitude towards business failure is perhaps the most tolerant in the world. That’s not much solace in the face of a big failure, as even Moltz admits.

But if you can’t accept the possibility of failing, you’ll never move forward.

Small business owner Rex Hammock said this back in 2000:

Even smart businesses managed by smart individuals and smart investors die. Businesses start and die every day. They always have. They always will. I am old enough - and have been fortunate enough - to have succeeded significantly and failed miserably and frankly, the failures have done more for me than the successes.

Well, the words certainly appear quicker. About 50% quicker. It’s also more accurate. A great thing if you can’t spell is that it spells words correctly. It also needs barely any training.

The new version allows you to format text as well as deleting and copying it.

You can use Dragon with just about any program but it does work rather well with Word and Firefox for example. In Firefox you can jump to a hyperlink by just saying part of its name. You can also control Windows itself and other programs with voice commands.

I have to say that, so far, this has been slower than typing but then I am a touch typist. I have also had to make corrections, albeit verbally. For example, ‘but then’ came out as ‘Batman’. It also offered irritating spaces after apostrophes. (I found out later that single quote commands are better.)

Okay, I give up. I resorted to using the keyboard to remove those pesky spaces. Actually I’m still speaking but I’m about to revert to typing.

It’s a strange thing but, even though I said I was going to type, I carried on talking. DNS really is pretty good until you want to do something weird.

For straightforward text entry, it makes few mistakes. And, when it does, you just say the bit it got wrong - my most recent one was ‘typing’, it kept putting it in as ‘type in’. But all I had to say was “select type in” and it threw up a few alternatives. Number one was ‘typing, so I just said “choose one” and the correction was made.

Of course, I had to be near enough to the screen to see when things were going wrong. But, equally, I could have been in a comfortable chair on the other side of the room, assuming I had a wireless headset. I could have tackled any mistakes later.

Some people don’t like typing, some have disabilities which prevent them using their fingers. Either way, Dragon Naturally Speaking, gives them a way of achieving something that was previously difficult or impossible. I spoke to a couple of people recently, one of whom works with Thalidomide victims, the other with people who have spinal injuries. Both reported how previously frustrated individuals had found DNS a great way of participating more fully in life.

This isn’t the prime use of this technology, but it is interesting to see that it can be liberating for people of all abilities. Except, maybe, touch typists.

Retail prices start at £89.99.

But TechCrunch frenemy Demo was also taking place, while in Europe Seedcamp announced its list of 25 startups for Seedcamp Week designed to provide specialist one-to-one mentoring, panel sessions and networking for early stage entrepreneurs.

Next week another talented band of UK tech startups will be heading off to New York on the first UK Trade & Investment-backed Digital Mission.  We’ll be releasing a podcast on Monday which will include interviews with many of the businesses taking part.

For me, this flurry of tech startup activity has also coincided with some interesting conversations about how the economy is affecting early stage investment, not just in web/tech startups, but more broadly for businesses that have traditionally fallen into the funding equity gap.

A senior figure in one of the UK’s largest networks dedicated to matching investors with growing SMEs said to me earlier in the week that they’d seen an increase in new investors looking for opportunities and more high quality businesses coming on board to seek funding.

As bank borrowing becomes tougher and more expensive, quality small businesses are increasingly looking to release equity to fund growth. An interesting shift which means the downturn is providing a devilishly good opportunity for angel investors to get into the market.

I also talked to a deal making lawyer and Bill Morrow of Angels’ Den who confirmed that foreign investors are being attracted to the UK right now as sterling weakens. Returns on some types of commercial property and UK-based fast growth startups are being viewed as an attractive investment risk.

Seems to me that silver linings are here to stay, even if it feels like we’ve not seen the sun for months.

Last week at Office 2.0, I met some folk from Yuuguu. It’s an early-stage UK-based company which has come out with a free service which enables you to see when someone’s around, to text-chat with them and to share your computer screen with them. Or you can give them control over your keyboard, mouse and screen. I tell you, watching someone else plunder your files and folders at will can be somewhat unnerving.

A piece of software has to be installed on any computer that is going to participate in the service. The free version allows up to 30 concurrent users. (It says here.) I guess that’s so you can do a presentation. That many people would make for a weird conversation.

The service can incorporate Skype telephony for a per-minute charge. Or you can make your own separate call. It makes real-time collaboration easy and it currently runs on Macs, PCs and three versions of Linux. I tried it between two PCs. And it worked quite well. I have seen other, better, systems but they weren’t free.

The Yuuguu name worries me a little because it doesn’t sound very businesslike, even though it does mean ‘fusion’ in Japanese. But at least it is businesslike in execution. It has recognised that audit trails are important and it stores all activity, including the content of the instant messaging sessions. It does not, however store the content of the screens being shared nor, I’m pretty sure, would it store telephone conversations. Which is pretty much how you’d want it.

Yuuguu plans to introduce advertising into its free edition and will be offering professional and enterprise editions with advanced features and no advertising.

The desktop element takes just a few minutes to install and get running. And it’s a cheap (ie free, apart from your time) way to collaborate or present through screen sharing and IM.

I’d say it has to be worth a try. You have little to lose and much to gain from this kind of service.

Thanks to an often overlooked and currently disabled real time search tool called ‘track‘, Twitter has almost accidentally found itself sitting on a veritable internet oil field.

So what’s it doing with its untapped riches? Well it’s locking down supplies, buying up surrounding land and biding its time with a long, but fragile straw.

Now before you ask, let me explain two things:

- firstly, Twitter’s situation is important for all businesses large or small because it is shaping a ‘real time’ web that is changing the way we do business and communicate;

- secondly, yes, I admit that much of what I’m about to say is inspired, stolen or bowdlerised from the terrific conversations in and around Steve Gillmor’s Gillmor Gang and Newsgang podcasts.

So why is track so powerful?  Well, mostly because it allows you to search events as they happen on Twitter in real time, not after the event. As Steve said on Techcrunch IT recently:

Search produces analysis after the fact, while track produces interactions that change the events themselves.

Anyone familiar with the way news feeds like Reuters are used in business and the way trading in stocks, shares and commodities is conducted will instantly understand the commercial implications of this.

‘Now’ is competitive edge. Two minutes later is money down the pan.

The screen above could easily be tracking twitter conversations about a product launch in real time.  It might be measuring intensity based on frequency, but also negative/positive reactions based on keywords.  A click on any of the plots on the graph and you could be taking part in a conversation as it happens.

The potential for more natural conversations with and between small groupings or large swarms of customers across the web is clear.  Focus groups become the stream of conversation - forming and reforming.

And track provides a real time discovery of these conversations on Twitter - a kind of Google as it happens.

You could be tracking your company, your competitors, your product launch, or the progress of flooding as a river bursts its banks a few miles from your shop.

It’s the immediacy of track and XMPP (an instant messaging/streaming technology) which gives Twitter its mojo and why the real time web will mark another massive social, and of course business, shift on the internet.

Much of Web 2.0 has adopted the Cluetrain conversation meme, but truth be told the conversation has been like a stuttering, delayed early satellite link-up. Twitter (with track and XMPP) and its successors bring a more human flow. No more hanging on the telephone waiting for a reply, as Debbie Harry and Aron Michalski might put it.

But there’s a problem. Twitter has closed down, both track and XMPP.  Some would say these were the elements that made the service so unreliable in the first place - something its more open competitor Identi.ca may also be discovering as it reaches greater scale.

Just as likely is that Twitter is protecting its business assets from competitors it thought might end up drinking its milkshake through the straws of its own APIs.

This may be a smart business decision in the short term, so long as Twitter is building a robust XMPP/track infrastructure, quietly behind the scenes.

If it’s not, then the poster child of micro-blogging could rapidly become a prospector showing the way, but never reaping the rewards of its discoveries.

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I thought I’d use my introduction here on SmallBizPod to get the inevitable credit crunch post out of the way first.  How’s it affected you and what steps have you taken to counter the financial implications for your business? 

I’d love to hear what you’ve done on this front, but in the meantime here are a couple of suggestions from me.

What often happens when the economy takes a dip is you find you’re trading well with business still coming through the door, but your customers start  dragging their feet as they don’t have cash readily available to pay you. 

And then suppliers need paying on time to keep your accounts with them running, so the knock-on effect begins to get uncomfortable for your own cash flow.  It’s a vicious circle that, if not dealt with, will drag you down.

There are plenty of ways of easing cashflow, but I thought I’d take a look at the pros and cons of a couple of financial products for small businesses out there that might prove helpful.

Factoring

First of all, factoring.  What is it and how does it work?

A factoring company will take one of your greatest assets, your outstanding invoices and pay you a percentage of them up front as soon as they’re issued.  That’s the basic principle, but what are the costs?

There are typically two costs involved: a service charge expressed as a percentage of sales factored, and an interest charge for the cash advances. The service charge, covering sales ledger management, collections services, and if you wish, bad debt protection, can range from 0.60% to 3.0% of turnover.

So the downside?  Well certain types of business will only qualify for what is quite a low % of release of funds against invoice.  Some are typically as low as 60%, and should the invoice be queried, very often the factor will ask for a return of funds until the matter is sorted out. 

Another downside is that very often you will be signing up for a 12 month contract which could make the service expensive if you end up having problems with disputed invoices.

Wage Bill Advance

An alternative option is releasing the value of another major outlay, your wage bill.  There are various options on the market, but one in particular that I know well is called Wageroller. 

Basically, your wage bill is paid by Wageroller for two months or 9 weeks, thus allowing you to use this money for other things.  Then in the third month you pay for month one and so on, and your staff know nothing about it. They all get paid as normal.

Costs involved? Well you pay a one off set up fee for this that is typically in the £1k+ mark, then you pay various fees that would usually equate to approximately 0.75% of the amount outstanding that month as a monthly service charge.

With this particular service, you sign up for a mere 13 weeks and can dip in and out of it as and when you want.  You only pay the set up fee once, and need nothing more than management accounts to apply for it.  No business plan required, no credit checks, and very quick to arrange too.

The downside? You need to be a limited company that has filed accounts at Companies House and has a wage bill of £25K each month.  So that rules out the one man bands unfortunately.

Either product will certainly improve cash flow but talk to an advisor or your accountant to look at them in depth and make sure they fit your business.  You always want to make these types of financial services work for you, rather than you working for them.

It’s quite unbelievable that the information was not encrypted before placing it on the stick. Or that the stick didn’t have some built-in encryption itself.

“It can’t be rocket science,” thought I. And, in about two minutes, I’d Googled an answer. It’s possible to encrypt these drives easily and at zero cost, apart from some time, using an open source program from TrueCrypt.

So, for anyone uneasy about securing the information that leaves their organisation on memory sticks, here’s how to protect yours. If it looks too techie, give this blog and your sticks to a techie and he or she will sort you out. A special folder will be created on the stick which, when plugged into a computer, acts exactly like a disk drive. Except, of course, everything in it is encrypted.

Preparing an encrypted drive on your memory stick

1 ) Visit TrueCrypt http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads.php and download the version for your computer type. The instructions that follow are biased towards a Windows PC. (Vista in my case.)

2 ) Run the downloaded program, accept the licence terms and select the ‘Extract’ option. This puts all the TRUECRYPT files into a folder.

3 ) Empty the memory stick of its contents - I copied mine to a folder on my computer and then deleted them.

4 ) Copy across TrueCrypt.exe, truecrypt.sys and TrueCrypt Format.exe from the TrueCrypt folder to your memory stick. They may come in handy when you go to another computer.

5 ) Run TrueCrypt.exe from your computer or from your stick and click on Create volume then, in the dialogue that appears, choose the ‘Create a file container’ option. Click Next.

6 ) In the Volume Type dialogue that appears, choose ‘Standard TrueCrypt volume. Click Next.

7 ) Type the drive letter of your thumb drive followed by :\ then the name you want to give the folder. I chose f:\myfolder. ‘Never save history’ is already checked, so I left it alone. Click Next.

8 ) You’ll be asked to choose your encryption options. Unless you have mugged up on the subject, you may as well accept the defaults. Click Next.

9 ) You’re shown how much space you have and are invited to provide a container size. I was using a 500MB card, so I settled for 400MB, in case I needed to keep some non-encrypted files on the thumb-drive as well. (Such as the TrueCrypt files that I copied just now.) Click Next.

10) Now it’s time to provide the password. Helpful suggestions are provided on screen. Hope you don’t mind if I keep mine a secret! I left ‘Use keyfiles’ and ‘Display password’ unchecked. Click Next.

11) Waggle your mouse over the next box for thirty seconds or so in order to generate an encryption key. Accept the defaults (unless you know what you’re doing) and click Format. Wait until a dialogue box appears to announce that it has finished - it will be a little while after the on screen counters stop counting.

12) A ‘Volume Created’ dialogue box appears. Click OK then click Exit in the Volume created dialogue.

That’s it. 12 steps that need to be taken only once to protect (part of) a thumb drive. Is this too much to ask of government employees and contractors?

Mounting the encrypted drive

Whenever you want to use the encrypted part of the drive, you need to run TrueCrypt. If it’s not on the target machine, run it from your memory stick.

The first thing you need to do is to assign the encrypted folder to a spare drive letter. TrueCrypt provides a list of spares - take your pick. Z is good, and unlikely to be claimed by the system for anything else.

Use ‘Select file…’ to locate your encrypted folder on the memory stick. Click Open.

Now Click Mount.

You will be asked for your password. Provide it and Click OK.

You will see that details appear against the appropriate drive letter. You can open it immediately by double clicking on it.

You will not be asked for your password again until you need to remount the drive.

Using the encrypted drive

Now just use it as a normal drive - you can open files and drag and drop them just as you would on any other drive.

When you’re done, choose the dismount option from TrueCrypt. You should then perform the ‘Eject’ operation if available (right-click the device in the ‘Computer’ or ‘My Computer’ list), or use the ‘Safely Remove Hardware’ function (built into Windows, accessible via the taskbar notification area). Otherwise you could lose some data.

If you have a power cut or the memory stick is removed any other way, the content of the encrypted folder always remains encrypted

A user guide is provided as part of the download. It will give you all sorts of additional clever tricks and advice. But what I’ve outlined here is safe. It works.

Perhaps someone should tip off PA Consulting and the Home Office about this blog …

But this week’s episode of Dragon’s Den is worth some follow-up, partly because one of the companies featured has given us an insight into the impact of appearing on the show.

For a while now people have been saying that lots of entrepreneurs only choose to appear on the show to get some publicity and are not seriously looking for investment.  While I’m not suggesting the guys from iFoods.tv did that, they have given us a chance to see the ‘Den effect’ in action.

iFoods.tv is a social media site for sharing cookery videos.  The two entrepreneurs who appeared on the show, Niall Harbison and Sean Fee fell at the final hurdle when it was revealed their site’s domain name was only an ’s’ away from iFood.tv, an apparently more popular US rival.

Fair enough. And in a fascinating post for all those out there interested in evaluating the relative popularity of web sites, Robert Gowans suggests that the Dragons probably made the right decision to keep their money to themselves.

Nevertheless, what impact did a prime time appearance on national TV do for iFoods.tv and for that matter its rival?  Well, take a look at the following chart from Alexa which shows a massive spike in traffic for both sites this week.  A spike which benefited its competitor also allowed iFoods to close the gap.

And Niall from iFoods confirms this with data for a 24 hour period which shows the following from what I assume is Google analytics:

55,563        Unique Visitors

186,819      Page Views

3.37           Page views per visit

40.97          Bounce rate

88.26          Percentage of new visits

Of course a spike is exactly what this will be, but most startups would be happy with this kind of uplift in traffic, as long as they can retain a proportion of visitors.  The 40.97% bounce rate suggests that ought to be the case for iFoods.

So, is a spot of torture in the Den worth it for the notoriety and traffic a startup might come away with? I’ll let you decide.

Anyone making such a claim is just begging, like Aunt Sally, to be knocked down. And, as an ex-journalist, that is a strong instinct. On the other hand, for a company, any company, to come right out and say that it’s committed to an environmentally beneficial agenda has to be a good thing.

So let’s start by taking our hats off to Michael Dell for saying “we’re driving green into every aspect of our global business.” At least employees, partners and customers know the commitment comes from the top. But, to be honest, IBM and HP could have said exactly the same thing. Maybe they did. Both companies regularly report on their environmental achievements.

I don’t recall anyone actually claiming carbon neutrality though, so let’s look at the Dell claim. It says that its HQ is powered by 100 percent green energy. This is part of the 116 million green kWh that it buys in the US each year, which represents about one third of its domestic energy use. So it is putting money into the preservation of tropical forestland in Madagascar to make up the imbalance. Its neutrality is being bought with these offsets, so the ‘five months early’ achievement looks more like newsworthy financial scheduling than anything else.

Dell is also making additional investments in wind power in the USA, China and India, by the way.

From a customer perspective, the announcements show that Dell’s heart appears to be in the right place. What’s really important to customers, though, is “what’s in it for me?”

Well, if you care about the environment, you’ll be pleased to hear that Dell (along with Acer, HP, IBM and Vodafone) is a member of the Carbon Disclosure Project which demands that the vendors’ primary suppliers report their CO2 emissions each quarter.

If you care about saving money, then Dell can provide power-optimised desktop and server systems. It’s not always easy to know what to do when you have existing equipment, because it takes a long while to recover the cost of the replacement in terms of energy savings. And, of course, the new device comes with an embedded carbon cost, as does the device you’re getting rid of. Find a good home for the latter and you can feel better about the former. And, if you can’t find a good home, Dell will help. See its Pure Earth website for more information.

Other makers offer environmentally friendly computers. Other companies have slashed their environmental impact and bought offsets too. But none, to my knowledge, has dared to claim neutrality. It was a smart, albeit brave, move by Dell. But it seems to me that the company was restricting its claim to power neutrality in its U.S. operations and this is only one part of the whole environmental story.

What I wasn’t expecting Rachel to say, she did:

I think you’ll find the answer in Napoleon Hill actually … he looked at all the great entrepreneurs of the time and the one thing he found is that they all had a huge sex drive.

This might be a slight over-simplification of Hill’s classic Think and Grow Rich, but his chapter on The Mystery of Sex: Transmutation certainly goes into some depth about how the energy of the libido is often channeled by successful people to focus on achieving specific goals, creative, political, entrepreneurial or otherwise.

So the week after publication of a book by writer Paul Carr, which I haven’t read, but is rumoured to expose the sex, lives and egos of some well known web entrepreneurs, perhaps it’s a good time to explore briefly the fact and fantasy behind the entrepreneurial libido.

Rachel Elnaugh

The whole concept of channeling sexual energy or ‘transmutation’ has lived on since Napoleon Hill published his book back in 1937.  Post-Freudian blogging guru of personal development, Steve Pavlina, has written extensively on the subject.

One of his key evolutions of the Napoleon Hill theory is that unless a goal, whether entrepreneurial or otherwise, is actually arousing, it’s unlikely to be a great goal in the first place.  By tapping into the ‘chemistry’ of this very phsyical energy, an entrepreneur can achieve much more.  As Steve says your goals should:

resonate with your own biological attraction factors, such that you actually enter a state of biochemical arousal just by thinking about them.  In this state action becomes effortless and enjoyable.

The cynical, repressed Englishman in me balks at the idea of entrepreneurs leaving damp patches on their balance sheets, but passion has always been a much vaunted trait for the founders of successful startups.  It’s not hard to see a sublimated sexual drive at work.

This is beautifully expounded by VC Naval Ravikant in response to a classic post by Netscape and Ning founder Marc Andriessen on that old chestnut of age and entrepreneurship.

Naval takes the view that not only do young entrepreneurs have less to lose, more time and more enthusiasm, they are much more likely to take risks or to take a swing of a bat (to use the Andriessen baseball analogy) because it’s a great way of showing off to attract a mate.

The argument goes that (with some notable exceptions) once you’re hitched, settled and middle-aged you might as well forget any idea of creating a successful business from scratch.

Napoleon Hill disagreed.  The business people he studied in the early 20th century were by and large not successful until their 40s.  Hill suggests it took them this long to learn how to channel their sexual energy and they’d simply spent too much time sowing their oats earlier in life.

Whether the Dragons started behaving more like rabbits than fire-breathing mythical creatures before or after their business successes isn’t clear.  Is the number of their progeny indicative of their entrepreneurial prowess?  Probably not.

But risk taking, power and wealth are the same aphrodisiacs they’ve always been and having a large family is a hell of a lot easier after you’ve made your first million.

In western Oklahoma, we’ve built up from one tentative test project to an all out boom in development. A recent public meeting in Enid, Oklahoma, drew more people than they had room for. Hundreds of landowners turned out to listen.

Drive up the Interstate highways of Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Iowa or many other Heartland states, and you’ll see the huge turbine blades being trucked to construction sites all over. Small manufacturers all across the mid-west are benefiting from this new industry. The cost to produce and install the turbines is approximately $2 million per megawatt of production capacity. And turbines are on back order.

What’s driving this activity? First, the high price of oil has also brought up natural gas prices, and natural gas is one of the top fuels used to generate electricity. That makes it easier for wind power to compete on price. Second, a production tax credit offered by the federal government has made it more attractive. That tax credit is scheduled to expire at the end of the year. Has it served its purpose? Yes.

Photo by Becky McCray - used with permission

Should it be renewed? That’s up for discussion.

Wind energy leases offer a way to produce extra income from farm and ranch land. Only about 5% of the surface is removed from agriculture, so most of the ground can still be productive. That’s an important side benefit of wind development.

The demand for electricity in the US isn’t going to decline. But there is another hurdle to overcome: our incredibly limiting power grid. Different regions of the USA use slightly different power transmission, and inter-connectivity is a problem. Also, much of the big power infrastructure is either insufficient or outdated. Considering that no matter how we produce our power, we have to transmit it, the US electrical grid is one of our biggest infrastructure needs.

Other innovative alternatives are being implemented all over. But wind power is benefiting from being ready to go at the right time. And from my windy corner of Oklahoma, that’s OK by me.

No doubt the conference presentations will be Twittered and blogged to death, leaving a persistent and searchable record, even if it is pre-filtered by the interests and biases of the writers. But for me at least, the value of such an event is largely in the networking and in getting answers to awkward questions face to face. If I do go, you’ll hear about it here first.

Concurrent with the invite, a story was running about US immigration and what it is allowed to do with your digital devices, had they a mind to. The story pops up every few years (see this piece from the Washington Post for some background), but the trigger this time was partly a public declaration by the Department of Homeland Security of its policy and partly the stated intention of Democratic Senator Russell Feingold to introduce legislation to prevent abuse of these powers.

I’m almost scared to write about the subject, in case I’m targeted as a consequence. But the fact is that laptops, iPods, memory sticks, posh phones and all the other clutter of 21st century life can just be taken away for examination ‘without suspicion of wrongdoing.’ Not only that, but data can be shared with other agencies (public and private) and even be destroyed.

I’ve been passing through US airports for 28 years without any serious hiccups, but just the thought that this could happen disturbs me more than somewhat. Quite apart from anything else, my laptop contains a lot of confidential material relating to customers, unpublished writing that technically belongs to publishers and even some highly secret program source code. Most of the rest of it is the usual nonsense that anyone could look at if they were interested.

For me, and anyone else thinking of travelling, the question is “what to do?” One answer is to take no devices, buy a pay-as-you-go mobile phone on arrival and use cyber cafés, other people’s computers or buy yourself a spare machine for web access either to your computer back in Blighty or to somewhere in the ‘cloud’. Such measures seem a bit extreme relative to the risk. According to Jayson Ahern, the Deputy Commissioner of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, it affects fewer than one percent of the 400M people entering the US. It’s a small percentage but a heck of a lot of people.

If you’ve got nothing at all worth hiding, then backups of your devices before leaving your office should suffice. It would be bad luck if your kit was selected for special treatment. If you have got something worth hiding, you might do better to encrypt it, give it an innocent looking name and put it on a server somewhere for collecting remotely when you arrive at your destination.

In comments to a story in the Register the other day, one reader came up with a couple of interesting suggestions: “encrypt it, put .mp3 on the end and save it on your phone or mp3 player” and “stuff 8gb of information onto a Micro SD card and hide that somewhere.” He suggests that you “tape it behind a rivet in your jeans or something so that the hand scanner has a good reason to beep at it.” His or her name was the unlikely Nexox Enigma. Travelling today, apparently.

See you at Office 2.0 perhaps? It’s giving away an HP sub-notebook to paying attendees. So you wouldn’t even need to bring your computer with you.

**************************************

Things have been moving so fast it’s difficult to know where to start. The end result is an exhilarating milestone in CrystalClear’s journey – we launch on 1 September as an Experienced Investor Fund (EIF) based out of our Gibraltar office.

It has not been easy, predictable or linear progress. Two steps forward, one back and some unexpected stumbling in a manner similar to my last walk home from a good night at the pub.

Indeed at a couple of points it looked like we might have to radically rethink our strategy to get to market as set-up costs were looking higher than were modelled in our business case.

However we subsequently engineered the opportunity to become a fully independent vehicle in an umbrella structure provided by a new fund-of-fund business recently launched in Gibraltar.

This will mean a substantially reduced upfront, IT and trading cost overhead. The deal has been an excellent development in other ways too as it provides further synergies through access to an existing European marketing distribution network, an enhanced regulatory status, another layer of risk management, middle/back office coverage and the potential for a chunk of further seed funding.

In one sense it’s amazing that barriers to entry are low enough to mean a fully fledged hedge fund is a realistic target for a small business venture.

This generalisation shouldn’t mask the fact that there is an incredible amount to execute. In the last month we’ve produced our introductory prospectus and completed the majority of our website design.

We’ve interviewed and then appointed our prime broker, administrator, lawyers, and provided our track record data for audit by accountants.  And that’s not to mention the marketing drive in parallel to get to critical mass.

All this work has been aided by the fact that I have managed to wangle myself a redundancy package from my investment banking job giving me the financial buffer and even more critically the time to give the fund my full focus.

The current economic climate brings new challenges that would have been unthinkable two years ago. A good example being we’ve had to think long and hard about who to use as custodian.  The assumption that all the big names are bulletproof and a safe bet to hold capital is no longer a given.

There is a whole new layer of institutional risk to be considered and with the Bear Stearns saga, Lehman looking vulnerable, a rush to patch up balance sheets with knee-jerk rights issues and the rumour/fact surrounding a whole host of other investment banks, the level of client service provision is now secondary to us from the primary issue of the custodian’s core health.

On a personal note, having worked the entire 10 years of my career at two large institutions, I am unbelievably energised by this major entrepreneurial change in direction.

I’ve learnt an incredible amount at two great companies but was becoming weary of the greasy corporate pole. The opportunity to now make a break from the politics and conflicting agendas of the office jungle is a joy to behold.

So it’s a healthy and logical progression to find myself where I am now. And I know for sure I will not miss the daily four hour commute in an out of The City, although I’m sure I’ll find airport departure lounges as tedious when the novelty wears off.

Until next time…

Marjolein Hoekstra in the Netherlands (she calls herself CleverClogs for good reason) alerted me to one of the services, called Diigo. It started out in 2005 but March saw a brand new version, so it has the advantage of both experience and freshness.

The first I heard of it was when Marjolein, who is researching this whole area, told me she’d turned a series of my blog posts on handling the press into a Diigo slideshow. Very kind of her, to say the least.

You can play and pause, jump to the original page and add comments, sticky notes and text highlights. Rather handy if you want to step through a series of web pages in a presentation, say, and make sure that eyes are drawn to the right bits.

But, the idea can be used at a much more mundane level. You can email, “Here is a bunch of sites you might find useful” and provide the web address. Quite often, that’s all you need to help other people out or introduce them to your thinking. Here’s a Diigo I prepared straight from some of my sustainability bookmarks. The controls, incidentally, integrate well with modern browsers making selecting pages easy peasy.

The other service I had tried was JogTheWeb. Similar idea, not as elegantly executed but still usable. Here’s an example that provides links to Freeform Dynamics’ assorted bloggers. It’s possible to add comments to each page, although I didn’t. This one displays the URLs of the original pages but they are not ‘hot’ so you can’t jump directly to them.

Although these two free services do something similar on the surface and, for many users, this will be enough, the Diigo offering is also deeply social. In fact, the company describes it as ’social information networking’. You can see who else has bookmarked or commented on the page you’re reading. You can find bookmarks by tags and you can even find like-minded people through the tags they use.

Finally, I thought I’d ask Marjolein why she chose to introduce me to Diigo rather than the others she’s looked at (including, it turned out, JogTheWeb). She said, “I found it very easy to create a slideshow: just create a list name, then start bookmarking the pages you’d like to add to that list. When ready, turn the list into a slideshow by visiting http://slides.diigo.com.” She added, “I discovered that each slideshow has its own RSS feed which means that when you update your slideshow ‘Green Computing‘, I could be notified.”

All sounds good to me. Thanks Marjolein. Do let us know when you’ve completed your research.