I think people are kind of missing the point.

If you haven’t had a chance, watch the short video below and read the live blog of the event from TechCrunch.

I installed it as a virtual machine using VirtualBox, as you can see in the picture above. Given that there aren’t any guest additions, it’s somewhat limited – even with a ton of memory allocated, it lags a bit and has a 800×600 resolution. So I’ll withhold my real review until those are released. Some people in the comments on TechCrunch and Lifehacker don’t understand this and are blaming these things on Chrome.

The two things that really stuck out to me while playing around were how freaking fast it booted, and that there is no “install” like a typical Windows or Linux OS – it just boots into the OS the first time around. Really cool.

If you’ve watched the videos or read the articles, I’m sure you’ll agree that it does some pretty cool stuff right? Like boot up instantly. And like save everything in the cloud so you can instantly jump from one computer to another without missing a step (even keeping your tabs open). And it’s super fast.

But everyone is focusing on the wrong things. They’ll only be supporting minimal hardware at the start – you won’t just be able to download it and install it (easily), you’ll have to buy a “Chrome OS netbook”. And it’s just really not practical to have NO hard drive storage at all. And you can’t use other web browsers. And you’re screwed if you don’t have wi-fi. And that it’s basically the same as Chrome the browser, so why bother?

Yes, if you look at things as they likely will be in 11/2010 when the OS launches, that’s probably all it will be. It’ll be great to give your kids. It’ll be great to have a secondary computer that boots up and down in a second for when you’re on the go.  For most people though, they’ll stick with their Windows or Mac or Linux primary computer.  It won’t be a game changer next year, so everyone is writing it off.

The thing that people seem to be missing is that this isn’t about November of 2010. It’s about November of 2015 and November of 2020. Google is placing a bet that we’ll all be operating out of the cloud in a few years. DVDs and MP3s will be a thing of the past because it’s all available at super high quality anywhere in the world. Photoshop and video games and all of our computer-intensive software will all be better online. There will be absolutely no need for local storage of anything for the majority of computer users.

Now, they could be totally wrong. Personally, I’d say it’s 50/50. But – and this is a huge but – if that is how things turn out, they will be light years ahead of the competition. They will have been tweaking and improving their OS for five years while Microsoft and Apple are playing catch-up. They will have suppliers building their “netbooks” with their components. They will have a market share of greater than 0%, whereas Microsoft and Apple will have nothing.

I don’t know how it will turn out.  I do know that it will be fun to follow.

An example for Detailed Image around holiday time would be showing different content to people who are past the safe cutoff date to receive a shipment before Christmas. For instance, on 12/21 a person in California might see an ad hyping up our gift certificates, while a visitor in New York would see an ad that they can still receive a ground shipment prior to Christmas.

And that’s just one example. I’m planning on doing some other things with geolocation for a future project, so I though it was time to finally figure out how I was going to do it.

And once I started looking into it I realized that the only way to do this with any kind of accuracy is to query a very large, actively maintained database of IP addresses and their corresponding locations. I narrowed it down to two options:

• GeoLite City – a free downloadable database that is update monthly and claims to be 79% accurate to a city level (which is where I got the 80% number above). They also offer a premium version that’s slightly more accurate.
• Google’s API, which maintains this database on their end for Google Maps and probably fifty other things that we don’t realize.

There are some definite advantages of having the GeoLite City database on your server, namely that you can query it on the server side prior to loading a page. To do this on any scale, however, you really shouldn’t install it as a MySQL database. Instead you should use their binary format and corresponding API.

This seems like an awful lot of work. Plus it requires that someone update the database monthly when new releases come out. Worth it for some people and some projects I’m sure. Not me though. I also don’t like using my resources when working on a project when I can use someone else’s resources, especially when it’s Google and it’s free and reliable.

So then I started digging into Google and I had a really, really hard time finding documentation. Finally I found this page with one example way down on the bottom, and with some common sense was able to use that to get what I needed.

In hopes of saving someone else some time, here’s a really simple way to implement IP geotargeting on your site in a few minutes. The simple function below gets all of the important info from Google (latitude, longitude, city, country, region) and writes it out to the page. What you do from there is up to your imagination!

Here’s all you have to do:

1. Sign-up for an AJAX Search API Key
2. Use the Javascript below, replacing YOURKEY with your actual key from Google
3. That’s it! Check out a demo on my site.

Javascript:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=YOURKEY"></script>

<script type="text/javascript">

function geoTest() {

	if (google.loader.ClientLocation) {

		var latitude = google.loader.ClientLocation.latitude;
		var longitude = google.loader.ClientLocation.longitude;
		var city = google.loader.ClientLocation.address.city;
		var country = google.loader.ClientLocation.address.country;
		var country_code = google.loader.ClientLocation.address.country_code;
		var region = google.loader.ClientLocation.address.region;

		var text = 'Your Location<br /><br />Latitude: ' + latitude + '<br />Longitude: ' + longitude + '<br />City: ' + city + '<br />Country: ' + country + '<br />Country Code: ' + country_code + '<br />Region: ' + region;

	} else {

		var text = 'Google was not able to detect your location';

	}

	document.write(text);

}

geoTest();

</script>

Most people won’t put in the time to get a knowledge advantage. Sure, there were folks that worked hard at picking up every bit of information that they could, but we were few and far between. To this day, I feel like if I put in enough time consuming all the information available, particularly with the net making it so readily available, I can get an advantage in any technology business. Of course my wife hates that I read more than 3 hours almost every day, but it gives me a level of comfort and confidence in my businesses. AT MicroSolutions it gave me a huge advantage. A guy with little computer background could compete with far more experienced guys just because I put in the time to learn all I could.

But I’m very selective with what I read. If it sucks, if I’m not learning from it, I put it down. That’s how I judge any book/magazine/blog – did I learn something?

When it comes to blogs, if it goes a few weeks without me gaining anything from it, I delete it from my Google Reader. Two or three bad issues of a magazine and it’s done in my book (Entrepreneur magazine is one that I ditched a while back). If a book just isn’t what I expected it to be, and it’s clear it isn’t getting better, I put it down and move on to another one.

Sort of an updated version of the What I Read post from almost two years ago, here’s a list of the work related blogs, magazines, and books that I currently read. Meaning that I consistently find value in their content. I obviously don’t reread the books in their entirety on a regular basis, but I do find myself constantly referring back to them, so I consider them “must reads” for aspiring entrepreneurs.

(I read a lot more blogs that aren’t listed here, many of which are sports related or fitness related or are blogs written by my friends/family)

Tech Blogs

• Lifehacker
• ReadWriteWeb
• Smarterware
• TechCrunch
• WebWorkerDaily
• SEOmoz SEO Blog
• Get Elastic

Entrepreneur’s Blogs

• BlogMaverick (Mark Cuban)
• GuruGilbert (Adam Gilbert)
• Ma.tt (Matt Mullenweg)
• Nevblog (Neville Medhora)
• Four Hour Workweek (Tim Ferriss)
• Musings of a B-School Professor of Entrepreneurship (Dr. Bill Wales)
• Signals vs. Noise
• Corporatepreneur

Magazines

• Inc.
• Fast Company
• Wired
• Fortune Small Business

Books

• The 4-Hour Workweek – by Tim Ferriss
• Good to Great – by Jim Collins
• The E-Myth Revisited – by Michael E. Gerber
• Getting Real – by 37 Signals
• The Millionaire Next Door – by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko
• All of my programming books

What about you guys?  What are your must read business blogs, magazines, and books?

Apparently it’s not quite good enough for one customer.

Said customer decided that he was going to outsmart our system by buying a gift certificate at 20% off and then turn around and use the gift certificate to then place his actual order for 20% off, effectively double-dipping and getting 36% off (20% off of 20% off). Since we do not allow discounts on gift certificates, this customer did a big run around and placed two orders just to get the exact same discount he would’ve gotten to begin with.

Now, had we messed up and accidentally let it slip through, we probably just would have allowed it and then put in a feature not to allow it in the future. Or maybe we would have contacted him and held the order until we received payment for the remainder of the order. It doesn’t really matter either way. That’s not what bothers me.

What I just can’t understand is why people go to such troubles to try to rip off companies. I don’t understand why someone would even try to do this.  I mean hell, we’re already giving 20% off and free shipping. You damn well know that if you get away with it it’s because of some technicality on our part. We clearly did not advertise that intended use.

Is it the few bucks you’re saving? Is it the feeling of getting over on someone? If you like our products so much, why wouldn’t you want to support us so we can stay in business?  Would you want someone to do this to you?

Golden-rule stuff aside, is it even worth all of the brain power to come up with the scheme, and then the extra time executing it, just to save a few dollars?

In the first two years of any engineering degree you generally take all of the same classes as any other student at any other engineering school in the country. You take your Physics, your Chemistry, your Calculus and Differential Equations, and your Statics and Dynamics.

Engineering Dynamics is generally considered one of the hardest classes at RPI. The professor was not my favorite professor. The material was difficult and explained poorly. I know a lot of people who went to the local community college to take the class over the summer. Despite the extra expense, they found it worth it to avoid having to take the class over and over again just to pass. I struggled to get a B (on a curve).

The tests took upwards of two hours and generally consisted of 3 or 4 really large problems. Frustrated with our poor test scores (I think the class average was like a 30/100), the professor looked at us and told us that we should at least be applying the “common sense check” to every answer. If the answer didn’t make sense, we shouldn’t turn it in.

For example, if we were re-constructing a high speed freeway auto accident and told to find the speed of the two cars, common sense would dictate that one car probably wasn’t driving .007 MPH. Nor was it driving 4,000 MPH. Neither of those answers make any sense whatsoever. We all know that two fast cars would be driving somewhere between 50 MPH and 150 MPH. A 10 year old would tell you that. But people would put those crazy answers down anyway.

This has always stuck with me. Every time I solve a problem, I think “does this answer make sense?”

It really applies to anything.

Today I was putting together some international shipping data for an upcoming meeting. I needed to figure out exactly how many international sales we’ve had over a few different time periods, what services we used, and what percentage of total sales each service was during each time frame. This involved quite a few custom database queries that I could easily mess up with a typo here or there. Then I needed to gather future potential shipping quotes from the USPS API, the FedEx API, and from some proposed new FedEx rate tables. Again, lots of potential for typos.

After every single step I made sure that the answer made sense before moving on to the next. I looked at previous numbers. I cross-checked with Google Analytics to make sure I was in the same ballpark. I found a few real orders in our database and made sure that my rates sent to the country were about right. I took the time to make sure that the data I’m about to present makes sense. It takes a few extra seconds of work to avoid a potential catastrophe.

It’s a really simple concept, an overtly obvious one, yet one that many people seemingly gloss over. You’d be shocked at how many times people just throw together a spreadsheet and blindly trust the numbers that Excel spits out without ever thinking about how the numbers should come out. I saw it all through college, I saw it in the corporate world, and I see it with the companies we deal with.

There are soooo many instances where I want results from only within the last week or the last year. In particular, any time I have a programming question, I want an answer within the last year…not something similar from 2001 that doesn’t apply to today’s web. A solution that worked on PHP 4 a few years back, might not be the best/safest solution for a site running PHP 5 in 2009.

When I installed Ubuntu 9.10 a few weeks ago just after it had been released, I had an issue with Compiz Fusion graphics and only wanted answers from within the previous week (no sense in looking at resolutions from a previous version of Ubuntu). I also filtered by forums and by blogs to see what other type of results I could get. The most helpful results came from forums within the past week, which of course makes sense.

Previously I would have had no way of getting to those answers this quickly (or really at all). Thank you Google.

When I guest lectured at James Madison a few weeks back I was asked a couple of questions from students interested in learning how to program. I get those questions in various forms all the time. I decided to write a post about how I’d recommend going from nothing to programming a real live web site that can make you money. Well, that “post” became quite lengthy and I decided to start a new section on the blog. You’ll notice an “Essays” tab on the top nav now. I’ll probably put two types of posts in that section – how-to type of guides like this one that I’ll continuously update and maintain over time, and generic essays about entrepreneurship topics that have nothing to do with my current happenings. Essentially, any post that I plan on keeping relevant at all times will now become an “essay”.

The first such essay is Web Design & Development for Business. The table of contents is as follows:

• Who Should Read This?
• Getting Started – Just a Little Theory
  • Which Languages Should I Learn?
  • Wait…Why PHP & MySQL?
• How Much Should I Learn?
• How Long Will It Take?
• What You Need To Get Started
  • Software
  • Hosting and Domains
• The Programming Languages
  • HTML, XHTML, & CSS
  • Javascript
  • PHP & MySQL
  • AJAX
• Your First Commercial Site
• What’s Next?
• Feedback

Let me know what you guys think. Is there anything that you think I should add? Do you think this will be helpful for aspiring young entrepreneurs? Too long? Too short?

I think the next one I’ll tackle will be a re-write of the SEO/Web Marketing e-Book available for download on Faceup-Sites. That’s a bit out of date. Plus I’d like to open it up for everyone to read without a download. Then I can just take that entire site down and redirect it all to the article.

So you end up being on call 24 x 7 x 365.

This used to stress me out.  I think it stresses a lot of people who are used to working a corporate job.  It’s rare at large companies that problems exist that no one else can solve.  But that happens all the time in a small business.  It’s impractical to have everyone trained on everything that goes on in the company.  One way or another, you’ll probably have some unique knowledge that others don’t.

Today was supposed to be an off-day from the warehouse for me, but at 9 AM I got a call from Greg telling me that FedEx updated their Ship Manager software and something was preventing us from being able to process our orders.  We import a batch file from our system, print all the shipping labels for the day, and then export back out the tracking numbers to the system.  Nothing was working.

So I dropped what I was doing, hopped in the car, and a few hours later was able to get everything up and running.  All of our orders were able to ship out for the day.  No customers were affected.  It could have been much worse.

It was frustrating, it wasn’t something I had anticipated or hoped would happen today, but once it did it didn’t really bother me.  It’s part of the deal.  If you want to run a business and have all of the freedom and benefits when things go great, you’ve got to accept the fact that there are going to be a bunch of mini-crisis that occur on a semi-regular basis.  When the problems are critical to your business – like printing shipping labels or your server mysteriously displaying an error on New Years Eve – you have to drop what you’re doing and solve the problem.  No matter where you are or what you’re doing.

Because, if you don’t, no one else will.

After a couple of awesome presentations at Skidmore College, I was a bit bummed to hear that Professor Wales, my good friend and teacher of the class, had accepted a position at James Madison University in Virginia.  I had enjoyed going in to speak both semesters and thought that the two of us had a ton of future potential working together to grow young entrepreneurship in upstate New York.  Of course, I also understood that it was a great career move for him and that it didn’t signify the end of our potential collaboration.  JMU is a great school and he has a ton of great resources at his disposal. He originally asked if he could video Skype me in to guest lecture, but after some thought I decided that if I was going to do it I’d rather do it in person.  My girlfriend and I decided to turn the trip into a long weekend in Washington, DC.

This past Friday morning I gave guest lectures to both of Professor Wales’ Entrepreneurship classes.  Each talk lasted for 50 minutes and had about 25 students in attendance. He’s done a great job of improving the class each iteration.  This semester student groups are required to start a business that turns a profit of $200 by the end of the semester.  Extra points are awarded for eco-friendly projects.  You can read about all of the projects over on Prof. Wales’ blog.

As has been the case in the past, the Q&A portion of the lecture has been the best part.  I tried to tighten up my actual presentation, but next time I think I’ll shorten it a bit more.  20 minutes of presentation and 30 minutes of Q&A would probably work best.  This time it was closer to 30/20 the other way.  My goal for the presentation itself is to tell enough of my story to get them interested enough in asking me questions.  Rather than guess what they want to know, I’d rather answer it directly.

I like to do a sort of “guided” Q&A – my last slide has about 20 topics related to young entrepreneurship that they can ask me about.  It works well because it lets them know that I’m willing to answer just about anything.  The slide is below.  I’ve revised it each time based upon questions from the previous group.

Once we get rolling on the Q&A I generally tend to get questions about anything and everything, which is when I think both sides really are enjoying it the most.  I think it’s a great presentation strategy.  I sort of stumbled upon it because originally there were too many topics and I couldn’t decide what to cover and what not to.  Now that I’ve used it a few times I’m going to work it in to every presentation I do from here on out.

I was just so impressed with everything at JMU.  They were nice enough to pay for my hotel and dinner, although it was completely unnecessary.  The faculty that I met were just genuinely nice people.  I can see why Bill took the job. The town was a great college town.  And of course, the students were fantastic.  For being early on Friday morning, I was surprised how attentive they were and genuinely interested in what I had to say.  It’s hard to get up in front of a room of people you’ve never met before.  Seeing people really listening to what I was saying eased my nerves a ton. A handful of students even came up after class to discuss various things with me, which makes me feel like I didn’t totally bore them.  Everyone at JMU made me feel right at home.

Every time I get back from doing these types of things I’m all fired up. There are so many young passionate students out there that can start great businesses and change the world.  Not just in Silicon Valley, but at all the great institutions around the country (and the world for that matter).  In a lot of cases, I feel like they just need someone like Prof. Wales to come along and show them how to get started.  By taking a class like this they’re able to get a real taste of entrepreneurship and decide if it’s for them.  I wish every talented student had the same chance.   Hopefully as time goes on, that’s something I can help facilitate.

Thanks to everyone at JMU for the awesome experience.  I look forward to coming back soon!