HaTCH

The Billion Dollar Marketing Campaign

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 02 Mar 2014 19:31:00 +0000

H&R Block has said that Americans left $1b on the table last year in potential tax returns. That's a nice little slush fund for someone in Washington!

So, this year, H&R Block has used that statistic as the cornerstone of their marketing campaign for tax season. And this campaign was huge. They used every type of medium available - TV, radio, social media, billboards and even vehicle wraps.

The campaign used the slogan "get your billion back America" and used a recurring character wearing a bowtie. The man in the advertisement portrays a trustworthy accountant who is very believable.

It would be great to know their return on this campaign.

Gigable Promises Win-Win-Win

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 28 Dec 2013 14:10:00 +0000

Gigable is a new crowd-funding platform for bands/artists to fill the room at their next gig. The band/artist posts a gig and then fans pledge for a ticket (and other rewards) until the goal is met. If and when the goal is met, money is exchanged and the gig is put on the books.

Venues have a lot to gain from this model as they will no longer have to 'hope' the band brings enough people.

Fans will love it, because they get some cool rewards with their show tickets and the band will be playing to a full house.

Bands should love it, since they will be able to go into new markets with confidence.

This could be the start of something great.

Figuring Out Obamacare (aka Affordable Care Act)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Oct 2013 12:27:00 +0000

Here's a great resource to understanding the new healthcare law. Doyle Rowe, LTD. has been consulting with groups large and small for 25 years on acquiring the best health care plans.

They are experts on the new Affordable Care Act and can guide you through the process to find the best plan that fits your budget and health care needs.

How To Create A Swag Bomb

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Oct 2013 15:25:00 +0000

Tim Ferris and Marc Ecko have a secret to share. And that's how to go from niche to mega-mainstream.

In the latest post on Tim's blog, Marc Ecko writes on how to properly create a swag bomb. What is a swag bomb? It's a must-have for innovators and creators everywhere. This nugget can blow your brand wide open.

Image credit: dribbble.com

Any Room Left For More E-Commerce?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 15:04:00 +0000

Amazon may be the 900lb. gorilla, but as we know, there's always room for better curating and boutique shops.

This great article on Pandodaily highlights that fact that Amazon can't do it all when it comes to e-commerce. I certainly believe that which is why I'm invested in MileFork.com.

Grow Your Own Mushrooms And Pivot Your Startup Strategy

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 22 Aug 2013 20:57:00 +0000

This is a great story about two UC Berkley grads who launching a mushroom business - and then pivoted their strategy very early on by listening to customers.

Alejandro Velez and Nikhil Arora were two months from graduating when one of their professors told them a very random fact that you can grow mushrooms from used coffee grounds. That little fact caught their interest and they started a business selling mushrooms.

While at farmers markets, they did an experiment to see if selling DIY kits for growing mushrooms change the customer engagement. Short answer - it did. And by a huge margin. Adults and kids were fascinated by the kit and spent much more time engaged with their products.

Here's the video where they tell the story.

Source: Startup Lessons Learned

Experience The Zen Of Gardening From Your iPad

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 21 Aug 2013 20:40:00 +0000

Unity Studios has released a new app that lets a person grow flowers and leaves and provide a daily dose of creative zen.

With this app you can:

Design your own flower and leaves
Unlock challenges
Take screenshots of your flowers and share them on Facebook and Twitter
Do all this in many languages

Let's Grow is available in the iTunes store. Here is the link: https://itunes.apple.com/app/lets-grow!/id588671980

Source: PRnewswire

Wood Egg Cracks The Code For International Business

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 16 Aug 2013 13:52:00 +0000

Derek Sivers, the ex-founder of CDBaby, has launched a new venture called Wood Egg. Since the sale of CDBaby a few years ago, Derek has been living abroad and learning a lot about international business.

Wood Egg is a series of entrepreneurial guides to starting businesses in many countries. The first series of books teaches how to start a business in 16 countries in Asia. Derek's plan is to release a new series of books every year.

What's extraordinary about this company (if the content wasn't awesome enough) is that has created a process for building the content of the books. He has created a 200-question process that someone could take and hit the streets of any country and collect the raw materials for a book. Then, he has editors who assemble the information into a book format. There are volunteer and paid positions in his company and the waiting list is long.

Medium Is XL On Stories

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 02:38:00 +0000

Medium is a... hmm. What do you call it? It's not a blog. It's not website in the traditional sense. It's a publication that carries many talented folks who write about stuff for which they are passionate. I don't like the term "e-zine."

Evan Williams (Co-Founder of Medium and Blogger) says: "Medium is a new place on the Internet where people share ideas and stories that are longer than 140 characters and not just for friends."

I've setup a little shop there and look forward to contributing.

Vehicle Graphics Expose The Goods

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 10 Aug 2013 14:14:00 +0000

A 3M study shows that vehicle graphics has the lowest CPM (cost per thousand impressions) ratio than any other major medium. Vehicle graphics or "wraps" have increased in popularity among businesses of all sizes over that past 5 years.

Small fleets, such as HVAC companies and large fleets such as nationwide pizza chains have allocated a significant portion of their marketing budgets to vehicle graphics. And the results are paying off. These companies are seeing an increase in brand exposure and sales as a direct result of applying vinyl graphics to their company vehicles.

There are two main providers of vinyl media that is used for vehicle wraps; 3M and Avery Dennison. The state-of-the-art vinyl and adhesive is extremely durable and safe on vehicles. The vinyl material can be applied to any part of the vehicle and will last up to 5-6 years.

Vehicle graphics and wraps must be installed by a certified graphics installer. The installation process usually takes several hours and each vehicle is different and requires special tools.

The photos below show graphics projects completed by Digital Graphic Solutions in Valparaiso, IN. For each project, DGS provided the graphics design, manufacturing and installation.

Even Cats Love the iPad

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 13:40:00 +0000

How to stop the civil cold-war in America

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 21:46:00 +0000

The new Apple Tablet is called the iPad

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 18:34:00 +0000

The Kindle killer? Maybe. The next huge win for Apple? Perhaps.

The iPad was announced today at 10:10am PST by Steve Jobs.

Tablet computing has been around for at least 12 years. I should know, I worked at Cruise Technologies in 1996 where we created the CruisePad!

Back then, the problem was screen size/clarity vs. manufacturing cost. The CruisePad was designed for a completely different market and way ahead of its time.

How to go from 0 - $1b in sales in 8 years (with no advertising)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 17:05:00 +0000

Zappos.com is the shining example of how an online business can be profitable via word-of-mouth. This article on Read-Write-Web explores Zappos' success and talks to the CEO.

Business Owners Challenge

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 21:20:00 +0000

Want to find out what challenges other business owners are facing? Take this quick survey and get the free report.

New Podcast Series: PlugdIn

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:46:00 +0000

Something I've been planning for some time now and finally launched it!

The PlugdIn Podcast is a weekly discussion with (hopefully) interesting people involved in music, design, video, social media, charities and many other topics.

Here's the link to this week's episode. Enjoy!

What is Google Wave?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 14:01:00 +0000

Doing a little research and patiently waiting for my Google Wave invite, I wanted to get a better understanding.

Google Wave is a real-time collaboration platform. The easiest way to describe it would be a blend of Twitter, Flikr, YouTube and Word all in one interface.

It looks to be very early in development and Google is making it open source to accelerate the evolution of the product.

At this point, by just reading about it and watching demo videos, it doesn't seem to have the impact that Twitter or YouTube. But, it will be interesting to get in there and use it and watch it mature.

Connecting buildings via wireless

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 22:54:00 +0000

We highly recommend this product for ease of setup and cost.

The GNS wireless bridge solution is perfect to connect LAN's between buildings that are line of sight. Dedicated 54Mbs link.

Our implementation was up and running 15 minutes after the antennas were mounted.

SPAM VACUUM

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:43:00 +0000

How much time per week does your company deal with spam-related issues? Post comments below.

Phones vs. Computers

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 13:47:00 +0000

Here's a question to consider:

What's more valuable to your business; phone service or Internet access? How long could you endure an outage for either?

Post your comments below.

The 30-minute, 10-point plan to a faster computer

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:06:00 +0000

Remove all unnecessary programs.
Go to Start>Control Panel>Add/Remove Programs. Scan the list for programs that you don't use anymore and remove. Be careful not to remove Windows Components.

Delete your "temp files" AND cookies once a week. (Disk Cleanup)
Go to My Computer and right-click on the C:\ drive. Choose Properties, then Disk Cleanup. Check the boxes of the files you wish to delete.

Run defrag every three months.
Go to My Computer, right-click on the C:\ drive and choose Properties. Choose Tools, then Defrag.

Run full HD scan every 6 months.
Go to My Computer and right-click on the C:\ drive and choose Properties. Choose Tools, then Check Disk. Check both boxes. It will do the full scan and fix HD erros on the next bootup.

Stop unnecessary services.
Windows runs a bunch of "services" in the background that may not be necessary for you. Go to Start>Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Services and stop the following services. Alerter, Clipbook, Distributed Link Tracking, Error Reporting Service, HID Input Service, Remote Registry, Telnet and Telephony (if you are not running Skype or something like that).

Check your error log once per month.
Clues to bigger problems may be found in the error logs. Go to Start>Control Panel>Administrator Tools>Event Viewer and look at the logs. Sort by 'Type' and look for anything with a Red Error label. Make note of these errors and either search them or call a technician.

Minimize the configuration on your virus scanner.
Many virus scanning programs are setup by default to protect everything. You can probably turn some scanning off, like the firewall if you are using the Windows firewall. You can also turn off email scanning if you email provider is scanning mail.

Turn off network and folder autosearching.
This little tip can improve the performance of Windows Explorer. Open My Computer and then choose Tools>Folder Options from the menu. Then choose the View tab and uncheck "Automatically search for network folders and printers"

Reduce the amount of programs auto-staring on bootup.
If you have a ton of icons showing up in the bottom right of your start bar, you can reduce those and speed up boot time. Be careful with this setting! Go Start>Run then type msconfig. Go to the Startup Tab and uncheck the boxes that show Applications that you know you don't need to auto-start.

Clean the registry.
Cleaning the registry and make vast improvements on your bootup and processing speed. However, the only way to safely accomplish this is with a cleaner program. We recommend RegCure.

Outsourced Help Desks

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 13:04:00 +0000

For many companies, hiring permanent IT help is cost prohibitive. Even IT consultants can be a bit pricey. Below is a list of IT help-desk providers.

This kind of service allows a tech in a remote location to connect to your computer or network and troubleshoot problems. Growth for these kinds of services has exploded over the past year.

iYogi.net
PlumChoice.com
Support.com
Greenstar.com

Stay On Top With Google Alerts

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:30:00 +0000

Have you ever wondered if anyone is saying anything (good or bad) about your company on the Internet? Or, what are your competitors up to? Google Alerts will send you that information - automagically, and as often as you like.

Yet another free service by Google, their "alerts" are basically memorized searches that will email you the results. Let's say you are insanely interested in Madonna. You can add her name as an alert entry for 'news' and you will get an email (daily, weekly or as it happens) that will contain all news-related items by Madonna. Better yet, the email will be formatted like a search result, so you can easily scan and click only the headlines that interest you.

Since there are potentially unlimited topics to configure as an alert, it's easy to get carried away. But that's ok! Add and remove topics at will. You can also go back and change the frequency of email notifications. Additionally, you can setup the alerts to be sent to a RSS feed reader, like Google Reader.

I have found Google Alerts to be a great tool for filtering the information that I find interesting so I can be more efficient online.

Negotiating with Vendors (Part I)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 20:15:00 +0000

Here's one area where business owners can fall into a costly trap. Vendors making big promises in the pre-sales process only to underdeliver after the check is cashed. There are a few ways this can be avoided.

Get the Demo
If it's software that you are buying, get the demo version up and running for about 30 days (10 days at least). This will give you time to make sure it's easy to deploy and you can see it in action for a few days. Talk to the vendor about customizing the software to conform with your process. Most software these days should be easily customizable without costly consulting charges.

Testimonials
Any vendor worth dealing with should have a complete set of testimonials. These may be found on their website or in their product literature. Get the names of large and small current customers and talk to them about their experience. Ask about the vendor's post-sales support. Ask about their implementation. Was it on time? What kinds of problems arose? How were they handled?

Are there free options?
Within the last 8 years, hundreds of websites have popped up providing valuable tools and resources. If you are looking to implement a software solution, try searching for "open-source" software. Open source refers to the fact that the source code for the software is openly available at no cost. A group of developers join in on maintaining the software and adding functionality.