See you in the cloud!

You are starting a new business so one of the first things you need is a website and an email address. Funds at start up are limited so you go looking for the cheapest website deal you can find.

Your neighbors grandson just moved in with her to save some cash while he starts his new, cheap website design, web hosting, domain name registration service. Great! He is charging ¼ of the next cheapest price you have found for a website so far. You know nothing about that stuff so he handles it all! Website built, email working, money saved great!
Flash forward 6 months, or a year or 18 mos later.

The website thing didn’t work out for the neighbors grandson, he has moved to Denver to live with his girlfriend and you want to move your email and document storage to the cloud via Google Drive or Microsoft 365.

You are increasingly busy and therefore very mobile. You want to access your mail, calendar, contacts and files on your smartphone, tablet or any internet connected device handy. You don’t just want to change you need to in order to be productive while being mobile.

You contract someone to handle the particulars of this upgrade.

Guess what they need. Yup your hosting company name and sign in credentials. Your neighbor calls her grandson on Monday he responds on Thursday. He doesn’t have that stuff any more but he will try to find it. Tuesday of the next week he calls back. Great all is a go now! Nope!

The neighbors grandson got your domain name through a third party, and your email is hosted by yet another company, that company is located in outer Mongolia or somewhere where English is a very challenging language due to the fact that that country’s root language and the root language for English are very different.

It took three more phone calls to the grandson to gather all the information.

The person you contracted must now spend MANY hours trying to unravel where your DNS records and MX records are and work with someone who, while earnestly trying to help, speaks very difficult to understand English.

The final cost to you, not to mention a couple of weeks frustration, is MUCH more than it would have been if you had spent a few dollars more on the front end.

My strong recommendation is that you should get your domain name the same place you have your web site hosted.

Be sure to get your log in credentials if you have someone handle this transaction for you. Do not hire the cheapest web designer. Hire someone who has been in the business of designing web sites for a few years. Further it is WELL worth it to pay $5.00 more and have your hosting and domain registration at a recognized company like GoDaddy.com or Yahoo Small Business. If your web designer is truly a professional they can design and upload your web site to any host. Often designers will have agreements with web hosts whereby they get paid for having your web site hosted with them. There is nothing at all wrong with this if it is a well known company. GoDaddy.com is the largest domain name registrar in the U S. Google Business Apps actually has a wizard built into their setup function for GoDaddy.com. This not only makes it easier for your consultant but reduces the time spent on this front end, necessary function and saves you money.

In the long run cheapest is seldom cheapest and is often the most expensive!

Go Daddy Featured Offer! 35% off New Products! Offer good through 2/28/2013!

Greetings from the cloud,

The best way to take hand written notes on your iPad or Android tablet.

Evernote, Penultimate and Jot Pro are the best combination for taking handwritten notes on your iPad or Android tablet.  Evernote is the free note taking app that allows you to access your notes on any device and share them.  Evernote notes are taken using your tablets virtual keyboard. Penultimate allows you to take notes with your finger, a stylus or, my choice, a magnetic Jot Pro pen.

Email, print or tweet your handwritten notes from your iPad or Android tablet

Handwritten notes on your iPad or Android tablet  taken in Penultimate can be shared via email, printed or opened on your iPad. All notes are automatically saved to Evernote which offers the options of emailing, printing or tweeting your note.  In Penultimate you can add an existing photo to your note or take a photo with your tablet camera from within the app. Penultimate, Evernote and Jot Pro used for taking handwritten notes on your iPad or Android tablet add a new dimension of  mobile productivity to your iPad or Android tablet. Watch the video below for an overview of how to use Penultimate, Evernote and Jot Pro to take and share handwritten notes on your iPad or Android tablet.

Greetings from the cloud,

External hard drives crash

If external hard drives crash, and they do, and you have a music collection so large that the storage cost in the cloud would be too expensive how do you safe guard and store your music and still be able to access and play it at will? Google Play is the answer. Google Play will upload your music collection up to 20,000 songs,with a maximum file size of 300 mb per song. I have several songs that are 20 minutes long and they uploaded.

Have you ever lost 12,000 songs all at once because the external drive you stored your music on crashed?

In 2010 I suffered two painful and grievous losses. My beloved companion of 17 years Ginger, a Chow Chow German Shepherd mix died and the external drive that I stored all my music on crashed. I had a music collection of over 12,000 songs. Some of them old blues anthologies that were not replaceable. Many of these were given to me by my online friends all over the world. My first social media profile was on a music lovers site. I was eventually able to recover almost 7000 of these songs because I had them stored on other media and various cloud storage sites but over 5000 songs were lost! For a music lover that is a painful loss. I actually just stopped listening to music for almost a year. I couldn’t bear to open iTunes and realize some song I loved was no longer there!
Here are some of the things I like about Google Play:

• Google Play has the security of cloud storage
• Google Play will store 20,000 songs at no charge
• I can stream my music from Google Play
• I can share a song with my Google Plus Circles and/or I can share a YouTube video of a song with Google Plus Circles
• The mixes Google Play automatically creates based on my played music were, for me, excellent
• Google Play is always accessible
• I never have to sync my Google Play library with any computer, smartphone or tablet I wish to stream it on
• Songs that are only available if I purchase the entire album on iTunes are available individually at the Google Play store
• Google Play recommendations were excellent
• Playlists are easy to create

The only downside is that it does not compensate for volume issues so some songs play very loudly or very low. Otherwise great!

Greetings from the cloud,

Choosing a Hotspot Provider – Why buy mobile hot spot service?

Choosing a mobile hot spot provider is one of those issues I have tried to avoid. I told myself you don’t need a mobile hot spot because you can just go to Starbucks or other coffee shop or restaurant that offers free wifi, and the venues you give your DIY classes in offer free wifi. The problem that would not go away is that the wifi provided by most places that offer free wifi is shared and therefore not stable. As more users hop on the slower the connection becomes. You are periodically knocked off entirely. In a word free wifi while a service I take advantage of often, and am glad is available, is spotty at best. The last straw was when I scheduled a class and me and the participants arrived to be told that they were sorry but the wifi was not working that day and in fact had been off for over two weeks! No one called and let me know even though I had stressed how important the wifi was when I booked the venue. People had signed up for that class, made time in their busy schedules packed up their laptops and driven to the venue only to discover the class would not be possible. Last straw!

How much is mobile hot spot service?

The first place I went on my quest to choose a low cost quality hot spot provider was my cell carrier, AT&T. They actually did have a good option that would allow me and my family, all iPhone users, to use our phones as a hot spot. This plan gave unlimited useage for about $40.00 per month each for 6G of bandwidth. I currently am grandfathered for unlimited service at $30.00 per month. While AT&T’s option was an excellent option it required extending our contract another 2 years. Option B from AT&T was purchase a gateway for $150.00 and pay $50.00 a month on an extended 2 year contract. But always conservative I had two issues. Firstly no one in my family but me cared about having a hot spot and secondly I actually did not need it every single month. I would be paying for a much under utilized service every month! I decided to see what another carrier would offer.

Mobile Hot Spot Services need not be purchased from your cell carrier

Your hot spot provider and your cell carrier do not have to be the same company. You can use your phone for a mobile hot spot only if the service is provided by your phone service carrier but you can purchase a gateway and service from any provider. The gateway is a small device about the size of your phone or a little smaller. I visited Verizon after I left AT&T. Verizon offered a mobile hot spot service for $50.00 per month and a two year contract. You would also need to buy the gateway for about $150.00,a one time charge. Again paying monthly for service not used. The TMobile store was close to the Verizon store so that is where I went next. TMobile had a month to month plan for mobile hot spot service that provides 3.5G useage per month for $35.00 per month. No contract was required. The gateway was less too at $125.00, a one time charge. Months that I need less or more bandwidth I simply purchase up or down each month. I would not have to pay for service every I was not using every month. You just go online and purchase service as needed after the initial set up at the store. Up to 5 other people can access the hot spot. My only concern was coverage but after looking at a coverage map I was satisfied that this was the right option for me.

I did not go to the Sprint store but I did check out Sprint’s rate online. It appears that their mobile hot spot rates are in line with Verizon.

Shop Amazon for mobile

See you in the cloud!

Google Drive provides a rich array of features and capabilities for sharing and collaborating on documents.

The video below is an overview of  Google Drive Documents file sharing and collaboration. Google Drive collaboration works best if all collaborators are using Google Apps For Business or have a Gmail account. Collaborators from outside Google can be invited but some features will not work as intended. For example you will not be able to view edits as they are being made. Google Drive collaboration works best between Google accounts.  Sharing a document with colleagues who do not have a Google Account works fine as long as they are not document editors and part of a collaboration team.  Google accounts which include Google Drive are free. For best results all collaborators should have a Google Account. Google Apps for Business are low cost and provide an array of features formerly only available to large companies and make collaboration and file sharing within the organization easy and seamless.

Some features of Google Drive File sharing and collaboration are:

• Share entire folders in Google Drive
• Open documents and make changes in Google Documents
• See edits as they occur
• See who is making changes as they make the changes
• Highlight text in a document and comment
• Reply to comments
• View revision history and see what changes were made and who made them
• Revert to previous versions of a document
• View all comments including resolved issues

Learn more about Google Apps for Business and Google Drive contact me

Greetings from the cloud,

Finally a way to edit your Microsoft word, Excel and PowerPoint files that are stored in SkyDrive on your iPad and iPhone!   For those who want to know how to edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files stored in SkyDrive on iPad and iPhone Cloudon is now the ultimate! Cloudon added SkyDrive support in their latest update! The addition of SkyDrive support by Cloudon makes using iPad a lot easier for many people.  The Cloudon App provides all the functionality missing in the SkyDrive app. Now you can edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files on your iPad. Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents can also be created on your iPad using Cloudon and they can be uploaded to SkyDrive.   Now if they will add SugarSync in the next update Cloudon will be absolutely perfect!  Cloudon is a free application that simulates Microsoft Office on your iPad or iPhone. The toolbar is like the Microsoft office 2010 toolbar. Word documents, PowerPoints and Excel spreadsheets stored in SkyDrive and  opened in Cloudon appear exactly as originally formatted.  PowerPoint presentations will run with all of the animations and transitions.  Excel spreadsheets can be edited using Cloudon.  I ran a PowerPoint in Cloudon on a wall mounted monitor from my iPad using a  VGA adaptor on my iPad.  Cloudon until December of 2012 only supported Google Drive, Dropbox and Box.net.  SkyDrive was a much needed addition.  At last you can edit Microsoft files stored in SkyDrive and create and upload Word, Excel and PowerPoint files to SkyDrive on your iPad or iPhone using Cloudon.

See you in the Cloud!

Greetings from the cloud,

Amazon Online shopping and selling

Since it’s that wonderful time of year when we derive joy from giving and those who have something to sell anticipate a spike in revenue I thought I would write about Amazon.com, everybody’s online store. Amazon is the largest online retailer on the web today. You can buy virtually anything you want from Amazon from the comfort of your home or office. No traffic, no shopping malls and no rushing about. I did all of my Christmas shopping for out of town friends and family online at Amazon. Amazon wrapped the gifts, included a note and shipped them for me. So much better than past years trying to select items, wrap them and get them to the post office on time to be received by Christmas; think long lines and frustration.

Did you know that you can benefit from Amazon’s branding to make money?

Amazon is truly cashing in on the growing trend of online shopping. Amazon offers several ways for you to partner with them in success. As a retailer with a product to sell you can participate in Amazon’s online success and broaden the market for your product. For those of us without a tangible product to sell another way to partner is through affiliate marketing and setting up an aStore.

aStores For Affiliate Marketers

Affiliate marketers, such as myself, and just about every other blogger out there, can have a branded online aStore. Choose which existing Amazon catagories you wish to offer in your aStore, set up your store and share in amazon’s profits! Your aStore link can be advertised and shared on social media, through email marketing and on printed materials. You can have a link back to your website or blog and you can have your logo on your aStore page. I just set mine up in time for Christmas shopping. There is no charge to set up your aStore.

Amazon Pages

If you have a product to sell online you can set up an Amazon Page just to sell your products. Your Amazon Page will be a custom destination complete with a www.amazon/yourbrandname url, photos, social media links, message posts that you can cross post to FaceBook, large pictures, analytics, and page design options. Pages are free, for the present anyway. You can still of course sell your products on Amazon without having an Amazon Page.

Need help setting up your Amazon Page or astore? I can help! Contact me at lela@tipsfromthecloud.com.

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I will be traveling during the holidays and probably not blogging til after the new year!

See you in the cloud!