There are 7 rules you should never violate when choosing a domain name for your business. Failure to follow these rules will result in customers having difficulty emailing you, finding your website, or even worse, remembering it when attempting to refer you business! Violate these rules at your own risk.

Use common phraseology.

While it may make sense to have your entire company name as the .com name, this only works if your company name is both descriptive as well as composed of simple common words. SoccerByMary.com would be a good website name for a soccer store owned by Mary of the same (or similar) name because it falls into a standard phraseology. CigarsByTom.com, WatchesByBill.com, etc… It is a common practice to have product+”by”+name in a business name. This works well for small businesses. However, if you have a professional business, such as technology, law, or medical based businesses, this may be too unprofessional. LawsuitsByLarry.com may not be the image you want to convey, but the website name is guaranteed to be memorable, and easy to convey. Conversely, if you have a business that is hi-tech (or requires a post graduate degree) try to keep the name of what you do out of the domain name. People will have a hard time to remember it. Specialty practices such as Chiropractors, Anesthesiologist, Psychologists, Neurologists, Accountants, and others do not have a trade that is so common that it fits into a common phraseology.

Use the Name to Make a Powerful Offer

WatchesByBill.com, in our example above, is a common, easy to understand phraseology. However, the name DiscountWatchesByBill.com makes a powerful offer. You instantly know that “DiscountWatchesByBill.com” is the place to go for a good deal on watches. A powerful offer gives visitors a reason to click on your PPC ad, or your search result. A well named .com can give you an advantage in search engine results as well as ad campaigns because the offer speaks for you: it gives the visitor a reason to visit you, and allows you to stand out from the rest.

Keep it short.

People have very short attention spans. The shorter the better, even if you have to use a hyphen or something else in the domain name to get it. One of our customers has a name similar to Ericson Electronics and Energy, and rather than getting ericsonelectronicsandenergy.com, he got e-3.com. “e dash three dot com” is very easy to understand over the phone.

Use a sentence as your name

There are of course limits to this, but if you can use a sentence as your dot com name it is both easy to remember as well as satisfying rule #2 above. Some examples:

a.       Anyguttercleaned.com

b.      Taxesdoneright.com

Be careful not to violate #3 though! Don’t use a complete sentence such as billcansellyourhousetomorrowforlessmoney.com

Go for the dot com

There are a lot of other suffixes out there: dot net, dot biz, dot info, etc… Most consumers only know and understand one: the dot com. It is better to have something that is slightly less than perfect than to go with a less widely known or used suffix. The dot com suffix is the best one to have, period. Shoot for the dot com.

Avoid contractions, possessive tense, and trailing letters.

Any time there is an ‘s in the domain name, you’re asking for trouble. The brain has a hard time with the possessive tense when it is out of context. Bill’s canoe is bigger than Mary’s is easy to understand because the entire structure of the sentence is wrapped around it. But if I just say “Bill’s” then you don’t know if that is short for “Bill is” or the possessive form of Bill that tells us he has something. In short, just don’t do it! Some (bad) examples:

a. Wheresmycheese.com

b. Whosyourdaddy.com

Trailing letters are suffixed letters that are difficult to understand out of context. My own website name violates this rule (and this is where I came up with this rule!). highpoweredhelp.com contains a trailing “ed” at the end of power. People have a hard time hearing and understanding it is there, which results in many mis-sent emails. Avoid trailing “s” and “ed” words such as sports, powered, computers, etc…

7. Don’t abbreviate. Abbreviations and acronyms are a big no-no unless the visitors of your website deal with those abbreviations every day. For example, a company that deals exclusively with technicians from a telephone company could get away with using telco, SIP, or VOIP in their name. The rest of the world won’t know what it means.

Living with Violations

There are several websites that are spectacularly successful despite their violations of these rules. Notables are:

• Google.com. Violates #1 because it is a magic name. This is the only violation that can be cured with time and money.
• Lycos.com: violates #1 as a magic name. Never really able to overcome this to compete with yahoo and Google in name recognition.
• Linkedin.com: Violates #2 because it is not a common phraseology. Getlinkedin.com would fix this, but they have done just fine even with this minor flaw because of the networking structure of the site. It also potentially violates #6 because of the “ed”.
• Digium.com. Violates #1.
• Youtube.com. Violates #2.

Violations can be overcome if the website has other components that compensate for the violation. For instance, Google’s service was so spectacular that people introduced it into the English language. The original term, Google, which meant a number so large it is expressed as 10¹⁰⁰ has also become a verb, which means to search for something on the internet. Brute force of a good service fixed the violation.

Linkedin.com overcame its violation by the viral nature of the website. The point of linkedin.com is to be “linked in,” and thus by virtue of users using the site, the name became engrained in user’s minds, which overcomes the violation. Moreover, you don’t send invitations to linkedin.com over the phone. You email them, which removes the human element and propensity for mistakes from the equation.

Digium.com offers free open source software for users all over the world to use. If you want the free stuff, you have to learn the name!

Youtube.com shut down a piping company’s website and business because of their violation. Fox News reported that a company that produces plumbing tubes had their website shut down because people searching for youtube.com were typing in utube.com. utube is the common phraseology, and is an example of how people will draw from language experience to compose a domain name from how it sounds. Youtube.com has overcome this violation because of the content they offer, but the name youtube is counter intuitive, and violates the rule.

5 Ways To Know If You Can Overcome a Rule Violation

Generally, rule violations should be avoided; however, if you only violate 1 of the 7, and meet any of the following criteria, you may be able to overcome the violation.

1.      The Advertising Exception: You have a substantial marketing budget (potentially in the millions) to educate new visitors exactly what your domain name is. (Example: coke.com)

2.      The Service Exception: You provide a service that benefits visitors to a degree where they will overcome the violation by learning your domain name rote. (Example: Youtube.com)

3.      The Product Exception: You offer a free product that is wildly popular, and already has a following. Users who want the product are willing to put forth effort to learn domain names in order to get the new product or its updates. (Example: asterisk.org and Digium.com)

4.      The Networking Exception: The nature of your site is that it provides a networking aspect and users of the site (by virtue of using the site) will do the marketing required to overcome the exception. (Example: Linkedin.com)

5.      The Monopoly Exception: The site is an add-on or a required element of some other service or product. People paying for another service or product must learn the site if they want to take full advantage of their product or investment. In this exception, the website and domain name are secondary to another product, which is the real money maker. Example: tivo.com. Tivo.com is not the product, but provides another interface for easily scheduling recordings for television shows.

Be Patient and have alternatives. Don’t violate any of the rules above! If you are impatient and settle for something that violates these rules, it is nearly impossible to undo after you have built infrastructure and marketing around it. Also, since the entire world can have a domain name, it is not likely that the first domain name you choose will be available. Make a list of 20 and submit them to your registrar.

Streaming MP3 playlists through Asterisk is relatively easy. The concept is thus:

1. Use mplayer to stream the radio station from the source, and convert the format simultaneously using the following command:

mplayer -af resample=8000,channels=1,format=mulaw -playlist http://provisioning.streamtheworld.com/pls/WSBAM.pls

2. Add the command line parameter -ao to throw the output to a file:

-ao pcm:file=streamtemp.wav

3. Shove the output to “null” and make it a background process by putting the “&” at the end:

mplayer -af resample=8000,channels=1,format=mulaw -ao pcm:file=streamtemp.wav -playlist  http://provisioning.streamtheworld.com/pls/WSBAM.pls >> /dev/null 2>/dev/null &

4. Use PHPAGI to control the call flow, get temp file names, and shell execute the mplayer command. Everything to this point is done for you in the download below. For this, you need to download the phpagi package, and extract it under /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/. Primarily, you need to satisfy the include statement: include(‘phpagi-2.20/phpagi.php’). So, the “-2.20″ part may change depending on the current version of phpagi.

5. Download the AGI script radio-stream.php, extract from the zip file, and place in /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/.  Change file permissions on the php file:

chmod 777 /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/radio-stream.php

6. Add an extension to your dial plan. My suggestion is to use the callsign of the radio station. In this article, I have chosen WSB Radio AM 750 in my hometown Atlanta. So, my dialplan reads *750:

exten => *750,1,agi(radio-stream.php);

7. Reload dialplan.

Questions? Comments? Need Help? Leave comments below!

You may not know it, but your brain has an autopilot function built right in. You can harness this function to solve problems, create great new business strategies, and build your business. You actually use it all the time, but you have probably never been told how to command it to do your bidding. The process is quite simple, and involves programming your basal ganglia system.

Basal What?

The Basal Ganglia system is a part of the brain about which very little is known. It has been the subject of much controversy in the neurological world. It controls and contributes greatly with how we learn, store and process information, and work with problem solving. Diseases such as ADD, ADHD, Parkinson’s Disease, Huntington’s Disease all affect the basal ganglia and produce learning problems.

“Wait… you said that I use this all the time. How so?”

Have you ever had the “autopilot” experience when performing an activity? You can most commonly have this experience when you get in the car and drive to work. While in the car, you get lost in thought. You pay deep attention to a problem or daydream. However, you continue to drive. You subconsciously navigate your car to work. You stop at stop lights. You avoid collisions. You operate the car out of “second nature”.

This is the basal ganglia at work. It can perform tasks without you having to consciously contribute to those tasks, for that reason, I will refer to it as your “subconscious” for the remainder of this article.

Eureka!

Another experience you have likely had are “ah-ha” moments. Sudden and instantaneous solutions to problems that magically appear as flashes of inspiration. You probably have them all day long, and hopefully, you have a personal recorder like mine or a notebook to capture them. If not, get one. These flashes of inspiration are the result of hours if not days of work by your subconscious on a problem. If you do not capture them, they will simple fade away, and all that work by your subconscious will be lost.

You should always carry around a personal recorder like mine because the output of your subconscious can be likened to a printer on a table over a shredder. As each page is printed, you have two options: catch it as it comes out of the printer, or allow the next page of paper to push it off the printer tray where it will fall into the shredder and be lost forever.

Your subconscious is both genius and stupid. It has a nearly limitless inbound buffer where you can queue up hundreds of problems to be solved, but once it has solved them, it spits out the answer, and moves on to the next problem. Unless you capture it, it will be lost, and you’ll have to go through the whole process again.

Get a recorder like mine.

Your Subconscious Doesn’t Get Happy or Sad: It Just Runs Programs.

Programming your subconscious is a relatively simple task because your subconscious only wants programs. It is, in fact, starved for programming. It takes everything literally. If there is a bug in your program, it executes the bug just the same as perfect code. If you think you’re stupid, it will ensure you remain stupid. If you think you’re a millionaire, it will find a way to make you a millionaire.

Two Requirements for Programming Your Subconscious

To program your subconscious, you must first consciously admit and acknowledge its existence. You must honestly believe that you can program your subconscious. Otherwise, you subconscious will know you think programming it is hogwash and will respectfully disregard your programming instructions.

Second, you must feed your subconscious REM sleep. Your subconscious performs all of its best work during REM sleep. This means you must get a good night’s rest EACH AND EVERY DAY. Entrepreneurs tend to have a nasty habit of being night owls and pulling “all nighters” but those days simply must end if you are going to utilize this un-tapped power of the brain for business and profit purposes.

A good night’s sleep will give you anywhere from 2-4 REM sessions lasting from 90-120 minutes. Each of these sessions yields vivid dreams and is when the subconscious is hard at work sorting out your problems that are in the queue.

Fuel for your Brain

Your brain runs on sugar. Pure glucose. During the day, you burn up your stores and supplies of glucose, which cause you to become less and less effective as the day wears on. These glucose stores are replenished at night during REM sleep. Subsequently, your best work will be done in the morning. As Ben Franklin so famously remarked: “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

Believe it. Live it. It works.

How to Program Your Subconscious

Once you have optimized your life to work with your brain instead of against it, you are ready to start programming your subconscious. When faced with a problem, give it the “old college try”. Label the problem as solvable, and label the solution as important. If you’re able to solve it on the first try, great, if not, re-affirm that the problem is solvable and the solution is important. Then tell yourself: “I’ll let my subconscious work on this for me. I will have the answer when I wake up tomorrow.”

Depending on the complexity of the problem, you may need more than just 4 cycles of REM sleep to solve a problem. Most problems, however, will be solved overnight. Occasionally, you’ll wake up in the morning, and the solution will still not have presented itself. Simply repeat the process again. Repeat over and over until you get the answer.

Never lose faith in your subconscious or become discouraged. To do so is simply counter-productive. Remember, your subconscious is a brilliant genius that is dumb as a rock. It does what it is told. It will find the answer to anything you ask of it so long as you never call it stupid or forget to assign value to the solution. Have faith. It will work wonders.

References:

More on REM Sleep

As an entrepreneur and business owner, you are faced with many daunting challenges. You have payroll, employees, customers, clients, marketing, sales, “the books” and a myriad of other challenges to deal with. Meeting all these challenges requires energy, but where do you get it? Where is the limitless supply of energy that powers all the great entrepreneurs of history? The answer is simple…

Spouse, Significant other. Noun. 1) The person to whom you must consistently concede arguments to when they are wrong. 2) People often thought to be wrong when in fact, as later discovered, they are right. 3) Those, without whom, life would be boring, colorless, and uninteresting.

Your Greatest Energy Source

Your greatest source of energy comes from your spouse. I use the term spouse here to refer to your significant other, husband, wife, or partner. However you classify your relationship is up to you, and the words used to classify them are irrelevant. Who they are is important: I am talking about the person you share your life with.

Simply put: your spouse is the person who can supply you all the energy you have to run your business or they can sap it away in a heartbeat. The stubborn part of you says: “No! I can do it by myself! They don’t contribute to the business!” But how many times has a fight, lover’s quarrel, or simple separation because of a business trip sapped your energy and will power away from you? How many times have you sat down at the computer screen to “get some work done”, but only been able to think about the hurt, pain, or desperation you feel because your lover is hurt, upset, angry, or otherwise?

The special energy you and your spouse share is a never ending spring of entrepreneurial energy. Just as the saying goes: “Behind every successful man, there is a wise woman” or… in my case: a woman shaking her head, with her eyes closed, in disbelief, with a smile.

“CSO: Chief Spousal Officer”

Because we believe strongly in a concept or idea for our business, we may accidentally fail to include our spouse or even worse, alienate them. We may also fail to see them for the resource they are: someone who knows you so well they can see your blind spots. They are a barometer of your success, and they can provide an invaluable litmus test for the validity of nearly all your ideas.

So don’t fight. Concede the argument when you see your spouse is vehement or adamant on a point even when you know you’re right. You may find out that #2 is true: they were right in the first place, but you lacked the perspective (or patience) to see what your spouse saw in the first place.

Instead, empower your spouse with veto power. For many of my readers, this will likely horrify you. However, if you cannot trust your spouse enough to hand them the keys to your business, why did you marry them? Do they not have your best interest at heart?

It reminds me of a parable. There was a hunter lost in the woods. He had not scored any game, and was out of food and water. He came upon an old hermit’s cabin. The hermit not known for his kindness. In fact, he despised visitors. The hunter devised three plans: 1) storm the cabin and take the food he wanted. This plan was soon debunked because storming the cabin and just taking what he wanted by force would likely force the hermit into a defensive position, and he may attack the hunter as an intruder. Logically, he devised a simple solution to that problem. Plan #2 was to kill the hermit and take the food. Of course, he did not fancy murder nor did he want to spend the rest of his days running from the police. Finally, he decided on a solution.

He knocked on the door, and when the door opened, the hunter gave his gun, butt first, to the hermit. The hermit was very taken aback by the gesture. Here was a complete stranger on his doorstep handing their weapon to him, and begging for food and directions. Having been empowered by the hunter, the hermit took him inside, and fed him a meal and drew him a map so he could return home.

Such is the same with your spouse. Empower them to be a part of your dreams and your business…even if it is an “unofficial” non-paying position. They will, at the very least, appreciate being asked.

The Power of Spousal Buy-In

Something magical happens when you empower your spouse to join you in your great entrepreneurial adventure. They begin to want what you want. They begin to dream your dreams. Support comes more readily, and you are able to tap into the eternal well-spring of energy that comes from your loving relationship.

But, there are three secrets to obtaining this type of hyper-supportive spouse:

1. The empowerment you bestow upon them cannot be a figure head position.
2. You must make your own success more self serving to your spouse (it becomes “our” success).
3. You must communicate, communicate, and communicate.

Empowering your spouse cannot be a figure head position

You must give them REAL power. In many cases, you may feel your spouse is not qualified to render decisions, but that is no excuse to render them powerless because of it. If the decision is a complicated one, give them the background they need. Educate them. Even a crash course is fine. Give them the facts. Ask their opinion. Do this all in a manner in which they can accept it, and give them time to think about the issue if necessary (and possible). Remember, Sun Tsu wrote: “If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, then the general is to blame.” This has never been more true than with communication with your spouse.

Make your own success more self-serving to your spouse (make it “our” success).

Your spouse will love your business if it supports their dreams as well as your own. Incorporate your dreams together. My wife and I spend one day per quarter planning our respective businesses and planning how we will make our dreams come true. We use a simple formula.

1. We write down our dreams and goals for the next 90 days, 1 year, 3 years, 5 years, and 10 years on our own separate sheets of paper. We do not share them as we write.
2. Once completed, we compare.
3. We discuss each of our goals, and how they relate to each other.
4. We develop a family plan and a family set of objectives in writing, which fulfills each of the goals for both of us.
5. From the family plan, we develop business plans that support our family plan and business objectives.

The process is very simple, and has yielded some very interesting results. Initially, our plans were very different. We wanted very different things. Many of our wants and goals seemed to be at opposite ends of the spectrum. In spite of this documented discord of ideals, we persisted, and “worked the system.” Each time we complete this process our goals become more and more aligned with each other. In fact, this last time we completed the process we found out that we had the exact same goals. The only difference was the time scale. For example, upgrading to a new home was on both our plans. We had not even discussed moving to a new home yet, but we both wanted it. She wanted it in three years, and I had put it in the five year category. Nearly 90% of all our plans were identical. There were only a few exceptions: my purchase of a private airplane, and her interest in visiting Europe.

Since “success” is now unequivocally defined as “our success” getting support from one another is easier than ever before.

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

Many people, business owners especially, have an issue communicating their wants, needs, and desires. The pressures of owning a business (or several businesses) combined with our natural aptitude to work for and get what we want, causes us to stop communicating. We simply prefer to “work the system” or choose paths that require less human interaction. Those appear to be paths of least resistance. After all, who wants to deal with a person who is just going to get in your way? Right?

Wrong.

When it comes to your spouse, you have to communicate over and over and over. Talk about ideas that “go without saying.” Talk about facts that seem “obvious”. Ask the rhetorical questions as literal questions. You will find that the reason you love your spouse so much is because they are not like you. They are, in fact, most likely the complete and polar opposite of you. Where you love to be daring and risky, they love stability. If you love facts and figures, they prefer the big picture. Whatever the combination is, they are very likely: not like you.

Take time every day to talk to them about as much as you can. Have brain storming sessions with them about how wonderful you life will be when the business explodes and you have ample free time and even more ample cash. Where will you go? What will you do? What will you buy? Where will you vacation? Will you sail around the world? Will you buy an airplane? Will you buy a boat? Will you breed race horses? What will you two do with your success?

Talk and dream together. You’ll find that your spouse, under this careful regimen of love and care, will produce entrepreneurial energy for you like ten nuclear power plants.

When you have the love, support, and buy-in from your spouse, you will undoubtedly be: 10 feet tall and bullet proof.

Persistence is often quoted as the quintessential a key for success. It’s so obvious that it is frequently over looked. It is also the most elusive because it requires repeated, sustained decisions over time. There is one circumstance, however, where persistence will never pay off…

I Will Be Less Fat.

I frequently tell friends, colleagues and associates that I will be less fat tomorrow. It occured to me one day that my physical body should be as healthy as my fiscal “body.” Subsequently, I adopted an exercise routine that after weeks gave me a pearl of wisdom, which I am sharing with you now.

As part of my exercise regime, I ride 6 times a week for a minimum of 11 miles. That route takes me down roads, to the top of a national forest, through bike paths, to an access road near the interstate, and finally up surface streets back to my home. For months, one section of the path always gave me trouble. I always had to dismount, and walk up this section because it was a series of steps, uphill, created by railroad ties the national forestry service installed to help deter erosion.

I used to think “there has to be a way up this”. Occasionally, I would see that people do, in fact, ride over this section of trail. Usually, I was just a little too late or a little too early to see how they did it. I would come around a the pass and see someone speeding away from it (too late) or I would walk up the obstacle, re-mount my bike, and someone would blow by me at such speed that they simple had to have ridden up the obstacle without getting off their bike. Here, I was too early.

I never actually saw how they did it. Had I caught up to them, I could have asked.  Just two things stopped me from successfully navigating this section of the trail. The first: timing, and the second: it simply never occurred to me to ask someone how they did it. Day after day, I pressed on. I tried different paths up the obstacle, but every time was forced to get off my bike, and walk up to the top. Several times, I fell, which resulted in minor injuries.

There had to be a better way.

One week, there were several days where I could not ride because the weather did not permit it. After three days of soaking, torrential downpour, it finally let up, and I was able to continue with my daily rides.

The forest was soaked. It was hot, humid, and miserable. Despite the discomfort and the new addition of rabid mosquitoes, which swarmed around me as I rode through the trails never the river, I pressed on. Today, I had to make up for lost time. My target today: 25 miles.

Today’s ride was not part of my usual persistence routine. It was actually inspired by a deadline I had set for myself: to ride 500 miles by October 31st. My hard headedness to complete a double-duty ride that day, and catch up to my milestones was the main cause for the ride, not persistence. Persistence could have waited until tomorrow when normal conditions would return to the trails.

However, that day, a much more interesting, and much more useful event occurred. When I came to that same, troublesome obsticle of the bike trail, deep in the forest, I noticed something different. I noticed something I had never been able to see before. Despite all my persistence day in and day out, I had never had the opportunity for such a discovery:

Tracks.

Tracks from other riders showed me the exact path up the obstacle I needed to take to ride up the steps and continue on without dismounting from my bike, and having to walk up the steps. Every other day, I had come to this trail was nice, sunny, and lacked mosquitoes. Today, however, because I had a need to “catch up” on my exercise, I stepped outside of my comfort zone (literally) and dealt with 100% humidity and dense, blood hungry bugs to accomplish my goal. The result? The answer to a problem, which had been irritating me for weeks.

Had I given up or waited for better weather, I would never have seen how to scale that obstacle. Simple persistence and habit would not have revealed the answer either. Instead, there was a new element required in order to make the discovery: a deadline and milestone.

Epilogue

You no doubt have a difficulty in your business that you have resigned to live with. Something about which you often think to yourself “there simply has to be a better way to to do this.” But you press on. Wondering. Persisting. The answer to your question is not simply to put a deadline and a goal at the forefront of your efforts. To simply mimic this variable that produced an answer in my case will, in all likelihood, not produce any result in your case.

So, what’s the hidden ingredient? Your comfort zone.

In order to gain new information with which you can successfully navigate that troublesome problem, you must step outside your comfort zone. Do something you normally do not do. Take an educated guess. Take a calculated risk. Do something different, and pay attention.

Had I not been paying attention when I came to that section of the trail, I would have missed the subtle indentations in the mud, which gave me a much wanted answer. Paying attention is absolutely required to win this situation.

In your business, you have an obstacle. It may be a difficulty you have resigned to live with. It may be a thorn in your side, or it may be a gaping hole in your capabilities. No matter how large or small it may be, just remember: persistence through discomfort brings answers. Stamina in the face of attack, brings strength. Solutions love to be found, but must be wooed with careful thought, consideration, and action outside your comfort zone.

More and more companies are making an investment in virtualization. Moving multiple physical servers into a single virtualized server provides numerous benefits in teh cost savings department, disaster recovery department, and on the desktop / user’s side, it provides an incredible opportunity for systematization and standardization of desktops across users. But with all this technology, are you likely to be upgraded out of a job?

To truely understand how this will affect you, your organization, and your paycheck, we’ll examine how each of the following categories of IT professional fit into the overall situation.

Primarily, you must accept that it takes an army to run an information technology infrastructure. It takes network administrators, security gurus, hardware guys, desktop technicians, and, of course, managers.

Understanding where each role fits into your organization’s IT army.

Network Administrators

Network Administrators are like Roman Centuries. They typically command and control around 100 users on a daily basis, but may have 500 users under their command. They deal with high level issues such as user access and control, and other administrative tasks. They spend most of their time in active directory or Exchange, and on servers.

A large organization should have an equally large IT army, and will probably have multiple administrators each with a specialization (Active Directory, Exchange, etc…). It will make no difference to them if the server is virtualized or not. Their job will remain largely unchanged.

Security Professionals

Security Gurus are much like Roman spies or modern day counter intelligence officers. Their job is primarily to keep the good guys safe, the good data safe, and keep the bad guys out. They should be spending most of their time keeping abreast of the threats and conditions, and ensuring the network is safe and protected. Moreover, they should be educating the staff (either in person or by webinar) once / month because as we all know: socially engineered attacks are the greatest threat to any network.

Security professionals, much like spies, are rarely seen or heard from until it is reports time. Their jobs will remain largely unchanged as well because even though the technology is changing, the threats will constantly evolve to encompass new vulnerabilities in the new technology.  In fact, security professional’s job security may actually increase as a result of new technology and the multitude of “unknowns” the the new technology brings.

Hardware Professionals

Hardware Professionals are the “smiths” of the Roman army. You cannot fight a war without weapons, and you cannot have a properly functioning organizatoin without hardware specialists. Virtualization would make no difference to the hardware guy. He deals with voltage, circuits, cables, and wires. It doesn’t matter if the computer is running a host or guest OS. It still has to run. Hardware specialists role will remain largely, unchanged.

Desktop Technicians

Desktop Technicians are the front line of defense. They are the foot soldiers of the Roman army. They are the first deployed, the first victors of battle, but also the first to suffer injury or death in a conflict. That being said, no army can succeed without them. They are needed. They are vital, and they are essential. From Roman times to modern day, the foot soldier has been an indispensable asset to any military. Even in modern day times, when scouts have been replaced by drones, we still send hundreds of thousands of men and women over seas during conflict. The same will be true with a virtualized desktop infrastructure.

However, there are two caveats:

1. The number of foot soldiers (desktop techs) required for victory will be less.
2. The primary job of the foot soldier (desktop techs) will change.

Because corrupted registries, corrupted software, and other operating system related failures will no longer be an issues for the desktop technician, the amount of “break fix” work will consequently be decreased. The same has been true of the military and technology. The number of casualties in modern day wars is tiny compared to WWII and prior because technology allows us to fight wars, in some cases, without even showing up. We do it by remote control.

So shall the desktop maintenance become. It will no longer be the responsibility of the desktop tech. It will become either the network administrator’s responsibility, or a new position will be created specifically for re-imaging or re-loading desktops.

So what will become of the desktop technician?

The substance and category of their job will change from a desktop technician to a user service and support specialist. Users will be users. The will forever be accidentally deleting files, or dragging their inbox into their trashcan (or worse). Desktop technicians will have to acquire specialized knowledge in customer service and leadership in order to continue to add value to the organization and preserve their employment.

The days of uninstall, reinstall, and run will be over, and they will give way to “Thank you for calling the IT department, how may I serve you today?” will have dawned.

Users will always be users. They generally only learn applications to competency: sales guys will still use excel for everything, they will still use power point as word. Administrative staff will still only be using $21 worth of Office (links, bold, italic, underline, center, bullets, and numbering … sometimes). They will not learn how to line up tabs, they will never remember the steps to doing a mail merge using the Excel spreadsheet the sales guy improperly formatted.

Users will still attempt to send 110MB attachments via email, and wonder why Outlook is broken.

Remember: the army always serves at the pleasure of the populace (unless you live in a military run totalitarianistic country). It is one of the most expensive departments to operate. Only the fittest survive in the army. If you’re too slow, you will be slaughtered. If you’re among the best and the brightest, you earn ribbons and promotions. The same is true of an IT organization. Technology doubles every 18 months. If you are not constantly improving your knowledge and skills to keep pace with technology, you will soon be replaced by someone else who will double their knowledge in that same time period, virtualization, or a robot.

The only other way to avoid getting discharged is to provide the best customer service experience possible for your users. Proactively educate, and bring tremendous value to your organization. In this manner, not only will you keep your job when the “cuts” from virtualization come down from the powers that be, you’ll be justified in asking for a raise during all the firings as well.

They will have the money. You’ll be cashing in on the savings from virtualization.

One of the most beloved qualities of Asterisk as a PBX is the voice mail to email capability. Frequently, however, it breaks or doesn’t work. To many, this can be very frustrating, but troubleshooting the problem is actually just a simple set of steps. This article will give you the basic tools you need to fix the email problem that is plaguing your Asterisk phone system.

Step 1: Test Email Connectivity

It doesn’t do any good to try and email if your connectivity is bad, incorrect, or non-existent. The easiest way to test your email connectivity is called a “telnet test” or a “banner test”. The object here is to ensure that:

1. Your email server is up and running.
2. The port is correct
3. It is accessible.

Procedure

From the shell, type telnet mail.yourhost.com 25. You should get a banner response that looks like this:

Telnetting to see the SMTP Server Banner

The 220 response shown above means that the mail server is alive, well, and awaiting your connection.

Step 2: Send a test email.

Next, we are going to send a test email and see if it gets delivered. This will prove that all systems are go on the email side or will show any problems you have on your email side. The objective here is to determine whether or not the problem is with the email or asterisk configurations.

For this part, I employ a simple command line program called mailx. Mailx is part of the mailutils package, and on Ubuntu, may be installed with the command: apt-get install mailutils.

Procedure

From the command line, type:

mailx -s "Your Subject Goes Here" youremail@yourdomain.com

Once you hit enter, the cursor will just return to the left side of the screen. Mailx is waiting for you to type a message. Put in a few test lines, and then, when you’re done, hit CTRL+D to signify you’re done typing the message. mailx will prompt you for a "CC". Enter an additional email address here (optional), and hit enter.

If you recieve the email, then all we have to do is double check the voicemail.conf file to make sure it is setup correctly. If you don’t, then it looks like there is something wrong with your mail setup.

Step 3: Troubleshooting your MTA

There are many MTA’s (Mail Transfer Agents) such as sendmail and others. For simplicity’s sake, I am discussing nullmailer because it is easy to use. The concepts here will be the same for other MTA’s; however, their configuration may be vastly more complicated. If you’re not an MTA specialist, then I recommend you use nullmailer. (apt-get install nullmailer).

First, you should check to see if your MTA is even installed. For nullmailer, you can accomplish this by executing: aptitude search nullmailer. If it comes back with an “i” as the first letter of the status line, then it is installed. For anything else, run apt-get install nullmailer.

Procedure

Check your mailname and remotes configurations:

The mailname configuration (stored under /etc/mailname) holds the name of your mailserver. This has to really exist, or most mail servers will reject your mail.

The remotes configuration (stored under /etc/nullmailer/remotes) should contain the sending mail server configuration in this format:

smtp.mailserver.com smtp --port=[port] --user=username --pass=password

for example:

smtp.comcast.net smtp --port=25 --user=myuser --pass=supersecret

Once you have properly setup these files, repeat the mailx procedure above (Step 2) to ensure it’s setup properly.

Step 4: Clear the Queue

You may have had messages filling up in the queue while the email was broken. You can check this by listing the contents of /var/spool/nullmailer/queue. If that directory is full of files, you have a bunch of emails waiting to go out. There’s only one problem: they are misconfigured!

Execute nullmailer-send form the terminal, and watch for error messages. Most commonly, the server names, hostnames, and other configurations were incorrectly copied into the outbound messages. So we need to know what they are, and do a find and replace. Nullmailer-send will give you the error messages. For instance, let’s say it tells you that mail.localhost.local is an invalid sender domain. You can use sed to execute a find and replace on every message in the queue to fix this issue, then run nullmailer-send again, and they will all go out.

Procedure

1. Run nullmailer-send
2. Note the errors
3. Use sed to execute a find and replace on all messages in the directory to fix that error. Use the syntax: sed -i ‘s/findthis/replacewiththis/g’ *
4. Repeat steps 1-3 until they send.

Alternatively, you could just delete all those messages from the queue. This has pro’s and con’s. The pro’s are: your users know email has been broken, and won’t expect to receive old emails. So, life may be easier. Additionally, if you clear out the queue and emails from 2 months go out ot users, they all might have a fit, and your phone will ring off the hook with "user panic." The con is: you lose data. Delete with caution. Send with caution. Caveat Emptor.

Step 5: Check Asterisk Configs

The voicemail configuration file for asterisk is held in /etc/asterisk/voicemail.conf. configure the following directives to make it work:

serveremail: This is the "return address" of the user in the form of username only. Mine is configured as "asterisk" (serveremail=asterisk).

sendvoicemail=yes

Next, configure the individual voicemail mailboxes. These usually go under the default context. You may have a need to put them in different contexts; however, that is an advanced configuration, which is outside of the scope of this article.

The syntax for a mailbox is:

NNNN => NNNN,Directory Name,email@yourdomain.com

where “N” represents a digit 0-9.

Once you have properly configured your voicemail mailboxes, you can reload the voicemail application to make them live by entering the asterisk CLI, and executing reload app_voicemail.so.

If that still doesn’t work, restart services, or reboot the box (as a lazy or novice way of restarting everything).

Conclusion

Fixing Asterisk voicemail to email problems is conceptually simple: make sure your server configs are right, make sure you can get to the server, make sure the MTA exists and is configured properly, and make sure you have the voicemail mailboxes setup properly. Do all this, and 99 times out of 100, your email will begin to flow. If you still have problems, feel free to post questions at the bottom of this post, and I’ll be glad to help.

Intellectual Capital

Intellectual capital is nothing more than specialized knowledge.  Intellectual capital typically exists before any business does. It is formed from the scientist who invents a new widget, the computer programmer who develops new software, or the ex-con who spent 3 years in prison reading about horticulture and agriculture so he could start his own business when he got out.

Intellectual capital may also be intellectual property, a methodology, or simply: a set of answers needed by other people.

Intellectual capital can be used to generate business captial and generate money, but intellectual capital by itself is rarely the source of riches. It is a fuel that is to be burned in the machine of business to generate business capital, which is where the real wealth created. When companies buy other companies, they do not buy intellectual capital, the buy business capital, systems, and cash flow.

Business Capital

Business capital is the by-product of mistakes, time and experience of you and your employees. Business capital represents the net worth of an employee’s knowledge and ability to perform their job and “grease the wheels” of your money making machine called a business.

For instance, one of the most overlooked and under appreciated departments is IT. IT Guys know that the entire “belly of the beast” operates solely on their ability to build and maintain networks and information infrastructure. But how much is an IT guy worth? If you take the average salary of an IT professional ($60,000 / year depending on the area) you can quickly see how how valuable the “average” IT person is to a large company.

However, when an IT person increases their personal intellectual capital and transmutes their knowledge into systems that produce profit for the company, they multiply their business capital. You go from being the break-fix guy to the guy who saved the company 11% on costs last year and helped pad the bottom line an extra 5%. What do you think that guy is worth now? The answer is no longer $60,000 / year. The answer is: replacement cost, which is salary + benefits + time required to find a replacement + learning curve + lost revenue from service interruption. That’s a lot more than $60,000.

I have a friend who worked for a small company of 45 people here in the Atlanta area. My friend, Steve, managed their network, serviced all the computers, wrote programs to automate tasks, built servers, built and operated the database, and kept the entire infrastructure going all by himself. Over the years, the owners of the company became short sighted and told him repeatedly that he needed to take a pay cut from the six figure salary he was earning to something more along the lines of the $60,000 / year mentioned above. Their reasoning was: “we could fire you and hire two college kids to do the job.”

They had no idea how expensive it was going to be to replace Steve’s accumulated business capital. The entire business ran on command line programs written in C, which were operated from scripts. 15 years of code. There was very little documentation on what operated what, and what little documentation there was were Steve’s personal notes, and those might as well have been written in Sanskrit because only Steve could read the notes and understand them. Just to “keep up” with everything Steve managed, the company would have had to hire a C programmer, a database administrator, a network administrator, and a help desk tech.

When Steve left, it only took a couple of weeks and their entire IT infrastructure came into catastrophic failure. Weekly sales and commission reports could not be created, so the sale people could not be paid. Backups fail. Email crashed. The more their cheap college kids tinkered with the system, the worse it got. The company even tried to hire Steve back, but because they had burned the bridge and repeatedly told Steve he wasn’t worth what they were paying him, Steve had no interest.

It would have been vastly cheaper to keep Steve on at full pay (or even increase his pay by a percentage) because of the value of his acquired business capital.

Money

One of the most mis-quoted proverbs of all time must be: “Money is the root of all evil.” The correct quote is “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil”, and it originates from 1 Timothy 6:10 in the New Testament of the Bible. And, this quote is very true. Money is a tool, and should be treated like such. It is a wonderful slave, and an evil master. Money is often referred to as liquid capital. We characterize it with terms like liquidity and cash flow. Money is nothing more than the oil of the machine of business. It allows energy and value to move from one part of the machine to another and back again. When the oil runs low, the machine cannot function properly. When the oil is plentiful, the machine runs well. When there is “too much” oil, some is skimmed off the top and distributed or stored for when the machine needs more.

Money is a natural by product of the delivery of goods or services, which are the combined result of growing intellectual capital and growing business capital. Both need to grow in order to continue the growth of money and wealth. The growth of intellectual and business capital should always be the goal. Money itself should never be the goal. When you begin to chase money as a goal rather than build ever increasing intellectual and business capital, your business will invariably decline.

Never chase money. Chase intellectual capital. Chase business capital. Keep members of your team that are rich in both, and fire employees who are not appreciating in intellectual and business value. Keep this cause, and money will show up in your bank accounts almost as if by magic.

There is an old adage that states: “If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself.” You may be tempted to think this is good advice, but you would be wrong. You may be tempted to think “no one in my company can complete this task, because no one can do it to my standard.” Again, you are causing trouble for yourself.

Pride Paves the way to Bankruptcy

The difference between doing something well and choosing properly something that only you can do is huge. The former leads to bankruptcy, stress, exhaustion, and a poorly run business because that decision is made from pride. When pride says “Only I can do” it is typically wrong.

Conversely, when necessity says: “Mr. Owner, only you can do this one” that’s logic, not pride.

For instance, only you have a clear vision and truly understand where you want your business to go, what kind of culture you want the business to have, and how successful you want the business to be. This is strategic, and like most strategic issues, only you can do it. Only you can write the vision and missions statements. Only you can safeguard the strategy with which you will grow the business into a thriving enterprise.

Another example of things only you can do is: exercise. Proper health and exercise are very important. If you’re laden with prescriptions, or if your calendar is full of doctor’s appointments, you cannot concentrate on your business properly. Conversely, if you do something only you can do: exercise, then that gives way to less stress and a healthy lifestyle. So the question becomes: “Do I delegate this work so I can go run 6 miles or do I do it myself and keep my employee bored in the office and idle?”

You run.

The Application

When you have clarity on what tasks only you can do, and what tasks can be delegated, your choices become clear. Do I clean the house or do I exercise? Simple. You go exercise, and pay someone to clean the house. Do I cook dinner or do I hire a house keeper? The answer? Hire a house keeper? Why would you be doing $8 an hour work when you could be doing something priceless like spending quality time with your family, which is something only you can do. Why do yard work? Why clean out your own gutters?

Admittedly, many of my readers will not be in a position to hire full time staff to operate their home, garden, and gutters. But you are in a financial position to make certain small steps. You can hire more employees, or change the way you interact with your employees. You can begin to implement this strategy of leveraging only the highest and best use of your time. You are in a position to clarify (in your life and business)  what tasks are tasks that only you have the capability of completing? Things you can do are not necessarily things you should do.

Tasks that only you can do are, by necessity, things you must do. Things you do because you don’t like how others do them are not things you should be doing. That’s just your pride interfering with your success.

Decisions are a great resource. They cost nothing to produce, and can make all the difference in the world to your business. Are you making the right decisions? How do you know?

Clearing the Fog of Failure

One of the most overlooked means of success is the speed at which you can fail. Frequent, sustainable failure (planned mistakes called “tests”) will give you knowledge of the business landscape with great speed. Just as military scouts are forever attempting to monitor and probe enemy territory, so should you be probing the market to remove the “fog of war” surrounding it.

Carl von Clausewitz was a Prussian military strategist. One of his chief theories was the “Fog of War”. Simply put: the fog of war is a blanket of uncertainty that surrounds a conflict or battle because you cannot know all of the data about your enemy. You deal with bits and pieces, and assimilate those as best you can; however, the rest you must approximate. As the battle begins, troops move, and more territory comes under your control, the fog of war becomes less dense around certain areas of battle, which have been explored or monitored, and lifts completely when it has been conquered.

In business, we have many fogs to deal with: marketing fog, employee fog, sales fog, service fog, and customer fog to name a few. Each fog surrounds your goal. Each fog begins very dense. As you experiment with each, you learn more skills, become more productive, and gain insights into each of the problems, missions, and difficulties that stand between you and success.

Failing quickly in small sustainable tests can yield extraordinary amounts of information. The trick is to only allocate a minimum number of resources that could successfully accomplish a given task. For instance, a commander does not send just one soldier to do anything. He sends at least two, and in most cases he sends a small team. You must learn from this same commander. Underfunding a marketing test will assure failure.

Moreover the commander will not move entire battalions just to go see “what’s over that hill?” That would be an extraordinary waste of resources when a small team could also suffice. Conversely, if the commander KNEW what was over the hill, and he also KNEW what forces would be required to take it, and he also KNEW that taking the target would give him an advantage over the entire enemy, then he will deploy entire battalions and every man he has at his command in accordance with a strategic plan to take the target, and turn it into an asset.

Likewise, you must first test your market, identify your targets, and pick the top targets into whom you will invest the maximum amount of resources for an identified and quantifiable return.

Quick decisions and quick failures will help the commander determine what areas and locations are valuable and which are not. Then, quick decisions accompanied by a strategic plan will result in the acquisition of those targets, which will then become the commander’s assets.

Your business should be no different. Use quick decisions and quick failures to identify niches in your market and to uncover their weak points, selling points, pain points, and the like. Then, when you have identified your targets, deploy resources strategically and without prejudice in an effort to acquire them as clients.

An Unlimited Resource

Decisions cost nothing to make, do not require any resources, and can be manufactured by anyone as fast as humanly possible. You have an unlimited supply of them, and you can throw out any decisions when ever you feel like it as a “bad decision” and replace it with a better one. Put simply, decisions are wonderful because they always produce some type of data with which you can grow your business and learn.

You might be thinking to yourself: “I have made some really bad and expensive decisions in my life… I am not sure I believe all this.”

I would not dare contradict what you’re thinking. I will, however, tell you that there is one key word in that phrase: expensive. No decision should be expensive until you have properly lifted the fog surrounding the decision. You don’t bet the farm until you know it’s a sure thing (or as close as you can get to a sure thing in your industry). All your decisions should be small, risky ones until you strike it rich with a winner.

For example, when I first began to market totalticketsystem.com, I had several pay-per-click advertisements on the various search engines. None of those campaigns spent more than $5.00 / day. NONE OF THEM. I tested well over 100 headlines, 37 pictures, and 15 different landing page scenarios before I found the winner. Once I found the winner, I put big bucks behind it, and BOOM! it sold out (as you can see here). Slowly and methodically I lifted the fog that surrounded what my target audience (IT professionals like you) wanted from a ticket and billing system. Once I hit that vein of gold where I was communicating to other IT people about issues and features they really cared about, I put serious resources behind it.

If you’re doing the math, I had to make 100+37+15 (152) decisions before I found the winner. 152 total decisions – 1 winner = 151 bad decisions. To put it bluntly, I made 151 bad decisions in 1 month! Then I sold out the entire system in 1 week!

How to Make Quick Decisions

In order to make quick decisions, you must have a set of criteria by which to measure your decisions. Our criteria and checklist is listed below. Feel free to use and adopt any part of it to your own means:

1. A clear vision, mission, and statement of culture of our company.
2. Does the decision fit into our overall strategy?
3. Will the decision yield good information with which we can move forward?
4. Am I willing to take a total loss on this decision if it doesn’t work?
5. Am I willing to back this decision with the minimum necessary resources for this to have a good chance of success?
6. Have I documented how this decision came to being, and how it will be executed so I can reproduce success and avoid future failures?
7. Does this decision force me outside of my comfort zone?

If you have all seven of these tools in place, you will be able to make quick, accurate decisiosn that produce copious amounts of information in real time. Your company will be able to “bob and weave” in the market until you have found a tight niche and profitable mechanical means and tactical execution that boosts your bottom line.

If you have any questions on how this may apply in your business, leave a comment below, or friend me on Facebook, and send me a message.