I’ve been doing some research over the last few days and have found that niche search is far from solved. Many market verticals are lacking an effective aggregator for timely content. The tools everyone needs are known, but they haven’t been implemented. Instead of true solutions, we find scraping sites that just suck in content and spit it out un-validated, unverified and unorganized. Because of the high costs of building robust tools, what results is a poor, incomplete collection of information, which quickly becomes stale.

That coupled with inaccurate supporting information, primarily due to high data-set costs, provides a less than desirable experience for users. Mahalo saw this in the generalized search market and put into place human editors who comb the internet looking for the best information and vetting user submissions. The result are guides of information that are informative and helpful.

How long will it be before we see Mahalo style sites targeting niche verticals? Who out there is working on a white label Mahalo which can be reused in these smaller markets?

Some five or six years ago, I implemented an email data transfer process using PGP to handle file encryption leveraging self signed keys that relied on the freely available tools to handle the encryption of the data. All was good (or good enough). The data was secure, everything worked and I was happy.

Fast forward to present day.

I need to update the code so I can deploy on a new environment so I turn back to the company who was so much help last time and what do I find? The “free” product has been replaced by a 30 day trial version that cripples some features (actually locking you out of your data BTW). Licensing is ridiculously hard to understand - suddenly I realized why so many individuals and small businesses don’t bother to encrypt their data. Hell, many organizations don’t even do it as often as they should.

Unfortunately I can’t alter this process to veer from PGP, I am no longer the owner of it, but I think for all future implementations I’ll use GnuPG. I highly recommend anyone dealing with sensitive files make a strong effort to stay away from the larger vendors until they make a serious effort to make encryption available to individuals freely (and easily).

Cutting through wood with a hand saw is a hard job. Pushing the blade back and forth through the wood slowly but surely making the cut deeper and deeper until it’s completed is a time consuming, labor intensive task. Once completed, there’s almost always another piece that needs to be cut.

Often in our daily tasks, we find ourselves pushing and pulling the saw blade back and forth, moving a project along towards it’s expected completion date. As soon as that project is completed, often before it’s completed, another one presents itself and requires our attention. This is very similar to cutting through the log. We often feel taking even the shortest break will put us off our course, the work will pile up, and we’ll never get it all done.

You’re wrong. Sharp tools cut faster.

Franklin Covey has taught us this already. Taking a 10-20 minute break to sharpen the saw can make the cutting process go faster. Increasing productivity and of course resulting in completing the tasks quicker. Taking the time to obtain the needed skills is a hard discipline, but it must be done and done now!

Think about your current and future task list. Now, take 10 minutes to think about your most mundane task and research to see if there’s a book, course, webinar or other resource you can tap to learn more about it. Even the most cursory overview will teach you some nuance that improves your productivity - sometimes - you’ll learn your understanding of a topic is really far more basic than you realize. The added time spent on yourself will help you to complete that mundane task perhaps a little more efficiently, giving you more time to complete the task at hand.

What saw am I sharpening?

I’ve been writing simple, and some not so simple, CRUD (CReate Update Delete) SQL for most of my professional career. I find it boring and tedious, but a necessary evil in the Web 2.0 world. This week I started reading Refactoring SQL Applications by Stéphane Faroult and Joe Celko’s Thinking in Sets. What I found was that many applications I’ve seen (and written) hardly tap the power of SQL and that there are some major mistakes that the PHP/Perl/ColdFusion/ASP.NET/C# programming manuals proliferate in the over simplification of relational database design. I’m now realizing that the majority of code I’ve seen and worked on is actually using SQL as a giant persistent hashmap!

These books are causing me to think about not just the CRUD statements differently, but how my applications interact with the persistent storage engines web apps interact with every day.

Take a few minutes today to sharpen your saw.

Mashable had a great piece by guest author Michael Cerda for employees of small companies to help know when to jump ship. I highly recommend reading this for anyone working at a small(ish) company. I’ve seen evidence of this at a number of the places I’ve been in or worked with (not just tech companies either) and would be wary if you see anything in your current situation that you can relate to.

Brian Nadel recently wrote a nice article comparing broadband service from the big three wireless carriers, AT&T, Verizon and Nextel. Normally I have good connectivity within my house through my local cable carrier and don’t mind paying for airport WiFi once in a while. I’ll be traveling to the Northern Virginia area in the next month and want to have a broadband connect card as an option for connecting wirelessly. The $300/night hotel I’m staying in doesn’t offer free WiFi, instead it’s a $10/day T-Mobile hotspot. Add that together with the fees from the airport (Boingo) it comes up to a hefty $80 for internet service while away from home for a single week!

In Brian’s article he mentioned that AT&T had an $80 option for those adverse to a 1 or 2 year commitment. Intrigued I stopped by my local AT&T store and was given a bunch of misinformation that differed even from the information I was able to read on the AT&T site. 2 calls to AT&T later I was still unable to get the $80/month plan mentioned. I asked my sales consultant if there was an option to add it onto an existing line of service which could be upgraded and downgraded as needed based on my travel patterns and still no luck. At least a 1 year commitment is required. I was able to get an offer of a month to month with no discount on the card plan (which is to be expected) for $29.95/month with a 10Mb data allowance. Unfortunately the overage charges are outrageous ($0.06/kb). A single webpage might end up costing $2 to $3 to view!

There are companies that are catering to my more specific needs - a short term “rental” but they’re making a hefty profit on the service. I found two services, one which I wouldn’t even think about giving my credit card information to. The other, Rovair, seems to have a nice product offering, comparable with purchasing WiFi cost wise - but of course with the added convenience of your own dedicated connection.

Verizon and Nextel only offer plans with contracts as well. Verizon does have a 1 year options and Nextel locks you in for 2. So now I’m back to considering my options with pay as you go WiFi and spotty EDGE connectivity through my paired Blackberry and probably the most economical - going without <shudder />.

Nothing like a nice fluff piece in the monthly issue of Fortune Small Business, but I figured I’d check and sure enough Rochester, MN made the list of 100 Great Places to live and launch a small business (although with 100 cities - most major metro areas do). The winner was Bellevue, Washington. San Jose, CA ranked 66th. Other Minnesota cities with honors were Minneapolis, MN at #23 and St. Cloud, MN at #75.

Recently I had the opportunity to purge over 15 years of saved papers, files, magazines and other junk. With the family out of town for a few days I sat down with the goal of getting myself inline with GTD and purging the backlog of files. I had made an attempt about 6 years ago, thinning out old bank statements, but now it was time to get serious. With all of my necessary organization items at hand I started going through the files, sorting them into 2 boxes: one to shred and another to recycle. After many hours of processing all of this backlog, I ended up with a box 16″x16″x16″ (~41lbs.) of potentially sensitive papers.

I own a light weight shredder that will process 5 or 6 sheets at a time without much effort, but I didn’t want to dedicate an entire day or more to feeding paper and emptying the impossibly small receptacle that it’s attached to. I began the quest for a shredding service online by filling out 3 different forms for local shred on site services. Only one bothered to email me back (although another did put me on their email SPAM list) with a proposal. They actually recommended their ship and shred service as it would cost about 1/2 as much as the on-site document destruction process. With no other alternatives easily at hand, I opted to give it a try. I filled out the online form, provided some information about the contents of the box and where I live - the whole process only took about 10 minutes at the end of which I had a FedEx label to ship the box to St. Paul, MN about an hour away. The entire charge was right around $45 and was good for up to 65lbs.

I then used FedEx’s online tool to schedule a pickup for the package and 24 hours later it was gone. Checking the rates with FedEx’s site, the shipping costs for the box was around $15 (if I had shipped it with my corporate account) so the shredding portion fills out the rest at $30. Of course they’re saving a few bucks because the box is lighter and they presumably have worked out a better rate with FedEx - but I digress. This is considerably cheaper than even hiring someone at $5/hr to feed the paper into my shredder for me (which may or may not have gotten done in the 9 hours that would have paid for). According to the site, once it’s all done I’ll get a certificate of destruction that I can print from the website. Good to know if your a small business needing to purge some documents in compliance with federal law. As I see it, it saved me countless hours of shredding and I’ll use them again if I have a large quantity of documents to shred.

This is a repost of an entry I initially made on my personal blog. As my new repository for all things technology related, I’m reposting it here.

Yesterday I had the need to host a conference call. Being a one person shop, it’s cost prohibitive for me to pay money to have an on demand conference bridge (especially when most of my clients have their own.) Back to my problem, I needed to speak with another small company yesterday and there were four of us that needed to be on the call. I can bridge two calls together with my Vonage service, or even just using my cellphone, but four - that’s one too many. So I tried FreeConference.com and was very pleased with the results. The base offering is free (you’ll pay toll charges to the dial-in line, MN for me - go figure) and they have a $0.10/minute plan for toll free numbers and will even record the call. After the call ended, I received a report of who was on the call and for how long, even what numbers they called in from.