Wow! Now this is a pretty crazy infograph. My how the times have changed. I remember having only one or two computers and it was only DOS! Heck, even when I started at the local community college they only had a few pc’s and they were DOS as well!!! Glad we’re not dealing with that stuff anymore. I think the scariest stats in this infographic are near the bottom. 64% of teenage students used emoticons and a full two-thirds of American teenagers use internet abbreviations (OMG, LOL, etc.) in their schoolwork. See for yourself below…

Via: Online Colleges and Universities

great video on how social media can help your business grow…

Name: ShiftPlanning ()

Quick Pitch: ShiftPlanning Provides free employee scheduling tools to businesses of all sizes.

Genius Idea: ShiftPlanning is a web-based tool for companies that want a way to easily and efficiently manage work schedules and availability.

Schedule management, especially for companies or individuals who work remotely, can be difficult. Sure, you can use stuff like Google Docs () and Basecamp () for setting company-wide events, but once you have more than a handful of employees, keeping track of all that information can be tough.

ShiftPlanning is a suite of shift and scheduling tools that both employers and employees can use. You can use the system to set up multiple schedules, trade shifts, handle vacation days and requests, and to create a record of availability.

We like that ShiftPlanning doesn’t keep your data behind its walled garden; you can print or export files, access the site from your mobile phone and even integrate the system into your own website.

ShiftPlanning is free and worth checking out if you have problems managing schedules and employee shifts in your business or organization. What tools do you use to manage schedules? Let us know!

Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the “new CloudApp()” contest – use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP () app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”

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Wow! This integration into Bing maps is stunning. It really shows where the future of navigation and augmented reality is blending together. It should make for interesting vacations Are you on the map? If not, you’d certainly want to be. Imagine someone looking up your location on Bing only to find bland photo’s or just a map. Blagh! That’s not good for your image or marketing! Why not jazz things up by snapping some interesting photo’s and hosting them on Flickr so they “augment” what your viewers/visitors see about your business online? Maybe even some video. Heck, you could even broadcast a live event and tweet about it to promote it. Share it on Facebook too! Do everything you can to increase your market share.

With tools like Bing maps’ augmented reality and the increasing popularity of social media it’s becoming easier and easier to leverage these tools to drive business and the great part is it’s all FREE! There are no excuses for not doing these types of things to get more business. If you don’t have time or the knowledge to get it done, hire someone to do it for you! There are lot’s of great avenues for that, such as outsourcing it to someone overseas! For example, 123employee and AskSunday promote their skills in this area. Making excuses will not make you money.

The bluetooth headset and case from Mogo is revolutionary in it’s design. Not only is it cool to have my headset incoporated into my case for my iPhone but this is the slimmest bluetooth headset ever made! I’ve always hated having to carry around my headset separately and really don’t like having to use the corded versions, especially when getting into and out of the car. I no longer have that problem with my Mogo headset!

I saw a design similar to this on and LG? phone or something like that offered by Verizon a while back and always wondered why manufacturers don’t/didn’t offer this kind of thing more often, especially since some states, mine included (CA), require the use of a headset if using the phone while driving. Fumbling around with a corded headset is worse than just holding the phone to my head, in my opinion.

This headset works great! It is loud enough, very clear, connects fast and easily, stays put pretty well (don’t expect to go jogging with it but hey, it’s an earpiece and not headphones right!). I love the fact that I don’t have to worry about losing my headset or searching my pocket for it in a hurry.

The case fits great too. I actually broke my case while trying to insert the charging cable (I can be kind of clumsy sometimes) and when I contacted the manufacturer they offered to send me a new case no charge! I thought, wow, now if only all manufacturers were this gracious Well, it didn’t stop there. They OVER DELIVERED BY INCLUDING A BRAND NEW HEADSET ALONG WITH THE NEW CASE FREE!!!! (and charging cord too)I was surprised the headset was there and didn’t want to get charged so I called and they said,

“Thanks for the follow up.  Yes, we want to “over deliver” on the support of our early adopters.  If you’re happy – please tell the world!   (maybe a good post on the Apple website)   We did have a batch of products that had your problem so we’re trying to make everyone happy and in love with MoGo products.”

So, I did post a good review on Apple’s site and am now blogging about it here. I figured it’s the least I could do for such great

service. I think a lot of us get so accustomed to poor service that we fail to recognize the one’s who over deliver. Who do you think provides a great product and/or service? Let us know in the comments below!

BTW, they make a version for the Blackberry and one for your pc to use with Skype too!

This is a pretty awesome email marketing service. They are really working hard on making this seamless, easy and extremely functional. I highly recommend Infusionsoft for your CRM, email marketing and e-commerce needs!

Click here to view the embedded video.

At the beginning of the week, Dag Kittlaus wrote a post for Mashable about the birth of the virtual assistant. Today, Dag’s company, Siri, is releasing its iPhone app, Siri Assistant. Siri helps people get things done, by combining intelligent voice recognition with hooks into tons of different web services, making it easy for people to use their mobile devices to get things done.

When I talked to Dag a few weeks ago, he gave me a demo of what Siri Assistant is and what it does. The concept is pretty powerful: talk to your phone and let it find and make plans for you. So instead of going directly to a website and doing a traditional search for movie tickets at a certain time, I can just say “Get me movie tickets for Shutter *Island around 9 pm” and options for theaters near me (or theaters that I have previously indicated are my favorites) will show up and I can then purchase tickets directly from my phone.

Check out this screencast to see more of what Siri Assistant can do:

Siri was born from SRI’s CALO Project. The CALO Project (or Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) is the largest Artificial Intelligence project in US History. DARPA invested $150 million into CALO over the course of 5 years. What was learned from CALO has been implemented into Siri.

Using natural language understanding (think the Dragon Search and Dragon Dictation apps for the iPhone) to connect with existing services and APIs and traditional search components, Siri can become very adept at helping people get things done.

Siri has more than 30 different partners whose APIs the app can plug into when answering a request. These include services like OpenTable, MovieTickets.com, Eventful (), StubHub, Taxi Magic, Rotten Tomatos, Bing (), Google Maps (), and Yelp (). This list of partners will continue to expand over time.

What I was particularly impressed with is that if you have existing accounts with these services, you can log in to them and have Siri remember those credentials — so you can get your OpenTable points or use your MovieWatcher card. Siri will also offer up results from Bing if it can’t find something with one of its partners, so you aren’t just limited to the services that are integrated at the API level with Siri.

When I think about the best use cases for something like Siri, I think about when unexpected things come up — say you need to book a flight to a different city and also get a hotel room and taxi — and time is of the essence. It’s much easier and faster to say what you need than to have to go through the manual search mechanisms.

Siri gets better the more you use it, can adapt to the places you frequent, and can use technologies like geolocation to find better results. You can correct it with text input if the voice recognition isn’t right and also use traditional text input to get results.

Siri Assistant is free and available right now in the App Store. It’s an amazing first glimpse of a Jetsonian type of future. Now all I need is my jetpack and my robotic maid!

What do you think about the advancements in voice recognition and how they are changing how we can get things done? Let us know!

I received the following email from the makers of “Fresh the Movie”. I thought it was important so I’m posting it here. Hopefully you think it’s important too and will help stop this non-sense!

Genetic food giant Monsanto is at it again. Its next target: a new product that could eliminate all organic alfalfa, a key food for raising organic-fed cows and pigs without any genetic engineering.

The USDA is well on its way to approving Monsanto’s genetically modified alfalfa. In its own report, the USDA says that not enough consumers care enough about organic foods for the USDA to block Monsanto’s modified alfalfa seeds. [1]  This is absurd since one of the main reasons people buy organic food is to avoid genetically engineered crops.

The USDA is only accepting public comments for the next two weeks. We need you to write to the USDA right now and tell them they must not approve Monsanto’s mutant alfalfa. We’ll deliver your comments before the deadline. [2]

Click here: http://action.freshthemovie.com/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=1753

Alfafa is one of the major food sources for certified organic animals, not only because of its quality as forage, but because Monsanto’s patented genes are already found in 95% of soybeans and 80% of corn. If the USDA lets Monsanto sell its new alfalfa, it will inevitably overtake organic alfalfa crops through the natural pollination process. [3] As a result organic farmers may be feeding their cows genetically modified food.

Just like its corn and soy, Monsanto’s alfalfa is designed to tolerate its leading herbicide: Roundup. We can’t allow Monsanto’s greed to take-over one more crop. The consequences to our choice as consumer, to biological diversity, to the survival of our small and organic farmers depends are too dire.

Monsanto’s domination of our food must stop. For the USDA to shrug it off like nobody cares is to add insult to injury. We only have two weeks to submit our comments.The fight for FRESH food will continue, and with your help we’ll make it clear that people care about the food they eat.

Let’s show the USDA and Monsanto that people want food free from Monsanto’s modifications. Write your comments to the USDA now and say no to genetically modified alfalfa.

The fight for FRESH food will continue, and with your help we’ll make it clear that people care about the food they eat.

Thanks for all you do.

Technorati Tags: fresh, organic, food, genetic, Mansanto

This is pretty amazing! Looks like an oversized pda type of cell phone but with much more capability. It has a wierd/cool new optical mouse too. Check out the video. I bet you’ve never seen anything like this before!