September 8, 2010
How a New Breed Of Small Businesses is Harnessing the Power of Emerging Technologies
A small seafood restaurant attracts new customers with virtually no marketing budget. A four-person iPad case manufacturer generates more than $1M in revenue in four months with only four employees. A voice-over company is able to connect thousands of artists with opportunities, all without expensive hardware and software. A law firm increases access to key information while dramatically reducing technology-related costs and risks.
And these four companies are hardly unique. A new breed of small businesses is using Software as a Service (SaaS), free and open source software, social media and networks, mobility, cloud computing, and other emerging technologies to do things simply not possible even five years ago.
June 30, 2010
The LAMP Technology Stack
The technology stack that Voices.com used to build and maintain its web application is known as LAMP which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (or Perl or Python). Used together, they represent the most popular and most powerful form of web servers and website hosting.
June 28, 2010
How To Speed Up a Website
For a web-based service that helps to make the world sound good, we've been focused on speed as an element of design. After 12 months of hard work, we've achieved a 10X improvement in page loading times. This means it's ten times faster navigating the website, uploading and download audio files.
Voices.com's page load time has been reported as fast as 963 ms, which is ten times faster than the 15.30 seconds previously reported by Pingdom, a web site monitoring and measurement service.
In today's article, I'll share with you a number of tools that we used to achieve these improvements in page load time.
June 7, 2010
History of Video Games and Voice Overs
The video game industry is one of the largest and most profitable markets in the world. For years, it's been the fastest growing segment of the entertainment industry and has since eclipsed motion pictures. In the U.S., the gaming market raked in 19.6 billion dollars in revenue in 2009. In that same year, the Hollywood box office took in only 9.7 billion dollars.
72% of Americans are gamers and use a variety of gaming consoles. Other than innovative game ideas and superior graphics, part of this success is due to the astounding voice talent that heightens the experience of playing the games.
June 5, 2010
Strategic Thinking for a Successful Podcast
As with any other part of your marketing efforts, including a podcast, it truly benefits you to be prepared.
Whether you are podcasting for leisure or business you will need a plan.
Planning topics to discuss, possible guest interviews, and the duration of your show in advance will go a long way when producing a professional sounding podcast. Since you'll be recording your podcast in an almost live fashion, you will have the flexibility of going back and re-editing sections before committing your show as "podcast-ready."
March 23, 2010
How To Build a Mobile Website
While most of us working in technology companies are aware of the mobile Internet tsunami, many businesses have yet to embrace the technology by publishing a mobile version of their own website.
Do you have a mobile version of your website? Are your customers asking you for one?
I believe we've reached a critical point where businesses must have at least a brochure style mobile site to explain to mobile visitors who you are and how you can serve them.
After two years of accessing Facebook, Twitter and now FourSquare almost exclusively on my iPhone, I realized it was time that our company, Voices.com, created a modest mobile website. Here's how we did it, and how you can too, in just ten simple steps.
January 14, 2010
Voices.com Moves Into The Convergence Centre
You and your colleagues are invited to the official Opening Event of the new Convergence Centre at 999 Collip Circle at the University of Western Ontario Research Park, London Campus.
The event will include a formal opening planned for 1:15pm, along with an open house throughout the afternoon that will allow tenants, guests, and members of the public a chance to drop-in whenever they are available. We'll provide food and music, tours of the new building, and we will have talks by Windermere Manor's Writer-in-Residence, Christine Walde, and artist Troy Ouellette about their work and cultural activities happening and planned for the Research Park.
Click through for all the details...
September 2, 2009
Fixing Broken Links with the 301 Redirect
In the Bible, Jesus tells the story called "The Parable of the Lost Sheep". If a man lost a sheep, he would leave the others to look for it. When he had found it he would be very glad and rejoice with his friends. In this way the lost sheep becomes temporarily more important than all the others.
Do you spend a lot of time trying to create that winning piece of content or obtaining the prized link in an effort to gain new visitors to your website? Why not get the fundamentals right first by retrieving those broken links caused by moved pages, deleted pages or new URLs?
August 21, 2009
Twitterforce
The team at Voices.com is the first company to use TwitterForce to manage Twitter conversations directly within Salesforce.
We've been able to import entire tweet conversations with one click. Specifically, we can create leads, cases, and solutions from tweets.
The set-up was simple. Like other Twitter monitoring applications, we just defined search terms and monitored Twitter search results for those terms.
Finally, and most importantly, we can now engage our customers and industry people by sending outbound tweets with case solutions or custom messages.
August 10, 2009
Call Centre Week Canada
Keeping customers and winning new ones via word of mouth is the key to maintaining top line revenue - you can never cut costs enough to survive if you can't maintain the top
line. However, customers are now much less tolerant of any service glitch.
Delivering flawless service is critical to maintaining reasonable margins and taking advantage of the most cost-effective marketing mechanism... word of mouth.
Businesses of any size can take advantage of this tremendous opportunity to hear how other companies operate and utilize their call centres to create memorable customer experiences and spur on positive word of mouth.
Next week, I'll be speaking at Canada's most highly anticipated call centre event alongside 35+ award winning speakers, all of whom are prepared to share their call centre solutions.
July 18, 2009
Twitter Verified Accounts
It's real. Tonight I confirmed the existence of Twitter Verified Accounts, a much needed add-on for businesses, brands and celebrities to communicate to users that they are the real deal.
As Twitter describes the new service, the purpose of Twitter Verified Accounts is to prevent identify confusion and establish authenticity.
March 17, 2009
Salesforce Launches New AppExchange
Today, marks the launch of the redesigned AppExchange, a online application store for business users where they can extend the functionality of Salesforce.
As many of your know, I'm a strong advocate of Salesforce for both small and big business. In fact, we started with the Professional Edition focused on the Customer Relationship Management elements and have since upgraded to the Enterprise version and have taken advantage of the full suite of tools.
Many of those tools have been found in the AppExchange, including Salesforce for Google Apps, Salesforce for Google Adwords and Salesforce Mobile.
January 16, 2009
Download the Audio from President Barack Obama's Inauguration
On January 20, the United States of America will inaugurate its 44th President, Barack Obama. President Obama will be the first African American to hold the office, and will step into the White House in the midst of a trying economic situation and panoply of unresolved international issues.
January 3, 2009
Annual Website Maintenance Checklist
It's the time of year when we make resolutions are made. I'm not much of a resolution-maker myself, but I'm going to suggest that small business owners make one. Namely, it's a suggestion that you resolve to fix up your web site and pay attention to things you might have ignored for too long. I know you're busy and your time is valuable, so chances are good that you've missed a few minor issues that are making your web site look old and outdated.
Think about this way: Your car needs a tune-up every 15,000 miles or so to keep it running at its best. Your teeth need a checkup at least once or twice a year. Well, a regular checkup will also keep your web site running in peak condition.
January 2, 2009
Update The ⓒ Copyright Year On Your Website
First of all, Happy New Year!
And, with the new year comes some annual maintenance that every webmaster should be conscious of. Here's a quick tip from my list of annual website maintenance.
May 31, 2008
Blogging 101 - Tips for Effective Business Blogging
There has most definitely been a shift in the media landscape, from traditional media including newspaper, radio and television to online media. The most prevalent of the online media sources are blogs.
What Is a Blog?
Weblogs, web logs or simply blogs, as they are known, are easy-to-use websites (no HTML knowledge required), where you can quickly post thoughts, publish articles and interact with people. Blogs are typically accessible to any Internet user.
Blogs are Exploding
Technorati is now tracking over 50 million weblogs and about 120,000 new weblogs are being created worldwide each day. That's about 1.4 blogs created every second.
Businesses can take advantage of this powerful communications medium, starting with a few simple steps to get involved today.
April 15, 2008
Is the Mobile Web Dead? Not for Hybrid Web Apps
Most sites that are built exclusively around or are developed solely for mobile applications are probably dead. This may because the cost of mobile usage has been far too high in North America such that most mobile users are limiting severely how and when they access the net to avoid outrageous bills. Only now are annual flat rate fee structures coming into effect in North America.
April 14, 2008
Salesforce and Google Link CRM Apps to Office Tools
This morning, the Official Salesforce Blog announced that they have expanded their partnership with Google and together have delivered an industry-changing new product called Salesforce for Google Apps.
Techmeme and the New York Times has some great coverage on this developing story.
As heavy Salesforce and Google Apps users, we're pleased with this development and can see how we'll be using this dynamic duo for greater productivity and ultimately our ability to deliver a better service.
March 26, 2008
Leo Laporte Should Record an Audiobook
Monday evenings, I typically grab an hour to listen to my favorite podcast, This Week in Tech (TWiT) hosted by Leo Laporte, with frequent guests John C. Dvorak, Patrick Norton and others who analyze the weekly news in from the world of technology.
Seeing as Audible is their major sponsor, I knew the time would come when they discussed recording audiobooks, the time required and how much narrators get paid.
Well, I've got some answers for you.
March 23, 2008
Web Applications Improve with Greater Bandwidth and Better Security
There's been some discussion regarding software developers exploring new ways to bridge the gap between desktop and web applications.
Development tools such as Adobe AIR and Mozilla Prism are the two most notable players. To get a feel for what can been done, Adobe had published a nice gallery of applications.
Let's face it, the only reason desktop applications are still relevant is because of bandwidth and security.
March 22, 2008
How To Create a Sitemap (For People and Search Engines)
Sitemaps have been around since the advent of the Web and used primarily as a way to list all the pages on a particular website.
Nowadays, sitemaps have other purposes such as organizing web content by topic, showing the search engines which pages you have created and developing a linking structure that emphasizes specific areas of your website over others.
But just how do you make a sitemap? And, how do you get that sitemap into Google, Yahoo! and MSN? That's today's topic and for the webmasters and entrepreneurs out there, I think this article will be quite refreshing.
March 9, 2008
Voice Commands To Improve Data Input on Small Devices
An article in the New York Times explains how the barrier between man and machine is fading away.
For decades, we've been stuck with the mouse, icons and drop-down menus, originally invented at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s and made popular by Apple and Microsoft in the next decade.
How far have we come?
February 15, 2008
Amazon S3 Outage
News: There was a relatively short outage on Amazon’s S3 storage service a short while ago. Voices.com uses Amazon to host audio demos, but not auditions or files uploaded for SurePay escrow transactions.
February 12, 2008
The Three Layers of Podcasting
Photo by stevegarfield.
After the recent report that podcasting is on the rise in terms of both a larger listening audience and ad dollars spent on the medium, there's been significantly more chatter about how to start a podcast.
First and foremost, podcasting is about the content, not the technology. It's easy to get overwhelmed with technical details and special equipment, but it's really not that complicated.
Today, we're going to break it down into three simple steps; production, distribution and monetization.
January 11, 2008
How To Import Your Del.icio.us Bookmarks into Your Google Account
This tutorial covers how to export your Del.icio.us bookmarks by saving an XML file to your desktop, then importing that file into your personal Google account or your corporate Google Apps account.
You'll be amazed at how easy it is to do. Let's get started.
January 7, 2008
Voices.com Moves Ahead in Fast Company's Fast 50
Each year, the challenge generates thousands of entries and tens of thousands of comments from around the world, and results in high-profile recognition of 50 leaders, innovators, and technology pioneers. This year's challenge promises to be bigger and better.
December 10, 2007
The Audio Recording Signal Chain : Preamps
A microphone preamp is a device used to amplify the voltage taken from a microphone to a higher, more usable level. Most microphones must be used in conjunction with a microphone preamp to function properly.
Even with the best instruments, microphones and recording gear, the quality of your recordings depends greatly on your preamps.
Let's dive in and learn about the differences between hardware and software preamps, as well as how to choose the right preamplifier for your home recording studio.
December 4, 2007
The Audio Recording Signal Chain : Microphones
A microphone, sometimes referred to as a mike or mic captures the sound of your voice and converts that sound into an electrical signal.
All modern microphones are designed to accomplish the same thing. A microphone takes varying pressure waves in the air and convert them into varying electrical signals.
There are five different technologies commonly used to accomplish this conversion:
December 3, 2007
The Audio Recording Signal Chain : Sound Sources
Over the next few articles, we'll be discussing "The Signal Chain", audio engineer speak for the steps that a sound takes during the recording process.
The decisive factor for judging the sound quality of an audio production is subjective and influenced by current trends.
Having said that, knowing and optimizing the signal chain in your recording studio will ensure the best possible sound with the equipment readily available to you. It is important for you to understand what each component in the signal chain requires to perform at its optimum state, and that's precisely what this series aims to teach you.
Let's dive in...
