This maybe a slighly unusal post for some of my readers but I wanted to put this solution out there for anyone else who is suffering with what is a potentially great module for Drupal 7 called rotating-banner. The problem is the file in the projects directory needs to be patched. With forum help for others I hand patched the correct file and it now works like a charm.

I post it here for anyone to download who needs it. Download, unzip and replace your previous rotating-banner.module file.

There is no warranty expressed or implied. I used it and it worked for me. Good Luck

Update

This post has caused quite a discussion on LinkedIn. Why not see what people are saying…

The announcement of the "new iPad" or the iPad 3 was made this week by Apple. I thought it was about time to review how iPads are being used in the small business world. Will I get excited enough to buy the new iPad? Not sure as my iPad 1 is still working well. Sure it's a bit heavier that the new version and it doesn't have a camera or LTE – though it did load iOS 5.1 and runs just as well as it did before.

I have loaded the new iWorks tools, Pages, Numbers and Keynote all connected via iCloud which is fine for the limited amount of content creation I do using the iPad. 

After all the last couple of years using my 1st generation iPad here are the business tools I use most:

• Evernote – because it captures notes easily, sound records meetings as I take notes and then auto syncs when I am next in a wifi zone
• 1Password – for all those passwords I need to find when I use Safari (I have 1Password on all my devices and find it saves my memory on a daily basis for all those login id's and passwords)
• Safari – for all those browsing needs
• Mail – all accounts are IMAP and so sync up and I don't care which device I use to read my emails
• GoodReader – the companion program I use to read all those attachments on emails too big for Mail and for syncing my documents from Dropbox and a plethora of other servers

In my first article on the iPad I spoke about jailbreaking and loading Frash for running flash apps on the iPad. I discovered an even better solution where going down the jailbreaking path wasn't required

iSwifter – built to play games it can load ANY Adobe FLASH site I have visited. It loads the site very quickly, sometimes awkward to use but it is usable.

Many of the tools I use are also available on the iPhone and for my desktop and so I am always in sync with my data. A great way to ensure you're backed up.

There are literally hundreds and hundreds of useful specific apps you can load and use on your iPad. This is just a list of the ones I use almost every day. Every business has different needs for their work tools and processes. 

Contact KIX to let us help you bring tools like the iPad into your business to make you and your staff work even better.

I trust this has been useful for you. If you find other tools useful for you in your business then please let me know via the comments section.

There’s a lot of hype about the iPad. Great marketing from Apple about its latest wonderful hardware creation. A technological marvel for sure BUT is it useful for business professionals?

To get an understanding both of the tool and its capabilities, I had to get one, which I did after a lot of research on the net, reading magazines and visiting Apple shops. I am writing this article on the iPad on one of the many downloaded tool (apps). I bought a 16GB WiFi model not the 3G model. The base version to my mind has to be capable of delivering a business result. If its not then it doesn’t matter which version you buy, the outcome will be the same.

There are some basic functions that you want on the road:

• Email
• Browser
• Access to your documents
• Create, edit documents
• Access to the internet without the 3G version and now wifi

Before we get too fancy in our requirements lets examine each of these basic needs.

Email:

The built in email system, similar to Apple Mail and the iPhone version, is a good email client. Sure it misses some features from desktop clients but it works well. Especially if you combine it with GoodReader / QuickOffice / DocsToGo or similar programs to work with attachments. There are free versions of these programs which have some restrictions.

There are some paid for email apps, I’ve tried Altamail and found it to have good features. EXCEPT for send mail where it got stuck more often than not. The ability to flag bulk changes is a real bonus in this app.

Browser:

The iPad comes with Safari, a perfectly adequate browser. It can sync bookmarks with its desktop brother and allows you to have many browser windows open simultaneously. Of course it can’t render flash content, the bug bear of many, Many, MANY iPad and iPhone users. I wont rant about this here, but its a major shortcoming from a business and end user perspective.

There area range of browser alternatives on the iPad becoming available from the App Store, Mercury and Atomic to mention just two. The 3rd party apps, all have their own tweaks and focus to improve your browsing experience. To help overcome the Flash limitation, I tried two approaches:

- Access to hosted desktop

- Jailbreaking and installing Frash

There’s a new app on the iPad called iSwifter which does the job very well, not a free app but with the money and even on my iPad-1 its performance is quite satisfactory.

To be continued…

The debate over the safety of mobile phones hots up again. New studies (reported in the Sydney Morning Herald) have shown just how hot the phones get when held to the head. The mobile/cell/handy is a tool we use daily, in fact since the iPhone came it's a way of life to some and with how hot the Blackberry get (maybe we should call it the "hotberry") those heavy business users might want to take head of the warnings.

The question then remains if this is such a great business tool how can we use it safely?

How about: – use it less – use a corded mike/earphone – use a Bluetooth headset (hopefully they are ok) – use your desk phone or IP phone with a headset/mic

Just be careful and like most things, use in moderation is rarely bad for your health.

Do you have a strategy, for your business, for your technology that supports your business?

Lots of businesses do not have any strategy at all, or they get 'sold' something that sounds good only to find out that it really doesn't suit their needs.

In my experience you need to just do a few things to get you moving in the right direction!

• know what you want to achieve
• know how you will recognize that you've achieved it
• make sure the solution you implement supports your business goals / objectives
• set clear timeframes and responsibilities and hold people accountable and make sure they have the resources to achieve it (don't set them up for failure and them blame them)

Seems reasonable!

You would be surprised how often these simple things are overlooked. Are you overlooking them now in your business?

Contact us to help you get the best outcome possible for you business.

It's very difficult in business to continuous achieve a better than 10% conversion ratio for you sales. In simple language that's one in every 10 potential customers actually putting their hands into their wallets and paying you for your goods and services.

One of my mentors James Schramko is consistently achieving double digit success with his online sales techniques. He is a recognised leader in the internet business community in this area.

In March 2010 James is running one of his limited seminars for you and a partner (not necessarily your spouse) here in Sydney. If you are interstate or overseas, it's well worth the visit. If you can't make it then one alternative is to join his online forum, where I am also a member and have been for sometime, and engage with the community there.

If you want to know how to achieve significant success online this is the right place to start.

The thing that sold me on James in the first place is that's he's genuine. Not trying to sell you something all the time. He gives and gives and gives and then gives some more. The workshop is a great environment for people who currently aren't familiar with internet marketing techniques through to more experience marketers looking for a boost. I'll let James talk to you more about this. Just click on the picture above and he can tell you in his own words.

Firstly, what is social bookmarking?

To be successful on the internet, people, customers, prospects, have to be able to find you. To find you they often use a search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing to look for the "thing" they are interested in. To be found on the first page of a search engine is vitally important as most people, actually more than 95% of people never look at more than the first 3 pages of results. Some of the popular social bookmarking sites are Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Facebook and Twitter. 

How is this relevant to social bookmarking?

Well, in short if you have provided items of value, like an article, a book, a video and put it on the internet then the more references there are to that piece of content the better. The social book marking sites, and there's more than 150 of them, create a link back to your article. The search engines love to see this link, they give you credit for having all these links to your content, and presto you climb up the list of results in the search engines. We want our business to be as high up on this list of results as possible, preferably the first page. This isn't an article about search engines or SEO but it is very relevant.

Lets look at this in a bit more detail.

Social bookmarking is a way of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs online.  You might have the best product in the world, but if you can’t generate the traffic you’ve just got a nice website on your hands with no customers.  Even if you have a loyal mailing list you will still need to constantly update this by attracting new online visitors.  

There are many options for making connections on social bookmarking sites.  To find the best you need to take your time and surf around.  Once you have researched the best start to set up some social bookmarking accounts that you can use regularly.  

StumbleUpon is one of the most popular of the social bookmarking sites which is both powerful and easy to use. First you need to create an account and then create a toolbar interface.  All that’s left to do is click on the Thumbs Up icon (which is found on your browser after you install the StumbleUpon tool) in order to recommend a website.  This can be done for any websites you own and you can also ask your friends to give you the Thumbs Up.  In addition to these ratings you can also add comments about your website.  

Can you Digg it?  Sounds like a line from a 70s song, but it is actually a very popular social bookmarking site. Digg works very much like StumbleUpon in that users are allowed to push up the ratings for a particular site so that it reaches the front page.  If you can make it to the front page you will be presenting yourself to thousands of potential visitors and more and more people will start hitting your site to see what you are all about.  

To assist you in publishing your information out onto the web there are a number of services available to you. There are both free and paid services and those listed here are the free services. They require a bit of effort from your business to maintain but the effort pays off over time. You will need to register yourself or your business to each of the social sites you want to be profiled on. This can take a little time at the beginning, though once done you don't have to worry about again.

• Clipmarks markets itself as “scissors for web pages.”  This site lets you submit items that are transmitted to the Internet – including to an iPhone and to Facebook.  It provides a one stop shop and can save a lot of time.
• You can sign up with services like OnlyWire to get similiar capability to Clipmarks. OnlyWire has a free and a paid option. 
• Another option is to use a site called Socialmarker. Using your social site accounts it steps your through the creation process of entries in each of these sites. You would repeat this process for each new piece of information that you want to promote out onto the internet.  
• Alternatively you can use ping.fm to connect to all your social media accounts. 

Some of these services provide a small application for your browser. Just install one or more of these plugins for your browser. These "plugins" allow you to carry out a multitude of functions such as clicking once to submit your item to many sites in one go.  In order for this to work, you will need to join any social bookmarking sites you want to use.  

You will need to ensure that visitors to your site know how they can rate your site.  It is not possible to bribe or reward them for bookmarking your site.  This is the social bookmarking equivalent to stuffing the ballot box.  

You can publish links to bookmarking sites as a gentle and polite reminder to your visitors.  Don’t be coy about submitting any updated information to these networks yourself.  You will just need to ensure that you do it in such a way that it doesn’t appear as spam.  If you tell people what you have got and where they can find it there is a good chance they will pass this information on to others.

In the spirit of this article there's a button just below that says "Share / Save". Go on, click and and social bookmark this article and see how it works.

Festive Season Greetings

It’s the middle of the festive season once more and it marks another year of activity and achievement. The year behind us is just that – behind. Let’s learn all the good things and put them to great use in 2010 to give it the promise it deserves.

Remember to tell those that mean so much to you how you feel. Do it openly and freely without any expectations. It is after all – about communication.

So from all of us at The KIX Group the best of Seasons Greetings and Great Expectations for a fantastic 2010.

How's your current web site working for you? Do you have an online strategy? Getting all the traffic you want? Making Sales?

There are so many approaches to building and effective business web site. Many business have spent a lot of money developing a wonderful looking site. For anyone finding it – the WOW effect is going to get them. If your objective was to get the WOW happening then great…your achieved your goal. There aren't many business with such a clear goal achieved on the net.

For the remaining businesses not falling into this category, there has to be an alternate approach.

Some questions to ponder:

• If my web site is going to do more for my business…then what do I want it to do?
• What are the different types of web sites?
  • an electronic version of my current product and company information
  • an existing customer support area operating 24*7
  • a way to interest potential new customers to learn about the products, services and solutions I offer and be able to get their information so I can follow them up
  • be able to take orders and potentially have the solution delivered with as little handling, overhead as possible.

There's no reason you can't do all those actions…is there? Apart from time and cost! No matter what your selection(s) above, you, the manager  / business owner has to be sure of one fundamental thing.

Is what I am doing going to dovetail with my over all business strategy?

Your site is just another arm of your business and has to live just as any other part, like sales or support. It's going to take time, effort and investment. Done correctly it can make money, save money, or just make it a better to deal with you and your organization.

Now that you have made the decision to proceed with the project to develop something appropriate for your business, there are just 10000 more questions (kidding – only 9000) to go.

It's time to take action – we can work this process through with you as we have done with others before you.

Sign up to our regular mail out with up to the minute information on the latest techniques for doing business on the web and get a copy of our Rightlinker tool as our thanks.

All your channels to market are a mechanism for you to communicate with the world. We will help you facilitate this communication.

Life is often full of things that VEX us. It’s is worse when the thing that causes us to be vexxed is an important tool, like my iPhone. Now I want to say up front, I did take the Apple Care extended warranty, because if I hadn’t then I wouldn’t have found out why it stopped working that Sunday afternoon.

I had been making some calls and put it back in my pocket. I heard it give the message received beep and retrieved it only to find a totally blank response. Almost like a teenager on a Sunday morning. I tried all the things known to man and Apple Support to resurrect it, without any luck.

Taking it to the Apple Genius bar on the Monday, initially nothing, then please make an appointment with one of our techs. So with appointment made I left and returned.

In the meantime as I couldn’t be without my phone I put my SIM card into my slightly older phone, my Nokia N95. It’s a great phone, but seriously, after using my iPhone for 12 months it was like going back in time. Sure it did it’s stuff well, made calls, had the GPS, could send and receive all manner of messages, but the interface was just, well, clunky. So after being a Nokia advocate for such a long time I knew I had been converted.

Back to my iPhone. At the Genius Bar in the Apple Store, the guy there was very helpful. Checked this and that, ran some diagnostics, and actually got a glimmer from the device. I felt there was hope. He thought it might be a faulty connection to the screen or the screen itself was failing. It was only when he opened it up to reseat the connection did he find the real cause. The connector was indeed not seated correctly, but for the past 12 months or so it had been burning the logicboard (motherboard) and it was slowly frying itself.

Outcome: I was given a brand new device.

Thoughts: If I hadn’t had my extended warranty then I probably wouldn’t have even gone to the Genius Bar. To then find out it was a faulty unit all along made me think, would have the unit been replaced so quickly without the Extended Warranty. Probably not without a fight as the 12 month warranty was just passed.

I am happy with the outcome, two iPhones as I had already gone and upgrade to the 3Gs as I didn’t think my 3G would be fixable and I couldn’t live with my N95.

Yes the iPhone is a great bit of kit, but more than that “it’s my preferred tool of trade”.