Monitoring Your Web Site
If the performance monitoring tool you use only tells you what’s happening on your Web site when users are there, your site could go unmonitored for a significant portion of the day. How would you know if your network provider was down for 45 minutes last night? What will have happened to the customers who were trying to get information from your site at that time?
To comprehensively monitor your Web site and ensure your service providers are doing a good job for your customers, employ a tool that checks your site regularly throughout the day—not just when traffic is heaviest. “Synthetic transaction” tools do just that. They check to make sure your applications are working, even when no one is interacting with them. With synthetic monitoring, you get the following benefits:
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Preparing Employees for Benefits Enrollment
The Principal Financial Group’s Renee Schaaf talks about best practices for open enrollment
Smaller businesses are significantly less likely than larger ones to offer health insurance, surveys show, but there are small firms that offer comprehensive benefits and do so with excellence.
Renee Schaaf, vice-president of retirement and investor services for The Principal Financial Group (PFG), spoke recently to Smart Answers columnist Karen E. Klein about a national contest her firm sponsors to identify small and midsize companies that excel in employee benefits. She discussed the best practices for open enrollment that the winners have in common. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow.
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India Inc. Battered by Credit Crisis
Strapped by recent M&As, companies like Tata Motors, Hindalco, and Suzlon Energy are scrambling to come up with cash to pay for big-ticket acquisitions
These days when KPMG’s Mumbai corporate finance head Rohit Kapur meets Indian chief executives, he finds a marked difference in the corner suite talk. Until recently, Indian bosses were still firming up their mergers-and-acquisition shopping itinerary. No longer. “Now they talk of rationalizing their business portfolio and monetizing assets to expand their core businesses,” he says.
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Why Obama Should Keep His BlackBerry
The news over the weekend was full of stories about (the AP’s, for example) how Barack Obama will have to give up his beloved BlackBerry once he enters the White house. While I can see why he might choose to, I cannot fathom why he would have to.
The best reason for letting go of of the time-sucking communicator is that the President can’t afford to be reading jokes forwarded by friends and tapping away on a thumb keyboard when there a Free World to run. Maybe, but if he could do it under the pressures of a campaign, I suspect he can handle it under the pressures of office.
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Jerry Yang to Step Down As Yahoo CEO; Will Microsoft Return?
Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang will step down as CEO as soon as a successor is found, the embattled Internet company just announced. The release (quoted in full after the jump, along with Yang’s memo to the troops) came shortly after the blog Boomtown broke the news.
The move may well prompt Microsoft, whose repeated attempts to buy all or a portion of Yahoo failed to produce a deal earlier this year, to come back with another offer. That’s what investors, who have bid up the stock about 4% in extended trading after the market close Nov. 17, may be hoping.
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Increase Revenues While Decreasing Costs
In an uncertain economy, your customers may be watching their pennies. If you are working to increase your profits, you may feel like you are swimming against the tide. However, with some clever repackaging of your products and services, you can come out on top. Here are a few examples to help get you thinking about how you can tackle your own situation.
Example 1. If you own a styling salon and charge $35 for a standard woman’s haircut that takes one hour, figure out how you can repackage that haircut so you can charge $20 for a 20-minute haircut. The service is going to be different, so you have to rename it. What you finally offer is a “Quick Cut for ONLY $20.” If you can schedule two quick cuts in an hour, you are money ahead, and your client is happy because she has paid less for an acceptable cut.
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Facebook Destroys Lucrative Birthday Reminder Industry
Facebook just added another extremely useful feature for users, and in doing so took out a slew of applications that do that same thing. You can now get a weekly email telling you, simply, which friends have birthdays coming up.
That’s good news for all of us who want more birthday information. It’s bad news for Birthday Alert and its clones that already do that on Facebook. Birthday Alert has 180,820 active monthly users.
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ONEsite Launches Proprietary Social Ad Platform
White label social networking software maker ONEsite is launching its very own advertising platform InteractAd today, essentially declaring traditional online advertising is past its prime and that it’s time for social advertising to take its place.
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Flash Is Now A Platform, AIR Gets An Upgrade, And Adobe Puts A Catalyst In Gumbo
Realizing that Flash is a better name than Flex for a platform, Adobe is now referring to everything it does related to Flash (including the Flash Player, Adobe AIR, Flex developer tools, and Flash media servers) as the Flash Platform. That’s what I’ve been calling it anyway, so I’m glad they finally caught up.
Beyond the marketing shift, Adobe will be making some more significant announcements at its MAX developer conference this week. Here’s a summary:
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Twitterank Might Not Have Been a Phishing Scam, But It Was Fascinating
This week has seen an incredible amount of interest around Twitterank, a new tool that popped up that computes a numerical score of … something.
At first, no one was really too sure what Twitterank was computing, but, it related to Twitter, one’s perceived popularity, and had a quirky site, so, why not enter in your credentials and see what the site had to say about you seemed to be the thinking.
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