An artisan choclatier, a Harley-Davidson dealer, a major appliance servicer and a distributor of natural Stevia sweetner - the finalists for the inaugural Distinguished Entrepreneur of 2012 Award in Southwest Florida.
Sure, the region is known mostly for its beaches, its golf, its sunshine and climate and wonderfully sub-tropical way of life. But Southwest Florida is also a hotbed of the entrepreneurial spirit and the Small Business Development Center of Florida Gulf Coast University will celebrate that spirit and these four finalists with a grand banquet May 23rd:
- Benjamin Fleischer, owner of Pyure Brands, LLC
- Scott Fischer, owner of Scott Fischer Enterprises, LLC
- Norman Love, owner of Norman Love Confections
- Steve Marino, owner of Home-Tech Consolidated, Inc.
The four finalist were selected from a total of 32 nominations by four equally outstanding judges: Tim Cartwright, chairman of Tamiami Angel Fund; Phil Borchman, Editor, Gulfshore Business; Colleen Kvetko, president and CEO of Shamrock Bank; and Stephan Bothe, chairman and CEO of Flexi.
Nominations were received from all five Southwest Florida counties (Glades, Hendry, Lee, Charlotte and Collier) and included a wide range of businesses and enterprises.
The Distinguished Entrepreneur will be announced at the May 23rd banquet, which will feature speaker Carl Gould, heralded business coach and lifelong entrepreneur. The banquet is set for the Cohen Student Union on campus of FGCU. Order your tickets online or call Deb Newman at 560-3648 or the SBDC Office at 745-3700 for information on tickets and sponsorships.
Relevanza is pleased to be a sponsor of the Distinguised Entrepeneur of 2012 Award and banquet along with the Presenting Sponsor, Markham Norton Mosteller Wright & Co., Media Sponsor Gulfshore Business Magazine, as well as Brennan, Manna and Diamond P.L., Dolphin Global Technology Solutions, Guerilla Media, Photo Magic, Slick Ink ALL MEDIA , Third Eye Management, Busey, Gator Press, the Southwest Florida Regional Technical Partnership, John Fernandez Photograph and Wells Fargo.
We received earlier this week an inquiry about cloud tools to be used within a team on a corporate level:
The staff is currently using Dropbox to organize spreadsheets and documents on the cloud. It has some distinct drawbacks and I wondered if you had heard of any other service that might be useful. As additional locations are opened it will be useful for all members of mgmt to have access to data as soon as it is prepared. It would also be helpful to have a cloud based scheduling tool so that important meetings were not overlooked. Have you heard of any services that might be helpful?
Our answer:
We find that GoogleApps provides a considerable amount of collaboration tools for corporations. You can set-up a domain name with Google: ie. "YourCompany.com," and have all your staff members as users with e-mail address, document/spreadsheets & forms collaboration, sharing of contacts & contact groups and common calendars shared over the whole domain. This should give you a great start organizing your Google Drive - the newest Google Cloud service - and integrate seamlessly with GoogleApps for Business.
That social media is already playing an important role in health care should come as no surprise.
The extent to which social media will become an integral part of health care in very near future is evidenced by a conference held April 24 on the campus of New York Medical College in Valhalla, New York. The entire conference was run by medical students from the Class of 2015, reports the HealthWorks Collective. (Hastage: #NYMCSPAD...okay, a terrible hashtag but a hashtag nonetheless.)
Nearly 80 percent of the audience was medical students, reports HWC. Of those, 97% use social media; 91% use it for professional or educational purposes.
Dr. Howard Luks, who described himself as a “social orthopedist,” suggested a doctor's relevance in the 21st Century will depend on how that doctor uses social media to develop a professional network and pointed out 17% of his private patients are due to his use of social media activities.
You know what we need? Yea, we need another social media platform.
Because the social signals are just not fragmented enough yet!
Okay, okay...snark aside, now we're all waiting with baited SEO for the formal unveiling of Wander, the newest kid on the social block.
At least, in its previews, Wander shows a little style, a good dose of clever and, yes, snark beginning with its utterly pointless leaderbord. And its home page and sign-up sheet promptly tells visitors it will be launched soon..."until then, get lost."
Wander, says founder Jeremy Fischer to TechCrunch, will be a "combination of Tumblr and Pinterest, Yelp, TripAdvisor and Foursquare."
Okay...got that? (Hell, I would have thrown in a little Layar just for good measure...but that's just me.)
Even though Wander remains in what is called, "mystery mode," Fischer says the new platform will be "away to see the world through other people's eyes."
And he managed to collect $1.2 million from angel investors so, I'm suspecting, Wander we will soon.
Let's hope with a name like Wander it will have a very viable mobile component.
Oh yea...and when you DO sign up? Be sure to click the cow.
We all know the InterWebs to be a basically lawless frontier, despite efforts by the U.S. Congress to control it (see, now, CISPA).
French Tweeters (Pepiers???) were actively skirting elections laws on Sunday, using code words to report vote tallies ahead of the prescribed 8 p.m. (Paris time) official release hour. The New York Times reports the coded Twitter electon reports read something like this: "the flan is decidely in the oven while the tomato was surprisingly green and the temperature in Budapest hovered around 25 degrees."
Beats the hell outa "red states, blue states." Viva la France!"
One InterWeb tool the French scofflaw Tweeters probably did NOT use on Sunday is GooglePlaces, the location-based search tool that allows business owners to manage location information for Google searches. Unlike Foursquare or Yelp or any of the others, registering a business location on GooglePlaces puts one's business into the enormous and ubiquitous Google search universe.
Luckily for you, Relevanza co-founder Birgit Pauli-Haack has written a free ebook outlining in simple steps the best way to get registered on and actively use Google Places. Download it here (along with other ebooks). And, on GooglePlus, read here a little more about GooglePlaces page rankings.
Hey, we're just trying to help.
Oh, and by the way, back over in France...the flan and Budapest head to a runoff with the flan slightly ahead.
Pinterest, Pinterest, Pinterest...Marsha, Marsha, Marsha...it's always about Marsha, er, Pinterest.
Well, okay, that's all well and good. Pinterest is exploding in popularity and use. With 5 million users and nearly 1.5 million daily unique viewers, Pinterest has quickly become the third largest platform in the social space. And with good reason.
Among other attributes, Pinterest is leading the way into the new world of visual social media. Didn't someone once observe a picture is worth a thousand words?
And perhaps you SHOULD be on Pinterest...perhaps...if...if...it's useful for you and...if...if...your community is there.
Which brings us to the point: social media is, above all else, about community and building community and sharing within that community and listening to what the community is saying to you. It doesn't really matter how a person or company or organization defines, "community." It is more than simply, "audience," or, even, "customer base." (Although both those defined groups may be part of community.)
Effective use of social media means reaching, listening to, communicating with one's community and knowing where to find one's community in the social space is essential.
Among the many benefits of the Affordable Care Act, passed in 2010 and being implemented in steps over the coming years, is the opportunity for health care organizations to morph into what will be called, "accountable care organizations."
The idea of accountable care organizations is an all-encompassing opportunity for people to have health care in a single place from cradle to grave with an emphasis on wellness care early in life so health care later in life will not be so extreme, costly or drastic. We get education and wellness early in life to stay active, healthy and productive through all our years.
Social media will play an extremely important role in the future of health care - and, specifically, in the role of accountable care organizations, because much of the interaction can and will take place on the Internet and through social media spaces. Online consultations, messaging between doctors and patients, prescription refills, instant access for patients to their medical records will all be part of the health care online environment of the future.
But that future is already here for veterans of the U.S. Armed Forces through the single-payer systems of health care operated by the U.S. Veterans Administration (VA).
Close to 80 million American veterans personally visited the many VA clinics las t year or took advantage of the wide range of services available to vets through the VA health care system.
Much of that work in the future will be handled online, through the VA's online health care tool, MyHealtheVet.
Once enrolled in MyHealtheVet, patients can securely send and receive messages, consultations for non-urgent care, can access blood work and lab test results, can schedule face-to-face appointements if necessary, can get prescription refills, can monitor and graph health statistic and vitals such as blood pressure and blood sugar and a range of tasks previously requiring a trip to the VA clinic.
From appearances, it seems the VA is quickly morphing into a prime example of an accountable care organization envisioned by the Affordable Care Act.
Image business with a social mindset...a report on 2012 trends from Deloitte
Deloitte Tech Trends 2012 tells us (among other insights):
"Even today, business leaders may dismiss the potential of social business, either relegating it to the realm of Internet marketing or ignoring the buzz as a passing fad. But that’s changing as boomers evolve into digital natives, millennials permeate the workforce and social media becomes a part of daily life. The doors are now open for social business.
"Leading enterprises today are applying social technologies like collaboration, communication and content management to social networks – the connected web of people and assets that impact on a given business goal or outcome – amplified by social media from blogs to social networking sites to content communities. Yet it’s more than tools and technology. Businesses are being fundamentally changed as leaders rethink their core processes and capabilities with a social mindset to find new ways to create more value, faster...
"Social business can shift an organization’s dynamic from isolation to engagement by providing vehicles for discovering, growing and propagating ideas and expertise. This shift requires organizations to take a more active approach to social. Beyond social monitoring and listening posts, leading organizations are establishing command centers to interact with consumers and the marketplace via the social sphere."
Read the full report here. Read more on the Relevanza Tumblr blog, Social Media Technology.
Okay, so let’s see...Facebook buys Instragram for $1 billion very large.
That’s $40 million per Instagram employee (25) or $40 per Instagram user. There is little doubt it was an amazing announcement, an amazing purchase and gives a huge kick in the credibility to so-called “niche” social platforms.
Instagram was, up until Monday, still considered a niche social platform - though wildly popular with iPhone users and brand new to the Android market.
Even Pinterest, the fastest growing social platform in the space at 12 million users, is still considered a niche platform. So is Foursquare at 15 million users.
But niche platforms are not to be triffled with and can be very userful and interesting stops along the InterWebs.
Foursquare grew 1000 percent a year from 2009-2011, for example, Instragam reached 10 million users in 9 months and added another 9 million between December 2011 and March 2012 and Tumblr has 15 billion views each monthl
Although perhaps not technically considered a social platform, the increasingly popular Houzz has the look and feel of a social platform. Launched in 2009, Houzz is a space by and for architects, builders, interior designers and anyone really who loves living spaces. Filled with over 400,000 images of homes and interiors, Houzz is a treasure trove for designers and home builders. And with over 65,000 design professional logged on and accounted for through individual Houzz profiles it has become the single largest online gathering place for home building and design.
If it looks like a social platform, walks like a social platform and quacks like a social platform...
Which Blog Software is right for me? How do I get started? Who can help me?
These are all valid questions! And there are no easy answers.
Most of the time your decision will depend on a few variables you will need to consider. And, sometimes, after writing (blogging) for a year or so you may decide your original assumptions are out of date or have changed.
What does one do then? Start over? Shell out more money to convert your original site?
Our team deals with a variety of different software writing/blogging packages - and we’ve tried many more. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. The world of Internet communication is filled with trade-offs.
So let’s get started...
