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Twitter is a great tool for soliciting advice from people. You can ask questions and you will find that a variety of people will respond to you. Use the right hashtags and even more people will answer your query. However there are pros and cons to getting advice this way.

Here’s an example. You want to choose new lighting for your home office. You want to know what the difference is between Fulham Ballast and Metal Halide Ballast. A number of different people answer you.

Benefits to getting an answer on Twitter to a question like this include:

• A lot of responses will come through.
• You will probably receive instant information from people.
• You might get the answer that you need to make an informed shopping decision.

Drawbacks of using Twitter to find out about these lighting options:

• The people who answer you might not know what they are talking about.
• There’s a chance that you’ll get spammed by people trying to sell you a specific product.
• You might not get the answer that you need to make an informed shopping decision.

Your best bet is to use Twitter in conjunction with other online resources when you have questions such as this one. In this case, you could use lighting forums and home office forums as well as blogs on these topics to supplement the responses that you receive from Twitter.

Technorati Tags: Fulham Ballast, Metal Halide Ballast

A startup company called CloudShare has just received $10 million from its second round of institutional funding. This means that the company is set to move forward with developing and launching its product.

What exactly does CloudShare do? Well, this forward-thinking company has a business product which uses a cloud-based infrastructure to deploy various training software. Essentially, CloudShare allows businesses that already do training to take that training to the cloud so that customers can use it more efficiently.

One example of a company that could use this type of product is Cisco. Cisco training is some of the most popular business training that people get on the job. This new product would allow Cisco certification training to be moved into the cloud. Different types of training could be offered to different customers with ease.

Why would businesses want to move their training away from demo centers (where that training occurs now) and into the cloud? Cost, of course. Demo centers are expensive to build and operate and they aren’t always up-to-date. Taking things into the cloud allows businesses to offer the most up-to-date training at the lowest cost. This is the way of the future and CloudShare hopes to be a part of it.

Technorati Tags: Cisco certification training, Cisco training

My sister and my best friend both got married earlier this year.  I’ve been to only a handful of weddings in my life, but I’ve noticed a few things about the impact a venue makes.

The first few weddings I ever went to were what you might call budget weddings.  In each case, the venue — which had been chosen in order to save money — detracted from the wedding in a major way.  A small or cheap venue tends to make you feel like the event isn’t that important after all — or like it’s not really real, in a way.

Another thing I’ve found detracts is when you have the ceremony in one place and the reception in another.  That interruption while everyone travels from one place to the other just seems to throw off the general mood and disrupts the continuity of the wedding.

In my limited experience, the absolute best venues were the ones that had some sort of local history to them.  My sister, who had a Victorian-themed wedding, had her ceremony at a historic city park, and the reception at an old mansion-turned-venue nearby.  My friend had her ceremony and reception at a local historic mansion as well.  In both cases the venues added a lot to the atmosphere of the night.

There are a lot of wedding venues to choose from, and a decision this important cannot be made after seeing only a few of the ones in your area.  If you are looking for outdoor wedding locations in Michigan, for example, be sure to consider venues in a fairly wide radius.  For instance, a Petosky wedding can be a little ways away and still be doable for your guests, and opening up a wider variety of venues may enable you to find the perfect venue for your special day.

Technorati Tags: outdoor wedding locations in Michigan, outdoor wedding venue, Petosky wedding, Victorian-themed wedding

There is a practice today known as texting (or sometimes even as txting). It’s the practice of sending a text-based message to a mobile phone from either another mobile phone or from a computer. If you look at your cell phone, it might offer you an option for sending text messages. More likely, though, it offers you the option of sending SMS messages. These are the same thing. The real name for the action that is provided to us by our sms providers is “SMS”. So why do we call this practice texting?

SMS is an abbreviation for Short Message Service. You use an SMS gateway to transmit a text-based message from one device to another. As we all know, this is a short message that is generally limited to 140 characters. What makes this type of message unique from other messages that you might send on the phone is that the SMS message is text-only. If you send a message with a photo or video attached then you’re sending an MMS message (a multi-media message). It is because of the fact that the SMS message is always a text message that it started to become known as texting. It’s a unique abbreviation for the act of sending a text message. And now it’s abbreviated even more (to txting) because SMS has caused us to start writing messages in short hand to keep within our space limitations.

Technorati Tags: sms gateway, SMS providers

Sometimes I find it hard to get things done in my small company and I think that today will be no different.  Unfortunately, today is the day of the month where I do all of my business errands and it is looking like it is going to be a full day.

You see, I have to go down to the local document imaging service agency to inquire what the cost will be to digitize our catalogs.  There have been a number of clients that have asked if they can get a digital version of them, but unfortunately up to this point all we have carried is printed versions.  I am sure that they can do it for us, but as for cost, I guess I’ll find that out today.

I also have to talk to some document management software vendors today to negotiate the best price I can get on some software that I have been eyeing.  I don’t really want to have to spend more than I have to, but I don’t know if they would even consider negotiating, so I am just going to ask.

Also, I have to run down to the bank, pay some bills, and basically do all the little tasks that us business owners sometimes get stuck with.  I just can’t wait until tomorrow to be back in the office – I’d rather be working on the business than driving around all day.

Technorati Tags: document imaging service, document management software vendors