Infographic: How To Prepare For Calamities

manny catabas / originally posted 3 days ago at EC Mobile Solutions

Infographic guide on how to prepare for calamities such as tropical typhoon, earthquake and terrorism. Three calamitous events that hit the Philippines recently, just weeks ahead of each other.

Disaster Recovery Reverse Engineering: From The Cloud To The Ground

by manny catabas / 20 hours ago / originally posted at ecmobilesolutions.com

The Philippines was recently been hit by a triple whammy – terrorism, earthquake and tropical storm, in that order. All with dire consequences for businesses and lives. All occurring just weeks ahead of each other.

These events may have occurred in different places, but the intensity of each is almost the same in magnitude – whole cities or provinces were desolated; The effects and consequences for businesses: prolonged work stoppages.

Except for the terrorism, these natural phenomenon are a regular occurrence.  The Philippines is situated in the so-called Pacific Rim of Fire, together with Japan, Vietnam and China in the Western Pacific. It extends up to the Eastern Pacific where the US West Coast is located running down the whole length of the Pacific rim of Central and South America. Within this region tropical storms and earthquakes are to be expected at any time (another is volcanic eruption), sometimes with the kind of magnitude that is immensely devastating.

How To Build Your Free Web Presence

This post is related to my previous post on "More Than a Storage, You Can Turn Your Cloud Storage Into ECommerce Platform". Here I will give a concrete example of how to have a free web presence (that is if you opt not to hire the services of a web developer or designer). Otherwise you will have to settle for the very inexpensive option.

First thing to do is open a free Dropbox account. If you already have one which I would presume is positive, then check your storage capacity. Though your web capacity does not require so much amount of space, I suggest you leave at least 250 MB reserved for this purpose.

Next step is register you dropbox account with Site44. Register with your Dropbox account. Then give your consent for Site44 for access to your Dropbox file. Do not worry as Site44 will only create a folder named site44 and this is the only folder Site44 will have access to.

Once the folder site44 is created in your dropbox files, go back to Site44 and give your web site its name. If you do not want to pay for a domain name, then you have to settle for a website address as yourwebsitename.site44.com.

Now your web site infrastructure is established. You now have a domain host (Site44) and a web server (Dropbox). For a web site that is meant only for display these are all what you need. Now let's build your web site.

Remember you prefer to work on your own and there is no web developer nor designer working for you. So how do you do it?

There are thousands of free templates  available in the internet provided by very nice people who only want their name or company retained in the code. I think that is a fair deal. Select a free web template (a sample site that offers free templates can be found here) from hundreds of templates that suits your taste. Download your selected template to your computer not yet on your Dropbox folder. Since your Dropbox folder is synchronizing what ever you save there.

After you have made your selection comes the tricky part - modifying the template for your own web site. You are not a web developer nor a web designer, again you ask the question how do I do it? Simple. These templates include instructions or notes on what items have to be edited for your own purpose. So it is really easy to modify them. There is no need to modify everything.

Ok, let's see how you could modify these templates for your own use. For this you will need a tool web developers use. I recommend Kompozer. This is a free developer tool. With this tool you have a choice how to edit your web site code - in developers view or graphic view. In graphic view you can see how your web site will look like and you can perform your editing here. What You See Is What You Get (WYSIG) in our developer language. Yes, instantly you see what your web site will look like while you are editing the template.

After finishing your editing and you are already satisfied with what you have done, copy the entire folder where you have saved your template to your Dropbox folder created by Site44. After Dropbox finished uploading your finished template, it will synchronize with Site44.

You now have a website of your own without spending a single cent.

If you are still having a problem on how to do this, just send me an email and let us talk how I can help you, or contact my company, EC Mobile Solutions. We offer this kind of services for the small business. Please click on this link for more information.

On my next post, we will tackle how you can turn your website into an inexpensive ecommerce web site. So you will not only have a web site that is a marketing tool but a sales tool as well.

Do Not Forget the Feature Phone In Your Mobile Strategy

The mobile technology may be revolutionizing the way consumers behave online. Smartphones may be selling briskly all over the world. A new era in digital communication and commerce is dawning.

There is no doubt that consumers today are more mobile. In some countries, the number of mobile device may be at par with the nation's population. This phone density has never happened to the telephone. The reason is that mobile infrastructure is more cost effective than a land line structure.

In the Philippines, getting a mobile phone is easier than getting a land line. This despite the telephone's head start of almost a century. Well, that's what innovations are for any way. And mobile technology has really benefited so many people.

With the advent of this new technology comes the way people live with it. The growth of mobile devices is staggering that it has created a new era. The PC era has really ended.

Western nations are leading the way with how to create opportunities with this new phenomenon. Apple store recently awarded its 50th Billion downloader of its apps. Fifty billion downloads, Wow! You can just imagine how much business there is in mobile apps. Thus, many companies are riding to this extravaganza. Mobile commerce is included in their marketing strategies now.

This may be true in the western side of the world and in some industrialized countries in Asia. But how about those in the developing world?

In a recent article by BBC News, use of feature phone in developing countries is still quite a number to reckon with. They are still part of the demography any marketer has to consider. And the functionality of the smart phones like payment gateways are not preferred by the users of these kind of phones. It is to be expected, any technology in its beginning has to consider the behavior and acceptance of the consumer. It will take time for everyone to adjust or adopt to changes. This is not new. Always this must be included in every marketer's consideration.

Based on the graph provided by BBC News it will still take about four to five years before smart phones will be at par with feature phones. Still, even though these users may belong to a demographic group that is not a marketer's preference, still they are consumers your company has to reach out to.

A Nightmare on Tech Street

The Wizard. The word has become a sobriquet for techies or tech people.



Webopedia has three definitions for the word and and all of them technology related. It has become synonymous to a person who is an outstanding programmer. The system administrator for a chat room. Or a utility in an application or computer program that directs you through different steps to accomplish a task.

Though the term was flattering as it is true in a sense - tech people can make the usual burdensome tasks into a magically easy way through the use of technology. Well, actually there's no magic. Programmers do the task in their logical steps.

Since, business systems has been with us for quite a time now, most businesses has come to rely on them. As their dependence grows, their expectations of the system and their programmers grow disproportionately.

How? Business mindset of budgeting is a major consideration. Always. And the IT Department is not immune to it. They expect more but they would not allocate enough (so how could you operate on a shoestring budget?).

As technology ages there come tools and methodologies that evolve, and they expect us to know everything and be updated with these new methods and tools. We may be wizards but one thing certain is we are not omniscient.

I may sound bitter or doubtful of my profession, no I'm not. That's one of the challenges we face. Voila! We usually get over those kinks in our programs so why can we not get over the kinks in our lives?

More Than a Storage, You Can Turn Your Cloud Storage Into ECommerce Platform

By now, most of us have one or more preferred cloud storage - Dropbox, Box.Net, Google Drive, SkyDrive. We know how it is used: primarily for storing our files into the cloud so we can access them from anywhere or from any device. Another most common use is as a sort of a backup storage in case of a computer crash.

But what you may not know is that your cloud storage can be used into any e-commerce or m-commerce (mobile commerce) platform. There are quite a number of tools or apps that you can use to maximize your use of your cloud storage, whatever it may be.

I will cite just a few and limit to what I have tried, some are free and some requires a monthly fee. Even if you are charged for a fee, I can assure you that you will get your money's worth for its very functionality:

1. Document signing function.
There are a number of apps offered to let you have a e-signature for documents - Adobe EchoSign, DocuSign and my favorite HelloSign. The HelloSign is more to my taste as it is very simple to use, no limit and most of all it can be integrated with your Gmail account, what more can you ask? So if there's a document or a contract to be signed, store it to any of your storage cloud and let HelloSign do the rest.

2. Sales Ordering Function
Handshake is an app that can be installed in your Box storage so you can use your Box folder as repository of all your sales record done via Handshake. Handshake serves as your product presentation platform, Sales Ordering platform where you can fill up sales orders and your office can instantly pick up that sales order and prepare the delivery to your customer in a jiffy. Isn't that efficiency?

3. Web site function
Need a web site? Then turn a folder in your Dropbox into a web site. Site44 is an app that can be integrated with your Dropbox account. The drawback is you have to have knowledge of HTML programming code so you can have a real fantastic web site of your own. Actually HTML programming is not that hard to learn. There is a ton of templates you can use for website you have created.

4. Other useful tools you can use. The Practical E-Commerce has other apps which can turn your cloud storage into powerful platforms for e or m commerce. Visit their web site here.

As you can see, there are a lot of things you can do with your cloud storage. Maximize them and you can profit from them.

The Mobile Trend

There are some interesting fact now with regards to the mobile era:

"The Philippines is 10th among all countries using mobile internet, according to admob."

Mobile is the trend now. It is time to realize the difference between mobile users and internet users.

A mobile user surfs the web on mobile devices while an internet user surfs the web on PC.

Mobile internet has a different protocol than a PC internet.

If your web site is not mobile friendly, then you have a problem.

Your Business and Social Media

In marketing, there are two objectives that is always present: one is to keep customers and how to add more customers. Customers here meant the users of a company's products or services. And marketers will pay good money for the success of its engagement campaign with its clientele.

The advent of the Facebook era has brought marketing effort to a new dimension in engaging with its customers and clients. Many companies have looked into this social media phenomenon with much interest. They are of the belief that those who do not will lose the game. 

But how do you play the game? 

Social media is a totally different way of engaging with your clients. Here, you don't make a sale intonation directly, but in a subtle way. Lest you will be making your page a spam machine and your followers may lose interest and worse lose them. Giving tips and tricks that will generate responses is one way to do the engagement.

People loves promotions and freebies. Offer these now and then so that you get the interest of your target market. 

Invite your audience to an event that you are directly or indirectly may have an interest on. It may be a fair where you have a stall or a community event that you may not be directly involved but could initiate a visit to your store. 

When you engage more with your clients you learn to know more information about them - their likes and dislikes.

There are so many opportunities that can arise with your social media engagement. The more you touch base with your customers, the more will you learn how to fit your offerings and strategies.

Image courtesy of  FreeDigitalPhotos.net