I have decided to give you a very interesting post for the day. You might be asking wtf is this guy talking about? A business paradox?
Let me explain. Say you own a small business and your business sells ties. Say that across the street a larger tie selling business pops up and is offering ties at a cheaper rate and is more innovative at selling ties. You might think how the hell am I going to compete with this larger and more powerful tie company?
You could always copy the ideas of the larger tie company and offer similar if not identical services but then you risk getting ridiculed and called a “copier”. Not to mention the inevitable lawsuit that would follow for “copying” ideas.
The best solution would be to think up new and improved ideas, right? This would require thinking outside the box and what some think would be countless hours of time formulating innovation. Honestly you would end up thinking to hard and spending all that time for nothing. Trust me I have been down this road and it does not end well.
So what if I said you could beat out your competition just by stealing? Now before you go off and call the popo. I am not talking about stealing ties from your competition. I am talking about stealing ideas. This does not mean you need to go all Mission Impossible. It means stop thinking about how other tie companies are beating you and think about how other companies not in direct competition with you are doing their business.
In this example lets use a a fictional company called Buy Club. The Buy Club stores give shoppers memberships that allow them to exclusively shop their stores and get discounted prices. Why could you not just steal the membership idea for your business and offer something innovative your competitors don’t? Thus solving the Business Paradox 
I strongly feel that most people try so hard to find out what “thinking outside the box” means and not really thinking outside the box. I am sure if you look at some of the most innovative ideas in business you can narrow the origin of said ideas to many companies across many fields. Overall thinking outside the box is more literal then we might think. Think outside your own market and steal ideas from other markets. In the end making you the innovator by not constricting your ideas to one field.
Thoughts, ideas? Leave a comment!
Updated way to enable tethering:
Simple! Just go to this website on your phone. http://help.benm.at/help.php
- Click on mobileconfigs.
- Select your Country.
- Select your carrier.
- It will ask you if you want to install.
- Click install.
- Enjoy your tethering via Settings > General > Network > Internet Tethering
Old way to enable tethering:
iPhone 3.0 is live! So I am going to repost the tethering tutorial. Now there is no need to download anything (aside from the carrier file). Seems you can just run a little command in terminal (Make sure you are on OS 3.0 on a 3G iPhone and iTunes 8.2):
So open up terminal and type:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE
After that, the steps become a lot more simple.
1. Download this file (for AT&T) and mount the disk image (thanks Gizmodo) for other carriers, try here.
2. Option-click on “restore” in your iTunes with your iPhone attached. Browse to the opened disk image file and hit OK. It will update phone settings for a few seconds.
3. You have tethering. Now go into your iPhone/settings/general/network/Internet Tethering and turn it on.
Boom – 3 steps to tethering…
As a side note is highly recommended that you not use this as your primary internet service. Please if anything try to stay under 5GB’s of transfer per month to avoid service termination.
Today I ran into an interesting problem where a virus infection on a computer caused a major issue with IE7. After doing some research and messing around on my own I found the easiest way to get IE7 back up and running if you run into a similar issue.
Description of the issue:
Internet Explorer 7 will only open for a brief period of time and closes. Users are unable to get into internet options from control panel or by right clicking on the IE7 icon on the desktop.
Cause of issue:
This issue is most likely caused by some type of malware on the system. Please before you attempt any repairs of IE7 run your virus protection software to ensure the system is clean of infection before you continue.
Resolution to issue:
- First and foremost if SP3 is installed please remove it from the system. This will allow you to uninstall IE7 and have it roll back to IE6.
- After you have removed SP3 reboot and remove IE7.
- I highly recommend after IE7 is removed that you rerun your virus scanning software to ensure the infection has been removed off the system.
- After confirming the infection has been removed run windows updates to reinstall both SP3 and IE7.
Conclusion:
I am making this post because I could not find any resource on the web that would give me a straight answer. If you have any questions just leave a comment below or shoot me an email at support@geekologist.net
Wireless keyboard and mouse combos are continually to grow in popularity. They’re perfect for typing while you are sitting back and relaxing, keeping pets from getting tangled in the wires, and keeping an overal clean look on your desk. However, sometimes your keyboard will just not work, whether you’re hooking it up to another computer or even simply changing the batteries. The following is a troubleshooting guide to aide you in getting your wireless/keyboard mouse combo functioning properly again.
1. Follow the instructions provided in your user manual for connecting the keyboard and mouse to the wireless sensor. If reconnecting does not work, go on to the next step.
2. Check to make sure the batteries are not dead. While this may seem like the most basic thing to check, it can also be overlooked. Some wireless sensors can even tell you when the battery is dying or dead. If the batteries are dead, install a fresh set of batteries and reconnect the keyboard and mouse.
3. Check the drivers for possible updates. Although not often a common problem, you should have Windows Device Manager check for it automatically or check the manufacturer’s website yourself.
4. Uninstall the drivers, unplug the wireless sensor, and restart your computer. Once your computer is fully booted, plus the wireless sensor back in and allow Windows to recognize the device. Sometimes a fresh install of the drivers will allow the keyboard/mouse combo to work again.
5. Battery Conductor Nodes. Look on the inside of the battery compartment, specifically at the positive/negative node springs, whichever is easier to access. If the spring is compressed, it means the springs are not receiving the electric charge from the battery to power it. Therefore, the spring needs to be uncompressed. Take a small screwdriver and carefully pop the spring out a little bit. Reinstall the batteries.
These are very basic things to check before assuming that your keyboard/mouse is completely dead. If your keyboard/mouse combo continues to cease functioning, consult your owner’s manual for further specific troubleshooting.
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March 31, 2007 8:30pm Sydney, Australia sent a message to the world by turning off over 50% of the lights in the city. Fast forward to 2008 and on the same day and same time over 25 countries and 350 cites participated in what is now know as Earth Hour. Will you participate this year? Let us know in a comment below.
I find this topic very interesting, considering I am a geek I tend to get my news and updates from places on the internet. However what I find interesting is that this trend seems to only occur in people of my generation. A.K.A people between the age of 15-30.
Because of this I decided to doa little social experiment and ask around my family and learn how they get the news and as predicted most family members over the age of 30 get the news from T.V
Don’t get me wrong I completely understand that social media can causes undesired effects but it is interesting to know that anyone with a computer and an internet connection can turn into a journalist or news anchor. Take into consideration how many people watch sxephil on youtube. He is funny and makes the news entertaining. The real question is this our future and what does it mean for news media business. Are these news media avenues (FOX,NBC,CNN,etc…) going to start using things like twitter or even ping.fm to mass send info to the world? Is online news as accurate as news in the paper or on T.V? Where do you get your news? Let us know in a comment below…
The next highly anticipated release of Ubuntu will be official is scheduled for release in April this year, the release will be codenamed Jaunty Jackalope. I managed to get the Alpha release of the OS last week and I am impressed so far, there are many improvements and additions to the OS, however for me the most interesting for me is the new notifications feature.
The feature displays activity from music software, IRC clients and IM applications on your desktop. You can customize the notifications position and theme via the System menu.
This really is another step in the right direction for Ubuntu, as the eye-candy availiable is becoming a wide-ranged field of desktop effects which are really tasty!
The pretty much wraps up this post, be sure to look out for the official release in April!
Yesterday I did a video on a cool service called Yammer (http://yammer.com). What Yammer allows you to do is make something similar to a twitter page for your business. In this sense this allows employees from a small, medium, or large business to collaborate just as people do on twitter.
Yammer takes it a step further than twitter and allows co-workers to post attachments and even assign roles or positions to users. I truly love this idea/concept and I can see modernized business taking this and running. In my mind this is a great way for employees from all over the nation or even globe to collaborate and share experiences that will not only help the employee learn but also help your business or organization accomplish tasks in a more efficient manner.
For more information please watch the video:
Do you have a computer with Windows Vista installed? Does that windows vista system not have the greatest graphics card onboard? Well Windows has finally made a huge improvement to the graphics subsystem to help you out. Microsoft is aiming to help GPU-less folks by allowing a plain old CPU to act as a graphics hardware accelerator. This entire system is designed to run on a processor as little as 800Mhz but a dual-core or higher CPU is recommended. In private benchmark testings using intel integrated graphics and an i7 processor the team was able to get a whopping 7.6 FPS at 800×600. This is about a 1.5 FPS improvement over the integrated graphics alone. Although the WARP (or Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform) was designed to help out people without GPU’s to improve the Aero experience, I am really excited to see how this technology evolves, and what it means in terms of a more pleasing experience in Windows 7.
Got any questions or comments? Let us know below!