Comcast Capping Consumer Broadband?

I saw the following headline in my feed reader:

Comcast to cap monthly consumer broadband

After I recovered from choking on my coffee, I read the full story, courtesy of Webware.com (now part of C\Net)… and it ain’t pretty:

Starting October 1 customers of Comcast’s residential data services will have an invisible barrier on their monthly data usage. Under the new guidelines of Comcast’s Acceptable Use Policy announced Thursday, that cap will be set at 250 gigabytes per month, per account.

Users who go over the limit will get a courtesy call from Comcast’s customer service for the first instance. However, under the new policy a second-time offense means the service is immediately suspended for an entire calendar year.

The cap - at 250GB per month, sounds like a lot - and for a casual user, it is. But for anyone with a home office with some online backup systems (such as Mozy) - this can be a real problem.

So what happens when a customer breaks the 250GB barrier?

Users who go over the limit will get a courtesy call from Comcast’s customer service for the first instance. However, under the new policy a second-time offense means the service is immediately suspended for an entire calendar year.

Well, alrighty, then. How about some alerts or usage meters? Not so much…

Surprisingly the company is not providing any tools to help users monitor their current usage. An FAQ on Comcast’s support site simply suggests that customers do a “Web search” for bandwidth metering software that will track this amount for them.

Ok - to recap - Comcast will now place a low limit on bandwidth on our access, not tell us if we’re close to it, not provide any tracking or measurement - and then cut off service on the second “offense”.

So how about upgrade options for heavy users?? (From WebWare’s followup post) - uh… nope.

Will you be offering larger bandwidth packages for home businesses or “excessive users?”
Bill G.: No packages at this time is being offered for larger bandwidth.

As this is supposed to go into effect on October 1st, I have yet to get a letter about it from Comcast - I happened to see it on WebWare.com. 

I really hope Comcast reconsiders this - or comes up with a better accomodation for heavy users.

Maybe I need to look at Verizon’s FIOS.

UPDATE: Webware just posted a nice list of bandwidth meters - good to know.

 

 

 

 

Get The Most Out of E-Mail with IMAP

One of the best kept secrets to efficient email management lies in the protocol (how’s that for a $10 word!) that the email system uses. Aside from free email accounts, if you have domain email (you@yourdomain.com) - you’re more than likely using the emailboxes included with your web hosting service.

What most don’t realize is that web hosting email is based on POP (Post Office Protocol). POP is great - but it does have one very important limitation… your messages are never fully synchronized across all the places where you read mail… your desktop computer, your laptop.. your mobile phone.

That’s where IMAP saves the day! With IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol), your message folders are synchronized and identical across all devices. So, a message you send with your mobile phone is accessible on your desktop, etc.. In this age of mobile messaging, that’s a real advantage.

So, if your hosting service only offers POP mail, how can you get IMAP?

There’s a growing number of email-only service providers that do nothing but email. Besides being better able to offer much larger mailboxes and better support, a separate email provider will offer IMAP. Some of the best providers are nominal in cost (and in the case of Google Apps - free):

Mailtrust (Varable rates - outstanding support and reliability
Fastmail ($39.95/year)
Google Apps (Free or $50/yr; free service offers up to 100 6.7GB mailboxes!)

To switch your email while keeping your web hosting, you need to make a “MX” update to your domain’s DNS (something that ProVirtual Solutions can help you with!).

Here’s a recently posted article on the GMail blog that will help describe the difference between POP and IMAP.

Free & Low-Cost Alternatives to Microsoft Office: A Free Presentation

A few months ago, I did a teleseminar for members of DVVAA about free and low-cost alternatives to Microsoft Office. There are lots of options out there - and more becoming available every day!

This 32-page presentation provides a nice overview of what’s available for both in-office workers and road warriors. You may be surprised to find that you don’t need to spend hundreds for a full-featured office suite! Here’s a quick preview of the presentation:

Or… get a FREE PDF download! It’s much easier to read. Click the button…

Enjoy!

RescueTime measures your productivity (do I really want to know this?)

I just installed RescueTime - a free product which aims to provide users with a cold, impartial analysis of how you spend time on your computer - without data entry. RescueTime runs in the background and (basically speaking) tracks the focus of windows on your computer to compile a report which you can have emailed or published in an RSS feed.

You can even define productivity goals and measure your progress! So, if you have decided to spend 50% less time processing email, RescueTime will let you know if you are on track to achieve that goal.

There are obvious privacy concerns with any product that “tracks” activity on your computer. However, RescueTime does a good job of addressing these concerns by providing useful features to whitelist and suspend tracking for activity that you don’t want to include in reports:

What about my privacy?
We take privacy pretty seriously, and it was one of our biggest concerns when we built RescueTime. Our first line of privacy defense is to provide a prominent pause feature that allows you to suspend tracking. Second of all, you can delete any particular data. Finally, we ensure that the only thing we track is the names of the apps and sites you use and the times that you use them. We also offer a “Whitelist” feature that allows you to only track the web sites that you want to. For more details, check out our privacy policy.

RescueTime also offers a paid version that will track the productivity of a workgroup.. so it looks like the product is also aimed at small businesses who are serious about measuring the results of adopting alternative processes and workstyles. It may provide weary commuters everywhere with a great tool to convince management that it’s time to start adopting work-at-home options!

This may be a perfect way to measure once and for all how much time I really spend with email, eBay and celebrity gossip blogs. If my results aren’t too terribly embarrassing, I will post again in a month’s time to share the verdict.

Ok, I get Twitter now.

I spend a lot of time playing with new Web 2.x services and putting them to use. I love finding something that saves me a few minutes or fills a need - a need that sometimes, I didn’t even know I had (Jott.com, comes to mind!).

I never really “got” the phenomenon that is Twitter. I never spent much time with it, as I assumed it was a MySpace-y type app that was for tweens texting one another about prom shoes - but I confess, I never gave it a fair shake. If you aren’t familiar, Twitter allows you to quickly update “what are you doing” and update your website and your “followers” (or all Twitter-ers at large) with brief text messages. These messages are sent to your website, blog, rss (my favorite), phone, etc. - instant broadcast udpates as to your - status/thoughts/etc.. Twitter, however, allows users to restrict updates to approved “followers”, so that you can use Twitter to update family members, workgroups, etc with updates without burning phone minutes or spending time on phonetag calls and voice mail. Useful!

So, as proof that Twitter is more than another teenage tech distraction… here’s a blog post that describes the clever and lifesaving use of Twitter during a recent tornado outbreak in OK.

In case you are wondering - here’s my Twitter page.. there is absolutely nothing of interest there.. but follow me if you like…

Also - please comment if there is something I am missing - or another great way to use Twitter.

Evernote Will Change Your Life

If you ever looked at your browser’s “Favorites” file - its more than likely that it is completely disorganized and out of control. I (like most) had a bad habit of viewing a webpage that I want to revisit - then “adding to favorites” or “bookmarking” - only to discover that I could never find it again in the giant list of pages I tried to save to it over the years. Looking at my “favorites” now in my browser - I dont even know what a lot of it is or why I wanted to save it in the first place. It’s a useless mess.

Enter Evernote. Evernote is an immensely flexible “clipping” tool that works on your desktop, on your phone and on the web. It allows you to save almost any kind of information (webpages, text, sound, pictures and video) and index it any way you like - tags, categories, separate notebooks. Evernote is similar to (also excellent) Google Notebook - only pumped up with an elegant interface and far more flexible features.

… but that’s not all. Evernote also indexes by the content of your notes - including images. So, if you are in the grocery store and you want to save a picture of a cereal box (can’t imagine why you would need to do this, but please humor me here.. ) - text in the picture (Cap’n Crunch, in this example) would be captured and indexed.

So - if you were doing research on the vast health benefits of Cap’n Crunch, and you had saved your assortment of documents, webpages and pictures of Cap’n Crunch resources in Evernote - and you did a search on “Cap’n Crunch” - not only would you get the text and webpages - you would get the images that contained the phrase “Cap’n Crunch”. Incredible!!

Like any great Web 2.0 app, it works with everything else you use. You can easily email notes to and from your Evernote account, and even dictate notes to it using that other spectacular service Jott! (I posted about Jott! on my former blog, but do yourself a favor and visit Jott! right now!)

Evernote is in “private beta” so you do either need an invitation (I have a few left - just email me [mary * at * provirtualsolutions.com] if you would like one) - or you can register for an invitation from Evernote - which may take a few days to a week. It works very smoothly  - so I doubt that it would be in a private beta very much longer.

EventBrite Is Simply Spectacular

If you host online or live events… do yourself a huge favor and check out EventBrite. EventBrite literally does it all… contact management, fee collection and promotion. While testing the service for some upcoming teleclasses I’m planning, I was blown away by the completeness and ease of use. I couldn’t think of a thing that I wanted to do with an event that it wouldn’t accommodate.

EventBrite even supports event affiliate revenue shares - not only for users to promo the EventBrite - but for user’s individual events! Simply put, you can create an event - then set it for others to promote, allowing you to set the revenue share.

EventBrite’s automated promotional and convenience features are one-click wonders - allowing you to automatically promote your event on other venues including Eventful, ZVents, Yahoo and Googlebase. In addition it provides the organizer with customizable event pages, RSS event update feeds, automated “add to calendar” links. The list goes on.

What does all this cost? Not much! If your event is free, it costs nothing. For fee events, you pay a fee of 2.5% of the ticket price, with a .99 minimum.

Check out EventBrite today and make your event planning effortless!

The Best Time of Day for Marketing EMail Delivery: 9:00am (MarketingSherpa)

Renowned marketing advice site MarketingSherpa.com is famous for their case studies and comparative tests on all sorts of marketing tactics, especially email campaigns. An article just posted there addresses the age-old question of what time of day is best for delivery of email marketing campaigns.

This is a question I get often. The answer is generally a judgement call, and I have always advised clients that overall, midweek (Tue/Wed/Thu) is best - and morning is best. Monday is, well - Monday… and Friday is least likely to get attention, as everyone is distracted with weekend planning. I would always freely admit that this theory of mine is simply experience (business web traffic is generally highest midweek) and common sense.

Much of the answer to this question differs a lot based on the audience you are marketing to. I dont think the above works when marketing to consumers, as personal emails will do better evenings and weekends. I’ve also noticed that business contacts I have that market to us "solopreneurs" ofen send on Sundays (a quiet day when we all tend to catch up on email correspondence). The MarketingSherpa study described here addressed a combination: an e-tailer attempting to reach consumers at work. Here’s a nutshell summary of MarketingSherpa’s verdict:

Test returns produced a clear winner — 9 a.m.
The clickthrough rates for each:

*  9 a.m. performed 15.63% better than 4 p.m.
*  9 a.m. performed 9.4% better than 12 p.m.
*  12 p.m. performed 6.9% better than 4 p.m.

Click here to view the whole article (open access until January 29, 2008)

Merry Christmas & Happy Googling!

It’s already Christmas Eve… and another year is almost done! I look forward to 2008 with a fresh start with new services to kick off the year.

Every once in awhile, it’s a good idea to Google oneself and learn where you stand out on the web. The new year is a great time to do this - and resolve to do what you can to spiff-up your online image. Money.com has a nice summary about where to start:  You’re only as good as Google says you are (Money.com)

Merry Christmas!

LinkedIn Launches App Platform, New Features

If you’re a LinkedIn user, you may have heard about their launching an API which would allow developers to create applications for LinkedIn users. The project, officially called the LinkedIn Intelligent Application Platform, has been launched, along with a few new features including customized modules, company news (available with the soon-to-be-launched homepage redesign) and automatic network updates.

Read more about LinkedIn’s new features.

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