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The other day, updating an article I’d written about Hawaii’s Big Island, I discovered that the National Park Service had installed a free automated cell phone tour for drivers exploring the fiery roads of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Since this World Heritage Site and International Biosphere Preserve is home to active volcanoes and a plethora of mind-boggling volcanic phenomena, an explanatory cell phone tour sounded like a great idea.

To ensure that I’d be passing on accurate info to readers, I dialed the tour number (808-217-9285). Soon enough I was listening to a free and informative NPS talk about the awesome sights along the Park’s Crater Rim Drive and Chain of Craters Road (download a PDF with maps and info about these roads).

Apparently I’ve been on another planet when it comes to these mobile phone tours. I knew they existed, but I had no idea how prevalent they’d become–there are thousands of tours out there, and more coming every day. Unlike traditional audio tours, the mobile version is not confined to buildings; a cell phone tour can cover a wide expanse of territory outdoors, as with the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park tour.

And they’re not confined to audio, either. With the increasing sophistication and use of smart phones, more and more multimedia tours—with far greater complexity than audio tours—are being delivered.

And it’s so easy! To access audio tours, visitors simply call a phone number via their own cell phone. Tour exhibits or landmarks are numbered, so when the visitor encounters something they want to hear about, they simply enter the item number into the phone. They can remain connected throughout the tour, or hang up and call back each time they want to learn about an item. They can linger at a stop as long as they like, or move on quickly. Nothing needs to be done in a prescribed order. Many tours also provide the ability for the user to leave feedback.

Old-style audio tours required the venue to provide a visitor with expensive equipment to hear the tour content (remember carrying around those bulky devices in museums?). But now the visitor provides the equipment (a cell phone). All the venue needs to provide is the pre-recorded digital tour. For that reason, many tourism destinations have embraced these tours, offering them for free:

• The National Park Service, for example, has instituted free cell phone tours at many of its properties (e.g., Grand Canyon National Park, Minute Man National Historical Park).
• New York’s Central Park Conservancy has put together a great free tour of the Park, with each of the 41 stops narrated by a different celebrity (Regis Philbin, Alec Baldwin, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Glen Close, Jerry Seinfeld, etc.). Call 646-862-0997 to hear a few famous voices rave about Central Park landmarks.
• The State Historical Society of North Dakota created the cleverly-named “History on Call” cell phone audio tour, whereby people can listen to recorded messages about many historic sites throughout the state by calling one phone number (701-557-9190).
• Visit museumpods to find a long list of art, history, sports and other museums (at least 200) that offer free mobile tours (e.g.,  the Bishop Museum Planetarium Skycast, Hirshhorn  Museum & Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian American  Art Museum). Museumpods also allows uploading of museum tours for social media dissemination.

Businesses, too, are increasingly using mobile tours because they offer multiple benefits ranging from expanaded visibility to customer feedback. They’re proving beneficial to retailers, real estate brokers, and manufacturers. They’re extremely useful at trade shows and consumer product shows. Visitors can easily leave feedback messages via the phone tour, increasing its value to business: imagine getting quick, real-time feedback about a product in your store!

If you’d like to explore making a phone-based tour for your customers or visitors,  a few companies have become well established in this business. Among them are these two (but use them as only a starting point in your research):

• OnCellsystems, which has created hundreds of tours for cultural institutions, the retail and manufacturing industries, and real estate firms. Call in and listen to a sample from one of their clients here.
• Guide by Cell creates audio tours and smartphone apps.

Packages at both start at around $50 per month.

Last month the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released a 10-year projection for job growth and job loss in specific industries (2008-2018). Total employment is expected to increase by 15.3 million (10.1%) during this period, with growth concentrated in the service-providing sector.

This growth in the service sector marks the continuation of a long-term trend, with the U. S. economy shifting away from the production of goods. As has as always been true of goods-producing industries, growth in the service sector varies depending on the service (goods) provided. Healthcare and social assistance will soar; utilities won’t do well (see the chart below):

Here’s how the change in occupational groups is expected to look:

Of the 20 fastest-growing occupations in the economy, an extraordinary half are related to healthcare. This is primarily due–no surprise!—to the aging of the Baby Boom generation, requiring a rise in doctors,nurses, home health care workers, physical therapists, etc.  Here’s a chart that lays it out clearly, along with educational requirements:

Finally, here’s the Bureau’s projection for industries that will gain or lose the most jobs during 2008-2018:

Top 10 Industries with largest wage/salary employment growth (2008-2018):

1. Management, scientific, and technical consulting services: Up 835,000 jobs (+82.8%). This sector will experience a stunning increase of nearly 83%! According to the BLS, this growth will be spurred by the continuing need of business for advice on planning, logistics, new technologies, workplace safety compliance, and environmental/employment and other regulations.

2. Offices of physicians: Up 772,000 jobs (+34.1%)

3. Computer systems design and related services: Up 656,000 jobs (+45.3%). Plenty of programming jobs have migrated offshore, but there is still plenty of onshore work in this category. Computer programming is a solid job choice for the years immediately ahead.

4. Other general merchandise stores: Up 607,000 jobs (+40.7%)

5. Employment services: Up 600,000 jobs (+19.1%). Head-hunters, or, more properly, employment placement specialists, will be hot. Good jobs for those with people skills.

6. Local government, excluding education and hospitals: Up 487,000 jobs (+8.4%)

7. Home health care services: Up 441,000 jobs (+46.1%). No surprise here, with Baby Boomers hitting retirement age and heading into senior citizen-hood. According to the BLS, the 55-and-older group will increase by 29.7% during the 2008-2018 period. This fact also greatly influences No. 8 and No. 9, below.

8. Services for the elderly and persons with disabilities: Up 431,000 jobs (+73.8%)

9. Nursing care facilities: Up 394,000 jobs (+24.4%)

10. Full-service restaurants: Up 343,000 jobs (+7.5%)

And here’s the 10 U. S. industries that will encounter the greatest number of job losses in the coming decade:

1. Department Stores: Down 159,000 jobs (-10.2%). Department stores have been losing customers through the past decade due to online shopping and the proliferation of Big Box stores.

2. Semiconductor and other electronic component makers: Down 146,000 jobs (-33.7%). The drift to offshore manufacturing will continue.

3. Auto parts manufacturers: Down 101,000 jobs (-18.6%). This can come as no surprise to anyone.

4. U.S. Postal Service: Down 98,000 jobs (-13%). Again, no surprises here—the once-mighty USPS has been in a battle for years against FedEx and UPS, not to mention that few people write letters or mail checks these days.

5. Printing businesses: Down 95,000 jobs (-16%)

6. Cut and sew apparel makers: Down 95,000 jobs (-57%). This industry has been decimated over the last couple of decades, and will continue to send jobs offshore.

7. Newspaper publishers: Down 81,000 jobs (-24.8%). Apparently the worst is not yet over!

8. Support businesses for mining: Down 76,000 jobs (-23.2%)

9. Gas stations: Down 75,000 jobs (-8.9%)

10. Wired telecom businesses: Down 73,000 jobs (-11%). In the last couple of years, an increasing number of people have done away with their landlines to rely solely on cell phones.

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My Tip of the Week:

Want to remove all the clutter on the average web page, concentrating instead on content?

Use the simple and free bookmark tool called Readability. Developed by arc90 laboratories, it works like a charm!

Congratulations. You’ve published a website. Now you want to make money. Most website publishers want to sell advertising on their sites. How do you get ads for your web pages? Not a simple project, but a range of options exists for the undaunted entrepreneur. The business of selling ads is challenging yet doable. You don’t need to become an online advertising executive to enter the fray.

Five ways to sell ads

Let’s assume you have one banner ad per page on your site. You can sell ads in five ways.

Flat Rate. Advertisers pay you a flat rate to display their ads on your site for a period of time.

Cost Per Thousand, or cost per mille (CPM). The advertiser pays you a certain rate for every 1,000 ad impressions, where an impression is a single appearance of an ad on a web page. The ad server counts each time an ad loads onto a user’s screen as one impression.

Cost Per Click (CPC). Advertisers pay you a fee each time users click on their ads.

Cost Per Acquisition or Cost Per Action (CPA). Advertisers pay you each time users click on their ads and continue onto their sites and perform the agreed-upon actions. This may be purchasing a product, registering for a newsletter, or other action of value to advertisers.

Cost Per Lead (CPL). The advertiser pays you for each qualified lead your site generates from their advertising. This is a type of CPA deal.

Assemble a media kit

Create a five- to fifteen-page PDF document for potential advertisers. Include an overview of your site, pictures and descriptions of major sections, information about your site audience (demographics and reach), and other information about your site useful to advertisers.

Create a rate card

A rate card lists the different ad sizes you accept on your website and the cost for each type. Put the information in a table format listing the sizes, site sections, and targeting types. Rate cards are a starting point for advertisers to determine what you charge. Most advertisers and agencies, however, pay some amount less than what you have listed.

Calculate the value of your website

What is the value of your website to advertisers? Revenue Per Thousand Page Views (RPM) expresses the total value of all advertising that appears on your website pages. RMP gauges the overall success of your site.

One way to calculate RPM is to total the money you earned from your site in one month divided by the number of page views. For instance, if you made $5,000 and displayed 100,000 page views, your site-wide RPM is $50.

Another way is to calculate the effective CPM. Let’s say you sell a banner ad on a flat-rate basis for $1,000 and displayed 100,000 pages views. Your effective CPM for the banner ad is $10 CPM. ($1,000/100 since CPM is per thousand page views = $10 CPM.) You sell another ad on a CPC basis and get 200 clicks at $0.25 each or $50. Your effective CPM is $0.50 CPM. ($50/100 = $0.50 CPM.)

To calculate RPM you add the effective CPM of each ad unit on a page. For instance, if you sold two ad units on a page for $10 and .50 then your RPM would be 10 + .50 =$10.50 RPM.

Once you establish an RPM minimum for your site, you know your baseline earnings. Use RPM to gauge the health of your ad sales and maximize the value you receive from each web page. You want to sell your entire advertising inventory for the maximum dollar amount possible, thus generating the highest RPM. Over time, you can increase RPM by selling a variety of ad types and changing your targeting criteria.

Find advertisers for your site

Advertisers want your viewers. In internet marketing, reach is how many different people visit a website to see an ad and also what percentage of these people fall into the targeted audience.

A common measure of reach for a website is its “unique visitors per month.” For example, an advertiser has an ad banner campaign targeted to car owners. Out of the 100,000 unique visitors your website receives each month, 90 percent own  cars. A car ad running on your site would reach 90,000 different car owners in a one-month run. Hence, your website has a reach of 90 percent.

Your goal is to make sure you have a buyer for every impression on your site, every day of the month. Usually, a portion of the impressions each month fall in the remnant category. Remnant inventory is generally used for house ads or is sold to bulk advertisers. For a low CPM or CPC, the bulk advertiser agrees to pick up all remnant inventory on your site.

Make your website attractive to advertisers

You want your website to attract advertising. Penny C. Sansevieri, CEO of Author Marketing Experts, advises her clients to blog frequently.  “You need an active blog that is being referenced on other blogs,” she says. “Your website is like real estate. Imagine a store out in the middle of nowhere. Now imagine that same store in the heart of a busy street with traffic buzzing and the sidewalk full of people. That store has quadrupled in value,” she says.

Traffic and buzz makes your website valuable. What have you discovered about attracting advertisers?

Corporate and personal brands are easily destroyed by the lightning-fast way that information zips through the Clouds. Just look at what’s been happening to Tiger Woods recently: there was nothing even remotely gradual about the descent of this previously unassailable icon. Or consider the great Domino’s Pizza fiasco from this past spring, when some minimum-wage employees videotaped themselves doing a few rather unappetizing things in the kitchen. When the video went viral,  creating a firestorm of media coverage, these low-level employees had caused damage to Domino’s reputation estimated to be well into the millions.

Smaller Internet firestorms can be brand-destructive, too. Take the east coast advertising exec who traveled to a client’s Midwestern city and tweeted his disdain to colleagues: “I’d rather die than live here.” The client saw the Tweet (yes, they do know about tweeting in Ohio and Iowa) and nearly cancelled the contract.

It’s for reasons like this that findings in a recent study by Russell Herder/Ethos Business Law should come as no surprise. While eight out of 10 senior executives surveyed believe that social media can enhance customer relationships and build brand reputation, 51% nonetheless feared the potential negative impact of social media on employee productivity, and 49% worried that it could damage the company’s reputation. Executives from companies who use no social media stated two main reasons to explain why (after the No. 1 reason, ignorance about social media): security issues (40%) and concerns about the damage to employee productivity (37%).

(An aside: of those executives who believe that social media can be valuable, Facebook is the most-used vehicle, followed by Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and others.)

Despite the potential risks, companies are losing a tremendous competitive advantage by ignoring social media.  So what to do? Many companies–40% of those surveyed, in fact– technically block employees from accessing social media while at work. However, such a method has a tendency to create resentment among employees…and where there’s resentment, mischief, or worse, easily rears its head. What’s needed, Russell Herder believes, is for companies to draw up a carefully-considered, strategic plan for the wise use of social media:. However, only one in three businesses surveyed had a policy in place to govern social media use. Says Russell Herder:

“Instead of ignoring the need for responsible guidelines, organizations of all sizes should begin to define their strategy regarding social media, and most importantly, the rules for employee engagement…The rules for creating and implementing a social media policy are not universal. They must take the form, substance, philosophy, and culture of the organization to which they apply.”

Russell Herder cites 10 important elements to include in a good social media policy, spelling out:

1. An effective overall philosophy.
2. A requirement that employees be open, honest, respectful and transparent in their usage of social media.
3. Rules for reinforcing the company’s confidentiality and proprietary information policies, making them applicable to the social media environment.
4. The rules for differentiating between an employee’s personal and business online identities.
5. Job performance vs. company time.
6. How to avoid conflicts of interest.
7. Use of Disclaimers regarding employee views.
8. What policies the company uses to monitor employee social media usage
9. How the policy is applied across employee groups
10. Any other company policies that might impact, or be impacted by, social media usage.

Social Media is here to stay, or so it seems. If your company is missing out on a potentially good thing by ignoring this transformational form of communication, maybe it’s time to put an intelligent social media policy in place and move into the future.

For more details on all ten points, Download a PDF with highlights of the Russell Herder study

The Russell Herder/Ethos survey discussed here involved 438 randomly-selected management, marketing, and human resources execs within companies across the U. S. It has a statistical reliability of +/-4.8%, with a 95% confidence level.

An acquaintance of mine—a computer industry insider who is always au courant with what’s happening in Silicon Valley—recently shared with me his worries about the current job market. He’s worried, I should add, not for himself but for one of his daughters. Versatile, charming, well-educated, an experienced and highly-skilled marketer, she’d ordinarily have no problem landing a top-flight job. But these are not ordinary times; there are few jobs to be had. Like a great many others, the state of not finding a job has begun to seem normal to her.

My acquaintance—I’ll call him Simon, and his daughter will be Julie—has until recently forced himself to not interfere in the life of his adult daughter. But a few weeks ago he decided that he had to step in and offer fatherly advice. But he didn’t just barge in. He gave a great deal of thought to how he could be helpful. The first thing he did was peruse available literature on how to find a job. Most of what he found centered around a few good points:

1. Create and Build Your Brand: A personal “brand” is a way to differentiate yourself from others by highlighting what makes you unique and valuable. In other words, a brand is what people think of when they think of you. You then leverage your brand across platforms (creating profiles on social networking sites, sending out tweets, maintaining your own personal website, etc.) in a consistent manner.  [Read a Wall Street Journal article on how to build your brand]
2. Massage Contacts: Get the word out to everyone you know that you’re seeking a job. You never know who might be the person who connects you to the opportunity you’re seeking.
3. Research Potential Companies: Harness the power of the Internet to find companies that are hiring in your field. Investigate their bottom line and future potential. Determine how they treat employees. There’s a lot of information easily available that can help you create a list of companies to target—profitable companies that  you’ll be happy working for.
4. Use Social Networking Sites to Find Jobs: Sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and all the rest have resources that can help. Twitter has become a very popular  resource for finding a job:  How to Find a Job on Twitter; Twitter Job Search; or Wall Street Journal article on using Twitter to find a job
5. Have an Up-to-Date Resume: Work on it, whittle it, and work on it some more. Be concise, accurate, and, above all, be truthful. If you feel that your resume is badly-written, get professional help, or try the free and helpful tools on sites such as Resume-Help.
6. Learn New Skills: Don’t sit on the couch acting depressed in your spare time. Instead, take a class and learn a new job skill, or brush up on skills that have become rusty. Learning something new makes life exciting.
7. Prepare to Star in Job Interviews: Dress for success! Wear something that makes you look and feel confident. Make a list of questions you might be asked in your interview, and come up with really good answers. Practice answering questions while looking in a mirror. At the interview, don’t complain about the job market or anything else: be positive and sincere.

After doing a week or so of research, my acquaintance Simon gave some thought to the way Julie had been searching for a job. As he told me, she had been using a gestalt process rather than a systematic one, which he viewed as the fatal flaw in her job search. He then drew up a systematic plan of attack and offered it to her to use in any way she saw fit (he was very careful not to say “This is what you should be doing”). Happily, she accepted his advice as spot-on. She began using a more systematic technique and within two weeks had gone on her first serious job interview in many months.

I asked Simon if I could use his attack plan on Plugin.com, and he was generous enough to agree. So here’s one Silicon Valley Insider’s reasoned plan of attack for finding your next job:

It seems to me that you need to apply your e-marketing skills to yourself and sell “Julie” as a product to the world. You need to find a way to rise above the hoi polloi of job seekers so that employers call you rather than vice versa. To accomplish that means having a systematic planned campaign with regular reviews, progress assessments, and daily reports to management.  I’m happy to play manager for the moment.

First, you need a regular schedule with the day broken up into small manageable parts. The programming world has found this to be a good mechanism for making things productive. So make a list of what is to be accomplished today, then tomorrow, and so forth.  Here is a beginning:

1. Make a detailed plan for the day [15 minutes]
2. Exercise to keep yourself alert and mentally active [1 hour]
3. Education: learn something new that makes you more employable  [1hour]
4. Keep track of the market for your services: what’s hot and what’s not [???]
5. Network (gathering resources and intelligence) [1 hour?]
6. Scan published opportunities and send out resumes [1-2 hours]
7. Document what you did and send it to your “manager”  [15 minutes]

And so forth and so on.  Of course your topics will be somewhat different and a whole lot more specific.

You are the marketeer so you’ll have to figure out how to get yourself known to the world at large.  Think of yourself as a product. How will you get the word out? This is low budget guerrilla marketing. You might be able to use Facebook and social networking to leverage yourself into rock star status.  (Well, singer in a girl band status with potential.) Twitter is the new hot thing. There are folks using Twitter to find jobs. Find out how that works and give it a try. Organize your out-of-work friends to work as a collective and meet regularly to do things to find jobs together. Expand your network any way you can. Write a blog about finding a job in Silicon Valley and document what you do and what works and what does not.  Be creative and outrageous.

Good luck in your job search, readers. Remember to be systematic, but leave room for being creative, outrageous, and courageous. Most important, land that job!

The idea is catching on—bringing a baby to work means employees return to work sooner, reducing employee turnover and improving morale. But there are many down sides, including reduced productivity, liability, and office disruptions.

Parenting in the Workplace Institute

Carla Moquin, founder of Parenting in the Workplace Institute, has several active websites and blogs on the topic, such as www.babiesatwork.org and www.parentingatwork.org. As America’s most outspoken advocate of Baby at Work programs, her Attachment Parenting agenda is off-putting. Moquin’s strongest argument for allowing babies into the workplace, for instance, is that breastfeeding and holding babies in a sling at all times is best for child development.

However, this is not a debate about whether or not being around Mom or Dad 24/7 is best for baby. On the other side of the argument are businesses with employees, deadlines, and financial needs that will be affected by the presence of a tiny new co-worker.

Productivity and Parents

In Moquin’s e-book “Babies in the Workplace” she first claims that productivity of workplace parents goes up if they bring their babies with them. She quotes Deborah Driskill of CDG, a baby-friendly company, who claims that parents become “very organized and efficient because they schedule their work around the baby’s schedule.”  However, this begs the question:  shouldn’t workers be organized and efficient anyway?

Only pages later and throughout the publication, Moquin concedes that productivity of parents who bring babies generally goes down, even to as low as 70% of non-parent workers, a fact that is repeated in many other sources. This low productivity can lead to resentment amongst co-workers, who are left to pick up the slack.

Burden on Others

Speaking of picking up the slack, Moquin frequently alludes that everyone in the office will “pitch in” when it comes to caring for the baby. If the parent has a meeting or important call, a co-worker is expected to step in and care for the child. From a productivity standpoint alone, this is destructive. Other workers will be forced to put their own workload aside, slowing down employee output across-the-boards.

Unless the company has an on-site nanny who was hired specifically for childcare, this method is presumptuous and intrusive. The “It Takes a Village” concept is nice in theory, but a web designer with an afternoon free of meetings does not necessarily want to spend her day bouncing someone else’s baby on her knee, nor was she hired to do so.

Advocates of Babies at Work Programs will argue that the Web Designer with no desire to babysit is welcome to turn down the chore. But the same designer may not feel that the workplace culture allows her to turn down the task. It makes her look bad or uncooperative. Workers who don’t mind pitching in may resent those who choose not to.

Or, a superior may take advantage of subordinates by expecting them to take care of an infant while they do important tasks. A subordinate will not see himself in a position to refuse, and is taken advantage of. Meanwhile, his workload suffers, and he slowly begins to resent the boss, as well as the company.

Policies Must Be Made First

Theoretical negative situations are so numerous that it almost doesn’t seem worth it to invite so much trouble into the workplace. But many feel the benefits outweigh the risks. If company policies are put into place beforehand, there is a much greater chance of success. Moquin suggests putting guidelines into place regarding workplace disruption (too much and a parent is asked to make other non-work arrangements), and stipulating that the parent must be the primary caregiver. Some companies also chose to offer parents work at a lower percentage of their salary for the time being, to prevent other workers from feeling shafted.

Ultimately, most employers who have embraced the idea feel that it’s better to have a worker in the seat working at lower productivity than leaving their job vacant for months while the worker is home with the baby. And since it retains good employees and can attract many more, the benefits outweigh the risks.

Final verdict: worth a try.

Few people know their way around startups like Paul Graham. In 1995, as a software programmer with a CS PhD from Harvard, he co-founded Viaweb (with Robert Morris). The Internet’s first application service provider. it allowed users to build and host an online store from within their own browser. Viaweb was bought three years later for nearly $50 million by Yahoo! and became the Yahoo! Store.

Graham has remained extremely active as a business essayist, programmer, and venture capitalist—leading BusinessWeek to name him to its 2008 list of The 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

First, Graham the writer. He’s the author of Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age (O’Reilly Media, 2004), which “explains this [computer/technical] world and the motivations of the people who occupy it. In clear, thoughtful prose that draws on illuminating historical examples, Graham takes readers on an unflinching exploration into what he calls ‘an intellectual Wild West.’ ” (Graham is also the author of two programming books about Lisp.) On his own site, paulgraham.com, he’s penned dozens of lean, insightful essays covering a huge array of business and technical ideas.

As a programmer, Graham is most recently the author of Arc, a dialect of Lisp (with which Viaweb was created). Arc entered the world in 2008 to a lot of attention and mixed reviews. He also wrote the hypothetical programming language, Blub. Earlier in the century he developed a spam filter that InfoWorld called a “stunning answer to spam e-mails.”

But it’s Graham’s work as a VC that is of interest here. In 2005 Graham co-founded Y Combinator to provide seed funding to early-stage, technically-oriented startups. “Y Combinator is a big change from the way business is usually done in tech circles,” Michael Kessler wrote in USA Today. He goes on to discuss the procedure used by traditional venture capitalists, describing it as a “clubby system of who-knows-whom…nearly impossible for a young, unconnected programmer [to break in].”

Y Combinator has changed that. The company gives valuable mentoring and limited seed money (less than $25,000) to startups that are barely out of the gate. “At Y Combinator,” says the website, “our goal is to get you through the first phase. This usually means: get you to the point where you’ve built something impressive enough to raise money on a larger scale. Then we introduce you to later stage investors—or occasionally even acquirers.” In exchange for funding, mentoring, and contacts, Y Combinator takes a small percentage of the new company, typically 2-10%. Among the companies Y Combinator has helped to start are the successful reddit, Scribd and Loopt.

At any rate, the bottom line is this: Paul Graham knows startups. So the following list, taken from his essay, “18 Mistakes That Kill Startups,” is worth reading. If you want to know more, visit the original essay to read his interesting explanation about each of these 18 points.

1. Single Founder
2. Bad Location
3. Marginal Niche
4. Derivative Idea
5. Obstinacy
6. Hiring Bad Programmers
7. Choosing the Wrong Platform
8. Slowness in Launching
9. Launching Too Early
10. Having No Specific User in Mind
11. Raising Too Little Money
12. Spending Too Much
13. Raising Too Much Money
14. Poor Investor Management
15. Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit
16. Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty
17. Fights Between Founders
18. A Half-Hearted Effort

Like most writers, I try to be really careful about backing up data in an effort to prevent both short-term and long-term loss.

Short-term loss is when I lose everything I’ve worked on during the last hour or even the entire day. I try to prevent short-term loss by turning on the “make backup copy” option in Word and saving frequently while I work. But, nonetheless, once in a while I lose something. It’s awful, and a waste of time, but at the most I’ve lost a day. And it’s odd how much of what you wrote remains in your mind and tumbles out joyously, unlike the slow crawl of words on the first go-round.

Long-term loss? That’s when you lose lots and lots of files because your hard disk fails or your house burns down or someone steals your computer. None of those things have happened to me—yet—but I realize they’re possibilities. So I have multiple external hard drives. I make DVDs of data and give them to a neighbor. I keep a data DVD in the tire well of my auto. And just last week I decided to look into storing data online.

Online storage offers me another way to provide backup, certainly—but that’s not the only reason I’m trying it out. One benefit that really appeals to me is mobility: if I put documents in the cloud, then I can access them wherever I am. That means when I travel I can keep a bare minimum of files on my netbook or laptop, hitting the cloud for anything I need. Online storage is also a good way to collaborate and share files. There are really many reasons to put files online.

I’ve looked around, and here are some of the terrific free options available, in alpha order. I’ve signed up for Windows Live Skydrive, which suits my needs. But there are plenty of other gems in this list that might work better for you. Let me know how it works out!

Box.net: Geared to businesses—but the free Lite version is fine for home, self-employed, or small biz use— Box.net permits the sharing, management, and access of business content online. Something like 50,000 companies around the world use Box.net to do just that. The company claims 99% up-time, and offers SSL encryption, redundant storage, configurable permissions, and more.  The free Lite lets you invite in 5 collaborators and gives you 1GB of storage, public file sharing, mobile access, and more. Three paid levels cover companies with more comprehensive needs.

Dropbox: If your needs for online storage are low, you can store up to 2GB on Dropbox for free. In the bargain, you’ll get to use a few other cross-platform sync/sharing services, easy file access from computers and mobile devices, and more. For $9.99 per month you can upgrade to 50GB of storage; and $19.99 gives you 100GB.

File Factory: A whopping 100GB of free storage is yours at File Factory; you can upload up to 25 files at a time, with no file larger than 300MB. It’s a bit slow, though. If you want this service to run faster, you’ll need to upgrade from the free Basic to the fee-based Premium ($79/year). If you share files—photos, say—you can make money with File Factory: $10 for every 10,000 downloads.

IDrive: A full-featured 2GB backup is free (features include automatic backup and more). Upgrade to IDrive Pro ($4.95/month, other price packs) and you’ll get 150GB of storage.

MediaFire: It hardly seems possible, but MediaFire offers unlimited storage on its free account, along with unlimited uploads, downloads, and bandwidth…and with no signup required! Drawbacks: file limit of 100MB, banner ads, no SSL Encryption, and a few other things. If you upgrade to MediaPro ($6.97 per month), you can upload files as big as 10GB, don’t have to endure ads, and you’ll get a whole bunch of other features.

Mozy: Mozy offers 2GB of free storage for free. You can get unlimited storage via a tiered licensing system (a onetime $3.95 for a desktop license, plus a monthly $0.50 per Gig; a different set of fees applies to servers). Using Mozy requires you to download a Mozy utility which makes file transfer, automatic backup, etc., really easy.

MyOtherDrive: Another free 2GB service, offering unmetered bandwidth, encryption, and more (including advertisements). You can choose between archival or synchronized backups, and can backup all your computers to this account. Move up to Pro ($4.99/month) and you’ll get 100GB of space, and Enterprise ($240/year) gives you a giant 1TB!

Orbit Files: You’ll get 6GB of space with Orbit, but along with this choice comes a few limitations: a maximum upload file size of 10MB, limited monthly bandwidth, no public files, and, worst of all, if you don’t log in for 45 days, your stored data is deleted. Two other options are available: Zeus Pro has 200GB monthly bandwidth ($5/month, $45/year) and Olympus Pro offers 300GB monthly bandwidth ($15/month, $149/year).

syncplicity: “Everyday sync, backup, and sharing as simple as it can be,”  is how this syncplicity describes itself (sync + simplicity = syncplicity, get it?). The free version gives you 2GB of storage and lets you sync two computers. Upgrading to a subscription ($9.99/month) boosts you to 50GB and sync-ing as many computers as you like. For either free or subscription, you can get an additional 1GB by referring friends (up to 3GB).

Textive: Here’s something a bit unusual. You can upload up to 1GB of documents (Word docs, PDFs) for storage on Textive. If you choose to make some of them public, and if people read them, you can earn money in the process—20% of the revenue from ads on your viewed pages. Ah, but here’s the rub: you don’t get paid until you’ve earned a minimum $20.

Windows Live Skydrive: Get 25GB of free personal storage with Skydrive, part of Microsoft’s Windows Live group (no file larger than 50MB can be uploaded). The password-protected Skydrive lets you handle files in three ways: you keep them private, share them with contacts, or go public. Installing an Active-X-based tool makes uploading drag-and-drop easy, but you can upload files without it.

Sometimes that disappearance seems like a good idea. Remember the audio CD? I haven’t bought one in maybe three years and can’t imagine ever buying another. Good riddance! Millions of the things end up in landfills each  year, put there by people who can’t be bothered figuring out what to do with them. The CD Recycling Center of America is a good starting place; also, check out this UK-based list of 101 suggested uses for old CDs.

Occasionally I have mixed feelings about something that’s on its way to becoming obsolete. While I understand why it’s heading out the door, that doesn’t prevent me from mourning its passing. Here are two things that fit that category:

The Hand-Written Letter

This year  the Palo Alto-based technology market research firm Radicati Group estimated that, worldwide, 247 billion messages are sent each day. By 2013 this figure is expected to double to 507 billion per day. About 81% of all email is spam, but still—that’s a lot of email. Add to that the nearly 3 billion text messages sent daily in the US alone, and the wildly popular prevalence of Twitter, and what do you have? The demise of the hand-written letter.

Earlier this century I spent a few years doing research for a biography that was published by HarperCollins/Ecco. During the course of my research I traveled to special collections in Paris (Jacques-Doucet Biblio), Washington, D. C. (the Smithsonian Institution), and other archives. I must have read something like 5,000 letters dated from about 1870 into the 1960s. Most were written by hand, and the handwriting itself could be quite revealing. If I hadn’t held my subject’s letters in my hand, I’d never have known how she pressed forcefully on the pen when writing about something that angered or moved her; wrote with such big swooping characters, a visual representation of her outsize ego; squeezed in scribbled add-on comments in the margins, proof of her busy mind.

In other words, the manner in which these letters were written gave away secrets. Even more important, though, is this: the letters exist. They are tucked away, waiting for the next biographer to come along and probe for revelations and facts. With email, messaging and tweets replacing letter-writing, what will tomorrow’s biographers do? Most of the new written communication is ephemeral; it quickly ceases to exist, leaving no trace.

I’m not the first person to decry the demise of the handwritten letter, though: take a look at this 1880 article from the New York Times, which begins: “The old fashion of letter-writing has gone out. It has been swept away in the rush of the modern world.”

Cursive Writing

The demise of the handwritten letter has an ancillary victim: cursive writing.

According to Time Magazine, “People born after 1980 tend to have a distinctive style of handwriting: a little bit sloppy, a little bit childish and almost never in cursive. The knee-jerk explanation is that computers are responsible for our increasingly illegible scrawl, but Steve Graham, a special-education and literacy professor at Vanderbilt University, says that’s not the case. The simple fact is that kids haven’t learned to write neatly because no one has forced them to. ‘Writing is just not part of the national agenda anymore,’ he says.”

Many schools just don’t teach cursive writing any more, or confine instruction to a single year (or less). Perhaps that’s because people no longer need to write by hand except for casual note-taking and the like. And if you want to  write a letter in a beautiful cursive script, all you need to do is download the appropriate fonts to your computer. (For more info on this topic, read a recent AP article about the demise of cursive writing.)

Who knows? Maybe handwritten letters will become a fad, and people will pen their innermost feelings and thoughts and send them off via snail to a loved one. In the process they might save not only handwritten letters and cursive writing, but the post office, fountain pens, and archival research.