Top 10 Ideas for Restarting an IP Program

This is a guest post by my buddy, Bill Meade. In it, he explains how organizations should approach reigniting intellectual property programs. Most organizations have IP programs languishing on their books. Bill specializes in turning these programs into steamroller, competitive advantages. Bill was the IP manager for HPʼs LaserJet group during HP’s rise from 18th in US patenting to #3 in US patenting. His website is here. He is also the worldʼs best beta tester of books— and has provided this valuable service for most of my books.

1. Isolate your patent business model. The big question here is how will patents pay for themselves? By protecting markets from competitors? By being licensed? By reducing the rate of patent litigation? The best place to start an IP program is with a solid foundation on profitability. Then, once you’ve decided what the IP business model is, measure it. Gilb’s Law of Quantification is that there is always a way to measure that is better to not measuring at all. Supertrue for the area of IP. Measure and ye shall receive.

2. Tell inventors the “what.” If you write down the seven areas where you want inventions, and make these areas into a cover sheet on your invention disclosure, you will increase the rate of strategic inventing. Increase from whatever it is now, to over 90%. Until inventors get calibrated, filling out invention disclosure forms is an uncertain, risky, stab in the dark. Tell inventors what you need, and you drain the uncertainty, risk, and much of the career threat from sharing ideas.

3. Tell inventors the “why.” If you can proactively communicate the criteria by which invention disclosures are evaluated, you will increase your rate and quality of inventing dramatically. I think the best way to do this is to pick four scales that range from 1 (low) to 10 (high), have a legal person rate each disclosure on these scales, and have a technical person do the same. You’ll learn a lot as the two raters talk about the differences in their scores and begin to converge. Information is contained in contrasts such as these:

   • Scale 1: Bringing in new business

   • Scale 2: Required investment

   • Scale 3: Competitive pain caused

   • Scale 4: Current business protected

   This process forces your legal and business people to operationalize their currently implicit theories—for example, “Above 30 is a default file patent decision”. Then you can objectively communicate these scores with inventors to calibrate them to the company’s standards. Numerical clarity simultaneously increases the rate and quality of inventing. Quality comes up rapidly, so rapidly that the IP department budgets become immediately overtaxed with potential patent ideas that attorneys canʼt bear not to file on.

4. Make a contract between IP and Senior Management. The biggest sin of omission in starting an IP program is not having an activity-based budget contract between management and the legal department. It can seem like an approach of “Break it. We’ll fix it as we go” is a good enough start—especially before you have shown that you can improve either quality or quantity of IP.

   It’s not true.

   Break-fix does not work for legal departments. Legal is not a BUSINESS function. Legal is a dignified profession. When corporate lawyers need more money, they won’t demand it. Every legal department I’ve worked with has been a wall flower about money—denial ain’t just a River in Egypt. Lawyers won’t pound the table (like psychotic marketing VPs) and demand funding. So without a contract you are likely to end up killing your IP program with success as the legal department chokes on increased activity and improved quality.

   If you have a contract between the IP people and Senior Management, the IP people wonʼt drown in the great disclosures theyʼve always wished to see. And management, for the first time, will have to specify (cap) the appropriate activity level for IP in the company.

5. Establish a translation layer. I have a Ph.D. in marketing with minors in electrical engineering, evolutionary ecology, econometrics, and statistics. When I arrived at HP I was a in marketing, managing printer products. Very soon I was beamed across the group into managing the business side of a million dollar a month burn rate, patent litigation event between HP and Xerox. My background in BOTH hard science and soft science sides was the reason for this assignment. Hard science plus soft science training prepared me to be able to translate between all the stakeholder groups in intellectual property.

   Being able to translate between engineer and marketeer, engineer and attorney, between attorney and VP of Technology, and between outside counsel and inside counsel, and most importantly for that litigation event, between the PR people, business people, and patent attorneys, we were able to shut down the HP/Xerox litigation at minimum cost. The IP management game is won by simplifying and accelerating communication. Hire a translation layer person, someone who delights at being stuck in the middle of people who can’t, don’t, or won’t communicate.

6. Build the rebel alliance. Unrecognized in every great technical company is an incipient alliance of people who want to help intellectual property management happen. IP rebel alliance members are sometimes are visible as patent coordinators in business groups, but the vast majority of potential rebel alliance members are below the waterline like an iceberg. By tapping the rebel alliance, I was able to keep IP strategies moving while remaining flat to the wall—not leaving a cost profile that a computer or finance person could see.

   For example, I built a world wide automatic payment system for IP payments. But, by tapping the rebel alliance, I built this system without head count, budget, or even an accounting code. No company knows what it should be spending on IP. So the less you have to spend, the more successful you can be. The way to spend less on IP than anyone for a given level of success is to build the rebel alliance.

7. Democratize inventing. If you haven not engineered an ‘inventing democracy,’ you don’t have it. Being content with inventions that find you, means you have biased and filtered access to the ideas created in your organization. A lot of things make inventing undemocratic: habit, cultural assumptions, ignorance, and inertia. My personal favorite ‘wrong’ cultural assumption is that engineers in engineering groups CAN be inventors while engineers in sales groups CAN NOT be inventors - even if the engineer came from an engineering group and is used to be an inventor.

   You need to build business processes between the legal department and the inventors. Between the legal department and the business people. And probably between legal, finance, business, and inventors if you have invention incentive program. Democratization of invention is engineered in over time as you feel your way iteratively discovering breakthrough processes. If you design in open-ness, you’ll maximize the quality and income of your IP system.

8. Be enthusiastic. The root words of “enthusiasm” are “en” which means “in” and “theos” which means god. Enthusiasm is the god within. And enthusiasm is responsible for all the results I’ve achieved in IP management. This was surprising to my boss; he was a twenty-five year managing counsel for IP who once said, “The policies have been on the books for seven years. The doors of the legal department have always been open. Why is everything happening now? … I’m surprised at how much more happens when enthusiasm is behind the process pushing.”

   Enthusiasm is not taught in law school. So, enthusiasm is crucial complementary skill to your legal department. Make sure whoever you hire is famous for enthusiasm. For example, while I was running an invention workshop for the first time at a client. During the presentation the IP attorney (now GC for IP) present looked at me and blurted out “This is like an intellectual property revival meeting!” Yes, exactly!!!

9. Strip your disclosure. Invention disclosures are complex forms created by patent attorneys to pass muster with other patent attorneys. The requirements to document an invention are however, very few. Why complex forms for simple inventions? Because attorneys are shifting the work they are supposed to do, on to inventors. If you want more and better disclosures from the inventors, simplify. Take the legal department’s work, off the backs of your inventors. If the legal department needs more people to process invention disclosures, so be it.

   Starting up an intellectual property program is about profit, not cost. Groundrule #1 is that nobody in the system gets to optimize their own costs at the expense of other people in the system. Simplify the disclosure, put a targeting cover sheet on it, you’ll be delighted with how the results come in good and then continue to get better every month.

10. Close the open loops. Intellectual property is managed open loop. Invention incentives if companies have policies, are always a disaster as far as inventors are concerned. Companies are either months (or years) behind in payments, or the payments come so far after invention (4 years if the patent has to issue before the inventor receives payment) that the “incentives” are useless for making inventors feel like they are part of a team. Basic strategies like how IP pays for itself, are not written, reviewed, measured, or routinely revised.

    But donʼt feel bad about IP being open loop. This is what an ground floor opportunity looks like!! Intellectual property infrastructure and culture are built up over-time. Reigniting an IP program is a lot of fun because reigniting IP programs helps companies protect and re-monetize themselves, gets employees working together in new ways, and makes jobs more meaningful for people when they see that their work is valuable, patentable, and part of the company’s competitive advantage going forward.

How to Convert PSD Into HTML - The Best Option

"I speak HTML, CSS, and Javascript." Resumes containing such phrases are not rare in the Internet. But what to do if your "native" language is colors and lines? In other words, if you are a designer and need to translate your works (e.g., *.psd designs) into HTML/CSS code?

There are three main options to solve this problem:

1) Code it yourself,

2) Use automated tools, and

3) Hire a provider of PSD-to-HTML/CSS conversion services.

And here comes another question: Which option is the best?

In fact, there is no all-purpose choice to suit every situation. Really, people and circumstances are different.

To convert yourself or not yourself - Is that a question?

Some of my friends-designers agree with marketing guru Tom Peters: nowadays design is one of the most essential competitive differences that can set products (and websites) apart from other commoditized rivals. A designer is becoming a central figure in website success. And she/he should be completely concentrated on design because very few people can be a universal genius like Leonardo da Vinci.

Others say that web designers should know not only the color theory or graphic techniques but also PSD slicing, HTML coding, content writing, SEO, and marketing. Only in this case designers will create something really effective in the present-day Internet.

For me every website element should be well-designed: website concept, its structure, graphics, layout, HTML/CSS markup, and content. The deeper designers know respective phases and website development operations the better, because she/he can see and control the process in whole. But it doesn't mean that designers should do all the work themselves.

Which of PSD-to-HTML options is the best when...

... HTML/CSS is easy for you or when it looks like mumbo-jumbo? When there is a long line of clients or only few orders? When you design an experimental site for yourself or an important custom work? When there is a large budget or tough times?

These situations obviously require different solutions.

So what is the recipe?

To be effective, we should be flexible. It is difficult to be a universal genius but it is possible to have a universal (or almost universal) knowledge base and manage the process.

1. Collect information: Design-to-XHTML/CSS tutorials, reviews of automated conversion tools, and lists of PSD-to-HTML services providers.

To keep track of new developments, Google Alert can be of very useful assistance or just regularly visit such sites as designfloat.com, designm.ag, noupe.com, tripwiremagazine.com, csstea.com, just to name a few.

Speaking of tutorials, gather not only the newest techniques and CSS tricks but older materials too, because they may contain gold nuggets of information.

2. Try them and make your own lists. Select tutorials, automated tools, and providers that are the most useful, efficient, and comfortable just for YOU. It takes time but it pays off. Moreover, one day you can publish your own lists named "Practical Collection of PSD-to-XHTML Tutorials" or "My Favorite Design-to-HTML Services."

Select several (2 or 3) providers because of:

1). Risk management considerations: if you urgently need to convert your design and the primary provider is overloaded, you will have a reserve option.

2). Providers can have strengths in different fields, e.g., one is more proficient in PSD to WordPress themes conversion, others -- in design-to-Drupal or Joomla templates development and implementation.

3). Services and your requirements to them (as well as functionality of automated tools or perceived importance of tutorials) change with time.

Check out selected providers yourself. It is not out of place because what was the best for someone may be not so good for you.

3. Evaluate project circumstances: volume of works, urgency, project requirements (including W3C standards compliance, browser compatibility, semantic coding), project importance, budget, your level of HTML/CSS knowledge, and so on. Then take your lists and choose an option or their combination that is the most effective for you in this concrete situation.

Each of these options -- Do it yourself, Use automated tools or Service providers -- can be a good solution to convert PSD into HTML. But no less important is that there are different alternatives available for choice. Really, to be flexible and succeed -- that is the best option.

About The Author
Natalia Savchenko is a proficient web designer and the CEO of HTMLcut.com, a PSD to HTML conversion and HTML coding services company.

How to Build a Website For Free

When it comes to online website maker software, Site Rubix is second to none. You can use this software to make anything from websites for fun, or even pages to make money online. There are tons of different programs online that can help you make your very own website, you can choose from highly technical and expensive products like Adobe's Dream Weaver or use free on line HTML editors such as Weebly and Squidoo. The only problem with free on line HTML editors, most lack the tools required to make some of the more advanced sites.

Site Rubix has a number of different features that set it apart from its competition. And to top that off, it is extremely easy to use! You can make professional looking websites in no time at all.

There are quite a few features that help make this software easy to use. All of its 16 pre-made templates can be easily dragged and dropped into place. There are also a number of different headers and layout designs that can be used to create incredible sites in a matter of minutes.

Another thing that sets this free website builder apart from the competition is its one click FTP uploading capabilities. This makes uploading your website simple and easy. Even if you don't have your own hosting space, Wealthy Affiliate has more than 600 megabytes of free web hosting available to all of their members. Site Rubix also has a huge support section that keeps it at its peak potential.

The program also offers a number of different tutorials and guides that are one click away. This makes the learning process simple and easy. There is also a support section on the forums full of people willing to help you with anything you need.

It does not get any easier than this. This is why Site Rubix is great for you. It is simple to use, and extremely powerful at the same time. There is not another website creator out there with these capabilities .This is only one of the free tools that you will find at Wealthy Affiliate.

Jack is a 66yr old retired business owner, who was forced into retirement early when he was the victim of a violent crime. Jack found the online world so he could work from home.Its been a long strange trip for Jack, but after a lot of time and attending the school of hard knocks, he has become successful.You can get his free Wealthy Affiliate Unplugged Guide his inside look at the Best Affiliate Training, Jack holds nothing back in his 80 page look inside Wealthy Affiliate get yours for Free Here , http://www.wealthyaffiliatenewsunplugged.com

How to Create a Conference Dashboard on a Web Based Tool

There are several web developers that are trying to create a conference dashboard. The majority of them succeed while the others fail. If you do not want to add the number of those who had fallen short, you should be able to possess a good idea about the conference dashboard. While others attempt to hack into the information about what the other developers had done, you can create your own. If you notice that there are a bunch of social media dashboards that contain all kinds of news information, you may want to emulate them. This is because you would seem like you are a member of the press with all the great news on your dashboard. Currently, there are developers that try to hack into the conferences that they are attending but most of them doubt the effectiveness of such task.

So, now, your task is to create your own conference dashboard. Here, you can use any tool such as iGoogle. They will enable you to view the elements that you might want to learn more about at the conference. Therefore, at whatever time that you have an access to the web, you can take advantage of the fact that you will be able to scan tons of data especially the new ones. They can prove to be very useful for your conference dashboard. So, if you want to make this project work for you, you can follow the steps in this article.

The first thing that you have to do is of course log on to iGoogle. You can use others such as Page Flakes or NetVibes. Now, you will have to augment a number of search strings like Twitter Search. The next step that you have to take is to put in a local map. Then, you can increase this by adding a news feed. You can also add other elements such as a chat client or Technorati search if you want.

If you have followed the steps above in proper order, you will now marvel at your newest and functional conference dashboard. There are still a lot of things that you can add here such as the Flickr tag search. As you start your project, you will be able to determine what other elements you may want to add in your conference dashboard.

Now, if you like it the customized way, you can give it a great sense that you have done it for your own preferences. So, distinguish what you want to see on your conference dashboard and know how you can change it. As mentioned there are several elements that you can add. They can be widgets, feeds or gadgets. You can also add some live blogging tool so that if you cannot be present at one stream, you can obtain the gist from the others.

For some people, they go to dashboard meetings because they want to meet other people. They will want to know who will be going there. After the conference, you can get links to the media such as session streaming and interviews.

If you are interested in Conference Dashboard, check this web-site to learn more about social media dashboards.

Preview of Jolicloud: The social Netbook OS

One of the things that has been most-surprising about the advent of Netbooks is that it has become less about the hardware as much as how mainstream operating systems and applications have had to adapt to fit within their confines. In the earlier generations of these machines, operating systems like Windows Vista just didn't cut the mustard, which is why most Netbooks you can buy right now are either running Windows XP or a variant of Linux.

While that is certain to change with the release of Windows 7 in late October, which runs leaner and meaner than Vista ever did (and could even come on a thumb drive), Microsoft's stumble opened things up for other operating systems to come in and fill the gap. Many consumers have more of a choice than ever with alternate operating systems that are becoming easier to install and use on these smaller machines.

One of those, called Jolicloud is launching in beta in the next few months. Created by Tariq Krim, who founded and later left widget-based start page Netvibes, the alternate OS has been designed for Web workers, or people who do most of their work (or play) on Web applications and services.

I've been giving it a thorough run-though over the past few days and have come away impressed at what it's trying to do. Some bits and pieces are definitely still beta, but the underlying approach of making Web sites and software applications feel the same, as well as introducing users to new ones to use is really innovative.

How it works

Jolicloud centers on a directory of applications that can be sorted by genre, release date, and popularity. To download or remove them from your computer, you just click on their icon and it does the rest. Jolicloud groups both Web apps and software programs under the same name umbrella, and both are added and removed from your system in the same manner. There's also a normal add and remove programs tool just like you get in Windows, but it's easier to do it from Jolicloud's rounded and simplistic interface.

To install or uninstall "applications" you can head to Jolicloud's online directory.

(Credit: CNET)

Jolicloud is designed to let users hop back and forth between apps that all use the entire screen. Apps you have open stay in a top menu bar and can be switched back and forth just by clicking on them. Alt+tab works too.

Interestingly enough, you don't actually launch any downloaded app from the directory screen. Instead, they're housed in a simple three-pane menu that users can hop back to at any time. This keeps apps organized by whatever category they were in on Jolicloud's directory, but it's also a little jarring after using Windows or Mac where you're used to a start button, quick launch menu, or dock.

One of the big draws to Jolicloud is that it takes this list of apps you have installed and backs it up. If you have multiple computers running Jolicloud that share the same account, it syncs up those apps, including any log-ins or shared data. This puts less of an importance on what hardware you're using, meaning you can hop from machine to machine and get right back to what you were doing on the other.

Jolicloud users can befriend one another and keep an eye on what apps are being installed.

(Credit: CNET)

As mentioned earlier, Jolicloud allows users to befriend one another as well as join groups. This means you're alerted to new applications on a constant basis. For many though, this may be a little creepy.

When showing this to one of my friends, their first question was "does that mean everyone will know what video I watched while I was supposed to be working?" Luckily no. For now it's limited to displaying what applications your friends are adding or removing--not what they're doing inside of them. But I could easily see that changing with some apps that share your information with others, like social-gaming site Kongregate, and social networks Facebook and Twitter.

Easy and hard at the same time

Jolicloud fits on a CD or a (more Netbook-friendly) USB thumb drive. It can be installed on top of, or beside your standard OS. In my case, I installed it alongside a build of Windows XP and it automatically partitioned my hard disk to make extra room. The whole thing took less than half an hour from start to finish, and when it was done I could still boot back into Windows without a hitch.

The USB creator makes it easy to create a bootable USB drive with Jolicloud on it.

(Credit: CNET)

One change since earlier versions is a cross-platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux) software utility that lets you create a bootable USB key. You just tell it where the Jolicloud install file is and where the USB stick is and it does the rest. Previously you had to do this using third party applications, and/or a multistep copy and paste into the command line. Not exactly user-friendly.

Although it's not done yet, there are some definite key features that make Jolicloud more than just a re-skinning of Linux. The idea that you can discover new applications and manage what you have installed on your machine in the same place is downright cool. So is the idea of having all your apps and settings synced up between multiple machines.

I'm less enthralled by the idea of having to basically install bookmarks, and do away with having multiple windows open in the same desktop area--something I've grown very accustomed to on Macs and PCs. It's also still Linux, and comes with some of the same hang ups and the often-steep learning curve.

For instance, on the machine I was using to test it (Acer's Aspire One), I had to manually track down the Ubuntu Linux display drivers in order to get the screen resolution above 1024x768. As a result, everything I was looking at was stretched out. There was also no software for the multitouch trackpad I was using, which meant no handy gestures for things like page navigation or on-screen shortcuts. These things could certainly make their way into future builds, but in the meantime, the fact that I was a part of the technological minority became abundantly clear.

Will these kind of kinks be worked out eventually? I sure hope so, because it's one of the few things that held me back from fully enjoying the experience. I greatly dislike having to hunt down drivers, or deal with bugs that keep me from using certain applications, and I have a greater tolerance than most folks. One of the easiest way to square away these problems is to partner with hardware vendors and get Jolicloud on there as the main or alternate OS. Offering it for free, which is what Krim is currently doing, is a good way to start.

The good:
• Free (for now).
• Large directory of applications that are easy to install and uninstall.
• Simple way to create a USB key w/included software.
• Multiple types of installations, including ones that can sit alongside your normal OS.
• Windows emulator (WINE) so you can run many applications you're used to.
• OS and applications automatically update.

The bad:
• Can't have multiple applications on screen at the same time.
• Downloaded applications are organized for you and cannot be reorganized.
• Does not work on all Netbooks, only certain models.
• Linux-related hang ups like limited driver support.

Meta Tags - How Important Are They?

Are meta tags really that important? Individual search engines use their own judgment with regards to meta tags. Some search engines do use them. But I'll let you in on a secret, Google keeps the specifics of everything they do a secret. There are a good many sites that achieve page one ranking on Google that use no keyword or description tags at all, so take it with a grain of salt when someone tells you they are really essential for Search Engine Optimization. Again, each search engine has its own method for indexing -- some assign them considerable importance, thus it is best not to omit them.

Meta tags are lines of code that are hidden in web pages. The code information is not revealed in the web browser (but refer to the discussion of the description tag, below) but they are utilized by search engines to help categorize your web content. It is possible that you might choose to omit descriptions, or keywords, but your site won't look right if you don't put a "title" tag, since the web browsers will show it as "Untitled Page".

In order to grab traffic, years ago, meta tags would be "stuffed" with repetitive information, or information that has nothing to do with the web page. Search engines still check to be certain that the keywords are relevant; however they don't give as much "weight" or importance to them, thereby penalizing this abuse. In any case, if you don't include meta tags, or they are filled with useless keywords, you will not rank well overall.

The "head" section of the web page, is where meta tags are located. Some people say that you shouldn't use any capital letters for your keywords, and also don't repeat words in the keyword tag.

Mostly, the actual meta tag contents are not visible, but the "description" tag's information will be shown on nearly all of the search engine results as well as the title page when the results are revealed. Avoid repetition of keywords in the description tag, and keep the description text relevant.

Stephen Grisham, Sr. is a copy writer for InfoServe Media, LLC. InfoServe Media is a Houston, TX web design and web hosting company. If you just need periodic updates to an existing site, InfoServe Media also offers website maintenance.

How the Cisco Networking Academy is Getting Results and Jobs for IT Students around the World

By Mike Stone

It goes without saying that most people who acquire skills through the Cisco® Networking Academy® are looking to get a job with an IT company. What student Selim Kolgeci, of Suhareka, Kosovo, did not expect was that he would set up an IT company of his own.

Impatient for commercial success, Kolgeci did not wait to complete his Cisco CCNA® course before becoming his town's first-ever Internet service provider (ISP), for 200 clients, and opening and running one of the first Internet cafés in Suhareka.

Kolgeci sold his ISP business in October 2007 to take on a more traditional job as a network manager, although he still retains his cybercafé. He is a prime example of how the Networking Academy not only delivers skills but also directly helps to create employment.

"I used the skills that I got from the Networking Academy to enable me to start this business. And I achieved my dream," Kolgeci, an experienced IT enthusiast, explains. "When I first applied, I thought that I was just going to attend the course and consolidate my knowledge.

"But after spending a week there, I saw that I had made a really good decision."

Gabriela Sandu, now a successful programmer for IBM, similarly remembers how the Networking Academy made all the difference to her technology career.

Before breaking into programming, says Sandu: "I attended a lot of long courses on algorithms, C, C++, Java, Prolog and scheme programming, but none of them got me where I wanted to be." And this was despite her attending the most prestigious university in her native Romania.

Then, about three and a half years ago: "I saw an announcement in a bookshop saying that a Networking Academy course was going to begin in two weeks time. For me, this was the spark I was looking for. So two days later I enrolled and I couldn't wait to begin the training."

"This was the spark I was looking for."

— Gabriela Sandu, IBM programmer and former Networking Academy student

Sandu passed the course with flying colors and after graduation got a job as a Java developer in Portugal, before being headhunted by IBM. She says: "I'm still working for IBM Romania. I have been working here for almost two years now as a programmer, mostly in Java."

Her responsibilities in the role are daunting, but she still has time to extend her skills through the Networking Academy. "For two months now, I've been enrolled in a new course," she says. "I'm taking the Unix class and I'm very pleased with it so far.

"I always encourage other people to enroll in a good class. For me the Networking Academy program is the best way to go. Working in IT really rocks."

Every day, the Academy, one of the biggest corporate social responsibility initiatives on the planet, takes hundreds of young and not-so-young students and prepares them, too, for a rocking career in IT.

And for some, who come from disadvantaged backgrounds or find themselves in difficult circumstances, the Networking Academy is not just a route to a new job. It is a route to a new life. Take Gordon McCallum, whose career path from oil rigs to IT involved a nasty car accident.

McCallum's injuries were too severe to allow him to return to his original profession, so he started looking to the IT industry as a new career direction. During a three-year recovery he studied at his local Cisco Networking Academy at Speedwell in Bristol, United Kingdom.

He completed a CCNA course in one year and passed his exams in August 2005.

"The Cisco Networking Academy played a major part in my successful career change from being an oil rig engineer to working at what I spent over three years retraining for: working as close to Cisco as possible," says McCallum.

After gaining his qualifications, McCallum was quickly hired by Comstor UK, the most successful Cisco distributor in the United Kingdom. "I will always be grateful for the opportunity that the Cisco Networking Academy has given me," he continues.

At 45 years of age, McCallum was a mature student when he entered the Academy. In contrast, Tim Groote, from Schoonhoven in the Netherlands, found his studies helped him become the network manager and administrator of an entire company at just 19.

Groote completed his CCNA1 and CCNA2 courses at Da Vinci College, Dordrecht. He says: "The knowledge Cisco has provided me with has proven to be invaluable on more than one occasion, and helped me a great deal in acquiring a position as network manager."

Mike Stone is a freelance journalist located in Barcelona, Spain.

7 best jQuery Plugins To Create a wonderful Tooltip

Tooltips are one of the most important JavaScript widgets on the web. Although important, they also happen to be a very badly misunderstood and poorly implemented component. This tool corrects the situation. You’ll get a professional piece of sofware that is easy to understand and use.

Simpletip

Simpletip allows you to create tooltips with ease on any element on the page using the power of jQuery’s selectors and event management. The tooltips can be static, dynamic, or even loaded through AJAX with a variety of different visual effects.

qTip

qTip is an advanced tooltip plugin for the ever popular jQuery JavaScript framework.

Built from the ground up to be user friendly, yet feature rich, qTip provides you with tonnes of features like rounded corners and speech bubble tips, and best of all… it’s completely free under the MIT license!

jQuery Tools/Tooltips

This tooltip plugin can contains any HTML element such as links, table, forms, and images. Implementing this plugin is very easy. The default effects are sliceup and toogle. However, you can easily build your own effects.

Orbital Tooltip

The concept behind the Orbital Tooltip is to allow more flexibility to developers needing more specific positioning for their tooltips. With this jQuery plugin, you can position a tooltip around any element in a 360 degrees around it!

Tipsy

Tipsy is a jQuery for creating a Facebook-like tooltips effect based on an anchor tag’s title attribute.

jTip

jTip pulls content into a tool tip using the HttpXMLRequest object. By adding a class attribute value of “jTip” to a link element you can create a tooltip from the content found in the file the href is pointing too.

clueTip

The clueTip plugin allows you to easily show a fancy tooltip when the user’s mouse hovers over (or, optionally, clicks on) any element you designate in your script. If the element includes a title attribute, its text becomes the heading of the clueTip.

How To Create A Product Review Site

Product review sites are a great way to promote and sell products. When most people visit an e-commerce site it can have an adverse effect. They know the site is trying to sell them something and their resistance can be elevated because of this. If on the other hand you one of your friends was to tell you about a great product, you would be more inclined to purchase this product yourself.

The idea is a product review site is to give the customer an unbiased opinion of the product they are interested in. A common mistake many people make is to try review every single product they can find, before launching the site.

If you have reviewed a few products then there's no reason why you can't launch your site and start driving traffic. It's important to get things going and start testing and seeing what works and what doesn't.

It's important to be honest with your reviews. You want to talk about the pros and the cons and really make the reader feel like your giving them an honest review. If you are constantly giving every product a 10/10 with no negatives, your readers will lose trust in you and it's only down hill from there.

After someone reads your review there will be the option for them to go to the actual product page for the product you are reviewing. This is where you want to implement a squeeze page. You might offer them a weekly or daily newsletter that provides the latest reviews.

After you have captured the customer's information you then forward them onto the product page. You should also provide the option for the customer to skip this option. The customer might be interested in the product but not necessarily want to sign up to your list.

Having a good page rank is going to help with your product review site. One useful technique to increase your page rank is to take advantage of amazon.com. Visit Amazon.com and find similar products that are related to the product you are doing a review on. Review some of the products that you find on amazon.com on your own product review site.

You can then go back to amazon.com, sign up for a free account and post your review of the product on their website as well. In your review you post on amazon.com you have a link back to your product review site.

When Google and other search engines crawl and run their spiders over amazon.com which they do regularly, they will find your review and a link back to your site. Because amazon.com has a good page rank, this will also help your site's page rank. The more quality back links you can get to your site, (such as the one just described) the better you will rank with Google and ultimately the more quality traffic you will drive to your site.

Another powerful tool you can use on your product review site is a blog. When you create a product review you can also post it on your blog. This alerts the search engines that you have a new review and will get your review indexed on Google faster.

A popular service many people offer with their blog is a rss feed. If someone grabs your rss feed for your blog and posts it on their website, then this is going to give you much more exposure and more promotion which again leads to more traffic.

Below are examples of good product review sites:

http://101date.com

http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com

The reason these sites are so successful is because the rank high on Google search pages for popular search terms. Take a look around at these sites and learn from what they do.

If you haven't already got a web site and you are looking for some where to start a product review site is the perfect place for it. If you already have a website you can simply add in a product review section.

Overall providing a personalized review for a product is a great way to improve conversion rates and increase quality traffic to your site.

For information on internet marketing go to http://www.net-marketing-guide.com Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Chris_Hebrard

Some features that would really make Twitter better

If you don’t know what Twitter is, then please do go here.

I have started using Twitter a little more in the past couple of months, and I am liking it more and more (consequently, I have reduced blogging a little, but more about that in a different post). Below is a chart which shows my tweeting pattern since I joined – yup, signed up a long time ago, but only adopted recently:
Having started using Twitter a lot, I realize that there are a lot of features that Twitter can improve upon. I suppose that is the main reason for why there are so many applications out there which have been built using the Twitter API, but some of the features that I would like to see are related to the core Twitter offering. Here is what I would like to see in Twitter:


Opt-in Indexing of Tweets – what this means is that I should be able to choose whether I want search engines and other aggregators to index my tweets or not. In fact, I should even be able to choose whether my tweets should show up in Twitter search or not. Currently, everything I tweet is indexed by search engines, and of course also by Twitter. It is much like what WordPress.com gives you – the option to whether you want your blog posts to be searchable on search engines.

Some people might say that if I want that, then I should just protect my updates. But that is not what I want. I do want other users on Twitter to be able to follow me and I do want my updates to appear on the Public Timeline. I just want to prevent them from being indexed, that is all.

Original Trending Topic Tweets – this one is really close to my heart – every time I see a Trending Topic and click on it, all I see is trash tweets. Let me explain. The moment a topic becomes trending two things happen: spammers move in and start using the trending topic to spew spam; people start using the trending topic keywords as part of their tweets because those words are… trendy.

Not too many people are tweeting about the original cause of why the topic became trendy (though this varies from topic to topic). This usually is the number one reason on why I don’t use the Trending Topics feature at all.

What I would like to see are the tweets which caused the topic to become trending. The original hundred (or thousand) tweets which came out and defined a trending topic. At least this way, I would be able to see real discussion about a topic.

Filtered Trending Topics – based on the screenshot released by TechCrunch of the Twitter admin hack, it is clear that Twitter is tracking more than just 10 trending topics. I think it should let me block out certain topics from the top 10 list, and then fill out the the available slot with some other topic that is trending.

This feature would allow me to only see topics that I am interested in.

User Rating – there really needs to be some sort of rating system in place. And it should then be used in Public Timelines, Search Results (or trending topics), etc. to sort, hide/show tweets.

For example, if someone has been rated really low by fellow Twitter users (spam bots will fall in this category), then I shouldn’t see their Tweets when I click on a Trending topic. This would clean it up so much.

Well, there are many other things that Twitter can do to improve, but the ones above are my top choices (wish list items).

What would you like to see in Twitter that is not there?