Web Worker Daily

I’m one of those fanatics who goes out before dawn on the day after Thanksgiving, to wait in line for the doors of my favorite stores to open so I can snap up the best deals before they are gone. It sounds really crazy, until you see my receipts and calculate how much money I’m saving for my effort. Read the rest of this entry »

Last spring, I bought my first Mac laptop to replace my aging Windows laptop. Mac fans may say the result was predictable: My shiny new MacBook quickly became my primary computer while my desktop PC gathered dust.

That change left me with one problem I hadn’t anticipated, though. My office wouldn’t function as well with a laptop as my primary computer. I had to rethink the whole layout. How did just changing from a desktop PC to a smaller MacBook manage to make my office totally dysfunctional? Read the rest of this entry »

Gary Vaynerchuk is the host of Wine Library TV (with over 80,000 viewers a day) and Director of Operations at his family’s company, Wine Library, in Springfield, NJ. He grew that business from $4 million to $60 million in only five years, and is now the co-founder of VaynerMedia and a consultant for Fortune 100 companies. An in-demand public speaker, Vaynerchuk has keynoted at events such as FOWA and South by Southwest, and also appeared on many television shows such as “Ellen DeGeneres”, “Late Night With Conan O’Brien”, “The Today Show”, and CNBC’s “Mad Money With Jim Cramer”.  Vaynerchuk’s second book, “Crush It!“, came out earlier this month.

I sat down with Gary at LessConf in Jacksonville, Fla., to talk about working hard and building brands. Read the rest of this entry »

Mike McDerment is the co-founder and CEO of Freshbooks. I caught up with him at the recent LessConf event in Jacksonville, Fla, to chat about Freshbooks’ focus, whether you can trust web apps with your data, and working with family members.

Do you work with family members? How does it work out for you?

If you are a serious photographer, one of the things you live (or work) most in fear of is of losing a whole session of shots before you are able to properly back them up. This can happen in many ways: equipment loss, memory card failure, accidental erasure, or theft. But as with everything digital, there’s a gadget that can help solve that problem — if you are willing to pay the price.

That gadget is the Epson P6000, and even if you aren’t a photographer, it comes with some features that may be of use to you if you need to carry media with you or do presentations on the fly. Read the rest of this entry »

Social media is becoming a must-use tool for marketing businesses of all types and sizes. Next month, well-known social media marketing consultants Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo will be publishing their comprehensive guide to social media marketing, “Friends with Benefits.” The title, while sounding gimmicky, is actually a very apt one that summarizes neatly the world that awaits in social media for companies who use the medium properly.

The guidance offered in “Friends with Benefits” is clearly tailored towards large businesses. There are repeated references to structures such as your company’s legal department, “marketing VP”, company intranet, IT department, and communications department. Bootstrapping small business owners (who are most likely to need a “self-help” book like this) may feel a little left out of the practical aspects of the advice offered here, although most of the general concepts apply to all companies, no matter what the business size. Read the rest of this entry »

All but the youngest of web workers grew up learning not about email but about paper correspondence, as dictated by the likes of Emily Post. I personally learned to type on an electric typewriter in high school, and can write a perfectly polite thank you notecard thanks to the schooling of my mother.

Email didn’t become a regular part of my life until well into adulthood, and I rapidly learned there were no hard-and-fast rules governing the rapidly evolving email frontier. I had to learn with the rest of the world as the rules evolved that “all caps” was the equivalent of shouting, and that it was rude to forward everything you thought was funny to your entire address book.

As email became a more integral part of my business life, the questions about what was the correct way to use it became more complex. And yet I had no Emily Post to turn to for guidance on the correct etiquette in this new form of correspondence. Or at least I didn’t, until I found “SEND: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home” by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe. Read the rest of this entry »

This week, Intuit announced that it will be releasing the 2010 versions of Quickbooks Pro and Quickbooks Premier to users on Oct. 7.

So what’s new for Quickbooks users in 2010? Intuit says it has streamlined the install process from 15 screens to only six for small businesses with simple accounting needs. You will be able to edit multiple items in the lists of items/customers/vendors at one time in a spreadsheet-style screen, and data can be pasted into those lists from Excel. There are new form templates, and more form customization options, including decorative backgrounds. For more advanced customization, there is integrated access to design services. Quickbooks 2010 users will also have the ability to put their signature on their checks directly within the program without printing them. Read the rest of this entry »