Talk and surf on a Verizon iPhone 5 (now)

When I switched to Verizon and cancelled my AT&T wireless service it was because the most important feature of the phone - actually making a phone call - was challenging at best with AT&T in the Orange County area.  Calls dropped constantly. And I even lost critical minutes responding to an emergency at home because of an "out of range" issue just a few miles from my house.  I never regret my decision to switch to Verizon.  

One of the challenges that came with Verizon is the lack of simultaneous talk and surf capability.  I can't email an attachment or something to someone I'm talking with.  It reduces the phone's capabilities such that I resort to waiting to get to my computer to have certain calls I could otherwise have if talk and surf worked- which is a big marketing point AT&T has in it's favor.   And this really detracts from the point of being "mobile" on a Verizon iOS device. According to Gizmodo, this is still a problem with the Verizon iPhone.  I can vouch for it being an issue with Verizon and KDDI (AU) in Japan as well.

Enter Line2. I was on a call today with AppleCare in the US, sitting in a Starbucks in Kobe, Japan. During the call the AppleCare representative asked me several times to try things on my iPhone to resolve the issue- which I was able to do.  At the end of the call, my iTunes Match on iCloud was working again.  And I realized I was doing all of this while talking via Voice-Over-IP on a really poor 3G connection.  No LTE involved.  I was really happy.  I used Line2 because I wanted to call an 800 number for AppleCare in the US.  Because of this experiment, I'll now use my Line2 number in the USA whenever I expect I'll need to talk and surf at the same time.  All of this costs me just $10 per month.  Add that with Verizon customer service and reliability and I'm sold.

Isn't it great living in the future?

A tech crisis that kills businesses - and how to avoid it

I feel sorry for a lot of techs with titles like IT Director or CIO who may not have the skills required to prevent a catastrophic - and unplanned - career disaster.

One of my mentors, now retired, was a CIO at some very successful and prominent companies, including one tech company famous worldwide. He typically came in to his role on the heels of another CIO's departure, often related to some kind of technology failure or crisis that negatively affected the business. Systems and devices stopped working, information goes unavailable. Millions or tens of millions of dollars of business is lost.

One day, when I was nearly done with business school, my mentor explained to me over lunch what the root cause of all these IT failures was.

"It isn't a tech problem," he said, "It's a business problem."

In almost every case the business crisis happened because of a tech resource mismatch: Either the CIO couldn't see an issue to take steps to avoid it, or was operating without a comprehensive technology blueprint for the business. So ultimately the IT Director or CIO gets fired or resigns, and another one gets hired.

Do you feel this way about your IT?

The next part is really interesting: the majority of the time the same scenario happens again. Tech crisis. Business falters. Money lost. IT Director or CIO gets replaced. If the CIO didn't feel like the tragic Greek character Sisyphus, repeatedly pushing a boulder up a hill into eternity, the CEO certainly must have felt that way. Just like in a small business, it doesn't matter that the tech is at fault for a major tech problem- the business owner still owns the results. In my experience, most of the time the business owner knows something is wrong- it's scratching at the back of their minds. They just don't know what to do about it, or they've outgrown their tech or external service provider, and they don't know what resource they actually need. So it's a business problem, not a tech problem. It's a lot like giving one's excellent bookkeeper the title CFO and later getting angry about poor CFO performance.

A lot of times when CEOs and business owners engage me to help them get more horsepower out if their technology, I usually help them see what they need to do to help their tech, who is often great at executing technically but needs management that understands how to design and a system that is manageable.

If you don't have a comprehensive IT blueprint for your business technology, or if your technical resource is spending more than 30% of their time fixing problems, it may be time to check the title you put on their card, or check your expectations against their skill set.

If you're a business owner or executive who feels you may have an IT mismatch, feel free to email me anytime and I'll be glad to set up a complimentary and confidential call to discuss your situation.

How your domain name can disappear (and how to prevent it)

A little oversight can pull the plug on your entire business identify, brand, and ability to communicate with customers.  It's easily solved though with the right resource.

This week I received a call from a prominent local business that received another email from a domain name registrar that they didn't know how or whether or not to act on.  The name the email was addressed to was a former employee's name, and they weren't sure whether or not it was valid.   It's easy to assume right now at this moment that the email should just be processed, acted on, or ignored.  Then move on.  Right?  

Absolutely not.

Any question around the status of their domain name resulting from receiving this email  indicates the business has a major - and very expensive - problem in the works.  Here's why:

1. The business owner and CFO or controller should already know the status of all domains.

• This is one of those areas where either the company's technical person, either internally or externally, has been "too busy" to get this step done, or the company doesn't yet have an tech resource and needs one.  
• Think about your company's lease on its current space:  You know when it ends, and there's a designated contact on file for both your company (likely the business owner) and the landlord contact.   Why would your domain name, your company's most brand-valuable web real estate, be handled any less formally? 

2. Domain name registrars and other Internet marketers often send confusing and misrepresentative emails.

• Some of these emails and letters make it look like you need to take action in order to preserve your domain name, but in reality you're authorizing them to switch your registration service to them. This can be disastrous on for three reasons:
• The first problem with this is that you could lose your domain. Authorization to transfer or other doesn't necessarily mean keeping ownership of your domain.  Regardless of whether or not you can fight it afterward and prove you were fooled, do you really have the time to deal with it?
• The second problem is that even if it's a valid transfer, this doesn't mean your DNS (domain name service) settings transfer.  These are the settings on the Internet that everyone uses to send you email, to find your web site, and more.  Imagine losing all connectivity while it takes days or even weeks to restore (see problem #3).
• The third problem is how you go about recovering from an accidental ownership change.  The moment this happens, even though it was easy for the blunder to occur, it's painfully slow to recover from.  You may have to get your corporate ownership papers, identification cards, visit a notary, hire an attorney, and other steps.  All to prove you're the owner.  Then it takes days or weeks for the registrar or ICANN (the entity that loosely regulates registrars) to process.  During that time you have to operate without your email, web and other services.  To your customers it's like you've disappeared.  Even if you spend the energy communicating your temporary email address to your customers, you'll have to do it all over again when things get back to normal.   Think of the impact to your brand and to your business.

Wouldn't it be better to prevent all this?  The solution is as simple as getting all the information you need in order, and making sure it's on the right calendars and reviewed at the management level at least annually.  This typically should be assigned to a technical resource at the right level- namely, a management level that understands business and technology.   If you already suspect you have a mismatch in technical resource because your technician or service provider's busy fixing things all the time, then this may not be getting the attention it deserves, and you definitely do not want to assign this priority to a tech who only understands the technical layers.  That could lead to a small oversight becoming a big disaster.

Backup Basics #2: You're not planning to backup

Think about it: What's the only way you can measure success when it comes to your backup?  It's not how often you back up.  It's not how big or awesome your cloud backup company is.   The only way to measure success when it comes to backing up is:

1. When the backup restores completely
2. When the restore happens in time

Not being able to restore is no good.  And like a bad transporter accident, not funny at all.  This design belongs to Glenn Jones; you can buy his T-shirt on Threadless.  Click through and request a reprint!

It's really a simple backup basic:  You're not planning to backup.  Instead, you're planning to restore.  And restoring completely is one thing, restoring on time is another. I have seen companies very nearly go out of business because it took two to three weeks to get their data back, and in the best cases, weeks longer to get back to 50% functionality.   The good news is this can be prevented by asking yourself the right questions, then taking the appropriate actions:

Determine your target restore state first.

The first step is to determine what your target end state looks like.  Always start by assuming complete data loss.  Think of it this way:  If your computer (or phone) were stolen right now, and if you were to go buy another computer right now, what would you need to get back up and running? Here's a list of a few questions I've found most people don't ask:

• Can you restore your entire platform the the ground up? Could you restore in a way that does not require any reinstallation or reconfiguration?  Most cloud vendors don't advise you that their backups often only backup the data, but can't restore the operating system.   The difference here could be days, even weeks, of time spent looking for restore disks, application installers, licenses, and more.  And that's only if you remember what you had installed in the first place.  Imagine trying to rebuild your house after a total loss in the fire entirely from memory, but without plans, without a concrete foundation or property lines.   Think of all the things you'd forget and all the things you'd miss.
• How recent is your most recent backup?   The older the backup, the less useful it is.   Restoring is about returning yourself to service.   I've been told using a computer restored to a backup a few months old feels about as awkward and useful as attending one's high school reunion.  Not to mention useless from a productivity standpoint.  Can you afford to lose three months of work and start over?
• What's your platform dependency?  Even if you have a restorable complete set of data from yesterday, what if you don't have a computer (or phone) that can accept it? PC users are really susceptible here: Windows on a PC ties into the hardware so much that you can't simply restore another PC.  You typically have to start from scratch, reinstalling and reconfiguring everything.   The disruption and expense associated with recovering from hardware failure here is high.   Mac users often think they're immune to such problems, but heightened belief in immunity often comes with increased shock at the cost and disruption of finding out that you have to buy all new apps and the associated migration, or face the unfortunate alternative of feeling cornered into a very expensive repair to keep using your existing software.
• When was the last time you tested your backup? If you worked at TechRoom for a week, you may be surprised at the number of people coming in for data recovery from a Time Capsule (Apple's wireless backup device).  Just because it reports the backup is good doesn't mean it is. If you want yet another example, read in my previous posts about my 90-day nightmare with an iCloud backup that wouldn't restore.

The next step always reminds me of the clock on the TV show 24.

Determine how long you can wait for the restore to finish.

I was just at a doctor's office recently where a technician had implemented a cloud based backup service that is gaining a lot of popularity as a "low cost" and "simple to implement" backup system that's presumeably Mac and PC friendly.  I see a new one of these every few months.  Like any other technology business where anyone with venture capital can buy a catchy name, servers and some programmers to write code, cloud backup vendors keep popping up like Tribbles.  The problem that this doctor had is that he was never presented with the number of hours it would take to restore his backup.  In a theoretical vacuum, the restore would have taken 5 days.  In reality, the restore would likely take 7-9 days to complete.  

In the case of the doctor, this assumes readiness of everything else, and only waiting on the data.  In the case of most customers, the clock doesn't even start ticking until the problem is understood and addressed by a tech, after which the difficult conversation around data recovery or restoration happens.   What if you planned for the breakdown instead?  What if you chose a backup system based on it's ability to restore in the time frame you required?   The same volume of data for the doctor, over USB 3.0, would take roughly an hour.

How long can you afford to be down?

Hopefully this second Backup Basic helps prompt thought.  At best, it is meant to help prompt action.   Feel free to drop me a line if you have questions or feedback.  I'd love to hear from you.

Going paperless adventure #1: THE Shredder

The Mobile Shredding Truck

I'm a huge fan of David Spark's Paperless.  I've been on that trajectory for years.  One of the most important discoveries for me was how to efficiently destroy documents.  Especially because once you start, there's a lot to shred in the first few years.

The all-caps THE in the blog post title is on purpose.   My little boy likes big earth movers and other construction vehicles.  And there is nothing cooler to him than a trash truck.  After about a year of Fridays out on the curb with my little boy, I can totally picture Michael Bay as a two year-old getting his inspiration from a trash truck with a huge claw powered by massive hydraulics.  Totally cool. That's why when I discovered the mobile shredding truck, I had to share.

This is my first post indulging my inner 2-year-old.  After discovering the ScanSnap, I've come to the point where pretty much everything on paper that comes to me ends up scanned within a day or two. After that it's destined to meet the shredder. A couple years ago I got tired of spending hours in my garage shredding paper 5-10 sheets at a time, dealing with the dust, getting funny looks from the neighbors every time the trash man bumped over the recycle bin filled with shredded documents.

So I went looking for a shredding company for my personal use. I've seen companies like that for businesses, but my needs were lighter.  I found three companies, and one stood out because they actually have a security certification, and they go out of their way to demonstrate it.  OC Shredding company in Lake Forest, CA, allows you to drive down on a weekend and you can pay by the box.  They destroyed about 5 bankers' boxes work for $25 for me.  It took all of about a minute.  And you get to watch it.  This not only gives me back lots of hours in my life not standing in the garage struggling with the damn shredder, but it really delivers to my inner 2-year-old.  If you go, take your little one, you'll be a hero for it.

Check out the video.  I just wonder what makes the red warning light go off.  Click play to indulge your inner 2-year-old:

Online privacy

Some of you know I'm a big fan of Duck Duck Go because of their single-sentence privacy policy.   Today they linked to a page called Vanishing Rights that you ought to be aware of.  

I meet a lot of people including business owners who think the Cloud is the Holy Grail of technology. As with any technology disequilibrium, other folks see it as a way around the status quo.  In this case the status quo is your fourth amendment right to privacy.

The #1 business owner tech trap: Abdication

It's never easier to abdicate.  Try delegating instead.

After working with thousands of business owners, I've learned that most tend to abdicate - they largely avoid - the technology in their business. You might be thinking "not me" either because you always have the latest iPhone or iPad or because you spend lots of money on new computers for your company.  But that has nothing to do with it.  You may still be abdicating, and if you are, it's one of the single most costly mistakes you can be making.

To abdicate means to avoid something, either through delegation to someone else, or hope that it'll just be OK. In business, abdication happens for only two reasons:

• You don't want to deal with it
• You believe you can't understand it

What exactly are you abdicating?  It's simple. Here are some example questions to ask yourself:

• When was the last time you reviewed a data preservation (backup) report and received positive confirmation your data is safe and recoverable in the time frame you expect?
• Do you know all the potential ways someone could gain access to your business electronically, and are the passwords strong?  When was the last time the passwords were changed?
• Are all the services you're paying for really being used? How many accounts of former employees are active?  Have they been disabled or do they still have access to the system?
• How much of your monthly service costs is going toward issues that could be prevented through training? What if the issues are with the same employee over and over and require different intervention, not a technical (and costly) one?

I remember recently getting engaged with a customer who hired us to manage their IT.  One of their users, I'll call her Candy, constantly complained to the HR Director that her problems with her computer and her iPad weren't getting fixed.   We discovered this during the initial assessment walk-through. This was a major concern to the HR Director because it constantly sucked up her time.   At least 4 hours per week of email, calls, and this employee stating she couldn't do her job.  

Because I won't allow abdication, during each service we reviewed with all the users at the beginning.  Candy tended to always have an issue that needed to be addressed.  It was addressed and resolved through training, validated by Candy herself. When she complained the third time, we didn't even get a call (at least not until later).  Candy was confronted by her manager, holding a stack of TechRoom service orders. Her manager didn't have a hard job at all.  The only question asked was "Candy, I see you had this problem before, and that you verified these steps worked to access the server. Can you show me how that works?".  Candy demonstrated that she could, and then she timidly stated that she must have made a mistake- it wasn't an issue after all.

Prior to this event, the employee had used about 4 hours per month of technical service time.   At the prior service provider's rate, that totaled $7680 per year.   Did the service provider ever escalate the issue to the business owner or their manager?  No.  It was far easier to just apply service hours to the problem, resolve it, make the issue go away.   

At what cost?  $7,680

Keeping the owner- in this case his designated manager, the HR Director, in the know, helped resolve an issue that previously was seen as a technical one, but was actually an management issue.   

Abdication isn't just the business owner's fault, even though the business owner pays 100% of the cost. Service providers and technical consultants usually don't address technical matters in a holistic business perspective. And when most business owners abdicate, they usually assume the most technical person in the office is the qualified one to "deal with it", when the most techie person usually has no idea what it is they just signed up for.

If you really want technology to "perform" for you, as measured by happier and more productive employees, happier customers and increasing profits, you need a technical service that understands how to help you delegate technology and keep you involved and in control as a business owner.  

Done right, good technical service gives you visibility and control without taking up much of your time. Not done, if you abdicate, the hidden costs skyrocket under your nose until you notice it in a crisis mode.

Happy Thanksgiving

Love your family and enjoy this holiday, everyone. I'm grateful for my family and friends, and I dig the technology that allows us to connect in just seconds with those we love, worldwide.

Happy Thanksgiving,

James

Anti Black Hole Friday

If you don't take action, you may as well just toss your data in and wave goodbye.

Technology doesn't happen.  Life happens. Then your life gets sucked into a black hole.  

In my recent Backup Basics blog posts, I shared that there are only two reasons you can lose your data, and I even offered to help (see the bottom of this post).  But every Thanksgiving there are a million circumstances that push your precious photos, contacts and work product to the edge of a black hole of dangerous loss.  Here are just five common disasters:

• Your MacBook Air, left closed near the fireplace where you were relaxing, is accidentally stepped on by your visiting cousin Billy Bob, who 6'5" and a spry 225lbs.  The MacBook Air doesn't fare too well.
• Your toddler (or someone else's) found your new iPhone 5 and thinks it's funny at the bottom of the toilet.
• After a brilliantly orchestrated meal for everyone, you relax and catch up on email and the glass of Shiraz you're enjoying accidentally tips over, right into your notebook.
• El Nino can't make up its mind this year. During a storm on Saturday the power cuts out. Now your computer doesn't boot. It just beeps. And what's that clicking sound? That major proposal you promised your customer is due Monday morning.
• You get a call from your alarm company on Thursday night in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner. There's been a break-in at your office, windows were smashed and two computers used by your partner and key employee are missing.  What was on those hard drives?

Every year life happens and then the calls come in to TechRoom on Monday morning.  Each year over the holiday get a message via LinkedIn. 99% of the stress I hear isn't about the hardware.  Hardware's replaceable.  Your data isn't: The photos and videos in your camera roll, the company financials on your desktop, and your entire platform: All the software that together is a configuration you're used to, that muscle memory commands as much as anything.  No loaner in the world is going to get you back in action.

How many hours of your time, with how many techs will it take to play the game of technical charades to get you back to a semblance of productivity?

It doesn't have to be this way. I've shared on my Backup Basics blog posts that there are only two ways you can lose data: 

1. You put backing up off and never got to it.
2. You think you're backed up, but you're not.

You can't control everything. Accidents happen. Hard drives fail, even new ones. You have to plan for the failure, and plan for the data loss.  If you do, then you can put things back to the way you want it to be, just like flipping a switch, and with zero stress. You may have to buy a new device or computer, but since it's Black Friday, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Don't let this holiday become a black hole to you data, your life and your business.  Do it now.  And if you need help, my team is available to get you started, no matter where you live, and even via remote access.  I don't care where you go for the help, I just want you to take action. But if you choose to call TechRoom, I'm offering a one-time 20% off of remote access and carry-in service when you mention this blog through 11/21.

Backup Basics #1: Do it now.

Think of the most valuable data in your life:  Photos of your baby, your kids, your family.  Company financials. Your work documents, email, contacts.  

Now imagine losing it all at 5PM today.

You have until 5PM today to take the most important first step to preventing data loss, and it takes less time than your lunch hour.

I want you to take that feeling and act on it.  You don't need to be technical. My dad proved that to me.  He once dug a hole in the ground out at Joshua Tree in the middle of the night, but the brand new Ironman Triathlon watch I had given him into the hole, covered it with dirt, marked it with a stone "duck" so he could find it in the morning, and went back to bed.  He did this because he couldn't figure out how to turn off the alarm.  Dad was so non-technical I sometimes called him "Mr. Analog". He had two hard drive failures, but he never lost data because he practiced Backup Basics #1: Do it now.  And I'll even make it easier for you (see the bottom of this post).

Later I'll share how to make your backing up bulletproof.  Today you just need to do something.  Here are a few things you can do, right now, that will give you greater peace of mind tonight and through the weekend:

Everyone: Go get an external hard drive.  

Whether you're a stay-at-home parent or a Fortune 500 CEO, you can go get an external hard drive today, plug it in to your computer, and copy most if not all of important files, getting them in two places.  Think risk management here: If your hard drive were going to die at 5PM today, would you rather have a mostly complete backup or none at all because you put it off because you didn't know how to do it according to what a technology guy would call "correct".   I'm suggesting this for anyone, including the most non-techie people in the world.  

On a Mac, you can either use Apple's Time Machine function built right into your system preferences, or if you want to keep it really simple, just drag and drop folders containing your important stuff into an external hard drive.  Want a tool that's really easy to use?  Try Bombich's Carbon Copy Cloner.  It's the most powerful, lease expensive application for backing up I've ever used.  If you can find your hard drive in one pull-down menu, and find an external hard drive in another pull down menu, then that's all you need to back up.   For Windows users, right-click and copy-paste folders to an external hard drive (copy, don't cut!) or if you feel a little adventurous, try Roxio's Back on Track application.  It's the closest equivalent to Carbon Copy Cloner I've found for the PC running Windows.

Remember, your hard drive could die at 5PM today.  In reality, it could go anytime- age doesn't matter that much with hard drives.  Go get an external disk now. Not sure what to get?  Send me a message via the contact form on this page and I'll be happy to provide suggestions.

Business owners and CEOs

If you read my blog post about your budget, then you already know that your go-to technology person or resource is probably busy fixing something today. There's nothing wrong with that, but if if that technical person's single highest priority is not data preservation, then your entire business is in danger.  I'm talking business interruption danger that could lead to going out of business.   I have a very simple step you can take to make sure you're safe, without having to get technical and without having to take your time away from other areas of your business:

Take everything else off your technology guy's agenda today except backing up.  Tell your tech you want a current backup of the company's data on your desk for you to take home before 5PM today, together with a list of the sources of data that got backed up.  Remember the saying "work expands to fill the time allotted"? There's no shortage of things to be fixed, and fixing things feels good.  Backing up is boring.  It tends to get on the back of the IT person's list, and most business owners feel that they probably wouldn't understand the list (or it makes their head hurt trying).  

It's that simple.  No other work is to be done. Backup on my desk by 5PM please.  Thanks.

So while your IT person's getting that done, go get a hard drive for yourself over lunch and get your own files copied over.

Do it now.

Notice I didn't say please.  Remember in my recent post I shared that after working with thousands of customers, I've learned that you can lose data for only two reasons:

1. You put it off and never got to it.
2. You think you're backed up, but you're not.

I want you to make progress right now, today, by taking an action. In my repair business at TechRoom, I cringe every time a mom or dad comes in for recovery of photos of their baby's first few years of life. A liquid spill on a notebook or a hard drive upgrade I can deal with.  Broken computers are repairable.  We're great at recovering data, but not every recovery is successful.  Lost data is permanent.

I want you to act on this, right now, today.  I don't care where you go, so long as you take the first step. To help, if you call TechRoom and mention this blog post I'll give you 20% off any TechRoom service between now and Wednesday November 21, including carry-in and remote access service to set up and verify your backup.