I’ve been a user of an online money management site called Thrive (http://www.justthrive.com/) for some time now.  It’s marketed as “Free online money management, just for you.”  I’d previously used their main competitor Mint.com but had a couple of bad experiences which is why I went with Thrive.  As I was going through my email this morning, I saw this subject line which concerned me: “URGENT: END OF SERVICE NOTIFICATION”.

Here’s the content of the message: Read the rest of this entry

Cloud computing is all the rage these days.  Every time you turn around you’re hearing something about how it’s the wave of the future and how it’s cheaper, better, faster, etc.  For some businesses, the “move to the cloud” can be a good thing, but in other cases it can be a very risky proposition.  You need to ask yourself – can your business rely on the cloud?

Recently, Amazon’s EC2 cloud server service went down for more than a day.  If you are/were an Amazon customer using this service you lost service.  In some cases you lost data and in some cases the data that was lost was NOT recoverable.  Some major players in the social media landscape (Foursquare, Reddit, Quora, Hootsuite and Moby) were completely unusable.  Additionally portions of CNET’s functionality was compromised.  CNET’s response?  “We’ll be back shortly, we hope. Sorry, it sucks for us too. We’d point fingers, but we wouldn’t be where we are today without EC2.” Read the rest of this entry

In the 7 years I’ve been selling our services, I can tell you the number one reason why companies switch to Acroment is because their current IT provider doesn’t call them back.  The first operational rule for any service business: be available to your customers.  If you’re going to provide a service in the first place why WOULDN’T you want to make yourself available?

We do not hide from our clients.  Ever.  We don’t hide behind email, voice mail or a contact form on our website.  I don’t have to look at our financials to know that we spend $2,500-3,000 per month on communication tools so that we are accessible to our clients.  All of our engineers have email enabled smart-phones. Our office phones, forward to our mobile phones. All voice mail messages are forwarded to our email. Why do we utilize this technology?  Quite simply so that our clients can reach us any day any time.  Even when employees are out of the office or on vacation, have the people in place to pick up the slack. Read the rest of this entry

The PC and I have been BFF’s for years. For Christmas, my wife got a unibody Macbook to replace her aging Dell. Knowing my wife uses her computer mostly for photos, music, email and web browsing, the Mac was a safe choice and gave me an opportunity to fully appreciate the Mac operating system – OS X.

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I read a LOT of blogs, newsgroups, and internet forums about technology and also participate in some for other IT companies to stay on top of trends.

A recent poster said this in one of my IT professional newsgroups:

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