Of This and That
Posted On: 2011-03-24
Ok so it's Thursday and that means that the week is almost over. It's been quite an interesting one so far and I'm sure it's about to get a whole lot more interesting too.
I just sent off an email to all our clients to remind them of my terms of service ... particularly in relation to unpaid accounts and already I'm getting responses.
In tough times like this paying your bills can be hard ... your cash flow can really drop to a trickle as those who owe you money stop paying and that makes it hard to find the cash you need to pay your accounts. Recently I read a report in a financial newsletter that said that here in Australia most businesses were taking 90 days to pay an account and that can a death blow if you're a small business with limited capital and you're waiting for someone to pay you.
I know that in this industry some sponsors take a while to get your money to you and that leaves you in the same situation that some of my clients are in and you're left wondering which bills to pay first. If you are in that situation then here's a useful rule of thumb to help you make the right decision ... identify which creditors can do your business the most harm if you don't pay them?
Sometimes you just have to sit down and decide which bills you pay first and which ones you're going to leave till a later time. If you're a webmaster then you will understand that your hosting bill always comes first. Never let that bill go unpaid because if your host cuts you off you're out of business.
That's something that many mainstream businesses that have taken their business online are beginning to learn. If you're a mainstream business with a website just don't let your hosting bill slide because if you do then a major part of your business is going to disappear and that is going to hurt.
FireFox 4 is out
FireFox 4 was released yesterday for general consumption and against my better judgment I installed it on my laptop last night. I say ‘better judgment' because I had seen some screen shots the layout of screen and I didn't like what I saw and now I've played with it I think I like it even less.
As far as what you see on your monitor if you use Firefox 4 the biggest difference is the change in location of the tabs bar if you have more than one tab open and the address bar. In Firefox 4 the tabs bar has been moved to a spot above the address bar while any extra toolbars you might have remain below the address bar.
That may not sound like a big deal but if you're like me you tend to work between the webpage that's displayed and the tab bar and it was really handy to have that tab bar just above where you were working. Now that the tab bar is away at the top of the screen it's further to roll with your mouse ... especially if you've got a bunch of toolbars displaying too ... and that just annoys me.
I don't understand why that had to be changed ... perhaps someone needed to justify their existence and the easiest way to do that was to shuffle the address and tab bar.
Apart from that it functions pretty much the same as previous versions of Firefox. My partner installed it too and I know he was worried that a lot of his precious plugins wouldn't work but in the end only three were incompatible with Firefox 4. Hopefully those will soon be updated.
Sometimes you really should take the deal
Did you know that the Google boys once offered their work to Excite for a mere $750,000? They did and Excite turned them down.
Now if you're relatively new to this industry you probably don't even know who or what Excite was. If you're not new to the industry then Excite is probably just a hazy memory because it disappeared years ago.
But if they had taken the deal things could have been so much different.
Late last year Google made a multi-billion dollar offer for Groupon ... an offer they turned down. Earlier this year Groupon was assessed to be worth many billions of dollars more than what Google offered for it and Groupon now plans to go public.
However last month Groupon's revenue took a significant dive ... perhaps due to all that bad press Groupon was getting from disgruntled merchants ... and I'm sure that lots of people are waiting to see what the company's revenue figures are going to be this month.
Now, when the initial placement offer goes ahead, Groupon may find that they're not worth even what Google was willing to pay for the business. Perhaps we'll see another company that should have taken the deal.
And that's it for me this week ... it's time to have fun and lose myself in some client work.