The Sony Vaio VPCCW17FX uses the Realteck ALC262 codec and out of the box Ubuntu 9.10 the internal microphone does not work.  However the mic input jack does work.

Recently purchased a Sony VPCCW17FX laptop that is equiped with an nVidia 220m graphic chipset.   Not a fan of Windows 7 so I installed Ubuntu 9.10 without a problem.

However to take advantage of nVidia and have all the bells and whistles I needed to update the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.   There were several issues generating via X -configure.   First was the xorg.conf file when tested would come up with a blank screen.  The second was getting the monitor timings correct.

I found this helpful post on nVidia forums and have to give credit to egghead3!

Anyway, to make life easier for everyone I figure I would post the files needed to make nVidia shine on the Sony laptop.   If you are not using a VPCCW17FX this might not work but check the post mentioned above on how to set up your nVidia 220m

Download xorg.conf and SNY05FA.bin and place them in /etc/x11 directory.  Make sure you backup your old xorg.conf file if you have one.

UPDATED: Fixing wireless issues with Ath9K driver.

There is a a bug with straight 2.6.31 kernel install with the wireless driver and it will drop the connection during reauthentication.   The following will correct this problem with 9.10 Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-karmic linux-backports-modules-wireless-karmic-generic

I’m not a doctor but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.   That being said I did work for a large cell phone carrier and visited a testing lab where all the engineers used hands free sets with phones they were testing.  Understandable since they get in demo phones for testing and until they do, they have no idea what the radiation levels are being emitted.

Now I’m not going to argue if cell phones are safe or not.  There are plenty of new articles out there like this one from The Street,  but I did find this useful CNET site that does describe the cell phone radiation levels and what they mean as well has list currently manufactured cell phones and their radiation levels.

In a nutshell, I think I will use my bluetooth until all this is sorted out.

This weekend a local wine store opened in town and my wife and I decided to spend time on main street and check it out.   It was a nice store in a historic building with a good selection of wine.

I notice a buddy of mine who is an area wine rep was helping the new store owner by doing some tastings in the back of the store.   Great guy and very knowledgable.   Never got to talk to him as he was helping another couple.

We browsed the store for probably 15 minutes to see if he would free up.  As we perused the wine there were some unique selections that we studied.   We might have even bought a few of these unique bottles but nobody helped us.   I am assuming the other two other folks were the owner and employee or partner.  Not once did they greet us, welcome us to the shop, or asked if we had questions.  Nor did they seem busy as they just hung out at the cash register talking to each other.

Now this might be a bit obvious but if a person comes in your shop they are likely there to buy.   If you do not help said customer out or out right ignore your potential customers, how do you plan to sell the wine?   If I wanted to be ignored and not talk about wine I could have gone to the local super market.

When your a specialty shop your advantage of the mass market such as a super market is expertise in the product.   People go to these specialty stores to learn more about the product and enjoy the experience.

As a business owner you should always ask yourself:

• Are you ignoring your customers?  What can I do to increase interaction?
• What is your competitive difference the market place?
• How can you exploit that to your advantage?

I was reading Whitney Hoffman’s article on the Difference Between Listening and Hearing and it got me to thinking about all the conversations I have had last week, last year and all my life where the conversation was frustrated by neither one of us listening.   I would say X and they would hear Y and then I react to Y and they start talking about Z.   Very frustrating.

I have played a lot of poker and chess in my lifetime.   I like to think several moves ahead and reading people is important to know how they react to such moves.   My father is a classic conversationalist.   He can steer a conversation and take you down a path without you knowing it.   As a teenager it was a bit unnerving because the topics would change to a subject I would rather not talk about and find myself in the middle of the conversation without knowing how I got there.

Conversations come in many forms today with social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.   Filtering information has become specialized features of these sites and value-add software such as TweetDeck.    Tools make online conversations much easier and person to person it has become harder.    Especially when some folks solely rely on their email accounts.  You can tell a person something but if it isn’t in a email form then the conversation didn’t exist for them.      And what about a more flamboyant conversation online?   Well, Google Wave is about to wash upon us like a tsunami.  I think this problem is just going to get worse where personal communication becomes harder and harder.  Where the computer and email has just about put the death knell on writing letters to a friend and cursive writing, we now have instant conversations via email, Twitter and Facebook.

But what about in person?   I am in the middle of reading    Just Listen by Mark Goulston M.D. (no I do not get any referral fees from Amazon, I live in North Carolina) and he talks about the difficult conversations were people are not listening.    I find it an excellent book for anyone that finds themselves in difficult non-listening conversations be it your teenagers or your boss.   I won’t go through the techniques here since I am only half-way through the book and Mark does need to make a living so buy his book!

That brings me to Whitney’s article of a video of Malcolm Gladwell talking about plagiarism and I had to laugh.   About a month ago I found a presentation with Seth Godin at a change conference where Seth talked got an advance book of The Tipping Point by Gladwell and it inspired him to write a book on the subject and give it away for free.   Of course he sent Gladwell a copy of the book and asked permission to publish it since it was on the same subject Gladwell was writing about.  Gladwell not only approved but wrote the forward to the book!  I recommend you check out Seth’s presentation. It is a great talk on is approach to publishing and marketing that is quite unique and I think can be applied to many businesses and not just publishing.

Organizing

It isn’t easy to clean up my internet mess!   All the social media sites, the blog, the email accounts, rss reader!    Here is a couple of tips to help you clean up!

Blog clean up

This blog has been updated with the latest Wordpress.  I originally used an installer my hosting company provided but it was always out of date. I worried about migrating to a new installation of Wordpress but found the export utility to run flawlessly on a test site I use.   I am happy to report it works perfectly!

Next I made sure I was signed up on Wordpress’s site to receive an API key so I can integrate Akismet plugin to combat spam in the comments.   Everyday there is some bot trying to post about buying drugs online or linking some other phishing site.   Thank the heavens for this plugin!  Filters out the spam so I do not have to go through all the bogus posts myself.   Imagine if you didn’t have a spam filter on you email?   Yeah, it is the same problem with comment system on a blog!

I have also found a new template via Wordpress Theme Review that reviews themes for search engine optimization (SEO).   This was highly rated so I figured to give it a try.   I do like the layout but may change the colors.   What do you think of it?

Next I tackled adding Feed Burner to the site.   I found out that Google has acquired Feed Burner and my account with GMail was an old business account.   Didn’t seem clean to have people subscribe to the blog and see an old business account.   So, I had to create a new gmail account and sign up for Feed Burner.   The problem was my Wordpress plugin for Feed Burner was updated but I would not see the site use the new URL for my feed.   I found out it was the permalinks feature that wasn’t allowing the system to be updated.   I had to turn this off to get it updated correctly.  Once it was fixed I could turn permalinks back on for the site.

Next was adding Google Analytics to the website.   This was relatively easy by signing up for analytics and inserting a bit of code in the Wordpress theme.  Google Analytics gives great detail on where people are finding my site, where they are coming from, what day and time they are coming as well as keywords used from search engines.   Invaluable to track the progress and success of the site.

RSS Reader

I read voraciously!   I found that Google Reader allows me to read many blog feeds in an easy to use interface.   Switching email accounts I was worried I would loose my list of blogs that I follow.  Google has setup The Data Liberation Front that shows how to import and export from any of Google’s applications to other applications.   It was pretty painless to move from my old account to the new account.

I periodically clean up the sites that I read if I find they are no longer active or their posts are no longer an interest to me.   I am back down to 81 feeds that I read (ok, skim) and you can see the ones that have interested me through my shared items.

Twitter

I have not been using Twitter very much because I found that when you have a lot of followers it is hard to keep up what is going on in the world.   Twitter recently updated their system to create lists.  I find that pretty useful, however I found an application that helps Twitter shine and that is Tweet Deck.   This little desktop gem will work on all OS’s that support Adobe Air.   You can setup columns based on users or even search terms.   They also have an iPhone app that is excellent.

Next for Twitter I changed my generic ho-hum background.   I found that Twit Backs can generate a custom background with all your information about you via a web interface.  You can see the results on my Twitter page.  Let me know what you think?

Bookmarking

I have been a long time user of Delicious but I had an account that was an old alias of mine.   Trying to be consistent I created a new account on Delicious with my name and was able to easilly export from my old account to the new account without any problems.   If you want to see what interests me you can see my links on my Delicious.com/geoffcorey

Anyone else have any internet cleanup tips?

It is a tough proposition.  I helped build the website GameVee that was dubbed a YouTube for gamers.  The site was geared for gamers.   The best feature was the ability to take XBox Halo 3 film from your file share and convert it to video and put it on the web.   This was a great feature because the user didn’t need a capture card nor did they need to understand the multitude of video formats and bitrates.

GameVee tried to build a business based on advertising.   Like many other “Web 2.0″ sites this is a difficult way to survive as a company.   With advertising you need volume in traffic.   Volume in traffic increases the bandwidth costs.   It is a catch-22.   The advertising revenue generated from the increase traffic never would cover the bandwidth costs.   There were other opportunities to make money for that business but never pursued such as charging a subscription for converting Halo 3 films.   GameVee was eventually sold to GotGame and the best feature of GameVee was shutdown. Indeed it looks like they plan to shutdown GameVee altogether according to one of their administrators.  No doubt the bandwidth costs are the main reason.

Other companies are subsidising the bandwidth costs.  YouTube has been regarded as a money loser for Google since purchased.   If it wasn’t subsidised by Googles ad revenues from the search engine, it too would likely go the way of the doo-doo.

Solutions to this problem are being tackled like the company I now work for Digitalsmiths.  They provide video indexing and search services that will help generate targeted advertisements.  Many of the clients are showing videos of older TV shows.   These shows have a better chance with advertising.  Long running videos can reasonably place advertisements in the middle of the show just like you are watching TV.   More targeted advertising and ad presentations increases the revenue of a video asset.   A better proprosition then short clips like those found on YouTube and GameVee.   These sites would see a rebellion if the ad was shown in the middle of the video.  Instead they rely on ad placements on the page.   That is a very limiting option as there are only a few highly visible locations on the page for an advertisement.

With internet advertisements predicted to retreat in 2009, making money on video will be even tougher.   Time Warner Cable raised their fees recently and Viacom decided to raise their fees as well.  Time Warner Cable rejected the new contract and threatened to take their channels off the line up.  What a giant failure on Time Warner Cable.  They have zero leverage in that negotiation.  They even suggested that fans of Comedy Central could just watch their favorite shows online!   What a great suggestion.  Indeed why bother to deal with a greedy company with terrible customer service.   For years people have been asking for a-la-cart subscriptions.   With the internet that is almost a reality.

Premium movie channels on cable cater to movie buffs.   The failing of these channels is they hammer the same movie over and over.   Time Warner responded with their digital service On-Demand.  Nice service.  You can select a movie when it is convienent and watch it instantly.   Well that service is limited to the 30-50 movies they offer.  Netflix has responded with 10,000 movies that can be watched on demand for their $8.99 a month service for renting DVDs.   Brilliant!  Can you imagine if NetFlix teamed up with Viacom to provide the same service for Viacom shows?   How about working a deal with the NFL and MLB?   These franchises have realized that they can create a premium service because folks will pay for it.   Imagine Netflix creating the dream of consumers, a-la-cart programming service that allows you to watch shows on demand with content you want to see.

Indeed, I did sign up for Netflix after a 8 year lapse because of the “Watch Instantly” feature.   Add in a few a-la-cart options and I will flush TWC completely.   Does that mean it is the end of cable and satellite?  Doubtful, now that most of Americans have gone out to buy their digital TVs.   High Def will ensure cable and satellite will survive.   I’m just one consumer that doesn’t care if I can count the wiskers on actor’s face.

First thing you do is write a business plan.   Learn more. Then the second thing you do is write a business plan.  Yes it is painful but you have to write a business plan.   You cannot get a loan, venture capital financing or know where you are going or if you are getting there without a plan.

Starting a business takes a lot of work.   You need to understand what you are providing, how you going to measure you success, what is the financial return, what is the break-even point.   The business plan provides a lot of these answers.  If you don’t like the answers, then you probably ought to stop and come up with some other idea.

Ernest Young had an outline that I like to use when I evaluate ideas and potential businesses.   There is a PDF located here.

The first thing to tackle is the financials.  Lets face it, the purpose of the business is make money and you need to know how long it will take to break even.   If you cannot live on water and bread until that point then maybe you should find investors, but I get ahead of myself.

Financials need to be there and they need to be realistic.  You can look up online for key ratios for the industry.  This is important to double check that your numbers are real world.   If profit margins are high or cost of doing business is too low, it is likely you didn’t do your homework or you are not being realistic in your financial statements.

Products.  What is your product?  What business are you in?  More importantly what business are you not in?   Figure out who your customers are and how are they are grouped.  Each group may have a different need for your product.   Each group will likely have a different marketing message.   Which group are you going after?  Don’t say all of them, that is not realistic.

Who is your competition?  Why are you different?  Why would someone switch from your competitor and use you?   You may want to read Purple Cow by Seth Godin.   It is good book for differentiating yourself from everyone else.

Still want to go into business?  Still viable?  Great!  How is your company going to be run?  What is the operational plan?   How are you going to run the business?  Who is doing what?   What are they responsible for?  I recommend reading E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber.  Excellent book to help you define your organization so you can work on the business instead working in the business.

Need help with the business plan?   There are plenty of professional services likely in your area that can help.  The Small Business Association can point you to SCORE that helps entrepreneurs put a plan together.

So you still like the plan but you need financing?  Well the Small Business Association is a good place to start.   There is also likely an “Angel” investment group that meets monthly that listen to people with business plans to attract early investors.   Understand this group of early investors wants to make 5 – 10X their money.   If your plan realistically is not going to generate that type of return, then don’t waste your time.   Same goes with Venture Capitalists.   They finance 1 in 1000 buiness plans and they are looking of a high rate of return on their money.

Other options is go the slow and steady route if that is possible.   Instead of starting out with a large organization or retail space or server farm, can you do it cheap?   Start small and validate the market?  Can you do it without quitting your day job?  This is usually the best and safest way to enter a market. Some of the biggest companies started small and cheap. Home Depot is a perfect example.   Know why the sign is orange?   Because they couldn’t afford a lighted sign so they made one out of plywood and used florescent orange paint to attract attention.

A business plan is a living document.  During initial development of plan you may rewrite or refine the plan a dozen times.   Once the business has started you will likely need to update or change the plan often.  Any changes in business plan must be communicated to the employees so that everyone in the company is moving in the same direction.  It does no good to make a plan and not communicate it to the employees.  Nothing will happen in that scenario.  Management by wishful thinking is not a viable business planning.

One thing I cannot stress enough is please do not go into business without a business plan.  Too many good companies fell apart because they failed to plan who they are and where they are going.   Too many company have failed because nobody knew how much money was needed to get to the break even point.   These questions cannot be answerd without a business plan.

Took the kids to see Maw-Maw (grandmom) in rural North Carolina.   Driving there I was thinking of my own childhood on Signal Mountain, Tennesee.   We use to go up to the corner gas station and Junior was there with his overalls and we would pick up a case of soda in bottles and return the empty case of bottles.   Now I doubt anyone would argue that ice cold soda from a bottle is one of the best experiences.

Now that the big cola providers have all given up glass except around Christmas time for Coke, I was thinking it would be great to return back to those grand days.   RC Cola is a Carolina product as much as moonshine and tobacco.   They have always fought for shelf space at the grocery store even when they are cheaper better tasting product IMHO.

Maybe Royal Crown should pull a purple cow right out of Seth Godin’s playbook.   If they can setup distribution with local businesses in rural North Carolina and start packaging their product with glass they may see growth against the big companies.  It would be some time before they hit the cities with this strategy because the cities and suburbs are full of transitional people from other lands that just wouldn’t understand and honestly wouldn’t slow down to notice.   But in rural North Carolina it could make a resurgance.  Who knows, maybe we will be seeing more RC Colas, Moonpies and checkers.

So what do you think the goal of these websites are: Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Pownce, YouTube, etc?   Wouldn’t you love to read the original business plan vision, mission and strategy statments?   I bet it is full of B.S. and what they stated in there business plans was very specific and they became something else.    Facebook prolly had something like, “To recreate the high school/college yearbook online”.    Total crap, they became a lot more then that.

Why are some of these sites so successful and others not so successful?   Look at Twitter ridiculous growth curve.   Do you think they had some vision of becoming a tool for other companies/applications backbone?

I have been reading one my favorite authors, Seth Godin’s latest book.   And it hit me that all these websites basically should have the same vision and mission statement.   Why some are successfull and others are not is really a case of how close their statements are to the following or just dumb luck.

Vision – Create online community

Mission – To enable users to tell there story, connect with others, and promote discussion

Now you look at that and say, how do you get from that to Facebook?   Well, that is a long story but you can look at your Facebook account and the applications you use and look at the ones you passed on.   My bet is the ones you passed on add no value to your interaction with others or are just stupid marketing applications.

Speaking of marketing, look how bad companies are implementing it on social networks.   I get at least an invite a day to some twitter user that is following 55,000 users.   Like anyone is going to follow them and listen to their marketing BS.   Definately old school and pretty much completely worthless today.   I’m afaid Seth Godin is correct, old school marketing is dead.   Move on and use the social web as it is intended.   To tell a story, interact with others and garner discussion.