Business Information for Entrepreneurs by an Entrepreneur

The other day I was on the phone with a fellow small business owner and we were brainstorming some ideas which he listed as we spoke. At the end of the phone call, I asked him to send me the ideas we had talked about and then I logged onto my email to wait for it to come through. A few moments later, my fax machine beeped and out came a fax of a lined piece of paper with handwriting on it.

Unexpected, but not the end of the world. When I bought my printer, I made sure it had multiple capabilities (including fax, scanner, copier, etc.). Once the fax came out, I put it right back in the machine and scanned it using OCR recognition. When I bought the fax machine I didn't know what OCR was or why I'd need it but now I am glad I bought it.

OCR stands for “Optical Character Recognition” and it allows you to scan a handwritten document (like I did) and turn it into a text document. After scanning, in moments, I had turned my friend's handwritten page into typed text in a Word document. There was the odd error here or there (probably attributed more to his handwriting than to the OCR capabilities) but nothing I couldn't fix in about 30 seconds.

Incidentally, for movie buffs out there, it's the same technology Harrison Ford used in the recent movie Firewall when the villains wanted him to scan bank account numbers.

Convenience and Hollywood entertainment… does your scanner have OCR?

I apologize that I'm blogging about Google twice in one week. I wouldn't do it if they'd just stop trying to be so darn helpful.

I know that many people go to Google's main page, www.google.com  to browse. My home page when I first turn on my browser is actually Google's “other products” page: http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/  because it gives me instant access to whatever I'm looking up: regular searches, news, blogger.com, images, video, etc. It's quick to see when they add new things so the other day I noticed a link I hadn't noticed before: http://webaccelerator.google.com/ . This is a Google Labs product, which means they're still testing it, but will let you download a version to try it out. If you use a DSL connection (that is, high speed not dial-up) then this is for you. It places a toolbar on your browser that helps you to browse more quickly.

They give details on their site on how they can help you browse more quickly. Some of the ways include pre-fetching pages or saving pages and only loading updates. One neat (but essentially pointless) feature of the toolbar is a counter that adds up how many minutes or hours you save by using the accelerator. A clever idea but it's really just there for interest sake.

Use it to browse more quickly. As I mentioned in a previous blog, it's another way for Google to become King of the Online World.

Recently I was in an audience at a presentation. It was all I could do to stay awake! The speaker had great content but a terrible delivery. He seemed to talk into the podium and after concluding he said, “Uhhh… okay, that's what I have to say.” The applause was polite.

Not everyone was born to speak in public but if you want to share your passion for you business, you should be prepared for it and be ready to present. After hearing that presentation, I wanted to make sure that I was prepared to give a dynamic presentation when called upon so I picked up a book from Amazon to “brush up” on my public speaking skills.

10 Days to More Confident Public Speaking by Lenny Laskowski and The Princeton Language Institute is an excellent book that can help you succeed in public speaking.

What makes the book so good is that it is very practical and easy to read. Laskowski's approach is to divide the topic of public speaking into 10 sections and have the reader tackle one section per day. Each day, one short chapter covers topics such as “Relating to your Audience” or “Remembering what you have to say” or “Ending your speech with a bang.” He uses interesting real life examples and covers several types of presentations that most small business owners would typically have to give.

The book is deceptively robust! By that I mean, it's small — my paperback version is 203 pages but it is so easy to read that I usually read 2 or 3 chapters a day. When I first got the book I thought “How could the author cover such a huge topic in such a small book?” but by page 203 I knew that he had done so quite adequately.