Business Information for Entrepreneurs by an Entrepreneur

Not every site I recommend on this blog will have an obvious, immediate business application. From time to time I find something that I think is cool and cutting edge… and if history tells us anything, these cool and cutting edge things become mainstream in the future if enough people get excited about them.

http://www.swarmthe.com/

This is a graphical way to browse the Internet. Yes, it's unusual. Yes, it's difficult to see an immediate value… but something like this is exactly what the web of the future is looking for: a company willing to go beyond what we're doing today to try something new.

The more I think about it, the more I see great advertising possibilities coming from this, as well as a combination of the current tagging phenomenon, too, to help make the Internet even more user friendly.

Often, I'm asked by business owners about management resources to help them. Many entrepreneurs didn't make it to the C-level executive position before becoming entrepreneurs so they lack some of the managerial experience gleaned along the way.

This is a really impressive site, full of incredibly powerful information. Although it may be designed for corporate managers, its information is no less pertinent to the entrepreneur who needs to quickly learn how to develop their management skills.
http://www.managementhelp.org/

I don't have Skype… but I hate to admit it. I'll eventually have to get it because colleagues always ask me to communicate with them on it. But there are two reasons why I don't have it.

The first is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype. I realize you can't trust everything you read on the Internet but this has me concerned enough to think twice before I use it. Some of the things I'm concerned about include (quoting from Wikipedia):

• Keeps chatting on the network, even when idle
• Blind trust in anything else speaking Skype
• Skype makes it hard to enforce a (corporate) security policy
• SkypeOut can be more expensive
• The continuous access pattern does not allow the disk to enter “sleep” or “idle” modes while Skype is active, even when offline

Other reasons were mentioned but these 5 are my biggest concerns.

The second reason is anecdotal: Every time someone has called me (on my landline phone) from their Skype, the quality has been low, the delay between talking has been painfully long (even on local calls), and some of the time I'm put on hands-free, which means that my voice is coming out of the computer speakers and I can hear myself talking. All of these things are very distracting to having a real conversation with someone.

I love new technology and I love to see it leveraged for better business use. But to me, Skype just isn't there yet. Right now they're on version 2.5. I'll wait a couple more versions before I look at it again.