If you Google "browser war", no less than 1.25 million (MILLION!) results come back.

The names and players change (RIP Netscape!), but the debate rages on; which browser is the best? It's like dog and cat people. Dog people passionately believe their pets are superior. Cat people beg differently. The truth is both are cute and furry and you can't lose with either.

These days, the debate is over. Primarily its Internet Explorer versus Mac's new OS X (Leopard) versus Mozilla's Firefox.".

Speaking as a user, why do I have to choose?

Truth be told, I use both Internet Explorer and Firefox. When I added Firefox, I thought I was jumping ship from Explorer and would end up using Firefox exclusively. It didn't happen and it's not going to happen.

Both have features I like... and dislike.

I like Firefox for quick and dirty surfing. It loads fast and there's more real estate on my screen for the web sites, because the tool bar at the top is minimal.

IE 7 blocks me arbitrarily from certain sites with a pop up window their security certificate has expired. I've yet to find the over ride button on that one. It's still a free country on Firefox.

I also like the add-on themes with Firefox. I now have a University of Texas tool bar across the top.

Sometimes, however, I miss all those buttons at the top of Explorer. I know where the print and spelling and history buttons are and I use them frequently. I like the familiarity.

Depending on what I'm doing online, I choose my browser based on which one fits my needs the best.

Make love, not war, I say. p.s. it's okay to be a dog AND cat person, too.

This is my favorite description of the difference in philosophy between how Apple and Microsoft design things.

First here's how Apple does it

Next ... Microsoft.

They're both funny. Enjoy.

Here's a new word for you; Vistaphobe.

I just made it up. It's a Windows user terrified of upgrading his or her PC to Vista. Apparantly there are so many Vistaphobes out there, the PC makers are worried about losing their business. Enough so that they're willing to weasel around their agreements with Microsoft to dump XP and exclusively bundle only Vista after June 30th (a date that has been postponed since last year, due to consumer fear and loathing).

Here's how they are getting around it. After June 30th, buyers can still get a PC with XP. It will technically be a Vista- bundled PC downgraded to XP. PC makers, like HP and Dell, are taking advantage of a little caveat in their license agreements that allow "downgrade rights".

Hewlett-Packard is promising to continue selling "pre-downgraded" (I'm not the only one making up words these days) desktops, notebooks and workstations to the business crowd for another year (June 30, 2009). Dell says ditto. They're doing the same.

One other little jewel of information in all this; should you decide to bite the bullet and upgrade to Vista at a later date. No worries, you've already paid for it by purchasing a technically Vista-bundled PC to begin with.

We've always heard the "American Dream" is home ownership; preferably in the 'burbs with a picket fence, two car garage and walk-in closets for everyone including the family pet.

That dream has become a nightmare in recent months. Don't even say the "H" word. It might lead to discussions of aggressive lenders, increased foreclosures, lost equity from a rapidly deflating housing bubble and life without endless equity lines used to put in granite counter tops and home theater systems.

Despite all that and the recession, and the price of oil, and the war. and global warming, and entire industries outsourced overseas; the real American Dream is alive and well and thriving.

According to a recent Harris Interactive Poll conducted in part with Yahoo!, two out of three Americans want to start their own business. No matter how bad the economy gets that's not likely to change.

Here's why. You're looking at it; the Internet.

In past economic downturns, eventually the worm turns on smaller businesses too.

I remember back in the mid-80's while coming of age in my home state of Texas that the price of oil dropped from $40 a barrel to $12 a barrel. It took the whole state's economy with it. I lived in Beaumont where oil company workers and managers got laid off in droves.

The first thing that happened, I remember, was small businesses popping up like mushrooms all over town. Recently laid off workers that got a big enough package on the way out the door immediately used it as seed money to start that dream business; opening a baseball card store, a catering company, etc.

Eventually, all those mushrooms withered away. There wasn't much demand for Nolan Ryan rookie cards or catered bbqs in such a depressed local economy. When the last of those packages dried up, so did any hopes of unshackling from "The Man" and getting rich following one's bliss.

That was then, this is now.

I don't think we're going to see the dream die this time around, no matter how bad it gets and it's all because of the Internet.

Key diffrences between now and then due to technology:

1. It costs a lot less to start a business these days, thanks to ecommerce and cheap software solutions that allow small companies to act like big business. Laid off employees going independent don't have to dip into that package as often.

2. New business owners aren't bound to the limits of their own hard hit communities to drum up clients. It's still the world wide web; meaning somewhere out in cyberspace there's a whole customer base waiting for you that lives in places more immune to your specific current economic pain.

3. There are more ways to leverage your current business skills at a consultant's rate. The Internet has taken professional networking and online collaboration to new heights. Iti's easier to make those critical first connections that lead to additional investors and first time customers.

4. It's easier to succeed, because it's easier to know what to do. Need help writing a business plan, putting together that first budget, batting around the seed of a good idea and growing it into something real - voila! It's all a Google away.

Have a great weekend. We'll get back to business on Monday.

- Renee Oricchio

The headline says it all, but I'll say more of course.

After many months of rumor and speculation, Micrsoft is now offering an "all-in-one" subscription service of a web-based version of Office and other applications. It's in private beta for now (by invitation only) and code-named Albany for those of you who want to go back and track the trail of rumors over the past year.

As poorly received as Windows Vista has been since its release in January of 2007, the new vesion of Office that came out the same month has been as widely received.

A web-based version is needed and inevitable, I think. I see the greatest potential for Excel, for example. Excel is a database application and one single document can store literally hundreds of thousands of cells. That's a lot of data floating around as an attachment. It will make sense for a lot of businesses to house their key Excel spreadsheets in one centralized location where it can be babysat and viewed/edited with restrictions.

Ditto for PowerPoint.

It's finally arrived of, sort of. Vista users have been waiting months for that first service pack from Microsoft after numerous delays and false starts.

As expected, it's coming out in stages. SP is available to users who have their systems set for automatic downloads. You'll know it's happening by a series of popup windows you'll need to click through after the download takes place.

Also as expected, it's only available this time around in English, Spanish, French, Japanese and German. Too bad about those 30- something other languages on hold.

Here's the press release from Microsoft. It takes seven paragraphs on the dramatic growth and change of the Internet to get to the actual details of the service pack. Interpret from that as you see fit.

One little factoid buried in the copy that I found most interesting; 11,000 hardware and software products now carry the official "certified" or "works with" Vista logo. In other words, despite all the bad press and user complaints, we're all tenants in a Vista world now. It will get increasingly more difficult for us Windows users hanging on to our XP as long as possible.

I have hopes Microsoft will get it right next time around. The question is can people like me last with what we've got until that happens and skip this round of Windows altogether.

For those of you who can't, good news; Microsoft is offering a free phone tech support through March of 2009 for those that download the service pack. In the United States, that number is 866-234-6020.

For those of you that read yesterday's posting (whine-fest) of my trials setting up a new Internet connection in my new home office; don't think that was the end of it.

I just spent a week back in 1994; the last year I wasn't online with e-mail access and the ability to surf my heart out.

It wasn't pretty. I don't miss 1994.

- I don't miss calling 411 to get a phone number or, perish the thought, looking up a number in a big, bulky phone book.

- I don't miss flying blind using a new business without checking out their web site first.

I don't miss pre-1995.

This week is Turn off your Television week. I second that emotion. But please don't ask me to turn off my Internet connection.

Subtitle this: Setting up new Internet service shouldn't be this difficult.

People with home offices just get no respect from their internet service providers (ISPs).

Here's my tale of woe.

I moved last week, which meant my home office got moved too.

I've used a cable modem happily for almost eight years. When I originally set up that account back in 2000, DSL was more expensive and had a reputation of frequent technical difficulties. I took a pass and never regretted it.

However with my new home office, the phone outlet was closer than the existing cable outlet. I have many friends and colleagues who are happy with DSL. What the heck, I said. Let's give it a try.

Big mistake.

I won't mention names (I don't kiss and tell), but I called a telco that offers DSL service in my new 'hood, set up an account and was told I would get a self-installation kit within a few business days by mail. No problem. I did all of this a week before my move date.

A week came and went and the kit didn't arrive. I moved last week and was frankly too busy those first few days to even think about going online. Thursday came and no kit in the mail. Oops! That was a problem. I needed to blog on Friday.

I called the telco that was to be my DSL provider. While on hold for over 30 minutes waiting to talk to a human being, I called my local cable company on my cell phone and asked how long it would take to get me online. I was told it could happen that day. I just needed to drive over to their nearby offices and pick up a modem.

By the time the DSL folk stopped the elevator music and picked up, I asked for the supervisor. I explained the situation. She said they'd lost all records of my account request (although they processed the order for a home phone line in that same phone conversation more than ten days ago). She apologized and said it would take A WEEK to get me online.

I told her my cable company could do it that day and I actually believed them since they had, so far, kept their promises of delivering prompt new services when they installed my cable television earlier in the week.

I then asked if she were me, what would she do? She had to agree, she'd go with the cable modem and couldn't compete with their timing to get me up and running.

How sad! How pathetic!

She did not offer to rush a self-installation kit overnight via FedEx. She did not offer a few months of free service to make up for the wasted time. She offered nothing, except a polite apology and wished me well with my cable modem service.

Walkaway points I'd like to make from this cautionary tale of loss and redemption:

- In this day and age, any internet service provider that takes a whole week to activate a new account needs to stop being an internet service provider and stop torturing would-be customers.
- In any day and age, any company that so willingly lets a potential customer go to a competitor admitting that can't match their service should hang their head low and fire whoever supervises all the account managers.

The debate over cable broadband versus DSL broadband high speed connections continues to rage, especially for home offices and smaller businesses. Cable companies traditionally have focused more on residential customers and left businesses to DSL and T-1 lines, etc. However, over the past year or so, they've become more aggressive of going after the biz crowd.

Which is better? Which is faster? Which is cheaper? Which is more reliable? These are the factors weighed and debated over and over again.

What I've learned is this. Forget who's faster or cheaper. Who has a local office with a human face that has to talk directly to your human face and earn your business? It is easy to dole out bad customer service by phone. It's a little trickier doing it in person.

Your local cable company may actually be a huge cable operator like Comcast or Charter, but there's a store front in your area with a fleet of technician vans out back. They are organized to mobilize and send out a live body to the homes and offices of customers on a dime. They also have a public lobby with human reps manning the front desk.

You can't say that about most DSL providers.

Big difference. Think about it.

There's software to organize your passwords and put them in one place for safe keeping. People like me like to write up tips on keeping track of all your passwords. But, we often forget the hardest part; thinking up the darn things.

And it only gets tougher these days. Most password protected sites, accounts, etc. increasingly create stricter perimeters to create passwords (at least eight letters, combination of letters and numbers, finding something not already in use, don't use your kid's name or your street address, etc.).

Enter passwordbird.com; a little online tool to help you think up passwords. Just answer a couple of simple questions; like your favorite name and date. The passwordbird engine spits out a suggestion based on your answers.

It's just a rumor folks. So, take it with a grain of salt. But, I can't let this one pass by without comment. Apparantly, the 'softies in Redmond are thinking about opening bricks and mortar Microsoft stores.

If true, this is clearly inspired by Apple's success with store front sales. Problem: iPhones and iPods are cool bling that everyone wants. Zune is another story.

Microsoft would be wise to think about those Gateway stores, instead.

I can't imagine going into a store to get all hot and bothered about Vista demos or buying Office '07 off the shelf for a scrillion dollars.

Nor can I imagine teen geeks camping out for Halo 4 alongside IT managers waiting for the new version of Sharepoint.

If true, I pity the $8 a hour employee working the customer service window (When's the last installment of the service pack for Vista coming out, again?).

Me-ow!

If you have enough time with your small business to prepare
before the recesssion hits and you're not in dire straits yet, whether
a recessions coming or not, it pays to get a time-tracking capability
in place for your company so you can understand per project costs.

That's really important because it allows you to understand where
you're spending 80% of your peoples' time and once you understand
that, you can do intelligent things that might not be obvious, to
make your company more efficient and effective. Let's say that you've
had the luxury that I've had lately to sit down and think about
strategic planning and where you want to take the company.

How are we going to navigate the future minefields that we see coming, like
in our space there's a lot of web 2.0 coming out, peoples'
iPhones are going to be a way to enter time, all these kinds of
things, right? Its not a mystery. You can see whats coming. And
there are ways to prepare for that. So I've got some strategic project
that I think is important for the long term of the company and I
say:

"Okay everybody. Lets go do this".

Are they really doing it? Or is everybody so swamped with
current business that they're not having a chance to work on the future?

Measuring that is really important and if you're not
measuring it you're probably going to be surprised when
you do by what you find. So in the process of doing that you're
going to understand a lot of things that make you stronger in a
recession. You're going to be able to fire customers, instead of
employees. You're going to be able to break and close down projects
instead of firing employees and other things that make you more
nimble. And if you do have to fire employees anyway, if you have
to lay people off, you're going to be cutting intelligently without
a chain saw. That's a powerful thing. There were a bunch of articles
in Harvard Business Review recently about short term, medium term,
and long term projects that companies should be working on. And
when recession time comes, companies -- especially small growing
companies -- they cut all the long term projects. And if it gets a
little bit tighter, they cut all the medium term projects and they're
focused on just this quarter. And then the recession's over and
business starts to pick up again and it's time for next quarter and
they have no platform for growth capability, they've killed their growth.

It's sort of like not rotating your crops, they've depleted the soil.
They can keep growing what they've been growing, they can keep doing
what they're doing but they can't get to that next level of productivity,
they're not ready for changes that are coming to the marketplace.

Like in my case, the iPhone, time entry thing. If we don't get that
nailed, somebody else will and were going to be screwed. (So of course we're
working on that.)

So anyway, that's how you use timesheet software to avoid a recession.

It's April 15th. If you know there's no way in h-e-double hockey sticks that you're going to make it getting your taxes done and filed online or by snail mail by midnight; here's the link of the day.

Don't forget to do the same for state taxes. There are still residents of two states who don't have to worry about that part; Texas and Florida.

One last tip: the prevailing belief is that those that file online are less likely to get audited.

Good luck. Don't forget to write off those iPhones as a business expense (assuming you use yours for business and you're not reimbursed by your employer).

At least it happened over the weekend. Still for $50 million, Google probably doesn't expect it's new Web 2.0 media darling and online phone company to go down.

That's what happened, however. Grand Central was down for the count all morning yesterday with no calls going through.

That's a big problem when you consider, as the name would indicate, Grand Central is all about putting all your phone numbers in one basket.

That's a basket that can't afford to be dropped.

Grand Central is a great idea; consolidating all your numbers (home phone, business line, cell phones, etc.) into one place where you can check voicemail, forward calls, program all your lines to ring regardless of which number is called.

Couple of points to make in the wake of yesterday's wake-up call (that didn't go through; how many plays on words can I fit in one sentence?).

- Grand Central is still in beta.
- It did happen on a Sunday morning, rather than a Tuesday afternoon.
- Grand Central's official statement from a guy named "Craig" according to his blog, casually apologized to users explaining their was a power problem at their Colorado facility, He admits being slow on the take himself to respond since he was out of cell phone range up in the mountains with his family (overshare Craig!).
- I'm assuming Craig is in charge of Grand Central. I'm also assuming Craig is a young CEO/President who hasn't fullly realized he no longer is running a little ole startup, but a $50 million dollar Google investment. (I'm actually not just assuming on his job title. I cicked around until I confirmed that. But, I find it irritating and unprofessional that it's not apparant up front on his blog).

Memo to Craig: your "oops" days are over.

The great thing about wi-fi is that you're not only no longer tethered to a desk; you're no longer tethered to the inside of the office itself.

Memo to bosses: it's spring! Your employees are distracted, but in a good mood sort of way. Instead of dreading the seasonal slacking and deluge of impromptu "mental health" days that seem to coincide on those first days when temps climb above 65 degrees; realize spring fever is an opportunity for the business.

This is the time of year when your employees are likely feeling their most creative, inspired by good moods and good weather.

Channel that dreaminess into brainstorming sessions. Conduct them outside.

Declare a "Laptops on the Lawn" day. Supply the beach towels and snacks and park a whiteboard under a shade tree. You'll be amazed at what comes out of a change of scenery.

Create an outdoor wi-fi hotspot with some picnic tables and use it as an additional "conference room" for meetings.

An ongoing stresser in the average office is the constant assault of all the white noise. Flourescent lights, loud copiers, ringing phones, humming desktops with their little fans kicking on and off throughout the day to cool off the hard drive; it all adds up. Finding a way to let the troops work outside may sound like a recipe for goofing off, but you're likely to see greater productivity by sending them out onto the grounds where its peaceful and quiet.

No patch of grass on your office property, no problem. Stake out a local nearby park. Do whatever you must to create working al fresco opprortunities. I promise morale will go up, while those mental health days will go down.

Business culture has come a long way in ten years. First working from home was impractical, if not impossible. Then it was a perkf for an elite few at the top of the corporate food chain. Then it was a treat tolerated by the rare boss and frowned upon by most others.

Now, it's a way of life and common as dirt. Most bosses get it. Somedays people just need to not be in the office while they work once in awhile.

- Increasingly the line has blurred between work time and off time. Just as many e-mails go out at 10:30 pm as 10:30am.
- Gas costs $3.50 a gallon and commuters are getting killed financially. I can't tell you how many people I know that are paying more for gas each month than for their car payment.
- There are very few jobs that can't be performed remotely with an internet connection and secure line.

All that being said; since working from home has become so commonplace, perhaps its time to consider not working from home.

Home can be a tough place to focus and get things done. Homes are messy and come with loads of distractions and temptations to multi-task (like running a load of towels while you work, squeezing in a couple of errands around town, etc.).

My advice; have a couple of go-to spots close to home where you can camp out and really focus on getting your work done. Stake out a Wi-Fi spot at your nearest Starbucks or Borders. Try a hotel lobby, a local university or library.

Sometimes home can be a little too quiet for working. It helps to find a public spot that is subdued enough to get work done, but still has the energy of people coming and going. Exchanging a few pleasantries with the barista can be just enough human interaction to stave off those feelings of isolation.

Working outside the home in a public spot forces you to get out of your pajamas and take a shower. It infuses discipline and makes you feel like a human being and a professional.

Just a thought.

A new study on the habits of blog readers, conducted by The University of California at Irvine, is quietly making the rounds at conferences and on, well appropriately enough, blogs.

Not a lot of surprises here, but it bears highlighting some of the key observations.

People who read blogs tend to:

- find it habit forming.
- consider it as time spent goofing off.
- consider their connection with the author the key reason they keep coming back.
- consider their interaction/reaction to the blog as the real content and not just the content itself.
- bond with the blog's community; namely the author and other regulars who leave comments.

What can business's who blog learn from this?

- Keep it casual.
- Think of your blog as less of an information channel and more of a communication channel.
- Personalize your blog with pictures of the author. Write postings in the first person. Respond to comments.
- Write to engage. Put questions to your readers. Have running themes to keep them coming back. Note the personalities of those who leave comments and reference them in postings once and awhile.

My company sells employee time and expense tracking software. It is an application that turns your machine into a web timesheet server and you can install it for free in about 5 minutes. If you're small enough you can run your company on it forever for nothing.

You can also run it on our servers via the SaaS model, but for those that install it on their own machines, the majority are either running Linux or Windows.

We have a lower price if you're running Linux. Know why? Our support costs are lower.
Linux machines just seem to be far less likely to get a virus or a worm or an OS change
automatically pushed down from Microsoft which hoses your computer.

I have theories about why this is so but really it just seems like a problem Microsoft would
have solved by now. You'll notice that Symantec doesn't have a whole bunch of revenue from
Linux software. But they've got loads from people running Windows.

After a couple of decades of observing this problem recur, I still confused.

How hard can it be to fix this, really?

Hint: It's not beach front property or prime mountain real estate in the Carolinas. Nope, it's domain names.

Pizza.com was auctioned off recently for 2.6 million dollars. The seller, who snapped it up for 20 bucks more than a decade ago, brokered it through Sedo.com, a kind of Century 21 online broker site for domain names. 20 dollars to 2.6 million dollars in 14 years; that's one h-e-double toothpicks of a return.

Other addresses currently on the block include:

- fbi.info (hey, I thought they were gathering data on us; not the other way around!)
- mylingerie.org (.org usually means a non-profit. I'm trying to imagine an organization that sells teddies and fishnet hose as a public service and not for commerical gain).
- carsnatcher.com (co-owned by 20withoutparole.pen, no doubt)

All kidding aside, Sedo is just one of countless domain name broker sites. It's easy for me to imagine there is a whole subculture of entrepreneurs who "day trade" domain names, The bidding on blu-ray.net is currently sitting at 12,500 euros. What will that address be worth a year from now?

p.s. Happy birthday to my favorite entrepreneur, Zelda C.

Zelda is an old school small business owner who should be writing business books and teaching B school classes. Instead she chooses to quietly run a full-time cattle & horse ranch/oil and gas business.

Zelda runs her business by the old adage "if ain't broke, don't fix it,"

Along those lines, she:

- Still uses a dot matrix printer for internal printing that costs her a whopping seven dollars a ribbon.
- Has been using Peachtree Accounting since it was a mere sapling of a program back in the 80s and just keeps updating as needed. Talk about loyalty!
- Is comfortable with technology; but doesn't invest in anything that doesn't earn its keep when it comes to her bottomline (thus $7 dot matrix ribbons, rather than $40 ink jet cartridges).
- isn't someone who will ever need an executive coach to help her organize her work flow, manage her e-mail, lower her stress level or better finesse her business contacts.
- allows technology to free up her time, not so she can over extend herself to more business commitments, but rather so she can knock off at 5pm and have a life.
- Even with 20 years of experience in her line of work, is still humble enough to quickly tell anyone that she's still learning the business and is grateful for every new nugget that comes her way.

Moral to the story: many of us in the business world often mistake technology as the panacea of fixing all that is dysfunctional in getting things done. It's not. Technology is a tool. Sometimes - SOMETIMES - it solves a problem, streamlines a business process, facilitates faster communication, even helps us find whole new revenue streams and sales channels.

What it doesn't do is instill discipline, common sense when it comes to making critical decisions, common courtesy and integrety when we conduct our dealings or fiscal responsibility that makes a business last long enough to pass from one generation to the next (Zelda learned at the knee of her father and is a fourth generation independent oil executive. She won't be the last of the line).

Happy Birthday, Zelda. Please write that book! We need it more than software as a service or the latest killer app, version of Mozilla or open source solution.

In case you missed it over the weekend, Microsoft has sent a very public letter to Yahoo's board of directors giving them three weeks to work out a deal to be "embraced and enhanced" by the Redmond mothership or face a hostile takeover attempt.

Here's the letter. I think it's already gotten hostile. "Three weeks or else" is hardly playing by the Queensbury rules, so to speak.

I smell desperation. Vista has been an unmitigated disaster. Moving the Windows O/S off the desktop and into Yahoo's cloud would perhaps be the quickest fix.

My last thought on all this; if Microsoft is going to give anyone a three week deadline, why not give it to Vista's service pack team?

Mee-ow!

Back in the mid-90's, as the Internet became a household word and past time, companies felt tremendous pressure to get a corporate site for sales or to use one as an online brochure or both. No one knew how to monetize the darn things and actually make money. No one knew how or what they were actually supposed to get out of those web sites.

A little over a decade later, the issue of corporate blogging is quite similar. Everyone talks about blogging, but everyone has a different idea what it should be used for or how to achieve exactly what.

I ran across this wiki recently; a labor of love put together by Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine, Ross Mayfield of SocialText and a faceless army of volunteer watch dogs combing the blogosphere to monitor how businesses are using blogs.

Here are some of the more interesting findings of this admittedly unscientific aggregation of data on corporate blogging.

- As of this month, only 57 of the Fortune 500 companies actually have an official corporate blog (roughly only 10%).
- The uses and strategies of those blogs vary widely. The same team that put together the Fortune 500 blogging wiki has also put together this visual to show how blogs are used (information versus commentary, formal versus casual).

There are no hard figures on the number of small to midsize businesses that officially blog. Clearly, it is lifeblood for some businesses and the lowest item on the priority list for others.

What can we learn from those smaller companies that lost their shirts in the 90's racing to launch corporate sites with no measured ROI? Answer: plenty.

- Blogging takes a lot of human time to maintain and its more often a long wait to build an audience of regular visitors making it worth the effort. Don't make the committment unless you have the patience and resources to give it time to grow.

- Don't do it unless there's a clear objective, strategy and way to measure your ROI for the business.

- Lastly, first do no harm. Customers love transparency, but companies have a responsibility to keep somethings internal. Before you blog, be clear what's okay to make public and what needs to be kept within the family.

Someone's gonna get elected soon and be our new president and when the issue of healthcare in America comes up these days you hear one of 2 points of view:

1. Liberal - Copy someone overseas where infinite healthcare is available to everyone for free

2. Conservative - That's crazy - those guys wait in line forever and die in the ER due to lack of care - what we have is great

The reality is of course more nuanced than either of these concepts and this interview with Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute really tells more of the story.

Curt runs a timesheet software company in Austin

Worried about the recession driving down your online sales? This might be a way to not only ride the recession, but actually grow your customer base.

A new survey put out by the marketing research group Information & Communication (ICOM) shows 67% of consumers polled say they plan to use more coupons during the recession. 58% say they are particularly interested in paperless coupons (i.e. online coupons).

These are pretty dramatic results when you consider coupon redemption has dipped below a 1% redemption rate over the past 10 years. Nothing like oil going past $100 a barrel to get folks rethinking coupons again.

If you've been reading my postings over the past week, you'll notice I've been writing a bit about using text messaging as an additional marketing channel to reach customers. Sending coupons via text is quickly becoming very popular, especially businesses trying to reach the under-35 crowd.

While offering coupons through mobile devices may split between the generations, there isn't one when it comes to income.

Whether it's via email, snail mail, web ads, text message or carrier pigeon, 68% who make less than $50,000 a year responded favorably to using coupons more than they have in the past. 67% who make more than $50,000 also give coupons a big thumbs up.

Moral to the story: you're never to rich to want to save a buck or too rich to feel invulnerable to a shaky economy.

Amazon has launched a new way to impulse shop; just send a text message. Want a Blu-Ray copy of "I am Legend" or the latest James Patterson novel? No problem, just send a text message from your cell with the name of the product (or ISBN number, if its a book) to "Amazon" (262966).

Amazon will send you a couple of choices by price. Hit one or two to make your selection. Amazon then has an automated voice system that calls you immediately to complete the transaction.

Just last week, I wrote about what I call "Generation Text" (you heard it hear first, folks). 72% of the world's consumers that respond to text advertisements are under the age of 35. If they're responding to ads, think what they'll do with the shopping option.

Small companies, like Textmeforbusiness.com, are popping up allover the Internet catering to small to midsize companies that want to market via SMS (text messaging).

Many companies, especially local businesses, retailers and even radio stations, are experimenting with sending enticements like coupons, promotionals and contest teasers via text to engage their base. It does seem like a short walk to skip the preliminaries and go straight for the sale.

This won't hit critical mass for awhile, but it may be time to start thinking about this new sales channel and how your business can generate new customers and revenue streams from it.

As for bricks and mortar stores, imagine the dent in sales its going to make as customers cruise the aisles and comparison shop with Amazon via cell phone. Ouch!

Somewhere along the line, personal computers became the preferred target for April Fool's jokes. Some aren't so funny, like viruses and denial of service attacks. Others are mildly funny, if you have the maturity of a 12 year old boy and it's not your PC tied up for half a day while IT tries to figure out that's a fake blue screen of death.

Wired (enabling grownups who never got past age 12) has even put together a list of top ten April Fool's pranks to play on your colleague's computers.

Whatever happened to short sheeting a bed, bogus calls from angry bosses or ordering your neighbor in the cubicle next door a half dozen pizzas at lunch time?

I guess this is April Fool's 2.0.