End of the road for Shareholder Valuation based Business Models

Recent events around the massive oil spill in the gulf and a couple of interesting movies – Up In the Air by George Clooney and Capitalism a Love story by Michael Moore made it rather apparent that we are coming to an end of an era (in the way in which I was trained while studying MBA, and working for companies like Dell and Microsoft) on how business is done today.

A fully Open Source Enterprise Stack For Current Business Environment

What if your experience of open source weren't limited to handful of the popular open source offerings like Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla? What if there are alternatives to the likes of salesforce, Infusionsoft, Microsoft Dynamics for CRM offerings? Last year it was interesting to see how the community driven software had pretty much surpassed proprietary content management vendors, from pure flexibility, innovation, security and speed of change which is a must in the web environment.

The Dubli Business Model

Today, one of my business mentors had me review a business opportunity needing online traffic – Dubli. A friend of his is serious about undertaking this venture, all ready to dive in. My input in this area was sought, for my ability to drive online traffic to a Dubli network site, similar to this one.

Why LinkedIN?My Top Ten Reasons

Myspace, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Youtube, LinkedIN – I am an active member of all these sites, but I spend most of my “available” Web 2.0 time on LinkedIn. Here are my top ten reasons with some introspection on why I give LinkedIN this honor:

Google analytics for largescale ecommerce site

Lend Directly To a Person in Need

If you want to help a poor person in a developing or third world, giving to charities is not the answer.  Money soon runs out and the person is now dependent on that charitable offering again (most likely). Not if you have a plan to do something with the funds - like create a business. Well that is what Kiva does. It is a lending organization that enables people like you and me to give to person who is in need. They have third party organizations that vet the claims and uses of funds for these individuals. Typical borrower is looking at buying a cow, buy products for a local store or fix a taxi for his/her business. You can read about the stories of these people and give in increments of $25. These funds are returned in the future as the person is building credit!

How to Add Email Subscription To Your Drupal Blog

This a $700 dollar video! I got an email from a reader of SeoEcom that she had aquote of $700 to add an email subscription to her drupal blog site.If you can follow along to this video, you can learn how to

1. Use Drupal Views to create an RSS View for all your blogs (or anycontent you want to RSS on your site)
2. Burn the feed at Feedburner and use all the advanced tracking and emailsubscription features of a Feedburner feed
3. Enable email subscriptions to your blog for your Drupal site

Please follow along to the videos on how to do this. First off you need todownload Drupal Views (required) and Feedburner redirector (optional). Unzip thefiles and use your FTP application to install these modules on your Drupal site.Once these modules are installed you will need to enable them and then you canstart to define your view.

Using RSS Feeds filetype:rss

Almost once a month I get question on RSS, what it is, how to read rss feeds and should I use rss. This blog answers this question. First let’s start with what it is:

RSS is a technology that allows millions of web users around the world keep track of the latest information on their favorite websites. If you use bookmarks to revisit your favorite websites, chances are you are wasting time. You may visit a site only to find no new updates. Or you may miss a critical piece of information because you didn’t visit the site in time. 

Here is a really good video that explains RSS in simple terms:

Drupal Security

Drupal uses an open security model, to publish vulnerabilities, issue patches for known vulnerabilities and get independent audit of security issues using third party tools and its vast community.  With over 4000s contributed modules, the practices of Drupal.org, with it’s open security model, make it one of the most secure platforms to do business online and leverage community contribution toward a secure platform.

For the average Drupal site all that needs to be done is to keep its modules up-to-date and also the Drupal core version, which as of this writing is Drupal 6.12 and 5.18. Some deployments of Drupal have massive changes to the core, which should be an expecption managed by the client (that engages in the development effort, understands risks and alternatives)  – that if changes are made to the core or to a contributed module, then there is an strategy in place to test the site for various security issues, independently of Drupal.

Best of PowerfulCMS 2008

With over fifty sites built last year, I would like to nominate the top sitesfor each category – built by the team at PowerfulCMS. I will add the reasons for recommendation along withrecognising the contribution or innovation of the primary team member.Each of these sites are coded as per the current Drupal standards (5.x or 6.x) with all content modifiable with the Drupal CMS: