Blog

By Stefan Sojka

We operate in an industry that is built on an incredibly complex array of technology.  One of the most frustrating aspects for us and our customers is just how many different opportunities there are for technology to go wrong – on or off-line – with computers.

There are literally thousands of links in any chain between people on the Internet – even inside a single computer!  There are dozens of service providers.  Some we know about:

• Your ISP
• Your domain name registrar
• The company who built your computer
• The company who built your Website visitor’s computer
• Your Web developer – us

…and some we don’t:

• The owner of the submarine cable or satellite
• ISP installation contractors
• Server maintenance company
• Domain name authority
• Browser software developer community
• International Internet standards bodies
• Network router suppliers, like Cisco Systems
• The list goes on and on.

Besides all of the above, a successful Internet experience depends on the people at either end of the exchange.  Here are some issues that can and do happen along the way:

• Sound is used, but the end user doesn’t have speakers
• Visitors to a Website run an ancient browser, so the site doesn’t display correctly for them
• People run security software with settings that disrupt even safe activity
• An ISP’s DNS server has issues, causing some sites to be inaccessible
• An ISP like Telstra can get a massive surge of Spam and slow everything down
• Software gets installed and causes a conflict
• Website hosting software gets upgraded and some functions stop working due to a different configuration
• This list also goes on and on!

Over the past 15-20 years we have seen it all.  One day we will probably write a book about it.  Suffice to say we have come to accept technological issues as part of day-to-day life in the computer world.

When things go wrong, we are often the first people to hear about it, even if it is not our fault.  Sometimes we are not informed, when we should be – as customers think that perhaps their ISP is to blame.

What we would like to say about all of this is that we hope you understand a little about the scope of the industry we are all participating in.  We hope you accept that it is in the very nature of something so complex that things will go wrong.

In saying this, we are always here to help.  If you need advice or are becoming frustrated with a technical issue or service issue, please let us know.  We might just be able to help you work out where the real problem lies and who the real culprit is.  Sometimes it is something we can fix.  At the very least we can point you in the right direction.

If after we investigate a problem, we find it is our fault, we are bound to sort it out for you at no charge.  If it turns out to be one of the other many links in the chain beyond our responsibility, we will either recommend a solution, or arrange to fix it for you.  In these cases, we will charge a service fee for our time.

As one of your business service providers, we are here to help you manage this very complicated maze of technology that impacts – and helps – your business.  Nobody likes the ‘issues’ part of the equation – it certainly doesn’t seem very productive.  However, by effectively managing these inevitable problems, we do get to enjoy the huge benefits of the technology for all the times things are running smoothly.

With your understanding and our support, we can all move forward in this exciting digital world.

The silly season came and went and we are hitting the ground running... Hope you had a great break and are ready for 2014.

January is a great time to review your Website, to see if it remains in line with your business strategy and if everything is up to date (we are in the process of doing this ourselves!)

Copyright

One little thing you might wish to do is update your copyright notice at the bottom of each page, to 2014.

Updating your Website

Perhaps a few New Year resolutions are in order, as you start planning your year ahead:

• Review & update your text, keywords, etc.
• Update with new photos & other images
• Check for broken links or other little glitches
• Test any contact forms
• Check for old content that needs deleting
• Add new products or services, team members, latest news, etc.
• Ensure your Website is in line with your latest marketing efforts & business strategy
• Consider other ideas, like video, social media, press releases, exchange links, new testimonials, etc.
• Perhaps consider a complete revamp, to redefine your new position & direction for 2014.

Here's to the year ahead and may it be filled with joy and plenty of opportunity.

Are we getting older, or is time actually speeding up?  2013 seemed to have only lasted a few months... and here we are staring Christmas/New Year down and looking forward to a nice break for the silly season.  Somehow, however, even though it went so fast, we seemed to have packed more into this year than ever before!  That's weird.

2013 was a crazy year on so many fronts.  Locally here in Ryde, we saw Council and Local Paper – both clients of ours – getting embroiled in an ICAC enquiry!  That was certainly an interesting period in local history to have witnessed.  With luck everything will have sorted itself out in the New Year and the Ryde community can get back to working on building a great local future.

Our Creative Director has once again joined the Ryde City Economic Development Advisory Committee and at the Ryde Macquarie Park Chamber of Commerce AGM held recently, he was elected Vice President.

Our recording studio, Ryde Recording Studio, saw a marked increase in activity this year.  What started as a small hobby studio, mostly for our own projects, has ended up becoming quite popular for voiceovers and other post production work.  Not only that, but this year saw the release of our second song on iTunes – Mind Your back – a song written especially for ParaQuad NSW for their Spinal Cord Injury Prevention campaign. www.mindyourback.com.au – you can check out the track here – https://itunes.apple.com/au/album/mind-your-back-single/id692961825

Besides that, we scored an Audio Post Production credit on an independent short film entrant in the World of Women's Cinema festival.  We also produced monthly podcasts for Medical Observer magazine, featuring Dr Annette Katelaris and a great selection of top-line medical professionals and guests.

Stefan continued to co-host The Skeptic Zone podcast and produced music including the theme song for a special Skeptical and very funny radio play "Solar Flare".  He is building up quite a collection of demo recordings of his favourite songs and slowly but surely turning his musical talents towards his own compositions more and more.

On the Website front, Cyrius launched a few new Websites this year (some we can't officially tell you about due to commercial arrangements).  We continued to look after our very nice stable of long-term clients as they saw their businesses evolve through at times up and down conditions of 2013.  All in all we came through with flying colours and are very much looking forward to the year ahead in 2014.  May it be merry, jolly and filled with many rewarding experiences and achievements.

Happy New Year from the entire Cyrius team!

Software firm Adobe today revealed its network was compromised.  Information that was leaked included 2.9 million customer names, encrypted credit or debit card numbers, expiration dates, and other information relating to customer orders.  Adobe wouldn’t say when the breach occurred, and only mentioned that its security team discovered sophisticated attacks on its network very recently.

Source code for numerous Adobe products was also accessed.  Adobe says it has taken the following steps:

"As a precaution, the company is re-setting relevant customer passwords to help prevent unauthorized access to Adobe ID accounts.  If your user ID and password were involved, you will receive an email notification with information on how to change your password."

Adobe also recommends that you change your passwords on any Website where you may have used the same user ID and password.  The company is in the process of notifying customers whose credit or debit card information it believes to be involved in the incident.

If your information was involved, you will receive a notification letter with additional information on steps you can take to help protect yourself against potential misuse of personal information about you.

Adobe is also offering customers, whose credit or debit card information was involved, the option of enrolling in a one-year complimentary credit monitoring membership where available.

It has already notified the banks processing customer payments for Adobe, so that they can work with the payment card companies and card-issuing banks to help protect customers’ accounts.  It has contacted federal law enforcement and is assisting in their investigation.  Adobe says its investigation so far has found that the attackers accessed Adobe customer IDs and encrypted passwords on its systems.

It does not currently believe they removed decrypted credit or debit card numbers and that it does not think the illegal access of its source code could provide any specific increased risk to its customers.

The company also offered up the following apology:

"We deeply regret that this incident occurred.  We’re working diligently internally, as well as with external partners and law enforcement, to address the incident.  We value the trust of our customers.  We will work aggressively to prevent these types of events from occurring in the future.  Again, we deeply regret any inconvenience this may cause you."

Adobe is continuing its investigation.

From The Next Web – Emil Protalinski – Original article here

The Internet is a strange place when it comes to investment.  No one seems to quite know how much money to pour into a Web project to achieve his or her objectives.  The real world seems to have most things quantified quite clearly.  Sure costs can blow out, but in general, the pricing of commodities and services is within established boundaries, as is the scope of most projects.  A building, no matter how big or small, is just a building.  It rarely needs to become twice as large as soon as it opens, or change its structure mid-construction.  Web projects can and do morph very quickly.

So people, armed with much uncertainty, misinformation or even delusion, begin Web projects thinking they will spend nothing, then see how it goes.  And if it takes off, they will invest more money into the project.  The ground they build their plans on is so shaky that it is almost certainly doomed to fail.  Somehow some reality and measure must be brought in.  It makes it hard when we hear stories about start-ups who spent 3 months in a garage and then sold to Google for a billion dollars.  The reality factor is almost non-existent in these kinds of stories.

Websites really are projects just like any other.  They in fact do have parameters, scope and limitations, measurable and quantifiable factors, costs, benefits, investment and returns.

Rather than invest and wait for a return, many people expect Websites to bring in a return and then use that money to invest into the project.

While that sounds like a sensible idea, it ignores the fact that you have to start with something and that something is going to take time and money.  Somehow we have been led to believe that the first version of a Website should be free.  If you are a programmer and designer, this may well be the case, because you will do it all yourself.  But if you are an ordinary business person with little or no design and coding skills, you are going to have to pay someone to do the work… and you may not even know what work needs to be done, so you probably have to pay someone to help you work that out, too.

If your idea really is worth pursuing, it must be worth investing in.  No business is risk-free, so why not take the risk on your own idea?  If it pays off, you will be very happy indeed and if it doesn’t, you will have paid for some very valuable lessons, to take with you to your next project.

It’s October long weekend already.  It creeps up on you when the actual holiday Monday is the first day of the month.  One minute you are in the tail end of September and before you know it, you are enjoying the day off and suddenly realising that Christmas is just around the corner!  All bets are off as to when the first Christmas muzak is going to start streaming from the shopping centre car park loudspeakers.

It’s this time of year that we start taking stock and contemplating just how the year panned out, compared to how we thought it would as the fireworks were exploding at midnight, 9 full months ago.  It also dawns on us, that if there were things we told ourselves we would achieve this year, we are 75% of the way there, so we’d better get a hurry on.

Seeing as nobody can predict the future, it is a safe bet that nobody’s year goes exactly to plan.  Sure, we can all get done the things we said we would get done, but we can never know who that next phone call or email is going to come from, or what that next opportunity might be.  We can only fully control what we do, not what anyone else might do.

So it is this October long weekend that we at Cyrius reflect on the year that in many ways went according to plan and in other ways went in totally different directions.  We also look at the to-do list and realise that while it never seems to get any shorter, a thousand things did get ticked off this year.  Whether we were cleaning out the old paperwork from years gone by, or laying plans for the future, we got up each day and got things done.

Here is our little set of things to do as the year’s final quarter kicks off:

Christmas is Coming
As usual, anything that really needs doing before the end of the year needs to be done by Christmas.  Best to start now, because we all know how crazy things get as the silly season gets into full swing.  Start prioritising now, so as not to be disappointed. Maybe those shopping centres are onto something – it might be time to avoid the rush and do your Christmas shopping now!

Update your Website
For some reason, even though Websites are critical to most businesses these days and Search Engines seem to favour sites that update themselves regularly, people never seem to get around to updating them as much as they would like.  How about banging out a blog post or two (just like I am doing) and start thinking about what else you might do.  Why not add a few case studies of the work you have done this year?  Track down a couple of new testimonials or photos for your gallery?  Review all your text and see if it is still relevant, with regard to how your products and services might have evolved in the last 9 months or so?

Give your goals a second wind
Maybe you intended to do more than you actually ended up doing so far this year.  Why not review those goals now and give it a real good shot for the next three months.  With 75% of the year gone, that still leaves 25% and if you procrastinated at all, then you can probably get just as much done in three months as you got done in the last nine.

Start forward planning for 2013
You know how this year went.  You know how the last countless years went.  Maybe 2013 is going to be different.  It will be if you approach it differently.  Instead of waiting until New Years Eve to make your resolutions, why not start thinking about them now?  Look at the calendar and see how it is panning out already.  It might be time to pencil in some exciting new things.  Block out a weekend or two, or set some deadlines that are easy to count back from.  Things get hectic as Christmas looms, so take the time now to think clearly and map out some success for yourself.

Clean-up
How many emails are in your inbox?  How many files are sitting on your (real and virtual) desktop?  How efficiently have you filed away all the attachment files you have been emailed all year?  Are they all in one big messy folder, or have you saved, re-named and filed them where they belong?  How is your office looking?  Have you let it go, or kept it completely organised?  Why not approach the final quarter of 2012 in a state of peace and calm, sitting at a desk where the only thing on it is the thing you are working on right now?  Is there anything you know you should have taken care of months ago, but kept putting off?  Do it, tick it off and file it away.

Newsletter
Did you tell yourself you were going to contact all your clients this year with a nice friendly newsletter?  Did you never get around to it?  Don’t leave it too late, or you will be making contact just as they start to get frazzled and unravel with the approaching silly season.  Get the jump on them – and on yourself – by putting something together this week and getting it out.  You will be making contact at just the right time, allowing for enough time to take on any new work they might give you as a result of the contact and encouraging them to make the most of the remaining three months of the year.

The clock ticks and the calendar flips at the exact same pace, every moment of our lives.  The only thing we can do is to make the most of the time we are given.  This October long weekend, Monday 1 October is the perfect time to get to work.  It is Labour Day, after all...

Every day the proportion of people looking at Websites on mobile phones and other mobile devices is increasing.  A recent study by Morgan Stanley has predicted that by 2015, mobiles will overtake desktops as the primary means of accessing Websites.

Google has seen the writing on the wall and decided that if they are to keep earning revenue from Website owners to drive traffic to their Websites, Google is going to have to help Website owners ensure that their Websites are ‘mobile-friendly’.  Rather than having to zoom in on a tiny screen to a Website designed for a large desktop screen, users want to browse Websites on their mobile phones that have been optimised for the small screen.  This is not necessarily an easy thing to do for many Website’s, since the design and the code needs to be flexible enough to allow this transformation.

The buzzword of the day is “responsive”.  Websites need to be able to detect the type of device they are being viewed on and respond by serving up the most suitable design and layout.  You might notice many larger Websites now have a separate address for mobile phones.  For example, try http://www.smh.com.au and http://m.smh.com.au – you will see two very different ways of delivering the Sydney Morning Herald’s news online.

To address this growing need of businesses to have mobile friendly Websites, Google has launched a Website called HowToGoMo – http://www.howtogomo.com/au/d/ – this site allows you to test your current Website and even allows you to have a go at converting your site into a mobile version.  Depending on the success of this process, they also refer you to a range of specialist Mobile Website developers who can help make it happen.

Cyrius is not listed on their site, but we can help you, too!

Beam Me Up!

Another big shift for business is the ability to hold virtual meetings.  As broadband gets faster and faster, and the technology to facilitate high definition (HD) video conferencing improves on an almost daily basis, virtual meetings are becoming realistic alternatives to getting together in person to discuss business.  When you combine the added enhancement of being able to check out and share multi-media, Website links, graphics and documents, we might just be entering a new era, where business travel begins to grind to a halt, while business interaction grows exponentially.

Check out http://www.gotomeeting.com.au/ as just one of the places that is facilitating virtual meetings, webinars and training sessions.  If you thought this was all a little bit too much like science fiction, you might find that the future is already here.

Another financial year over.  How was it for you?  Did you celebrate?  Breathe a sigh of relief?  Work yourself up into a mild panic over your tax burden?  2011–12 has been an interesting year for us here at Cyrius.

It seems the whole ‘two speed economy’ concept might have a kernel of truth in it.  Perhaps it is more a chaotic multi-speed economy.  It certainly does seem a little more volatile and unpredictable these days than before – the economic climate seems to be changing as much as the actual climate.  What with the Euro crisis, the USA recession, mining booms, bank scandals, interest rate and currency fluctuations, it’s like the financial equivalent of nature’s floods, storms, bushfires and droughts.

We have experienced ups and downs with many of our clients.  Some who are usually experiencing booms have struggled to scrape through, while others who often do it tough seem to be getting on rather well.  I guess it is all part of the fun and games of business and society these days, as technology evolves so fast, bringing game changers and disruptors, making ‘business as usual’ a thing of the past and the only predictable thing being how unpredictable everything has become.

One thing is for sure, in an age of great change and upheaval, there are always going to be great opportunities.  All one needs to do is look for them.  How are things changing?  What new needs, trends or patterns are arising from the chaos?  How are people being affected and how can we help them?

A big opportunity, I believe, is optimisation.  When things get out of control or out of balance, there will always be ways to improve efficiency, eliminate waste, tighten up loose ends and clean up the mess.  Old patterns often represent bad habits that never needed addressing while everything was on an even keel.  Now, when costs are unpredictable, any cost saving, including time saving and productivity efficiency, is going to be very appealing indeed.

Perhaps as we enter this new financial year, it is a great opportunity to reflect on just how efficient and effective your entire operation has been.  Can you highlight and expose areas where you might have been a little lax, or where change has led to convoluted processes?  Have you been spending money in areas that are simply not worth it any more?  Have you been getting value for money out of the necessary expenses?

Take stock, reflect, clean-up, organise and rethink.  That old adage of keeping a level head while everyone else around you is flipping out might be quite apt now.  If things are as unpredictable as they seem, is it not the perfect time to get as much under control as you possibly can?  At least you will know that you are doing your very best, and giving yourself the best chance to succeed against the odds.

Happy New Year!  Here’s to an exciting, albeit tumultuous and unpredictable year ahead!

It's time to turn the Internet industry on its head and take control of our own data.  Google has essentially gotten where it is today by copyright piracy of every Webpage it's spiders could get their legs on, and piracy of our intellectual property – the usage data we create as we interact online.

I advocate total self-control and self-management of all our intellectual property, which includes our content and all our usage data – every single click and keystroke – where we decide who uses it and how much we want them to pay us to use it.

We might need to employ newly established agencies to help us manage our valuable intellectual property, but they would be agencies who work for us as individuals and help us control who accesses us with their marketing, who accesses our information, content and data and what price they should pay us to use what we create.

The current paradigm allows piracy offences in orders of magnitude greater than the piracy the general public is accused of perpetrating against the record and movie industries.

Until that changes, along with new citizen-focused laws designed to protect us from such blatant piracy, I suggest keeping as much of your own content as you can on your own hard-drives or servers, under your own protection and control.  Or at least get yourself a great publishing deal!

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/googles-drive-to-dominate-your-digital-life-20120425-1xk41.html#ixzz1t21MjJyp

The Internet is increasingly becoming the predominant place for marketing and public relations (PR) to be conducted.

In the networked world, everything is in the public space, so everything is publicity – good and bad.  The role of Online PR is to maximise positive publicity, minimise negative publicity, create a buzz and set up a business to attract interest from journalists, bloggers and ordinary Internet users.

Here is a great video about Online PR http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOzylUcfUeQ

Online Public Relations (Online PR) activities can involve:

• Blogging
• Activity in discussion boards
• Responding to negative comments and resolving issues
• Digital press releases
• News announcements on your Website
• Utilising online PR news wire services
• Writing articles
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Developing online networks
• Posting information on social media Websites
• Direct contact with journalists and bloggers
• Running competitions
• Initiating discussions and calling for responses to polls, surveys, articles or interviews
• Re-posting links
• Documenting all publicity received as news announcements and links on your Website

Benefits of Online PR:

• 
Generate publicity for your business, on- and off-line
• Build brand awareness
• Build your reputation
• Counteract any negativity about your business
• Increase traffic to your Website
• Establish yourself as an expert in your field
• Grow your business

Online PR is an exciting area of work, because the Web is constantly changing and evolving, with new opportunities and channels opening up all the time.  Traditional PR is still valid, but anyone who ignores or underestimates the value of the new media landscape does so at their own expense.