So, I thought I would cover The Big Business & Technology Expo at the McKay Events Center on the campus of the soon to be Utah Valley University. Being armed with my camera and a couple of extra free tickets (explained later), I was off for my conference experience.

After seeing the big press coverage and the expo’s PR machine at work I knew I needed to show up early.

Parking was crazy, even at  11:10am on opening day, just 10 minutes after the show opening. These people were so excited to get here, they stole cars from a local dealership and had to park on the grass just to get a close parking spot.

The show floor didn’t disappoint. It seems like it is exactly the same size as in years past. Among the many marketing companies, banks, and promotional item salesmen, the big surprise was how many people were playing Rock Band or Guitar Hero in their booths. There is nothing like a good guitar riff that screams "We should be your business partner."

The highlight of the expo is the free lunch from Bajios (Fresh Mex), Goodwood BBQ (BBQ at it’s best), or Rumbi Island Grill (Hawaiian goodness). Your entrance ticket is also your meal ticket. Thus, the best tip for those of you going to the Big Business Expo: Take extra tickets. That way you can get multiple meals (which are currently running small on portion size.)

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Ok, so I had a little fun with the title of this post. But, I’m going to share with you my top secret Google keywords. These aren’t just any keywords. These are the Google keywords that rank tylerwhitaker.com in the top ten search results on Google. I’m not really sure if other Internet Marketers share this kind of intel. But, In the interest of setting the baseline for this blog, here’s the list:

Tyler Whitaker – Rank: 1  I think this is has a lot to do with my domain name. I’ve owned tylerwhitaker.com for years. Owning a domain name for a long time with your keywords is always a big help.

tyler whittaker – Rank: 2  This is a funny one since my last name is spelled with only one ‘t’. I must have some backlinks somewhere with my name mis-spelled.

is there a tyler whitaker anywhere – Rank: 4  This is a good question and most days I have a good answer.

racellete – Rank: 5  This is the name of a specific cheese and a popular meal I fell in love with in Switzerland. I tried to find a local Salt Lake City supplier of racellete when I got back. I wrote a blog post about it. I think racellete is a misspelling. The correct spelling is Raclette.

"s infotech" – Rank: 5  This must be a typing mistake. Some kind of truncated version of title of this blog. "Tyler Whitaker’s InfoTech"

flying dragonfly – Rank: 7  Last year a wrote a post about the RC Flying Dragonfly from Wow Wee. It’s a remote controlled plane of sorts that is shaped in the form of a dragonfly. This might be a interesting keyword to use for a future marketing experiment.

tyler "news com" – Rank: 7  I have now idea why I’m listed here.

apprentice tv show 2008 – Rank: 8  I recently posted my thoughts on Donald Trump’s Apprentice TV Show. This current 2008 season has a group of celebrities competing. To bad it’s not more about business.

whitaker business solutions – Rank: 8  This blog is about technology business solutions.

The next step is to increase the rankings of this site using some of these keywords. Stay tuned.

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Unfortunately the two new employees that I had starting today at Mozy, pulled me away from a good chance to “get pumped” for more information on Berkeley Data System, Mozy.com, and Mozy Pro.com. I did however get a� funny IM from Phil Burns during the breakfast saying something to the effect: “We’ve been talking about you and Mozy for like 20 minutes.” It’s good to know that our products are finding so much interest� with such talented� technology professionals.

For those of you that don’t know about Mozy, it’s simply the best online remote backup solution on the market. It’s fast, easy, and very affordable. MozyPro.com is the business version of Mozy that offers all of the enterprise features without the pain and expense typically found with the more established legacy solutions.

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Swivel.com is the YouTube for data. Interesting business model: 1 part Google Spreadsheets, 1 part YouTube, 1 part graphics. I guess in this day and age you can take just about any idea and put it on the web and create a community around it. I like it. But I like the business ideas it represents even more.

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FEMA already have 2 of these $500,000 units and the military is looking at sending them to Iraq. I’d love a personal/family size unit if they were priced in the $200-$400 range.

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What do you get when you combine the human intelligence behind Amazon’s MTurk and Google’s clean and accurate approach to web searching: ChaCha.com

For a search engine ChaCha.com provides a clean interface and good results. But what is interesting is the human intelligence that’s injected into the equation. Can’t find what you need with other search engines? ChaCha.com offers the option to search with a “guide”, (someone trained in all things search.) This human factor is interesting and much more interactive when you can chat with someone to explain exactly what your looking for.

Unfortunately when I asked my guide for help finding a store in Salt Lake City, Utah that sells racellete cheese, I got back the digital equivalent of a blank stare and then she promptly ended the chat. So much for the human interface.

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Here’s a link to the podcast: http://osc.gigavox.com/shows/detail1624.html

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I just stumbled upon an interesting consumer voice mail business called GotVoice. They offer a free service to have your home of cell phone voice mail sent to your email in the form of an mp3 file.

I had this years ago at Echopass called unified messaging. We had voice mail and fax all sent to your email inbox. Very convenient. Minus the fax component (which you can get at PremiereWebPages.com by the way), this service is missing the ability to read back your email through your phone via text to speech.

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With Walmart’s decision to offer flu shots and $4 prescription drugs (based on their amazing buying power), it’s only time before they enter the in-store clinic market. Already market tests like this one in Utah are showing that consumers want the same fast, efficient, customer friendly service in health care as they are use to getting at the grocery store. My advice to traditional Doctor’s offices: evolve now while you still have a chance to keep your customers. 

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But when it comes right down to it, I’m spending a lot of time with my family and I’m catching up on a ton of projects that I’ve been putting off for the last several years as I’ve been building startups.

When will this end? That’s the true experiment from which I’m starting to see results. My creative juices are starting to flow strong again. I’m feeling recharged and full of energy. It’s only a matter of time before I jump back into the fray. But until then, I can’t recommend semi-retirement enough. It sure would be a bummer to work 40 years only to find out that I don’t like retirement. It’s a good thing I took some time to figure that out.

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So this begs the question: What will Microsoft do to counter this latest blatant attack on Office? Wage a low cost war? (Google Spreadsheet is free.) Offer an ad supported web version of Excel for personal use? (Possible but not until after Vista launches.) One thing is certain, this really ups the stakes in the personal productivity space.

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Bruce Fryer with a new startup Digisense brought up the Amazon S3 web service is being used by JungleDisk.com to provide super low cost online backup.

An interesting part of the discussion turned toward how to improve the agility of an organization. Scott Lemon brought up the idea that bi-annual layouts encourages healthly innovation. Phil mentioned that sometimes you need to cut of the head of the organization. And the way to do that is to create a separate organization and have it compete with the old one. The history of HP and Target are good examples of this.

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This generation is also bring a new look to the venture market where boot-strapping a company is the name of the game.  And with successes like Flickr (Yahoo), MySpace (Rupert Murdoch), and Upstartle / Writely (Google) I can see how Internet space companies can be built with little overhead achieve big multiples.

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First off, Nathan Conger from Novell showed us some of the latest features of the SUSE Enterprise Linux desktop. I must admit that it’s been a while since I’ve played with Linux desktops, but this latest version (available at openSUSE.org) looked really good. With multiple desktops on a rotating cube and the recent enhancements to the OpenOffice, I can start to see Linux as a corporate desktop replacement for some users. Especially if they spend most of their time in email, on the web, and using MS Office.

Another interesting item was a presentation on WeRelate.org. A non profit geneaology search engine that uses a user contributed wiki to fine tune / direct the search engine’s behavior. This site is unique in it’s mashup of a vertical search engine driven by an integrated web 2.0 user community. Another interesting twist is the adoption of community controlled related words / terms to make sure users semantically find what their keyword search is looking for.

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I found it particularly interesting to see the characteristics of what Ray Lane from Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Company is currently investing in.

Opportunities

• White space–not open source ERP
• Low effort improvement–install software faster, for example
• Free now, pay later–trust that the customer will see value
• Individual value–take the mindset of individual in the enterprise

Challenges

• Evaluation cycle–long bureaucratic
• Integration–a integrated platform
• Installability–hours not years
• Value creation–immediate and apparent
• Business model–customer centric
• Renewal

He described the three characteristics of enterprise software companies as follows:

Low resistance
Clear value to user
Immediate value
Short decision cycle

TCO (viral)
Low cost barrier to adoption–get the value and pay as delivered
Encourages viral spread

Intallability (viral)
Easy to install and use
Increased installation increases personal value
Viral effect

He gave iPod, Razor or Palm Pilot as examples of how a viral effect can take over.

The key themes, buttressed by cheaper and cheaper broadband, improved storage, etc.,  for enterprise software going forward include: 

Collaboration
Virtualization
Convergence
On demand
Contextual search
Anytime, anywhere
Anonymous connection
Visualized search

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Let me introduce Josh Coates and his company Mozy.com. Mozy offers 2GB of free online storage to back up all of your critical data. (They also offer more space at a very reasonable prices.) After small download, you can schedule automatic backups and rest assured that your data is safely encrypted in their datacenter.

I’ve worked out a special deal for my InfoTech readers. By clicking the following link you can get an extra 256MB of storage absolutely free.

Check it out at: Mozy.com

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InfoTech Article: Water Fall Process

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InfoTech: Logical Technology

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