Category: Business

Hotel minimum wage cost cutting

Business / Customer Service

The Los Angeles City Council recently voted to increase the hourly minimum wage to $15.37/hour for hotel workers at hotels with 300 rooms or more. Until today, the minimum wage for LA County was $9/hour. My first thought in reading the headline was – “Okay, so how do you cut costs at hotels?” My solution – cut staff and offer daily discounts to guests who choose not to get a daily cleaning service. I stay at hotels far more often for work than I do for personal travel, …

Voting on ads…

Business / Video / Websites

For several years I’ve felt like there’s something missing from ads – specifically video ads. More specifically, web-based video ads. Voting. We all remember those especially good ads. The kid reading the ingredients on a container of Breyers ice cream; Verizon’s “Can you hear me now?” campaign; Connect Four’s “Pretty sneaky sis!”. Of course, those ads were all pre-internet, so the way they rated commercials was by sales and by advertising teams crunching sales numbers. But so many ads are just awful and there’s no way to let …

Finally dumping GoDaddy… for Google

Business / Customer Service / Technology / Websites

GoDaddy has long been a staple in the domain and website hosting market for many years. Over the past many years though, they’ve gotten increasingly worse in customer service and price. There are many alternatives that people are happy with, and I’ve tried many. Several years ago I moved most of my web hosting, and the hosting of most of my clients and friends, off of GoDaddy’s terrible hosting services, but I’ve left domains there. (And so have many others.) Last month I had my final bad experience …

Small business and technology

Business / Software / Technology

I started in the software and technology world in 1995 doing tech-support for a software product called “Internet in a Box”. The job consisted mainly of taking phone calls to help customers who bought the software, to install it on their Windows 3.1 computer, configure their modems, or update their modem strings, to get connected to the Internet. By 1996 the Internet had become more open for the public but it still wasn’t “easy” to get connected. Internet in a Box was revolutionary in the same way TiVo …

How to stop Smartphone theft…

Business / Databases / Hardware / Phones / Technology

A recent article on CNET titled “Android, Windows Phone to add kill switch to thwart theft” missed the point on how to actually stop Smartphone theft. The article talks about Google, Microsoft and Apple adding a ‘kill switch’ to phones to "…remove all data and information in the event their devices were stolen." That’s great, but it doesn’t actually stop theft. As an Android user, the ability to remotely find, lock and wipe my phone gives me great confidence that my data is safe(r) than if there were …

When podcasts go mainstream

Automotive / Business / Microsoft / Software / Technology

If you have a car, you have a radio. If you have a radio, you probably listen to music, talk radio, news and/or sports. By the mid-1960s, radios were standard equipment in new cars. Today, it’s almost standard to have a USB or other MP3 player connection – or at least a auxiliary input jack to plug other devices into your car’s sound system. What’s missing though is the digital end-to-end solution that terrestrial radio provides. By that I mean that you turn on your car radio and …

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