Tag: Think

SOHO Networking

I am thinking ( I have been for over 3 years) of acting on some of my small business ideas. There are a growing number of people with home offices in my neighbourhood. I do not know the exact number but I believe that in the Montgomery , Montgomery Wood, and Montgomery Walk development we have close to 500 homes. Most of these homes have wireless.

I am making the assumption that within a block of units (8 homes) there at least half have wireless and most likely all have a home computer with DSL or cable broadband. I based this assumption on my own block. I pick up at least 6 wireless signals from my family room. Most of the wireless signals have no security and almost all use the default router settings. I am betting there are lots of people out there like Mukesh and Nilima.

I think there is money to be made offering an in home setup service for small offices/home offices. I think I can use my neighbourhood as a launching point for the business. I can place a small ad in the association newsletter or a posting to the web site. I am hoping that word of mouth would provide enough marketing initially to get from one gig to another. Hopefully some of the home clients would refer me to small business clients. But first baby steps.

I have thought up a short list of services I could provide.

  • Home networking
  • Wireless networking
  • Security
    • patching
    • anti-spy-ware
    • anti-virus
    • ad-ware removal
  • PC tuneup (defrag, temp file removal)
  • Software installation and configuration
  • Hardware installation and configuration
  • Blogging and web site hosting

I have not thought much about how much to charge. Should it be an hourly or fixed price for a defined service (a la carte)? Should I have the clients sign off when work is complete? Should I incorporate or do a sole proprietorship until the business gets larger?  Can I manage the work load?  How do I limit this to weekends only at first?

Google Pages

This morning I received the following email letting me know that Google has launched a new service they are calling Google Pages.

"Hi there,


Thanks for your interest in Google Page Creator. We appreciate your patience, and we're excited to tell you that we enabled your account today, so you can start making pages now! To get started, head over to http://pages.google.com and sign in with your Gmail password. We haven't opened up Google Page Creator to everybody yet, so you'll see a message on our home page saying that accounts are unavailable — you can just ignore that.

Google Page Creator is an experiment on Google Labs. Google Labs is where we put projects before they're ready for prime time so that we can start getting feedback from our users. So, please, tell us what you think, what features we should add, what problems you're experiencing, or anything else that can help us make Google Page Creator a better tool for you. We're listening.

This is the only email we'll be sending you — unless you'd like to receive updates in the future.


— The Google Page Creator team"

According to the web site for Google Pages is "a new product that makes creating your own web pages as easy as creating a document in a word processor". While that may be the intent I do not see too many people using this "product". Does Google already have another product for that, Blogger? Is this meant to replace that? Is Google Pages targeting a different audience that Blogger? All questions whose answers may reveal themselves in a few months I assume.

The "product" is fairly rudimentary. The interface is typical for Google; unattractive but functional.GooglePagesPageCreator

I am not sure what Google's target audience is for this tool. Maybe novice user who want a simple web page and who are VERY afraid of HTML will find it useful.

Web 2.0

The AJAX (aka web2.0) technologies are picking up steam. I have been hanging out at TechCrunch and I have been reading about some very cool technologies.

Online powerpoint style slide shows
Online Excel style spreadsheet

Someone has even started calling all this Office 2.0. Of course I think Zimbra is a better email solution than Gmail but all that may change now that Google is offering hosted mail to coporate users. Of course all of this new development requires new development tookits. Read all about these cool technologies over at SolutionWatch.