Hey, I just won a $7,000 Prize

Guess what, my entry won this contest! Worth $7,000 of free marketing from Starshot (Microsoft).

The contest was:

Write a brief synopsis between 500 and 1500 characters on why Windows 7 is a great business opportunity for you.

What I wrote was:

We are an IT consulting firm, and the only company based out of Atlantic Canada that belongs to Microsoft’s Partner Excellence Program. So we are always looking for ways of leveraging our respective brands to find more consulting work for us, and licenses sold for Microsoft. One such way is via a monthly technology column I write for the largest newspaper in the region. In October, right around the launch of Windows 7, I wrote a column on Windows 7 that was well received. I then put this article on my blog (see http://blog.nicomit.com/index.php/2009/10/windows-7-is-about-simplicity-and-responsiveness/), and now I have old-fashioned and viral marketing at work!

And what we won is:

What can $7,000 in marketing services do for your business? It can mean more demand generation, more event and telemarketing campaigns, a marketing program designed specifically for your business—quite simply, more chances to find new customer opportunities!

Windows 7 is About Simplicity and Responsiveness

David Miller is a brave soul. He is one of the senior technical support people at my company Nicom and he likes to use test versions of software long before they are ever released to the public.

So David has been using Windows 7 for months now as his main operating system, even though it is only being officially released to the public this month.

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Small Business Owners in HRM are Technology Savvy

If ever I had to put together an army, I’d recruit Costco shoppers for their sheer loyalty. My comments in last month’s column garnered more feedback than usual, most of it illuminating the privileges of membership which I so callously discounted in my remarks.

In my world, the privileges of membership usually relate to technology groups. One such group is the company I work for, and recently my business partner, Dave Nicholson, did a survey  to find out how small and medium-sized enterprises – SMEs – in the Halifax Regional Municipality make use of technology.

What he found was quite interesting.
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Mapping a USB Drive to a Folder

When you plug in a USB pen drive Windows automatically assigns the next available drive letter. This can become a little confusing when you are dealing with multiple devices. The following are instructions on how to map a USB device to a folder:

1. Create a subfolder under “My Documents” called USB;
2. Under the USB folder create a folder for each USB device you will be mapping;
3. Attached the USB device to your workstation;
4. Run diskmgmt.msc (Press Windows+R and type diskmgmt.msc);
5. Right click on the USB device;
6. Select “Change Drive Letter and Paths”;
7. Click “Add”;
8. Browse to the folder you created in step 2;