By Chad Henderson

While searching for an app that would allow my wife and I to share synced lists for things like grocery shopping, I ran across an application that looked promising called Zenbe Lists. According the description in the App Store, it would do exactly what I was looking for. It was not free, so I started looking at the reviews to determine if I would be willing to pay for the app. I only found a few reviews, mostly referencing a syncing problem the app was having. Growing concerned, I visited the company website and clicked on the support link at the top of the page. This took me to a page on Get Satisfaction devoted to this product. 

If you are not familiar with Get Satisfaction, it is a nifty web service that provides you with all the tools you need to respond to customer concerns and requests, without having to build out the system yourself. You simply set up a page for your product or service on Get Satisfaction, point customers who need support to that page, and then provide employees to spend time answering or responding to those support needs. 

The interesting part of the Get Satisfaction business model is that customers do not need to wait for you to set up a page for your service, they can do it for you simply by posting a question or a comment! Then that page will fill up with customers discussing your product without you even being aware of it. Luckily, once you become aware of it, you can then 'claim' it and start responding to the discussions that have already taken place. 

Get Satisfaction does a good job of making it clear if a company has claimed a page or not. A banner at the top of any page will let you know if that company is actively monitoring the page and responding to customer needs. 

When I visited the Zenbe Get Satisfaction page, the banner clearly stated that Zenbe had employees watching and participating in the page. Also, the fact that I was sent to this page from a link on Zenbe's own website, clearly indicated that they were aware and using this service. 

You can imagine my shock when I read down the list of problems and complaints on this page, and realized that most of them were six to nine months old with no response from any company representative. There were many posts talking about the syncing problem that was indicated in the reviews I had read, and a number of posts on many other software and server related problems customers were having. Zenbe had made a few responses to a small number of these, but nothing in recent months. 

More troubling than that, however, were the number of posts in the last few months questioning if the company was even still in business! Customers had grown so concerned about the lack of response from Zenbe that they had started assuming the company no longer existed. This is the exact opposite reaction you want customers to have when they reach out to you for customer support. 

As you can imagine, I did not purchase the app. 

Your business needs to have a plan at the very beginning on how you will deal with customer support issues and then make sure it is implemented. Nothing will kill your business faster than losing your customer's faith. Be prepared to devote time and resources to staying in contact with customers and making sure that they have their concerns addressed. If you put it aside, thinking you will come back to it later, you will lose business. Just ask Zenbe. 

Here is a great article from InfoStor.com about the trends in 2012 in the areas of data storage. The cloud will continue to dominate. RACK59 offers off-site data storage for companies big and small.

By Drew Robb

2011 seemed to be all about Big Data, cloud computing, solid state drives (SSDs), unified storage and integrated storage appliances. So what will 2012 bring? InfoStor talked to several veterans in the storage networking field about what they expect to see.

1. Cloud, Cloud, Cloud

Unlike other data storage fads that come and go within a few months, cloud mania will continue unabated in the year ahead. It has gone way beyond storage and is now very much part of the popular culture, even if few in the general public actually understand it.

My wife's hairdresser Arnaud, for example, is convinced that his iPhone has a wireless connection to an actual physical cloud that hovers above him as he moves around the city. But regardless of a multitude of misconceptions, expect to hear a whole lot more about cloud computing.

"Storage continues to move into the cloud at a steady rate, as more IT managers begin to understand the value of letting somebody else worry about hardware purchases," said Mike Karp, an analyst with Ptak-Noel & Associates. "This is going to have a profound impact on a number of things, not the least of which is the bookkeeping that goes on in data centers because the shift to cloud-based services means a shift from CAPEX-based accounting to OPEX-based accounting."

Read the entire article here: http://www.infostor.com/storage-management/6-storage-networking-trends-to-watch-in-2012.html

Here's are some links to what the data security, data center and colocation world is talking about:

* How many data centers are located around the world? Emerson has crunched the numbers and has come up with 500,000.  

* Facebook is committing to use green energy to power its data centers, according to Forbes. But can they sustain it? 

* The U.S. Army is working hard to consolidate its data center across the country. 

* Where is Amazon locating its next data center? The Amazon, according to Wired.com.

* Looking ahead to 2012 and some dangerous mobile security issues. 

* More predictions for 2012 in the world of data security. 

* Too many privileged users may be leaving some companies open to data security trouble.  

Chad Henderson is a new blogger for RACK59.com. He will be writing about local and national technology issues, the internet and the innovative community in Oklahoma. 

About Chad: Chad Henderson is a UX/UI designer and front end website developer, podcaster, twitterfiend and general purpose web geek. After teaching himself HTML by using Lynx, he started his first company, Dreamchasers Web Services, in 1994. Chad is also a founding partner of the Oklahoma City Coworking Collaborative, and can be found there often.

Today, Chad blogs about the Stop Online Piracy Act. 

* * *

In the next few days, Congress is going to be voting on what may be the biggest threat to the Internet, as a medium for the exchange of information, that we have seen since the DMCA reared it's nasty head back in 1996.  H.R. 3261, known as the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, may unintentionally (or possibly intentionally) neuter the world wide web as a place of free speech and force websites such as Wikipedia to disappear from our browsers.

If you are not familiar with the bill that was introduced by Texas Republican Lamar Smith earlier this fall, SOPA is intended as another tool for copyright holders looking to stop the illegal use of copyrighted materials on the internet, especially by those websites and servers that are hosted outside the US.  SOPA gives the Department of Justice the ability to force ISP's to block any website that is suspected of having infringing content.  Pay particular attention to the word 'suspected' in that last statement. The action the DOJ can take, can occur before a website has been proven to break any laws. It must only be suspected by a copyright holder to become a target.  SOPA would also allow the DOJ to force payment services such as Paypal and ad networks such as Google AdWords to stop doing any business with the suspected site. The bill could even prevent the website from appearing in search engine results. These steps would effectively vanish the site from the internet.  And not just the infringing content, but the entire site. The effect on a website could be financially devastating.

Imagine YouTube or Facebook suddenly vanishing from the web, simply because a user posted a video that contained a copyrighted song in the background. This scenario seems unlikely (and I will admit that it is) but is nonetheless a possibility within the vague wording of this bill.

Wikipedia is so worried about the possible ramifications of this bill, that founder Jimmy Wales is contemplating a site-wide Wikipedia blackout in protest of it. Sites such as I Work For The Internet have also appeared to garner grass roots support among internet professionals hoping to get the word out.

Learn more about this legislation and contact your representative to make sure they understand what is about to happen, too.

Related sites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/sopa-hollywood-finally-gets-chance-break-internet
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/12/i-work-for-the-internet-tell-congress-how-you-really-feel-about-sopa/
http://iworkfortheinternet.org/
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/112-h3261/show

The web activity tsunami that comes along with ecommerce during the holidays should keep every retailer on their toes. Lots of traffic can also mean plenty of threats to data and privacy. RACK59 helps businesses keep their data secure at our colocation facility in Oklahoma City, so an article we found at ITBusinessEdge.com with advice for protecting businesse during Cyber Monday and beyond brought up some great points.

Here’s a look at some good tips for businesses to keep from being online victims during the holidays:

Have a DDoS Response Plan: A solid DDoS plan should be explicit about the steps to be taken by an IT team in face of a DDoS attack.

If you haven't been inside OKCWorks, the home of RACK59, you have missed out on one of the most impressive structures in Oklahoma City. 

The former Lucent Technologies/AT&T/Western Electric plant has a long history since ground was first broken on the site in December of 1958. But since then, it has seen its share of ups and down.

Now, with RACK59 as its anchor and hundreds of thousands of square feet to be used and developed, it remains unparalleled.

"We believe OKCWorks has traits that are unmatched in the industry anywhere on the globe when it comes to expansion flexibility for users.  Also, the speed to market possibilities of OKCWorks will offer a terrific solution in an industry where urgent business needs surface rapidly." - Tom Freeman, Jones, Lang, LaSalle

On this blog, we will walk you through the plant's history and talk to some of the former workers inside. It's because of their innovations that great work continues to this day at RACK59.

In 1960, the 1,100 new Western Electric employees first walked through the door of OKCWorks. Construction on the original factory cost $35 million. The 1,300,000 square feed made it one of the largest facilities of its kind in the southwest. The City of Oklahoma City helped lure Western Electric to place the new site in town by paying for the financing of a smaller test factory at 39th and Tulsa.

The plant quickly became an economic powerhouse for Oklahoma City, stimulating the economy thanks to all of the new jobs that were created. 

Wrote the Oklahoma City Times on the groundbreaking day: "The ground-breaking ceremony for the huge, new Western Electric plant in Oklahoma City yesterday was definitely a major-league event -- one that puts our city in the class of the biggest industrial centers in the nation. December 10, 1958 will alway be a red-letter day here."

A major-league city? Sounds like OKCWorks was onto something 53 years ago.

Moving company data storage to an off-site facility is an investment worth making, just ask the biggest companies on the web.

Google, Facebook, Amazon and others are storing their data across the country, from Oregon to Oklahoma. 

"The assumption is that with the Internet, place no longer matters,"  Andrew Blum, a Wired magazine correspondent and author of "Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet" told the Associated Press.

The key for these companies is safety and security for their data first and foremost. Facilities like Oklahoma City's RACK59 have the power sources, rack space and security. 

Google recently located data center in Oklahoma, too. In September, the search giant planted a 130,000-square-foot data center in Pryor which employs more than 100 people. Google is known for using its offsite data centers as means to control costs in its business. 

With businesses like the best on the web choosing to go offsite, the momentum toward the idea continues to pick up steam. As a Dec. 2 article in U.S. News and World Report stated, this sort of data storage is going to revolutionize the way businesses do business.

"The idea is that computing 'be made available to people anywhere, anytime, like electricity or utilities,' says Venky Ganesan, managing director of Globespan Capital Partners, a venture capital firm that invests in a range of technologies."

In an effort to spotlight what's happening in the technology community in Oklahoma City and beyond, the RACK59 blog will be featuring Q&A's with leaders in the digital field. From website developers, to entrepreneurial innovators, there are many bright minds doing great work in our community. 

To kick off the series, we talked with Cory Miller, who runs iThemes. iThemes "builds high-quality, feature-rich, search engine optimized WordPress themes for businesses, government organizations and bloggers who want a professional website with a polished design without having to pay thousands of dollars for a custom web design."

If you like this Q&A, suggest some more to RACK59 by following us on Twitter and liking us on Facebook. 

1. Who are you and what do you do (in 140 characters or less)?

I am the founder of iThemes, an Edmond-based company that seeks to make web design fun & easy for do-it-yourselfers and freelancers.

2. What exciting project are you and your company working on?

Our motto is 'make people's lives awesome' - we do that by continually innovating with our products to solve our customer community's problems in web design.

3. What do you think about the tech community in Oklahoma City?

It's in the very basic but growing stages. We have some amazing companies (and more importantly people) doing innovative, rockin' work in web tech and we want to help grow that community here to create more web businesses and thus jobs and revenue for our city and state. We'd love to see OKC referred to as Silicon Pasture.

4. Flashback: Tell us about your experience with tech as a kid - what got you on this path?

I remember Ataris and the first GameBoys and playing Oregon Trail in our school's computer lab.

I bought my first Mac in 1994. I was using it as a fancy typewriter but signed on to AOL to get on the Internet (even though I didn't really understand that's what I was doing). I created my first website in 1998. I've always enjoyed technology when it makes people's lives better and easier.

5. Flashforward: What do you see happening in technology in the next few years?

The web is much like Oklahoma was during the Land Rush -- largely unsettled but brimming with opportunity. It's an exciting time to be on the web. You can stake your claim and with your time and talent make something out of nothing. That's exciting for me as we see the rapid innovation on the web and seek to be a part of its settling and expansion.

I can't possibly phantom what innovative, game-changing, world-changing things will happen in the next few years as a younger generation who are digital natives seek and seize the opportunity out there. But like many others, I'm anxiously eager to see these creative endeavors unfold in my lifetime.

Cory Miller photo by Matt Danner

Periodically on the RACK59 blog, we will look at how different industries are handling their data security. RACK59 secure and reliable data center services for many different industries. For more information about our company’s services go to our Service Page.

Accounting firms hold some of the most valuable data for companies around the country. Communication between an accountant and their customer can contain account numbers, pay records and other sensative information that needs to be kept away from prying eyes and Internet threats.

A recent article on AccountingToday.com outlined three key components that an accounting firm should have in place when it is putting together their data security strategies. Here is a summary of the recommendations:

• Physical security: Not only should your data center have cameras and alarms, but your server room should be raised and climate controlled. Access to the data storage aerass should be “strictly controlled.”

• Security technologies: Off-site facilities are one of the best choices for protecting your data, said Accounting Today, but “All of these security measures are for naught if you suffer a server failure or other catastrophic loss of data. A well-executed backup plan is essential.” Security systems must also be tested often to find weaknesses and missing elements.

• Policy and staff communications: A key to success in security company data is educating your staff on what data needs to be secured and how. “a security policy is useless if your employees don’t fully understand and agree to abide by it,” says the article author Hillel Sackstein.

  Data is becoming such a valuable commodity for businesses of all sizes and types. It’s what gets passed back-and-forth between professional service companies and their clients and kept by large corporations. Investing in the best company that can give peace of mind that your data will be safe is essential to a success and security in the future.