Written by Jeremy Martin on March 12, 2012.
Data.gov.uk, the UK government’s open data portal, is “the largest resource of its kind in the world”, the Minister for the Cabinet Office said today at a cenference in Birmingham.
“We’ve already released over 40,000 datasets on data.gov.uk,” Francis Maude told delegates at Birmingham’s Open Data Innovation Community event today. “We now have regular publication of central department spending data over £25,000 and local government spending over £500.”
Maude praised Birmingham’s ‘Civic Dashboard’ project, calling it a “field-leading example of…open data.” The site places public service requests received by Birmingham City Council on a map, allowing residents to see what issues are affecting their neighbours.
Maude said that the government would be relaunching data.gov.uk over “the next few months, to make it easier to navigate, search for relevant datasets and engage with Government and other data users”.
His praise for open data followed criticism from the government of the Freedom of Information Act. A Min
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Written by Michael Harris on March 10, 2012.
Statewide, 12,356 properties had foreclosure filings — including default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions — in February, RealtyTrac reported Thursday. That’s one in every 331 homes, compared with one in every 637 nationally.
Filings in February fell 0.89 percent from the previous month and marked a 3.52 percent drop from a year ago, according to the California-based firm, an online marketplace for foreclosure properties.
Foreclosures are expected to gradually rise this year as banks work through legal issues that have put many foreclosures on hold, RealtyTrac CEO Brandon Moore said. In 2010, foreclosure activity slowed because of investigations into robo-signing cases involving lenders filing improper or forged paperwork in foreclosures.
“Although national foreclosure activity was pushed lower by decreases in a handful of larger states,” Moore said, “21 states posted annual increases in foreclosure activity, the most states with annual increases since November 2010.”
Nevada has posted the nation’s top foreclosure rate for 62 months straight, followed by California and Arizona.
Atlanta ranked among metro areas with the highest foreclosure rates last month with one in every 244 homes having a filing. Chi
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Written by Jeremy Martin on March 7, 2012.
Free publicity is a great way to spread the word about your business. If you can get your business featured regularly in the newspapers and magazines your target audience reads, it brings your business to the attention of potential customers, and at no cost. Another advantage of being featured in articles written about your business is that editorial coverage gives you a huge amount of credibility. It’s an independent trusted person talking about your business – the total opposite of an advert, where you are delivering your message.
The good news is that getting free publicity for your small business isn’t difficult if you know what youre doing. All you need to do is decide what you want to achieve (more brand awareness; website visits; maybe more sales leads), think up some story ideas, and then submit them to the relevant magazines, newspapers and websites as press releases.
If you would like to generate some free publicity for your business, here are 21 killer ideas you can use to generate interesting stories that journalists will want to write about;
1. Be th
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Written by Michael Harris on March 4, 2012.
Glennon is a 20-year veteran of the AJC who started in the newsroom and has held leadership positions in both news and business operations. Her most recent post was vice president of audience.
“I look forward to building on the AJC’s current momentum, tapping into the abilities, energy and passion of those around me, as we continue moving into the future together,” said Glennon, a University of Georgia graduate who is 44.
The change comes as the AJC continues to reshape its news and business operations to broaden its digital reach while maintaining strong print products.
Joseph said Glennon is “an effective, collaborative and innovative leader, which she has demonstrated in a wide range of newspaper roles.”
Joseph, who had been AJC publisher since 2009, will be an executive vice president at Cox Media Group, which operates Atlanta-based Cox Enterprises’ newspaper, television and radio properties around the country. He succeeds Alex Taylor, who was promoted to senior vice president at Cox Communications.
In his new role Joseph will have responsibility for all of CMG’s newspapers, which also include the Dayton Daily News, Austin American-Statesman and Palm Beach Post. He’ll also ov
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Written by Michael Harris on March 1, 2012.
The milestone for the Nasdaq, heavy with technology stocks, came a day after the Dow Jones industrial average closed above 13,000 for the first time since May 2008.
Apple, the Nasdaq’s biggest component, topped $500 billion in market value, the only company above the half-trillion mark and only the sixth in U.S. corporate history to grow so big. Apple might reveal its next iPad model next week.
The Nasdaq last hit 3,000 on Dec. 13, 2000. Its last close above 3,000 was two days earlier. It was only above 3,000 for seconds on Wednesday before closing down 19.87 points at 2,966.89.
The Dow lost 53.05 to close at 12,952.07. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 6.50 points to close at 1,365.68.
For the month, the Dow gained 2.5 percent, the S&P 4.1 percent and the Nasdaq 5.4 percent.
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Written by Jeremy Martin on February 28, 2012.
The UK government’s recently launched cloud services procurement portal was taken offline for at least two hours today after Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform, on which it is hosted, suffered a power outage.
“Power outage on Microsoft Azure means #cloudstore is temporarily unavailable,” the official G-Cloud twitter feed confirmed at 12:22PM. “Patch being applied so will update when normal service resumed.”
UPDATE The G-Cloud Twitter account confirmed that CloudStore was back online at 17:40.
Windows Azure has been suffering performance difficulties since the early hours of this morning. The performance monitoring portal reports that there was an issue with “Windows Azure service management” at 1:45 GMT this morning. At 3:00, it reported that “a limited number of currently running hosted services may experience a capacity impact” as a result of the issue.
At 5:00, it said the outage had been “traced back to a cert issue” and that work had begun on a fix for the issue. At
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Written by Jeremy Martin on February 17, 2012.
The web is a great leveller for businesses, enabling small companies to compete with their larger rivals nowhere is this illustrated more clearly than on auction site eBay. Currently, eBay is the UKs leading eCommerce site with over 150,000 small businesses selling their wares online.
Here are some tips to help small businesses sell successfully online:
Customer service
Aside from providing the goods as advertised, good customer service is the key to repeat custom in any line of business. Some of the things you can do to differentiate yourself from your competitors include:
You are a business
Unlike hobby sellers, if you are looking to use eBay to run your own business, you need to look and act like a business.
Know your market
As with all types of business, you need to be sure that there is a market available for your products.
Good presentation
No-one will buy your goods unless you present them well.
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