Life is good at Paragon Software. We just finished one of our most successful years to date. The momentum rolling into 2010 is looking really good for us. I am still managing the direction of the companies channel sales group and helping out with product management. Being in these two key sections of Paragon Software Group lets me get a very high level view of where the company is and will be moving to in the future. I am excited for what this year is to bring with new products and some additional technology that is needed and different enough to get peoples attention. One of the obstacles many companies face is the ability to get exposure to more people. Traditional marketing only goes so far and emailing news is not the best way to communicate with people and even worse if you want to have your message shared with others. Social Media seemed like a great venue for Paragon to shift into. The company has a corporate marketing team that manages a Twitter profile and a Facebook page but our region (America) wanted to do more. So we started creating accounts on social media sites so we can ...

I'm a huge fan of social media. I joined Twitter on June 30 2007 and after a few bumps in the road, I was addicted and even wrote a set of top twitter tips. I try to follow the trends and news around social media as best I can. Really more of a hobby and fascination to me than anything else. I would have loved to get a job in something social media related but that quest always evaded me. That is until recently. I work for a growing software company and they don't have much of a footprint in the social media world. Like many companies, they didn't know the difference between Twitter and a blog or that Facebook was for more than keeping in touch with their friends and family. Knowing that getting into social media and doing it right was needed, especially for a technology company, someone had to step up to the keyboard. That someone was me. I created the Paragon Software Twitter profile and a Paragon Software Facebook page and started looking for inspiration. I know my way around the popular sites. I've grown a healthy network of friends and followers. What I needed was a ...

We are just about to close the books on another year. I have been less than average with my updates o the blog but I think I have made up for it on my Twitter and Facebook interactions. Something about being able to give a quick update to people without having to take the time to write an entire post made more sense with my schedule recently. Between the new boy, new job and my circus act I've been going on all cylinders for the past 12 months. That being said, I got a digital b!@# slap the other day for not updating my blog more often. I took it well. They were right. Even though micro-blogging is a much simpler way to keep friends up to date with whats happening in the 'now' I could have spent an hour a week updating my blog. What's the point of having a site if you never touch it? IIt's not like I have a lack of things to talk about. I could write a dozen posts just on the company I work for and what projects I am working on. So that's where I think I will start. Hope all of you have ...

I got a Roku from a special someone after visiting their house and being in complete amazement over the technology. I've had a Netflix account for several years. First I was crazy and would get 3 movies at a time, rush to watch them all and mail them back to get three more new movies in the mail. I even started adding movies still in the theater in my queue just to get the DVD once it was released. I don't get to the theater very often so DVDs were the only way to stay on top of the best flix out there. Netflix has had the "Watch Instantly" feature online for a while. When I would be working late into the night, I would use it to have a movie playing on one monitor while I slaved away on the others gettting work done. It was a great feature from Netflix to use for a guy that is glued to a desk 10+ hrs a day. The only problem I had with the Netflix 'watch instantly' feature was that there were only s a few dozen movies to watch online. Most of them were old and rarely any TV series that ...

Last month I met with a writer for a local Concord Ca. paper called the Concordian. The Concordian has been around a really long time. I should have asked the date they started. I couldn't find it on the website.The paper was mailed to everyone in the city. It was a free monthly newspaper that talked just about our not-so-little city. Not to be confused with the local blogs like Mayor of Concord or Claycord that fill the internets with news. Recently the paper has had to stop the mailings but still prints thousands of copies and places them in Concord, Pleasant Hill and surrounding area. The writer André Gensburger who is also the co-publisher for the paper first entertained the idea of talking with me a few months ago. He said my background would be something interesting that the community may want to read about. The topic of the article was to talk about how I have adjusted post Iraq. I agreed and thought this would be a nice thing to talk about. The last time I was interviewed by the media for Iraq was after coming home and talking to reporters that had read my Last Letter From Iraq. The ...

After starting with Paragon Software Group in June I have been able to gain a lot of traction internally with my coworkers as well as build on the momentum of creating a better more efficient channel sales experience.Using the principles I developed while writing the Channel Sales Playbook, I have been able to hit the ground running with the new company. In fact, I may be updating the Channel Sales Playbook or putting together a new one just to give a more detailed set of actions that I have tested with positive results. (In my non-existent spare time) Besides the channel stuff, I also have the responsibility to work with the developers and the product managers in Europe to generate documents and product copy that will be used for the company website and be distributed internally and externally for customers. This is a new role for me. I did something like this in my last position and I obviously like to write so it seemed like a good fit. Writing product documentation is not as easy as writing a blog post about a shiny new desk or Twitter tips 101. In the latter, I am writing for myself and can be ...

After my initial addiction to Twitter, I started becoming fascinated by the growing amount of Twitter applications that were being developed. One of the suggestions I had made about how Twitter can make money was that they charge a fee for validated API applications. I don't know if they started charging but the recent 'validation' of Twitter applications makes me feel much better about using services that I have to identify my credentials through. Between getting my breaking news updates and talking to friends, Twitter has become a staple in my life. I want to share some of the best Twitter applications that I use on a regular basis. TwitterFon TwitterFon is a simple, clean, easy to use, and is a superfast Twitter client for your iPhone and iPod Touch. TwitterFon is focused on ease of use and 80% of your daily Twitter tasks, such as see your friends/replies/messages timeline, see favorites, and send/reply a tweet. You can also search tweets, get twitter trends, upload photos to twitpic.com, and update your location information. TwitterFon is my primary iPhone Twitter application. Monitter Monitter is one of my favorite voyeuristic Twitter applications. So simple that a 5 yr old can use it and yet powerful enough to show me ...

I have been wanting a new desk for a long time. I have been using my wife's desk that she had in college ever since I got back from Iraq. Do to the nature of my work and the fact I'm addicted to my computers, I spend more time than I care to admit at my desk working, writing or playing Bejeweled. When we moved out of SF and into the burbs, I wanted to throw out the old one and start in the new place with a new shiny desk. The old desk was nice but it was small and didn't have a lot of storage options. I wanted something bigger but we had said that when I got a new desk it had to be better than the particle board one we had. We were looking for something that looked like a piece of furniture and most desks we found were too expensive at the time. It also had to be long enough to cover the long wall of the room under the window. For Fathers day my gift for being a new dad was a new desk.  We ended up getting a modular system from JC Penny of all ...

As if I didn't already have enough to get done, I found out last night that I somehow got a computer swine flu virus. Well, that's what I'm calling it anyways. Now it doesn't look like my computer is going to die but it's definitely not doing well. I realized I had a virus/malware/rootkit when I typed something into Google and when I clicked a link, Firefox sent me to some completely different site. I wanted to make sure I wasn't smoking crack so I did this a few more times. Yes, I was infected. The worst part is that the virus is completely random. Now this virus is not just related to Google searches. I am infected with Bing, Yahoo and any other search engine I try to use. As I said the browser redirect virus is random so there is a chance I get to the site I wanted to look at. But in this case when I am doing a search for Spyware tools and click on Major Geeks link, I get directed to Stopzilla's website. If I go back and click the same link again, I get sent to a completely different site. When I click the link from the ...