I use Amazon S3 to host my business videos.

S3 offers incredible performance, unlimited storage, and is extremely affordable. Another Purple Cow from Amazon.

Plus it looks a lot more professional than hosting your business videos on a crowded social video site with user generated videos and ads surrounding it.

• Amazon S3 for video hosting.
• Camtasia / Jing (both from the same folks) for screen capture.
• S3 Fox Free FireFox plugin to upload videos to your Amazon S3 account.
• FlowPlayer free flv player (flowplayer.org) to play the videos.

And I’m done!

Check out some videos I have hosted on S3.

“Twit” is no longer just a mean word

I signed up for Twitter a while ago. But I never “got it” – until recently – when I figured out the awesomeness of microblogging.

Seth Godin wrote this on his blog:

“My goal in creating this blog is to spread my ideas and keep me from having to write a book about every single thing that pops into my head. I’m an amateur, not a professional.”

“Micro” blogging takes this and turns it on its head – and completely frees me from even the “gotta write a meaningful post” world of “macro” (a.k.a “the usual style of”) blogging.

Microblogging lets me put out stuff that is interesting, stuff that I want to share with my followers, but is too trivial to take up space on my blog.

Though many folks use it in a more social and personal context (“watching Spiderman now”, “woke up late”, “eating lunch” types), it has a much more powerful and serious side to it that is just begging to be taken advantage of.

Now I’ve started leaving behind a trail of my online activities on twitter – for my tribe: Web sites I’m visiting, articles I’m reading, videos I’m watching, books I’m reading…

Whether you twitter or tumble or spoink, do it so that you can make meaning for your followers.

I invite you to come stalk me

Quite frequently, I am reminded of how we take certain things for granted, while it could be something completely new/interesting/educating/shocking for someone else.

Using Google Alerts for competitive research is one such “thing”. During a chat with a friend the other day, I casually mentioned how I use Google Alerts to keep an eye on my industry, and it completely blew him away, while I’d actually been doing this for as long as Google Alerts have existed (and before that News.com alerts).

So, for what it’s worth, here goes:

I use Google Alerts to set up specific alerts for specific keywords.

When Google first finds any new or existing content (blog posts, web pages, forum discussions, etc) anywhere on the web that it hasn’t indexed before, that contains these keywords, Google sends me an email with a link to this newly-found content.

And if a publisher has password-protected their content, but still allowed Google to index it (using the “password-protected content” sitemaps feature), then Google emails me a little blurb of that password-protected content!

So, basically I have set up tens of alerts, the first one (vanity “alert” ahead – quite literally! being my own name (“Ravi Jayagopal”). That way, I always know the instant (or within a few days at worst), if anyone is blogging/writing about me or my products.

Here are some of the alerts you could create:
1. Your full name
2. For all your product names
3. All your web site urls
4. Each and every one of your competitors’ names
5. All of your partners’ names
6. Name of any industry expert (or their web site url) whose blog/site you follow (like I have one for “Seth Godin”
7. The name or category of your industry: For eg., right now I’m a month away from launching a very powerful “Access Management” software to manage subscription-based web sites. So, some of my alerts include the keywords “subscription”, “content”, “download”, “security”, etc. Yes, I do get some false positives, but who cares!

The kind of stuff Google finds on a daily basis thanks to these alerts, not only help me keep a tab on myself, my customers, my competitors, and my idols, but it also gives me a lot of new ideas, new features for my products, and great new ways in which I can make my product remarkable!

So go create your alerts today.

I was recently in the market for an “e” fax solution. I looked at quite a few services. My basic requirements were these:

• Reliable
• Low cost (not necessarily free – because I wanted the service to be reliable and accountable)
• Didn’t need a local area code – anywhere was fine, as I don’t receive too many faxes
• Offer a free trial – so that I can experience it first-hand
• Offer a decent number of incoming pages in the package
• Offer a low-cost pay-as-you-go model for additional use

• After hunting around the web, looking up various forums and wasting time on made-for-adsense spam and junk-review sites, I stumbled across MaxEmail.com.

  You can get your incoming faxes sent to your email address as a PDF attachment.

  I went through their 1-month free trial, was highly satisfied with the quality of their service, and just now signed up for a whole year at $24/year (their “lite” plan).

  If you are looking for something similar, go check out MaxEmail.com

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