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January 14, 2010
Welcome and thanks for stopping by. I will attempt to tell you in less than five minutes why I started this blog and why I waited thirteen years to do it. I started my first ecommerce website in 1997. It was for a wholesale clothing manufacturing business that I had started. Since then I have been the president of three other companies, mostly in what would be described as small to medium-sized businesses.
The companies I have run had less than 100 but more than 10 employees and sales revenue in the $1 – $10 million range annually. All of these businesses have had a web presence, ecommerce, database marketing and a variety of technologies to support their operations. On top of that, I am a writer and enjoy writing books and articles, but I have never blogged publicly and I have never had a personal website, facebook page or social media presence.
Today all that changes and I will tell you two reasons why. First of all, I value my privacy and haven’t wanted people to be able to easily google me and find out what I would describe as personal or private information. I have run more than one business that was in the direct marketing industry and I know first-hand the level of information that can be purchased on specific consumers and companies. Nonetheless, I didn’t want to make it easy to be found, or to be bothered for that matter. Much of my job has been in sales, so I made sure that my customers knew where I was an how to reach me, but that didn’t go for the entire world. Two things changed my mind.
The Freedom to Fly?
The first thing that convinced me was the other day when I was purchasing a ticket online from Airtran, which I fly regularly, when suddenly they asked me for a new level of information that they had never asked before. Essentially they were linking my passport information with my credit card and driver’s license information although I was only taking a domestic flight. I certainly understand why Homeland Security would want this level of information, but that doesn’t mean that I believe it is right for them to require it. Of course, I provided the information as requested and realize now that flying the friendly skies is taking on a whole new meaning in regard to our identity and the RFID chip in every new passport.
This is not a political website, but to get a feel for this, you may want to watch this video of The White House Chief of Staff http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjjIDgh90Vc . I’m not sure what Rahm Emanuel meant by “Known as maybe a possible terrorist” places you on the no-fly list. If you intend to keep flying like I do, you will have no choice but to submit to this level of personal information and database profiling.
Picture a Pedestrian on a Superhighway
Secondly, I always believed the internet was a great tool for gathering information such as Wikipedia, or product information from companies and convenient retailers such as Amazon.com. It was also an efficient tool for business with global email communication and neat financial tools such as Paypal and online banking. Although Google has been an amazing success and I certainly use a variety of their tools, I never really believed that algorithm-driven search engines would help us the same way one person can help another person. Today they don’t have to.
There is a very powerful and new web-based application that may prove to be a tenuous invasion of privacy also. The name of this company is Aardvark and their website is www.vark.com. I intend to use their tool to help people with their businesses.
Without going into too much detail on the technology behind it, basically Aardvark (vark.com) routes your questions to a real person who can help you and that you may already know personally. Not to be confused with forums, or Yahoo! answers or wikianswers.com, vark leverages social networks and essentially rides upon a level of trust (albeit a low level many times) that so many people have put into place with their social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Think of it as ”six degress of separation meets the search engine.”
Friends, Romans, Countrymen Lend Me Your Ears
It is important to understand that Aardvark reaches out beyond people that you have designated as “friends” and extends it’s questions and answers to “friends of freinds” and possibly beyond. You can learn all about how it works at their site. I will use it simply to help business people overcome challenges primarily in the area of sales, marketing and new business development which is my area of expertise and my personal passion.
What am I asking in return. It’s simple. When I answer a question on www.vark.com, I will include a link to this page and ask people to voluntarily rate the quality of the answer if they are so inclined. It’s that simple. TradeWithDave.com – trading your time in exhange for free ideas.
Have a great day!
Dave Harrison
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