Any great IT professional knows that technology is always changing. With the advancements in time-keeping, there’s no reason any up-and-coming IT professional should be without the latest and greatest wrist watch. Here are a few selections that are perfect for those in the technology field:

1. Touch Screen Watch – Kenneth Cole

The stainless steel band and case of this watch eliminates any feeling of geek and replaces it with sleek. Using a unique digi-touch technology, the watch is water-resistant, can tell you the time in 32 different world cities and has the following features: backlight, date calendar, alarm clock and time. Perhaps best of all, this digital watch has eliminated the need for a degree in rocket science to set it.

2. V 10K – Rado

This watch won’t perform any technological miracles but it is reportedly the hardest watch on earth which makes it pretty darn cool. The curved diamond crystal face is scratch and chip proof. Wearers have reported wearing the watch through all manner of physical activity, from mountain biking to construction, with any sign of wear to the watch.

3. Tima – Jonathon Cohlmeyer

Originally a concept watch, the Tima has finally been released to the public to critical acclaim. With integrated apps and a wide face, the watch is both stylish and futuristic without being over-the-top. The watch is both analog and digital, displaying both at the same time in e-ink technology.

4. F1/Carbon GMT – John Pszeniczny

Made of carbon fiber, rubber, metal and Swarovski crystal, the watch takes its inspiration from Formula 1 racing. With 18 rubies, the watch will give you the time of each of the 18 cities on the facing circuit. Taking the racing theme just one step further, the watch features a lap time function and a stopwatch. The black strap and striking display will look at home on any modern wrist; whether you’re a race car driver or the go-to computer guy.

5. Faceless – 100% Company

Designer Hironao Tsuboi has created an amazing watch that doesn’t look like a watch at all. Imagine the surprise on their faces when you turn your “bracelet” on to display the time! These watches look like a silver metal watch band traveling around your wrist without a face. Push a button and the time is displayed in LED right within the band.

6. Zihotch Retro Phone Watch – Maywadenki

If you’re looking for a watch that the guy in the next cubicle won’t have, this one is it! The rotary face of the watch mimics that of an old phone. What time is it? Dial 117 on your watch to find out. Dial the wrong number and the phone will tell you, “We are sorry, the number you dialed is not in service. Please check and call again.” We bet you’ll be dialing the wrong number just to hear your watch speak!

7. Infection – TokyoFlash

You thought you learned how to tell time way back when, didn’t you? You may want to re-learn when you strap this watch to your wrist! There are no numbers on the Infection, only a series of LEDs. 12 red LEDs represent hours, 11 yellow indicate five minutes and four green LEDs represent single minutes. Good thing you’re in IT; we don’t know if anyone else would be able to figure this fun watch out!

For IT professionals, it’s all about the tech. Any of these new watches will suit you in your new profession perfectly. From the ultra modern to the fabulously retro, there’s a watch to suit your style to a “T”.

Author Tanya Peterson resides in NYC and is a content contributor for watchrepairny.com, a Manhattan provider of fine services such as Omega watch repair and engraving since 1978. Tanya’s grandfather was in the antique watch business and it’s been a fascination with her since childhood.

In business, I (and by extension Customer Hook) are very similar to Lord Grantham. We have a lot of clients (over 7000 on a daily basis) yet we treat everyone with respect, and deal honestly with everyone, even if that means giving a refund now and then if someone wasn’t satisfied with their results.

And I’m not ashamed to say I’ve lost my temper at a few clients over the years, through no fault of either party. I have my weaknesses like everyone else. Anyway, I hope season 3 of DA will be as good as 1 and 2.

Rental v Purchase

Much like with owning versus renting out a home, office rental versus office space purchase is a double-edged sword. Pay a monthly rent quota can take a real damper on your monthly budget, on the one hand. On the other, building a whole new location from the ground up or purchasing a pre-existent one is no easy feat, money-wise, either. The key aspect to consider here is foresight and perspective. If you’re new on the market, or if your business has recently (and, most likely, narrowly) escaped the looming prospect of bankruptcy, then purchasing a headquarters should be far down on your list of priorities, in terms of business strategy. If you are already an established presence on your corner of the market, then this might just be your next logical step. There’s no point in paying rent for the headquarters of a major business, no matter how well located it is. Overall, the money invested into renting could just as well go into buying a location which you know you own, and which will me the corner stone of your upcoming expansion.

Location, Location, Location

This one is obvious, you will say. A good headquarters is, first and foremost, well located. Indeed, it makes perfect sense—however, it’s worth asking yourself how you define a good location. Are you downtown? In that case, congratulations. You’ve drawn the winning ticket. Make sure you hold on to that place for dear life. In most other cases, however, there are several aspects to bear in mind. On the one hand, you should be as close to your competition as possible. If you sell ball bearings, for example, it’s generally wise to set up shop next to the largest ball bearing factory in your city. On the other hand, never lose track of what good location means to your employees. If you want to cut your loss margins and improve efficiency, make sure they are close to all the major means of public transport in your city. Make sure there is at least one supermarket or store nearby, or have a cafeteria set up for them. Alternatively, you can also contract a catering firm, though these tend to be expensive and the quality of the food usually leaves a lot to be desired.

How Do You Like Your Design

Office space interior design is important because it’s your biggest, most visible and most tangible business card. It will always make a major impact on your prospective partners and clients. Never treat this aspect lightly. Hire a good interior designer if you can afford it and make sure you stay current in terms of design trends. In the long run, your clients will be pleasantly impressed with a business that can offer both a pleasant environment and quality products or services.

Well, this article aims to prove you otherwise, by showing you exactly how a tablet can add
to your productivity, focus, effectiveness and connectivity capabilities. Provided you use it
right, your tablet will indeed become a powerful business ally, not to mention it will add to your
comfort and resourcefulness. Let’s see exactly how:

1) Increased connectivity

With a tablet computer inside your briefcase, you will be able to connect to the Internet anytime,
anywhere – from a comfortable ample screen, unlike that in your smartphone. Which means,
you’ll find it much easier to keep track of your e-mail inbox, keep growing your business’
social media presence on the go, do research on new products, services, and even on the
competition. With the increased connectivity, you’ll be amazed with how much extra work you’ll
manage to squeeze into times that would otherwise be idle.

2) Superior time management

From advanced schedulers and to-do list makers to personal organizers, think thanks and team
management tools, you’ll be happy to realize there is a multitude off apps you can use to vastly
improve your time management skills and get more things done in less time. Once you find
the combination of apps that works best for you and effectively get in the habit of using them,
you’ll soon begin to wonder just exactly did you manage to get anything done in those dark days
before you finally decided to get your tablet.

3) Improved focus

Tablets are usually designed as media consumption devices, which means they aren’t good
for as many things as your personal computer. While this may sound at first like a limitation,
you will soon find it’s actually a blessing. You will find it much easier to stay focused on a given
task while using a tablet, since there will be fewer distractions and less temptation to multitask.

If you’re the kind of person who keeps meaning to read those documents or look at those
customer’s files but you keep getting side-tracked, a tablet will help. Not to mention that slow computers have a way of getting on your
nerves, whereas tablets tend to provide a silky smooth user experience, all around.
Try getting a tablet and you’ll never want to look back!

4) Extreme portability

When it comes to portability, you can’t beat a tablet – even if with one of those tiny netbooks,
you still have to clear room in a table to fold out the machine to get work done. With s tablet,
you just take it out and you’re ready for action! No waiting for the computer to boot, no dealing
with messy software: with a tablet you get vastly superior battery life (usually 10 hours or
more), highly responsive applications that seldom crash, and a mobile workstation that does
not stutter… all wrapped up in a lightweight and thin package that fits comfortably inside any
briefcase or bag.

5) Great ally for presentations

You will soon find that your tablet can be a great ally, when it comes to doing presentations for
a group of a few people, or when you’re out and about and need to show projects or assorted
documents to your costumers or business partners. Not only because the whole thing looks
stylish, but especially since you can zoom and flick around those documents in a blazing fast
fashion, as well as pull up any piece of information you need from the Internet, and quickly email
everything to the customer for future reference.: simple, fast and efficient…
just as you like it!

All things accounted for, a tablet won’t replace your computer… nor is it meant to. What it will
do is make your life simpler and keep you from routine stresses such as figuring out how to speed up your computer
at a time when you really need to check your e-mail or read a document without losing time. Try
getting a tablet and you’ll never want to look back!

1. How to set up a great looking site, without html knowledge, that will rank in Google

2. How to incorporate a blog into that same site, and how to use the blog for maximum effectiveness in Google

3. How to add cool social media tools, website tracking, contact forms, image galleries, and more in just a few simple clicks

4. How to get people to pay you $500 or more for the services above, which will literally take you less than an hour to do in most cases.

Interested? Our classes fill up fast, and we have them on the 4th Thursday of every month, from 7-8pm at our office location: 2975 Executive Parkway, Lehi, UT.

It’s free, and bring as many people as you want. We might have donuts, but don’t hold us to that.

Sign up here to reserve your spot.

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Pre-Sales Activities
As any IT sales recruitment professional will have you know, pre-sales is all about landing the customer and ensuring them that they will have a pleasant experience while and after having purchased any given item or service from your company. It’s not always easy to land a customer, although it’s easily at least half the challenge of any sales position. In IT sales, it is essential that the customer understands what you are selling them. This involves providing detailed information about the technical specs of the product, and the way it will respond to the customer’s needs. If they ask for a demonstration of the software, device or service before the sale, make sure you can offer them one and be prepared to answer any sales. Specific cases of the pre-sales operation involve responding to a PQQ, or a pre-qualification questionnaire. If short-listed, a more detailed ITT (information to tender) document will soon follow.

Selling Per Se
The stage of the actual sale is all about negotiation. You need to make sure you are skilled enough to convince the client that they will reap the most benefits from the deal, while also ensuring advantageous conditions for the supplier. You need to make sure you possess detailed knowledge on the product and are prepared to present it in such a manner that will convince the customer that it responds to their specific business needs. Also, where customer-supplier interaction is concerned, you will also have to deal with courtesy calls and follow-ups, right after the negotiation and the sales proper. Good speaking skills are also a big advantage here, since they will help you deliver convincing, powerful sales presentations.

Post-Sale: Technical Support
While some sales staff dreads this part of the process, it is usually a great opportunity to further demonstrate your skill. Show that you care about the customer by readily and promptly solving any faults or problems that may arise during the usage of the sold item. This involves having a positive, pro-active and transparent attitude. Do not try to minimize the client’s issues and also respond to their questions in a manner that is clear and easy for them to follow. Additionally, you and your company might also decide to run programs for maximizing the use of the software, service or device. You can train users either individually, or in group coaching sessions. In any scenario, follow-up is essential to maintain and develop a strong customer base, comprising individuals whom you know will want to continue doing business with you in the future.

Personalized Content
The content of any sales coaching session should depart from the company’s sales model. However, a generic presentation is surely not enough. What is more, it will likely be perceived as patronizing, or at least a time waster by senior level sales staff. Personalizing the content and tailoring to respond to the actual day-to-day challenges met by the sales department is what one needs to do. Similarly, while Sales and Marketing are essentially two peas in the same pod, addressing them as such is effacing and to be avoided. Customization of content is key.

The Continuous Approach
Unlike training, sales coaching needs to be seen as an ongoing process. A disparate series of sessions will leave the participant feeling frustrated. They will probably not understand the usefulness of the coaching to begin with. As such, coaching sessions need consistent, persistent ongoing follow-up, much like therapy sessions, if you will. They need to be integrated in the workflow of any given week, and one week’s topic should be based on where the conversation was left off the previous week.

Coaching is Not Performance Assessment
If you want to make the most of coaching, create a friendly, relaxed environment for your sales team. Have them feel like you are listening and responding to their problems, rather than assessing their sales performance. To avoid this pitfall, make sure your employees understand that coaching and assessment sessions will be held on different days and will never overlap.

The Importance of Coaching Infrastructure
Coaching needs to be supported by all rungs of the corporate ladder, from front-line managers, to second-liners and seniors. The essential aspect to coaching is that it needs to be experienced and invested into as an ongoing effort.

Accurate Observation of Market Behavior
An efficient sales coach is not a manager who will teach their staff about the sales strategies that worked for them. On the contrary – managers need to be constantly in tune with and updated on today’s sales methods, which have substantially altered and continue to develop over the years. Market behavior and market behavior change in particular needs to be kept under constant observation.

What’s Your Scope?
When organizing a team building activity, you need to be very clear on what it is exactly that you want to achieve. Is the goal the discussion of a new project? Are you and your associates planning to set up a new strategy or business model? Do you simply want your employees to get to know each other better? In any of these cases, there are specific activities and events that you might want to look into before deciding the step-by-step schedule of the outing. An adrenaline-filled thrill ride might not be entirely appropriate for all attendants. Another great rule of thumb at this stage of the process is to consult with those who will be partaking, and ask for their opinions, suggestions and expectations. This is also a good opportunity to investigate the specifics of some people’s diets, habits or lifestyles, which may otherwise prevent them from truly enjoying the experience, if it is not properly planned for.

Have Fun… But Don’t Force Fun
The most successful team building getaways are those which relocate the team to a new setting or locale. You don’t have to splurge on location and it doesn’t have to be anything extremely fancy or luxurious. Trust us when asserting that any change of landscape will prove beneficial for you and your employees. Good food, a good experience and well-planned activities will ultimately matter more for the overall success of the endeavor than anything too exotic, or a hotel that is so expensive it’s intimidating. Also, reminding everyone every other ten minutes or so that the experience is bound to be fun, that they are going to have lots of fun and that fun is the only thing they are allowed to think of will most likely result in quite the opposite. Plan activities, but let people enjoy them at their own pace and in their own individual ways.

Smartphones have changed how consumers shop. Gone are the days of driving miles between stores to compare prices, then holding off on a purchase until an online search can be performed. Smartphone apps not only compare prices of local brick-and-mortar stores, but provide access to a wealth of online product reviews and ratings with little more than the snap of a picture.

(Courtesy of Wyemji)

The most popular app in this category is Google Shopper. Using Google’s extensive Products and Maps services, Shopper provides context-sensitive offers based on a consumer’s current location, along with results from its database of online merchants. Other apps such as TheFind, RedLaser and ShopKick are completely changing the game for consumers, vastly reducing the inconvenience of finding the better deal and forcing retailers to compete more effectively.

Smartphones have changed how medical care is obtained. Inexpensive apps are beginning to replace dedicated devices for monitoring glucose levels in diabetics, tracking and reminding patients about medication use and communicating verbally. Medical apps are especially helpful in developing countries, where qualified physicians may be miles away. By entering symptoms into a medical application, villagers in remote areas can provide doctors and nurses with enough information to determine whether it is necessary to visit an expert for further help.

Other apps aid physicians. References, notes and cards are replaced by apps which help calculate dosages, track contraindications and provide a wealth of information right at a doctor’s fingertips. Smartphones can even diagnose Parkinson’s disease. By using the accelerometer to analyze a smartphone’s motions, researchers can determine whether a given shake represents a Parkinson’s tremor.

(Courtesy of marcopako )

Medical apps are only in their infancy, and a number of promising innovations can still be made. Integrations with sensors and telecommunications might result in apps which detect abnormal health conditions, bringing them immediately to the user’s attention. An app may even spot the early signs of a heart attack and call 9-1-1, acting more quickly than a human likely could to save a life.

Smartphones also help blind people to read. On-board cameras are used to capture text which is then spoken aloud, or converted into Braille via vibrations on the touchscreen. These applications replace cumbersome desktop scanners and computer systems with devices that fit within the palm of a hand, thus empowering the visually impaired to read in a variety of circumstances unavailable to them previously. Mobile apps do more than process text, however. Many are also capable of identifying currency, books, DVDs and other products, making it easy to identify items in a pantry or on a bookshelf without sight. Again, many of these uses are yet in their infancy. Some companies are exploring using live video chat functionality to provide assistance with tasks that computers cannot yet accomplish.

As the smartphone industry grows, cell phone plans will become more than a means of keeping in touch with family and friends. For many, they will become an essential tool for living more healthily and happily. These are but a few of the many areas in which smartphones are changing the world, and each is full of yet untapped potential. The future of smartphone applications is indeed a bright one.

This is a guest article by Ruben Corbo, a writer for the website Cell Phone Expert where you can compare cell phone plans. When Ruben is not writing he’s composing or producing music for short films or visual arts.