Greetings!
Irina Carrel here from Carrel Consulting Inc. - one of your community moderators. I would like to use this forum to share ideas and start the dialog among the community users about collaboration best practices.
Virtual Assistant for the Real Business
7/14/2008 | posted by
irinacarrel
Maybe I am the only one left in the Silicon Valley who has not yet heard of Virtual Assistants. But until last Friday, I was completely unaware that the old profession of a personal assistant, or secretary, has taken a new, virtual twist.
While trying to arrange a meeting with one of my clients, I was referred to his virtual assistant. I dialed the number, and a nice woman’s voice with a mild Southern accent answered. I was so curious about the “virtual” part of her job that I ...
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If you feel that your good-old recycling, hybrid-driving, organic-shopping habits are no longer enough to help save the planet, I recommend going to one of the new Green Clean parties. I bet you can find one in your neighborhood.
This is not your Mom’s Tupperware or Mary Kay party. It is a fabulous, well-planned, and very educational gathering of local women (at least mine was all women…) who all want to be green. For two hours, me and a dozen of my new green best friends mingled a ...
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All throughout this political game of musical chairs, I can’t help thinking: How come you can vote for the best singer on the American Idol by text messaging, or pick your favorite dancing stars over the Internet… but the most important, the most crucial process of nominating a president still relies on some strange, archaic system?
In many political shows tonight I heard the same refrain, suggesting that the candidates invest so much effort and energy in Iowa and New Hampshire to ...
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I love getting cards. Ever since I was a kid, I always counted how many cards I received for my birthday and for Christmas. One time, I got two dozen Get-Wells from my friends just for spending a night at the hospital! I used to keep all my cards in shoe boxes as reminders of how much people care about me and my family.
As a grown-up, I still like getting cards, but these days it’s mostly to hear from old, far-away friends and see how much their kids have grown since t ...
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This week, I am back on my ‘green’ soap box. Tomorrow (Sunday 11/4) marks the end of Daylight Savings Time (DST), sending clocks back an hour, and messing up our calendars, computers and internal clocks. For most of my life, I never questioned DST and treated it as a minor inconvenience and a reminder to change batteries in my smoke detectors. But for some reason this year, I decided to read up on this—why do we need DST? The answer that we all know from kindergarten—it h ...
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The University of California, Berkeley announced last week that it is making its entire course lectures and special events available on YouTube. That is Web 2.0!
Berkeley is the first university to offer complete videos of courses and events on the popular video-sharing and social networking site. Last year, this UC School launched a very successful podcasting program, delivering thousands of hours of content and dozens of courses through the school’s web site.
What we are seeing i ...
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My family’s quest toward living green has started many years ago - long before green was a theme of big companies’ commercials and a hot political subject. We were the ones carrying around empty plastic bottles until we found a proper recycling bin, meticulously separating our trash, illuminating our living room with hospital-like florescent bulbs and driving a not-yet-fashionable hybrid car.
Now green is hot. Companies and governments are investing in cool new technologies th ...
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Saw this article a couple of days ago and had to share it… CA sponsored the survey of 100 chief information officers, and found that a third of IT projects runs between 10 and 20 percent over the original budget and one in four projects costs 50 percent more than it was expected to. Given that the typical large company is running 29 projects at any one time, there is a terrible strain on IT to support the business by delivering high-quality, functional and scalable applications.
Clearly, ...
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Yes, the heat wave has finally reached Northern California. And while we are not as bad as the “other” Californians (I have always been convinced that Northern and Southern CA should be separate states… but that’s for another post), the Silicon Valley is slowly simmering in still, hot air smelling like smoke from the nearby forest fires.
Am I going to tell you another story about saving the air by using WebEx? Not this time. Hopefully my conviction about using online co ...
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Like many of you, I lost my phone line when Skype service went out 2 weeks ago. And despite the extensive news coverage and the big deal that my fellow bloggers made out of it, I was OK. I survived using my Verizon cell phone, and honestly was not really inconvenienced. Things were back to normal within a day, and like millions of other Skype users, I went back to using my phone without ever considering switching to another provider.
Why? Well, going back to the conventional and reliable AT& ...
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