Fire-Wired Blog

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com With technology and gadgets having woven themselves into the very fabric of our collective existence, it would seem that gift buying would be easier than ever. Walk the aisles of your favorite electronics section, pick up a few gizmos, and your holiday shopping is done within one short afternoon. As idyllic as that sounds the dream starts to dissipate as soon as you start encounter questions of brand, quality, life expectancy, and the mother of all criteria, cost. Who would have thought ubiquitous dream appliances would not tame the stress of gift shopping, but heighten it? Well before your fears boil over into hysteria, let’s approach every shopping speedbump with the same problem solving zeal our tech overlords used to develop our life altering gizmos. As the most financially successful people will tell you; make a budget and stick to it. Yes, you would be a surefire Hall of Fame parent if you bought each of your four childr...

This article was first published by  iowabusinessjournals.com Every once in awhile you find yourself in tough spot of needing immediate alterations to commissioned work but are not able to meet in person. If you find yourself in this sticky situation right at a deadline sometimes the only solution is to walk through each edit step-by-step. 10 years ago this would have been one of the most painful phone calls of your professional life, but today due to screen sharing technology it is but a minor inconvenience. Free screen sharing software has been around for over a decade. Baked into every Macintosh computer is the easy to use and cost-free Messages, formerly iChat, and on the PC side Microsoft owns and gives away the most popular personal video conferencing tool in Skype. Both Messages and Skype offer the same basic tool of full screen sharing along with it's video conferencing and texting platform, but if you’re looking for more collaborative features you’re using the wrong se...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Headphones have come a long way. From decades of soup on the endless of a metal headband to tiny, wireless hearing aide like ear inserts the innovations continue to shrink and astound. Everyone has their preference and while audiophiles may tell you there's only a few  headphones truly worthy of listening to music through, audio quality is not always the point. While they've been around for nearly as long as recorded sound has existed, it wasn't until the last decade or so that headphone style erupted into consumer war. The first truly mass marketed as “cool” headphones were the expensive and style Beats by Dre. Founded in 2006 by hip hop legend Dr Dre and music industry mogul Jimmy Iovine, Beats by Dre became so stylish that less than a month later and acquisition by Apple made them both multi-billionaires… Problem Beats headsets are primarily about style. A quick Google search about Beats by Dre audio quality and bui...

This article was first published by  iowabusinessjournals.com Getting honest feedback from loyal customers and employees is practically gold. While your knowledge and ambition may drive your business, thoughtful, outside perspective can be the fuel that makes sure your doors are open for the long haul. But what is the best tool to reach your invested followers? Right away we can discount direct mail. Unless it's a package, bill or birthday card almost no one cares about the mail. So don't waste your money on postage. If we also discard all passive and intrusive survey methods such asin-person point-of-sale surveys, comment cards, and polling phone calls what eventually are left with is online surveying. Amazon product reviews, Yelp, TripAdvisor- these are all wildly popular because they are a public social platform to vent frustrations and for consumers to act as food critics. Still all too often these platforms are not constructive for improving a business. Direct onli...

This article was first published by  iowabusinessjournals.com Let's say you operate a dental practice in Clive named “Clean Teeth.” You have a decent number of clients but you have the capacity to take on many more. The first moves are always the same: circulating ads in print and potentially local radio or TV. Next comes social media with a Facebook page and ads. The problem is advertising is great for market awareness but doesn't always convert to sales and social media is a bottomless ocean your business might drown in unless you are a particularly savvy poster. To take your fate into your own hands you need a tool that generates continual visibility with little work from you. This is the perfect situation to employ Search Engine Optimization. Best known as SEO, search engine optimization takes your businesses website and tailors it so sticks out to search engines. Without SEO in place a customer searching the web for a dentist in Clive may completely miss Clean Teeth. F...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Oh my word, did you see what the new iPhone can do? It can wirelessly charge! It allows users to create custom emojis! You can edit screenshots! It has a processor five times as fast as lightning! THE SCREEN GOES ALL THE WAY TO THE EDGES! The new iPhone has pushed us literally to the edge of technological innovation. This truly is the greatest time to be alive! Except it is not. All the things Apple unveiled last month at their giant promotional event for the brand new iPhone 8, 8s, and iPhone X have been on the market for years. No they haven’t been available in iPhone form, but Samsung, LG, HTC, and Motorola –basically Android carrying phones– all offered one or all of the latest and greatest iPhone tricks. So why is the market reacting like Apple has flipped the tech world on its head? 10 years ago when the iPhone came out Steve Jobs truly revolutionized the tech world. There had been smartphones before, there had been pi...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Automation is an incredible gift to the modern society. The most menial of tasks have been passed off to soulless robots and machines. No more drilling holes in license plates or tightening screws on car chassis after car chassis. While a godsend to industrial production automation has also killed hundreds of thousands of jobs and become a political landmine in the modern economy. So what do you suppose the effects will be when artificial intelligence comes to fruition. For those who don’t understand the difference, artificial intelligence is automated devices and machines that also have the able to make decisions about their actions instead of following a single programmed routine. Artificial intelligence has all kinds of practical applications from computer programs that could decipher human actions and anticipate what next moves, to devices that autonomously scan human bodies, diagnose, and prescribe courses of treatment wi...

For Tiny Explosions ' 6th bout in the Des Moines 48 Hour Film Project  we lucked into the opportunity to make either a "Road Movie" or Sci-Fi short. We decided to kind of do both, and the result was a film worthy of screening, titled  Snap Back . Required Elements for this year's film included: Character : Freddy or Fiona Brown, poet Prop : Rubber Band Dialogue : "You heard what she said" While we did screen at Best of City this year, we didn't win any awards. A head-scratcher because why would our film screen again if it didn't receive any specific acclaim? Maybe we Being There'd ourselves . In the long run awards (outside of the overall winner or runner-up) are no big deal as you don't know how the judges graded and the recipients are almost always puzzling. As an example a couple of Tiny Explosions' past award wins have been confusing. The important thing is we're all exceptionally proud of the film and I don'...

This article was first published by  iowabusinessjournals.com Owning a small business owner means never being off the clock. It might 3pm on a Saturday and you’re drifting peacefully in a boat across a lake and one comment from a fellow weekender flips you from relaxed weekend mode into business mode. Of course this is only one example, these little episodes can happen at a family dinner, a dental appointment, in a dark movie theater, or any one of a billion scenarios. In all these scenarios you are innately equipped with your person business acumen; however if the situation gets serious you will probably find yourself without specific documents that may be required to seal a deal. This is where cloud computing is vital. If you aren’t backing up and securing your important documents online (i.e. “the cloud”) than you are cutting your business off at the knees. Paper is still a vital part of contract work and long term secure storage, but having remote access to contracts, legal...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Sports gambling is illegal in almost every state, and even the states where it is legal it is highly regulated. For many sports gambling is seen as a predatory evil that preys on the weak willed and hurts society as a whole; others view betting on sports as a way to heighten the stakes of entertainment or possibly even make a living from a specialized knowledge set. For those with no stake in the argument, it can be seen as an odd discussion. Why is gambling on sports legal and yet the stock market exists? You might not have looked at it this way before but the stock market is basically legalized sports gambling. Traders pick a team they like, feel they have some insight into their fortunes, and place a bet on whether that team will succeed or falter. The capitalist viewpoint is you trading stocks isn’t gambling because buying stock is making an active investment in a business (i.e. “Team”) thereby supporting their cause. That...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Don't give your customers a reason to say no. As time passes more and more reasons have become immediate dealbreakers. The very first was a sanitary storefront, a few generations later it was air conditioning, then public bathrooms, and slowly but surely “cash only” signs became public advertisements for “we don't want your business.” Now there are plenty of other criteria that will cut off prospective customers, but in the era of constant connectivity free WiFi is becoming a new age requirement. The security warnings of public WiFi have been broadcaster loud and frequent but the masses don't care. If you are a public facing business then you must consider offering either password protected or completely free WiFi to your customers. For roughly the last decade coffee houses have been feeling this pinch. Instead of reading the paper and drinking a cup of joe, coffee patrons now sip and stare at their phones. Even with...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com There is nothing simple about technology. While all you need to write the most basic of websites is five or six lines of code, try programming something as complicated as a multimedia website like YouTube or a layered smartphone application like Facebook and you’re getting into millions of lines of code (potentially billions). But beyond design, programming, and delivering digital media content, there is also the extremely complicated business side of technology. So many websites, social networks, applications, and software packages are nothing more than ideas. There is no secret recipe that is impossible to crack. So to protect hardware and software manufacturers from intellectual property theft there’s patents, a federal government designation that legally plant a creator's flag on an idea, innovation, and invention. But following a recent Supreme Court decision that entire system is in trouble. It may not seem like the s...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com The future is gonna be great. Computers are gonna be the size of coins, they’ll be able to process videos and games quicker than you can read this run-on sentence, and screens will be floating holograms in the air… At least that’s what I’m told. See every spring the world’s tech giants hold their annual developer conferences and use their moment in the limelight to proselytize their version of the tech future. This spring the most bombastic version of the tech future came from Facebook, who in so many words said the end of the smartphone is nigh. Dubbed “Facebook F8,” the annual developer conference is the routine moment for Mark Zuckerberg to throw out his pie in the sky ideas. In 2015 is was connectivity and messaging. In 2016 Zuck waxed poetic on the imminent omnipresence of artificial intelligent mobile assistants (think next-gen versions of Google Now, Amazon Echo, or Siri). As for 2017, well apparently we’re a stone's th...

When I got my first, personal GoPro one of the first videos I shot with it was a drive through Northern California's Avenue of the Giants. Now I've been cutting together personal travel videos for a long time now, but when I sat down to edit the Giants drive down... I just couldn't do it. Driving through the redwoods was just too cool to condense. So on our 20mbps home internet connection I decided to upload all 38 minutes of the 1080i drive. As the upload slowly progressed Marieta asked "Who's gonna watch 35 minutes of us driving?" Well as of this post the answer is more than 10,000 people. Click to watch the video YouTube. While Marieta is still baffled about the success of this video, I get it. If you want to experience a place you're hoping to visit or relive a personal favorite; a polished cut-down video doesn't do it. Videos like this uncut drive offer unfiltered access. So following this experience I've looked for similar opportu...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com You may not have realized this but for the last month (and every month going forward) your web browsing history has been packaged and sold. In two disgustingly fast weeks in late March both houses of the United States Congress and President Donald Trump sold you out. Both Iowa senators and all three republican representatives voted to repeal a late term President Obama signed FCC regulation that required internet service providers to ask subscribers permission before selling their web usage and browsing history. So take a moment to think of every little thing you’ve done online in the last month and know your ISP not only knows about it, but that information to a third party. Why would our elected representatives want to sell your web history on the sly? Well the official party line is holding ISPs to an unfair standard kills innovation and hurts job growth. The subcontext involves internet service giants’ campaign contribu...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Unless your business is flush beyond compare, chances are you do not employ an in-house digital services manager. It’s highly likely you do not even employ a single IT person. So why are you messing with custom website design, company owned webspace, and managing disparate IT properties such as security, storage, e-commerce, and all the rest? One of the best signs of leadership is understanding what you don’t know and partnering or employing those who do. By cobbling together a patchwork of IT products and services that is what leads to your online presence being hijacked. For hackers, it is shocking the amount of time and effort it takes to scrape a poorly secured site, assume its identity, or simply break in and realign a sites content and security configurations. Conversely, for the individuals and businesses who administer these amateurly developed sites these actions can be devastating. Should your small business's’ site ...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com In a world that is becoming increasingly more paperless, some people still must toil in reams of paper and vats of toner. Who are these people? Small business owners and their employees. All jokes aside; if you’re a lawyer, car dealer, healthcare provider, or anyone that handles contracts and receipts there is no escaping the necessity of paper. While the technology of making paper hasn’t evolved to drastically in the last 50 years, the method for printing on it certainly has. Printers are the real headache of paper-strapped small businesses. Beyond handling a constant onslaught of printing jobs, the requirements a printer must have to get purchase cover cost,  connectivity, reliability, speed, scanning, faxing, copying, ease of use, and a modicum of intuitive troubleshooting when it inevitably fails or jams. See in an office where your IT person is basically whomever used a device last, every device needs to work on-d...

10 years ago I learned about an awesome challenge called the " Script Frenzy ." The idea was for writers to take the month of April and write a 100-page screenplay or other creative project. While I thought the challenge event was an incredible idea I never actually participated before the  official project was sent out to pasture after the 2012 event... But then March 30, 2017 rolled around and I discovered the perfect story to frenzy onto the page and today I have a 101-page script. No this is not my first screenplay. But it is the first one I've gotten to the point of typing "The End" and still felt the absolute NEED to produce. I won't bore you with details of the screenplay other than it's an adventure-drama-romance set in Iowa's Loess Hills and loosely "based on actual events." As I've recounted on here   many times before I love cinema and a long term goal of mine has been to write-direct a feature film. Am I delude...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com This lesson is far too important to slow walk you to understanding: stop what you’re doing and activate the baked-in device tracking tools available to you and download some extra security measures while you’re at it. Sometimes in our never ending tech excitement and device worship we forgo the simplest steps to ensure data and gadget security. So if your smartphone, tablet, or laptop are repositories for your sensitive information consider how devastating losing those tools could be to you or your family. At this point many will say ‘oh nothing will happen to me, I always keep my phone/tablet/laptop safely stored and only the most brazen thief would walk off with it.’ Well guess what that can happen to you, as I am a living example. Last month a burglar broke into my home -while I was in the house, sleeping no less- and made off in the middle of the night with nearly all of my devices. Luckily all the devices required pass...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Let’s do a little experiment. Pull out your phone quick and plug in your company’s website. Now you either see one of two things; either a shrunken recreation of the website you’ve grown used to seeing on your desktop or a neatly rearranged version of your site’s content and navigation perfectly scaled for your phone’s screen. If you found the neat version, congratulations your company is using responsive design and meeting the expectations of the modern consumer; however, if you found the shrunken facsimile let’s spend the next 300 words explaining why you need to embrace responsive design. As fast as technology seems to be advancing, the sad truth is the foundation for most innovation is the corpse of outdated technology. Everything and anything you can think of maybe connected to the internet, but all that content was built with a very 1993 interpretation of how it may be used, i.e. 20-inch screens and keyboards. Since 2013...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com Of all the things that should be simple, why is it accepting customer payments has become so frustrating? If you run a brick and mortar storefront, cash only makes things super easy for you but a horrid announce for your customers. If you run an online only business then e-commerce pretty much requires a credit card processing tool, but processing platforms or “gateways” abound with varying different transaction and services fees. Finally, if you run a hybrid online-and-physical-storefront business you have added headache of adding card, cheaper, and NFC readers into your payment processing juggling act. Before you go any further, no there is not an easy one-size-fits all solution. Why not? Well look no further than Des Moines based payment start-up Dwolla who after six years of processing consumer payments for businesses killed its public app, deciding instead to focus its efforts on business payment solutions. Dwolla was ...