Dr. Pete released his first book last year, “The Secrets of How to Feel 20 Years Younger in 90 days or Less,” which is already underway towards becoming an underground viral success. As part of Dr. Pete’s new initiative, we are going to market the book as a free enticement for allowing Dr. Pete to share his information and build a following.

Ecropolis and Dr. Pete worked together to develop a simple roadmap… a strategy for success. I’m writing this post as the sun rises on phase 1 of the plan. What I would like to convey by this post is that as of now, we have no premonition as to how successful our efforts will be. From here, it’s a clean slate. We’re launching a new website on a brand new domain name, designyourultimatelife.com. As of this post, no one knows about it. In fact, just today I am hooking up our Google Analytics account so we can begin to measure our success. As part of the innaugural launch of this business, we’ve also planned and scheduled an intense two day workshop called, “Create Your Best Year Ever“, which we are marketing to draw followers, help us build a platform for creating video content that may become products or made into promotional material, and lastly to potentially raise some needed cash. The website is the gateway to event, the place to get information, to register, and to pay.

Here’s a simple outline of the process and where we’re at.

1. Create our mission statement for the venture and the event and begin to build marketing copy around that mission.
2. Shoot and edit a short video with Dr. Pete explaining our event.
3. Build a website that serves as a landing page for marketing the event and gaining registrations. The website features the video.
4. Seed the website with some relevant blog postings to build keyword density and give us syndication hooks.
5. Create a series of creative advertisements for both web-based usage and physical distribution.
6. Create SEO accounts, i.e. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc.
7. Upload our video to every web destination accepting free video.
8. Design an email template and begin sending emails to our personal sphere’s of trusted connections.
9. We’re already forged some strategic partnerships that will allow us to expand our sphere into our partner’s trusted connections.
10. Our primary market right now is local to Dr. Pete so our last step will be to hit the street with physical handbills and flyers going out to businesses and anywhere else we can get eyeballs without spending a lot of cash.

As of now; Saturday, January 30, 2010, we are working on Step 5. In the next couple of days the advertisements will be ready for review. I hope that you will take the time to return to this page to see how the project is coming along and most importantly, I’ll be using this as a case study to demonstrate a process, and also to continue to perfect it. For that reasons all comments are welcomed!

To see the website, go to www.designyourultimatelife.com

Ecropolis will be live, on location at the Stanford School of Business to webcast a special presentation given by Mr. Heath on Thursday, March 25 from 12:00 to 1:30 PM ET

Chip Heath is the Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. Chip will cover topics from both of his books:

Made to Stick: Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? Chip answers these questions and will discuss the six principles of sticky ideas: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions and stories. These “naturally sticky” ideas spread without external help in the form of marketing dollars, PR assistance, or the attention of leaders

How to lead a SWITCH

Why do some big changes happen easily while many small changes prove impossible? The answer hinges on some of the most fascinating findings in psychology. Building on this research, Heath will reveal a simple, 3-part framework that will help you change things in tough times, whether the change you seek is at work, at home, or in society. All of us have things we want to change—in our families, our businesses, and our communities. But where do you start? And don’t people resist change? This program will explore some reliable ways to make change efforts stick.

This live webcast will also include synchronized presentational materials as well as live chat, to be moderated by Verne Harnish, CEO of Gazelles, Inc. and executive education firm in Ashburn, Virginia that provides services and training to the executives of fast growth companies, worldwide.

Ecropolis will webcast Jeff Jarvis’s presentation LIVE from New York on Thursday, February 18th at 12:00 noon-1:30 pm ET (US)

Jeff blogs about media and news at Buzzmachine.com. He is also an associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York’s new Graduate School of Journalism

In talks around his book, What Would Google Do?, which has been featured in BusinessWeek (cover story), Inc., Newsweek, Forbes, CNBC, The Daily Beast, and Library Journal, Jarvis has unpacked the strategic and operational principles that have underpinned the Google’s phenomenal success and applied them outward. In talks, he provides an indispensable manual for survival and success.

Jarvis underscores how critical it has become to see the world as Google sees it. “The question we ask is about thinking in new ways, solving problems with new solutions, facing new challenges, seeing new opportunities, and understanding a different way to look at the structure of the economy and society and how we relate to each other,” says Jarvis.

He explains how businesses can grow and prosper in what he calls our “new Google century” by following such laws as:

MANAGE ABUNDANCE, NOT SCARCITY

MAKE MISTAKES WELL

GIVE UP CONTROL

GET OUT OF THE WAY

LOW PRICES ARE GOOD (FREE IS BETTER)

DON’T BE EVIL

Geoff Smart is Chairman & CEO of a management assessment firm for CEOs and investors, which he founded in 1995.

Geoff Smart solves every manager’s #1 problem: making hiring mistakes.  The stories and advice Geoffrey Smart presents, draw from some of the most extensive research, interviews and experiences ever assembled on the topic of talent management:  Why most managers are terrible at hiring.  How to generate a source to locate the right candidates.  What to look for in choosing the right candidate.  How to sell the ideal candidate on accepting the job at your company.  The session includes a significant amount of audience interaction including live demonstrations of the interview techniques, audience realtime Q&A, and simple “takeaway tools and templates” to help attendees maximize financial performance and their own career success.

In their instant New York Times best seller Who: The A Method for Hiring, Geoff Smart and Randy Street interviewed over 20 billionaire entrepreneurs exclusively for the book (a record) to collect their best advice and stories on the topic of hiring and hiring mistakes.  The largest statistical study every done on this topic was conducted with the University of Chicago’s Steve Kaplan, which revealed some startling findings about types of candidates who succeed and fail, and simple, practical solutions are presented.  The book is a New York Times Bestseller, Wall Street Journal Bestseller, USA Today Bestseller, and was ranked the #1 bestseller of all books on Amazon. Over 20 CEOs have endorsed Who.

Ecropolis has been selected by Normandy International for website hosting and back-end maintenance and webcast support  for www.bmf09.com, the official website of the Bermuda Music Festival, Quincy Jones and Friends.  Normandy International has distinguished itself as a pioneer in developing new means of distribution for networks, celebrities, music promoters and sponsors. Bermuda Music Festival will prove to be a testament Ecropolis’s ability to execute on innovative online video strategies. In the case of Bermuda Music Festival, Ecropolis will support three webcasts leading up to the actual festival. These webcasts will be hour-long interviews between Rock Neuman, the promoter for the festival and three of the high-profile artists featured at the festival, including Quincy Jones, Erykah Badu, and John Legend. Normandy International is also coordinating with artists and promoters to possibly webcast select performances from the music festival itself. Normandy established a relationship with the innovate steaming platform service provider, LiveStream.com to provide the encoding and content delivery to a global audience. Ecropolis has worked closely with the producers of the festival and the Livestream.com staff to insure successful webcasts.

FOLLOW UP: Quincy Jones webcast from his home in Las Angles, California. The interview content with Quincy Jones has great historical value and created some great initial buzz and excitement about the upcoming festival. Hundreds of users logged on live with hundred more logging in post interview to watch the archive. The delivery over LiveStream was flawless with fantastic stream quality delivered using rtmp h.264 Adobe Flash technology.

Lisa Amore, of Amore PR did an amazing job of providing a sound bytes via Twitter to the hundreds of Twitter followers of @bmf09.

Ecropolis will webcast Jim Collins – author of “Good to Great” and  his most recent, “Built to Last“ from the Gazelles Fortune Small Business Growth Summit in Dallas, TX.

People, Strategy, Execution, Cash — Jim Collins, the #1 business thought leader of our time, will anchor the Summit with a four hour workshop covering his latest discoveries in studying “gazelles” which were able to both survive and thrive in turbulent times. And his latest research indicates that turbulent times will likely be the norm for the rest of our business lifetime, so you better know how the best have done it in the past. Jim’s ideas will span all four key decisions.

Several hundred viewers are expected to tune into this live event. There will be a live chat session in tandem with the speaker, moderated by, Verne Harnish, CEO of Gazelles, an executive education firm in Ashburn Virginia that provides resources for fast growth companies.

Jim Collins delivered a rich three hours to a conference audience of approximately 500 executives as well as a group of about 100 local business schools students. Ecropolis saw to it that Jim Collins was streamed live to at least 1000 other executives, globally. Ecropolis streamed live using Flash encoder over a platform called Livestream.com. Because of the importance of this event, Ecropolis brought in a satellite internet truck that remained on standby, if the hotel’s bandwidth had faltered we were able to make an immediate, seamless cutover. We received positive reports from the 4 corners of the globe. Thanks to the Livestream.com platform the even was ready for on-demand viewing within an hour of completion. This was of particular importance because we were only allowed to show the archived stream for 24 hours.

Ecropolis will be webcasting  Robert Cialdini – “Author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” from the ASU (Arizona State University), Phoenix, Arizona on November 17, 2009, 12:00PM ET.

With more than two million copies sold worldwide “Influence” has established itself as the most important book on persuasion ever published.  Robert Cialdini, Ph.D explains why some people are remarkably persuasive and how you can beat them at their own game. You’ll learn the six psychological secrets behind our powerful impulse to comply, how skilled persuaders use them without detection, how to defend yourself against them-and how to put those secrets to work on your own behalf. Whether you are a mere consumer of someone weaving the web of persuasion to urge others to buy or vote for your product, this is an essential book for understanding the psychological foundations of marketing.

Extensive training in the psychology of influence, together with over 30 years of research into the subject, has earned Dr. Cialdini an international reputation as an expert in the field of persuasion, compliance. Influence has been listed on   the New York Times Best Seller List. Fortune Magazine lists Influence in their “75 Smartest Business Books.

Several hundred viewers are expected to tune into this live event. There will be a live chat session in tandem with the speaker, moderated by, Verne Harnish, CEO of Gazelles, an executive education firm in Ashburn Virginia that provides resources for fast growth companies.

FOLLOW UP: This event was a fabulous success.: from the production and stream quality to the level of audience interaction and moderated discussion; everything went perfectly. The material presented by Dr. Cialdini was well worth the small cost of this webcast. We saw attendance and participation from business executives from around the world. The entire webcast was available on demand within ten minutes of wrapping up thanks to the server-side archiving capabilities built into the CDN platform Ecropolis is now partnered up with.

The second type of open source is less altruistic and is at the heart of the business model of thousands of sofware development firms, worldwide. Of course, many open source products start as what I first described and become profitable businesses later; like Mozilla (Firefox) or Red Hat (Linux). How does a business make money with free software? There are several channels: (1) support and other services, such as customization (2) premium offerings: Many companies will offer a free version of their product but then also sell a super-charged edition. (3) Licensing technology for use within commercial products. (3) Advertisting, especially if it’s mainstream software that is Internet enabled. Mozilla, makers of Firefox web browser reportedly earns 88% of it’s revenue from Google alone, who paid Mozilla 75 million in 2007 just to be the browser’s default search engine. (4) Donations. Paypal has made it increasingly easy for even weekend hobbiest developers to bring in extra cash for their efforts. As a consumer of technology who is striving to conserve cash during these lean times, you and your business can benefit from the proliferation and maturity of many prominent open source technologies. These are some popular titles that you should evaluate and see how they might fit into your business model.

Desktop Software

Open Office:

Openoffice.org offers users a full Microsoft Office compatible suite with a familiar look and feel, at no cost with no restrictions. The software includes word processing,spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. Open Office stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. That means that you can open Word documents from sources outside of your company with no trouble at all. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

System & Network Security

If you are tired of renewing your anti-virus, anti-spyware subscriptions you should take a look at the following free applications.

Clamwin

ClamWin is a Free Antivirus program for Microsoft Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003 and Vista.
ClamWin Free Antivirus comes with an easy installer and open source code. You may download and use ClamWin on every machine in your organization without limits. It features:

• High detection rates for viruses and spyware;
• Scanning Scheduler;
• Automatic downloads of regularly updated Virus Database.
• Standalone virus scanner and right-click menu integration to Microsoft Windows Explorer;
• Addin to Microsoft Outlook to remove virus-infected attachments automatically.

Spybot Search and Destroy

Spybot – Search & Destroy detects and removes spyware, a relatively new kind of threat not yet covered by common anti-virus applications. Spyware silently tracks your surfing behaviour to create a marketing profile for you that is transmitted without your knowledge to the compilers and sold to advertising companies. If you see new toolbars in your Internet Explorer that you haven’t intentionally installed, if your browser crashes inexplicably, or if your home page has been “hijacked” (or changed without your knowledge), your computer is most probably infected with spyware. Even if you don’t see the symptoms, your computer may be infected, because more and more spyware is emerging. Spybot-S&D is free, so there’s no harm giving it a try to see if something has invaded your computer.

Accounting

GNUCash

GnuCash is personal and small-business financial-accounting software. Designed to be easy to use, yet powerful and flexible, GnuCash allows you to track bank accounts, stocks, income and expenses. As quick and intuitive to use as a checkbook register, it is based on professional accounting principles to ensure balanced books and accurate reports. GNUCash has a graphing module and comes with a full suite of customizable reports.

TurboCash:

TurboCASH is a full blown multi user, multi company program. There are no hidden corners and no paid “Enteprise Versions.” The same installation of TurboCASH works in over 20 languages and in over 50 countries. You can use this program for a business with no accountant up to a business with 50 accountants. This ability to work in so many environments is a major boon for TurboCASH. New releases are available to everyone instantly.

Running Remote Applications

Just recently, Google annouced the release of NeatX an NX server specifically designed for running open source programs (X Windows) over remote desktop connections. Although NeatX was adapted from technology designed primarily to optimize X11 sessions (X Windows), it can be configured as a proxy server to tunnel Remote Desktop Protocol (for Windows Terminal Services sessions) and remoteVirtual Network Computing (VNC) sessions (most modern general-purpose operating system platforms), giving them some of the same speed improvements. Microsoft’s Windows Terminal Services is very costly to license so the release of NeatX will be a boon for businesses ready to adopt Google’s technology. NeatX’s source code is open and is available but packaged installers have not been release yet, as the software NeatX is still heavily under development.

Collaboration: The key to a virtual office strategy:

Digsby

Digsby has to be coolest video, voice, chat applicaition out there. Digsby interfaces with AOL’s Instant Messenger, Windows Messenger, ICQ, Google Chat, and the open source platform, Jabber. Even more it can be integrated with Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hot Mail, AOL Mail and any standard POP3 or IMAP email account. Each account adds a little icon to the system tray where you can quickly check your account status. And even more, you can access the basic social networking features of LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. Digsby has a chat widget that you can incorporate into a web page, which Ecropolis uses in some places on its site to provide support services and in other places to handle potential sales related questions. Another great thing about Digsby is that it logs your chats so you can always search through old chat snippets.

The next section of this list is all web-based software. Most open source software is designed to run on top of a foundation known as LAMP which means Linux (the OS), Apache (Webserver), MySQL (database), PHP/PERL/Python (scripting engines); these are all well-developed and supported and considered best-of-breed technologies. Most web-hosting companies run on a LAMP environment; which is why your typical web-hosting is so inexpensive. Ecropolis hosting runs on a LAMP environment with a commercial software package on top of it called Plesk, which gives our hosting clients an easy-to-use, very slick GUI interface to manage their accounts with. Users can manage databases, email, upload/edit/delete files and every other aspect imaginable. The Ecropolis LAMP environment can also parse, compile and render Ruby on Rails, JSP and ASP script code. For Ecropolis, Plesk insures its servers are always up-to-date with the latest upgrades and patches; a must with open source software. Incidentally, Ecropolis also maintains a Windows IIS environment capable of executing ASP, .NET, and Coldfusion, which is an application server.

All of the software in the following list can be installed in a couple of clicks from our control panel. I think it’s also important to mention that just because these are web-based applications, if they are for internal use you could very easily turn up a LAMP webserver using any old PC that’s lying around. For ease, I recommend actually departing from the Linux part and going with WAMP, the “W” is for Windows or MAMP on a Mac. There are open source software packages by the same names, WAMP and MAMP that offer intuitive installers that not only install Apache/MySQL and scripting engines, but also give you access to an interface that simplifies the management of the software bundle’s many configuration options. (Let me know if you would like more information on how to best set this up-I’m considering creating a tutorial on it.)

Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing

The following applications are all available on the Ecropolis hosting platform and can be self installed using our Installation Wizard. Ecropolis can also provide support and services for any of these best-of-breen open source packages.

eGroupWare

eGroupWare is a free enterprise ready groupware software. It provides calendar, knowledgebase, content management system, address book, project management, and inventory tools. It is available in 25 languages.

Brim

Brim is a web-based information manager with support for bookmarks, calendar, contacts, notes, news, passwords and tasks.

Crafty Syntax Live Help (CSLH):

Crafty Syntax Live Help is a multi-user, multi-operator, multi-department Live Help support chat system.

MediaWiki

MediaWiki is the same Wiki-software that runs Wikipedia. MediaWiki is a Web-based wiki software application deployed by many organizations as an internal knowledge management solution, and as a content management system. MediaWiki is written in PHP, and can use either the MySQL or PostgreSQL relational database management system. MediaWiki supports more than 70 languages; it is scalable and customizable.

Moodle

If training is an important part of your operation and you have a curriculum you could install Moodle and build your own ecourses using this elearning package that’s being utilized by institutions world-wide as a robust platform for hosting coursework.

eTicket Support

eTicket Support easy-to-use helpdesk and customer support software that allows you to take control of your company inbox, and productively handle interactions between you and your clients. – a savvy web based helpdesk software solution, with intuitive AJAX based interface and with .less is more. approach. Support Center 1.0 is AJAX, PHP / MySQL helpdesk software for small to mid-sizes businesses. It provides organizations with ability to set up centralized email management and support ticket system for communication with customers. Along with all the important features, easy learning curve and fast and easy to use AJAX interface, it makes addressing customer questions quick and painless.

PHProjekt

PHProjekt is a modular application for the coordination of group activities and sharing information and documents through the Web. PHProjekt provides the following features: group calendar; project management tools; file management; contact manager; e-mail client; built-in HTML editor; Wiki; forum; export of documents to CSV, XLS, Doc, PDF, XML, RTF; synchronisation with Microsoft Outlook and PDAs; support for 38 languages; support for protocols like LDAP, XML/SOAP, WebDAV; support for 9 types of databases.

CRM – Customer Relationship Managers

VTiger

VTiger is the best 100% Open Source CRM I have come across. Sales force automation, marketing automation, customer support and service, order management and more. Fully open source with a plugin architecture that has given birth to plugins to communicate with Outlook. You can install a customer portal module, project management module and integrate it with popular shopping cart systems. Some of the add on modules are commercial and do cost.

SugarCRM

Sugar is a commercial product with an open source, community edition that is stripped down and limited as to how many user accounts you can have. Sugar is a great choice if you feel your organization may scale rapidly enough to need enterprise level solutions available in the future. More information is available at www.sugarforge.com

Get Your Blog on!

Wordpress

You can install the very same software that drives the Wordpress.com website, skin it to match your style, and extend it even further by installing plugins (done by the click of a button) that extend your blog site into just about any direction imaginable; even a shopping cart. The Ecropolis Report is powered by Wordpress. The Wordpress plugin installer is great; you can search the Wordpress plugins database and install them with the click of a button right from your WP control panel. It’s also worthwhile to mention that you can actually use Wordpress to power your website. Using Wordpress as a CMS for your business website gives you an easy to maintain site, that can be search engine optimized and social network enabled right out of the box. Best of all you can probably do it on your own or with very little help.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

A CMS manages the content of your website from text to images and photos and video. All of the CMS software mentioned here offers a great way of launching a turn-key, user-managed website in very little time an at no cost. These CMS packages will make it possible for users within an organization to manage every aspect of the website without having to possess any technical knowledge or skills. They also allow for users and groups to use permission access and management-level security control with every activity leaving an audit trail. However, because every organization is different and there will be differing goals for the website; and for that reason, there is usually some up-front customization of the visual design and information architecture, as well as the functionality; which again, can be customized using available plugins or by having developers develop custom plugins. A few of the strongest benefits across the board are the following:

• Great templates available free and commercial for skinning a site to be visually appealing
• Easily SEO optimized out of the box, an for the long run. (Ecropolis offers SEO services and consulting)
• Extensible into a plethora of functional areas, such as ecommerce.
• Can be used to build community-based websites and provide for a “social networking” platform.

Below are the three best-of-breed open source content management systems. They are all completely free and are supported by a huge community of developers and designers that have made contributions to the core or in the form of numerous plugins that can extend the functionlaity of this systems in every way imaginable. There is also a lot of commercial support for these products in the form of technical support, customization, and commercial (paid) plug-in development.

• Joomla – www.joomla.org
• Drupal – www.drupal.org
• PostNuke – www.postnuke.com

There are thousands of more great software titles available that you can download and install for free. We have a list of free software downloads that you can browse by category and link to the software maker’s website. You can also visit Tucows. com and search for software by keyword. If you find some good discoveries there be sure to come back and post comments so that our readers can benefit from that knowledge. The largest catalog of open source projects, which includes a download repository is Source Forge at www.sourceforge.net. Source Forge is really a platform built for development teams but they have an excellent search and a lot of information available about various projects posted there to help in evaluating software that you think you might use. Be sure before you do choose a software for business use; that it popular, which can be measured by how much it has been downloaded. Also check that it has been updated recently and has been around for a few years. When I’m perusing new software, I stick to those three rules at a minimum and never gone wrong. You should also Google a software title before going too far and just see what else has been written about it.

Again, as you discover great software for small business use. Drop us a comment and share your find. Also, if there are questions or you are interested in how Ecropolis might be able to help, please be sure to let us know.