Twitter was down for several hours today. At first, the reason was unknown. Later Twitter communicated they were facing an ongoing denial-of service attack. Switching to Facebook did not help. Facebook is facing serious issues as well. The cause of Facebook’s downtime is still unknown. Could this be prevented?

The economic crisis hit hard, rather unexpectedly and affected most the whole world. It’s logical that people start looking for who’s to blame. For sure things need to change. On the other hand, I get the feeling that people also over exaggerate. They become too short-sighted. In the past months in both the US and Canada one can notice all kind of campaigns and social network claims that have been sent to prevent jobs being transferred offshore. During the past fat years, when their economy was profiting from offshoring, nobody was complaining. Can you just turn back time?

The world started with a Big Bang and now it seems that the Universe is expanding endlessly. And that’s exactly what happens with the phenomenon of social networks. In every quantifiable way, in every statistics, we can notice a massive growth of interest in social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. However, what is the future of these networks? How long will they last? What sizes are they able to reach? Does a 3712% growth in the time spent on Twitter within one year prove that the future of social networking will be bright?

For a long time the Blackberry was the mobile device of choice for the enterprise users. Recently this is changing. Some months ago I had to choose myself between a Blackberry and an iPhone. The elegant, very intuitive and smooth interface of the iPhone occurs to attract more and more business users.

Thanks to the Internet the market you can reachhas dramatically increased. If you manage to bring your business online geographical boarders will disappear. People can read about your business, while they probably could hardly do that before.  The main question is how to reach all those potential clients. Again the Internet may help because the market for advertising is shifting more and more towards online advertising. A decent Internet Marketing Strategy should become part of your marketing strategy. And your online advertising plan will for sure have to include Google Adwords! Below you will find some tricks how to use it, provided by Google.

If you have been online today, you couldn’t have missed it. A new Firefox release is available, after several hours already over 2 million people downloaded the new version. High time because the last official release is about one year old. Despite all the buzz that was going on today on Twitter and other social networking sites and blogs, what does this really mean? Who is going to use the new fancy functionalities? Based on some analysis of web statistics I presume that the first user group will be mainly software developers and web designers. Besides I do not believe that Internet Explorer will lose any market share.

The time has come to present your business online if you haven’t done it yet! Take Poland, for example, here only about 48% of businesses present themselves online. Time for a change! Recently PMR communicated that online retail is growing in Poland, like it is growing everywhere. Combined with the increase in online banking and the amount of people that have access to the Internet, the market is getting ready for the next online sales increase. Retailers and small businesses (SME) should be aware of that. Decide for yourself why you would like to (not) join this trend. Although this article is based on data related to Poland, the advise provided is applicable to all retailers and SME’s.

This week’s post “The 10 Safest Places In The World For Outsourcing” by Bob Evans led to quite some discussion online. Or probably even more discussion was initiated by his last week’s post “The 10 Riskiest Locations In The World For Outsourcing”. The conclusion of both posts is that Poland is a safe have for outsourcing.

Computerworld UK published an article in April saying: “Outsourcing Not the Big Savings Firms Expect, Study Says”. Summarizing, the recession is pushing businesses to cut the cost of their software portfolios, but most companies overestimate the savings that offshoring can deliver, as presented by CIO.com. On the other hand I firmly believe it is possible to save costs if you follow the proper approach.

They already managed ages ago! So why don’t we manage to realize something as simple as a web application? Ages ago people managed to fulfill miraculous projects with hardly any tools. Today we can choose from a wide range of tools, but still we do not manage to run a project according to the client’s needs. What goes wrong?