Totally Incorrect » David

TweetsGiving 2009

David — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:01:00 +0000

So what are you grateful for this Thanksgiving?

For many of us it has been a tough year (relatively speaking of course, we still have things better here in the US than most other people) but there is still much to be grateful for.

In my case, I have a great family, work with some fantastic people and have had a chance to make a difference in people’s lives since I met the great people involved in 12for12k.

I’m really looking forward to Thanksgiving dinner where I’m breaking with tradition and cooking a nice tenderloin of beef.

What about you? What are you grateful for this year?

Want to show your gratitude and help others? Sign up for the TweetsGiving community – make a small donation if you want! See below…

This post was created as part of a global groundswell of gratitude called TweetsGiving. The celebration, created by US nonprofit Epic Change, is an experiment in social innovation that seeks to change the world through the power of gratitude. I hope you’ll visit the TweetsGiving site to learn more, and to bring your grateful heart to the party by sharing your gratitude, and giving in honor of that for which you’re most thankful.

***Very Important Step: Make Your Pledge

We hope in addition to sharing your gratitude this TweetsGiving, you’ll also pledge a gift of $10 (or more) in honor of whatever it is you’re most grateful for. By doing so, you’re helping to build a classroom, orphanage/boarding facility, cafeteria and library at Epic Change’s partner school in Tanzania, all out of sheer gratitude.

It only takes two minutes to pledge, just select $10 (or more) in the widget below and click on the orange give button. Thanks!

Totally Incorrect Podcast – July 2009

Big 12for12k bash – Live in Lowell

David — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:07:54 +0000

For the December “Homeless” theme, the New England 12for12k team would love to invite you to Live in Lowell! – a special 12for12k event.

Live in Lowell! takes place on Thursday, December 10th and will be an evening of music, networking and fun in support of MA Coalition for the Homeless.

There will be live music all night with some of the coolest local musicians as well as raffles and auctions.

All in all, a great opportunity to meet with other social media enthusiasts, support a great cause at a time of year they need the help and have a good time as well.

Our venue, The Mambo Grill, is right in Downtown Lowell, Mass – where the American Industrial Revolution was born. Lowell is easy to get to from all the main highways and there is parking on the street or in the garage just around the corner.

Live in Lowell!

At the Mambo Grill
129 Merrimack Street
Lowell, MA 01852

December 10th, 2009
Starting at 7.00PM
$10.00 donation (more if you like) at the door.

If you can’t make it to Lowell, we plan to stream the event live on the 12for12k site.

Want to help out? Great – you can contribute right here:

Free video streaming by Ustream

12for12k Live!

David — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 13:13:25 +0000

Getting 12for12k out of our computers and right to real people – my friend Rich Marti organized a great live music event at The Rock Cafe in Rocky Hill, CT. This was all in support of Musicians on call – the 12for12k charity for October.

If you missed the event, you can check out my slideshow of images with the soundtrack coming from the live band.

Musicians on Call is a group of great people making life better for unwell people. Please support them. I have 8 Google Wave invites left and if you leave me a message in the comments that you’ve donated $35 or more, I’ll add you to the invite list. How’s that for a win-win!! (November 1st only)

Use the Chip-In widget below to contribute.

Totally Incorrect Video-cast! 12for12k

David — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 20:40:42 +0000

If you read Totally Incorrect, or hang out with me at Twitter, you’ll know that I support the charity movement 12for12k

For a while, I’ve wanted to put a video-cast of my thoughts together and finally got around to it.

To get more information, here are some links:

12for12k.org website

Follow Danny Brown on Twitter

Follow Henie Reisinger on Twitter

Musicians on Call

Doctors Without Borders

The brilliant bluesy theme music is by Lee Douglas

Want to contribute? Do it right here:

What do you think? Do you see social media as a good way for non-profits to thrive? How could 12for12k do a better job? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Mass Innovation Night – #MIN7

David — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 03:19:55 +0000

Amazing, tonight was MIN7 – the seventh in the series of Mass Innovation Nights. The concept seems to get better all the time, with some great companies being introduced and a new idea for the format as well.

For the first time, it was possible for innovators to meet one on one with legal experts, finance experts and banks to help get their businesses off to a good start.

As always at Mass Innovation Nights, there was a company that really caught my eye. This time it was mybrainshark.com – wacky name, but a great way to host presentation on-line. This is something I’ll be checking out for sure.

Check here for details on all the companies at MIN7.

As usual, I had the trusty iPhone with me – here are some of my favorite images from the evening:

Storm in the Cloud

David — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:40:19 +0000

Storm in the Cloud

I must confess I’d pretty much forgotten about the T-Mobile Sidekick. Some time ago, it seemed to be popular with the younger set as a texting and communication toy – I vaguely recollect my daughter telling me she wanted one, but iPhones and other cool devices consigned the Sidekick lust to history.

A while ago, the maker of the SideKick, Danger Technologies, was purchased by Microsoft and that’s the last I heard of it.

Until this weekend; when it was announced that Microsoft/Danger had gone and lost a lot of their user’s data while trying to complete a network upgrade.

The Sidekick is actually a clever little device – it is a cellphone with a slide-out keyboard that basically acts as a dumb terminal for applications hosted on Danger’s servers, it’s a cloud computing device that’s been around since before the term was fashionable. All the user’s data such as contact lists, text messages etc, is also stored on those servers.

Cloud computing has been around a while now and is growing rapidly. Until now, the biggest objections to the concept seem to have been related to privacy concerns and downtime. I don’t think anyone seriously thought cloud computing providers would just lose all the data.

Now that the unthinkable has actually happened (whoever would have thought that Microsoft of all organizations wouldn’t take the trouble to have a proper backup plan?) I thought it would make sense to look at my own exposure to the cloud and what I can do to make sure my stuff is safe.

There are a number of cloud computing companies that have some of my files.

Google:
Gmail – I’m a big user and have a ton of information stored there. I’d hate to lose all of this and currently take care of Google to take good care of my data. A copy of all my Wordpress database backups live in Gmail as attachments.

Google Docs – I use this for a number of tasks including a lot of our business marketing files. I do have a lot of these files on local computers

Google Calendar – my life is run from here, but I also have local backups by syncing with Outlook.

Amazon
All of the finished photo images from our wedding photo business are hosted by SmugMug which in turn keeps them on the Amazon S3 service. There have been a few outages with the system – more of an inconvenience than anything. Until this week it had not occurred to me that there was a risk of all this being lost.

Todledoo
I have a fair bit of information stored in my Todledoo account, mainly notes and tasks to complete. On the whole this isn’t critical for me, just as well since Todledoo uses servers at Rackspace which for some reason has never provided me the warm and fuzzies.

LiveDrive.
Now this one does worry me because I don’t know enough about this company to have real confidence that my data is safe. I became a LiveDrive client when it became clear GDrive wasn’t coming anytime soon and I wanted big online stoage.

I have a lot of data backed up there, RAW images from my wedding shoots, archived images, my music files, my “MyDocs” folder, Wordpress database and file backups.

On the face of it, LiveDrive offers a nice unlimited on-line storage solution at a great price. However it isn’t always available and looking in their forums shows a lot of unhappy customers. Some of the advertised service, such as being able to use LiveDrive as my iTunes folder just don’t work at all.

For the photo business, LiveDrive is convenient, but everything is backed up in a couple more places. like I say, I really don’t have the confidence that the company will be there in the long term.

You might think I’m am idiot for using LiveDrive if I’m uncertain of the service (you might be right), but I do only use it for backup, not as primary storage.

Mozy
A while ago I opened an account here (mainly because EMC is a company I’d totally trust with my data storage). Problem with Mozy is that it is backup rather than storage – if a file is removed from my hard drive it’s removed from the Mozy drive too (after a bit of a delay) which is not really what I wanted.

I still have the acocunt – because it is cheap – and files are backed up everyday. I jsut don’t know which ones. I probably should pay more attention.

Tracking and Traceability.
Two of the software companies we work with, BellHawk and Mobia have a cloud computing model for keeping track of clients assets and other items. While there are certainly some big advantages in a client not needing a huge IT infrastructure, I don’t know where these guys are hosting the data or how safe it is.

Of all the companies, other than Mozy, the one I trust the most is Google. Well, I least I trust them not to lose my data, I fully expect them to ransack it for useful things they can use to help their advertising. Come to think of it, I would have trusted Microsoft as well – shows how little I know.

What about you? Do you have a big reliance on cloud computing and data storage? Has the Microsoft/Danger fiasco changed how you use these services?

Photo “It looks like rain” by Ian Boyd

http://www.flickr.com/photos/itsaboyd/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

12for12k Musicians on Call

David — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 18:09:45 +0000

Music is incredibly powerful and can be enjoyed by everyone. We are really pleased to be supporting Musicians on Call – a unique group of musicians bring the healing power of music to bedsides in healthcare facilities. Musicians On Call uses music to promote and complement the healing process for patients, families and caregivers.

Currently Musicians on Call has chapters in New York, Philadelphia, Nashville and Miami and provides services in a number of ways:

Bedside Performance Program

Volunteer artists give live performances in-room for patients that are too ill to leave their beds. To date, Musicians on Call have played for more than 150,000 individuals and their families. They also have 32 regular scheduled weekly performances at 27 facilities throughout the four cities they currently cover.

CD Pharmacy Program

Musicians on Call also provide hospitals with complete CD libraries, as well as personal CD players for the patients to use – all free of charge. Thanks to this, there are currently 310 CD Pharmacies throughout the U.S., Puerto Rico and Dublin in Ireland.
Project Playback Program

As well as the volunteer artists who help Musicians on Call achieve their aim, the charity also has a program that gives patients the chance to have their own music recorded and produced. By using special software, patients can compose their own songs and work with volunteer professionals – artists, producers and more – and get help in the writing an recording process

How Can WE Help?

Now in its tenth year, Musicians on Call has recently launched their One Song campaign. For just $10, Musicians on Call can bring one song to the bedside of those the charity benefits the most. Our donations will mean the following:

$10 brings one song to the bedside of a patient in a healthcare facility

$50 brings 5 songs to the bedsides of patients in a healthcare facility

$150 brings music to 15 patients through MOC’s Bedside Performance Program

$250 buys 20 “Discmen” for a CD Pharmacy so patients can listen to music in their beds

$500 brings the Performance Program for three weeks to a healthcare facility

$1000 brings the Performance Program for six weeks to a healthcare facility

$2500 creates a CD Pharmacy in your name or in honour of someone

$5000 brings the Performance Program for six months to a healthcare facility

$10000 brings the Bedside Performance Program to a healthcare facility for one year

Want to contribute to this great cause? You can do so right here:

UniqueDay Events – Caren Interview

David — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 02:24:46 +0000

My interview with Caren Holliday – done for 12for12k Doctors Without Borders Event

I Love Barbara Talisman!

David — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:38:59 +0000

When I was heading out to the office this morning, I glanced at the 12for12k Twitter stream and saw a response from Danny Brown to a blog post that had been written by someone called Barbara Talisman.

Knowing that there is nothing like a good fight to start the day, I felt compelled to read the posts by both parties – Ms. Talisman first.

To say I was surprised was an understatement. You can read her contribution to American literature here. I had no idea at all who this person is, but there was a rather rude person on the weekend 12for12k conference call and I believe it was her. Check out Danny Brown’s much more dignified response on his blog here.

My first assumption was that she must have been drinking when she typed the post – I can imagine anything more bizarre. As a supporter of 12for12k and Danny Brown I was also somewhat offended by what she said.

Anyone that has connected with Danny knows that her accusations are a long way from the truth. Yes, there are quite a lot of social media “experts” that take every opportunity to promote themselves and their businesses, but Danny Brown isn’t one of them. I don’t ever recall him even mentioning his marketing business at the same time as 12for12k, I don’t see him trying to flog his latest book and I don’t see his blog full of affiliate links (well, other than the Headway theme one, but I have a Studiopress theme link so I can’t complain about that).

I often can almost feel the embarrassment of Danny when he responds to those “oooh you are soooo great @DannyBrown” Tweets and he always makes a point of highlighting the fact that 12for12k isn’t Danny Brown, it is a team of dedicated people.

Is 12for12k perfect? Heck no! I don’t believe Danny had any non-profit experience when he came up with the idea and the whole thing is a work in progress – albeit with some expert guidance from people such as Jon Aston, Rich Marti, John Haydon, Mickey Gomez, Sarah Robinson and the unique (but totally crazy) Henie Reisinger.

So why to I love Barbara Talisman?

For a couple of reasons.

First, while she timed her attack for her own reasons, she has done nothing but make Danny Brown and 12for12k look good. A lot of very influential people have come to Danny’s defence and pointed out the gaping holes in her argument.

Second, with the launch of the big Go Global 24 hour event to support Doctors Without Border, 12for12k needed every possible bit of attention on the blogs and social media sites. Barbara made sure we got it.

Thirdly, Ms. Talisman had the good sense to apologize. See this later post on her blog. She is even offering to help – we’ll see if it happens.

Finally, there is one point she made that I do agree with. Where were all these supporters of Danny Brown when they were needed to support the charities? There should have been more raised than there has been and I’m hoping that the 12for12k team (including Barbara, if she is serious about helping) can get to grips with this. The great ideas being put forward for next year are going to make a huge difference so the future looks good!

Oh, one more thing – I was reminded of the huge value there is in thinking before clicking on the Publish button – thanks Barbara, no wonder I love you!

Anyway, what is much more important right now is Go Global 24 hours. Please check the 12for12k Events page for info of how you can help!

Would you like to leverage your social media experience to help others? Support 12for12k!!

12for12k Global Event #GG24

David — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:30:22 +0000

I’ve already written about the program that the 12for12k team has been putting together to support our September charity, Doctors Without Borders,

The month has started really well with the Music as Medicine events proving to be a huge success and going a long way to meeting our goals. It is going to be up to the social media community to take over and finish the month on a high note.

12for12k is planning a gala Go Global 24 hour event that will be accessed from the Go Global 24 portal on the 12for12k site. The host for the whole 24 hours will be Henie Reisinger – one of twitter’s most dynamic and engaging personalities.

Go Global 24 (#GG24) Starts: 3 am Eastern Daylight Time on Tuesday, September 29 and Ends: 2:59:59 am Eastern Daylight Time on Wednesday, September 30.

It is really important that all the friends of 12for12k support the event by blogging and tweeting about what is going on.

We are going to offering sponsorships for 1 hour segments of the event. These can be purchased in advance by business wanting to take part and they will also be auctioned on eBay. The #GG24 sponsorships will offer some huge advantages to the sponsoring businesses.

Sponsors can use #12for12K’s collective global reach to introduce themselves, their latest innovation, their hottest new promotion, their brand… all in a way that adds value.

For example, in their hour, sponsors might conduct a question and answer session, run a contest, host a moderated panel discussion, and/or point fans and prospects to relevant information on their blog, or website, or microsite.

In addition sponsors will receive:

Real-time introductions, comments and thank yous
Will be featured on our event portal during their hour
Permanent thank yous on 12for12K.org
Lots of tweets and retweets and blog posts: before, during, and after the event

This is a huge opportunity for a business established in social media, or just getting started to create a really big impression, get out their message and have fun doing it.

However you choose to support 12for12k, you’ll get to meet a lot of influential social media people and (my favorite part) have a great time while helping others!!

There will be more information released over the next few days, so I’ll be updating this post from time to time.

Important Update: Along with the sponsorships we are also seeking items to be auctioned on eBay at the same time as the event.

If you have something you’d like to have included, you can send details to Jon Aston (jonaston@gmail.com) and he will include on the 12for12k auction site. As an alternative, you can set up the auction on your own account and set it up to donate directly to Doctors Without Borders. (I’m going to be setting one of these myself so once I know how to do it, I’ll post here again).

Should you set up your own auction, please let @12for12k know so we can include links to it. Also let us know the total you raise to update the grand totals.

If you’d like to make a direct contribution to Doctors Without Borders, you can do so via this 12for12k page.

Thanks for the support – as Jon Aston would say “You Rock!”