The days of everyone using the same browser and running on the same Operating System are over.  With Firefox, Safari and Chrome picking up speed on Internet Explorer, it’s more important than ever to make sure your app is  cross-browser compatible.  Making certain your app looks and functions nearly the same across all “major” browsers will allow the best audience experience possible and most importantly, allow maximum traffic.

The numbers say it all. The chart below (courtesy of www.arstechnica.com) represents July2011 Worldwide browser stats.  As you can see, Firefox is closing the gap on the IE dominance, followed by quickly growing Chrome and Safari audiences.

In a 2010 W3i survey on browser behavior, nearly 700 users provided feedback.  When asked if they use more than one browser, 43% of users responding stated they did.   When asked if more than one person uses the computer their survey was taken on, 51% replied “yes”.    These results echo the need to make sure your app functions well in the various browsers available.

So how do you test compatibility? The best way would be to download every browser you want to test and walk through it just like a normal user would.  If you’d rather take a shortcut, there are many online resources available to assist checking browser compatibility.  Many options exist online, including  Adobe BrowserLab, Browsershots CrossBrowserTesting, IE Tester and more.  While testing browsers for compatibility, keep in mind the different versions of each brand.

Don’t forget mobile. Mobile commerce is growing steadily.  As with desktop browsers, mobile browsers do not function the same.  As consumers rely more heavily on Internet via mobile devices, testing appearance and functionality is vital to preventing lost revenue.  Help is also available with many mobile browser compatibility-testing tools to choose from.

If you’re looking for ways to increase your reach, it’s important to keep browsers top of mind.   Making your app cross-browser compatible will maximize the effectiveness of your site and application by allowing the most traffic available.    Last, but definitely not least, your users will thank you.

Need help discussing other ways to increase distribution?  W3i has the people and the tools to get the job done. Contact us today.

Sue Ann Heck, Account Development Manager, W3i, LLC

Sue Ann has extensive experience in account management and prides herself in building quality, long-term relationships with W3i’s valued partners.

TV versus Web

January and February are, with out a doubt, major months for the broadcast television industry. The two months historically play host to a majority of the major awards shows (Oscars, Golden Globes, SAGS, and Grammys) as well as prime time coverage of the President’s State of the Union Address and the holy grail of U.S. media, the Superbowl. That got us thinking, what impact does that have on web traffic when, allegedly, most America is glued to the tube? The results may surprise you.

Traffic during the State of the Union

Traffic during the Superbowl

Web Traffic Impacted By Primetime

Not shockingly the Superbowl was the winner over the State of the Union for biggest change in traffic.

• Around kick off time, traffic dropped about 30% in the W3i network.

For both the Superbowl and State of the Union we compared stats to 7 days prior. (Red Line is the event, Blue line is 7 days prior)

We’ll let you infer the rest. Congrats Greenbay.

Peter Novotny, Senior Marketing Manager, W3i, LLC
Peter uses his years of experience in Media Buying and Search Engine Marketing to lead the B2C user acquisition efforts for W3i’s web properties.

Apple loves to mark major milestones with big giveaways and while my fingers are crossed that I download the 10 billionth app from the App Store, Horace Dediu over at Asymco decided to mark the occasion by revisiting app growth metrics. He analyzes them alongside iTunes Music Store Growth.

By now I’m sure you’ve seen countless blogs including TechCrunch report Horace’s finding that more than 60 apps have been downloaded for every iOS device sold.But there’s a more watershed finding in his data.

From Britney, GaGa and Bieber To Angry Birds, Groupon and Pandora

Hands down, the most stunning inference from Horace’s data is the quantity of app downloads and the growth rate of the App Store. Chief among his findings:

• 30,000,000+ daily app downloads versus around 10,000,000 daily song downloads
• The App Store will hit 10,000,000,000 downloads in less than half the time it took iTunes to mark the milestone

Ponder for a moment what those numbers allude to. . .Apps are more in demand than digital music in Apple’s distribution channels.

The red line below shows the daily download rate of apps, while the blue line indicates music. The slope of app line is significantly steeper than that of music.

Even with the emotional and cultural significance that music plays across the world, the number of daily app downloads far exceed and outpace growth rate of music downloads. As a former Top 40 radio guy that would be lost without his Pandora, Shazam and I Heart Radio Apps these stats literally blows my mind.

Apps Are Just Getting Started

Horace draws three conclusions from his findings

1. Apps overtaking digital music is a watershed event. Apps are a new medium: they will impact all other media.
2. As the number of apps attached to any single device continues to increase, apps create increasingly higher switching costs for users.
3. Apps consumption is increasing at a rate to overtake the PC software market.

You can read his full report here. Needless to say it’s a great time to be developing an app and if you can solve the discovery challenge, the potential is tremendous.

Ryan Ruud, Associate Marketing Communications Specialist, W3i, LLC
Ryan is a new media communicator with a decade of traditional and emerging mass media experience. He uses his passion for apps and connecting people in W3i’s marketing/communications efforts.

So you created a killer new app, tested it thoroughly, ran a beta test by some early adopters and now it’s time for release.

Many things can go wrong in the wild. Computer configurations vary greatly and users have a wide variety of system settings and hardware configurations. Many variables can affect the performance of your app—slow Internet connection, low-end hardware, buggy drivers and antivirus software to name just a few. It’s not uncommon to release an app and find out later it is failing on one segment of computers—and even worse…you have no idea why nor can you reproduce the problem in a lab!

More often than not, all you will hear is “it’s not working,” and for every one of those you can assume there are ten more who simply uninstall your product and move on.

You can save yourself a lot of time and aggravation by building performance monitoring into your app. It is a great way to gain insight into how your app is performing for your users, and it will help you react quickly and fix problems before your app fades into obscurity because of poor app performance.

Plan from the Beginning

Plan to implement app performance monitoring from the beginning. As with any code change, it is more difficult and far more expensive to go back and retrofit performance monitoring. Although there are some methods that don’t require extra code at all, you at least want to make sure that you are ready with whatever tools you use on the release date.

Have a Method to Receive Information

There are a number of ways to send information from your app. If you are creating your own solution, the most common method is a simple POST operation to a web page on your server. From this page you can capture information and store it in a database or save log files to disk. You can then query the data to find out if problems are occurring on a particular type of computer or system configuration. If you don’t have a database, you can simply capture files, or if you want an even simpler solution, just set up some hidden pages to track a hit counter. This won’t give you as much information but it can still help you find out if a particular type of problem is happening.

There are third party solutions available too. For example, Microsoft’s Windows Error Reporting (WER) is a set of technologies that captures crash data and makes it available to developers. WER provides reporting as well as dump files, which enable you to load a crashed session into your debugger and view stack trace and variables at the point of failure. You need to follow certain steps when building your app to make crash data useful. You also need to setup a Winqual account to access the information. The service is a bit cumbersome to use, but it can be a very powerful tool to help diagnose problems in the wild.

Know when your App is Performing Badly

Having the tools to capture information is great, but it’s not going to help much if you don’t know when to capture it. If you’re using a third party solution to capture crash data, information gathering is usually automatic, but if you are building error logging and reporting into your app, you want to spend some time during design and development to identify the key performance points and build in measures to detect when the app is not performing optimally. It may be tracking download time if your app downloads files from the Internet, or detecting application errors and crashes. Whatever it is, take the time to build these measures into your app and trigger an action whenever they fall below an established baseline.

Be Sensitive with User’s Personal Information

In any scenario where you are sending information back to your servers be aware of privacy concerns and take care both to inform your users and ensure that you are not unintentionally sending sensitive data. Data collection practices should be covered by your privacy policy. It is also good practice to prompt the user and ask for permission before transmitting data to your servers.

Capture System Information

Problems in the wild—especially those that cannot be reproduced in a lab—are often related to system configuration. You want to capture this information so you can quickly find out if a group of users having problems have the same system setup. It may be a particular version of Windows, a driver, a version of a shared component or possibly even conflict with another app such as a virus scanner. There are a number of API functions that you can use to gather system info. You can also find system info in the registry along with info about other apps installed on the computer. For example you can look under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall to get a list of software that is installed on the computer. If you are using shared components such as MFC or .NET, you should locate the relevant DLLs and get version information. Version information for your own app and components is also important. After releasing updates you want to know if errors are happening in the new version or the older ones.

Capture Error Data

Of course the most important information is: what happened? You want to capture either a crash dump or some kind of log file (or both if you can). Crash dumps can be obtained through Winqual or you can capture your own by building support into your application. Log files may be easier to deal with, but they don’t always give you the detailed information such as stack trace and variable values. Log files also require you to add lots of code to write messages to a file. However, log files can often provide information you won’t get from a dump file, such as the chain of actions a user took leading up to a crash. This is why it’s a good idea to employ both methods whenever possible.
Take care when adding logging to your app. You need to ensure that log files roll over regularly and don’t accumulate indefinitely on the user’s computer. Also make sure they don’t grow too large to send. In particular, watch out for loops which can dump thousands of messages into your log file. It’s a good idea to add safety checks to your logging routines to check if the log file has gone over a predetermined limit.

Conclusion

Computer configurations and installed software vary greatly in the wild and are often the cause of app performance problems that were missed in testing. There are far too many combinations to test thoroughly in a lab or during development. While rigorous testing is key to quality assurance during the development phase, having a strategy to diagnose and fix post-release problems is also a very important part of managing your application life cycle.

Bill Zitomer, Software Development Team Lead, W3i, LLC
Bill uses his over twenty years experience to build W3i’s core desktop products as well as back-end technologies.

Recently W3i released a new service, Apperang.com, for incentivizing users to download mobile apps for their iPhone®, iPad®, and iPod touch® devices

W3i was able to create this service in a couple of months because of some great industry leading tools. Apperang.com was built using Microsoft’s .NET framework and ASP.NET web application framework. ASP.NET provides many out of the box features that make creating sites quick and simple. Things like Site Membership and Forms Authentication, Session State management, Master Pages and customizable controls provide the fundamental pieces needed to build a robust web application.

Site Membership

ASP.NET provides an out of the box solution to provide membership to your site. With a few simple configuration settings and the use of the Web Site Administration Tool you can setup users and roles for your site. There are also a series of controls that ship with ASP.NET that allow you to provide login, registration, and password recover functionality to your own site with no extra coding. Even if you don’t use the built in ASP.Net Membership, Forms Authentication provides a quick way to manage users throughout the page life cycle and most authorization can be handled by setting up configuration settings in the Web.config file. If a page needs to display content differently based on whether or not a user is logged in or based on a role, the LoginView control can handle this declaratively, meaning no extra code needs to be written. All of this out of the box functionality is extendable. So even if you need more control over certain behaviors you can write you own custom code using defined extension points.

Session State

ASP.NET has a built in session management system. It’s part of the page life cycle and handles the loading and persisting of session data. You can store just about any kind of Object in session making it very easy to store and retrieve data. You can choose from five different modes Off, InProc, StateServer, SQLServer, and Custom. Each one has an advantage and disadvantage, mostly dealing with a balance between performance and the durability of the data after the applications and servers are no longer running. The Custom mode allows you to build your own Data Provider if you have specific needs on where and how your session data is stored.

WCF

In the near future W3i will be releasing the Apperang Mobile App into the App Store. Another great advantage to using the .NET Framework is access to the Windows Communication Foundation or WCF. WCF provides the ability to expose functionality in a Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) type fashion without being locked into a specific protocol for communication between systems. W3i has taken advantage of WCF by utilizing the RESTful services feature in order to expose key functionality to the Apperang Mobile App. In a matter of a few weeks we were able to expose a set of services with the same functionality that was built into the website by utilizing WCF. WCF also allows us to add or change protocols with simple configuration changes. So if at some point in the future we need to expose the service using SOAP we can do this by adding a new endpoint configuration. The other great advantage of WCF is that it is fully extendable and can be customized at about every point in the pipeline, though you probably won’t need to as it is full featured out of the box.

Expect to see W3i release some new sites and services in the upcoming months utilizing more of Microsoft’s .NET framework and ASP.NET.

The legal notice that users now see when they go to the LimeWire website sends a pretty strong message: “Downloading or sharing copyrighted content without authorization is illegal.” After a four year long battle, a New York judge finally put the kibosh on LimeWire’s lackadaisical methods for policing its peer-to-peer free music service. The industry has been in an uproar over the under-the-counter music that’s making its way into users’ headphones at the hands of LimeWire.  High profile labels are left to sit back and say, “Show me the money!” with multi-millions in damage claims. In the meantime, millions of users are left searching for a new source for free music.

The recent federal court order requiring LimeWire to cease distribution of its software is a boon to those who own the rights to many of the shared files.  While they did not receive a big check as back payment, they did get the satisfaction of seeing that their collective voices are being heard. Chalk up a small victory for copyright law.

The social media world is buzzing with news of the shut down as LimeWire users gradually become aware they no longer have access to their free music source. It has been suggested in numerous circles that people will discover a new means of getting the music they want for free. But, with this new crack down on piracy, it is wise to avoid sources that are less than reputable and dabble in the copyright infringement game.

The solution to LimeWire users’ dilemma is to utilize an alternative that takes a lawful approach to free music downloads. One legit player in the market is Music Oasis, owned and operated by W3i, who works directly with the artists and labels. These partnerships are legally defined through license agreement, thus making Music Oasis an exciting white hat option for discovering new artists and titles.  As the Music Oasis inventory of fresh, new music continues to grow, more users are finding it a refreshing change.  Moreover, Music Oasis is spyware and virus free since the download is done through InstallIQ, which is certified in the TRUSTe Trusted download program  which generates a level of security that file sharing companies like LimeWire have struggled to provide.

Is the free legal music download the wave of the future now that peer to peer file sharing has taken a mighty swat to the hand? Or, will we see more artists raising their collective fists in frustration as new players move in to take LimeWire’s place in the dark alley of infringement?

Randi Kucala, Marketing Specialist, W3i, LLC
A proponent for Internet users, Randi endeavors to make every interaction with W3i’s sites a positive one. She specializes in copy writing and on-page SEO.

Where are the top three places you spend your time, I imagine your list looks like this:  work, in bed and in the car.

Regardless of which one of those three locations you’re at, applications are a touch, flick or wipe away.

With the killer success of App Stores, apps for handheld devices clearly are on fire. But what does the future look like for apps in cars coupled with car electronics and who’s in the game?

Who better to get the answers from then the CEO behind one of the most successful auto apps in the Apple AppStore, Pete Tenereillo. Pete is the CEO of Trapster, an auto app that is consistently in the top two spots in “Navigation” for the App Store.

Rob Weber, the co-founder and Vice President of Business Development for W3i got a chance to chat with Pete at the iPhone/iPad DevCon 2010 in San Diego to discuss app distribution to cars.

Pete says there are three key players in the game of in car apps. OEM Systems who build navs and try to sell them as a “part” for your Mercedes, Chevy etc.–like OnStar, AcDelco and Uniden. Think back to the OnStar campaign, “standard on every new Chevy.” The app came as is on the Chevy.

Car manufacturers are also in the game doing their own thing, but for them they just want access to the app to rebrand and repackage it. Finally you have aftermarket folks like Pioneer where  consumers buy them after they own the car to be installed on their car.

“Most of the next generation OEM and aftermarket supplier nav systems seem to be based on Android, while many car manufacturers are building proprietary connected nav systems based on either standard or proprietary technology,” says Tenereillo.

Tenereillo still contends that users will only want to download apps to one device, a phone or tablet, which can then be docked in a vehicle. The apps would run from the device, rather than be stored in the vehicle.  This seems to be the way Samsung also thinks the market for in car apps will go, their new tablet will also feature in car docking accessories.

“There is another whole school of thought in connected nav systems, where the car simply becomes a UI for what’s already on the phone, clearly voice commands, and maybe even heads-up display at some point,” Tenereillo says.

In the end, all of the players are facing competition from apps like Google Nav on the Droid

Ford seems to be muscling their way into the game after their announcement at CTIA 2010, that they’re inviting more development for car apps.  Where will the auto/app world move to next? Having apps on one device is important, but cost is the biggest factor, sound off below.

MinneBar 2010, an (un)conference aimed at getting Minnesota tech and design communities together, was held on May 22^nd at Best Buy Headquarters.  Here’s a short recap of the event and what’s new on the Minnesota tech scene:

Opening remarks were by MinneBar co-founders Luke Francl and Ben Edwards. They thanked sponsors, including W3i.

The first session I attended at MinneBar 2010 was “Legal Implications of Limewire on File-Sharing Business Models” by Ryan Miest of Robius Kaplan Miller Ciresi, which described how most of the copyright concerns involving file-sharing networks go back to the Sony BetaMax VCR law suit from 1984. No one thought Napster had a leg to stand on. Others like Grokster andLimewire were able to continue after learning not to be centralized like Napster. The Limewire decision is likely to be appealed with respect to the courts findings of personal liability of their CEO. I didn’t think they sufficiently covered veil piercing.

Graeme Thickins briefly introduced me to Rick Mahn founder of Social Media Breakfast Minneapolis and Myke Roventine. I joined about 75 others to hear Myke’s MinneBar session, “Social Web Design: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back”. Myke pointed out what he felt were flawed design strategies by the market leading social media players like Facebook, Twitter, Google and Yahoo. Does everyone need to put their Twitter feeds on their blog? The Twitter feeds miss the context of the conversation, and aren’t making the web better when being on others’ blogs. He also commented that Facebook has changed functionality multiple times unnecessarily, such as moving the search box several times over the past couple of years. These unnecessary changes caused confusion for users. He also commented how Twitter’s “infinite scrolling” for tweets could be improved by adopting additional UI controls such as those found on BlipFM. He said the big guys are trying the changes instead of user testing. Phil Wilson remarked during the session how this was “try fast, fail fast.”  Also during the session Steve Borsch announced that he just deleted his Facebook account due to privacy concerns.

Next I went to “Bowling for Market Share- How to Grow Your Startup by Narrowing its Focus” by Curt Prins. Curt provided very good start-up marketing advice. Curt laid out his very pragmatic approach to B2B marketing for tech start-ups, and the developers in the audience definitely seem to embrace his methods.

Over lunch, Robert Stephens who was so gracious to advocate for Best Buy to allow Minnesota techies to use their space, briefly remarked on Best Buy’s strategy around digital televisions, and his recent trip to Google IO.

Next at MinneBar, I caught Aaron Kardell’s iPhone app marketing session entitled, “Getting started with iPhone & iPad Development.” Aaron is the founder of Performant Design and developer of the popular iGarageSale app.  Aaron shared his lessons learned in iPhone app marketing, such as the importance of getting on the top 100 lists, requesting app store reviews within your app, ideally after the user has been using it for about a week, some ideas on how to get noticed by Apple (such as taking out ads in Cupertino on Facebook), using roadblock ad campaigns at popular Apple/Mac blogs, using incentive app downloads to burst your downloads, and using vendors like Tapjoy and Flurry App Circle.  After the business discussion, Aaron coded an Italian food finder iPhone app using Yelp’s API and Mapkit.

The next MinneBar 2010 session I attended was “How to Measure P&L When Your Price is Free” by W3i’s Product Manager, Kristin Oberhaus. With users wanting free apps on the Internet, you need to balance the demand gained for free app versus paid app promotion.  Kristin pointed out various models to drive revenue for free applications, including cross-subsidy, three-party, freemium, and nonmonetary.  When free is your model, your P&L must be based on the value driven by your free app and not the price.   

Next I spoke on a panel of Minnesota tech thought leaders, and discussed “How Can Minnesota be Better”. Thank you to Jeff Pesek and Mike Bollinger for inviting me to participate. The session was largely centered on the culture of risk aversion in Minnesota, how Minnesota tech start-ups need to focus on home runs and not just niche singles and doubles, and funding. Jon Dahl, co-founder of YCombinator-backed, Zencoder said that if Minnesota was going to try an incubator concept like YCombinator or TechStars the incubator would need a lot more cash, given the lack of local angel funding and VC activity, and a mentorship program– both essential elements of YCombinator.

MinneBar 2010 proved to be a great place to network with top Minnesota tech experts. I spent a couple of hours after the sessions ended schmoozing with several new faces, including Derrick Shields & Dylan Petersson & of WebproLeads, Matt Bauer of Pedal Brain, and Thomas Grabowski, co-founder of LogLogic. I also listened in as the first ever Minnespark award winners were announced. 

Further, it was refreshing to hear a lot of buzz about Minnesota tech jobs. I gathered that W3i is not the only company hiring right now. It seemed to be a common theme that Minnesota tech jobs are in abundance as many of the companies present indicated they have positions available.  Minnesota Recruiters survey indicates that there is optimism for job growth in 2010 and an increase in personal job security. Minnesota’s tech scene has a large, highly skilled, and growing workforce demonstrated by the energy and attendance at MinneBar and the tech job buzz being generated there.

Thanks to the organizers and attendees, along with Best Buy for allowing us to use their campus (which is absolutely cool) to promote Minnesota tech and design.  As evidenced by the increase in attendance over the 2009 event, MinneBar rocks.

Rob Weber, Vice President of Business Development and Co-Founder, W3i, LLC
Rob is an Internet marketing pioneer with over ten, profitable years evolving W3i in the consumer application industry.

So, you know you need to have a mobile app for your next campaign, but you don’t know where you should start. I asked Aleksey Cherfas, our top mobile app developer, to tell me what he thinks digital marketers need to know about app development, and he distilled his guidance around how to choose a platform, how to choose what type of technology to use, how do you determine what features to include in your mobile app, and how to drive continuous engagement.

One of the most important decisions in preparation for mobile app development is to decide which platforms you will target. Do you go for the iPhone OS, because everybody seems to be so hyped about the iPhone and iPad; Android, because you heard it is a promising open source platform; or the BlackBerry, just because this is what your boss uses? Regardless of whether you decide to cover multiple platforms right away or focus on just one from the beginning, you should start with analyzing your prospective users and the marketplace. Determine if you plan your app to have a global reach or focus on local markets and seek out device usage in those markets before committing to any particular device. A safe bet would be to single out one device to start with and then gradually expand to others, focusing on those that are more relevant to your domain.

Once you decide on the platform, you have at least three choices in terms of the type of applications you can develop. You can go for developing a native app, which takes advantage of platform specific functionality and design, arguably making it easier to operate for your users, though condemning your development effort to be very complex and technologically involved.

On the other end of the difficulty spectrum in the world of mobile app development are Web apps. These applications are Web pages that are rendered inside a mobile browser and capitalize on the browser’s multitouch technology for navigational interaction. Some basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is usually sufficient to build a simple and effective application. There are even frameworks that allow you to harness the power of JavaScript in mobile browsers without much effort. JQTouch, a jQuery plug-in for mobile app development, is one such framework.

Your third option is a combination; kind of a half-native, half-Web app where you would create a native app that uses a browser engine for rendering your content as Web pages but requires you to develop your own navigation instead of using built-in mobile browser navigation controls. This option is a little more technologically involved than a simple Web app. Because you are using a browser engine for displaying your content, the effort is not quite as involved as with the native app.

At this point, it should be mentioned that there are several services that try to solve the multiplatform conundrum and complexity of native development, making your entrance to mobile app development a lot easier. These services will allow you to write your code once, in many cases using JavaScript and HTML, and they will take care of compiling applications into the native code for different devices. Some of the more prominent of them are Rhomobile, PhoneGap, and Titanium. If you plan to develop an app by yourself, do give high consideration to these services.

As you think about the design of your mobile apps, consider these options. You can either make your design very specific to the standards and conventions of each platform, or use your design from other domains (website, desktop software) and transplant it onto the mobile app. Even with the array of platforms out there, it’s possible to use blueprints that will nicely fit into different platforms without violating too many conventions for each platform. There’s no right answer when it comes to design. If you deviate from the standards, you should still stay within familiar metaphors so that the users don’t have to work too hard to learn how to use your mobile app.

The main difference of mobile apps from your other domains is limited display area, so keep it very simple and to the point. Don’t try to incorporate every single feature into the first version of your app. Start with a simple feature of essential functionality and let the user feedback drive your future functionality and application design. One way to keep functionality to the minimum is a product requirements document (PRD). In its simplest form, PRD is a list of application requirements (features) with a brief explanation and some weights attached to each feature. The commonly used weights are “must have,” “good to have,” and “may have.” Keeping these weights in mind makes it easier to set development priorities and move unessential application features into the next releases. Again, keep it simple – think in terms of “must have” requirements for the first release.

Even after users install your app, you are still only one of many that occupy their home screen and will constantly need to compete for their attention. Updating your app often is one approach to keep users engaged and interested. Many successful apps release updates at least once a month. With each update they address bugs and performance issues, but most importantly they try to come up with a small new feature that will keep users interested and prompt them to re-download and open your app.

With so many options to choose from when developing for mobile platforms, your decision should be based on your requirements and resources. If you are to remember one takeaway from above, it’s: keep it simple.

Rob Weber, Vice President of Business Development and Co-Founder, W3i, LLC
Rob is an Internet marketing pioneer with over ten, profitable years evolving W3i in the consumer application industry.

Picture this: you have all the beloved pictures from your first child on your laptop. You took the time to organize them by month and importance.  You renamed them from the archaic naming scheme that your camera uses to something like “babyname.FirstSteps.jpg”. The screensaver on your laptop cycles through the pictures for all to see. Then one day the laptop makes a dreaded noise and you see the lovely blue screen of death and POOF, your pictures and everything else on your laptop are gone or corrupted.  Devastating!  You need a backup plan.

Did you have anything backed up to another source other than your laptop? Did you put them on CD’s, DVD’s, an external hard drive, or the cloud? You need to think about these things in the modern age that we live in with digital media and our growing dependency on it. You can use cloud based backup services such as mozy.com or carbonite.com to back up your files. You can use external hard drives or DVD’s, but you need to keep them offsite at a trusted friend’s house or a bank deposit box. However, they need to be easily accessible so you can keep them updated.  I bet you are thinking “Why do I need to keep them offsite – that seems pretty inconvenient?”  A slight inconvenience will be worth it if your house burns down and your only backup goes with your laptop in poof of smoke and flames. Theft is another reason to backup your data and keep a copy in an offsite location.

Businesses also need to keep this in mind. You can backup data all you want within your data center but what if your data center disappears tomorrow?  Where are your backups? Ask your IT staff if your data is backed up and can be retrievable in the event of disaster. Ask yourself how important your business data is and how devastating it would be if it was lost.  An ounce of protection today can prevent a ton of pain tomorrow. I don’t care if your backup solution is a manual file copy from one office to another. The point is that you need to have a backup plan, so think ahead and prepare for potential disasters and how you would survive them.

There are numerous software packages and companies that specialized in enterprise disaster recovery tools. Commvault is one of the industry leaders that have a holistic backup solution. We, at W3i, utilize Commvault for our enterprise backups both in our data center and to copy data to an offsite location in the event of a disaster in our production data center. We test key systems on a quarterly schedule to ensure that we have full faith in our backups.  Our confidence level of our backups is extremely high. How high is your confidence level?

How would it feel to lose the precious pictures of your first born? How devastating would it be if your company lost its essential production databases? Plan for the worst, and you will be prepared if it happens.  If you have any other advice for backing up your data, feel free to leave it in the comments?

Matt Brauchler, System Administrator, W3i, LLC
Matt has over 7 years expirence working in Information Systems. He is a System Administrator for W3i with an emphasis on Enterprise Virtualization and Disaster Recovery Solutions. He is also a lawn perfectionist and enjoys learning new technology.