Administrator's blog

As a communication company, HOLDCOM continues to look for new and innovative ways to serve our clients. We are happy to announce we have begun creating video content to further assist our clients. These short informative and hands on videos feature live action and close views of our equipment, installation, troubleshooting and more. It's also a great way for you to get to know our staff better. Check out the sample below.



Visit www.holdcom.com/videos for new and updated videos. If you want to learn more about how you can use video to promote your brand or business, come join us at this month's social media mixer here at our HOLDCOM offices. For complete details or to RSVP for this free Social Media event go to http://bit.ly/16wihl

I was about to shut off my computer and head to sleep when I found an article, 10 Amazing Sand Artists and their Artwork, on Digg.

One artist in particular, Ilana Yahav, stood out.

She doesn't manipulate with chisels or shovels, nor does she craft her art on the beach. She throws handfuls of sand on a fluorescent material and uses her fingers to create suns, sheep, doves, anything and everything.

Her art takes the medium of sculpting outside of its natural habitat. Instead of smushing millions of grains of sand together to make hardened sculptures, she creates work that changes every second. Traditional sand sculptures are static, while hers moves and flows, capturing the elusive qualities of sand. Her art is more of a performance than a final product.

Both presentations highlight the ephemeral nature of sand: the sculptures erode in a matter of hours because of the tide, while the latter can be shaken and dispersed, or a breeze could smudge the image.

This is what we need to do in business
This is what we need to do in life.

Evaluate the competition, study the medium, but always test our limits; look at projects from different angles, identify posssible problems, and figure out which solution would best fit.

Precedents don't work very well. They are cheap and easy. Each new day is individual and needs a new set of eyes.

Who knows, it could be high tide.

Checking up on the same blogs gets tiring after a while, so I decided to give myself a challenge. I wanted to find websites/blogs that provide unique services.

Demogirl is a prime example of a website that has capitalized on the Internet explosion of social applications. Demogirl "creates screencasts that help users get familiar with new web software", or in other words, they create a dummy account and test-drive applications, then share and review their findings.

Iminta acts like an RSS "Queen Bee" feed, where all of your social applications' updates gather. It resembles the "My World" page in Flock, as described in our previous entry Sound Wisdom: Flock Web Browser.

Profilactic is not what it sounds like (but it does offer protection from confusion!). You can find over 186 social applications and businesses listed in a presentable and easy-to-access display.

Just think, none of these services existed two-three years ago!

Another competitor to Twitter and Plurk just opened up: Identi.ca

As the Dow uneventfully nudged its way into the third quarter today, one highly anticipated report from the automotive industry failed to meet expectations, much to the (temporary) relief of General Motors' investors, employees and executives. Many analysts had predicted that, for the first time ever, Toyota would trump GM in total US car sales for the past quarter. Surprisingly, and despite the dramatic Prius proliferation on American asphalt, GM retained its crown by a comfortable margin. I later discovered that Toyota's marketing and limited roll-out strategy for its flagship hybrid may have pulled in the reins on the photo finish forecast. So, at least until the next race, GM will hold on to its title and struggle to maintain its first place lead. Unfortunately the same can't be said for its waning market capitalization.

Today's focus on cars also featured a story about our most wanted four wheel "friends" and their increasingly expensive appetite for gasoline (Jacqueline Mitchell, Forbes.com). As the most-wanted sedan, we'd expect Toyota's Prius to lead the pack, particularly in light of its 46 mpg EPA rating. And that it did. However, would you believe that the gas-guzzling Lexus LX Series full-size luxury SUV took the 2nd place most-wanted position? Well, it did. I suppose anyone who would wait on line to fork over the $74,700 purchase price, would have no qualms about frequent refills for this 14 mpg "hog". Talk about extremes!





By Jacqueline Mitchell, Forbes.com

For every article lauding the progressive state of the Internet there are one or two pessimists. These debbie downers hail the DotCom Crash, the uncontrollable expansion of webjunk, and the "selling out" of once free website as precursors to an inevitable Web 2.0 disintegration (not the Cure kind, though that is a great album).

A little history lesson about Message-On-Hold: Once upon a time, back in the eighties, some telecom geek invented the Music On Hold circuit (MOH) that allowed playing an audio source to callers waiting on hold. (The Hold button had been previously invented by someone trying to ignore an annoying customer but the exact chronology of that has been lost to the ages) After playing the radio for a while someone figured out that a business could use this time to promote their business to their callers on hold. (Around this time, a few companies appeared including Holdcom, to take this idea to a professional level... but I digress.)
So every business could now use their phone to inexpensively promote their products and services to almost every business caller. But alas, not every business. This MOH circuit only existed in key business systems and PBX's, ie. more expensive installed systems. One or two line off the shelf phones did not have MOH "power."
Enter Panasonic riding in on a white horse with a neat little 2 (and 3 line) phone that had a built in Music On Hold input. Now small or home business could sound like the big boys. In the those early years, we sold a bundle of these and the future looked rosy for mom and pop and even mom and pop's kids. But then the sky fell.
Panasonic was getting flack from their key phone system sales, that this neat little off the shelf phone was undermining their more lucrative business key phone sales. Guess what happened next? Faster than a political denial, these phones were off the shelf and sent to oblivion. Like they never existed. Some salespeople at Staples and Officemax refused to deny their existence, but these individuals invariably disappeared shortly thereafter with no forwarding address. The world was once again a better place for key phone system sales. But not for mom and pop.
Fast forward to 2008: A new day is dawning, and a new two line phone is on the market with that simple circuit (MOH) that can help turn your telephone calls into multi-level business promotions and customer service information centers. Yes, all the bullet points we've been espousing for years for "real" businesses with "real" business phone systems including Promote products and services, cross-sell, reduce call abandonment, answer often asked questions, and more, can now be employed by the lone one or two man (person) band working from their home or small office.
And Holdcom has got them and they're packaged with a nifty little MP3 player and custom program. You can check them out at at the Holdcom store.