Since launching the beta of the www.numeroom.com web site I've contemplated adding a formal forum for feedback from the user community. I have "help" rooms set up for real time interaction but the critical mass of users is not there yet to take advantage. Setting up the forum would not be too much work as the AgilEntity framework has "forum" as a managed entity type, however that would require some integration time (say a day) ... while going over the results of an test twitter ad campaign that I started with the site www.magpie.com ( a post to come on how efficient this seems to be compared to Facebook ads...) I noticed the "feedback" tab they have prominently displayed on the right side of the screen. I clicked on it and was taken to a well designed voting system for "ideas" submitted by users of the site. This was a custom implementation of exactly the feedback that I needed for my site. So rather than spend a day adding it using an AgilEntity forum, I simply created a new account at the site behind the forum www.uservoice.com and added that into the numeroom home page within minutes in development and after a quick test phase within minutes rolled to the production servers in Texas. The usefulness of the distributed infrastructure business models becomes readily apparent when a focused piece of functionality can be added to a site so easily. In fact www.numeroom.com does the same thing but for secure collaboration and file sharing, any business or individual that lacks the expertise , time or money to implement their own solution can simply license it from us. Back to the numeroom.com feedback, I placed some ideas that I already in mind for the site as initial suggestions, if you have a beta account or just have an idea on how the site services can be made better go suggest it or vote up the existing idea.
As the US economy continues to suffer the doldrums of stagnant investment in many industries, belt tightening budgets in many of the largest cities and continuous rounds of lay offs at some of the oldest of corporations, it is little comfort to those suffering through economic problems that what is happening now, has happened before. True, the severity of the downturn might have been different but the common factors of people and businesses being forced to do more with less is the theme of the times. Like environmental shocks to an ecosystem, stresses to the economic system lead to people hunkering down to last the storm, but it is instructive to realize that during the storm, all that idle time in the shelter affords people the ability to solve previous or existing problems. Likewise, economic downturns enable enterprising individuals and corporations the ability to make bold decisions with regard to marketing , sales or product focus that can lead to incredible gains as the economic
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