It's a Mesh: merging web, mobile and traditional marketing

I'm so proud of all of the area business people who have been coming out to the free monthly social media workshops!  A number of them have been able to come to all three so far, and every month we also have new participants. A few of Monday night's participants are in the photo at right.

We were fortunate to have Ben Capozzi, Director of the Business of Art & Design Program at Southern Virginia Higher Education Center and Halifax County's King of Twitter, help out with the Twitter workshop this month. You'll be glad to know that Ben plans to help out with future workshops as well.

The Riverstone Energy Center is holding open houses every month during 2012 to allow the community to see firsthand part of our investment of Virginia Tobacco Commission funding - a unique high tech center that the Halifax County Industrial Development Authority has developed in South Boston, Virginia. Even if you're not located in Southern Virginia, if your company can benefit from 3-d modeling and simulation or advanced coatings research and technology you should be looking at Halifax County as a possible strategic location.

The Energy Center is part of a  strategic move by the Industrial Development Authority to position Halifax County as a uniquely qualified location for energy and manufacturing companies that require integrated workforce training and access to 3-D modeling and simulation and/or advanced coatings technology research and training.

You've probably heard about the controversy surrounding SOPA and PIPA, but if you're like most people you have no idea what it is, what it means, and why you should care.  SOPA stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act and PIPA stands for the Protect IP Act.  Like most things, they started out with good intentions but have dangerous implications for the future of the internet.

The goal of SOPA and PIPA is to give the government and copyright holders the ability to block access to "rogue websites dedicated to infringing or counterfeit goods," especially those outside of the US.  SOPA is supposed to protect against copyright infringement and would allow copyright owners and/or the US Dept. of Justice to seek court orders against anyone who facilitates or enables those who are infringing on copyrights. The key words are facilitates and enables - notice it doesn't say actually infringing.

Recently we've had several clients who were confused about what PayPal is and how it works, so here's a quickie overview.

A basic explanation from their own website is that PayPal is a service that enables you to pay, send money, and accept payments without revealing your financial information.  Most of our clients have questions regarding using PayPal to accept online payments, though.

Before PayPal, if you wanted to have a merchant services account (i.e. accept credit cards) you typically had to pay an application fee of up to several hundred dollars, fill out an application and authorize a credit check, and provide quite a bit of information about your business; the process took weeks to complete and was inconvenient and expensive.

While website development is our core business, the philosophy that drives our business extends much further than that.  Over the years we've been fortunate enough to work with some great clients and most of them are still with us; just today we did some maintenance work for a client who's been with us since 1997!