Online Service Review: Website and Server Monitoring Services – AlertBot, Pingdom

At R7 Solutions, we’re experimenting with website and server monitoring services. So far, we’ve tried AlertBot and Pingdom, two of the industry leaders.

These services provide one or more remote locations from which websites or services are tested for availability. If a site is unavailable, you receive e-mails and SMS messages on your cellphone until the sites are back up again.

We’ve done this kind of monitoring using our own installed products, but are looking for an outside service since this gives us the advantage of a distributed monitoring network and advanced, professional monitoring software that is continuously maintained and improved.

Since all of our application servers reside behind firewalls (duh!), we can’t/don’t really want to use the advanced service monitoring features of AlertBot. We’d have to expose database ports and the like to the outside world, which we’re not going to do.

But we are using the website monitoring and smart content monitoring features of both systems to test that the web applications themselves and up and responding.

We’re also looking at HyperSpin and AlertFox.

When we’re done, I’ll post a review and let you know what we decided on. So far, Pingdom is winning my votes. It is easy, fast and reliable. A little pricey for what it does, but that’s true of most of the good ones.

Software Review: RoboForm – Password Manager for the Busy, the Lazy or Both

If you’re like me, you’ve got 15 different passwords for 15 different online services. There are online banking passwords, website hosting passwords, online store passwords, server and e-mail passwords. Everything is online.

What’s worse, you might not be like me, and you might have one or two passwords for all of your online services. Shame on you!

Honestly, we all do it to some degree: Left to our own devices, we’ll rotate between several passwords that we re-use between sites. This is a big problem, especially if you share your e-mail password across sites, because it leaves all of your accounts vulnerable to a single breach in any one of them. And believe me, not all services have great security policies. Or perfect personnel and hiring policies. Breaches happen.

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Online Service Review: Google Alerts – Cheap and Dirty Competitive Intelligence & Market Tracking

I use a whole slew of Google Alerts to keep up with what friends, colleagues and competitors are doing. Google Alerts is a free service of Google that automatically sends you an e-mail when a particular search comes up with new results in their index.

For example, a new article about your selected keywords will trigger an alert, just as if you’d run a search and asked for the results ordered by the latest items.

For me, as an entrepreneur, obvious keywords include the names of businesses in which I have an interest, products that I follow, and executives and others who need an eye kept on them at all times, lest they do something brilliant or dastardly without my immediate notice.

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Software Review: Joomla – Free, Open Source Content Management System (CMS)

You probably know this already, but keeping your website up to date, edited and organized can be a challenge for even the well-funded startup venture.

There’s just so much going on that it can be hard for an entrepreneur to make the time to get this crucial task completed on a regular basis. Sometimes it gets delegated to an outside company or a junior staffer, but that can result in a less than satisfactory website.

The founding entrepreneur needs to be hands-on with the company’s digital communications, even if the details are delegated, to ensure that the message is delivered. Most entrepreneurs don’t have the time, skill or inclination to play web master, editing HTML on their website, nor should they. But hiring the outside design firm to make every minor change is expensive and wasteful. There has to be a better way.

Enter the “Content Management System” or CMS.

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10 Truths About Winning Business Plan Competitions – And Raising Venture Capital

I judged the Oklahoma Governor’s Cup business plan competition a couple of weeks ago. It was 8 hours of tough, solid work, but it was rewarding.

Meeting enthusiastic groups of students presenting promising businesses – some of which are already well on their way to launch – and working with an amazing panel of smart, experienced judges, is a very satisfying experience for a serial entrepreneur.

Having now judged many years of business plan competitions, including my own mini-competition that we put on each year as a part of my class at Rice University, I’m going to jot down a quick list of things student teams need to do to be competitive in these things.

These are some brutal truths that may not be politically correct and that the books and professors probably don’t tell you about business plan competitions. Here they are.

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