Archives for May 2012

Affiliate Summit Central 2012, the first Affiliate Summit in Austin, TX, kicked off with the official welcome party on May 14, 2012 with live music from The Cody Jasper Band, Sam Sliva and the Good, and FallenAsh.

The first day of the conference started at an early (by Affiliate Summit standards) 7am, when registration opened up.

Full pass holders got a limited edition Affiliate Summit t-shirt.

Emcee Heather Romiti began the day with some announcements before turning things over to Maribel Sierra, Social Media and Communities Director, Listening and Engagement at Dell.

This first day also included a Meet Market, two sets of sessions, and Ask the Experts Roundtables, which were complemented by Nate the Great, a local balloon artist.

The first day finished up with ShareASale.com hosting their traditional Under the Stars party for conference attendees.

The second and final day kicked off with a drum circle, organized by Benjy Portnoy, to wake up attendees.

This was followed by a series of sessions in a new, truncated format where they only lasted 20 minutes each.

The conference finished up with open networking after an intensive day and a half off fun and business.

Big thanks to the sponsors, speaker, and attendees.

I’ve been on a long journey with Dell products that began back in the mid-1990s. I have continued buying Dell machines for my business and family, because they’ve been reliable, easy, and fast.

My latest computer is the Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook, which is just a gorgeous, light, and speedy laptop. I was excited to get this one as a gift from Dell to share my candid views of it.

I got a chance to meet a bunch of the folks at Dell in 2010 when I was selected to sit on their inaugural Customer Advisory Panel, so thank you to them for sending the XPS 13 my way.

Anyhow, on to the XPS 13 – it’s amazing to see how Dell has evolved from some of those back-breaking laptops I used to haul around years ago.

This beauty weighs less than 3 pounds and it’s less than a quarter-inch thick, which is not so much more than an iPad.

I think this is significant, because I’ve been hearing from lots of people that they travel with their iPad over a laptop these days. Personally, I want and need the power that comes with a laptop over a tablet.

Some other specs I like are the backlit keyboard, nearly 9 hours of battery time, and the HD display (Corning Gorilla Glass – nice when it encounters my rough travel and my 4 rough kids).

It’s also got a machined aluminum body and carbon fiber base. Now that doesn’t really mean anything to me, but I like the way it looks and the fact that this enables it to be light and cool to the touch.

Now for the guts of it – the XPS 13 boots super fast with its SSD (solid-state drive) and Intel Rapid Start Technology. They’re available with 2nd generation Intel Core i7 processors.

The base model runs $999 with 4 GB of memory, a 128 GB solid-state drive, and it runs on Windows 7.

As far as ports, it’s got two USB ports and one Mini DisplayPort.

I was going to say my one issue with the XPS 13 is that I often take my laptop to use for presentations with my projector, and the projector uses a VGA connector.

But I just searched and found that I can just grab an adapter for pretty cheap to run the XPS 13 to my projector. Nice.

I’m excited to make this my everyday laptop.

Thumbtack.com, in partnership with the Kauffman Foundation, has released data indicating that Idaho, Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah are the friendliest states towards small businesses.

Small business owners gave California, Hawaii, Rhode Island, and Vermont the lowest ratings.

The Thumbtack.com Small Business Survey drew data from a nationwide universe of job creators and entrepreneurs to investigate the best places in the country to do business.

Some key findings from the survey:

• Texas had three of the top five cities (Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio and Austin), while California was home to the bottom three (Los Angeles, San Diego and Sacramento).
• Small businesses said licensing requirements were nearly twice as important as tax rates in determining overall business-friendliness.
• Among small business owners nationally, women were 9% more likely than men to feel supported by their state governments.
• An important predictor of small business friendliness was whether small business owners are aware of the state or local government offering training programs for small businesses.
• Nationwide, small businesses owned by politically conservative entrepreneurs were 17% healthier than small businesses owned by politically liberal entrepreneurs.
• Idaho, Nevada and Delaware had the most small business-friendly tax codes; California and New Mexico had the least-friendly tax codes.
• Nebraska small business owners were the most optimistic about their business improving during 2012, while Iowans were the least optimistic.
• The South was the most small business-friendly region of the country, while New England was rated the least small business-friendly.

See the full results, which include full sets of rankings, dozens of easily searchable quotes from small businesses nationwide, regional comparisons within states, and Census data comparing states’ and cities’ key demographics against those of other states and cities.