Boldacious Digital

Digital Business Consultant & Wordpress Consultant

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Build your own business app

Boldacious Digital is running a “Build your own business app – no programming required!” event at Destiny Hub, 49-57 Loder St, Atherton on Tuesday 19th Feb 2019 from 12 to 2pm

You can book your tickets here

Or see the event advertised on Startup Tablelands Facebook page

ST’s own digital workhorse, Seamus Campbell, will start off the year with a Lunch & Learn mini-workshop perfect for small business operators who may be a little tech-phobic. If you haven’t heard of Startup and Innovation Tablelands or attended any of their events, now is the time to begin! This group of local small business owners and innovators have a wealth of experience and skills to share. Save the date and watch this space for more details of other events.

Says Christine Doan (from Startup and Innovation Tablelands): “Seamus is one of the magical tech-savvy types amongst our ST Drivers. His special skill is to see how someone’s brain works (we are not quite as standardised as computers—and certainly more complex!) and to find ways to tweak software so the software fits the brain, rather than having to bend your brain to match your software”.

Whether you are tech oriented or not, you will love hanging with Seamus. He is so knowledgeable, generous and able to communicate his knowledge in a straightforward manner. Seamus specialises in collaborative software, which for the average person means online solutions for your business that make communicating with customers, clients and co-workers a breeze.

If you are tech-phobic, you will be even more keen to work with Seamus – he makes it possible for you and your computer can stop hating each other – and maybe even find ways to like each other! What a boon!

For any small business, and especially those in the Start-up phase or their first couple of years of business, these tech solutions will save money, time and a lot of effort. Imagine this: you are busy, you have several clients waiting to talk to you to discuss their needs, get quotes and perhaps book you for work. The longer they are waiting, the more likely it is that they will go elsewhere. You have a website but it could be doing more work than it is, you just don’t know how and you don’t have the time to work it out. Seamus from Boldacious Digital has the answers to make your website work for you.

During the workshop, Seamus will work directly with a real start-up business from the local area, Sara Isherwood from Firefly Foods – an organic catering business. Using collaborative software, he will demonstrate solutions to common problems she has, and scenarios that all small businesses face, from how to present yourself and your services professionally online, to seamlessly booking and confirming clients.

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Cate – Beyond War

Seamus from Boldacious has been supporting us for the last 3 years.

He has a great knowledge of what applications are out there and which are best to do what we want to do, with the skills that we have.

He has been on call, and is very helpful and explains things in a way that makes sense and enables us to help ourselves – we can try things knowing he will be there if we get stuck.

He set us up with AirTable to manage our media contacts and Zoom, Trello, Evernote and Google docs to help us collaborate and get organised.

He helped develop, maintain and troubleshoot for our websites and member databases using WordPress and NationBuilder, including Friends of the Earth FNQ, Wage Peace and Beyond War.

Cate – Beyond War

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Your Data: Where should you keep it?

You should keep ALL your data in the cloud! I repeat, put your data in cloud storage – very important.

Why?

One very good reason is that’s it’s safe there. If you lose laptops and external hard drives, or they get stolen or break down, they can be replaced (bloody annoying but not catastrophic); if you lose all the docs, photos, files ie all your data then that can be catastrophic. Put your data in cloud storage.

Here is a good example of this:

None of the principal cloud storage companies (eg Google, Dropbox, Amazon, iCloud) have ever (to my knowledge) had a major hack. Icloud was reported to have been hacked but that was actually a password hack which is a very different animal. A point here to remember is that Password Managers and 2-Factor Authentication (use password october) are essential!

And the major cloud storage companies encrypt your data so even if the data centres are hacked, then your data has to be un-encrypted before it’s of any use to anyone. Their encryption is the best that is available too.

Most of them keep your data in multiple data centres, so in the event of a breakdown or failure of one data centre, your data is safe in another one.

Basically they have the best engineers and technology in the world, so are far safer than your laptop or external hard drive. Their job is to keep your data safe and they are world-best at doing that.

Having said all of the above, it still is a good idea to have external hard drive local backups.

So, what about emails? I recommend using a cloud-based email provider like Gmail, Mac Mail, or Outlook 360 (not the old Outlook). All of these give you storage space as well (a nice bonus).

There are two other main advantages of cloud storage:

  1. you can access your data on all your devices – your laptop, smartphone and tablet.
  2. collaboration is easier and less time-consuming

Finally – photos on your smartphone – most people have thousands of photos! Both Android and iPhones have the ability to do auto backups to their respective clouds of all your photos.

This has two major advantages:

  1. Frees up space on your phone
  2. Keeps your photos safe if you lose your phone, or it fails, or gets stolen.

Set up and use iCloud Photos

Setup and use Google Photos 

Google Photos is currently the better option for a whole lot of reasons (for both iPhone and Android)

 

 

 

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Why you should integrate Evernote and Google Drive

Google Drive is an amazing cloud storage platform, and currently the best platform for collaborating on documents.

Evernote should be your second brain. Evernote stores information and lets you find it fast!

Once you get into the habit of storing documents on Google Drive, it can get crowded and (if you are like me, chaotic).

Although G Drive has excellent searching capabilities, it can get hard to find things. Where Evernote shines is that you can add tags and comments to help you find files.

In a match made in heaven, you can now integrate G Drive and Evernote.

This video gives an example of why you really should do this.

Now setting this up is very easy – just watch the video below to see how.

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Google Drive or Dropbox

Where to store your files in the cloud?

The 2 big boys are Google Drive and Dropbox; there are others, of course, but we’ll just look at these two today.

The best solution is to use both, but you need to know the strengths of each, so you can decide what to store where.

They both store files (documents) in the cloud for you; for backup, collaboration or sharing.

Both let you share selected documents with other people.

Both have free versions available with limited storage.

DROPBOX

  • syncs just your changes so uses less data
  • easy to keep local versions of your documents (handy if travelling by plane)
  • you can fine-tune your sync options eg keep local copies of some of your files, but not all
  • searching is not as good as Google Drive
  • you have more sharing options than Google Drive

google-drive-searchGOOGLE DRIVE

  • a bit safer than Dropbox, although both are very secure
  • Google Drive does have better encryption
  • far better searching: Google Drive search is excellent (see image)
  • will search for text and items with images and pdf’s (Dropbox now has this for Professional and Business accounts)
  • Google Photos is incredible – it sorts and labels automatically, and you can set up your phone to backup all photos automatically to Google Photos
  • by far the best for collaborative editing of documents. It is brilliant! You can allow people to edit, suggest or make comments on your documents.

BEST SOLUTION

The best solution is to use both! You could use Google Drive for collaboration and photos, and Dropbox for backup and when you need local versions of your documents.

You get heaps of space this way and the best of both worlds.

The one big caveat is that you MUST have a system or set of rules for what is stored where – otherwise you’ll spend frustrating time trying to remember which cloud storage each document is on.

Of course, for Microsoft-centric users there is OneDrive; and for mac users – iCloud