June 28, 2004
My Two Cents
Did I Write That?
by Michael Nikolich
I almost had a heart attack the other day when a client responded to a vile email that appeared to come from me. The text of the message looked like a chat room string and it contained some very foul language. Whoever sent it cleverly co-opted my identity, making it look like it had been sent from my computer.
Of course, the first thing I did was call her to apologize and assure her that I would never, under any circumstances, use vulgar language in an email. The next thing I did was contact our ISP to install an industrial grade spam filter on our email server.
When I wrote my business plan for Tech Image in 1992, I never dreamed the Internet would become the pervasive business tool it is today. While email has dramatically reduced the amount of junk mail and faxes I receive, I’m positive I spend more time today clearing out the deluge of garbage that arrives in my Outlook in-box.
“Spamming is the scourge of electronic mail and newsgroups on the Internet,” says Vint Cerf, one of the pioneers of the Internet.” Spammers are, in effect, taking resources away from users and service suppliers without compensation and without authorization.”
While lawmakers try to legislate the problem and software programmers scramble to provide solutions, the problem is getting worse. Even with a spam filter in place, I still receive anywhere from 50 to 200 spams per day at work. Some days I spend an hour or more processing emails. What a colossal waste of time.
If you ever receive a message from me or one of my associates that appears to be spam, please alert me immediately and I will do everything I can to fix the problem.
We’ve Moved
Now that I got that off my chest, I wanted to crow about our new space.
Tech Image just moved from Arlington Heights to new offices in Buffalo Grove. We’re in a three-story building that is on the west border of the Buffalo Grove Golf Course, near the corner of Lake Cook and Arlington Heights Roads. In case you were wondering, I purposely made sure my office does not face the course. The links call loud enough to me without the visual reinforcement.
The new space is beautiful and we have settled in after a relatively painless move. The new address is 1130 Lake Cook Road, Suite 250, Buffalo Grove, IL 60089. Our phone number has been changed to 847-279-0022 and the fax line is 847-279-8922. Our email addresses remain the same - first.last@techimage.com.
Stop by for a visit!
Tech Image Beta Tests Analyst Views
Finally, Tech Image has been selected as a beta tester for Analyst Views from Bitpipe, Inc. Analyst Views is positioning itself as the leading one-stop online resource for IT analyst reports and market research and we have found this service to be a marvelous tool. With just a few clicks, we can pull up information from more than 100 analyst organizations that includes executive summaries of reports, the author of the reports and even summaries of where companies are receiving coverage. There’s also a mechanism to help us quickly purchase the research if we desire.
Right now, only a handful of PR firms in North America are using this service. Ask your account manager to provide a quick analysis of the coverage your organization is receiving from the leading IT analyst firms and benchmark those results to your competition. You may be surprised by the results!
We’ve always been an early adopter for the latest and greatest tools the PR industry has to offer. Tech Image was the first U.S. PR agency to have a Web site, and our proprietary database of media and analysts is still legions ahead of what most agencies use. Analyst Views is yet another reason Tech Image is becoming the must-have public relations firm for technology leaders.
Anyway, that’s my two cents’ worth.
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