JBCR Virtual Solutions Blog

Archive for October, 2009

Did you try to get insur­ance for your home and home office just to be turned down?

Did you decide to get home insur­ance with­out claim­ing  you have a home office?

I have such a story to tell you, but first let me say that if you have home insur­ance, and you have a home office, and have not declared you do, your insur­ance will be void if any­thing hap­pens to you. Trust me, it is true.

 My Night­mare!

After years of  hav­ing home insur­ance with the same com­pany, which included  busi­ness insur­ance (equip­ment replace­ment) the com­pany I had my pol­icy with changed hands not long before my pol­icy was up for renewal. Once the renewal date was close I thought it would be easy to get the same insur­ance cov­er­age.  I was very wrong.  They would no longer cover me for both.  I was told I had to get busi­ness insur­ance in order to have home insur­ance.  No busi­ness insur­ance — no home insurance!!

After many days of work­ing with the “new com­pany”  they  found a com­pany that would cover my home office (which did not include cov­er­ing my home insur­ance)  my rate would have gone up over $2000 per year.  Yep, you heard me right. That quote didn’t even cover home insur­ance!  I knew that fig­ure was a no go for me — and would be for most peo­ple like me.

After many stress­ful days and sleep­less nights, and many hours of search­ing for com­pa­nies, I found one that will cover my home, plus my home office busi­ness equip­ment, that is actu­ally less than what I was pay­ing in my pre­vi­ous pol­icy, and includes cov­er­age in other impor­tant areas.

I am thrilled to bits with my cov­er­age and just blown away by what goes on out there. 

Want more info — con­tact me. No I am not an agent  

Note: This post is for my Cana­dian readers.

I went into Face­book yes­ter­day and noticed at the top it now had News Feed and Live Feed.  Wasn’t sure what it was except that Live Feed looks very much like Twit­ter with benefits. 

Facebook’s Ray­lene Yung  explains: “While see­ing real-time activ­i­ties is extremely valu­able, we also want to be sure you don’t miss other inter­est­ing con­tent. After hear­ing feed­back from many of you and explor­ing some new designs, we decided with today’s changes to move what you used to see in High­lights from the right-hand side to the News Feed view in the main col­umn so you can more eas­ily engage with both views.”

Chris Crum’s arti­cle states they are test­ing so this may change due to how users react. 

What do you think?

There are a num­ber of good arti­cles out there about what is going on with Google and Bing when it comes to Rank­ings and search results.

“Google and Microsoft have both inked deals with Twit­ter, and Microsoft has also inked one with Face­book to inte­grate Twit­ter and Face­book updates into Bing search results. Google will be adding tweets to search results.” says  Chris Crum.

Google’s Marissa Mayer says, “We believe that our search results and user expe­ri­ence will greatly ben­e­fit from the inclu­sion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look for­ward to hav­ing a prod­uct that show­cases how tweets can make search bet­ter in the com­ing months. That way, the next time you search for some­thing that can be aided by a real-time obser­va­tion, say, snow con­di­tions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and shar­ing the lat­est and great­est information.”

Click here to read more of his article.

Any­one who uses Twit­ter fre­quently knows how hard it is to keep up with Tweets.  Not only that, if some­one has posted some­thing and you answer your answer will come as a tweet and not a retweet if you don’t do it right.

One of the best ways to ensure you are reply­ing to a tweet is “Tweet­deck”  http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/Tweetdeck 

Tweet­deck is a very pop­u­lar appli­ca­tion for run­ning Twit­ter on your desk­top and phone. It has many fea­tures, but one of its best is its one-click retweet­ing fea­ture – hov­er­ing over a pro­file pic­ture pro­vides the easy option for retweet­ing anyone’s tweets – just click the bot­tom left icon.

Here’s is how it looks on my com­puter screen

Tweet­deck is free to down­load, installs quickly but how would any­one get any work done!

Just found One­MinueU thanks to a post from my Face­book friend Adam Urbanski.

At this site you can post a video or arti­cle, or watch a video / read an arti­cle. It is a net­work­ing ser­vice that allows users to cre­ate and post online edu­ca­tional “how-to” multi-media for enjoy­ment, knowl­edge and entertainment.

The Terms of Use is quite long but prob­a­bly worth reading.

Check it out!

http://www.oneminuteu.com/

Jan