Eric and Jeff Continue the Technology Discussion From Last Week...

Well, greetings everyone. Welcome to the Wednesday, September 10th, 2014 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook with WSI Internet Consulting, where we work with businesses and organizations on helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me and WSI online at www.poweredbywsi.com. With me this week is my good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday partner, Mr. Jeff Simpkins. Jeff, say hello to everybody out there in Free Webinar Wednesday world.

Greetings everybody, this is Jeff Simpkins. I'm with Community Bank Consulting Inc., and you can learn more about me and Community Bank Consulting Inc. online at www.communitybankconsulting.com.

Excellent. 2 weeks in a row, we got another record going, a winning streak.

I know we both have some travel coming up, so October, there will be a few weeks that there will be no Free Webinar Wednesday.

There will be. So, but until then, we've got 60 minutes— well, 57 minutes to fill, and plenty of attendees that are joining us live. So I'm looking forward to it because, you know, last Last week we got going and talking, and I had a big old laundry list of things that I wanted to chat about. And we got into— I don't want to say into the weeds, but we got into some things that I think were well needed and some questions. And I thought we, you know, covered some pretty cool stuff. And it's funny, I was at a meeting just this week and had a conversation, and somebody had the same question that we had last week of how do you create a hashtag And I was prepared to answer that, and I even used your folder label analogy of defining a hashtag, and they're like, oh, I get it. And I gave you full credit for that reference, Mr. Simpkins. So, you know, I'm sure your royalty check is in the mail.

So, well, I think you had a charity fundraiser at Cedar Point.

I did.

That you mentioned. Yes, up to date on that.

I did. I, I say I survived The Rev3 Triathlon at Cedar Point. As you may recall, I did what's known as the Aquabike competition, which is basically I swim and I bike, and I did not run. I dislocated my kneecap in a training exercise, I guess we'll call it. And so I decided not to run the 13.1 miles, but I did swim and I did bike, and it went really well. This is the donation page, and I want to give a shout-out and thank— we had announced this last week, and actually during the presentation, we had a couple of donations even come right in. People were doing a little multitasking, which is good. We certainly do that, but it was really, really cool that we got some donations to help support the Children's Neuroblastoma Cancer Foundation. It was good. They had a— I ended up finishing 2nd in the Clydesdale division, and the swim was probably one of the most difficult that I've ever experienced. Pretty significant waves out on Lake Erie, and I was just really glad to get back to shore after my 1.2 miles in the water. So if anybody's curious what Lake Erie tastes like, just send me an instant message afterwards and I'll be happy to fill you in. Because I definitely got more than a mouthful.

There's probably a single word you could use to describe it.

Yeah, yuck, I think would be probably the most politically correct term I could use. But gives me a whole other sense of respect for the people that go into something like Special Forces and Navy SEALs. And I'm thinking, all I'm doing is swimming a triathlon and these guys are in the ocean and holy smokes. So, but survived, spent some time in the park with my buddy Shane and, uh, kind of remembered Christy obviously while we were there and was able to raise, uh, $700 and almost $750. Um, I'm going to actually leave the donation page up, not that I'm pimping for more donations, but the donation page is up for the entire month actually because September is National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. So, I know that there were some friends and family members that didn't get a chance to donate before the event, so they're going to come in afterwards, and some people that are mailing checks and whatnot. So, it's a great cause and the money goes directly to them. I don't get a stitch of the money. It's all for cancer and trying to fight this deadly disease. So, 9 years old is not when you're supposed to leave Earth and— go someplace else. So it was good.

So, uh, I think you did manage to have some fun as well. I believe I saw a picture of you on Facebook, and perhaps you had a beer in your hand.

I think after the event, yeah, there's usually— and maybe even, you know, Saturday before, I might have indulged in some, although not very much. But yeah, celebrating that, getting it finished, you know, And being with a buddy in Cedar Point, you know, you kind of get a weekend to be like a kid for a while, so it's pretty cool. So yeah.

Well, they are famous for some of the best roller coasters in the— I know in the US and maybe in the world. Yeah, well known as having awesome roller coasters.

Yeah, yep, they definitely do that. So I'm assuming you did not swallow lake water this weekend, so anything new and exciting in your world?

Well, I was in the lake this weekend, and I probably did manage to swallow a little water while my black lab was making me chase the balls I was throwing with her, but nothing like, uh, nothing like the lake water you swallowed.

Yeah, well, nice. That's good.

Last weekend was awesome. Uh, I am making a specific point of Getting in the lake as many times as possible of late because I know there's not that many weeks left that that's gonna be an option.

Yep, absolutely. So, well, let's get into it. Absolutely. And probably should have provided this disclosure earlier on, but for those of you that might be new to Free Webinar Wednesdays, it is more than just me and Jeff talking about the weekend. All of the Free Webinar Wednesdays, although that's probably one of the most fun parts, right? All of our shows are recorded and made available at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Again, referencing last week's show, I thought we covered a lot of really great stuff, and there were certainly some things that we had talked about that I was planning on just kind of doing a high-level review, and we ended up going into some pretty nitty-gritty details talking about how to customize a Bitly link and shorten URLs and the Google URL builder and the advantages of tracking when people are clicking on images and links and banners. So if you didn't have an opportunity to take a look at that, or you were in it and you'd like to check it out more, go to Free Webinar Wednesdays and scroll down. We've got the archive there for you so you can check that out. So, and as with all weeks, we do like participation. We had a lot of great comments and questions last week. So as we're walking through this week's discussion, if you have an observation, comment, thought, or anything else that you feel like sharing, Feel free to go ahead and type it into the chat box and send it to us. And we love to hear from our attendees live. If you're listening to this on a recording, not gonna be so easy to do that, but if you're live, send us a note and let us know. So, alrighty. Well, I have, and you can see kind of my very last tab here, if I unhide my little alert, you can see I've got Apple waiting around. So I figure if we talk about Apple now, we probably won't get to much anything else. They made a little bit of an announcement yesterday that we'll go into. And Jeff, I know you actually listened to it live. So there's some new things going on at Apple.

Pieces of it.

Pieces of it. So we certainly aren't the de facto expert. Maybe we should have invited Mr. McPherson to join us again, and he could have— I'm sure he had it streaming in his office. Maybe he was even there, got to listen to U2 or something. But we'll talk about Apple and kind of wrap that up, some of the things that they have announced and new services. New devices and what that may mean for the overall digital gadget market in general. One of the items that I wanted to talk about last week, and Jeff, you and I are Google Drive, Google for Business users, I caught that Google Enterprise actually has changed its name even though you can see the URL says Enterprise. They've changed their name to Google for Work instead of Google Enterprise. And I don't know as if there's been a ton of functional changes in the services that they offer, but what I have gleaned out of it is Enterprise, I think, sent the connotation that you have to be a large organization to use their enterprise-level software, their enterprise-level solutions. And I think with this name shift to Google for Work, what they're trying to do is position it— and you can see just from some of the screenshots that they're showing here, you know, the bike mechanic, the small business— I think they're trying to position themselves not as an intimidating big, big service that you have to be an expert on or a lot of employees to be able to take advantage of. I think they're trying to be more attractive to the small business owner. And I know that you are— I'll probably get the name wrong— aren't you like a certified Google for Business or Google Drive provider? What's the official title that they've granted you? I'm butchering it, I know.

I have no clue. Yeah, that was a service that I helped some folks with a couple years ago, and Discovered it. It's something that if you do it on a large scale, it's worthwhile. If you don't do it on a large scale, it either costs you money to do it or you're working for pennies per hour. Anyway, Google does have business partnerships available.

Yeah, but I think, you know, and I'm starting to use the Google and the cloud, and I know one of the next items that we're going to talk about is kind of the The decreasing cost and the increasing capacity of cloud storage, which makes it really easy for people to store things online. Of course, with the alleged iTunes hack and the leaking of the celebrity nude photos, you know, that's got everybody now thinking cloud, cloud, cloud. But, you know, the nice part about all the Google services is everything is out there for you connected without necessarily having to have anything installed on your computer. You can jump from workstation to workstation, computer to computer, access from multiple devices. And so if this is not an area— even if you're an Apple all-in person, there's still viability to take a look at Google for Work as a way to use that either from a personal family perspective or from work and being able to collaborate and share information and keep organized. You know, we're doing a lot of blog content review and collaborative editing through the Google platform. And the more and more we use it, the more and more we introduce particularly our bank customers to it, you know, they're surprised at, you know, how 2 people can be in at the same time and working on it together. And some light bulbs are going off, which is kind of cool.

Yeah, the One of the new offerings, newish offerings in Google for Work within the last month or couple months is they have an addition. The base price for Google for Work is $5 per user per month. I think if you pay monthly, I think it's $50 per user per year if you pay annually. They've got an expanded service available now that's $10 per user per month. And with the $10 per user per month plan, if you have 5 or fewer users, you get 1 TB of storage per user. If you have 5— if you have 6 or more users, you get unlimited storage on Google for Work. There was a period of time— Google has done a really outstanding job of adding new functionality really almost daily releasing new functionality as part of Google for Work. And there was a time that I didn't really care for the way Drive worked. I didn't feel like it had adequate search capabilities in it. But they have done a really, really nice job of improving Drive. And I've actually started using that as my primary online storage facility now.

Well, one is—

I think that's a really good value.

Yeah.

For $10 a month. I think you get 30 gig per user if you're on the $5 a month plan.

Yeah, I did notice that upgrade because as with you, you know, we'll talk about Dropbox because I've used that interface quite a bit, and then I also have a Hightail account which formerly was YouSendIt. Google Drive has changed and given you the ability now, much like a lot of the file directory systems on an operating system, where you can look at it either in list view Or folder view. You can double-click on folders and open them. Performs much more like a desktop experience even though you're running everything directly through your browser. And, you know, I have within my Google+ account, my photos are being synchronized from my device. So anytime I take a picture, so all of my funny pictures of my buddy Shane crossing the finish line because he was hamming it up quite a bit. Those automatically get synchronized when I get a Wi-Fi connection into Google+. I've also got them synchronized through Dropbox, so I'm a little bit redundant, but I've had enough computer crashes in my day. I'd rather have 2 copies of everything than no copy of everything. But with the storage and the capacity that's there, that's a pretty nice feature, and it is much, much easier, and it's a lot faster search capability. You would expect that as being part of Google because that's really what Google is known for. But until this last update, I didn't feel as well as you that the, the search capabilities within Google Drive really met what I felt that they should be for a company like Google. So, right, yeah, so definitely, definitely nice. So, well, since—

Integrations that you get if you use Google for Work is within an email You actually have a link to save directly to Google Drive any attachments, and that is awesome. You literally click on it, it takes you to your tree that you have your folders within Google Drive, and it's instantaneous. There's no uploading and worrying about bandwidth and things like that.

Now, for the audience that may be frequent flyers on Free Webinar Wednesdays, I think you guys probably know I'm an Android device guy and Jeff's an iPhone device guy. Are there any restrictions or limitations or enhancements that the Drive app either provides or limits you with on an iPhone and iOS, or is it really pretty seamless? What you want to do on the desktop you can, you know, essentially do on your iPhone or your iPad.

You know, I would say it's seamless. The Drive app for the iPhone Works awesome. Obviously, it doesn't store the information on your device, so the speed that you get information back is entirely dependent on the speed of the connection you have at the time you do the search. I was at a prospect site a week or so ago and pulled up some documents right from Drive and accessed them. It'll be interesting with the Google announcement yesterday. It's been leaked for a few weeks or so that there would likely be a new larger iPhone. And of course, that was confirmed yesterday. I have never been a big use my phone for that kind of stuff kind of guy because I use a MacBook Air. And it's so light, I have it with me most of the time. So we'll see if when I make the switch to the larger iPhone, which is my plan at this point, sometime within the next few months, if I find myself using my phone for more functionality of accessing documents in Drive, email, and things like that.

Yeah. Well, I guess since we've already started the conversation about cloud and storage and talking about even the opportunity or plausibility of unlimited storage in Google Drive, I know Dropbox is a service that you and I have talked about quite a bit. And there was a release that went out in August. I found this and queued it up, and we were going to talk about it last week, but we ran out of time. And as a result of— and I know you use box.com as well, or is it still box.net? I forget if it's one way or the other.

They switched it to box.com.

Okay.

And yeah, go ahead and let's talk about Box after you finish with Dropbox.

So I know Dropbox and Box and some of the others have gone through, and, you know, most of them, if you're not using the services, they give you some basic free accounts where you get, you know, maybe, I don't know if it's 5 or 10 megs worth of data space or something like, maybe it's more than that, just to get started. Then if you want, you can flip over. But you can see a terabyte now giving you capacity for $10 a month, lowering its prices. OneDrive from Microsoft is another pretty popular storage platform. That's out there. You know, one of the things again that, that we've got across both of our phones, both my wife and myself, is I've got the same Dropbox account logged in on both phones, and the camera is connected to the Dropbox account. So anytime my wife takes a photo or I take a photo, it ends up saving it into the Dropbox camera uploads. So we've always got a nice update archive of everything that we've taken pictures of. So that makes it pretty convenient. But yeah, the other thing that— and I don't know if Box offers this, I don't know if Drive offers this, but if we just pop over to Dropbox directly, I can't really log in other than— let me see here. Yeah, we're going to actually see all of my info, so I'm going to log out here real quick. When you go over to Dropbox, they've got a Packrat service. I subscribe to that. I think it's like an extra $34 a year, and that is an add-on that gives you the ability to go back in and recover any deleted file that had been archived on their platform for as long as you're a subscriber. And they were eliminating the Packrat service as an option and providing, I think it was a year or 2 years of go-back. And then if you didn't want to pay the $40 a year, you could just satisfy the, the 1 or 2 years go-back capability. I elected to pay the extra $40 just in case, and we've got a lot of our business files and stuff stored in there. But I don't know as if Box or even Google Drive has that capability. If you delete a file, whether it's intentional or unintentional, you can go back and get that at some point down the road. Kind of a nice little safety net for you, if you will.

I'm sure Box or Dropbox has this feature. Both Box.com and Google Drive have programs that you can install on your machine that actually give you the ability— on the Mac it's called Finder— to have folders on Finder that sync real time.

Yep.

With a folder matching folder on Google Drive. I actually use that a good bit. What I tend to do is I have a temp folder that syncs over to Google Drive, and if I know I'm gonna save something to Google Drive that's not coming in from email, I will place it in the temp folder because I don't keep my whole directory tree in the Google Drive sync program. But I'll put it in the temp folder, give it time to be backed up with CrashPlan, which is the backup program that I use. And I think you still use it. Yep. With CrashPlan, it has that same feature. Anything that gets backed up on CrashPlan, as long as you have an account with CrashPlan, it gets archived forever. So I'm doing a similar thing. I'm just using a different approach. There you go.

And as a gentle reminder to the audience, if there's a backup recovery service strategy approach that you're using and you'd like to share it as an alternative, certainly let us know. But yeah, CrashPlan, I had used Carbonite for a number of years, and this just seemed like a little bit better deal with a little bit more functionality.

Yeah, Carbonite's awesome. CrashPlan did offer some pretty significant pricing incentives when they first came to market that both you and I took advantage of. But, you know, I would consider switching back to Carbonite at some point in the future if they ever had that, that feature that your files get saved forever. But it's not something they've ever offered that I'm aware of and, and don't currently offer.

Yep. So, um, but the good news is for all of these plans, your data rates are getting slashed. I think the other common cloud storage platform that a lot of people use, uh, is in addition to the, the Microsoft platform, is the Amazon Cloud. And Jeff, I believe you had been a user of Amazon Cloud Storage.

I have.

And I don't know if you continue to use them, if that's just part of your Prime membership, or if you've kind of fallen out of favor for the Amazon. But you want to maybe comment about what's going on over in the Amazon world, or if you're using that anymore?

You know, I've used it on a limited basis. The service that I use from them more than anything is the music storage service that actually scans my my hard drives for any music files when I run a program and replace it in the Amazon cloud so I can access my music from lots of places, from my Roku and my phone, my iPad and my computer, and all kinds of things like that. I think I have stored some picture files. That's— I don't remember if it's part of my Prime membership, or seems like I got some expanded memory On the Amazon Cloud Storage. Amazon Cloud Storage, last I read, and I think this is an article that you actually posted, Eric, but Amazon Cloud Storage was losing the pricing war. At this point, I feel like I'm gonna— because Google is something that I use every single day.

Yeah.

I'm probably going to be leaning more towards Google and just use Amazon as kind of a backup.

Yeah, well, suffice it to say, if anybody out there has been on the fence of using a cloud-based service, whether it's a formal backup platform like a, you know, Carbonite or a CrashPlan, or kind of ad hoc file services, you know, it's a buyer's market because the prices are dropping and you can get a ton of storage. I think Back to the, you know, mid-'90s, early '90s, when we actually implemented our first local area network at the bank that I was at. And we put in Novell 312, and I think the total storage capacity for the entire file server, which was about the size of a desk, it was— Maybe a gig at the most. And I thought, boy, I can't imagine ever going beyond. And it cost a pretty penny. And now you can get a terabyte worth of information for $10 a month, uh, or storage. So it's, it's kind of fun to see how that has evolved. And with all the digital resources and content that we're all accumulating these days, video and documents and images, having a place that you can get those saved and archived and You know that they're going to be there. That's an important thing. Cool. Any other thoughts on cloud storage? I got a couple other things I wanted to squeak in here just to make sure I stumbled across, and then we can hop in and chat a little bit about what's going on over in Apple world.

Yeah, we haven't talked about Box that much. We've got it up on the screen right now. I have used Box in the past because of the tight integration with my email system and other business services, I'm going to move away from Box and again get over to Google Drive. Their pricing is not quite as attractive as Dropbox and Google Drive. They do have some really nice business features in Box, so I'm not knocking Box, but man, I love the integration that's available in Google Drive at this point. One of the things we haven't mentioned that I certainly have envy over is that very, very limited number of towns that have the Google Fiber service. Are you familiar with that service?

Oh yeah, yeah, Google Fiber. Yeah, that would be—

Kansas City, it's coming to Austin, Provo, Utah. But what made me think of Google Fiber is your Google Fiber, if you're on a paid plan, that includes 1 terabyte of storage.

Yeah. No, that would be probably the best Christmas, birthday, anniversary, Father's Day combination present that anybody could ever give me is if fiber came to my community.

That would be even better than an Apple Watch. Absolutely.

Absolutely. So yeah, and you know, at some point, you know, we joke about the fact that fiber is in just some select communities. You know, is it possible that at some point down the road there's gonna be technology that's gonna make it? Maybe fiber isn't the answer. Maybe a new technology comes around that makes it possible to get fiber-like speed with less infrastructure cost. Yeah. Um, you know, there's, there's likely going to be some solutions coming around that will do that just because internet connectivity and, you know, the, the need for bandwidth and data is becoming so ginormous. Um, you know, we have to think about the fact that the way that the internet was created over 40 years ago by Vint Cerf, one of the co-fathers— he had a pretty interesting interview on The Colbert Report a few probably about a month ago. And the technology that's running the internet today is really similar to what was developed back in, you know, the late '60s, early '70s. And but, you know, when the internet was created, we didn't think of audio and video and email and social networking and messaging. And, you know, so there have been patches, there's been updates. I don't know if people realize, but we actually ran out of IP addresses a few years ago. And had to migrate from what's known as IPv4 to IPv6. And so, you know, thinking about it as a residential development, we ran out of addresses and couldn't deliver mail. We had to figure out a different way to number the mailboxes so that we could continue delivering mail to everybody. And, you know, while we certainly hope we don't outgrow that, the concept of the Internet of Things and literally billions of nodes that exist or will exist on the internet because your television, your Roku, your toaster, your refrigerator, all of that.

Security camera.

Exactly. Those are all going to, if they don't now, they will at some point have the requirement for an IP address because they're gonna be connected and they're gonna be communicating with one another and you're gonna wanna have access to control your security system and turn your lights on and check your drop cam. And so it's no longer just human beings. I can't validate this with a citation of the source, but I had heard there are more things on the internet now than people. The devices outnumber the humans because there are just so many things that don't require human involvement. So yeah, so suffice it to say, Google Fiber would definitely be on my wish list, although I'm I'm not holding my breath for this one. I can't imagine the Marshall-Battle Creek area being real high on Google's target list, unfortunately.

I'm surprised you're not moving to Kansas City or Austin just for that reason.

Yeah, there's another individual in our household that I would have to convince to move away, and I don't think that's going to happen. My wife kind of likes it there.

I've had the good fortune of visiting Austin a couple times in the last I can tell you it wouldn't be such a bad place to live.

Yeah, yeah. They probably sell a special strap that you have to use to hold your computer down to the desk when you plug it into the internet, because otherwise it'll just fly right off the internet— off your desk and out the window because it goes so fast.

So yeah.

What's our next topic? Yeah, well, kind of a subtle continuation from our topic of last week. I know We talked about Bitly and we talked about the Google URL builder and ways to track and monitor what's being done, which kind of was precipitated by my involvement in a banking conference for the Illinois Bankers doing a social media boot camp basically. And one of the tools that I'm starting to use is a tool called SumAll, and they've got 2 versions of it. The free version provides the ability for you to get an account, log in, and you can connect literally an unlimited number of accounts that will feed data into it and track from a metric in an analytical perspective. And what I mean by that is, let's say that you are a business owner and you've got a Google Analytics account You've got a Facebook page, you've got a corporate Twitter account, and maybe you want to take a look at your LinkedIn. So like the main ones, and each of those have got their own analytics platforms that you can go into and you can see what's going on, but they're all separate and disjointed. And if you wanted to compare, it's not a real easy exercise. So what SumAll does is it gives you the ability to use their platform as a dashboard, and you can go in and you can create these different dashboards. And as you can see here, we've got Twitter and Facebook, and it looks like they're using— I don't know what the green one is, I don't know what that one is, but let's pretend that, you know, maybe that's Google Analytics, or maybe that's— looks like that might even be sales numbers from a custom dashboard. And now you can actually track your activity, and it plots all of that activity on the same graph. And the reason I like that is for some of our clients, we're starting to do more proactive either Facebook promotions or we're trying to get their employees more engaged on LinkedIn and we're posting links to blog content that resides back on the business's website. So the hope is that as we see more engagement through social media, we're going to see more engagement through their website through Google Analytics traffic. And by being able to go into a system like SumAll, it allows you to track that dashboard And you can see on a day-in and day-out basis when one item moves, does it have any sort of an impact or correlation on other items that you're also tracking? And so it's a pretty cool platform. The thing that they are doing to monetize this is they've actually developed a support, I guess, a secondary service where they can work with the business and help produce content that you can use to then send out as part of your Facebook updates, your LinkedIn status updates, your tweets. And so they have a paid service that they will actually provide assistance on building the content that can help generate the actual engagement and interaction for you. I'm not using that service. 'Cause we have a team that does that, that especially in the banking industry, you kind of have to be careful what content you're creating. But from a tracking and a measurement perspective, it's pretty interesting to be able to get in there and pull up a dashboard and take a look at 3 or 4 different platforms, but have them all plotted on the same screen to see if there's really any, you know, connection between all the different entities. So it's a relatively new one, and I don't know if a lot of people out there are familiar with it or heard of it, but it's kind of cool. So just as a general note, I see somebody actually in the live room looks like has raised their hand. That may have been a mistake, or it may have been intentional.

Hi, Eric.

We've had technical challenges with the raised hand because that indicates to us that you want to ask a question and unmute your line. So if you do have a question, if you could just type it in the questions area, we can answer it for you there. Or if that was a mistake, you can go ahead and lower your hand, and that way it's not there.

Or I could do it for you.

Or you could do it for you. So the hand is lowered. So if you do have a question, certainly type it in. Um, but this was one that I, I wanted to cover last week because when we went into the Google URL Builder and even in Bitly, we showed how when links are clicked on and shared and activity results around things that you're actually producing, it gives you that tracking and that ability to actually go in and not necessarily from an ROI perspective when you're talking about return on investment, but return on engagement. And see if you're actually getting any interest in what it is that you're doing. And this takes that really to the next level. I think you can even probably put in a Bitly account here, a specific Bitly handle, and see whether that's getting activity or not. So I'd be interested in hearing if there's anybody in the audience that has used this before, or if they're excited about trying to use it, or maybe you're multitasking and you're signing up for a free account right now. If that's the case, case, feel free to come clean. We won't tease you too much. Um, but that was one. And then as we talk about kind of measuring ROI, I always in my presentations— excuse me— in my presentations kind of scratch out ROI and I usually say ROE. So instead of return on investment, I like to say return on engagement. Um, but when I did my social media session with Deborah, Um, the co-founder of the Socially Legal Audit Tool. She says ROI, but she actually uses a different word for the I. Instead of investment, she likes to use the word influence. And so she has actually talked a couple of times, uh, in the session about services like Clout and Cred. And so I just wanted to mention those. I'm not going to get logged in and go through, uh, a nitty-gritty intimate you know, tour. But if you've not heard of these before, these are platforms that actually you can— again, free account, sign up— they connect to your social platforms and they analyze your posting activity, your engagement, what sorts of information you're talking about, where do you tend to be most active, is it in LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook, and they come back with a score. And in Klout, it's a Klout score, and Cred, it's a Cred score. But this is designed, and there's a lot of people that debate whether it's valid or hokey-pokey or contrived, but one of the metrics to actually go in and actually analyze and see what your influence is on others and what sorts of things you talk about. Deborah made the joke that according to Klout, she's an expert in zombies and pizza because apparently She had done a couple of tweets about pizza that got a lot of engagement and chitchat, but she's also a big fan of The Walking Dead. And so it's not social media law or legal issues or compliance, it's zombies and pizza. But if anything, if you've not done something like this before, it's kind of an interesting exercise because it's a mirror of, or at least to a certain extent, A mirror of what maybe a service like this, which maybe is an assimilation of the internet itself, but a mirror of what the internet thinks you are all about and what information you're sharing and what persona you're putting forward. And so if you end up like Deborah and you're all about zombies and pizza, but you really want your persona to be known as social media and it's something that you're concerned about, then, you know, take a look at the content that you're sharing and the information that you're posting. And it's one way that you can again gain some feedback, just like SumoAll and the Google URL Builder and some of these others give you metrics on your links. These 2 services can provide you with some feedback and metrics on your social performance and what sorts of things you're talking about. So Jeff, I don't know if you've ever signed up or done one of these. I'll see if I can get quickly signed in here with Twitter just to give An idea of— so we're getting a redirect here. While it does that, any comments on your part?

I don't. I haven't used services like this because for my business it doesn't tend to be one of the routes that I found most effective.

So very similar to what SumAll has done in their content production perspective. You can see that these are some of the things that it thinks that— I would love to be a pro cyclist. I'm not, but I talk a lot about bicycling. But these are some of the suggestions it thinks, and it recognizes LinkedIn and marketing and technology, but it goes out and it finds some content and some people. Apparently there's not a lot of LinkedIn Or not a lot of clout people interested in banking. But if I go into LinkedIn, it makes— go figure, huh?

Reinforcing the comment I just made.

Exactly. So, um, but if there are people that I wanted to engage with on LinkedIn or information that I wanted to learn, um, there's some content here, some articles, uh, I can actually create and act and post directly from this platform. So that makes it kind of cool. So there's my friend Kirby. I'm sure he'll appreciate that. But some pictures. There's my ice bucket challenge with my wife. And you can see our dogs actually eating the ice cubes when we were done. So, but some interesting ways to just kind of see what the internet thinks about you, or at least what some of these platforms So, all right, we are in the final 15 minutes. I know we could talk more about this, and because you had the opportunity to listen in a little bit yesterday, I'm gonna defer to you. I'm curious, what are your thoughts, observations, the things that you thought were cool, things you want to learn more about? Let her rip, my friend.

I'm excited about the iPhone 7. 6. There's a couple things on this that I think— yeah, I tend to skip one generation of iPhone. So I'll go buy generation A, skip B, buy C, skip D, buy E, and so forth. The 6, I think, is the one that I'm most excited about. One of the things that I hope they do well is the new payment feature. What did they call it? Apple Payment, something like that.

Something like that. Now, are you talking about the 6 or the 6 Plus? Because I know they've got 2 sizes now. Are you going to go with the really, really large phablet or mini, mini, mini tablet, or are you going to go with the standard version?

I think I'm going to try the 6 Actually, the 6 is larger than the current 5 versions by, I think, about a quarter of an inch.

Okay.

But I think I'm gonna try the 6 Plus, the 5.5-inch version.

The big one.

I may hate it, but there's only one way to find out, and that's to Give it a run.

So Free Webinar Wednesday fans, keep tabs on this thread. Maybe the next month or so there may be an iPhone 6 Plus available for sale from Jeff Simpkins, depending if you like it or not.

Thank you for typing in the question box, Apple Pay.

Yep.

Apple Pay actually will only be available on the 6th 6 Plus, or if you have a watch, the new watch, you can use Apple Pay. But if you have a 5 or older version, it will not be available because it doesn't have the technology in the phone.

There it is. So for the bankers in the audience, because I know we have a few of them that are with us today, As you see something like Apple Pay and payment methodologies being shifted into the device and the wallet or the note cards, or I can't remember what exactly they're called, as a community bank, is this something that I should be concerned about? Should I be worried or scared? Is this gonna make the checkbook obsolete or my debit card obsolete that my customers are using? Do I need to figure out a way to get my cards into the Apple environment? What are your preliminary thoughts?

I can give you the information that's— an overview of the information that's available now. Apple initially has partnered with some extremely large financial institutions. The way you will get your cards into the device is you will take a picture of the card And the picture of the card will actually put the card information into Passbook. Unlike the Google device, the card number is not actually stored on the device. What happens when you use the Apple Pay feature is that it will go out to the financial institution. It will get a token from the financial institution. It will come back and it will provide a unique one-use card number that will actually be transmitted to the merchant. So the possibility of fraud is significantly reduced since each time you use the device, as it's been described at this point, there's no striping— swiping mag stripes, there's no keying in card numbers, there's no getting the security code off the back of the card. Every single transaction has an electronic token affiliated with it that generates a unique card number.

Interesting.

That's what's being publicized. You know, I guess my question that came up as soon as I was listening to it described is for recurring transactions. I wonder if you're going to have the ability to use the Apple Pay feature if you are doing something to set up a recurring transaction, because one of the things that they are promoting is how great it will be and how much easier it will be than anything that has been available on the Internet so far. The names that come to mind that they partnered with, the card names, the networks, Visa, MasterCard, and American Express. But then you see the participating banks listed there, Bank of America, Capital One, Chase, City and Wells. And then they've got some of the larger players that are coming in the near future. They claim that the brands that are going live with them on rollout actually drive about 80%— I think I heard 80% of the transactions in the United States.

Yeah, these are the stores.

So, right. Yeah. So moving on to another thing that came out as part of the announcement yesterday. There are lots of things in the new phone as well as the watch that are health and fitness related, some really cool features. Since you're Mr. Health and Fitness, did you happen to pick up on any of those?

Well, it would have been nice if they— one, I don't think the watch is waterproof, so it wouldn't have done me a whole lot of good in my triathlon. And, uh, 2, it doesn't have, uh, any sort of an inflatable mechanism to help me keep from drowning in Lake Erie. So it— Pretty serious waves. But I do know, and you take a look at the back of this, I have a Mio Alpha watch that actually collects my heart rate through a light sensor that reflects capillary action your skin surface. So that's how it measures your heart rate instead of a typical chest strap. I did catch that the, the watch, the Apple Watch, is going to be able to also do similar technology. So I saw a little blurb where they interviewed Dr. Oz, and he's talking about being able to know information about you without you even really knowing that it even existed. And obviously in the healthcare industry, that certainly has some pros and cons associated with it, um, as to whether or not that information is there. But it'll be interesting to see what happens with a lot of the fitness tracker services like the Fitbits and the Jawbone Ups and the Nike Fuels. Um, I know Google— the Motorola 360 is scheduled to be coming out shortly, which also is going to be a smartphone kind of capable with alerts and Different design, but you know I I've bought into the fitness tracker mentality. I now that I've used a Fitbit for a couple of years, there's a few things that I think is a fitness tracker that it should have that it doesn't. And one of the things I was looking at one of the new Garmin, and I think the Apple Watch has this. Um, is it can monitor, and if it detects that you're sedentary for an extended period of time, it'll give you a little nudge and tell you to get up from your desk and walk around. And, and often that would be helpful for me because I'll sit down at the desk and I'll get there at 7 o'clock. I won't even get up for lunch, and before I know it, it's like 4:35 and I haven't gotten off my butt all day. Not because I'm lazy, but because—

I've been doing that as well.

I just get there and I need a little nudge to say, you know, hey, get up, walk around, get the blood flowing. You know, that could be done with an egg timer that you buy for $2 at the grocery store. So do you need to have, you know, who knows what the watch edition with the gold plate is going to cost, but I think the entry level is $349 for one of these things. So, you know, do you need something like that? This isn't something that people have to have, but when the iPhone came out, it wasn't something anybody had to have either. They kind of I don't wanna say they invented the smartwatch, but there are some things in here that I think other smartwatches don't have. They've been silent on battery life. I think that's one of the inconvenient things that they need to solve is, am I gonna have to take my watch off every night and plug it in? And if I don't, I'm not gonna have a watch. You know, so that's inconvenient. Is it going to be waterproof or not? Probably not. You know, so there's a few of these things. And again, if we've got any Apple heads out there that have had an opportunity to take a peek at the watch, we'd be very curious to hear what you guys are having to say about it.

You make a really good point about the watch being waterproof. I use a Garmin Fitness watch. I don't remember what the model is called or anything, but I use it with a strap to monitor heart rate when I'm running, and it tracks the GPS for distance, things like that. But, you know, if the Apple Watch is not going to be waterproof, man, that's going to knock out a lot of the use, a lot of the really positive functionality for a lot of people. Yeah.

You mentioned Garmin and one of the devices that I'm actually eyeballing. I had my second Fitbit failure, unfortunately. The device just stopped taking a charge. To Fitbit's credit, they've been great at getting it replaced. They look the order up, they send it to me, no questions asked. They've never charged me shipping. But somebody turned me on to the Garmin VivoSmart. And if I had to buy a new fitness band today, this is likely the direction that I would head because it can provide some tracking information. It does steps. You can synchronize it with a Bluetooth-capable phone for text notifications. So it forms almost like a smartphone. It has tracking capabilities. If you use a heart rate strap, you can get your heart rate. It obviously monitors your steps and distance, and it's completely encapsulated and also waterproof because I wear mine swimming and shower and I never take it off. And so this is one that part of me was secretly hoping that Fitbit would come back and say, nope, we've already replaced it once, you're not going to get another one. And that would have given me an excuse to go buy this, but they sent it to me and I'm getting a new one. But at some point— This device, it's a little bit more slimline. It is waterproof. The battery will last seven days. It says there's another device that isn't as intelligent, doesn't connect with your phone. This one is a little bit bulkier, but they say the battery on this thing will last almost a year. But it doesn't have, like I said, it's a little bit bigger, and it doesn't have some of the. smartphone capabilities with it. It's a little less expensive. So you mentioned Garmin, and that just kind of jogged my thought process here to kind of mention that. But yeah, not having a waterproof— you know, you don't want to put something like this on and run the risk. I don't know if any of the smart devices that you wear on your wrist, whether it's the Moto 360 or the Samsung or LG, if any of those are waterproof or resistant, but that would be a concern. And, you know, they've embraced the dial here as a navigational element, which my suspicion is introduces more seams and probably further hinders its ability to be waterproof. So—

Right.

Yeah, but it'll be interesting. I don't think it's really going to be available for a while yet, so it's not something that you can You can go out and get today. But, uh, it'll be, be really interesting to see how it evolves and read some more reviews once people actually get some hands-on experience in real world. Because most of the reviews that I've read, they've just been demos and nobody knows how long the battery is going to last and some other functional questions that people just don't seem to know the answers to. But, uh, I think the concept of a fitness health kind of activity tracker Uh, is certainly one, the writing's on the wall and more and more people are building that into their devices. And it's, uh, heard an interesting story. Somebody got credit for, uh, about 6,000 steps because they wore their Fitbit while they mowed the lawn and the jostling of the tractor made it feel like it was, they were walking. So they got all this fitness credit for mowing the lawn on their riding lawnmower. So they're by no means perfect. Yeah, that's for sure.

It would only be better if they were eating Krispy Kreme donuts while riding the lawnmower.

Exactly. Not only were they not getting steps, they were actually doing damage, but yet getting credit in the Fitbit community.

Kind of funny.

Anyway—

I've been very tempted to download the new operating system in the beta form to my Mac. That Greg talked about when he was on a few weeks ago. I started one time and one of the things that I had to agree to scared me, so I'm going to wait until general release of the next version of the operating system for the Mac. There you go. Cool.

Well, we are at the 60-minute mark, Mr. Simpkins, and we could probably chat a little bit more about Apple, But I think the strategy of keeping this at the end was probably a good one. So we'll certainly be interested in watching how it evolves, and there'll be more reviews and ratings. And maybe after people get an opportunity to play with it, you get yours, we'll come back and we'll get Mr. McPherson, Captain McIntosh, to come back and join and go a little bit deeper dive to have a conversation. That'll be kind of a fun one. So I've, I will admit I've secretly thought about moving over into, into an iPhone, but I'm still not totally convinced yet. I just seems like every device I like, and I know it's not a good excuse, but I like having one cable that fits everything and I'd have to carry a whole nother set of cables and a whole nother set of So I don't know, we'll have to see what you think and maybe you can talk me into it. But for now, I'm still a tried and true Android mobile guy.

I think you should stick with whatever device works for you.

Yeah, absolutely. So cool. Well, Jeffrey, another good show. Thanks, Bob, for the heads up on the name Apple Pay. Hopefully everybody got some good ideas. We'll be very curious in future episodes, or maybe drop us a note if you give SumAll a try, or if you hop into Klout, what your score is, if any of those things are helping you. As a reminder, don't forget to click the like button on our Facebook page. Just search Facebook for Free Webinar Wednesdays. We post updates there as well when our recordings are available for viewing. And with that, I think we're to the end. So, Jeff, enjoy the rest of the week, my friend.

You do the same. Thanks, everybody. Sounds good.

Take care, and we'll see you next week at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Bye-bye.