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High School Sports Players and Collegiate Scouting Websites

We are working on another collegiate scouting website for a Bel Air High School men's soccer player. A couple of years ago, we launched a site for a Windsor Mills High School football player and had great success. The site generated traffic from over 50 universities across the country, as well as 1000's of private page views. Ultimately, the young man landed athletic and academic scholarships covering 75% of his tuition to Saint Anselm University, a Division II university in New Hampshire.

While the official eligibility clearing house website gives the student a bio section, a custom professional website adds value and depth to the student and increases the student's collegiate opportunities. We have developed a format for this type of website that allows the student to prominently display all of the vital scouting information, while delivering a personal flare. Scouts immediately identify with the student and can learn more about the students academic accomplishments and goals, athletic achievements and skills, and involvement with the community.

In my professional career, I have achieved no greater satisfaction than watching that young football player pursue his dreams of playing college football and getting an Engineering degree. The website we designed and developed for him was just a tool for him to get the best deal he could get; we are very proud to have been a part of that.

Zach Memmo is a soon to be 17 year old Bel Air High School Student that plays soccer for his high school and his club team, The Baltimore Bays. He just past the half way point of his junior year and dreams of playing soccer in college while majoring in Finance, and minoring in Sports Management. We are excited to see how many additional doors this website will open for him! www.zachmemmo.com

ObamaCare architect defends plan, says president not to blame for rollout glitches

Published November 03, 2013 FoxNews.com

WASHINGTON –  The architect of the Affordable Care Act insisted on “Fox News Sunday” that President Obama isn’t to blame for the rocky rollout of ObamaCare and deflected charges that the administration misled Americans about being able to keep their current health plans.

Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist, was part of the president’s health care reform team for two years and is the brother of former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

“We grandfathered in plans,” Emanuel said.

Host Chris Wallace pressed Emanuel to defend the growing number of cancellation notices sent to people whose plans changed after the law was implemented, but Emanuel could not.

Instead, he blamed much of the problems on insurance companies and not the new law.

“The law does not say ‘Sears drop coverage!’ Sears decides what’s good for Sears,” Emanuel said. “The insurance decides how to make money. When the private companies decide to drop an individual, you blame Obama. He isn’t responsible for that.”

Wallace’s other guest in the segment, James Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, called the grandfather clause in ObamaCare too narrow, adding that “the whole point of the exchanges was to close down the individual insurance market.”

Capretta called out Obama’s pitch to the public about the benefits of the plan and repeated pledges that Americans would be able to keep their current insurance providers if they liked it misleading and says Obama should shoulder the blame.

“There’s no extenuating circumstances,” Capretta said. “It was central to passing the law. He said clearly you can keep your plan. This wasn’t a minor pledge. It was central to the law. He broke that pledge.”

Capretta said the Obama administration “shouldn’t be able to play fast and loose” with people’s medical coverage.

In recent days, a growing number of Democrats have joined Republicans calling to extend the March 31 deadline to sign up for health insurance. They argue that the White House should extend the deadline to make sure that people who want it have enough time to buy it.

Capretta suggested “delaying the whole thing for a year.”

Emanuel did not agree.

“(Americans) will have a full four months to sign up,” Emanuel said. “You can’t prejudge now.”
White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer added a new twist to Obama’s pledge to millions of Americans that they could keep their insurance if they like it.

“[People who are happy with their insurance] can keep it, if it hasn’t been changed or canceled,” he said on ABC’s “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos.

In the days that followed the Oct. 1 rollout, the site has been riddled with problems.

The ObamaCare website shut down Saturday night for “extended” repairs, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Technicians have shut down HealthCare.gov during weekends since the site launched Oct. 1, but just for a few overnight hours.

"The HealthCare.gov tech team is performing extended maintenance this weekend to improve network infrastructure and make enhancements to the online application and enrollment tools,” agency spokeswoman Joanne Peters said Saturday.

Last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testified during a congressional hearing that officials are working “24-7” to improve the health insurance website HealthCare.gov. The online portal debuted on Oct. 1 to mostly negative reviews over glitches in the system.

The website was designed to allow people to sign in and sign up for insurance in their state.

It is a part of Obama’s signature health care overhaul.  The law, which was passed with no GOP support, was signed by the president in 2010 as a way to fix the nation’s ailing health care system and providing insurance to millions of people who couldn’t afford it.

Sebelius was grilled for three hours last week by lawmakers who wanted to know why there were so many problems with the system. Sebelius took most of the blame for the botched debut.

Jeffrey Zients, a former White House budget deputy, has said the site will be fixed by the end of the month. Sebelius has also said she feels confident about the Nov. 30 re-launch.

Strong Outlook For Holiday Online Sales

With this year's short holiday shopping season nearly here, retailers are nervous about sales performance. E-commerce, however, has been a bright spot for retail and is expected to increase in the 13% to 15% range this year. And while anxious retailers will be pursuing all possible avenues to boost sales as the holiday season approaches, newspaper advertising is still playing a key role in driving e-commerce.

By Jim Conaghan

NetNewsCheck, October 24, 2013 7:36 AM EDT

Seasons, both astronomical and metrological, have finite definitions. Astronomical is based on the Earth’s tilt, metrological on temperature. Professional sports have seasons, though the demarcation lines are fungible. Hockey champions skate on the indoor ice to finish their season in the heat of June, while baseball’s boys of summer might wait until a frosty night in late October before lifting their trophy.
And then there is the holiday shopping season.

Misty nostalgic memories might have one think it commences once Santa passes into Herald Square during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. But no more. “Christmas Creep” long ago pushed its invasion of the calendar turf into October, and this year staged a lightning assault on early September. K-Mart aired holiday ads for its layaway program a week after Labor Day. Wal-Mart alerted consumers in mid-August that its own holiday layaway program would begin Sept. 13. Retailers have reason to leap the creep earlier. Some are quite nervous about sales performance. This year there are only 26 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas, compared with 32 days last year. That abbreviated window occurs within in a still-tepid economic recovery. Further, sagging consumer sentiment aggravated by the 16-day Federal government shutdown that furloughed 800,000 workers, combined with news speculating about potential dire fallout from the debt-ceiling deadline are enough to make even the most optimistic merchant jumpy.

But there is one bright spot anticipated in this murky equation: e-commerce.Last year, Black Friday online sales increased 26%, while in-store sales slipped 2%. Shop.org, the digital division of the National Retail Federation, estimates online holiday sales will increase in the 13% to 15% range this year. A double-digit increase is eye-popping when considering NRF’s forecast of a lukewarm 3.9% rise in overall holiday sales. Similarly, eMarketer forecast e-commerce to jump 15% for the holidays, reaching $61.8 billion. And Volusion, an e-commerce solutions provider based in Austin, Texas, estimates small-to-medium size business will have a 20% growth in holiday sales, even greater for categories such as sporting goods (up 36%) and electronics (up 18%).

To prepare for the expected electronic rush, online retailer Amazon is hiring an additional 70,000 seasonal workers for the holidays, 40% more than in 2012. Wal-Mart just opened a new fulfillment center in Ft. Worth, Texas, dedicated to processing online sales.

The surge in smartphone and tablet purchases in the last 12 months provides a vastly expanded base of devices to engage in online shopping. EMarketer expects retail sales by consumers using smartphones and tablets to make purchases will reach nearly $10 billion for November and December, accounting for 16% of e-commerce.

Both digital and traditional media play an important role in driving ecommerce. Glossy catalogs now filling our mailboxes urge readers to go online to buy, many offering free shipping. Newspaper advertising also has a key role in driving e-commerce. In a study conducted during the 2012 holiday shopping season, the Newspaper Association of America found that 40% of adults took some form of online action — searching, purchasing or visiting a website — during the month as a result of seeing an ad in the newspaper. The study also pointed out that consumers who visit newspaper websites are far above the average online population in terms of their online shopping activities. Another NAA study, fielded in an online panel in the same time period, found that 63% of adults named local newspapers as the most effective place to learn about sales and store information for Black Friday, and local newspaper websites ranked second (47%).

Anxious retailers will no doubt be pursuing all possible avenues to boost sales as the holiday season rumbles onward.

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Jim Conaghan, a regular CrowdCheck contributor, is VP of research and industry analysis at the Newspaper Association of America.

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Google’s Maps Engine Pro Aims To Help Small Businesses

Google’s Maps Engine Pro Aims To Help Small Businesses Visualize Location Data As Easily As They Make A Pie Chart

Posted October 22, 2013 by Matthew Panzarino

Today, at Google’s San Francisco offices, Google introduced Maps Engine Pro, a utility that allows small businesses to use Google’s location tools to create maps out of location databases.

There will also be a mobile app available for Android initially to allow users to edit and create these maps on the fly. The app, called Google Maps Engine, will allow access to any level of GME service.

Brian McClendon, VP of Google Maps, noted that there are still 1 billion monthly users of Google Maps but also over 1 million active sites and apps using the APIs.

McClendon says that Google is also after semantic data, including local location, imagery, Street View and base maps. Each of those layers must be collected separately and sometimes includes mistakes. Google has spent a lot of time creating what it calls a ‘canonical base map of the world.’ This map allows it to answer questions like ‘how do I get there?’

But on top of all of those data layers is something Google is calling the Knowledge Layer, which contributes to people’s ability to get questions with more complex parameters answered.

All of these layers service consumers and the enterprise on either end of the scale. Now, to service those in the middle, like small businesses, Google is introducing Maps Engine Pro. It’s a tool that allows businesses to create internal- and external-facing maps that utilize its data layers to make business decisions.

Among the decision-making tools will be the ability to optimize the locations of your people and company assets, engage your users and build apps that take advantage of all of Google’s layers.

Google’s Vinay Goel, Google Product Manager on Google Maps, detailed how professionals could use some of these tools to solve problems.

One example Goel gave is that an insurance underwriter should have easy access to your location and the canonical data surrounding the risk profile of your neighborhood in order to calculate your plan and premium.

The pricing of Maps Engine Pro is $5 per user per month or $50 per user per year depending on the license usages.

Here’s an example of a map that you might see created in Maps Engine Pro:

Heather Folsom, Product Manager of Google Maps Engine Pro, spoke about the capabilities of the new service. Basically, you’re able to upload a spreadsheet of data that you might have with locations or other mappable data and see it instantly visualized. You can then sort or filter it and use it to craft strategies.

Pure Fix Cycles has been one of the testers for the program and a video shown to press at the event noted that MEP was used to visualize where the customer service calls were coming from on the East Coast. This allowed them to see where the best locations might be to send those callers to get service, which stores had the most inventory of the parts that were needed to fulfill those orders and more.

A demo was also given of placing a downloadable database of publicly available San Francisco planning department data on a map. Once imported, it could be easily filtered by any of the criteria in the data columns in a ‘Google Docs’-style spreadsheet. Editing this spreadsheet in ‘live’ fashion results in the points changing on the map.

Though this might appear, at first glance, to be Google tooling its Maps Engine product down a bit, it’s actually more about boosting the consumer maps offerings to be more useful to small businesses or pros.

The consumer tools that allow users to build custom apps are all well and good, but entering data that an SMB might have in its databases is tedious and doesn’t have the flexibility needed to create custom reporting tools and analysis. And on the other end of the range, the full-blown Google Maps Engine product requires some fairly serious geographic information systems chops to craft useful tools for internal use.

Google Maps Engine Pro is about making those tools more friendly and accessible, letting small business owners and other ‘professionals’ visualize their mapping data, rather than trying to do so internally from a spreadsheet list of locations. The key is being able to easily import and filter that data by a variety of factors. Just going by the demos that we saw, this appears to be fairly quick and easy.

It should be an interesting additional layer of data that helps businesses make decisions based on location data. Just a couple of years ago this type of tool might have to be manually crafted by a developer or contractor, or cobbled together out of open-source mapping data and tools.

Goel says that Google hopes that GME Pro will sit alongside documents, spreadsheets and storage that businesses will use daily to make decisions and get things done.

You’ll be able to find out more about the new Maps Engine Pro tool at Google’s Enterprise mapping site today.

Mobile Marketing: What You Need to Know

Below is an infographic showing 32 facts why you need have a mobile strategy!

Facebook defriends the ability to hide your name in search

By Matt Swider
techradar.com on 10/10/13 at 8:00pm

'Who can look up my timeline by name?' privacy setting gets the axe

Facebook is like chairs... chairs with everyone's real name on them

The ability to hide your Facebook profile from someone who searches you by name just changed to "it's complicated."

The social networking company announced today that its seldom used Who can look up my timeline by name?" feature will be gone in the coming weeks.

"The search setting was removed last year for people who weren't using it," reminded Michael Richter, Facebook's chief privacy officer, in a blog post today.

"For the small percentage of people still using the setting, they will see reminders about it being removed in the coming weeks."

No more false sense of security

Facebook noted that its "Who can look up my timeline by name?" privacy feature could create a false sense of security.

It didn't stop anyone from reaching your profile when your name popped up in a story or on a mutual friend's timeline.

It also spurred plenty of puzzled "I can't find you on Facebook" remarks when two people were legitimately attempting to become friends on the social network.

"The setting made Facebook's search feature feel broken at times," said Richter. "People told us that they found it confusing."

The new norm

This false sense of security is being replaced by controls on individual posts that you share, which Facebook calls "the best way to control what people can find about you."

In an effort to better inform its one billion users of this, Facebook plans to remind everyone that public posts can be seen by everyone, including people they may not know.

This warning message will be supplemented with a notice of how to change the audience settings for each post.

It also suggests visiting the privacy settings page within your Facebook account to quickly limit what you've shared in the past.

There's certainly more control over individual posts, but complete anonymity on Facebook is going out as a more populated Graph Search comes in.

Apple iPhone 5s Complain About 'Blue Screen Of Death' Error

by Amit Chowdhry, Contributor
forbes.com 10/11/2013 @ 9:38AM

The Apple AAPL -0.24% iPhone 5s was released three weeks ago and is distinguished from its predecessor by having silver or gold color options, a built-in fingerprint sensor and a 64-bit Apple A7 processor. Unfortunately, the iPhone 5s has an issue that has not been seen before in previous Apple products. The iPhone 5s suffers from the dreaded Blue Screen of Death(BSOD). I have not seen a BSOD ever since Microsoft MSFT +0.5% Windows 98!

What causes the BSOD error?  Many iPhone 5s users have complained that the BSOD sometimes appears while using the free Apple iWork apps that comes with new iOS devices. Others have reported that multitasking between apps seem to be a trigger for the BSOD. Once the iPhone 5s shows the BSOD for a few seconds, it simply reboots the device.  This error appears to be iPhone 5s specific and has not affected iPhone 5c users.

Apple forum users are reporting that the BSOD issue can be fixed by disabling iCloud syncing for the Apple Pages, Apple Keynote and Apple Numbers apps. In order to disable iCloud sync for iWork apps, go into the Settings of the iPhone 5s and then select iCloud.  Set the “Documents & Data” for the Pages, Keynote and Numbers apps to “Off.”

Apple recently released a software update to iOS 7, known as iOS 7.0.2.  This update fixed a bug that let users get past passcode security on the lockscreen, which was discovered several hours after iOS 7 was released to the public.  The update did not fix an issue that prevents certain iMessages from being sent, nor did it fix the BSOD issue.  Apple acknowledged the iMessages issue and said that they would patch it in a future software update.  To see what the BSOD issue looks like, check out the video below: