Meet Areeb Yasir, CEO of compevo communications

Areeb Yasir is the CEO of compevo communications and has driven compevo's strategic growth since 2001 in the IT and hosting markets.

1. Why did you decide to start compevo communications?

I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur and anticipated this move from a very young age. I think I've always been interested in the business world. Going into the IT world was only natural because I've been obsessed with computing and technology since I was a child.

2. How has your business developed since you started the company in 2001?

Honestly I started small; we started by selling CD-R discs and offering tech support and basic consulting and web development to the local Vancouver, Canada area. Within a few years, we grew with clients around the world while offering a variety of IT services, hosting and software products under our many brands from multiple parts of the world, with a focus on Asia.

3. Why has cloud hosting become so popular?

Cloud hosting has become popular because of changes in society, namely where everything we do is connected and on-line.

It is only a natural response that services to support this new way of living from personal to business would drive exponential growth in a short period of time. However, with the Cloud, I may be biased but there are also many pitfalls in terms of security, reliability, and privacy that most firms and individuals have not understood or addressed.

4. What are the benefits to your international customers of having your servers based in Canada?

In Canada we do not have the Patriot act, yet we are still quite neutral in terms of routing to the whole world, so we bring a lot of benefits of being close to the US with slightly less government oversight and intervention. Canada has proven itself a politically and economically stable country throughout many world events and the financial crisis of 2008, so many firms see value in working with a Canadian company. With that said, many of our clients opt to host their data in China or Russia for enhanced privacy, so long as their operations are within the legal framework of their respective countries.

5. I noticed that your personal website offers quite a variety of content related to software, hosting, and more. How do you choose what to share on areebyasir.com?

Quite honestly it is a bit of a toss-up. If I have time to get on the blog and I'm in the middle of something or just completed a task, a lot of times I just blog and document what I did. I think it's also important to humanize yourself and stay grounded. At the end of the day whether we work for ourselves or work for someone else, all jobs have their pros and cons.

A lot of people say to me, "it must be great to be your own boss," and I'll chuckle and explain that in some, if not most ways, it is like having a large amount of bosses with high expectations and tight deadlines--not to say I don't find it all thrilling, but it's important at least for me to remember compevo is only here because of our customers and our dedication and innovation to cutting edge, reliable IT services.

Thanks, Areeb!

Introducing Cloud Storage Top 10

Many of us have used cloud storage in one way or another--maybe to share files with a friend or coworker, or maybe to store our own files as a backup to what's on our computer, and so on. But how do you choose a cloud storage provider? Cloud Storage Top 10 is a small website with just one purpose: to share information about different cloud storage options.

This UK-based site gives reviews of different providers and also lists the costs and features of each service. The reviews emphasize paid services as these offer more storage space and are meant for regular/daily users who need to store lots of files. So if you are in the high megabytes or even pushing a terabyte when it comes to the amount of space you need, this site is going to be useful for you in looking at affordable paid options for cloud storage.

I found the site interesting as the only provider on the top ten list that I was personally familiar with was Dropbox, so I appreciated learning about other options. Six of the top ten currently listed offer unlimited storage, which is pretty cool if you ask me! And the reviews are very thorough in explaining exactly how each site works in terms of upload, storage, dashboard, etc, and what you're getting for your money.

If you are like me and have smaller needs in terms of cloud storage, you might like the article that Cloud Storage Top 10 has posted about free cloud storage options.

Introducing Web3Box, a Customer Relationship Management System

Customer relationship management (CRM) is one of those terms that is very familiar to some people and completely unknown to others! If you run any kind of business where you are interacting with customers, you probably already know about CRM. Sometimes called contact management software, CRM refers to software that you use to manage your relationships with customers through your interactions with them. CRM can help you with both current and future customers. The software helps you with a variety of tasks, from getting your contacts organized to ramping up customer service and even automating sales.

Web3Box offers a CRM system which uses cloud-based technology. While CRM tools have evolved over many years, the cloud-based alternatives developed in just the last couple years have become very popular--and they rank the highest in customer satisfaction.

In designing their CRM system, Web3Box describes their approach as focusing on the goal of "foster[ing] long-term customer loyalty." The idea is to simplify your administrative tasks and shorten the time it takes you to turn a lead into a customer. Who can argue with that idea?

They have also designed their system to have a user-friendly interface, and they offer customer support in getting the system set up to meet your company's needs. And the cool thing about the cloud-based system is that you can run it on mobile devices, which is great for companies where you need to be available to customers around the clock and where your employees may be working from their homes and other locations.

For more about Web3Box, check out the info linked here, which also explains how to request a demo.

Meet Emma Simpson, Managing Director of CheaperAccountant.co.uk

Emma Simpson is the Managing Director of CheaperAccountant.co.uk, a firm of accountants who have established a reputation across the UK for the provision of quality yet affordable accountancy services to small businesses. Cheaper Accountant has grown in population over the last few years and the company now works with more than 1,000 clients across the UK to provide cheap accountants for a variety of businesses.

1. At Cheaper Accountant, how do you keep your expenses and fees down?

We only operate online and take full advantage of modern technology to complete all of our communications with clients and for all of our marketing efforts. This means that our cost base is extremely low and much lower than a traditional high street accountant. Our website is our shop front and costs very little to operate, and the bulk of our online advertising is via social media which is completely free. So it is easy to see that without expensive high street rents and rates, newspaper advertising, property maintenance, and even an office secretary our rates can be reduced to a fee which is considerably less than the fees charged by other accountants. We may not be popular amongst other accountants, but we are popular with small businesses across the UK.

2. What are a few things that a small business owner can do to simplify their record-keeping when it comes to taxes?

This is a great question and something I am always happy to answer. Regulations stipulate that appropriate accounting records must be kept, but this task is now far easier in the modern world than ever before. Modern cloud accounting software allows the user to upload bank statements into the accounting system and then to simply click and allocate business expenditure to the correct category. Furthermore, modern iPhone applications allow business owners to scan receipts and then to upload the scanned document into the accounting system. With the growth of online, cloud-based accounting software business owners can now access their accounting records from a web browser anywhere in the world.

3. What inspired the founding of Cheaper Accountant?

I created CheaperAccountant.co.uk as I believed that small businesses should be offered a better deal for their accountancy work. Accounting for a small business is often more straightforward and less time-consuming than accounting for large businesses, and the fees charged to small businesses should reflect this. I firmly believe that all fees should represent the level of work and service provided, and I will never charge a client more than a fair price for my work. This has become the ethos of my company.

I also wanted micro businesses with very low turnover to have access to an accountant at a fair price. Sometimes it can take time to create a successful and profitable business, and in the early years of trading turnover and profits may be very low. We created a unique pricing structure for clients with turnover less than £10,000 and reduced our prices even further to ensure that even the smallest of companies can afford a qualified accountant.

4. Do you think there are any common misconceptions people have about hiring an accountant?

Yes I do. The major misconception people often have is that they can't afford the services of an accountant because all accountants are far too expensive. We have made it our mission to change people's minds on this and to prove to business owners that they can afford a professional and qualified accountant who is experienced to complete all of their accountancy work. Furthermore, we often save clients money by ensuring that they don't pay more tax than is absolutely necessary and ensure that all allowances are fully utilized. I have also received a number of tax refunds for a variety of clients and the reduction in tax obtained has often been more than the fees we have charged.

5. For people who are "going it alone" instead of hiring an accountant, what might you say to encourage them to consider giving working with an accountant a try?

I would say that working with a qualified accountant really can pay for itself and the gain can be greater than the cost. After all, how much do you know about accounting rules and concepts, and can you get your accounts right and avoid being fined? An accountant will ensure that your accounts are produced to a professional standard and will ensure that everything is submitted on time to the correct authorities. In addition to this, specialist accounting software is required to produce accounts in the iXRBL format mandated by HMRC and it is far more cost effective to pay an accountant to prepare your accounts in this format for you.

Editor's Note: Please click the following link for more information about cheap London accountants.

Thanks, Emma!

Meet Patrick of On Learning Point

On Learning Point is a website with free and useful information about online teaching and learning and the use of technology in online education. The training technology manager who runs On Learning Point, Patrick has a passion for training and training technology and has implemented and migrated several enterprise systems as well as small start-up sites; he specializes in creating cloud-based learning solutions that give the best training impact to the business.

1. What motivated you to start On Learning Point?

Our Learning Point is primarily an informational site about learning and e-learning and e-learning technology. I realized after being in the industry for 10 years that I had a lot of information and tribal knowledge that would be good to share and put out there to help others. And so, I created the site primarily as a resource site for people who are actually practitioners of implementing a learning solution, as well as to offer suggestions for solving everyday problems that people face.  

A lot of times, people face the same exact problems and ask me the same types of questions. Usually once a year, I get the same set of questions. These include: How do I set up a certification exam, if the requirements are "x"? Or, how many people can be included in this audience? What audience should be set up? It can be even simpler than that. Other questions include: How do I define my audience?  How do I build a training platform that I can use to deliver all kinds of different things?  

Some of the other things that I try to explore on the site are more the complexity of building an entire software stack, such as a platform as a service. This means that you'd have several different platforms all working together to provide a seamless experience. For example, with learning solutions, you may have a video delivery platform, a document delivery platform, as well as the LMS (learning management system), which does the tracking and the backend functions.  

That's primarily the focus of the site. It was an idea that I had been toying around with for many years, dating all the way back to 2003 when I was starting to get really heavy into the learning process.  

Back then, Moodle and some of the other open source LMSs were very immature. They had a multitude of issues. The issues were not being addressed particularly well. They were being addressed in a community manner, obviously, since this was sort of a side project for a lot of people. However, all of that changed in 2011 when they adopted a more formal development and a break fix model where people could actually pay for commercial support, as well as getting commercial grade fixes for the LMS when something broke. And this was a paradigm shift in the open source LMS market.  

There are other companies who did something similar, and they may have said that they were open source, but if you tried to access their code, you wouldn't have been able to do so. I think that's one of the major differences between an open source LMS provider and someone who's not. Technically, that's not part of the GPL license, that you have to provide the code on your website, but it really seems to be an indicator of whether the product is open source or not.

Some of those other products claim that they are open source, but if you were to go to their website, you can't find one piece of code. To me, that's not really an open source product when even though technically you are licensed, as you can't get a hold of the code, which means you can't fork it. It means you can't own it. It means you can't support it. You can't create derivative works from it. It's not an open source. It is a completely a whole different area of philosophy.  

The other thing that is really neat about the way learning management systems have come and the direction that they're going nowadays is the whole introduction of the cloud systems. Now you can create, without actually having to purchase a lot of heavy end equipment, products that are located right in the cloud and they can come and go and may have very short shelf life--maybe only one hour.  

You can spin up one instance and then deliver your training and then spin it back down. It'd be a strange scenario where you would want to do that, but there may be specific reasons for it, so it's a very interesting paramount change in the way things are now being done.  

2. What's the current role of technology when it comes to education/training programs?

The role of technology in training is ever-changing and ever-evolving. Right now, we're at a paradigm shift in the way training is being taught to everyone: everyone from high schools, preschoolers, and all the way up through post-secondary education, as well as corporate training as well. The ability to create video and deliver it anywhere ambiguously on any device is changing everything. Pretty soon, and you're already starting to see this, you will be able to do a little search for content and, on the spot, you will be able to learn anything that you need to know about anything, whether it is air conditioning repair, how to diagnose your car trouble, or how to apply for college credits.

It doesn't matter what it is. A lot of the institutions are realizing that as well, and so they've gone to a global learning reach where they've defined their audience as everybody in the world. Obviously, there are some language barriers with doing it this way, but the fact that you can actually deliver your learning content to any corner of the globe at any time, at any instance, is completely changing the way we do business.

Now, the similar technology needs to catch up and be able to track these types of delivering mechanisms, but at its simplest form. If you were to click on this website, I can track that you've launched the content. I don’t know if you finished the content, but I know that you clicked onto it and so I can track that click. The other thing I can do from a technology standpoint is that I can assess your knowledge very easily as well by creating quizzes after the fact.

So, whether or not you consume that content with me or you consume the content with some other provider, it doesn't really matter to me. The content most likely will be available to you, although maybe not always and then, by virtue of me assessing your knowledge and skill level, I can now say that indeed that you are certified. I can feel comfortable with certifying you remotely, without even having even seen you. This is great for me because I can charge you money to do so. And this is great for you because you may live in a rural area where these schools are not available except online.

The other thing that is quite revolutionary when it comes to learning is the use of video cameras and webcams. Through different services and virtual classrooms like Skype or Big Blue Button, you can now have a face-to-face meeting with one person or an entire class. And so you can take that traditional classroom environment and actually deliver it virtually anywhere in the world.

There are some technical limitations as far as bandwidth goes and you have to make sure that your video and audio is synced up, but that is becoming more and more ubiquitous. Some of the technology is going to need to catch up as far as tracking and recording as well.

But, at some point, there is no reason why anybody can't become an instructor. If you know something or you have a certain skill set or you have a certain knowledge area, you should be able to share that with the world and be able to resell that information. This is whether it's a recording or if it's actually a live class.

Some people start with doing a live class and, once they've done it a couple of times, and they feel like they've gotten good at it, they'll take that and actually record it. Once the recording is done, now you can sell that and repackage it as you want. Add a quiz and now you can certify someone: after someone reviews your content, heor she may be able to pass a quiz and now you have certification.

So, technology is changing everything by making everyone connected via the Internet.

3. How is mobile technology changing both learning and teaching?

To summarize, it's video and the ability to get that video anywhere. Anyone can learn and anyone can tach right from their mobile device, because let's not forget, they are all just little tiny computers. And they are perfect platforms to broadcast from.

It's an exciting time where things are really just spinning up and soon you will be able to learn things right at the point of needing to learn them. As an instructor taking a mobile device to the field will let you narrate and show the item being talked about. You can then wrap up the whole thing by making an assessment in the end and you will then have a full training module.

4. What is the cloud, and how is it affecting online learning?

Most people have heard of cloud computing by now, but just to reiterate, cloud computing is a shared computing platform that can be used to host and store learning content.

You can create a whole virtual machine or a server right in the cloud, using shared resources and you don't need to worry about any of the underlying infrastructure like:

Routers
Physical servers
Disks

All that stuff has been virtualized, so you just create an instance of your Moodle sites by going in through Amazon web services, create the server, and set it up, load your content and then you are in business. It can take as little as 5 minutes to get everything set up.  

This is incredible because this is a paramount shift in the way the speed of things can go to market in which you can bring things.  

Also, there is the ability to store items in the cloud, either as a student or as an instructor: if you have videos that you would like to store, if you have audio files, word documents, all your content can be stored up there on the servers, which are actually located in a secure location somewhere other than yours that can be accessed by any Internet-capable device.  

From a standpoint of creating content and hosting it and tracking it, it's never been an easier time in order to get that done.

It used to be, in the old days that you had to get a server.  

You had to size that server correctly, based on the amount of traffic that you were expecting.  

And then, perhaps you had to put a load balancer in front of it, and basically have to worry about a lot of different technical details such as:

What IP addresses you have.  
What are your DNS settings?  
How do you set all that stuff up?  
Do you run your own DNS server?  
Do you setup your own mail server?  

Anyway, all of that is not really an issue anymore thanks to cloud computing.  

There is one down side and thats privacy. You may lose the ability to have your items private--but anything that's out on the web, it's probably not going to be private anyway. So, unless it's secret content, it's probably going to be okay to have it on that server there in the cloud.  

5. What would you recommend to an entrepreneur without experience in new learning technologies who wants to start utilizing the online environment to offer trainings, seminars, and other interactive products?

I think, if you're an entrepreneur and you’re starting out today it's really a 3-step process.

1. The first thing you'd want to do is just create a base outline of the different courses that you're going to be offering.  

2. Next, you need to create that offering and start with the easiest thing you can start out with. So, whether it is a small, short PDF or a short video recording, you can start with that and get everything in place and start offering courses to people.

3. Set it up in the LMS, because it's so much easier to get started: you can be up and running the same day that the content is ready.

Often, it seems that people get stuck on the technology, and it becomes more and more this huge, great big thing.  

If you kind of have an outline of how you think it's going to look when it's done, start that vision and then break it down into little pieces and turn each one into an individual PDF.  

Sometimes people just get stuck on just creating that first PDF and when that happens, they find it hard to implement because it seems so massive.  

With each LMS that I've been involved with, they all started in the same place. They started with loading a single document, testing the ability to serve that document to other people and making sure that it was recorded and that the student had basic access to the content. It doesn't need to be any more complicated than that.  

The great thing is what you can do today:

You can very quickly create your content, and then very quickly set up in just an instance a learning site, and then launch it very quickly and get it out to the market, often within the same day of completing your content.  

So, there is no reason to make it overly complicated.  

One other problem area is that people will try to go through a whole LMS selection process trying to figure out which one is best. Most of the ones that are out there today generally do the same thing, just in slightly different ways, and so, depending upon what your goals are, it's probably pretty easy for you to achieve that goal.  

Get that content out there and start charging for it today. Validate that your business model is good and that the content is something that people would pay for before you invest many, many hours into the project.  

The other thing you can also do is you can use PLR content (Private Label Content), which is content that's already been written. You can take that content and rewrite it and put it up into your LMS immediately, making it a very fast turn-around.  

Depending on what area you're actually working in, you can get the LMS and the content pre-built for you and you can use that to turn-around your business model very quickly.  

Online webinars are also a great way to push content out quickly to the large groups of people. Software such as Big Blue Button and WebEx lets you talk and share your screen. Hold a monthly webinar, which is great for connecting to people and finding out exactly what the market needs.

To learn more about e-learning platforms, please visit On Learning Point. On Learning Point is a site dedicated to helping everyone learn about e-learning platforms and e-learning technology.

Thanks, Patrick!