Grocers – an industry as competitive as any – understand that business goes beyond selling. This is why many groceries are involved in the community, give back and encourage employee charity participation.

In an email from Sunguard today, this picture was included. (It was announcing a new website.)

Lesson: if a multi-million dollar multi-national can admit their website sucks (and fix it), so can you!

Almost all purchasing begins online. If your website sucks, you are missing out on sales.

One of my clients has AT&T Internet for his ISP. I get regular emails from AT&T about malware.

A host (x.x.x.x) within your IP block may be infected with a trojan, virus, or worm; or you may have a malicious user on your network. The host in question, (y.y.y.y), is sending unsolicited commercial email (spam).

If x.x.x.y is your firewall/gateway/NAT then it is likely that the offending email is originating from your internal network.

Please ensure all of the following actions have or will be completed in order to properly secure your network:

1) Implement a hardware and/or software based firewall solution

2) Install an anti-virus software product

3) Update virus definitions on a regular basis (recommended: daily)

4) Run a full virus scan on all systems frequently (recommended: daily)

5) Install all critical operating system updates and patches Official Microsoft updates can be downloaded from the Microsoft Windows Update site.

6) Disable all unnecessary services including: file/print sharing, Web/FTP/email/DNS servers, and remote access services. Consider blocking the following ports both egress and ingress: 135 tcp, 139 tcp, 445 tcp, 1025 tcp, 1433 tcp, 2745 tcp, 5000 tcp, 137 udp, and 1434 udp

7) Consider installing an anti-spyware and/or anti-trojan software solution

8) To help counteract recent worms such as the Storm worm, block incoming port 80 tcp requests to all IPs other than your webserver(s)

9) To counter email worms, block egress port 25 tcp traffic to all destinations other than the authorized SMTP server at the router or firewall and monitor your logs for any machines attempting to violate this rule set

10) Wireless routers should be password protected, using WPA or WPA2 encryption (WEP only if WPA is not available), MAC address filter enabled, and SSID broadcast disabled.

AT&T Internet Services Security Center provides their top 10 actions to help curtail spam and spyware. What are yours?

From Tom Fishburne’s Google NYC keynote about marketing today. How you position your company or your service in the marketplace is how you show value, differentiation, and how you to tell the story. (The story is very important.) And it isn’t so much about the WHAT as it is about the WHY! Start with the Why.