Can Enterprise Online Sales Demo Really Work?

I’m writing this post using my brand new upgraded Wordpress 2.5 platform. I find it good enough although I do missed the big old dashboard that has all those big fonts. Anyway, last week Thursday night there was another webinar which I’ve forgotten that I’ve already signed up to attend it online. I just realized about it the last minute when I suddenly received a reminder e-mail just before the online webinar was about to start.

Since the webinar was organized by Citrix, the organizer had everybody attending to install their software in order for them to show their presentation slides. Unfortunately, the audio is only accessible by dialing a toll free US number. Again, I used Skype for this purpose. It was interesting despite living in Malaysia, I have the same facility as what my counterpart in the US have. I just love being online on the World Wide Web. Here’s a screenshot of my desktop setup. (For those of you who like to analyze what type of person I am, you can see what application I have on my desktop as well *wink*)-

Ashrufzz Desktop Preview
My Desktop Preview
 

I love how the Citrix online presentation flow was handled. I’ve been to a lot of presentation from my experience attending talks, seminars and webinars and normally I can spot which presentation can attract my interest. This one, eventhough I can’t see the speaker’s face, the presentation style is quite good plus there wasn’t so much of a hard selling effort. Here’s an interesting slide I’ve taken from my desktop screenshot while hearing to the webinar:

Citrix Online Webcast
Citrix Online Webcast
 

Last year in December, I attended an online presentation meeting with a Canada based company. They use Adobe Connect to perform their slideshows and again Skype as the main audio communicator. That was my first time I’ve ever experienced a one to one online sales presentation and it opened my eyes to a whole lot more the usability of the web. I recorded everything using Camtasia software for my keeping.

An interesting perspective here is, not everybody is exposed to this new technique of doing demo presentation live on the internet. It might be useful at some point but there is so many technical aspect to take care of, at least initially. Anyway, the future of doing web conferencing online looks quite promising and I do look forward paying attention to it very closely.

2 Webinars in A Month

It has been a while since I’ve attended any seminars. The last would be during a conference my company sponsored a table top. But that doesn’t stop me from attending seminars. Nowadays, you can even attend a seminar from the comfort of your own office desk or even your bedroom with the creation of Web Seminar or better known as Webinar.

Armed with only your flash configured browser or special software and a decent broadband internet connection, you can attend or even held a webinar. So on the 5th of March which was last 2 weeks, I attended “MarketingProfs B2B-2.0 EXPO”. Since the webinar was hosted in the US, it was almost midnight from where I live but I was still at my office doing some last minute assignment. Here are some screenshots of the webinar I’ve taken during the webinar:

B2B 2.0 Expo 2.0 Main Area
B2B 2.0 Expo 2.0 Main Area
 

Since this webinar is using flash, it requires a little bit of download time and also consumes most of my underpowered Intel Celeron M notebook processor. It does kind of annoy me especially when my so called broadband internet somehow drops in between.

B2B 2.0 Expo 2.0 Booth
B2B 2.0 Expo 2.0 Booth
 

The booth are not the kind of booth you see at normal tradeshows and seminars but at least you can get information easily by just clicking and it automatically insert information inside my virtual briefcase. The only thing that I don’t like is how the sales chat is handled, it was so slow to load.

There’s also some free gift in a form of free PDF information download and stuff. Well, I did download some of them but it’ll just add more collection to my PDF junk inside my laptop. They did follow up by sending me e-mails but I won’t really bother on their offer and stuff since I’m not seriously in need of such services yet. I’m just there to gain a new experience.

Pre-Training Webinar

 

Last night, I attended another webinar. This webinar is supposed to be done at my office since it’s related to my job but I had the permission to do it at home since the webinar is held after my office hours. Furthermore, I need to make a recording of this webinar to be shared with my team mates so I need a stable internet connection. Apparently, my internet connection at home is much more stable than my office.

I missed 10 minutes of the introduction to the webinar because I misunderstood the instruction which required me to call a toll free number in the US. The webinar was held on Microsoft Live Meeting and I thought the audio would be included. I then remembered that I can use Skype to make phone call to the US and lucky it went through since its toll free anyway. Check out the video below to see the webinar live in action inside of my own bedroom:


ARCHIBUS Pre-Training Webinar @ Home from Ashrufzz on Vimeo.
 

I’ll have more events going on the next following weeks so I’m looking forward to that as well.

My Webhost Fanatical Version Upgrade

I hope my webhost have learned their lessons when the attempt to upgrade/repair the hard drive containing all their paid web hosting customer, resulted in a catastrophic hard disk failure which wiped out the entire hard disk with no possibility or recovery. It was truely a painful moment for me when that happened. Eventhough my blog was just 11 months old with some casual updates, I also add-on a few domain names on the same web host since that was the most economical thing to do.

Anyway, my web hosting will expire end of this month. I’ve decided that I shall remain with my web host which is Byethost for one simple reason. They are fanatically upgrading each and every components on the web host to the latest version available.

Byethost Current Component Version List
Byethost Current Component Version List
 

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, install this add-on for your Firefox Browser called Server Spy. It will tell you which version of web application server the website is using. New version normally has bugfixes and contain more new features for you to enjoy such as the one my web hosting is using which is Apache 2.2.8.

Despite the economical factor, I have plans to buy another web hosting for not to put all my eggs in one basket. I have 4 days of geeky days at home this Chinese New Year holiday so I might be doing a lot more of my online activities as what I’ve been doing before.

How to Remove RavMonLog Virus

In this post, I’m not going to insert any pictures or images. It has been a while since this problem occured. I’ve tried a number of those free anti-viruses (I’m stingy okay..hehe) and none of them work. I tried using a Ravmon Removal Tool (right click and save as here to download) but it didn’t cure my problem. I haven’t try the new version called the Smart Anti Virus 1.0 but I’m going to check it out soon.

Anyway, one of my colleague here at my office circulated an e-mail on how to remove RavMonLog virus. I’ve tried it myself, and it works:

THREAT NAME
Worm.RJump.A

CLEAN INSTRUCTIONS

  1. Right click on an empty space from the taskbar (or right click on the clock from the right corner) and select Task Manager.
    - Select the Processes tab, locate ravmon.exe, right click on it and select End Process
    - Delete the following file: C:\Windows\ravmon.exe
  2. To clean the removable storage device (USB stick, PEN drive etc.) right-click on your USB stick / PEN drive icon and select Explore.NB: Be careful NOT to double-click the icon because the malware will be reactivated.
    - Locate and delete the autorun.inf and ravmon.exe files
  3. Click on Start, Run, type regedit and click on OK.

NB: Before you edit the registry, please export the keys that you plan to edit, or create a backup of the system before you proceed.

  1. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
  2. Delete the "RavAV" = "C:\windows\ravmon.exe"

SYMPTOMS

  1. Presence of the autorun.inf and ravmon.exe files in the root of the storage device.
  2. Presence of a copy of the ravmon.exe file in the windows system folder.
  3. Presence of the RavMonLog file that contains the port number for the backdoor component.

DESCRIPTION

  1. Worm.RJump.A spreads by creating a copy on removable storage devices or mapped drives.
  2. It drops the following malicious files:
    • autorun.inf
    • ravmon.exe
  3. Also it drops a clean msvcr71.dll file that is a part of Microsoft Visual Studio.
  4. It opens a port for the backdoor component.

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