Business is not started any day with no proper planning. People, who don’t plan well and start a business with no goal, will surely fail to develop a good successful business. A new approach to strategic management was developed in the early 1990′s by Drs. Robert Kaplan (Harvard Business School) and David Norton. They named this system the ‘balanced scorecard’. The balanced scorecard is a management system (not only a measurement system) that enables organizations to clarify their vision and strategy and translate them into action. It provides feedback around both the internal business processes and external outcomes in order to continuously improve strategic performance and results. When fully deployed, the balanced scorecard transforms strategic planning from an academic exercise into the nerve center of an enterprise. Today implementing balanced scorecard to your own business is very easy by use means of computer. The Balanced Scorecard Designer (BSC Designer), software by Strategy2Act is one such good example of a computer application which allows creating scorecards. This software simplifies the process of creating and managing Balanced Scorecards.

Modern businesses depend upon measurement and analysis of performance. Measurements must derive from the company’s strategy and provide critical data and information about key processes, outputs and results. Data and information needed for performance measurement and improvement are of many types, including: customer, product and service performance, operations, market, competitive comparisons, supplier, employee-related, and cost and financial. Analysis entails using data to determine trends, projections, and cause and effect — that might not be evident without analysis. Data and analysis support a variety of company purposes, such as planning, reviewing company performance, improving operations, and comparing company performance with competitors’ or with ‘best practices’ benchmarks. Balanced scorecard incorporates feedback around internal business process outputs, as in TQM, but also adds a feedback loop around the outcomes of business strategies. This creates a “double-loop feedback” process in the balanced scorecard. The balanced scorecard framework is designed in such a way to carry out the entire necessary task easily. The simple yet powerful interface of this software let user to create scorecards, categories and goals. Performance measurement and calculation can also be performed at no time using this software. For all your balanced scorecard management, BSC Designer is highly recommended and just don’t go on my words and try this software yourself free for 30 days and then decide. You can download the trial version from the website right away, no questions asked and no long forms to fill. System requirements are also very less so it would run on most of the computers without any problem.

We have been using dual layer DVD, now Hitachi has came up with quad layer (still in development) using Blu-Ray technology which will enable upto 100GB of data onto a single disc. What’s interesting to note that there will be no need to buy any new blu-ray drive and just a firmware upgrade would enable existing blu-ray drives to accept this quad layer disc. Company also said that they are working on eight layer variant of this technology which would double the capacity to 200GB. It’s good that these disc capacities are increasing and it will prove best for HD movie releases but for PC users thinking of making their own HD disc of home movies, I would say burning 100GB will be a boring task even with fastest hardware.

Photo Source: PC Watch

Compare Suite is a kind of software which makes life easier and saves lot of time for other productive use. How? Have you ever saved several copies of a file and worked on them and then you can’t decide which file is modified in which way. Comparing files also becomes impossible if numbers of files are large for example for a web designer, the numbers of files can be quite more. A typical site may have 200 files and checking these files manually for changes can not only be a tedious job but also time consuming. The Compare Suite file compare utility does the job of comparing any number of files so easy and beautifully that you will simply love this software.

This file compare utility compares files by many ways. You can simply compare text in case of word files, Excel spreadsheets, PDF or html files and the software highlights the changed and matching text so that you can differentiate easily, it also gives detailed information on number of lines modified, when they were modified and percentage of similarity between two files. It highlights the changed, added and deleted text in three different colors which is yet another powerful feature of this software. Blue denotes added line/text, red for deleted line/text and green tells about modified line/text. The text file compare function is further enhanced buy the ability to compare one format of file with another like word file can be compared with PDF and other combinations as well.

While comparing two files you may want to edit files like copy pasting text from one another and this can be done very easily with few clicks and you are done. Not only files but you can compare folders as well. This is very important as comparing folders with large number of files manually one by one is almost impossible. The software created a detailed report when two folders are compared and now it becomes quite easy to make out the difference between the files of both folders. With a function called FolderPrint, you can print the content of the folders for a manual look and this is again easy as once the content of folder gets printed on pages, what you all need is a pen and some eagle eyed people. With this feature you can also browse files in a better way than you would do on a regular file explorer. With so many features, this software is a must try and you can download a 30 day trial and try it without any risk.

AT&T is planning to launch its 3G smart phone named ‘AT&T Tilt’ in U.S. market on 5th Oct, 2007.

This phone is designed by HTC and runs on Window Mobile 6. It adopts a QWERTY keypad, 2.8-inch color screen, 3 MP camera, Bluetooth 2.0 and GPS navigation function. Suggested price is 299.99 USD.

In this festival season there will be lots of shopping and the list of stuff that I have to buy online is getting bigger every year. But I don’t worry as I always get discounts whenever I purchase online using discount coupons. You will ask that, “Do I have an endless supply of coupons or found a treasure of coupons”? I would say yes and you can also have the same luxury and get online coupons for most of the stores and make big savings, thanks to CouponChief.com. My favorite store for most of the gift purchases is Dell and I always find dell coupons here. You will always find some irresistible offers here. People always get confused on what to buy for gifts and take my advice, if you don’t find anything just look for Zappos coupons and buy shoes or handbags as its one of those gift which most of the people would like to get. Enjoy this festival season and have a great time!

An ATM at a bank in Tbilisi, Georgia stopped working just because the Operating system installed in ATM (windows xp) was not activated! The pop up shows that only 5 days are left which means that machine was working for 25 days (30 day trial) without activation. If xp is not activated after install, it shows warning several times but here in ATM case the warning message popped up only before 5 days are left. This means the guy who installed Xp on that machine set the reminder to “remind me after 25 days” and then forgot to activate. I think that windows xp is not just right to be used in ATM machines, either Microsoft should make a different version of OS for these machines or much reliable operating systems like Solaris should be used.

Photo: zparks.lv (illustrated by me)