If you believe the folks over at the CareerCast.com, among the least stressful careers out there are a few IT jobs. They include:

Computer systems analyst and software engineer.

That’s probably news to a lot of systems analysts and software engineers who are battling deadlines, budget cuts and staff reductions like the rest of us.

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Keeping in touch with clients and customers will usually boost your customer service reputation, but how much contact is too much?

Legal experts are warning attorneys that exchanging text messages with clients has a number of downsides. Among them: the expectation that the lawyer is “on-call” 24 hours a day and can be contacted during each and every one of them.

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Jerusalem – As of January 1, 2010, food products exported to Europe will enjoy tax exemptions. The products include chocolate, pastries, waffles, pasta, coffee, fruit juice concentrates, marshmallow, fresh salads, and more.
As a result, the prices of Israeli products in European markets could be reduced, increasing their competitiveness.

So far, the exports of Israeli processed foods have been exported to Europe under restrictions of high levies, preventing their exports in some cases.

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If your company has any customers in Canada or Mexico, or if you
have domestic customers that ship to one of those two countries,
you’ve probably been asked for a NAFTA Certificate of Origin. And
depending on how much money these Canadian or Mexican customers can
save in duties under NAFTA, the requests may be frequent and
strongly worded.

Keep in mind, however, that not all products qualify for NAFTA. That
includes goods that are manufactured or produced in Canada, Mexico
or the United States. Before you can determine whether or not your
products qualify for reduced duties under NAFTA, you must understand
the NAFTA Rules of Origin, you must know and document the origin of
each of the components of your products, and you must know and
document where your products were finished.

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Here’s a new website that I came across today. Looks like they are looking to accomplish something like Yeshiva World and Vin News.

Shviger.com is trying to become the definitive source of news covering issues of particular concern to women and providing women’s perspectives on public policy. Looks like their goal is to offer community news, health, parenting, pregnancy, beauty, style, fitness, relationships, food and entertainment to the frum Jewish women around the world.

Country of Origin (often abbreviated to COO), is the country of manufacture, production, or growth where an article or product comes from. The origin of an article will affect its admissibility, the rate of duty, its entitlement to special duty or trade preference programs (such as: GSP, NAFTA & CBI), antidumping, and government procurement.

Unless an exception applies, all goods of foreign origin, and their containers, must be marked clearly and conspicuously in English with the country of origin of the article.

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Software Buying Guide: The challenge is in finding the right software. Whether you work for a small or large company, for-profit or non-profit, buying software for your organization can be overwhelming. Dozens or even hundreds of software solutions may address your needs, and arriving at agreement and managing expectations among all parties affected by the new software – end users, executives, finance and IT – is a true challenge.

Because of this, the resulting software purchase is often not as successful as it could be. What can go wrong? Implementation may take longer than expected. Costs may be higher than anticipated. Employees may be unhappy with the usability of the solution. And, in some cases, a company may simply settle for the easiest choice without doing the necessary research to find an optimal solution.

Here some insights from Capterra Software into to the software buying process…

Identify Software Options
This step involves creating an exhaustive list of all the software solutions that seem to meet your needs. With the number and variety of innovative solutions available on the market, it is important to conduct research and be as inclusive as possible in the early stages of the purchase process. Starting with a complete list of options decreases the likelihood that you will miss a product that is a good fit for your needs.

After creating a list of all potential solutions, the next step is to narrow it down to a manageable list of realistic options. Consider the following questions:

1. Does the solution satisfy your most important requirements?
2. Does the solution satisfy some of the less important, “nice to have” requirements?
3. How user-friendly is the solution?
4. How easy/complex is the implementation?
5. How customizable is the solution?
6. Does the solution require changes to your business processes?
7. Does the vendor have customers similar to you?
8. How compelling are the vendor’s testimonials/reviews?
9. How innovative is the solution, compared to others on the market?

Making the Final Decision

Contact the vendors on your list to determine final pricing and service levels, as well as to view product demonstrations and training materials. References from current customers that have needs similar to yours can help tremendously. A final factor worth considering is how helpful and proactive the vendor appears to be in the sales process. This is often an indication of how easy they will be to work with once you are a customer. In many respects, your relationship with the vendor will be a partnership, and you will want to find out what sort of partner they will be.

Software Buying Checklist

1. Articulate what you need the software to do.
2. Ensure these needs are aligned with your business goals.
3. Outline existing processes that the software will affect.
4. Note any problems or limitations.
5. Consider how these processes can be improved.
6. Determine and prioritize software requirements.
7. Decide whether to build or buy the software.
8. Identify all potential software solutions.
9. Match each solution with requirements and remove those that do not match.
10. Solicit recommendations from peers.
11. Narrow the list of solutions to a short list of alternatives.
12. Contact each vendor.
13. View product demonstrations with input from end users.
14. Speak with references.
15. Negotiate terms of contract.
16. Make final purchase decision.

Concluding Thoughts
Every organization has different software needs. Therefore, simply selecting the “market leader” will often result in a less than ideal solution. Because the search for software requires valuable time, it is tempting to cheat the process and take shortcuts. Unfortunately, this can come back to haunt you. Be patient, include all stakeholders, manage their expectations and consider all of your options, and your software purchase decision will be a smart one.

Even if you manage to keep your chargebacks below the 1/2 – 1% threshold, any chargeback claims – whether remedied or not – take up precious time researching what happened. I’m sure there are other ways you’d rather spend your time (like focusing on new sales).

The best way to deal with any chargeback is to prevent them from happening in the first place.

6 tips for Presale Fraud Prevention
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There are two concepts to translating websites: Machine Translation & Professional Manual Translation.

What is Machine Translation (MT)?

Machine translation is technology available for free on the Internet. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft provide free translation of any text at any length using their computer based translation technology.

The Concept of automated translation have existed since the Renaissance, modern MT’s roots began in the 1950s with a joint project between Georgetown University and IBM. Although initial optimism faded in the wake of a 1966 report by a U.S. Government commission that found MT to be too
expensive, inaccurate and slow to warrant further funding, research and development continued in Europe, Russia and Japan until picking up again in the U.S. in the late 1970s. Skyrocketing globalization and the development of increasingly robust and powerful computers in the 1980s then paved the way for a resurgence in MT usage. MT is now a critical component for meeting the language demands of the 21st century, enabling applications that human translators cannot handle and enhancing their performance
in other settings.

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The US Patriot Act, among many other security and regulatory initiatives, stipulate the requirement to “Know Your Customer”. This is called in the Ecommerce world “Restricted Party Screening” (RPS). Federal regulation Section 326 of the USA PATRIOT Act requires financial institutions and others to implement a comprehensive risk-based “Customer Identification Program” (CIP). Failure to comply with this important new legislation can result in fines up to $1 million.

This procedure may be complicated for many companies to comply. Such CIP procedures include determining whether a customer appears on any list of suspected or known terrorists or terrorist organizations issued by any Federal government agency, including those designated as such by the Treasury Department in consultation with Federal functional regulators. Matching against complex, government lists can be challenging, costly, and time-consuming, because they typically include mixed individual and corporate records, names in both first/last and last/first name order, aliases, lower and upper case text, multiple names embedded in the same record, and other anomalies.

There are many vendors offing such screening processes. Here’s an example of a few vendors
www.kewill.com
www.managementdynamics.com
www.DHL.com/TAS