This market may have started out with the original Flip Video, but it has since exploded with offerings from all sorts of other companies. One of the first major competitors to Flip Camcorder was the Creative Vado, but many people still say that it wasn’t up to snuff. Creative hopes to have a more competitive product with the third-generation Creative Vado HD.

As its name implies, this pocket camcorder is capable of recording HD video on the go. Creative has worked to improve on a number of features, including better low light video recording, the ability to adjust the exposure manually, and the inclusion of an external stereo microphone for better audio recording. You’ll also find motion detection modes, still photo capture mode, and headphone output for private listening.

Interestingly, the capacity is being limited to just 4GB with no apparent ability to expand the memory using SD cards. That’s too bad, but it is good to see that the new Vado HD is compatible with both Macs and PCs right out of the box.

Expect the third-gen Creative Vado HD pocket camcorder to go on sale in mid-December. It’ll come in five different colors and will list at an MSRP of $180. That probably means that the Canadian price will be closer to $200.

An organized and planned database will have relatable data separated into multiple tables. This data may need to be used together at some point. This is where MySQL JOINs come in. Carrying on with our previous instalment, we’ll continue talking about table joining.

Last time, we took a look at a basic table join, which selected all fields from two tables. Today, we’ll be covering how select specific fields from specific tables involved in our join. In your code, you may only need to use some of the available fields. By specifying just the fields you need, you can shave some time off your query. Let’s take a look at our previous join query, which we’ll modify:

[sql]SELECT * FROM table1 JOIN table2 ON table1.id = table2.id[/sql]

With this query, we use the wildcard character (an asterisk) to specify that we want all the fields. In a regular select query, we would use a comma-separated list of fields, in place of the wildcard, to retrieve specific fields. In a join query, it is the same, except with must specify the table that a field resides in. We do this in the format of: table_name.field_name. Adapting our previous example, we end up with this:

[sql]SELECT table1.id, table1.name, table2.mark FROM table1 JOIN table2 ON table1.id = table2.id[/sql]

Next time we’ll be covering joining multiple tables.

We’ve reach the end of yet another work week, so that means it could be time for you to join the masses at the crowded malls for some holiday shopping action. Before you do that, let’s stop for a moment and read up on some great business-related posts from the blogosphere.

Lesley Chang starts us off by discussing what she learned from Kirk LaPointe at Kwantlen University. He’s the managing editor of the Vancouver Sun and he has proclaimed that the press release is dead. Kirk also says that PR professionals are “always on.”

Scott Young is just as firm a believer as anyone else that you should pursue your interests, finding a job that is in line with your interests and hobbies. But, what if you have more than one passion? Do you really have to specialize or can you try your hand at being a generalist?

MoneyNing knows that many of us are in search of sun and sand during these gloomier winter months, but that doesn’t mean that we need to break the bank. Yes, it is possible to save money on cruises by shopping ahead and avoiding their pre-booked excursions.

Sam Chan has decided to jump into the latest social networking fad. He decided that he will Poken with the best of them, sharing his contact information with other Poken users. He’s also very happy with their customer service.

Rebecca Bollwitt, who most of us know better as Miss604, is currently embarking on some international travel. Somehow, she finds herself over in Switzerland to see how the Swiss are going to represent themselves at the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver. See, everything she does ties back to the 604. :)

Are you planning a major product launch for this holiday shopping season? Maybe you are planning a product launch in general and you’re looking for a way to build up the buzz in anticipation of its release. What can you do? It’s not like you can go about and start selling something that may not necessarily exist yet, can you?

This is where you can can provide an added incentive to encourage buyers to buy something, even before they have the actual opportunity to buy it. The concept of a pre-order is nothing new when it comes to DVDs and video games, but it can easily be expanded into all sorts of other areas as well. This could be as small as a new book or as big as a new car. But how would you go about convincing someone to promise to buy something when they can’t have the product in hand right away?

Try offering a presale bonus of some kind. Going to the example of a new book, you could start to build some buzz online — through Facebook, a blog, Twitter, YouTube, and so on — by letting people add themselves to a pre-order mailing list or something similar. In doing so, they will be given the most up-to-date information regarding your book’s release and you gain a valuable contact for your email marketing list. As an incentive to the prospective buyer, you can send them the first chapter of your book in PDF form as a free bonus for signing up.

I remember reading somewhere that in anticipation of the release of New Super Mario Bros. Wii, GameStop was providing a free gift card with 500 Nintendo Points to anyone who pre-ordered and pre-paid for the game. These points could be spent in the Wii Shop or on Nintendo DSiWare. It’s a small bonus, only worth about $5, but it meant the difference between someone buying the game at GameStop and buying it elsewhere.

Presales are also great for generating positive cashflow, which can help with expenses related to marketing, accounting, legal fees, and so on, even before you have a product that is ready for sale.

Are you getting ready to launch a new WordPress-based website or blog? Don’t want the public to see the site while it is still under construction, but you want to see exactly what the site would look like when it goes live? While you could certainly test it out on a separate domain or subdomain, it might prove to be more user friendly by trying a solution like the Custom Coming Soon Page WordPress plugin.

In short, this plugin allows you to display a special “coming soon” or “under construction” page to normal visitors. This special page can be completely customized with unique titles, background images, and templates. You can also implement a countdown timer, so visitors will know exactly when your site will go live for the first time.

On the back end, you can have full access to the real site, tweaking and making changes in preparation for the full launch. In this “hidden” area, you can perform upgrades, install new plugins, preview your enhancements, and fix bugs without affecting the regular site visitors. They won’t see any error messages or changes to the design until you are ready to let your site go live.

For more information and to download the Custom Coming Soon Pages WordPress plugin, check out the official page on CSS Jockey‘s site.

It may sound like a good problem to have, but it is still a problem being had nonetheless. At some point in your business ventures, you may encounter the issue of having too many customers or too many orders and not having the infrastructure in place to handle this added volume. This can happen both with real goods and virtual goods, as well as service-based industries.

Consider the hobbyist who decides to start selling her arts and crafts through online venues like eBay and Etsy. For a time, this side venture provides a little bit of extra spending money, but it is not a primary source of income. She may be happy with this level of profitability, but what if she suddenly receives a surge of orders through Etsy. Bearing in mind that these may be handcrafted items, how can she keep up the volume? This presents the problem of scalability.

If she wants to stick with the part-time hobby of selling arts and crafts online, she may have to refuse some of these orders or limit the number of orders that can come over the course of a set time period. However, if she wants to capitalize on this increased interest and expand her hobby into a business, she will need to figure out how to handle the larger number of orders. Will she start to hire assistants to make the product? Will she outsource to a third-party manufacturer? What about the logistics of taking, filling, and shipping the orders to customers?

Whether you are just starting out with your small business or you already have years of experience in running it, it is still worthwhile to consider the issue of scalability and how you will handle it should you have the good fortune of increased volume. What is your contingency plan?