Southern Maryland Wedding and Bridal Show

J.T. Daugherty Southern Maryland Bridal and Wedding Show

J.T. Daugherty Southern Maryland Event Center, Conference Center and Wedding Center announces its 2010 Southern Maryland Bridal Show – for January 17th, 11:30-3PM.

Strolling Fashion Show for Bridal Gowns, Tuxedos and Attendants, Complimentary Hors D’oeuvres, Cake Tastings, Door Prizes and all the Vendors you need to make your Wedding Day Dreams come true will be present!

Click Here To Register for the Southern MD Bridal Show, and You’ll Be Eligible for The Romance Package Giveaway!

J.T. Daugherty Wedding Center in Southern Maryland is a Southern Maryland’s only full service event center, conference center, wedding center and source for Southern Maryland catering – conveniently located in Lexington Park, MD across from the PAX River Naval Air Station in St. Mary’s County, MD.

Learn Integrated Online Marketing/Advertising, Branding, Web Design, SEO, Social Media, Analytics and Internet Video – in Northern Virginia, DC metro area.

As 2009 draws to a close, it’s become very apparent that 2010 will continue to be an extremely challenging year for businesses seeking new customers, and new ways to market and advertise their brand and services. As well, the ability of Northern Virginia and DC-area professionals to effectively learn and leverage new Online Marketing and Internet New Media/Web 2.0 skills is hampered by the current lack of expert yet cost-effective, local and hands-on Internet Marketing/SEO training. Add to this the dizzying proliferation of Social Media publishing and analytic tools, the rapid change in the search engine technologies and video media industries, and the quickly-growing competition for eyeballs and click-throughs from the web – it’s about time for some local solutions.

Local Internet Marketing and Media Workshops

KME Internet Marketing (KME) in the DC metro area is holding the first of an upcoming series of professional Internet Marketing and Media Workshops on January 29th, 2010 – from 9AM to 2PM, at Trivision Studios in Chantilly, VA.

KME is the region’s industry leader in providing cost-effective yet engineering-grade solutions for online marketing, social media optimization and analytics-driven Internet marketing management. Trivision Studios is a full service global creative design, branding and media production group, operating a 12,000 square foot, state-of-the-art studio facility complete with staging, lights, cameras, two-story loading dock, meeting space, media room, and omnimedia edit suites.

Our special guest Workshop lead is Melanie Alnwick, an instantly-recognizable local DC TV anchor, reporter and journalist. Melanie will be providing significant insider-knowledge and guidance regarding attracting broadcast media attention to your business and story, preparing for interviews, producing and submitting highly-effective video for broadcast or online business purposes. Kelly McLaughlan, CEO of KME Internet Marketing, will lead sessions on SEO, PPC and Google Analytics. Trivision Studios will provide corporate branding and web video production and distribution expertise. Ted McLaughlan – Enterprise Information Management and Media Architect – will provide professional insight into Digital Asset Management and Internet Media Distribution.

What You Get

This packed 5 hour hands-on Internet Marketing and Media workshop will deliver a package of information and guidance you can immediately use, including:

• Online Branding and Creative Design
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Website Reporting (Google Analytics)
• Digital Asset Management, Optimization and Distribution (RSS) – for Advertising and Marketing
• Pay-per-Click (PPC) Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – Local and Regional
• Social Media Optimization and Reputation Management – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube
• Online Web Video Production and Optimization
• Harnessing and attracting Broadcast Media Exposure

There simply doesn’t exist a more comprehensive, experts-led, cost effective or personally-tailored workshop event in this area for business owners, marketing and communications managers, journalists, new SEO/SEM professionals or other technology and new media practitioners. Don’t bother with online, out of state webinars or academies, online or offline degrees costing thousands of dollars from questionable sources, community-center seminars by industry amateurs, or other less-than-professional sources for a rapid, intense and ultimately valuable infusion of truly local Internet Marketing and New Media knowledge.

• Where should I post my advertisements online?
• What are the short and long term priorities for better search result rankings, for my website?
• What are the keys to successful PPC investments?
• Is my marketing budget being spent wisely, integrated and balanced across relevant channels?
• How can I make sure my brand supports my marketing goals?
• How do I use reports and analytics to support my marketing objectives?
• How much time should I spend on Social Media, and why? Can or should I do this myself?
• Can my web designer deliver SEO services?
• What should I do to get free, effective exposure for my business in the press or news?
• What should be in my marketing videos?

We’ll explore these questions and collaborate in the workshop sessions to arrive at the best answers for you and your business in the Northern Virginia, DC or Suburban Maryland region. You’ll get some immediate answers, some strategies to follow and resources to help.

Who Will Benefit the Most?

• Local and regional business owners whose websites haven’t demonstrated success in drawing highly targeted traffic for more sales
• Affiliate marketers who want to increase conversion rates by getting their product pages to come up higher in search results
• Webmasters, graphic designers or photo/video experts who want to offer their employer or clients more comprehensive services – not just website building, creative design or basic media products
• Bloggers, writers and journalists who need their content distributed and ranked high in search engine results
• Anyone who wants to make a career change – to work in-house as an SEO/SEM specialist or begin SEO consulting by learning the latest SEO techniques
• Marketers, Advertisers, Communications and PR professionals in a highly competitive industry who are under pressure to increase their brand’s visibility to reach the correct audience, while keeping costs under control

Take charge of your business marketing and advertising budget, get involved in the Web 2.0/Social Media evolution, promote and protect your brand on the Internet!

For more information about the KME Internet Marketing and Media workshop, including upcoming dates, times, location and registration, visit KME Internet Marketing – SEO Training and Education.

Vintage 51 Restaurant, Brew Lounge and Live Local Music

The past 12 years here in the Rt. 50 Corridor/Dulles South exurbia area of Northern Virginia’s Loudoun County have been an exercise in waiting – waiting for a real local music scene, waiting for decent restaurants, waiting for more upscale martini bars and brewpubs, waiting for the traffic, schools and economy to improve….Basically, waiting for the Dulles South region (Eastern Loudoun, Western Fairfax and Western Prince William counties) to evolve its entertainment, retail and cultural offerings in the same manner as the Dulles North area already has (i.e. Ashburn).

The wait’s over, finally – at least for those in the Chantilly/South Riding area who enjoy professional and local live music, handcrafted and locally-sourced classic American meals in an “urban lounge” setting, and a spectacular selection of custom martinis, Loudoun wines and regional craft beers not seen to date this side of Rt. 15 and the Dulles Toll Road.

Vintage 51 Restaurant and Brew Lounge fully opened recently in South Riding’s Market Square, at the intersection of Rt. 50 and the Loudoun County parkway. Vintage 51 is an extension of the very popular Vintage 50 Brew Lounge in Leesburg, already voted one of “Loudoun’s hottest new restaurants”.

Loudoun’s Best Beer
While Vintage 51 in South Riding is currently unable to serve handcrafted brews created over at its own Leesburg microbrewery, it does serve an inspired selection of wines, custom martinis and cocktails, and a huge selection of great beers (in the spirit of the Northern Virginia Brewfest series) from breweries including Clipper City, Flying Dog, and Dogfish Head. We purchased our own custom “Vintage Growler” with Bell’s Two-Hearted Ale for some Thanksgiving cheer…

Loudoun’s Finest Wines
For the Loudoun wine lovers, the Vintage 50/51 restaurant wine bars offer over 200 wines by the glass or bottle – ranging from international to very local Loudoun winery selections including Chrysalis and Fabbioli Cellars.

Loudoun’s Best Live Music
The live music scene in Loudoun County and Dulles South is dramatically improved with the addition of Vintage 51 live performers and local music events weekdays and weekends. We’ll provide a lot more information on this Dulles South/Loudoun music scene shortly – last night at Vintage 51, for example, we thoroughly enjoyed the smooth, reggae-infused, heavily-improvised acoustic rock classics by Purcellville’s own Miguel Aubertin, a popular favorite and regular around the Loudoun vineyard and Vintage 50 music venues. Sample his music at http://www.myspace.com/miguelandros09.

Loudoun’s Hottest New Restaurant
The Vintage 50 and Vintage 51 menus are a savory collection of locally-raised beef, lamb, pork and wild fowl dinners, fresh seasonal vegetables, herbs, fruits and cheeses, creative seafood appetizers, and classically modern, innovative New American comfort food. The “Made in Loudoun” initiative is clearly in play here – from the delicious lunch sandwiches with local ingredients and handmade sauerkraut, to organic meat entrees made with local ingredients from Loudoun’s own organic farm at the Fields of Athenry.

Check out the new Loudoun and Dulles South restaurant, brew lounge and live music scene now on a regular basis – in South Riding.

New site for Northern Virginia Business News – http://ping.fm/7Vs0q or http://ping.fm/pkKrs – publish here!

Happy Thanksgiving 2009! Hopefully your travels, entertaining and family fun events are safe and healthy this year. We’re looking forward to a little downtime and giving thanks for the highlights of what’s otherwise been a difficult year for many businesses. While hiring and long-term business investing hasn’t exactly picked up yet, there are many signs of pickup among Loudoun and Northern Virginia small and home businesses, as consumers and other small businesses begin to pick up buying activity or at least begin planning to do so. Social media business traffic is high right now, for businesses discussing and finding ways to more efficiently market and communicate their services, for example.

New this Thanksgiving – keep track of all the growing business news in Loudoun County and Northern Virginia, at Northern Virginia Business News online. A new online business and marketing publication service of KME Internet Marketing, Northern Virginia Business News (or “NOVABizNews“) provides fully search-optimized and free exposure of all Northern Virginia Business News events, press releases and social media announcements. Follow us also on twitter, @novabiznews.

Sponsored Message
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Interacting with various grandparents of friends and family over the past few months, it’s become apparent that there aren’t many resources easily available to help Seniors/Grandparents successfully negotiate the twin challenges of mastering Internet tools while extending or beginning a new career cycle – working at home. I’ll call this demographic “Career at Home Seniors” (CAHS) or “Career at Home Grandparents” (CAHG). CAHS seems more inclusive, though doesn’t necessarily include topics, opportunities or the help that may come from your children.

Why is this important? Many reasons, ranging from the economy forcing Seniors to re-initialize careers and jobs, the incredible potential for at-home income-producing opportunities made possible via Internet tools and social media, and simply the desire of many Seniors to continue “giving back” or at least leveraging lifelong skills and experience for the good of their community, family and business networks. All the communications, education and community advantages the Internet provides Seniors aren’t a new concept – but the real need, and real opportunities, to forge a new or extended career at home by leveraging Internet new media capabilities is a relatively unexplored topic.

All over the Internet are loads of “opportunities”, scams and entreaties to engage Seniors in all kinds of “Work at Home” activities (i.e. WAHS; “Work at Home Seniors”)…but most are day-to-day jobs or taskings, with little equity-building potential (in terms of income or knowledge) and short shrift given to leveraging and creating value out of past career experience and long-term relationships. Typical Work at Home Senior opportunities do not yield lasting value for Seniors, or their partners and families.

To truly create or extend a real career at home, as someone who may have retired from the daily grind, and is looking for low-impact but highly intellectual pursuits, the first step is not an online job search, or even an online “Web 2.0″ training course. It’s really what we call a “knowledge management” exercise…Basically, if you were to categorize the kinds of subjects you know most about, the type of people and organizations with whom you’ve got relationships, and the specific skills you’re good at on the Internet, what would these be?

Read more about this Career at Home Senior topic, at Fulcrumpoint – Achieving Professional Balance for Men and Women.

Two Factor Authentication Identity Management – http://Anakam.com wins Government Security News Homeland Security Award http://bit.ly/28FKAJ

SAN DIEGO, Calif. – November 2, 2009 –Anakam TFA® Two Factor Authentication has been selected as the winner for “Best Authentication/Identification Product” at the GSN: Government Security News 1st Annual Homeland Security Awards competition. About 300 government officials and industry executives packed the grand ballroom of a Manhattan hotel on Oct. 27, 2009 to witness GSN announce the names of the winners in multiple security categories.

Read the full Two-Factor Authentication and Identity Management Anakam award press release…

Anakam is headquartered in San Diego, though with offices around the country, including a substantial presence here in Washington DC and Northern Virginia – where Anakam supports Multi-factor Identity Management, Authentication and Secure Collaboration system and product implementations for eGovernment clients, including National Defense, Homeland Security and Intelligence Government customers.

Wikipedia defines Two-Factor Authentication as follows: “An authentication factor is a piece of information and process used to authenticate or verify the identity of a person or other entity requesting access under security constraints. Two-factor authentication (T-FA) or (2FA) is a system wherein two different factors are used in conjunction to authenticate. Using two factors as opposed to one factor generally delivers a higher level of authentication assurance. Using more than one factor is sometimes called “strong authentication”, however, “strong authentication” and “multi-factor authentication” are fundamentally different processes. Soliciting multiple answers to challenge questions may be considered strong authentication but, unless the process also retrieves ’something you have’ or ’something you are’, it would not be considered multi-factor.”

Allan Camaisa, Anakam’s Founder and CEO, was on hand at the GSN ceremony to accept the Anakam “Best Authentication/Identification Product” award personally. “We are honored to be receiving this award for our efforts to deliver a truly unique technology which provides for the trusted identity management of citizens logging on to Government portals- thereby allowing agencies to provide more valuable online services at a greatly reduced cost.”

“Congratulations to Anakam, our winner in the “Best IT Authentication/Identification Product” category, whose innovative technology enables massive scale, cost-effective and secure two-factor authentication for eGov applications. Anakam’s system has enabled remote identity proofing and strong authentication for millions of citizens, while lowering costs of service delivery dramatically by shifting to Web-based applications,” said Adrian Courtenay, Chairman of GSN.

This technology is extremely important in enabling greater security and privacy protection with respect to the proliferation of eGovernment services expanding through leverage of online Portals, Internet-based Web 2.0 technologies and mashup widgets, and government-branded social media channels – accessed across an extremely wide variety of fixed and mobile devices. Check out in LinkedIn the “Anakam Trusted Identity” and “Homeland Security Information Sharing and Social Media” groups and topics for more related information.

Anakam’s winning entry, Anakam.TFA® Two Factor Authentication, provides enterprises with trusted access through two-factor authentication without the burden associated with issuing tokens or cards and by harnessing the ubiquity of common devices such as cell phones and pagers. Winners in each category were carefully reviewed by a panel of judges and chosen out of multiple entries.

About Anakam

Anakam enables strong identity authentication and identity management at a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions, without encumbering customers, partners, and employees with cards, software downloads, tokens, or fobs. With tens of millions of end users, the Anakam Identity Suite® is unique in the industry, providing end-to-end multi-channel capabilities that allows enablement of secure, trusted eBusiness to very large user-communities in a single platform. The suite includes two-factor authentication, remote identity proofing and identity verification, professional credentialing, and secure collaboration and authentication. For more information, visit Anakam.com.

NOVA and Loudoun County Real Estate Notes – First Time Homeowners Credit Extended – FOX 5 News Report – http://ping.fm/CJD5M

Following the Senate’s approval this week, the House overwhelmingly voted to extend the First Time Home Buyer’s credit program from November 30th 2009 until April 30, 2010, and include benefits for current homeowners as well.

From the FOX 5 WTTG news station, courtesy of Melanie Alnwick (FOX 5 Money Reporter), “There is now a $6,500 credit for existing homeowners. They must have lived in the home for five years of the last eight years, and purchases must be less than $800,000. Income limits were also increased. Now couples making up to $225,000 and individuals making up to $125,000 can qualify. The National Association of Realtors reported that pending home sales rose in September for a record eight straight months. Vice President of Research Paul Bishop says 1.8 million people have taken advantage of the stimulus already, and it would like to see the momentum continue.”

Ingrid Myers, Realtor in Loudoun, Prince William, Fairfax and other Northern Virginia and Maryland locations, says “it’s a huge deal”, and many people waiting in the pipeline to buy homes will likely be motivated to buy now.

Find more about Loudoun County Real Estate and Leesburg Real Estate market values at this report, a Retweet of @novarealestate and @averyhess…

See Melanie Alnwick’s full report on the First Time Home Owner’s Credit Extension and its impact on Northern Virginia and Loudoun Real Estate