From the opening note, the music is the star of Cirque Du Soleil’s LOVE. The Beatles provided the soundtrack in my childhood and words fail to describe the amazing soundscape lovingly created by Sir George Martin and his son Giles Martin in the Abby Road Studio.  The music erupts through a breath taking custom sound system designed by Jonathan Deans that engulfs the audience in a way Paul, George, John and Ringo could never have imagined; notes leap into the air through 6,341 speakers, including three per individual seat with a stereo pair built into the headrest.

The Love Theater at the Mirage, like all Cirque shows in Vegas, features an incredible stage that is integral to the show.  This one has nine lifts, eight automated tracks and trolleys that allows seamless transitions between sets along with chain motors built into the ceiling that allows incredible, gravity defying maneuvers and reverse bungy jumping, enabling performers to fly upward and spin through the air.  The stage faces all directions, nullifying the usual orientation of “front” and “back.”  2,013 seats set around a central stage in eight sections; there isn’t a bad seat in the house.

The circus performance is more ephemeral and  harder to describe.   The choreography guiding the myriad movement and visual images is both entertaining and overwhelming, continually enchanting the audience as they stare at whatever piece of the tapestry caught your attention.

The storyline seems loosely intended to trace the rise of the Beatles from their days in Hamburg to their emergence into super stardom, then on to their breakup in the 70’s.  Along the way, we see England emerging from World War II and allusions to the psychedelics and politics, the war and cultural revolution that were the cultural milieu of the Beatles era.  These moments are communicated primarily through colorful costumes, iconic symbols and  fictitious characters like Sargent Pepper, Lucy in the Sky, Eleanor Rigby, Lady Madonna and Mr. Kite.

The show itself  represents a “reunion,” if bittersweet, as it seeks some form of closure for a story that so tragically lacks a happy ending. The support and unreserved enthusiasm for the project by the surviving band members, the families of the departed, along with the dedication and devotion of the Martins provides some closure and makes the goal of a happy ending almost obtainable.   As Sir George Martin told the BBC,

“It was strange, writing this for an old friend who was no longer with us.   Yesterday was first score I ever wrote for a Beatle song way back in 1965 and this, 41 years later, is the last. They bookend an extraordinary time…I never thought I would get this deeply involved with the Beatles again. It’s been a real journey but we were doing something worthwhile.”  He, continued, “We were trying to create a feeling of what the Beatles were all about, and what they were all about was love.”

Thanks to the hard work of Martin, McCartney and the Cirque creative wizardry, the audience gets to be deeply involved with the Fab Four again, if only for a few fleeting hours.  Don’t miss your chance to feel the LOVE again.

I’ve gotten tired of lugging my Nikon D300s everywhere, so I have decided to pickup one of these new super zoom miniature digital cameras. After some research, I have chosen the Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS3 10MP Digital Camera with 12x Wide Angle MEGA Optical Image Stabilized Zoom and 3 inch LCD (Blue).

It also does 720P HDTV. I will let you know what I think after I play with it take some shots for my site.

Lots of Search Engine Marketers talk about the tools they use. Tools for SEO such as keyword research, link analysis and site audits. Tools for PPC like bid management and reporting. Tools for conversion tracking, analytics, and optimization. SEM is rapidly evolving and new tools are introduced every week.. ItsTheROI uses many of those tools and we never stop looking for new ones and hearing what people have to say about what they like.

There is a whole different category to tools that we use every day that have nothing to do with Search Engines. These are online tools that make it possible for us to run a small business. Some business tools are so mundane that they are not worth a detailed discussion — No one really wants me to tell them about my DSL connection, my iPhone or what hardware is on my desk. Some are services such as hosting that go beyond the scope of this article

EchoSign: Do you hate printing agreements so you can sign them and then scan them again? Ever wonder how you are going to get those hours of your life back? Does your paper filing system lack organization? Do you ever forget to follow up on an agreement you sent out? Have you lost track of all of those NDAs? If you answered yes to any of these questions or most of them, then you will fall in love with the powerful yet simple contact management and electronic signature service offered by EchoSign.

It is really very simple.

• Upload a Word Document, PDF or just about any other text doc.
• Open the document in their preview screen and place the fields you require such as name, date, title and signature.
• Email the document to the other party. You can e-sign it first or you can wait for them to send it back with the electronic signature.
• Get a completed agreement.
• You now have a legal agreement that has a digital signature, document management with an archive, the works.

Efax: If you are like me, you haven’t owned a physical fax machine for years. None the less, business still occasionally demands that 20th century form factor. When that happens, nothing is easier than an fax to email service and Efax delivers for a price that is hard to beat… Nada. Ok, they do push some advertising my way and a bunch of emails that Gmail intercepts, but overall it is hard to beat.

Freshbooks: If you are not an accountant, accounting software tends to have a relatively steep adoption curve. Freshooks small business accounting software offers a hosted solution that is easy to use. While it is more expensive than Quickbooks or other desktop accounting solutions, Freshbooks makes it easy to setup repeat billing and sends the invoices automatically each month. That feature alone is worth the $14/month it costs.

PayCycle: Payroll is another one of those tasks that takes a lot of time and creates lots of stress. Have you filed your payroll taxes this month? Did you fill the form out correctly? How about calculating the withholding? Why does the Franchise Tax Board keep sending me letters that could be reminders about something I have already done or a threat to sue me or possible an invitation to an all day seminar about properly completing a payroll stub? Whatever the reason, I don’t have time to do that s**t and online payroll software means I don’t have to think about it.

Special bonus feature, I have all of my contractors setup on direct deposit, so I can pay them immediately without addressing an envelop, finding a stamp or giving it another thought. Paycycle.com does for employees and contractors what online banking did for paying your bills.

Updated: 4/28/2010

Task Squid is a online task management software developed by one of my clients for their own use and now coming out of beta as an actual product. Task Squid is really cool because it leverages the social networking tools I already use every day like twitter, SMS, IM, Google Calendar and Facebook to let me stay on top of tasks, invite others to participate and update the status of each task. The most interesting thing about Task Squid is that it is designed to remove the friction of adding a new user to an individual task without adding them to a team or setting permissions for other projects.

This post isn’t about SEO, so skip it unless you are interested in something personal.

Over winter break last year, my wife and I visited Siem Reap. Cambodia has a tragic history, but the Angkor Temples are magical places with a 1000 year old history carved in stone. It is something that everyone should see at least once in their lifetime.

The most striking thing about our trip was not the temples, it was the Cambodian people. Cambodia is one of the poorest countries on earth and you be face to face with swarms of street kids, mine victims and more than a small amount of tragedy. Like any tourist destination, the locals are skilled at working westerners for money, but beyond the obvious hustle, Cambodians are friendly, happy people who seem genuine and warm to foreigners.

Barely an hour after we arrived, we struck up a conversation with a local woman named Ara while we had lunch. She was our hostess at the Khmer Kitchen Restaurant located on Avenue 9. We started chatting with her about the places to see and where to get a guide, arrange a Tuk-Tuk, etc. She offered to set us up with a guide and a driver as well as accompany us to help translate (although many Cambodians speak at least some English). I am not naive, I know that she makes a commission from both the guide and the driver, but that is a small price to pay for having a human recommendation instead of asking our hotel to arrange it for us (and paying more, and knowing the hotel also gets a commission).

Over the course of two days riding from temple to temple in a Tuk-Tuk, we heard Ara’s incredible life story. She was born in 1984, only a couple years after the Vietnamese over through the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime. She was abandoned in the hospital at birth, presumably her mother was a “Taxi Girl” and and her father could have been a Vietnamese soldier, a foreign aid worker or a local.

She lived in the hospital until she was three years old, at which point she was essentially kicked out on the street to join the legions of orphans who survived by a combination of begging, selling postcards and books to the occasional tourists and stealing so they would have food to eat. When she turned 10, Ara was taken in by a group of Buddhist Nuns, who raised her until she was 16.

Ara’s life is full of dangers, catch-22’s and contradictions. All of the other girls who she grew up with have died of AIDS, drug abuse or the other consequences of prostitution. Young women (and girls) are frequently kidnapped by human traffickers and poverty is so pervasive that families also sell their daughters into sex slavery. Cambodia is a very traditional society, so there are still very few opportunities for women in business. She doesn’t date because men are looking for women with family status and besides, as she puts it, “who wants to marry a women with no money and wind up with six mother in laws”.

The amazing thing about Ara’s story is not the heart wrenching tragedy or the suffering this young woman has both witnessed and endured. In America her story is the stuff of a lifetime movie special; a voyeuristic portrayal of tragic circumstances and emotive suffering that leads to an unhappy life, followed by the redemption of a Hollywood ending that requires a box of tissues and the complete suspension of disbelief.

In real life, Ara is a happy person. She works three jobs on top of whatever money she earns as an ambassador to tourists. She happily arranges for official tour guides and Tuk-Tuk rentals, takes visitors to local stores and arranges any other activities tourists are looking for. Every month she walks for two hours to carry supplies to the Pagoda she grew up in (the roads are too bad for a motorcycle). Her dream is to own a couple of Tuk-Tuks so she has her own business (of course, she doesn’t want to be a Tuk-Tuk driver, because there is only one female driver in all of Siem Reap and Ara thinks she is “looks and dresses like a man”). She aspires to essential save up enough for an investment of about $2,000 and is content to work three jobs to get it.

We were so moved by her and taken with her that we decided to buy her a cell phone as a gift, in addition to paying her $20 a day for being our guide. The phone cost $50, which is more than a months rent and about what Ara would earn working in the restaurant for a month. Combined, the whole thing cost us less than a dinner with drinks at a decent restaurant in the bay area and about half of what is costs us for a night in the Sokha Hotel (we splurged for three nights at what turned out to be the only five star hotel in Siem Reap).

Hopefully the phone will make it easier for her to get business arranging tours for foreigners. Note that Ara is not a “Tour Guide”, which is reserved for men and requires two years of college and a license that cost $1,200. If you are going to visit Siem Reap to tour the Angkor Temples, be sure to email Ara, Makaralon@ yahoo.com and let her be your Cambodian Hostess.

If you are looking for family fun in Las Vegas , you should definitely visit Cirque du Soleil’s KÀ. KÀ is easily the most accessibly, husband and kids friendly of the Cirque shows, with an exciting mix of pirates, sailors, flying machines and, of course, incredible acrobatic performances. The most fantastic part of KA, Cirque du Soleil’s spectacular show atthe MGM Grand, is the stage itself. Amazing human feats of acrobatics, trapeze arts, dancers, martial artists, and tumblers aside, the gravity defying stage itself is the main attraction in this stunning theatrical experience. Built by a mining equipment company, the stage alternately twists and turns, stands on its side, spikes emerging and disappearing as the performers climb, chase, and fall in a surreal, dreamscape — Spellbound meets Mad Max at Thunderdome.

The plot itself is right out of Gilbert and Sullivan or Twelfth Night : Twin Sister and Twin Brother of royal descent separated at a beach head after a pirate attack aboard the sailing vessel which quickly becomes the stage; their loyal nursemaid and court jester, guardians throughout their perilous and phantasmagoric journey. While the Brother is learning the art of shadow puppets, hanging out in caves, and running from the creepy Archers, the Sister is climbing a mountain (the aforementioned amazing stage tilted to a 90 degree angle) scrambling and swinging up the spiked wall pursued by the vicious Archers.

Perhaps the most exciting moment in a 90 minute gripping-the-edge-of-your-seat extravaganza is the burlap tent which is magically transformed into a human flying machine powered by the forest people and the Firefly Boy. I am not one easily given to hyperbole but honestly there are not enough superlatives to describe the experience: amazing, spectacular, stunning, and very cool. Go see it when you are in Vegas. Though she has not seen the other shows in town yet, my wife is making me take her back to see KA again when we go back in the summer. KA-Boom!