You may notice something different about XNet President Arthur Zards every year about this time - he becomes bald. Not permanently, but he sports a cleanly shaved head right around every St. Patrick’s Day. Why? Because every year Arthur chooses to support his community by participating in St. Baldrick’s Foundation shaving events and fundraisers.
Collectively, XNet actively pursues community development opportunities like TEDxNaperville and SiliconPrairieSocial to give back to the area. However, each XNet employee also has their own individual passions and endeavors that make XNet more than just a company. One of XNet President Arthur Zards’ passions is raising awareness of kids fighting cancer in an effort to help find a cure.
Each year, Arthur donates his time and his hair to the St. Baldrick’s Foundation, a volunteer-driven charity that funds more childhood cancer research grants than any other organization, except the U.S. government. On March 18th, Arthur will be at Ballydoyle Irish Pub and Restaurant in Aurora, Illinois having his head shaved to honor Kids like Lilly, a 10-year-old from Frankfort who was diagnosed with an extremely rare Desmoid Tumor at the age of 3.
Read more about Lily
Arthur would like your support helping kids like Lily by raising money to find a cure. He’s looking for five dollar donations to help him reach his goal of giving $500. To make a donation, visit Arthur’s St. Baldrick’s Foundation Participant page and click “Make a Donation.”
Posted on March 13th, 2012 by XNet
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Gordon Brown, Prime Minister for the UK, recently addressed the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford. His comments on Global ethics in a connected world are even more powerful on a local level.
He asks what the possible effects would be if “the power of our moral sense (was) allied with the communications facilities we have”?
Global Voices, Local Connections
We marvel at communicating with people in China on our iPhones, but in looking so far afield we’ve lost sight of our own back yard. The same technologies that let us communicate our ideas on a global scale are far more valuable in connecting us to the shared experience of our neighborhoods and communities.
What can we do to better equip our communities to begin this kind of dialogue? What can we do on a personal level to insure our worldwide communications networks are mirrored in our local networks?
Building a Base
The power to connect with each other in a shared economic and technological network is a wonderful tool. SMB’s need to leverage and build these networks to insure that the communities they serve remain solvent in these trying times. Entrepreneurs need to build a base, a solid platform, for these initiatives to take off in their communities and then the world.
This great article from the New York Times (posted by @valdiskrebs on Twitter) goes into some of the challenges and rewards that businesses are seeing from collaborative efforts:
Netflix Competitors Learn the Power of Teamwork
What can we do as entrepreneurs and business owners to help foster collaboration not only in our industries, but also in our communities?
Check back later in the week when we’ll talk more about these relationships in a post titled, Phantom Partners.
Posted on July 28th, 2009 by David Metcalfe
Posted in Entrepreneurship, Professional Development, Suburban Business, What's New? | No Comments »
We decided to have a little fun in the wake of Steve Jobs’ iPhone update from yesterday, and created our own webclip icon for XNet.com. Now, you can have XNet on your iPhone: simply visit www.xnet.com, on your iPhone, click the “+” sign at the bottom of Safari, and save the webclip. The XNet iPhone icon will appear.
To do this for your own site, follow these three simple steps:
- Create a new 57×57 PNG file with your logo or icon with the background color of your choice (transparent creates a black icon).
- Name it “apple-touch-icon.png”
- Upload it to the root folder of your web site (the same folder that holds your index.html file).
- Create a webclip with your iPhone.
NOTE: At first, I searched the web for iPhone PSD templates with the aqua overlay and built the icon you see on this post. When I created a webclip on my iPhone, I noted that the phone had given it’s own treatment, resulting in a double-stamped coin effect. It really only takes the four steps I outline above. Apple builds the stylized icon for you!
Posted on January 16th, 2008 by Tim Courtney
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Arthur Zards is the President and co-founder of XNet. He is passionate about making the customer experience extraordinary. Arthur also enjoys carving 
James Chesterfield is the newest member of the XNet team. He is passionate about web design and content creation and enjoys watching 