Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock
Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock

Schrock Innovations wants to do its part to help those who were victims of the storm by offering free computer repair services as well as data recovery services for damaged hard drives.

We have finalized the specifications for this year’s Holiday special, and I need one more person who wants a computer that will run circles around anything else out there for years to come.

As many of you know, each year at Schrock we put together an amazing computer for the holiday season and sell a limited number of them at our cost. The system always retails for $1,499.99, and has become know in Lincoln and Omaha as a unique opportunity to lay your hands on an extremely advanced system.

In April of 2005 I brought you a story on our radio show Compute This (Saturdays from 10-11 in Lincoln, NE) about a small Fremont law firm that managed to successfully sue Microsoft for 22.6 million for anti-competitive practices in the state of Nebraska.You can listen to the archived interview here.

Microsoft settled the class action suit and agreed to pay 50% of any unclaimed funds from the settlement in the form of technology vouchers to Nebraska’s public schools. Schools were awarded the vouchers based upon need as measured by participation in the Federal School Lunch Program.

Based on those calculations, the Omaha World Herald reported today that Omaha Public Schools was awarded $4.05 Million after filing some grueling paperwork to prove that they were qualified to receive the funds under the settlement.

With everything going on this past week, Microsoft’s visit to Omaha for a technical seminar was unfortunately buried in the news. However, our own Blaze was in attendance and asked the questions our customers have passed to us about Office 2007 and Vista over the past few months.

The question I have been asked more often than not is how much the products would cost. The question caught the presenter off guard, as he seemed very qualified to speak to the technical aspects of the software rather than the business and supply channel plans. He told Blaze that he was not absolutely certain, but he could not imagine Vista costing more than Windows XP does now.

If you fail to ride the wave of change you will find yourself beneath it. For the past 4 weeks that overused motivational phrase has been my compass as all of the employees of Schrock from our web developers to our technicians have come together to launch a new chapter in Schrock Innovations history.

As many of you may have heard on the radio Saturday, I launched Schrock’s 2006 Back to School Sale. For the first time ever, we are now carrying notebook computers in stock. While I could bore you with all of the logistics and reasons we have not done this in the past, I think it is much more interesting to explain why it is important for the future.

I am proud to announce that the National Council on Economic Education has selected Schrock Innovations to perform a significant upgrade to their website, http://www.econedlink.org. The NCEE website allows teachers to look for or submit lesson plans for multiple grade levels designed to educate kids about economics.

Schrock Innovations placed a bid with the New York non-profit organization to rewrite their current ColdFusion website in PHP with a MySQL backend. We will also be developing a new lesson plan development tool that will allow NCEE employees, volunteers, and interns to design web pages that display lesson plans in a WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) environment.

Schrock Innovations is proud to sponsor the Deer Park Neighborhood Association’s new tshirts! The shirts will feature the slogan, “A Rich Past – an Exciting Future”

The Deer Park Neighborhood Association is one of Omaha’s most active neighborhood associations. The Association recently raised over $125,000 to build a brand new park in Omaha off of 13th and I-80. It was impressive to see so man families picnicking there this holiday weekend.