Web Informant

Orchestrating your Disaster Recovery with QuorumLabs onQ

2011-12-07T10:02:00.001-08:00

A complete disaster recovery appliance that can automate the protection of any any Windows 2003 or later server OSs. We tested v3.2 on a small test network of both physical and virtual machines in December 2011.

Price: Starts at $10k per appliance and includes three protected servers, additional servers and quickstart installation or upgraded hardware is extra.

QuorumLabs Inc.
http://quorumlabs.com
510 257-5227
info@quorumlabs.com

Speeding up your applications in the Cloud with Blue Coat MACH5

2011-08-05T13:06:00.001-07:00

If you are looking to control and improve your cloud-based applications performance, consider Blue Coat's MACH5 WAN Optimization Appliance. It works any private, public and hybrid cloud deployment.

MACH5 WAN Optimization Appliance
Blue Coat Networks
starting at $2995 for the smallest appliance
http://bluecoat.com/products/mach5

Making Online Video Enterprise Network Friendly

2011-07-21T05:35:00.001-07:00

If you are looking to control and improve how your endusers consume video across your network, consider Blue Coat's MACH5 WAN Optimization Appliance. It works for live, streaming, and on-demand video, and is easy to setup and configure.

MACH5 WAN Optimization Appliance
Blue Coat Networks
starting at $2995 for the smallest appliance
http://bluecoat.com/products/mach5

How to monitor services with Uptime Software

2011-04-14T11:55:00.001-07:00

Looking for an easier and more affordable way to monitor your IT infrastructure? uptime software's "up.time 5" provides a deep, complete yet simple to use IT Systems Management suite designed for mid-enterprises that will monitor physical, virtual and cloud servers and applications, along with mechanisms for enforcing service level agreements and provide for capacity planning.

We tested the software running on a Windows Server 2003. If you want to monitor various Windows events, you should do the same, although the monitoring station will run on various Linux servers too.

http://Uptimesoftware.com/register_standard.php

Price: $695 per physical server with no additional fees
Monitoring Station runs on a variety of Linux and Windows OS. Admin console requires either IE or Firefox browsers.

Using DataCore SANsymphony-V to virtualize your storage

2011-01-31T02:21:00.001-08:00

DataCore’s latest version of its storage virtualization software solves the biggest problem stalling server and desktop virtualization projects.
http://www.datacoresoftware.com
Pricing: DataCore-authorized solution providers offer packages starting under $10K for a two-node, high-availability environment.
Requirements: Windows Server 2008 R2
Management console runs on Windows desktop versions from XP SP3 to Windows 7.

Getting Started with Verizon CaaS SMB

2010-12-24T07:23:00.001-08:00

Verizon is using a VMware-hosted service by Terremark which enables you to set up virtual Windows and Linux servers with just a web browser. Fees are charged per resource used such as disk storage, RAM and Internet ports, and can cost about $100 per server per month.

Get more information and sign up here: http://www.verizonbusiness.com/Medium/products/itinfrastructure/computing/caas_smb/

McAfee Firewall Profiler v2 offers new analysis features

2010-12-24T07:03:00.001-08:00

McAfee's Firewall Enterprise v8 offers some impressive new features that can make analyzing your network applications traffic easier for IT staffs. In this video, I show you how to troubleshoot some common problems and using the Profiler graphical interface, zero in on how to fix them. You can download a free trial here: 
http://www.mcafee.com/apps/downloads/free-evaluations/default.aspx?region=us&pid=13880

Managing your network with Quest Foglight NMS

2010-11-04T11:48:00.001-07:00

Foglight does real-time performance monitoring for a wide variety of network devices and can capture traffic data too. It is easy to install and setup. Pricing averages $25,000 for most enterprises, with additional cost modules available for distributed networks and Cisco VoIP monitoring.
Quest Software
http://www.quest.com/foglight-network-management-system/
(800) 306-9329

Using Symantec's VIP Authentication Service

2010-11-04T07:57:00.001-07:00

VeriSign Identity Protection services provide a simple means of two-factor authentication for a wide variety of purposes such as email and Web logins and network remote access. They make use of both existing hardware credentials as well as newer software credentials that are available on a wide variety of smartphones.
Pricing is based on volume, typically around $7 to $12 per user per
year.
http://www.verisign.com/authentication/

Running legacy apps on Windows 7 using InstallFree

2010-10-12T09:12:00.001-07:00

InstallFree 7Bridge can virtualize and isolate applications from the rest of your desktop, so you can run older, legacy apps on more modern operating systems.

InstallFree 7Bridge
http://installfree.com
Pricing: $25 per endpoint with the first application included, additional applications are encapsulated by InstallFree at $5,000 per application plus an18% annual support/maintenance contract. There is also an enterprise edition that includes the ability to encapsulate your own applications. Volume discounts available.

Using applications whitelisting with CoreTrace Bouncer

2010-09-28T04:11:00.001-07:00

CoreTrace has a new software-only version 6 that provides solid endpoint protection by only allowing vetted applications to run across your enterprise. There are agents for all 32-bit versions of Windows since 2000 and 64-bit Windows 7 and Server 2008.
CoreTrace Bouncer
http://CoreTrace.com
Pricing begins at $35 per endpoint

New features of Symantec Backup Exec 2010

2010-09-14T08:31:00.001-07:00

Symantec has a new R2 version of its Backup Exec 2010 backup software that is easier to install, quicker to make backups, and a raft of new features that include better support for virtualization, archiving, and deduplication.

Symantec Corporation
Mountain View, Calif.
http://backupexec.com
Pricing: $1174 for one media server, deduplication and archiving options extra

PC Management with KACE Appliances

2010-08-12T08:54:00.001-07:00

The Dell Kace appliances are used to manage, control and deploy desktop system images that contain user files and applications and to do PC inventory and audits.

Pricing
Dell Kace 1000 Systems Management Appliance
$TKTK

Dell Kace 2000 Systems Deployment Appliance
$4500 for 100 nodes, additional nodes $13
$39,000 for unlimited nodes

Dell/Kace Systems Management Inc.
Mountain View, Calif.
kace.com

Running IE v6 on Windows 7 with Symantec Workspace Virtualization

2010-08-04T13:05:00.001-07:00

If you are looking for a way to run IE v6 on Windows 7 desktops, take a look at Symantec’s Endpoint Virtualization technologies. The software includes two different modules that are free of charge, including Workspace Virtualization administration and the Browser Selector tools. They are fairly simple to setup and flexible enough to isolate individual applications from the host Windows 7 OS.
Symantec Endpoint Virtualization
http://www.symantec.com/connect/endpoint-virtualization
Entry level pricing starts at $45 per node

Three minutes to data loss protection with Blue Coat

2010-07-23T14:54:00.001-07:00

Blue Coat DLP Appliance
410 N Mary Avenue
Sunnyvale CA 94085
http://bluecoat.com/dlp
Price: 250 users starts at $12,000 + $34 software licenses subscription per user

Data loss protection is still an evolving field, but Blue Coat brings a comprehensive solution that can be quickly configured to stop leaks of confidential data to unauthorized users. Is your data leaving with employees that are getting downsized? Is your customer list now the property of one of your competitor's? The Blue Coat DLP Appliance can detect when critical information is being copied from your network to a Web mail account, or placed inside a document that is emailed as an attachment, even over an encrypted connection or hidden inside a compressed file ZIP archive.

The revolution will be televised

2010-06-03T06:11:00.001-07:00

Those of us growing up in the 1960s might remember the song by Gil Scott-Heron, The Revolution Will Not be Televised. If you read over his lyrics, you will see lots of cultural references to the era. Remember, Vietnam was our first televised war. Before we had the Internet, we all watched the evening network news and could see the daily battles, body counts, and see for ourselves what was happening half a world away. It was a transformative media moment.
http://www.gilscottheron.com/lyrevol.html

While it wasn't live, it was very powerful TV. We had the full filtering and editing prowess of the network TV news organizations, with reporters on the ground and editors back in New York to package it neatly into 22-minute programs. We had Uncle Walter and Chet and David to tell us what was the significance of what we were seeing, and we had a simple us-versus-them war (which we lost big time, by the way). How simple those days seem now.

This week we witnessed another transformative moment, using the Internet and live streaming technology as another weapon. This time we are seeing events from the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, as a group of boats were stopped by Israeli military on their way to try to break the Gaza blockade. The flotilla came well prepared, not with traditional weaponry but with TV cameras and Web uplinks to broadcast what was going on to the world at http://www.livestream.com/insaniyardim.

The Livestream.com site is a tool that anyone with a Webcam and a broadband Internet connection can quickly become their own broadcaster, and the site carries thousands of live video feeds all day long.

Max Haot, Livestream’s co-founder said in the New York Times that he thought about whether to censor the live flotilla video but decided not to do so. He thought the Gaza flotilla was “a controversial but genuine humanitarian mission.” Still, he found himself thinking that his company needed policies in place to handle live videos of conflicts in the future. “After the events unfolded, I spent most of my Monday wondering if we had helped terrorists or a great humanitarian cause.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/world/middleeast/02media.html

Part of the issue was that we could watch the scene unfiltered, yet we still don't really know what happened. Were the flotilla organizers humanitarian aid workers or terrorists with a very clever propaganda agenda? Who attacked whom? Was the concrete and steel being carried by the flotilla going to be used in Gaza to protect civilians or store munitions? What we do know is that at least nine people were killed during the raid. What we don't know is how many Gazans and Israelis die every day because of the sad circumstances there. What we forget is that Gaza is run by a group that doesn't even want to acknowledge Israel's existence. The deeper that I and anyone else dug into this, the more unanswered questions I came away with.

Perhaps as the other journalists who were on the boats can tell their stories we can assemble a more complete picture. (The Israelis confiscated their equipment shortly after they boarded the boats.) But one thing is clear: Wars will be fought in real-time in the future, with world-wide audiences. In the words of Scott-Heron, "You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out."

"[Israel] may be a start up nation, but we are bricks and mortar communicators. Our adversaries have control-alt-deleted us," writes Amir Mizroch, the executive editor of The Jerusalem Post, in Wired:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/06/how-free-explains-israels-flotilla-fiasco/

Making the move to Windows 7

2010-05-11T13:55:00.001-07:00

If you are still running XP on your desktop, like me, you may be thinking about upgrading to Windows 7. XP is getting long in the tooth, many newer programs (especially those from Microsoft) aren't easy to run on it without a lot of effort, and you can't upgrade Internet Explorer if you are interested in sticking with Microsoft for your Web browsing.

Of course, you may just want to stick with XP until your aging PC emits its last dying gasp and then just buy a new PC with Win7 already on it. That can be fine for some people.

But if you do want to upgrade, Microsoft doesn't make it easy. The only way you can install Windows 7 is to wipe your disk clean and start with a fresh install. While this is appealing in a spring-cleaning sort of way, it may not be what you want to do. What they call an "in-place upgrade" – meaning that you can preserve your files, your applications, and your other customized settings – will only work if you are upgrading from Vista.

I have tested six different products that enable this migration directly from XP to Win7, and each has its good and bad points. Which product will work for you depend on a few different factors. Two of them are ideal for single PCs, or maybe up to ten individual PCs, but not for bulk migrations if you are planning on doing this across your entire corporation. These are Zinstall ($89) and Laplink's PCmover ($20 to $60). I was initially attracted to Zinstall because it offers a very elegant solution: you create an XP virtual machine that can be summoned at the push of a button while running Win7 on your desktop. Inside this VM, you can add new apps or do anything that you would do with your regular XP PC. The only problem is that instead of running two operating systems I ended up running a useless piece of metal with no operating systems, because of something that was wrong with Zinstall's install. Laplink's software converts things as you would expect, so you can't go back to XP once you have done the upgrade.

The other four tools are Microsoft's Windows Automated Installation Kit (free), the Dell/Kace Kbox 2100 hardware appliance ($4500 for 100 PCs), Viewfinity User Migration (free while in beta), and Prowess' SmartDeploy ($2000 per enterprise-wide license). Each of them has similar processes, because you aren't really keeping XP around, just the hardware it is running on. The trick is preserving enough of your user's footprints to make it feel like home. They work as follows:

• The tools start out with a fresh copy of Windows 7 as a master image.
• The entire machine is reimaged with Windows 7 -- just without you having to sit in front of it while the bits are put on the machine from a standard install DVD.
• Next, they stir in the particular applications that you want to deploy across your enterprise. This gives you the opportunity to clean house and create a more managed environment, which may not be what your end users want to hear, but gets back to that spring cleaning sentiment mentioned earlier.
• Each tool has ways to deal with the variety of hardware configurations that you place the image onto, and some make it easier to copy the user application settings and data files over to the new world of Windows 7.
• Finally, you send forth the image to your desktops and have them reboot with the new copy of Windows 7.

Sounds complicated? Yes, it is harder than jamming a DVD into your drive and letting it do its thing for an hour or so. But if you get the tool working properly, you can do a massive upgrade in a matter of a few hours, no matter how many PCs you need to touch.

What do I recommend if you have dozens of PCs to upgrade? I would start with either SmartDeploy or the Kbox. Both handle things somewhat differently, and you are going to want to read and watch my reviews to understand some of the issues.

If you are in Chicago next Thursday evening May 20th, you are welcome to come by the Chicago Windows User Group meeting where I will be speaking about this topic and showing how to use each product in a little more detail. Email me privately if you would like to meet up.

If you want to read more, go to a page where I have links to the various articles and video reviews that I have done for sites such as ITexpertVoice.com, SearchEnterpriseDesktop.com and CIOupdate.com. You can go to links on each of the reviews on all six products here:
http://webinformant.wordpress.com/win7/

Don't worry, the videos are just a couple of minutes long. Good luck with your own migration.

Prowess SmartDeploy eases Windows 7 migration

2010-04-27T07:52:00.001-07:00

SmartDeploy is a software tool that converts virtual machine disk files into Windows Image files that can be used to deploy new OSs, including Windows 7, across an enterprise. It is easier to use than WAIK [link], and Kbox, [http://itexpertvoice.com/home/kace-kbox-best-way-to-massively-migrate-windows-xp-desktops-to-windows-7/]
both of which we reviewed earlier.
Price: $1995 per technician, plus added fees for various support levels
Smartdeploy.com

Using Windows AIK to automate Windows 7 deployment

2010-04-27T07:43:00.001-07:00

has updated its own tool sets for this purpose, called the Windows Automated Installation Kit or WAIK. It has got a lot of new features for both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

I recommend WAIK if you have already tried out earlier versions and
know your way around SYSPREP and Windows volume licenses. Be prepared for a somewhat steep learning curve, especially if you are going to try to automate everything for your deployments and have a large collection of diverse PC hardware.

While you can't beat the cost (it is free), Kbox or SmartDeploy might be a
better alternative for these more complex situations.

You can download the tool here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=696DD665-9F76-4177-A811-39C26D3B3B34&displaylang=en

Viewfinity can solve multiple user XP Migrations to Windows 7

2010-04-27T07:36:00.001-07:00

Viewfinity User Migration is another XP to Windows 7 migration tool. It doesn't automatically move the applications, you have to reinstall them yourself or use another deployment tool. It does handle XP desktops that are used by multiple users quite elegantly.

See our other Windows Migration product reviews here:
WAIK: http://itexpertvoice.com/home/using-windows-aik-to-automate-windows-7-deployment/
PC Mover: http://itexpertvoice.com/home/using-laplinks-pc-mover-to-migrate-a-windows-xp-desktop-to-windows-7/
SmartDeploy: http://itexpertvoice.com/home/prowess-smartdeploy-eases-windows-7-migration/
Zinstall: http://itexpertvoice.com/home/product-review-migrating-from-windows-xp-to-windows-7-with-zinstall/
Kbox: http://itexpertvoice.com/home/kace-kbox-best-way-to-massively-migrate-windows-xp-desktops-to-windows-7/

Migrating to Windows 7 using the Kace Kbox

2010-04-27T07:29:00.001-07:00

Kbox is used to manage and control desktop system images that contain user files and applications and – with its Systems Management Appliance sold separately, to do PC inventory and audits. It also works with both virtual and physical machines too. Unlike the PC Mover and Zinstall approaches, they are designed for large-scale deployments of hundreds or more PCs. A more complete video that describes the process by one of Kace's techs can be found here.

KBOX 2100 Systems Deployment Appliance
$4500 for 100 nodes, additional nodes $13
$39,000 for unlimited nodes

Kace Systems Management Inc.
Mountain View, Calif.
kace.com
877-646-8366

Using McAfee TrustedSource to protect your network

2010-04-27T02:49:00.001-07:00

The combination of McAfee’s TrustedSource reputation system and geo-location filtering can help to better protect your network when using McAfee Firewall v8, as you can see in this short video.

Using McAfee Firewall to block BitTorrent in three clicks

2010-04-27T02:46:00.001-07:00

McAfee Firewall v8 has a lot of flexibility when it comes to blocking difficult applications like BitTorrent, and in this short video, we show you how to do so using a combination of features in the firewall.

How to use McAfee Firewall to prevent SSH tunneling

2010-04-27T02:44:00.001-07:00

Network admins need more granular control over how Secure Shell (SSH) connections traverse their networks, and in this short video, we show how McAfee Firewall v8 can be used to allow SSH for file transfer and terminal connections but be used to block BitTorrent apps from tunneling through that protocol.

Controlling applications with McAfee Firewall’s AppPrism

2010-04-27T02:33:00.001-07:00

We show in this short video an innovative method available in McAfee Firewall v8 that is called AppPrism. It can identify particular applications and control parts of their behavior, such as blocking Instant Messaging file transfer but allowing the actual IM chats themselves

How McAfee Firewall Enterprise can better secure your network

2010-04-27T02:28:00.001-07:00

McAfee’s Firewall Enterprise version 8 has more protection that can be more easily configured than the Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) 5500. We look at three distinguishing areas in this video:
• creating firewall rules
• protecting their network users and applications
• integrating other security features into their firewalls

We tested a beta of the McAfee Firewall Enterprise on a live network in April 2010, using its Windows-based client and also ran the Cisco ASDM client in its demo mode for comparison purposes.

McAfee
3965 Freedom Circle
Santa Clara, CA 95054
888-847-8766

http://www.mcafee.com/firewall/

Pricing: Starts at $1500 with higher prices for higher throughput and additional network interfaces

ITexpertVoice screencast: Microsoft Software Inventory Analyzer Comes Up Short

2010-04-23T07:56:00.001-07:00

Software inventory is one of the most important steps in migrating desktops to Windows 7. This video -- posted on ITexpertVoice.com -- shows you the promise — and limitations — of Microsoft’s Software Inventory Analyzer.

http://itexpertvoice.com/ad/microsoft-software-inventory-analyzer-comes-up-short/

How online relationships create trust

2010-04-13T12:11:00.001-07:00

I was talking to Paul and Dana Gillin about their new book, called the Joy of Geocaching. I would urge you to buy this book, even if you aren't interested in the sport. You'll see why in a moment.

Today's column isn't about finding small objects hidden in plain sight across the landscape. (It is actually more interesting than I make it sound.) It is about how online relationships can fuel and shape how we interact with our colleagues in the real world. You know, that environment that exists outside our desktops?

Our newspapers and Web sites are filled with stories about how the nature of friendship has become devalued as we go about connecting on MyLinkFaceSpace et al. But what few have covered is how the online world creates new kinds of communities, and builds trusted relationships that carry on in the real world of face-to-face interaction. And that is where the Gillins' book comes into play. In it, they tell stories of geocachers and how they have come to enjoy finding and hiding these objects.

There is one story of a woman who travelled to Toronto on a business trip with several colleagues. She left them at the airport, and was picked up by a stranger – with the only thing in common being that both were cachers. How many of us would climb into a car in another country with nothing more than exchanging a few emails? That involves a certain level of trust and comfort that just doesn't happen in the real world.

Other examples are people that use the Meetup.com site to find people of similar circumstances. And of course there are the online dating sites, too. Crowdsourcing is another. I am sure you could think of other examples.

This use of online connections to prime the pump for a face-to-face meeting happens more and more frequently because we are doing more than just sending emails, or friend requests, or linking to others via online sites. We are sharing a common bond, a series of interests. We are building an authoritative source of content, context and identity. And along the way, we start shaping these micro-communities one person at a time.

Yes, there are people who pride themselves on having thousands of "friends" or who can connect with celebs and CEOs alike. But that isn't what today's Internets are all about.

Yes, it takes a village. But increasingly, our villages are formed online and with hyper-specific interests – not just because we share a common street block or elementary school classroom of our children. This is nothing new. The early bulletin board systems were great at this. But what is new is the potency of these relationships, and how quickly they can come to fruition.

Sure, I belong to lots of different communities, some based here in St. Louis, some that include people from all over the world. And my biggest community is you, the Web Informant reader. Or I hope so. Do share some of your own online/offline relationship stories with my readers on strominator.com if you feel so inclined.

Self (and other) promos dep't

If you want to buy Paul and Dana's book, click here:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1884956998/davidstromswebin/

I will be on the Tim Taylor Digital Nation radio show this Saturday at 1pm Central, talking about Windows 7 migration tools and methods. This uses some of the research for articles and screencast videos that I have done for the Dell-sponsored site ITexpertVoice.com. If you are interested in having me come speak at your next group meeting about this topic, email me.
http://www.digitalnationradio.com

Finally, if you are going to be in St. Louis next Tuesday, do stop by and say hello at the Gateway to Innovation Conference at the Chase Park Plaza. While I won't be speaking, I do think the conference organizers have put together a great program.
http://www.g2iconference.com/

ITExpertVoice screencast: Viewfinity Can Solve Multiple-User Windows XP Migrations to Windows 7'

2010-04-06T03:24:00.001-07:00

Protect your virtual infrastructure with Hytrust Appliance v2.0

2010-03-24T10:36:00.001-07:00

Looking to get control over your virtual infrastructure? Then consider the Hytrust Appliance, which allows you to set up policies, access rules, and other security measures to segregate your virtual infrastructure from your users. It comes with integration with Microsoft's Active Directory users and groups, and a newly designed user interface with the ability to handle extremely large virtual installations.

We tested the appliance on a network of eight VM ESXi and ESX hosts during March 2010.

Pricing: Download for free, limited to managing three hosts
Standard edition $1000 per typical host
Enterprise: $1500 per typical host including federation across multiple appliances
Hytrust.com

ITexpertVoice: Prowess SmartDeploy Eases Windows 7 Migration

2010-03-17T02:13:00.001-07:00

SmartDeploy is a software tool that converts virtual machine disk files into Windows Image files that can be used to deploy new OSs, including Windows 7, across an enterprise. This screencast demonstrates its features. SmartDeploy is easier to use than Microsoft’s WAIK, and Kbox, both of which we reviewed earlier on ITexpertVoice.com.
You can watch the video here:
http://itexpertvoice.com/home/prowess-smartdeploy-eases-windows-7-migration/#more-1781

Warnings about Wifi-enabled air travel

2010-03-13T06:18:00.001-08:00

I have been on a few planes in the past couple of weeks that are Wifi-enabled. American has created an entirely new opportunity for identity thieves here, and while the opportunity to surf and email at 30,000 feet is tempting, count me out for those that will become frequent users.

The problem is that most people get lost in the wonderfulness of the Web and tend to forget that their seatmates can watch every move, see every keystroke (it doesn't take much to follow along, especially at the speed that many people type), and collect all sorts of information. By the end of one flight I was on, I had Larry (not his real name) the HP sales rep's Amazon account, read several of his emails, got to see his new sales presentations that HP corporate sales office had sent him, figured out that he was a recent hire as he was checking HP's Intranet to understand some corporate travel policies, found out who his clients that he had just visited were, and more.

Now, I wasn't really paying that much attention. I was tired, and just wanted to be left by myself for the trip. And I think we exchanged maybe ten words between us all told. But if I really wanted to do some damage, I could be all over Larry's accounts by now (he had some nice taste from what I could see he was looking for on Amazon, too).

Yes, people have been using laptops on planes for years. I used to do it all the time, back when the middle seat was rarely occupied and you didn't have to almost disrobe to get to the gate. But those days are almost as much part of history as calling the people that worked on planes stews. The difference is now that we have Internet piped directly to the seat, people are free to go anywhere and everywhere, and where they go are places that are critical to their life. I wouldn't be surprised if someone was doing their online banking in-flight.

So people, if you are going online up in the air, get a privacy filter for your laptop so that no one else can see your screen. They cost about $30. This isn't complex technology: it has been available almost as long as Windows has been around. And while you are at it, dim your screens to save on power anyway (Larry had one of those nifty power-packs to boost his battery, too). Or better yet: don't work on anything important on a crowded plane – and these days, what other kinds of planes are there? Bring a book or watch a movie if you must be immersed in your electronic cocoon.

I am reminded of a story from my early days as a reporter for PC Week, back in the late 1980s. We were very scoop-oriented, and would always try to get information from the vendors through all sorts of means, some of them probably unethical or at least uncomfortable in the light of the present day. One of our reporters was having dinner with her boyfriend (now husband) at a quaint and cozy Cambridge Mass. restaurant, and overhead two businessmen at the next table gossiping about work. What was unusual was they were speaking rapid German, and both were working for Lotus Development, at the time a powerhouse spreadsheet player. They were in town to discuss the company's future product plans. Trouble was, my colleague spoke German fluently, and got a couple of scoops that were published the next week in the paper. No one knew who the source of the leak was.

Remember loose lips sink ships, the World War 2 posters put up by the government? We need something similar on Wifi-enabled planes. Be careful out there people. You never know whom you are sitting next to.

ITExpertVoice screencast: Using Windows AIK to Automate Windows 7 Deployment

2010-03-09T10:00:00.001-08:00

If you are looking for a way to do massive Windows 7 migration, Microsoft has updated its own tool sets for this purpose, called the Windows Automated Installation Kit or WAIK. It has a lot of new features for both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. This screencast shows how it works:

http://itexpertvoice.com/home/using-windows-aik-to-automate-windows-7-deployment/

Managing the multiplatform mess

2010-03-08T07:28:00.001-08:00

I have been using Pandora's online stream music service off and on for several years. What got me more interested lately was it being one of the many services on my Roku video streaming box, which my wife and I use mostly for watching movies from Netflix's "watch instantly" queue.

As I investigated the service more, I came to understand exactly the challenge of what it takes to be truly multi-platform in the current era. It isn't just about having both Web and mobile phone versions of your service, but how you have to go deep into a lot of different devices to appeal to your customers.

The cool thing about Pandora isn't that you can create your own custom radio station that will try to find music based on a particular artist or genre. But that once you set up your account on one platform, you can access it in your car, in your home, and on the road in between. All with the same collection of stations and music. As you spend more time with the service, it tries to figure out your likes and dislikes.

Let's look at all the various places you can get your Pandora fix as an example of how hard it is to become this ubiquitous. First is the Web browser: you have to work in a bunch of them properly, so there is the usual testing in IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari. Add Mac, Windows and Linux versions of each browser, and that's 15 regression tests right off the bat. But we have just gotten started. Add in the newer brower versions, like IE8, the fact that Linux isn't a single OS, and 64 bit Windows. Then stir in support for both Flash and HTML v5, and you can easily get more than 200 different environments if you want to support a wider base. Pandora, by the way, doesn't officially support much beyond Flash on Firefox, IE, and Safari on Mac and Windows.

Then we have separate apps for each of the five mobile phone platforms (Blackberry, iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, and Windows Mobile) and four cellular providers because their phones work differently on each network. Never mind that each phone's ecosystem has different rules on how an app can get posted for download and get itself updated. There are at least twenty different tests there. The phone apps have to be designed to work with the limited screen real estate available on each phone, and yet still connect to your account in a way that you can recognize without a lot of user training. Some of the phones have different screen and control button configurations, so just supporting the Blackberry line, for example, isn't so simple. You also need to get the development environment for the phone (typically these run on PCs with simulators that show you what your phone user will end us seeing) and probably a bunch of phones to test out too.

But wait, there is more. How about Facebook, My Space, and other social networks? Don't you want to integrate with them and leverage them to make your app viral? More code to write, more interfaces to learn, more tests to run to make sure you new versions don't break these links.

Then there is support for the home-based entertainment systems. While each of these have some embedded Web browser in them (like the Roku or the Samsung BluRay DVD players), you still have to test to make sure that the pages load properly and the music keeps on playing and your fancy navigation controls operate as intended. There are more than a dozen different devices, including the Ford Sync in-car service that will be available later this year, to test out. The trouble here is that these devices typically have older and less capable browsers that don't get updated, unlike the PC world where users are trying out new versions.

As you can see, it is easy to lose count of how many different platforms you want your app to run on. And then if you have to make choices and limit yourself, how do you do the triage? Do you drop Andoid in favor of Roku? Bring up the new Ford Sync API and leave the Pre to wither away? The user populations of each of these communities is constantly changing, as sales wax and wane.

It is enough to make many of us long for the simple days of the 1990s, when we just had to worry about Mac vs. Windows support.

I got the idea to look at Pandora from an article in today's NY Times. And while the service can wreck havoc on corporate networks (lots of folks start the audio stream and then walk away from their PCs), I think they are doing exactly the right kind of things when it comes to managing their multiplatform strategy.

Making better backups with Sepaton DeltaStor deduplication technology

2010-03-08T06:43:00.001-08:00

Sepaton's S2100 is a virtual tape library backup appliance that can work to significantly reduce backup completion and restore times and cut down on storage requirements. It has a flexible capacity to hold from 3.5TB to 200TB and a wide collection of policies that can be crafted to particular applications and circumstances.

We tested a unit on a live network with actual production data with Firefox running on Windows XP in February 2010.

Price: starts at $110,500.
Backup products supported include Symantec's Netbackup and Backup Exec, CA ARCserve, IBM/Tivoli Storage Manager, and EMC.

SEPATON S2100-ES v5
400 Nickerson Road
Marlborough, MA 01752
Sepaton.com
508 490 7900

Taking credit card payments via the Internet

2010-02-22T10:02:00.001-08:00

It all started when one of my clients wanted to pay me with a credit card. It is odd that I have been in business for 18 years and this is the first time that I have been paid in this way. It is doubly ironic in that I used to teach classes on eCommerce back in the early days of the Web and hadn't ever gotten around to getting a merchant account, which is what you need to take credit card payments.

If you want to accept credit cards, you enter a brave new world where there is an entire collection of jargon to use your secret decoder ring. For example, "discount rate" is the fee that the card issuer (like American Express or Visa) charges you per transaction. Typically these are anywhere from one to four percent, depending on a series of circumstances. Then there is the "virtual terminal" which is a series of Web-based services that allow you to enter the credit card number in your browser and have the transaction completed online. These replace the typical credit card swipe machines that you see in every retail shop.

Since my client wanted to use their American Express card, my first stop was to try my business bank, Bank of America, and see what they could offer me. Online had limited information but I tried the 800 number and got nowhere fast. They suggested that I talk to Amex and see what they could do for me. Within about 30 minutes I was setup with an Amex merchant ID and could start accepting their card via a telephone response number. The issue was that the transactions would take some time to clear and actually end up in my bank. They could also sell me their virtual terminal software, called Payment Express, which would be an extra charge of $20 a month. Amex has many different options that can easily get confusing – my recommendation is if you want to go this way, first sign up online to access your account and then read the various screens that describe Payflow, Payment Express and their physical card payment terminals.

In the interests of research, I pressed on to see what else is available.

Paypal was my next stop. While you can process some credit card payments, once you get beyond a few hundred dollars you need to have a Paypal business account. This means $30 a month, plus transaction fees of 2.4 to 3.1% to use their virtual terminal software. Here is a description of that process:
https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_vt_hub-inside

Intuit was next. Their merchant services are $13 a month, and it took about a day to set me up. They also have their own virtual terminal software and their home page takes something to get used to. They also charge less per transaction, with fees ranging from 1.9 to 2.9%. They have a great series of online demos here on their Web site:
http://payments.intuit.com/products/quickbooks-payment-solutions/online-credit-card-processing.jsp

So which do I recommend? If I had to start over knowing what I know now, I would go first to Inuit. They are geared towards their online product, they have a simple sign up process, and if you already use Quickbooks they can integrate with that too if you end up with lots of transactions. (I have been a happy Quickbooks user for nearly two decades, starting with the DOS version, can you believe it?) I would steer clear of Paypal, I just think they charge too much for too little.

There are dozens of other payment processors online, and this isn't meant to be a comprehensive review. And feel free to share your own experiences on my blog or via Twitter.

Outbound content compliance using Global Velocity

2010-02-22T06:58:00.001-08:00

Looking to do a better job monitoring all of your network's applications portfolio? The GV-2010 is a unit designed to give you very granular control over how your end users use particular applications, and inspect all of your content leaving your network.

We tested the appliance on a small network in February 2010.

Global Velocity GV-2010
Globalvelocity.com
St. Louis MO
314 880 2900

Kace Kbox: Best Way to Massively Migrate Windows XP Desktops to Windows 7

2010-02-22T05:48:00.001-08:00

Kbox (which recently was acquired by Dell) is used to manage and control desktop system images that contain user files and applications and — with its Systems Management Appliance, sold separately — to do PC inventory and audits. It also works with both virtual and physical machines too. Unlike the PC Mover and Zinstall approaches, they are designed for large-scale deployments of hundreds or more PCs.

You can watch my screencast review here at ITExpertVoice.com:
http://itexpertvoice.com/home/kace-kbox-best-way-to-massively-migrate-windows-xp-desktops-to-windows-7/

Codeless Ajax Development with Alpha Five

2010-02-18T13:16:00.001-08:00

Alpha Five is a powerful database and Web applications server and development environment that has been around for many years and continues to get more powerful but not at the expense of ease of use. There are numerous tutorials

You can watch my screencast video here: http://webinformant.tv/alpha5.html

We tested Alpha 5 v10 on a Windows XP running SP2 in February 2010.

Documentation, copious code examples and videos:
http://docs.google.com/View?id=d52ghw8_92f9r2m4dx
http://www.ajaxvideotutorials.com/videos/help/01intro/
http://65.75.250.238/webApplicationDemoV10/default/index.a5w

Alpha Five v10
http://alphasoftware.com/products/v10/
70 Blanchard Road, Burlington, MA 01803
781.229.4500

Prices: Developer $349
Application Server $599, both for $799
Unlimited Runtime licenses $599
Windows XP or later required with at least IE v7 or Firefox 3.0

Searching for softphones

2010-02-01T11:20:00.001-08:00

Remember when your office phone was a solidly built multi-line key system with push buttons for the different extensions? And you had a secretary who would answer all of your calls? It seems so quaint now, like something out of a Tracy/Hepburn movie like the "Desk Set." (Which for those of you that haven't seen it, features a plot about a room-sized computer that replaces human workers at the TV station. Amazingly, 50 years ago too.)

The biggest change for office telephony these days is the separating of incoming and outgoing calling plans and how we will use computers instead of an actual phone instrument. Maybe, if we all can get our softphones to work properly.

I am not talking about some Claes Oldenburg sculpture, but the software running on your PC that enables you to make and receive calls. Softphones aren't new – I recall writing about them in the early 1990s. Sadly, the quality of software development is still akin more to this era than the modern day.

Voice over IP has made calling almost too cheap to meter, to recall a phrase from the 1950s (then it was about nuclear power, and we know what happened to that). That's why many vendors currently offer unlimited monthly calling plans for their VOIP Service – Vonage ($25), Skype ($3), Google Voice (Free!). What is important to note is that these are all outgoing calling plans. Anyone can call you without any plan, you just need a phone number. Here is where things get tricky.

I have been a happy customer of Vonage since around 2002 or so, using their phone service in three different states and for both home and work. The best part about using Vonage (or any other VOIP phone with a reasonable feature set) is that I can set up what happens when someone calls my number. Right now I have it ring both office and cell numbers simultaneously. This way I just have to give you one number to call me, and I can change cell numbers, or add a new location if I am working someplace for an extended period of time. The next best part about Vonage is that I can do all of this with just a couple of mouse clicks, without having to wait on hold for a Bell business office service rep to try to upsell me with services that I don't want.

But I don't really get that many calls anymore, not that I am complaining. Most of the time when I am on the phone it is to interview someone for an article I am writing or to listen to a conference call briefing. Those are calls that I initiate and I don't really need a physical phone anyway – I much prefer to use a headset connected to my computer, to free my shoulder so I can type in my notes. (Yes, I could use a Bluetooth headset for my phone, too.)

I started thinking that perhaps I could eliminate my office phone line, and swap it for a Vonage softphone, and perhaps save some money in the process. That led me to searching for a softphone that will run on my Mac, connect to my Vonage account, and be reliable. Getting all three criteria has turned into A Project over the past week.

The softphone costs $10 a month. A call to Vonage customer support set up things, and moved my office number over to the softphone account. I thought I was doing well.

Alas, it wasn't so easy. First of all, while Vonage has its softphone app on both Windows and Mac, the Mac version is a poor cousin and I couldn't get it to work properly. After spending some time with Vonage tech support, I found out that there are "issues" with it running on Intel-based Macs (which are all recent Macs for the past several years).

Vonage does have a softphone for the iPhone (and Blackberry too), but you need to set up another $25 a month subscription plan. It really is designed to call internationally from your phone and save you on these charges. So it really isn't the softphone that I am looking for.

There are numerous softphone VOIP software companies, and some even have Mac clients. I have tried a few, and tried to get them configured for my Vonage account, but with no success. There is a lot of poor quality information online, and many of these are smaller companies with no tech support.

What about Skype? Yes, Skype can be considered a softphone (and more, since it does video calls too). The monthly unlimited calling plan is $3, but you also need to purchase an online number for another $3 a month if you want people to call you. All of a sudden, my expected savings are evaporating. I like Skype and have used it for years, mostly for the IM features, and the voice quality is terrific.

How about MagicJack? This is a pretty cool USB device that you can connect to both Macs and Windows PCs, and it will set up a softphone (or you can use a regular phone and wire it to the USB device directly). All for $40 for the first year, and $20 a year thereafter. My one problem with the Jack is that I keep getting people calling me who are calling wrong numbers. Not sure what that is all about. I do get the occasional Skype from someone I don't recognize but not as often.

And then there are Google Voice and eVoice, a new service from J2 Communications, the people that are behind eFax and jFax. These aren't quite softphones, but do offer some interesting communications features to manage your telephony, and if I didn't keep my Vonage number I would probably be more interested in them. Google has also purchased Gizmo Project, which had a really nice softphone that came with a built-in voice recorder, so who knows what will happen to that.

Not having a traditional land-line phone can be an issue, I will admit. But it isn't usually a problem. So as I transition to a phone-free desk, I think back to the days when I had one of the old Western Electric phones. Maybe I should buy one and just keep it on my desk for old time's sake while I keep fooling around with my softphones and headsets. If you are interested, check out this site which has all sorts of great info on the golden era when people had to rent, not own their phones, and they still had dials instead of buttons.
http://www.frillfreephones.com/

The new browser wars: Flash vs. Swipe

2010-01-28T09:35:00.001-08:00

Pardon me for adding yet another iPad analysis (certainly, when a computer product launch makes it into Doonesbury, we have crossed a new threshold of hype), but one thing actually missing from the copious words and videos on yesterday's event at Moscone was the simple fact that we have a new browser war on our hands, and it isn't a pretty sight.

The browser wars of yesteryear between Microsoft and Netscape seem so quaint. (And look what happened to Netsacpe, too.) Today it is all about Adobe Flash versus the multi-touch swipe technology that is part of Apple's product lines.

Why is this a war? Apple's iPod, iTouch, and now iPad all share a lack of support for Adobe's Flash technology, the animation glue that binds Web pages to in-line video playback. When you bring up your Safari browser in these devices, you see a big blank nothing on the pages that have Flash content to play. And what that means to me is that Apple has made it clear: rewrite your sites to support our own technologies (including new apps that are certain to populate the iTunes Store soon), or be forever absent from this brave new world of cool devices that Steve is creating.

I come to the support of Flash most reluctantly, mind you. Flash is a necessarily evil, and for the most part we just don't even think of it when we merrily surf around the Internet, finding new video content to amuse and inform us. (Unless our plug-ins are outdated or messed up, that is.)

Flash will bring about the Internet TV revolution a lot sooner than the misinformed mainstream TV executives will like to admit, too: the more video that gets encoded in Flash, the fewer hours that 20-, 30-, and 40-somethings will spend in front of their living room TVs, if they even have living room TVs anymore. See what has happened to Leno et al. Their best bits are immediately uploaded to YouTube and watched the next morning. That is the power of Flash.

But Apple has its own idea about how to watch video, and it has nothing to do with standards that anyone else creates. It is about making Web content creators develop new iTunes Apps that can deliver their content customized for their devices. Anyone using an ordinary Web browser can be ignored. Granted, they have sold a lot of iPhones, so it isn't a market that has been marginalized like their share of the PC market – but still. Why do so many Web site owners want this? Because of the latest Steve reality distortion field. See the comment about Doonesbury above.

It is ironic, because in the early days, Apple was a big boost to Adobe's Postscript technology, the glue that made printing pretty pages from your PCs possible. But let's not rest on these accidents of history.

Is a multi-touch swipe worth starting a new war? Maybe. Swiping the glass for controlling the display is very intuitive. It is a wonder that more tablet PCs haven't incorporated it yet. In the mean time, we all will be watching and see how this shakes out, but (I can't believe I am saying this) my bet is on Flash.

It's all about the jobs

2010-01-25T09:51:00.001-08:00

Even Conan can't keep his job, although I am sure many of us would welcome a multi-million dollar payout as he got last week. But as our economy tries to re-start itself, I have seen first-hand how hard it is for people to get new jobs. Over the past seven months, I have been working with our local Regional Chamber and Growth Association in an effort called the St. Louis Job Angels, to help get information about new jobs quickly disseminated to the right people, and also provide self-help and peer networking to job seekers.

The effort was started nationally by consultant Mark Stelzner and has since become very successful here in St. Louis. We have more than 600 people on our LinkedIn group and a new job is posted almost daily. We also send out the postings via Twitter too, although trying to fit an entire job description into 100 or so characters is a challenge. Based on these efforts, I have some advice for employers and job seekers that I want to share.

First off, if you are going to post your opening online, make sure your Web jobs board is both search and Twitter-friendly. Try to have unique and simple URLs that people can email and Tweet to bring job seekers directly to the position at hand. Put all the information about the job on one page, including salary range, prerequisites, and reasonable experiences and skills required. Include a job number or some other identifying string that job applicants can use and reTweet so that others can quickly find the opening. And be specific about how to be contacted and with what information.

You would be surprised (well, maybe not) how many job openings I look at that don't have this basic information. This isn't rocket science (and we do have a few openings here in St. Louis for rocket scientists, believe me) and you would think that Al Gore still hasn't gotten around to inventing the Internet, what with some of the postings that I see.

Some online job boards that are part of individual companies are behind registration walls, so you have to provide all sorts of information about yourself before you can get to see the actual jobs themselves. Bad idea! You want people to browse your board, because they might see something else that they are more qualified or more interested in.

There is a reason not to skimp on descriptions. The more information you can provide the job seeker, the better and more of a match your applicants will be when it comes time to apply.

The unique URL per job makes it easier to reTweet the openings: you use a URL shortening service such as Bit.ly and you can send out the job post quickly without having to worry that Twitter will mangle the URL or that users won't be able to find it on the Internet someplace.

Some recruiters are told not to divulge the company name for fear that the company will be buried in resumes. Fair enough. But then provide more detail about the job so that applicants can understand what they are getting themselves into.

Also, be fair about telecommuting options. It is time to realize that many of us want to stay put for various reasons. If your management can deal with finding the best candidate in another city, then support this practice. I mean, we are in 2010, people!

Second, spend some time on LinkedIn. Yes, there are still plenty of places where you can post job openings, including Monster, Craigslist, and hundreds of other more specialized sites. And yes, employers should be promiscuous and post openings widely too. But the right use of LinkedIn by both employers and job seekers can be useful.

I keep adjusting my online LinkedIn profile all the time, even though I have had it for many years. I keep forgetting to add particular experiences, or to ask for references from previous bosses. So don't try to create your entire profile in one sitting, but come back to it frequently. I have some more tips on how to improve your LinkedIn presence here if you want to view my slides:
http://slideshare.net/davidstrom

Most of the people I know are still new at using this service, and some are unaware about the more advanced features such as Groups and Answers that can help augment your job searching and make the service more valuable too. Answers can help build your expertise and demonstrate your knowledge of a topic or niche. Groups can be used, as we do for St. Louis Job Angels group, how to find others who share similar traits and can be quickly scanned for updated information.

LinkedIn can be both a blessing and a curse. Getting groups setup is a slow process, and you have to follow an arcane series of rules if you want to play in their sandbox: for example, as group Admin, I can send out exactly no more than one weekly email to the group. I try not to bury people in emails, but still, sometimes you want to get the word out if we have had a lot of postings or some with very short response times.

Third, become better at marketing yourself. One of my colleagues here and the supervisor of the MissouriCareerSource local office, Frank Alaniz, talks about how to develop a resume that will present your qualifications in a way that a job interviewer or HR screener can quickly see you online. Most employers spend less than three minutes reviewing resumes, which means you have to grab them at hello:
http://docs.google.com/View?id=d6kgf4r_20gr2v5xg8

Good luck with your own job search, and maybe you too can host a late-night show in the near future.

Using Windows 7 Remote Server Administration Tools

2010-01-25T06:34:00.001-08:00

RSAT makes it easier to manage your collection of Windows 2003 and 2008 servers remotely and securely from your Windows 7 desktop. This screencast shows how it works.

There’s plenty to learn, including setting up new file shares, managing the built-in Internet Information Server Web services, handling group policies and other sophisticated features. The installation is somewhat convoluted and you’ll want to spend some time reading the help files too.

See my screencast video at: http://itexpertvoice.com/home/using-windows-7-remote-server-administration-tools/

Using the Windows 7 PowerShell Scripting Environment

2010-01-11T06:25:00.001-08:00

PowerShell ISE is a visual command-line editor that used to be called Graphical
PowerShell. In this video, we show you how to become familiar with its extensive
command set which can be used to automate common tasks.

You may view the latest post at ITExpertVoice here:
http://itexpertvoice.com/home/using-the-windows-7-powershell-scripting-environment/

Tune Up Utilities 2010 to tweak your PC's performance

2009-12-21T06:00:00.001-08:00

Make your Windows PC run faster and more reliably with this updated utility program. It can do many common tasks quickly and automatically, and clean up your hard drive and registry settings too.

www.tune-up.com
Price: $49.95, for up to three PCs
Supports Windows 7, Vista and XP with SP2, in both the 32- and 64-bit OSs

ITExpertVoice screencast: Using Laplink's PC Mover to Migrate XP to Windows 7

2009-12-14T03:31:00.001-08:00

If you are running Windows XP and want to upgrade to Windows 7 without having to reformat your machine’s hard drive, you currently have one choice: a utility called PC Mover from Laplink software. This video shows you the steps involved in the migration, along with things to look out for in using PC Mover.
http://itexpertvoice.com/home/using-laplinks-pc-mover-to-migrate-a-windows-xp-desktop-to-windows-7/

ITExpertVoice screencast: Using Windows 7 Mobility Center

2009-12-09T14:40:00.001-08:00

Windows Mobility Center is a new feature of Windows 7. Microsoft has collected in one place for road warriors a powerful series of controls that can help you quickly connect to wireless networks, adjust your screen for presentations, and set up other important adjustments. No more hunting around the Control Panel settings for busy people on the go. This video shows you the lay of the landscape with Mobility Center.
http://itexpertvoice.com/home/using-windows-7-mobility-center/

Developing the next gen of iPhone apps programmers

2009-12-08T07:47:00.001-08:00

I had an opportunity to audit a computer science class this week at Washington University, a class that was teaching students how to write iPhone apps. It was their final presentation, and I got to see a dozen apps that were very impressive. As I was watching the kids present, I was thinking back to my college days and the similarities and differences about my education.

Of course, back in my day real programmers wrote in Assembler, and maybe Fortran. None of this object-oriented stuff had even been invented. We also had punched cards, which is probably why I never became a programmer. In grad school, we had video terminals because PCs were still being tinkered around inside Silicon Valley garages.

In the Wash U class, most of the students had their own Macbooks, some better than my own. Each was given an iPod touch to use during the semester and this session was the moment of truth, where they had to demo their apps in front of the class. Most of the programming projects were functional, although there were a few students that had obviously been putting some long hours trying to get the bugs out of their apps. One of the kids was working on his presentation and actually debugged his app during class. Some things never change.

I was impressed first of all with the apps, which ranged from tracking what is in your fridge to being used by a personal trainer to track their clients' workouts to locating friends on a campus map during free times. There was an app that taught people how to count cards at Blackjack --this could have helped one of my dorm-mates who would periodically make a run to Tahoe where they still used single decks and come home with enough money to pay for his living expenses. Another was used to collate and tag photos from Flickr. Each team had to research and find an app to build that wasn't yet sold on the App Store, too.

I hope the kids take the time to finish them and post them to the App Store. Some of the apps were very polished and could probably be used as is with almost no additional effort, while a few just crashed with the slightest tap on the screen. I was also impressed with the quality of the presentations and how polished the kids were in front of the class. This isn't what I remember of my nerdy classmates back in the day, where we seldom even spoke to each other, let alone spoke Powerpoint. Most of the kids put together a few slides that showed their decision-making and progress during the class. Some of the apps were built in teams, some solo. There were about 25 kids in the class, with two women. (This is about the same sad gender ratio in my day, too.)

These were not beginning computer science students by any means. Each of them had to have an understanding of a lot of different pieces, including the graphics interface of the iPhone itself, database calls, Web services, and the Apple development environment that is used to build the app itself. That is a lot for any programmer to handle, but the kids took it in stride. You could tell that they learned a lot during the semester, and were proud of it too. Heck, I was proud of them and I didn't even know them.

One of the things that I was struck with during the class was how collaborative the kids were. This wasn't the introverted nerds of my misspent youth -- these kids were calling out suggestions to help each other and try to remove the remaining roadblocks in each other's apps. Some of them had tried to go down a particular path with one tool, only to change horses and use something else. It was fun to watch them get all excited about some arcane code fragment. Part of this I think was because the iPhone environment is so new and so contained that it makes it easier to collaborate, because there are so many things to learn that are outside the normal coding process.

They also learned first-hand about feature creep and trying to hit their requirements on time and how to balance making things work with making things look pretty.

Speaking of which, most of the students had high standards for the look and feel of their apps. There isn't much screen real estate on the iPhone to fool around with, and you have to make every pixel count. Some of the kids took the time to find the right icons to display on screen, and they all took pains to make use of the various menus and screen controls that make the iPhone apps easy to use with one or two fingers. That was impressive, and showed me that the iPhone really has a future and why 100,000 plus apps have been already created.

You could also see the beginnings of professional computer scientists here too. A few of them mentioned how they coded in pairs, using extreme programming techniques. I think that meant that the pair stayed up all night to meet a particular deadline, but still, that is how it happens in the real world too. And learning object-oriented languages is part and parcel to today's programming world, unlike the world that I entered after college.

One kid had the funniest line, talking about his mother, who is a project manager and a programmer. "My mom is very old school and knew all these Unix shell script commands that she never told me about when I was growing up." Oh, youth is so wasted on the young!

If your local university offers a class on iPhone apps, you might want to stop by and be inspired. I know I was. Thanks to the teacher Todd Sproull for letting me sit in.

Managing your Firewalls with McAfee Profiler

2009-12-02T06:37:00.001-08:00

Profiler makes it easier to troubleshoot and manage up to five McAfee Enterprise firewalls from one central console and help you keep up with changes to your network and applications. You can examine the implications to real-time changes in your network before you commit them and also quickly do ad hoc analysis on rule sets.

Version 1.5.1
Price: $19,500 for appliance model
http://www.mcafee.com/us/local_content/datasheets/ds_fw_profiler.pdf

ITExpertVoice screencast: Using Windows 7 Bitlocker

2009-12-01T03:07:00.001-08:00

Do you worry that if your PC is stolen someone can steal all of your data? Then you should encrypt your hard drive. In this screencast, we look at how Windows 7 has beefed up BitLocker, its built-in encryption program.

http://itexpertvoice.com/home/i-know-i-can-find-it-in-here-somewhere-using-windows-7-bitlocker/

Time to consider crowdsourcing

2009-11-30T11:02:00.001-08:00

We all know about outsourcing, the ability to farm out work to people, often overseas, that will work for less, and sometimes for a lot less. But a not-so-new trend is changing the way that outsourcing happens, called crowdsourcing.

The idea is to take a job and divide it into small enough pieces that someone can do it quickly in their spare time. Think about transcribing an audio recording. Or Photoshopping a series of photographs. The difference between regular outsourcing and crowdsourcing is that you don't necessarily know your contractors, and they mostly are here in the good ole U S of A. Think of it as stimulus package for our troubled times, but based entirely on the private sector.

The idea isn't all that new, but is catching on due to some important trends. First off, there is a critical mass of people who are willing to do the work, and probably more people are going to be interested because of high unemployment over the past year. Second, the Internet-based tools that are used to farm out jobs and track completions and manage the crowds is getting better all the time. Broadband penetration helps: now most people don't do dial-up, which is great if you are going to be online for hours at a time working the crowd-based tasks. Finally, many crowds have developed a solid track record, so it is more compelling for project managers looking for workers.

As a result, crowdsourcing is big business. There are several dozen firms that help organize the crowds of people that offer up their services, and some of them are making millions of dollars a year in fees that they collect from being brokers between buyer and provider. Amazon's Mechanical Turk and eLance.com are two of the more well-known ones, and if you want to find out others I suggest you first listen to my podcast with my partner Paul Gillin and Brent Frei, the author of one of the first industry reports on crowdsourcing. You can find the links to his report and our podcast if you go to: http://MediaBlather.com/103.html

Frei runs a company that provides crowdsourcing, so it isn't too difficult to see his self-interest. But the report opened my eyes to see the power and the promise behind the idea. For example, you can leverage your own billable time by farming out tedious tasks to someone else that would gladly do it for a lot less than your rates. Or compiling a list of vendors by doing online research of their Web sites. With a $10/hour intern, this project would have taken 12 hours or $120 to complete the task. By divvying it up among a crowd, Frei was able to get it done for about $18 total.

Now, I know what you are going to say. How can you ensure quality of the crowd-based researchers? What about the time and cost to manage them? There are ways to build in redundancy and have the results cross-checked, and with the right kind of project management, you can piece things apart in such a way that makes sense for your crowd.

Paul and I have been doing our MediaBlather podcasts for several years, and always on the lookout for someone interesting to interview, particularly on social media and new marketing tools. If you are interested in being on our show, let us know.

How to make LinkedIn even better

2009-11-24T08:00:00.001-08:00

LinkedIn has been busy in the past week, sprucing up their default members' home page, linking with Twitter, and putting together a very belated effort at opening their service to programmers.

I like LinkedIn. I am spending more of my time using it to promote myself, to connect to people that I know, and to build up value for my community and myself. With the help of the local chamber of commerce, I now manage a group called the St. Louis Job Angels, where we have listed more than 80 different jobs over the past couple of months and more than 500 job seekers and recruiters have signed up to share tips and support each other's efforts. So as a long-time frequent user, I offer some advice of where they should be going in 2010 – not that anyone will listen to my humble suggestions.

First off, they need to be more open. The add-on applications were a good first step (you can link up to your Wordpress and TypePad blog entries, publish your slide decks via Slideshare, and others). And the developer network (developer.linkedin.com) is a good second step, but I want more. I would like to use my LinkedIn connections as my main contact manager, but until I can gain more control over this information it isn't as useful as it could be. Why do I need to publish these Web Informant newsletters to a separate email listserv that I have to maintain with your current email addresses? Probably most of you subscribers also take the time and energy to maintain your current email address in LinkedIn, so why duplicate that effort? Well, because it is too hard to still setup groups and email selected contacts inside of LinkedIn.

Second, I want to be able to freely export my connections without having to resort to a third-party service. Right now, OpenXchange (ox.io) is the only way that I can extract my contacts. Yes, I can synch up my address books on any number of services (one that I have mentioned in the past is Glide, glidedigital.com) -- but these are strictly a one-way operation, pouring data into LinkedIn. I don't like using services that I can't extract my data easily.

Third, scrap InMail. We don't need another communication substitute for email or IM. Ditto for the LinkedIn toolbars for Outlook and the Web. My browser window is small enough without any more clutter.

Fourth, give me better and more discrete publishing tools for my groups, similar to the way the free Yahoo or Google Groups services operate. Right now, I can send messages to everyone, but only as the group manager. My group can't easily communicate amongst themselves, without my intervention. Subgroups are a nightmare to deal with. There is no easy way to remind people that I have invited to the group (but haven't accepted the invite). Can I get a URL that points directly to my group? Not easily. And so on. Any quick look at what Yahoo has been doing since they bought eGroups nearly ten years ago would show the way towards a truly useful service.

None of these suggestions would be difficult, or even time consuming to implement. And I am sure that there are plenty of other things that they have on their radar. Feel free to share your own on my strominator.com blog too.

ITExpertVoice screencast: Using Windows 7 Applocker

2009-11-20T07:54:00.001-08:00

My latest video screencast review for the Dell sponsored site ITExpertVoice has been posted, on using Windows 7 new whitelisting feature called Applocker. You can watch it here:

http://itexpertvoice.com/home/i-know-i-can-find-it-in-here-somewhere-using-windows-7-applocker/

The evolution of Web-based enterprise video

2009-11-16T06:38:00.001-08:00

This week Brightcove begins a new lower-priced video service called Express that starts at $100 a month and offers some impressive features. I'm glad to see them in this space, which is still very much in the pre-Guttenberg publishing era. I thought I would take this moment to talk about some of the issues involved in publishing Web videos for corporate uses, putting aside all the tectonic shifts that are happening in the Web entertainment arena for another essay.
http://www.brightcove.com/en/video-platform/editions-and-pricing

To put things in perspective, realize that it took only a few years for the Web to evolve from its first crude text-only efforts to a full graphical experience. Yet it has taken more than a decade to get videos inside the browser page. And while there are dozens of video streaming service providers, including Brightcove, Wistia, Fliqz and Kaltura, that offer ways of delivering videos, none of them are as easy to use as they could be, and almost none of them offer one-stop solutions for publishers.

In the last year I have spent a lot of time with video publishing as a result of my five-minute screencast videos, where I write, review, narrate and produce everything about a particular product. The product's vendor sponsors each video that appears on my WebInformant.tv site along with 20 other places around the Internet.

Just take a look at the most popular Web content creation tool of the moment, Wordpress, as a good case in point. If you create your own blog and host it using Wordpress.com, you can purchase a "space upgrade" for $20 a year and start uploading video content. But if you decide that you want more control over your page design and host your blog on your own Web server, this space upgrade option isn't available and you have to dive into the nasty world of third-party video player plug-ins. Even though you are still using Wordpress software. It is these sorts of gotchas that can drive you crazy, or keep me fully employed explaining them.

All of these video services operate in some broad basic ways. After you prepare your video, you upload it to their server and then annotate it with any supporting text, keywords, and other information. You are then given a bunch of HTML code to embed the video player into your Web page. When you view the page, you see a player that you can click on and control the video playback, just as you would come to expect from YouTube et al. The special embed code contains tracking information that the service collects and then offers reports so you can see who watched what videos.

The service that I use at the moment is Wistia.com. Their most basic plan starts at less than $40 a month, and offers some very sophisticated tracking and embedding features. Their video player is very clean and crisp, and I haven't had too many reports about playback quality issues from my site. I recommend that you start with them and see if they meet your needs, and if not then you might want to ask the following questions:

First, do you need a branded player for your videos? Meaning that you have your logo somewhere on the first or end screen, or underneath the video image. For some people, this is important. Some services offer a single player, like Wistia, while others, such as Brightcove, give you more stylistic choices.

Second, do you need control over the ultimate size of the video image on your Web site? The various hosting services either offer this explicitly, or else (like the basic plan from Fliqz.com) leave it up to you to edit their embed codes that they provide for you to copy and paste into your Web page. If you have to manually edit the code, you want to maintain the aspect ration (horizontal to vertical) so your video displays correctly. (It helps if you produce your video for the ultimate intended size that it will appear on your Web site, too.)

Third, how big of an audience do you expect for your videos? Given that these are targeted at potential customers and not people looking for the latest skateboarding cats or guys gone wild, you should set expectations accordingly: several thousand views over a period of a few months is a good audience. Some of the services, like Wistia, charge by playbacks per month. Brightcove charges on the number of individual videos and on your bitstream consumption, which is harder to estimate. Kaltura offers a free Wordpress plug-in for hosting up to 10 GB of monthly video data.

Fourth, what kinds of reports and features are available from your service provider? With some services like Fliqz and Brightcove, their more expensive plans give you more features and choices.

Finally, what else is or isn't included in the service? One of the things that I like about Wistia is the ability to share the video project with a number of collaborators, such as my clients, who can view the video directly, without my having to email them a huge attachment.

As you can see, there is a still a lot to deal with when it comes to Web videos. If you have another site that you would like to recommend, please let me know on my Strominator blog. And if you are a subscriber of Sam Whitmore's Media Survey, you can listen to me and Sam talk about some of these video hosting and production issues on a Webinar that we will host this coming Thursday afternoon. For those of you that aren’t subscribers, I will post my Powerpoint slides on my slideshare.net/davidstrom account afterwards.

Windows 7 LIbraries and Backup Features How-to

2009-11-13T09:03:00.001-08:00

My latest screencast video on how to use Windows 7 libraries and built-in backup features has been posted to IT Expert Voice here;
http://itexpertvoice.com/home/windows-7-libraries-and-backup-features-explained/

How to extract your LinkedIn contacts

2009-10-14T13:34:00.001-07:00

If you have spent any time online using social networks like LinkedIn or Facebook, you know they can be difficult to grow your network and add contacts. But even harder is the ability to extract your contacts once you have built up a reasonably sized network. None of the social networks makes it very easy to get this information.

Why would you want to do this? Several reasons. First is the peace of mind that you have control over your own data. Should you decide to leave the network, or should the network decided to leave you (either for cause or for lack of funds to continue operations), it would be nice to have your contacts tucked safely on your own hard drive. Second is the ability to do some targeted marketing emails or just do some research: none of the networks has the right search fields when you need to find everyone that lives in a certain area with a certain job or works for a specific company. Sometimes I can find people on my network using the search tools, but often I can't. And wouldn't it be nice to see if everyone that is on your LinkedIn network is also on your Facebook network? Or not, if you are still trying to keep these two separate?

Before you hit the reply key and tell me that there are several different services that allow for you to synchronize your contacts, that isn't quite what I mean. Yes, there are services such as Plaxo's Pulse and MyOtherDrive.com that allow for synchronization of your desktop to their cloud-based contact list, but that is usually in one direction only (Pulse offers de-duplication services and better searching tools if you want to pay them for a premium membership.) Say I don't want to have anyone from my last employer on my LinkedIn network, because I left that job under a dark cloud. (Purely hypothetical, of course, not that I am saying that this ever happened to me!) It isn't easy to find this out with these networks, even if you do know how to manipulate their complex privacy settings.

So if you are still reading down here, I suggest you take a look at a Web service called Open Xchange, at ox.io. You can set up a free account and within a few minutes have it setup to automatically bring in all of your contacts from Google's Gmail, LinkedIn, Facebook, and a few other places as well. What is more important though is that you can easily publish all this information (or some of it) to a Web site, or download it to a comma-separated file, so that you stay in control of your data at all times.

OX is the same technology that is white-labled by Network Solutions and 1&1 Internet as their own email services. You can also purchase a software license if you don't want to run it across the Internet and on your own Linux servers. It has a lot more under the hood, including plug-ins for Microsoft Outlook, import/export of calendar items, iPhone apps and a shared document repository. If you want to get a feel for the software, go on over to my screencast video that I just finished on the product here:
http://webinformant.tv/ox.html

(And while you are over there, if you haven't seen these videos, you might want to browser around, or better yet, hire me to do one for your company's product.)

I am glad to see products like OX take hold: all of us need better and more open ways to control our contacts.

Using OpenXchange to manage your communications

2009-10-14T09:13:00.001-07:00

A flexible unified communications service for collaborative workgroups that can share files, import and export contacts and calendars from a wide variety of data sources and Web services, including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google's Gmail. Entirely open-source based.

Price: Begins at $5/user/month for hosted version; $1095/yr for 25 users for server-based software version
Requirements: Works on a wide variety of browsers and operating systems. We tested it on IE 7, Firefox 3 and Mac Safari 4 in October 2009.

OpenXchange Inc.
303 South Broadway
Tarrytown, New York 10591
914 332-5720
http://ox.io

Making science a spectator sport

2009-10-08T07:43:00.001-07:00

I had a chance to see Dean Kamen speak last night, and I have to say he was inspiring. The man, who is known for inventing the Segway two-wheeled transport, has actually touched millions of people more directly through a variety of innovative medical devices, including the first portable glucose injector, better stents for heart patients, and improved wheelchairs and prosthetic arms.

The occaision was the kickoff of a science festival that brings together school children, scientists from around the world, and leading local technologists for a multi-day series of seminars held at our local science museum. Some of them, such as the session on the science behind flirting, are just fun. Others present up-to-minute basic research. There are even a variety of rare Omnimax movies too. For a geek, it is hog heaven.

Anyway, back to Kamen. He showed us some of the devices that he has invented over his career. What I found amazing is how down to earth he is about his creations: yup, I just came up with this thingie, it is now used by ten million diabetics or hundred million kidney patients. He wears jeans and work boots -- even when visiting the White House to receive one of his numerous awards or proclamations. Perhaps it is an affectation, but it comes across as someone who isn't trying to impress anyone. You got the feeling that after the speech and when the theater lights are turned off, he is just going about his business, coming up with the next great thing.

One of his current efforts is an international science competition called FIRST that involves thousands of grade school, middle school and high school students to build various robotic devices and square off against each other in the grand tradition of any sporting event. Indeed, that was his original motivation -- our society honors and extols the virtues of athletes, so why not use the same metaphor for budding student scientists? He has been extraordinarily successful. Each year's competition is larger with more teams and more corporate sponsorship than the last. One of his sponsors' CEO at a large aerospace firm put it this way: he told the audience that most of the engineers are nearing retirement age and he needs to find thousands of replacements, and find them quickly. So sponsoring FIRST teams isn't completely altruistic, it is the best way to develop a farm team and start locating and encouraging fresh talent. Makes a lot of sense to me. Kamen now requires his sponsors to kick in four-year college scholarships too, which is terrific.

Ironically, Kamen was here the day after Lance Armstrong was in town inking a new deal with Michelob, something else that St. Louis is famous for (the beer, not Lance.) Kamen also announced last night that FIRST will hold its final championship rounds in St. Louis starting in 2011. They have outgrown their current digs and he wanted to take the competition to a city that would be a natural fit for science buffs.For those of you that aren't local, this may come as a bit of a surprise. Not Silicon Valley? Or Austin? Or even Chicago? (That suggestion drew a big laugh last night.) St. Louis has long roots in science competitions, stretching back to Lindbergh's flight and the X Prize. I am very proud that our region was chosen and look forward to attending the events.

It is time we considering making science and engineering more of a spectator sport. We need farm teams, seeding the professional leagues, we need local venues that will bring out the tailgaters and the devotees wearing their colors parading around downtown the night before the big meet. We need commentators that will give us the play-by-play. We need the winners to be celebrated more than the annual Westinghouse/Intel scholars or the Nobelists that were just announced this past week. We need highways names after famous scientists, not just steroid-laden sluggers. Granted, nerds have come a long way since I was in high school and couldn't get a date. But Kamen showed me just how far we still need to go.

A happy ending: how two stolen laptops were recovered with Kaseya

2009-10-06T13:33:00.001-07:00

Have you ever had your laptop stolen? I did several years ago, from the trunk of a locked car in a suburban shopping mall. But lately thieves are getting caught because of better software tools that are on the laptops, and this is a story about two laptops that were stolen several months ago. The thefts were independent events, with only one thing in common: both of them were managed by the same Sacramento VAR, Capital Computer Guys.

Greg Hemig, the operator and owner of the business, has been a Kaseya customer for years and tries to get all of his PC support clients to install the Kaseya agent on their machines. This agent can do a lot of different things, such as remotely control the machine, update drivers, and install a keylogger to keep track of what the user is doing. Most people use it for fairly benign purposes but Hernig figured out quickly after the laptops were stolen that he could use the software to track down where the machines were being used.

Which he did. He was able to gather all sorts of information from them once they connected to the Internet – "I was able to find out not just an IP address, which is what a typical anti-theft product like LoJack would provide, but an actual physical address, the names of the user's girlfriend and family, how to access their bank accounts, and even turn on the microphone on the laptop and listen to what they were saying while they were typing." Scary stuff, but within two weeks of contacting law enforcement, he was able to get back both machines to their original owners.

The hardest part about the whole process wasn't collecting the information, but convincing the cops that he was legit and that they needed to act to retrieve the PCs. Both laptops didn't travel very far from their original locations – one was only 20 miles away.

Hemig charges $30 a month per PC to support his customers, and has more than 600 PCs under management in this fashion. That is a nice piece of business, and something that more VARs should consider. "It makes me more competitive, and it was the same price that I used to charge for break/fix work, but now I can deliver a lot better service to my customers," he says. "I think traditional tech support companies are going to disappear soon. Certainly, having Kaseya has changed my business completely. I almost wish my laptop would be stolen just to try to find it." Kaseya may be new as an anti-theft device, but it made it a lot easier to recover the laptops. And the company is looking into providing other tools to help its VARs in similar circumstances.

When is a friend a "friend"?

2009-09-28T12:57:00.001-07:00

Tonight I am expecting my BFF to stay for a short visit. He and I have known each other since high school, and we get together about once a year to catch up. That visit, and a new book called "Connected," got me thinking about friendship and how we account for our connections in this era of hyper social networking.

You might want to read this post that I wrote a few months ago about when to defriend and defollow, I want to build on the thoughts that I mention there:
http://strom.wordpress.com/2009/05/20/when-to-defriend-and-defollow/

Ironically, just because we have lots of social network "friends" doesn't mean we really socialize with the vast majority of them, or even have met them f2f. (BFF is best friends forever, f2f is face to face for those of you that either don't have teens or have yet to grasp the lingo). In my case, I try to keep my contacts in LinkedIn with people that I have some business relationship with, and Facebook friends a bit looser. It doesn't always work out that way, and now I have given up trying to distinguish the two networks. I have found that over the summer a lot more of my blog comments have come through Facebook than through either email or posted on my Strominator.com blog directly. Why? I have no idea.

Anyway, the book "Connected" is written by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler and talks about the inner structure of our social networks. I found it interesting. According to a recent survey, the average American has four close social contacts, with the variation between two and six for most of us. That surprised me, and you can read more of the sample chapter here:
http://bit.ly/2hpik8

The two authors talk about the effect of social networks on particular behavior, such as obesity and revenge and other things that you might not be thinking about when you are updating your status or posting a new set of photos from the weekend. It turns out that our networks influence a lot of what we do, no surprise.

They also talk about the structure of social networks: a fire bucket brigade where each person is just connected to two people, a telephone tree-structure for the PTA, and a military collection of squads and commands are three very different structures of how people are collected together into a group. And where you are placed in your network – either at the center with a lot of dense connections outward, or at the periphery with just a few friends – can also make a big difference in how happy or healthy you might be too, according to the authors.

As you can imagine, there are network visualization tools that can help you understand the structure of your social networks. One for Facebook that I have tried is called Touchgraph and it allows you to select different subsets of your friends and see how they are related. With over a 1,000 friends, it becomes hard to see the relationships, but one of the things that I noticed – at least about my Facebook friends – is that there are a lot of people that I know that also know a lot of people.
http://www.touchgraph.com/TGFacebookBrowser.html

If you find these concepts intriguing, pick up a copy of the book and let me know your thoughts.

The different Twitter account types

2009-09-14T07:48:00.001-07:00

I have been studying a presentation that Brent Payne made earlier this year and can be found here, entitled "How to Connect Great Journalism with the Greatest Possible Audience."
http://www.brentdpayne.com/presentations/spj/spj.pdf

Payne is in charge of the search engine optimization efforts for the Chicago Tribune Web site, and knows a lot about what he speaks. The presentation is chock full of a lot of great stuff, and I would urge you to download it and study it as I did. One particular section bears further discussion, and that is how to deploy a corporate Twitter strategy.

Payne talks about several different Twitter account types that are part and parcel to any business use of the popular microblogging service. And until I saw them delineated, I didn't realize how important it is to keep them straight. The four basic types are:

News feeds -- Here is where you automate posts from your blog sites and other RSS properties to this account. Don't follow anyone or send any direct messages from it. An example of such an account is @ccnbrk, the breaking news feed from CNN.

Celebs – You should force them on Twitter and give them the freedom to be human and Tweet about their personal lives and follow/respond to their followers. If you want some extra assurance, work with Twitter to have these made into verified accounts so people will realize that they are legit. @Andersoncooper and @oprah are two of these, I am sure you can think of dozens more. If your company doesn't have a celebrity spokesmodel, then don't worry about this.

Brand Personae – These are characters or avatars or Twavatars (I just made that up), something that your customers can identify with and lead brand awareness and perception on Twitter. This is the social media face to the public of your brand. They can engage your audience and represent you in the Twittersphere. Think of what Spencer the Katt did for PC Week back in the heyday of the PC era. And as we did with Spencer, we protected who it "really" was that was writing that important back-page rumor column as a trade secret (no, I never penned the column while I was there).

Ordinary folk – For the rest of us that don't fit into any of the above categories, it is still important to be on Twitter. Make sure you set some ground rules about how people will participate and what they will and won't Tweet that is part of your corporate acceptable use policies. Make sure you give employees some basic training in libel laws and also mention that they should be able to Tweet about competitors and speak honestly. Understand that mistakes will occur and that sometimes human resources might have to help out here. Don't get too heavy-handed though.

Finally, make sure you promote your Twitterers. List their IDs on their business cards, in their email sigs, and on your corporate Web site right next to their email addresses in your contact page. What you don't list email addresses on your Web site? Hmm, that is the subject for another day.

When you think about it, the different Twitter accounts is similar to the different ways that companies use blogs too: the difference is that with 140 characters, a Tweet can be a lot more flexible than a longer blog entry in terms of developing a personna.

Coworking, the next step up from Starbucks

2009-09-08T10:49:00.001-07:00

This being the day after Labor Day I wanted to pass along an interesting concept called coworking. Most of you are familiar with the idea of a shared tenant services for small businesses that can't afford their own office space but want to take advantage of a common collection of services such as fax machines, conference rooms, reception areas, and the like. But what if the $400 or so a month fee for these services is still out of the park for your nascent business owner? And what if working out of a coffee shop or other free Wifi place isn't really professional enough? In between these use cases is where coworking comes in handy.

Coworking goes under various names, including the "Jelly" (workatjelly.com) movement started by Amit Gupta. The idea is that people who want more than just a virtual water cooler of email, Tweeting and posting online can actually get out of the house and spend some time nearby other humans doing their work too. The goal is to create a community of like-minded people but from different walks of life, skill sets, and interests – just like your local Faceless Big Company Cubicle Warren. Bring your own laptop and cell phone, tie into a Wifi connection, and partake of the included coffee. The "rent" is reasonable – about $50 a month or even less, depending on how often you need to show up. Some facilities have more, such as multiple-line phones and conference rooms, and some have less. All are a step up from Starbucks, though.

There are lots of resources on coworking here (http://blog.coworking.info) and the Jelly main site also lists the locations in major cities, including one in St. Louis. So in the interests of research, I paid them a visit last week and was impressed by the concept. The coworking facility is in a residential neighborhood at the very southern end of the city, a few blocks from the Mississippi River. It is actually in a renovated home owned by Lisa Rokusek, complete with full kitchen and bathroom and guest bedroom. Lisa is a recruiter who lives nearby and first renovated the house as a guesthouse before she got into coworking. Now she is hooked on the concept and is developing a few other properties as well. She has about ten regular coworkers who come anywhere from several times a week to just a few times a month.

You would think that someone who recruits people for new jobs would want something more private, but Lisa was adamant that the idea works for her. She doesn't need a full-time, 9-to-5 office because she is often out visiting clients at their offices. And when she really needs some privacy, she steps outside with her cell phone to make the call. "And it gives my coworkers a sense of openness, because they are seeing how the sausages are being made," she told me.

Still, my work style wouldn’t tolerate such close quarters – at the St. Louis coworking site that I visited last week, it could easily house ten people in two small rooms. I like it nice and quiet and no one else around, because that is what I need to write and to interview people on the phone. But perhaps you are different, and crave the company and companionship. You might want to investigate coworking, and see if there is someone in your area that has such a setup, or even start your own house.

Free vs. Freemium in online markets

2009-08-31T10:11:00.001-07:00

I was talking to a colleague of mine who is an Amazon Vine reviewer (http://www.amazon.com/gp/vine/help) -- a select group of customers who are invited to post their opinions about new books and other items on Amazon's Web site. They get free copies, and their reviews aren't edited or modified in any fashion by the company after they are written. I was jealous, but started thinking more about the meaning of free.

Coincidentally, I have been reading (on my iKindle, of course) Chris Anderson's latest book "Free, the future of a radical price." The book is based on a Wired magazine article of the same subject (he runs the editorial for the magazine). He describes the various efforts of vendors to make money at giving away free stuff, by building a market or demonstrating value or building word of mouth. In the digital age, it is easy to have a place to download an app or read through a Web site and then offer paid upgrades for people who want more. Fred Wilson coined the term "freemium" to refer to this practice, and it is now so widespread that most online shoppers have come to expect that they can get something for nothing on just about every Web site that they land on these days. Or least a limited 30 day trial or download or subscription.

Indeed, in the new ventures that I have been mentoring I start almost immediately thinking about what they can give away for free. It is still the best way to start out in this chaotic eWorld. If you are starting a new business, you might want to take the time to at least skim Anderson's book. You also might want to read this New York Times article that analyzes the cash flow from Evernote, an online services company:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/business/30ping.html

Evernote converts less than one percent of the 4500 customers who sign up everyday to try their service into paying customers at $5 a month. But the more interesting number is that within a year of using the free service, the conversion rate jumps to four percent, because customers get more deeply involved and are willing to pay to enable more storage or more features. This brings the share of revenue per customer up from three cents to 35 cents. That is a powerful argument towards free. What is also interesting is that their variable costs have been plummeting, as you would expect: from 50 cents a month per active user down to nine cents today.

This is very typical of an online business, and indeed another example is how Google continually adds storage to its Gmail service, or why Yahoo can offer unlimited email storage – because these costs are dropping fast.

Then I realized that I have been doing this exact same strategy for the last 15 or so years ever since I started this Web Informant mail newsletter/blog/social network thingie. Whatever it has become, I do spend a lot of time each week thinking about what I am going to write to you all, and then posting it in its various forms around the Internets. And I don't ask you for money (well, I do ask for charitable contributions once a year, but that is another matter) and do it willingly and with the expectation that at some point in the future, you will "upgrade" to the paid Strom service of having me write something or speak somewhere or consult on something. Not all of you have hired me, of course, and some of you will never do so (don't worry, I don't take it personally). But enough of you do that this method has served me well in my business, bringing many loyal readers and clients over the years. The free Web Informants, and the various other cyber collections of stuff that I curate (there are tons of products on various lists here at http://strom.com/places) and hand-pick have built up a level of value, trust, and quality that I like to think you all appreciate.

Painless offsite online backups using 3X Backup

2009-08-25T10:51:00.001-07:00

The 3X Systems Backup appliance is a great way to automatically backup a collection of PCs and servers across the Internet at reasonable cost.

We tested version 2.1.6 in August 2009 on a small network of Windows clients and servers.

Windows agents available for 2000 and later versions, including both servers and 64-bit OS's

Pros:
• Easy to setup and operate
• Simple and effective offsite backups
• Can scale up storage as disk requirements grow

Cons:
• Only Windows agents supported
• Require recent browser versions such as IE v7 and Firefox v2
• Restoring full domain controller or specific email messages could be easier

Price: base system starts at $2,495.00

3X Systems 
1275 Kinnear Road, Columbus Ohio 43212
614.372.6868
http://3x.com

The battle of eReaders will be all about software

2009-08-25T06:53:00.001-07:00

There is a lot of activity on the eBook front: Sony earlier announced that they would be moving towards supporting the open ePub eBook format on their eReaders, and they are expected to announce a new eReader that incorporates cellular data connectivity. Barnes and Noble announced this week that they are partnering with Irex Technologies and will come out with a new device later this year.

But with all the hoopla and promise, one thing missing from a lot of coverage is the software side of things. That is where the eBook eBattles will be fought and won.

eBooks are beginning to take hold for a lot of different reasons: finally there are enough titles available (although in a confusing array of formats and readers). Prices on the devices have come down and quality has gone up. Prices on the eBook titles themselves are at parity with the mass market paperbacks. The size and quality of the screens is approaching that of printed paper. Battery life is reasonable.

All of this may be well and good, but the real reason that eBooks are doing well is that the software is finally catching up with the hardware. Why so? Because you need a great combination of eReader software along with Web storefronts that offer the books for sale and allow people to shop and discover books that they want to download to their readers. Some of the people that design the Web stores that offer up the eBooks are getting some clue here. The best example is Amazon's Kindle storefront. Why? Because first and foremost, they know how to sell books online. Inside of about 35 seconds, I can find and purchase an eBook, and in another 35 seconds, have it in my hot little hands and start reading. It is hard to beat that kind of delivery time.

Sony's Web store, ebookstore.sony.com, comes in second, such as trying to find bargains. On both you can sort eBooks by price, but because Amazon offers so many free eBooks, it is hard to find current titles. Sony does a better job. Sadly, in order to buy an eBook from Sony, you need their desktop client software. B&N.com is just plain miserable.

My choice of eReader is to use the Kindle app that runs on the iPhone/iPod touch. I don't have to carry another device around, and while the Kindle reader does drain my iPhone battery, I can deal with it. I also don't read much beyond text: if I had a need for more graphics-rich documents, I would consider another reading device.

I have read about a dozen books from start to finish on my iPhone and found the experience to be more than satisfactory. Most of these are the sort of books that I would buy in airports and dispose of or donate almost immediately after reading. The iPhone Kindle app has a few things going for it: since I carry my phone everywhere, I am not without reading material to fill in those small time gaps during the day while I am waiting in an office for an appointment or so forth. At night, I can continue reading in bed without annoying my wife, since the screen is backlit. The page turning process is something you get used to, and the ease at which you can find a book and start reading within about a minute is great for those of us that require near-instant gratification. You can be well into the new best seller of your choice before anyone else had even time to get to the bookstore, let alone wait for the overnight Amazon shipment.

If you are in the market for an eReader and have an iPhone, it is a simple matter to download the free app, start browsing Amazon's Kindle store, and stuff it full of eBooks. If you don't have an iPhone, it almost makes economic sense to buy an iPod Touch and dedicate it to reading books: the cost is nearly the same as the Kindle hardware device. The downside is that you will need to be in WiFi range to download your books. On the iPhone, like the Kindle hardware, you can download over the cellular network.

If you have a Blackberry, Palm and some other PDA, then you have two choices: either the Barnes and Noble eReader or the Mobipocket eReader. Both are more cumbersome to use than the Kindle app, and require you to download books to your desktop first. I couldn't really get the B&N app going, it seemed like it had too many moving parts.

Sony's eReader currently lacks the communications but supports a lot of different book formats, including their own which they are phasing out by the end of the year in favor of ePub. And they have a growing culture of modders who have exposed the underlying Linux OS to do various things:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/08/11/how_to_hack_sony_reader/

ePub-formatted books can be read on the iPhone with Stanza, but the process is also cumbersome and clunky, certainly nowhere near the experience of the Kindle. Google and others have digitized many public domain books in this format, but few of the current best sellers are in it. Amazon, by virtue of their market position, is in a better place here. They also understand how to develop Web software, something Sony -- and B&N for that matter -- still haven't caught on to. The better the Web stores are, the more eBooks will be sold.

For eBooks to be truly eUniversal, Kindle needs to be able to read ePub formats, and be available on Blackberries and Palms and other larger-screen phones and PDAs. And all the various players – including Sony – need to eliminate the digital rights management that comes with your eBook, as has been reported with last month's debacle over "1984."

While nothing will ever replace the physical bookstore browsing experience, at least for me, I am glad to see this market continue to mature.

Listening to the voice of the customer

2009-08-17T05:52:00.001-07:00

Two companies are showing that in today's touchy economy, making the sale is all about the way you respond to a customer via the telephone. And not only are they are listening very carefully but also they are using sophisticated software systems to help implement their solutions. One of them, called Aisle411.com, is brand new, launching this week. The other one is very well established, called Varolii, and we'll get to them in a moment.

Aisle411 is used to help consumers find a specific item in a store. Say it is a hardware store that you don't often frequent, so you don't have the store layout encoded in your brain. You spend the first few minutes wandering the aisles, or asking an employee where your item is located. Wouldn't it be nice if a service could tell you where you can find it – by aisle number and shelf position?

I have a confession to make: I am not a shopper. I don't like to buy stuff, of any kind. But what Aisle411 is doing is noteworthy just for people like me, who measure the amount of time inside a store in microseconds. According to their research, more than 13% of shoppers leave a store without finding what they came for in the first place.

Aisle411 uses speech recognition software and some elegant programming to direct shoppers to the right place in the particular store they are trying to navigate. You just call them up and say what you are looking for.

Behind this phone call there is a huge database of products, store layouts, and other information. And while Aisle411 is just getting started with a few Ace Hardware stores in the St. Louis suburbs, they have big plans to work with a number of national retailers, who see this as a way to differentiate themselves and offer up better customer service, as well as to increase sales by helping their customers actually buy more stuff when they are roaming the aisles. And Aisle411 is turning its systems into a way to provide better leads management, inventory management, and real-time tracking for store owners. They can deliver coupons for related products to the consumers’ cell phone via a text message, too. And the service is free for consumers.

Now let's contrast what an older company is doing to help provide better customer service with automated call center software. What do you do when you get a incoming robotic phone call from one of these services? I know what I do, I hang up. I don't want to talk to a machine. But to try to keep more people on the line, as well as actually provide better customer service, you have to combine the best bits of psychology with technology, as the folks from Varolii – one of the leading vendors in this software -- have found out.

The company's automated attendant completes over a billion calls a year for many large banks, airlines, and others that need to make customer service calls. They have begun learning from all these calls and now apply a little bit of psychology and population dynamics in helping their customers prepare the right series of voice prompts for their automated systems. Their goal is to help keep more people on the line and provide better customer service.

Varolii has learned that different age groups respond differently to how they are contacted by their systems. With Gen Yers, you want to send a text message and then follow up with a voice call, which is exactly the reverse of how to deal with a GenXer: call first and then follow up with a confirming text message, while for baby boomers call first and then follow up with email. And the strategy for seniors is to use voice prompts that speak slower and can be repeated. They have also found that the time of day and the sex of the recorded voice matters in terms of getting the best response too. How many of us have heard "press one for English, two in Spanish?" – well, that isn’t the best prompt design, because someone could hit the wrong key on the phone dialer pad by mistake and then start receiving prompts in the wrong language. A better method would be to move the response key further away, such as pressing 9 for Spanish.

They found that calls that avoided the use of Social Security numbers but could authenticate the account holder with some other specific information, such as an airline frequent flier ID or bank account number, increase the probability of action by 30%. And using the word "now" in a prompt, such as "press one now to activate your card," add a sense of urgency and that will translate into better results.

Finally, unlike the movie Jerry Maguire, you don't have me at hello. In fact, you want to avoid starting any calls with "hello" – when you remove hello from the initial greetings, you get a 50% increase in live answers. The company suggests starting off with identifying the company name and purpose of the call, and start talking immediately upon when the call is answered.

Both Varolii and Aisle411 are showing that it pays to listen and track what customers are doing over the phone. Both also marry some sophisticated voice response software with lo-tech phone calls to help improve customer service. It just shows you that when it comes to doing innovative things over the telephone, we still have a lot to learn.

Netflix should buy the US Postal Service

2009-08-10T04:13:00.001-07:00

Congress last week began hearings about whether to discontinue Saturday mail delivery, close local branches and other measures to try to balance the postal service's budget. On the national news last night was a story about how a small town in Maine fought to retain its lone street mailbox. I say desperate times call for much bigger measures, and my suggestion is to sell the entire USPS outfit to Netflix, lock, stock, and … Well, you don't want to say certain words around postal employees – at least until they become Netflix staffers. More on that in a moment.

It isn't so far-fetched when you start to think about the possibilities. After all, Netflix is keeping the USPS afloat with more mailings of DVDs than McDonalds sells burgers. They have more than 50 distribution centers around the country, all of them in locations that are more secret than Dick Cheney's bunker. They certainly understand how to run a distribution network, they have the machinery and the personnel. Plus, something that would warm the cockles of my Republican wife's heart, I can't believe that I am saying this but having a truly private mail carrier might actually bring some economic sense to our mail system.

How would this look? Here are my suggestions: First all, all mail would be one size and have to be sent in those familiar red mailers. That would mean that anything larger would have to use some other carrier, such as Fedex or UPS. International mail? Same thing. Magazines? Well, this is hard for an old magazine editor like myself, but they will have to change to the Netflix form factor if they still want to be mailed. Junk mail? Same deal. Standardization is key. No more post cards. If it doesn't fit in a mailer, you can't mail it.

Next, we eliminate potage stamps. Since we all will be using the standard mailers, we have standard postage. You buy the mailer and pay for the postage right then and there. Forget about metering based on weight: whatever you can cram into one of those envelopes is what you get to send. This obviates the need to run local post offices: if you need to mail something bigger, you can go on down to Kinkos or the local UPS store. They give better customer service there anyway. No more postage meters, but Pitney Bowes has been on the decline for years anyway.

And while we are at, we should eliminate business delivery of postal mail. Don't need it. You want to send something, use one of the other private carriers and get it there overnight. I recall a funny story a few years ago, when I was doing some work for a publishing firm and mailed in my signed contract. My editor kept saying that he never received the contract, because he never thought to ask where his actual postal mailbox was – there was little point because he never got anything via USPS that he cared about. The only thing that I get these days are checks, and we might as well move towards electronic payments anyway. Some of my clients now do direct deposit to my bank account, and I wish more did.

Netflix is a good choice to run the USPS for one other reason: it has an amazing employee base. You couldn't pick something that was more the polar opposite of the feather-bedded, anti-customer oriented, highly motivated, hyper regulated postal system if you tried. How so? There is no vacation or hourly time card tracking policy at Netflix. There is also no specified uniforms or other dress code policy there but no one has come to work naked lately. Their entire T&E policy is "Act in Netflix's Best Interests" and not much more than that. I think that says a lot about how much a company can trust its employees, unlike many firms that make you take odd flights to save a few dollars that consume hours of your time, or jigger your expense report so you can get almost reimbursed for your actual out-of-pocket expenses. The lesson is that you don't need detailed policies for everything. (You can see the details of this for yourself if you are interested here:
http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664

I know having Netflix run the postal system is probably a fantasy. But it is fun to dream, and have hopes, right?

Eyes on the prize

2009-08-03T07:16:00.001-07:00

The news last month that two groups of computational researchers have qualified for the $1 million Netflix Prize got me thinking about how other prizes have had a very influential role in technology development. For those of you that missed this nugget, several dozen different computer scientists and mathematicians have tried over the past year to improve upon the algorithms that Netflix uses to recommend new videos to its subscribers. The teams that could get better than a 10% improvement (defined very precisely by Netflix) would qualify to win the prize purse.
http://www.netflixprize.com/

This is only the latest in a series of prize-motivated developments. For the past three years, a group of southern California investors have been working on a venture called Prize Capital. The effort grew out of the work of the Ansari X PRIZE Foundation that awarded a $10 million prize in 2004 for the first private spaceflight.

Prize Capital combines old-fashioned greed with socially conscious investing on a grand scale. Their concept is thrilling, with a simple idea at its core. An investment firm creates a fund that will be used to invest in the total field of competitors in a single niche market. The complexity comes about in its execution, which may be why no one has ever tried to do it on the scale that they envision before now. The first prize effort is underway to develop better biofuels:
http://prizecapital.net/Prize_Capital/Algae_Fuel_Prize.html

Unlike traditional venture funds that invest in multiple companies or sector funds that serve particular markets, the prize capital model starts with this "matrix fund". The genius behind the idea is that this fund drives an entire ecosystem for directing high-return innovations. The largest and most noticeable element is a very public science contest that all of the funded companies take part in, going after a ten million dollar prize purse and racing to be the first to establish a particular invention, task, or medical cure.

The Prize Capital notion is revolutionary and differs from existing venture or sector funds on several different dimensions. First, the combination of the matrix funding model with the prize competition is a brilliant deal-discovery mechanism. The allure of the challenge and the chance to be in the spotlight, not to mention the actual cash prize itself, can help to locate and identify potential technology solutions in a particular market niche. Because the prize is a public one, the bright light of worldwide publicity associated with the contest can help bring about all sorts of benefits to the competing companies, including attracting additional investors and management talent.

Second, "the matrix model permits investors to bet on every horse in the race," says Lee Stein, one of the founders of Prize Capital and an early leader in the Internet payments industry in the mid-1990s. "A lot of times VCs don't make investments because they have a short list of companies in a particular niche but can only invest in one. The matrix model enables them to play the full field and spread their risk."

Traditional venture capital funding is not structured to take positions in direct competitors, while the matrix concept relishes this situation. Prize Capital leverages its relationship with the prize management industry to take positions with everyone in a given field. As long as the competition is attractive enough to cause everyone in a given field to enter a particular competition, the result is a new opportunity for investors to become involved with cutting edge technology. Spreading the investments across the matrix can create additional leverage and reduce the risk of the investors.

A third difference is that Prize Capital will own a royalty stream on the intellectual property generated by the teams in the competition. Even if a given company fails to win the prize, the fund has the ability to succeed.

Fourth, the prize mechanics are important part of the deal, and here is where the groundbreaking work on the Ansari X PRIZE has paid off. These mechanics have to be carefully scripted and innovation targets clearly defined. The competition also requires that the ultimate science must be repeatable and independently verifiable. This was done on the Ansari X PRIZE and is an essential element of any planned future competitions.

The prize is only awarded when a positive report comes back saying everything works. This process is more stringent than that is typically required by peer-reviewed academic journals, the current prestige venue for scientific results. Prize Capital thus could be in an interesting position of being able to set a very high bar here for how basic research is conducted in the future.

While the traditional VC trades capital for equity positions in their portfolio companies, Prize Capital can use other kinds of benefits, including the additional influence from the publicity and activities of the competitors as they work hard to meet the particular goals to win the prize, to secure stakes in the innovation on favorable terms.

Most science competitions have been funded through philanthropic means. Prize Capitalism leverages the large jumps in technology innovation and uses it to fuel an entire ecosystem of investments to take advantage of these innovations.

Look at what happened with the original X PRIZE. That initial $10 million prize purse was leveraged into over $100 million into work being done to develop two spaceports in the New Mexico and Arabian deserts. This isn't just a lot of dot-com sock puppets or social networking startups depending on ad click-throughs. This is hard-core real estate development, new job creation and engineers building real assets on the ground.

The Prize Capital model has something for everybody. It could bring a ray of hope for many people that are looking at ways to dramatically increase basic research and kick start medical cures. It can co-opt the heavy publicity surrounding the whole prize itself and the take advantage of the spirit of invention and innovation that so often goes hand-in-hand with the best American capitalists. It has universal appeal across nations and cultures too, and can play as well with the new generation of Asian proto-capitalists and with the old crew along Sand Hill Road too. And it has some Hollywood glitz on the order of "American Idol" and yet still appeals to button-down Wall Street bottom-line sensibilities. It is an intriguing mix of investors, capitalists, non-profit charities and philanthropists working hand-in-hand, all in the name of advancing science and fostering innovation. I wish them well and hope to see the fruits of their labors soon. In the meantime, keep your eyes on other prizes.

Houston, give us a reading on the 1202 program alarm

2009-07-21T08:54:00.001-07:00

Like many of you that grew up in the 1960s, I have been spending a lot of time online looking at the various commemorative links to the Apollo 11 moon landing that happened 40 years ago this week. I found it fascinating, not just because the event was such a key moment in my teenaged nerd life, but also because it shows how we managed to triumph over technology that wouldn't even be found inside your average watch today, let alone a cell phone or computer. Rather than pepper this email with a lot of links and run the risk of the sp*m gods, please go to strominator.com and you can click on what you want to follow up with more conveniently.

The Apollo spacecraft had three different display units onboard, running two computers: one in the main command module and one in the lunar module. Both weighed 70 pounds, ran at 1 MHz and had about 152 kb of memory.

To get an idea of how primitive the guidance computer was, you didn't have a typewriter interface or a display screen, but a box with mostly numeric input that you had to key in "nouns" and "verbs". You can go here and try the simulator:

The first moon landing was beset with problems. Armstrong had 17 seconds of fuel remaining, after having to take manual control over the lunar module and fly past some obstacles. The site was four miles off course because the module wasn't completely depressurized when it separated from the command module – a small amount of gas pushed it off course. And during the descent, several people documented how many times the guidance computer would get overwhelmed with data inputs and had to be rebooted, because Aldrin had not set one of the radar switches properly and it was filling up the computer with too much data. A young engineer, Stephen Bales, made the critical decision to ignore these warnings. There is a great video segment about it from CBS News that they ran this week.

There are probably hundreds of Web sites with various tributes to the space program, I will just mention two places that I enjoyed reading. First is a special report compiled by EE Times, which has eyewitness accounts from a few of the engineers who worked at NASA, along with a teardown of the space suits used and other technical info about the program.

The other is a list of numerous technological achievements from the space program that have found their way into our lives. And while Tang isn't on the list (and it is dubious whether it should be), there are lots of other things showing just how much innovation NASA had to do to put two men on the moon and bring them back home safely.

When did the browser become the next OS?

2009-07-14T11:30:00.001-07:00

"We view the Internet as the fourth desktop operating system we have to support after Windows, MacOS, and DOS." That quote was from an executive at McAfee, and DOS gives it away that it was spoken back in 1996.

With the announcement that Google will develop a quick-start operating system by next year for instant-on netbooks, I thought it might be interesting to take a trip down memory lane and remind us how we have gotten to the point where the browser has become the next OS, and probably now moving into first place rather than fourth.

Of course, the smarmy retort to Google's announcement is that we already have a quick-start, ultra-reliable Web OS, it is called OS X and my MacBook takes about five seconds from when I open the lid to when I can be surfing the Web. Unlike many Windows PCs, I don't have to have a degree in advanced power management techniques with a minor in spam and virus prevention to get this to work.

But let's go into the WayBack Machine to the early 1990s and see the context of that McAfee quote.

The first collection of Web browsers literally weren't much to look at, because they only displayed characters and basically just a page of hyperlinked text. This was the then-popular Lynx that was initially designed back in 1992 for Unix and VMS terminal users (that was back when we called them that). Think about this for a moment: this was pre-iporn, pre-IPO Netscape, pre-real Windows -- when the number of Web servers was less than a few hundred. Not very exciting by today's standards.

Then Microsoft got into the game, and things started changing. With the introduction of Windows 95 we had the beginnings of a graphical Internet Explorer, which ironically was licensed from the same code that Netscape would use to create their browser (and eventually Firefox). Windows 95 came with both IE and Windows Explorer, and the two were similarly named for a reason: browsing pages of the Web was the beginnings of something similar to browsing files on your desktop. Things didn't really get integrated until IE v4, which came out about the same time as Windows 98, and they were so integrated that they begat a lawsuit by the Justice Department. At the end of 2002, Microsoft was legally declared a monopolist and had to offer ways to extract IE from Windows going forward for users who wanted to install a different browser.

During the middle 1990s, we began to see better support for TCP/IP protocols inside the Windows OS, although it really wasn't until the second edition of Windows 98 that we saw Microsoft improve upon the browser enough that they could include it as part of their Office 2000 product. Before then, we had separate drivers and add-on utilities that required all sorts of care and feeding to get online, in addition to using AOL and Compuserve dial-up programs.

As an example of how carefully integrated IE was with Windows, when Microsoft released IE v7 along with Vista, initially you needed to verify your license of Windows was legit before you could install the latest version of IE on earlier operating systems. That restriction was later removed.

And lately Microsoft has announced its next version of Office 2010 will have even further Web integration and the ability to create online documents similar to the way Google Docs works. Google Docs is an interesting development of itself, because now documents are stored outside of the desktop and managed through a Web browser. As long as I have an Internet connection, I don't need any software on my local machine to edit a document or calculate a spreadsheet.

So what is the real purpose of an operating system? Originally, it was to manage the various pieces of your PC so that your applications could talk to your printer or your hard drive or display characters on your screen without having to write low-level programs to do these tasks. Three things have happened since the early PC era:

First, as the Web and cloud computing became more powerful, we stopped caring where our information is located. In some sense, having documents in the cloud makes it easier to share them across the planet, and not have to worry about VPNs, local area network file shares, and other things that will get in the way. And we even have cellphones like the Palm Pre that have a Web OS built in, so that applications don't have to be downloaded to the phone but can run in the cloud. At least, when developers will finally get their kits to build these Pre apps later this summer.

Second, as the desktop OS matures, we don't have to worry about the underlying hardware as much because that hardware has gotten more generic and the OS has taken on a bigger role (to match their bigger footprints too). Although printer drivers are still scarce for Vista, and 64-bit apps aren't as plentiful, for the most part we don't need a "thick" desktop OS. Yes, there are enterprise apps that need the OS, and some that need a specific version of Windows too, but most of our computing can be done without really touching much of the OS.

Finally, the browser is the de facto Windows user interface. Perhaps I should say the browser plus Ajax or the browser plus Flash. But most applications that were formerly client/server now just use browser clients, or run inside a browser with minimal desktop downloads. This has been long in coming, but now Rich Internet Applications can be considered on par with local Windows and Mac ones.

So here we are, at the dawn of the new Google OS. We have come full circle: from the green-screen character mode terminals of the mainframe and Unix era to the browser-based Webtops of the modern era. This doesn't mean that Windows 7 or 8 or whatever will become obsolete. Just less important. And given the multiple billions of dollars that Microsoft has made over the years from Windows (and let's not forget dear old DOS), you can imagine that there are some nervous folks up in Redmond these days.

How proudly we fail: how 25 innovative tech companies die

2009-07-07T03:20:00.001-07:00

I recently wrote a story for Datamation.com that looked at 25 companies that are no longer with us but were ahead of their times with innovative products. Before you write in and say that I missed your favorite, I wanted to take a few moments here and talk about some of the interesting trends that I saw from this list. The reasons for failure could be broken down into five general categories:

Corporate hubris and hijinks. Tech companies don't have the best record when it comes to staying on task, and this is especially true when they merge or start to bleed their best people. Look at Ashton-Tate's dBase. When they were at their height of their powers in the 1980s, thousands of people around the world studied their programming language and built databases on PCs (I was one of them). Then they lost their way and were sold to Borland in 1991, and that was the beginning of the end for both the company and its flagship product. Borland had a competing database product and couldn't sustain dBase. Or Banyan's VINES networking operating system, which also had a loyal customer base and had innovative directory services applications long before they were implemented by Novell and Microsoft. How about Digital Communications Associates, maker of the 3270 Irma boards? They quickly disappeared after 1994 when Attachmate acquired them.

The market evolved past them. Columbia Data Products made the first clone PCs back in 1982, not long after IBM came out with their model. They lasted five years, and the market moved on to more efficient suppliers like Dell and HP. Ironically, we got some other innovation from Columbia that they were less known for, the SCSI storage interface that was used for many years to connect hard drives to PCs. AST Research was another one who had a dominant share of the peripheral expansion market in the 1980s, only to see many of these peripherals integrated into PC motherboards.

Bright people working in the wrong company. Just because you have a collective brain trust doesn't mean that you are going to live long and prosper. Sometimes the chemistry is wrong, or the circumstances not quite right. Take First Virtual Holdings, one of the pioneers of Internet payment systems. Their founders went on to develop key products for Paypal. General Magic founding fathers went on to develop key parts of several phones including iPhone for Apple, Android for Google, and to help start eBay.

The Osborne effect. One company even is notable for its failed strategy of pre-announcing products that killed any demand. Osborne Computers was the early leader of portable PCs that weren't all that portable – at close to 30 pounds and a few inches too big to fit under an airline seat, they were a bear to fly with. Nevertheless, when Osborne announced a new version in 1983, everyone stopped buying the current models.

Engage lawyers. Sue everyone. Repeat as needed. Research in Motion uses this tactic to the present day, even though it has lost its share of suits in the creation of the Blackberry smart phone and millions of dollars. SCO/Caldera Systems has done something similar for early Unix inventors. Sometimes winning a lawsuit can be the death of a company too: Witness Stac Electronics that won $120 million from Microsoft on their disk compression technology, something that is now part and parcel to just about every operating system.

Take a look at my trip down memory lane here: http://tr.im/rcro

The self service Internet

2009-06-30T09:53:00.001-07:00

There is no doubt that we have become accustomed to less customer service and more self-service these days. Maybe it is because the general bar for customer service keeps getting lower and the actual service itself surlier. Maybe it is a cost-cutting measure as more retail establishments cut back on their staffs. Maybe it is a general increase in rudeness, or because of more violence or reality shows on TV. I don't know. Whatever the reason, self-service is here to stay, and we might as well get used to it.

The inspiration for this missive came from a blog entry on the New York Times Web site, entitled the Self-Service City. Timothy Egan talks about the various cutbacks in municipal services that have him growing his own food, hauling his own trash, and other activities:
http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/the-self-service-city/?ref=opinion

As he recounts, self-service doesn't always work out as well as we'd like, though. Remember how the Internets was supposed to empower everyone?

We buy our movie tickets on Ticketmaster/Fandango, so we don't have to wait in lines at the box office. We can examine online seat maps to find the perfect seat to watch our shows. Yet we pay "convenience fees" and surcharges that sometimes add $15 or more to the purchase. Convenient for whom, exactly?

We book our own flights online, because travel agents weren't as good as search engines in finding the best fares or flights. Now I have a Twitter account that notifies when fares drop from major St. Louis-based routes. (Go to farecomparelabs.com and enter your city for more info.) But I really don't need a search engine to find these fares, mainly because there are so few non-stop flights out of STL served by our one and a half major carriers (and American is dropping more nonstops, making Southwest our largest airline here now). Southwest has some amazing customer service initiatives, including calling you back when you dial their 800 number, rather than being on hold.

We bank online so we never have to enter our branch and deal with snarly bank employees or get stuck behind a first-time customer unfamiliar with general banking principles. And companies like USAA and ING have made this into a calling card, offering branchless banking for years with various online tools – USAA even allows you to scan your checks to deposit them instantly to your account. That is the ultimate in self-service banking, without the heinous float times that the ordinary banks like to lay on top of you for their deposits. And yes, some banks are getting it totally online: after Twittering Bank of America a few months ago, I managed to save $140 in overdraft fees. Not bad for a buck a character transmitted, surely the best rate that I have ever been paid as a writer.

Many of you use Web sites like FreshDirect.com to order and deliver your groceries, which seems like the ultimate in self-service time savers. I know several of you that are very happy with this service, but you have to be more organized than I. Like Ticketmaster, there are delivery fees that are added on to your purchases.

There are companies like RightNow Technologies that build self-service web sites that have frequently asked questions and answers. And there are numerous developments on social networks, such as Answers for LinkedIn, Vark.com and Mahalo.com where people can ask and get answers to their questions no matter how arcane. There are some people that spend significant portions of their day answering questions for people they don't know and have never met: isn't the Internet a wonderful place?

So what does all this mean? As we do more Internet-based disintermediation, the companies that can provide face-to-face contact and initiate customer problem resolution will win over loyalty and retain their customers. The best companies will combine great service by humans with electronic initiatives such as USAA's scanned deposits and Southwest's call-backs. Those that have the right attitude and understand how important customer satisfaction is will need to do both online and human-powered things together. The others will go the way of Worldcom, GM, and AIG.

Do share your own customer service success stories if you don't mind on my strominator.com blog.

Four useful tools for social networkers

2009-06-24T16:23:00.001-07:00

What do the services Pixelpipe.com, Etherpad.com, Tr.im and namechk.com have in common? All four are tools that I can't live without these days and didn't even know existed a few months ago. That is how fast the Internets are changing. I suggest you give each of the four a quick try out and see if you agree that you can save yourself a lot of time with each of them.

Pixelpipe is a service much like Ping.fm. It allows you to post the same piece of content to multiple sites. Whether it is a status update (which is just what Ping does), a blog entry, a video, or a series of photos, it is a very useful service and handles more than 80 different sites. Look for a review to come soon in Computerworld next month. The downside is that you have to store your authentication credentials with the service for each site, which may make you nervous if you care. And if you mess up, your typos will be immediately sent out to the world for many of your correspondents to see, because there is no easy way to recall the messages without visiting each site individually. I like it mainly because I post my blog entries to multiple platforms, part for redundancy's sake, part because I don't trust Wordpress to be the sole repository of my work product.

Next is Etherpad, a service that allows multiple people to concurrently edit a document using just a Web browser. You create an unique URL and then send that to your collaborators via email. Once someone knows the URL, they can make changes to your document, and each author's changes can be tracked with different colored highlights. I used this today with a client – even though we were sitting around a conference table in the same room, we were able to agree on the edits of a document within a few minutes, it was incredibly productive.

Tr.im is a URL shortening service with a twist: you can post the shortened link directly to your Twitter account. And while that is convenient, wait there is something that I really like. It will track all the people who have clicked on the shortened link and show you which client (browser, Twitter third party app, or service) was used in the process, along with time-series data on the clicks. You can really see the immediacy of Twitter, but you can also use it to track referrals on other services too.

Namechk is a very simple service that will lookup a particular username on more than 120 different social networking, blog and video sharing sites. It will see if it is taken or available. This is a very useful tool that you can show your clients how tuned in you are to that scene.

Let me know what you think about each of these services, and if you have others that you have recently found that could be useful.

2009-06-19T07:33:00.001-07:00

If I want a link to be clickable, all I have to do is compose it in this window like this:
http://strominator.com and Ping.fm will do the rest

2009-06-19T07:28:00.001-07:00

This is an embedded link to http://strominator.com

David Strom pic

2009-06-19T07:18:00.001-07:00

David Strom

2009-06-16T08:29:00.001-07:00

Learning about proxies in the news, see post on http://strominator.com

The Power of the Proxy

2009-06-16T07:38:00.001-07:00

Proxy servers have been in the news as of late, both as a result of the Iran putative election and a new legal case where Microsoft is suing purveyors of advertising click fraud. I thought I would take you through what proxies are, how they can be used for both good and evil, and what all the fuss is about.

First, here is a little background. When you bring up your Web browser, you are asked how you want it to connect to the Internet. Most of us that have home PCs don't use any proxy, and go out to the raw Internet without any fuss or bother. But enterprises that want to cut down on their bandwidth usage, improve performance and security, and have control over what their users see use them all the time. Each browser first checks and sees if the Web page that is being requested is on the proxy's cache, or memory, and if so, it saves a few milliseconds or more by grabbing the page directly, without having to traverse the Internet at all. So proxies are often combined with caching servers to deliver the best combination of features and management. As far as the browsing user is concerned, all this happens without any notification, other than the pages seem to load quicker on their PCs. About the only configuration option is the IP address of the server, which is placed inside the browser options or network settings. And proxies are available for more than just Web protocols, although that is their most popular use case.

That is the good side of proxies. What about the evil side? Proxies are supposed to be for internal users of an enterprise, but if a hacker can find out the IP address of an internal proxy, they can gain access to lots of network resources. This was a common MO for the hacker Adrian Lamo, among others, and you still find corporations that haven't locked their proxies down with the appropriate security. It is also possible for proxies to operate on a user's PC without their knowledge, which is a common way botnets are created.

There are also proxies that are used to make your browsing history anonymous, which can be used for both good and evil; depending on what information you are trying to hide.

Now to the news. Microsoft filed suit in federal court yesterday against three people it claims were defrauding Internet advertisers by having automated programs mimic users clickstreams. They found the fraudulent activities by tracing the actions to two proxy servers. And once they blocked the particular IP addresses of the proxies, the fraudsters would simply alter them in a continual game of cat and mouse. The fraud involved is significant, and ClickForensics estimates that 14% of the total ad clickstream is faked.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/business/media/16adco.html

When the Iranian government wanted to block Internet access, several private individuals from around the globe took it upon themselves to set up the open source proxy Squid (squid-cache.org) and other tools on their own networks to get around these blocks. They then publicized (via Twitter) the IP address of their Squid PCs so that anyone could connect to the open Internet, rather than be blocked. Of course, as the government learns of these addresses, they add them to their block list, so another cat and mouse game ensues.

(small self-promotion here) The news is very timely, indeed. I am off next week to work with Blue Coat on producing another of my screencast product review videos on their proxy and caching server line for my WebInformant.tv site. Let me know if you'd like me to do one of these for your product, they are a unique way to promote and explain a product.

Faster response times and Google's Wave

2009-06-09T14:10:00.001-07:00

For those of you that feel good about yourselves because you are IM'ing and Tweeting, your online life is about to get a whole more complicated thanks to Google. More on that in a moment, first let me set the stage.

I remember back in the day when many of us first got on email and we tried to do everything in it. When we tried to completely replace real-time phone calls and in-person meetings, it was an abject failure: you still needed that give-and-take. And many corporations that put up email support or customer response inboxes quickly found out that they needed to do more than just assign the inbound messages to a staffer: they actually had to respond with a meaningful answer. I remember an article that I wrote back in 2000 where I sent out a test email inquiry to 13 financial services firms and timed how long it took before I got a response. Some sent out automated responses quickly and followed with a more meaningful reply within an hour, some did worse. Ironically, one site where it was hard to find an email address now has one of the currently best self-service Web sites, USAA.com.
http://strom.com/pubwork/fintech2.html

Then came the era of Instant Messaging, and suddenly we didn't have to worry about email response times because we could connect with someone in real time. Some firms got into IM in a big way, particularly to connect remote work teams. And parents found out that IM was another tool in their arsenal of trying to track down their teens' whereabouts in those dicey after-school hours.

Lately everyone is talking Twitter, and that makes IM seem slow. Twitter and I are still getting used to each other, and I am still not sure that it will be tremendously useful to me in the long run. But it is sure fun to experiment with, and thanks to Bank of America being on it, I managed to save myself a bundle in overdraft fees about a month ago. But that is a story for another time. What I have found is that I am sending and receiving fewer IMs these days.

Some of the more interesting experiments in the Twittersphere have to do with aggregating Tweets from a variety of different sources. Take a look at scienceinthetriangle.org, a news site that reports on tech events in the Raleigh-Durham area that is the labor of love of a bunch of volunteers but is probably the best place to go to get up-to-the-minute news and blog posts in the area.

And then there is a new protocol and product coming from Google by way of Sydney Australia called Wave. It was announced a few weeks ago, and while I am still analyzing it, I can tell you that the near-instant response times that we get from our IMs isn't going to be fast enough. What Wave does is similar to a product called Etherpad.com that allows for real-time collaborative composition of documents, but oh so much more. You can thread your conversations, add wiki-like tools to do joint editing, and add email notification and Twitter-like status streams all in a neat bundle. The 80-minute demo video is definitely worth watching, at least the first third, here:
http://wave.google.com/

But before you abandon all hope of every staying current with the latest Internet fad, let's just go back to first principles for a moment and think about what your expectations of customer response times should be these days, and whether your company is coming anywhere close to fulfilling these expectations. With some people (such as my condo board), I have no expectations that I will get a timely response – that is just the type of folks that they are or they just aren't that service-oriented. With others, such as my Tweets to Bank of America, a few hours to reply was better than anything that I have gotten from them. Previously, I had to wait on hold or in line down at my very busy local branch for at least 30 minutes. For other businesses, overnight is still a reasonable expectation.

What I am saying here is that before you scrap yet another response system, take a few days to conduct a census of your customer-facing staff and see exactly what they are delivering now. And maybe try to improve the human side of your response systems that have nothing to do with any underlying technology.

I have no doubt that Wave represents a new way of thinking about how to interact with each other and work together. And while it might be a while before we can actually touch the technology, in the meantime let's not lose sight of how we work with our customers and give them the best possible service.

Keeping track of your Web site passwords

2009-05-28T11:32:00.001-07:00

I have a dirty secret to share with you all today: until recently, I didn't have a very good strategy for keeping track of my various Web site passwords and logins. Near my desk is a worn set of stapled sheets of paper with various notations about which username, email address, and password I have used to authenticate to its services. Luckily, I work alone, but still it bothers me that if someone were to break into my office, those special pieces of paper would probably be the most important thing to find. I know some of you use PostIt notes for this purpose, and keep them where no one would look, such as under your keyboards.

There is a better way, and I will get to it in a moment, but first I want to take you through what some of the other solutions that I have tried and rejected. Since I do most of my work on my laptop, why not just automate the credentials inside my browser? That is good for some of the sites that I use most frequently, but it isn't very secure should someone get a hold of my laptop.

Another idea is OpenID.net, which is an open-source collection of Web sites that federates your identity, including Yahoo, MySpace, Facebook, and others. OpenID sounds really good, until you start to peek under the covers, and realize that if a phisher ever got ahold of just one authentication of yours at one site, they could pretty much gain access to the rest of your OpenID sites. This is more 'phederated ID' and a hacker's paradise. The problem is that once you authenticate properly on one Web site, you can use your OpenID URL to gain access to anything else.

I have mentioned in previous missives Ping.fm and Quub.com that attempt to consolidate all of your social networking logins in one place, and be able to update your status messages across the board. But it is troubling when I get emails from Quub mentioning that they have upgraded their system and "had to clear everyone's existing credentials that were encrypted with the old algorithm. Please re-enter your credentials under Settings …"

RoboForm is another solution, which basically automates the credentials and saves it in an encrypted spot on your hard drive. That is great, but what happens if you are using a different PC?

Another way is to use some form of two-factor authentication, so called because it uses something that you – and only you – have on your possession, such as a special and unique SecurID token. I have one for my PayPal account, it cost $5 and is well worth the added protection that it offers. Basically, no one else can use my account unless they use the token to sign in.
http://tinyurl.com/paypalkey

But the issue with these tokens is that you need one for each of your accounts. There are some vendors who are trying to get around this issue by using one's cell phone as a second factor authentication tool including Phonefactor.com and FireID.com. Both require some integration of their tools into your applications, which isn't very good if you want to apply them universally to all of your Web authentications. FireID's solution involves using a special server that sits on my network, while PhoneFactor requires software agents to download to your desktop or to integrate into your Web applications.

So what else can you do? The service that I am trying out now is from Tricipher and called MyOneLogin.com. It costs $30 a year per user, and everything is done via their hosted service so there is nothing to download, other than an optional Firefox or IE browser plug-in to handle some tasks. You set up a special Web portal for your company, and then add your credentials to the various sites. It comes with hundreds of pre-set applications and works with either special knowledge questions (what was the name of your third-grade teacher) or with your cell phone. The good thing about MyOneLogin is that you can set it up and forget your passwords, because no matter where you are you can login to the portal and then to your applications. You can mix and match Web and internal apps, such as your VPN login, too, without any programming or installing any servers. And it is also a great solution if a company wants to keep control of these credentials to these sites, so when you leave you can't take your logins with you.

Look for one of my WebInformant.tv screencast video demos in the near future that will show you more about the service. And you can try it out for 30 days for free if you are interested. Maybe now I can finally toss those special pieces of paper – but first I will have to make sure to shred them!

When to defriend and defollow

2009-05-20T03:44:00.000-07:00

When I was growing up as a nerdy teen on Long Island, needless to say I wasn't one of the Popular Kids. Back then we called it Junior High rather than the current appellation Middle School and now nerds are now the new cool kids. In my youth, we didn't have reality shows where beauties met their geeks, Bill Gates hadn't yet gone to, let alone dropped out of college, and the Steves were still eating fruits rather than making Macs. We didn't even have computers, phones still had dials on them, and we all watched one of three network TV channels and read newspapers that came in the afternoon. And all of our parents bought American-made cars.

Ok, enough nostalgia. I give this as background, to explain my own behavior when I started getting involved in social networks. My first thought was to collect as many "friends" as I could, to grow my network quickly and add just about everyone that I had an email address for. Now that I have accumulated a bunch of people on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Plaxo, I have a different strategy.

I want quality rather than quantity. As my networks have grown – and they still aren't as large as my college-age daughter (see, it is that underdog feeling again) – I have seen the "feed" streams that are produced from all these people just burying me in the details and status updates of their lives. I try to dip into this vast, deep flow of information on a daily basis, but it quickly overwhelms me. I run back to the relative comfort of my email inbox, where at least I can hit the delete key and pare things down to a reasonable single screen of to-do and action items and people that I have to return messages to.

Burger King ran a promotion not too long ago where they asked people to defriend 10 Facebook friends in order to get a coupon for a free burger. They were swamped with thousands of requests, thereby establishing the value of a friend at somewhere around a quarter. That is pretty depressing. I always thought a friend was worth at least a couple of bucks, if not more.

I also want to grow my networks slower, because like anything else on the Internet, I am concerned about customer retention and my networks are my customers. You are the people that will (hopefully soon, puh-lease) pay me money to speak at a conference, write an article or white paper, produce a screencast video, or do some custom product consulting. So I don't want to just spam you with needless updates about what I had for breakfast or insights about my pets or family vacations, although I did get some interesting feedback when I mention the books that I read in my last missive.

So I have gotten pickier about who I add to my various networks. And while I don't want to be as snobby as that Jr. High clique of popular kids, I do think we all need to take a step back and consider what our friending – and more importantly defriending –policies will be going forward.

Over at Twitter (where my network is still "just" a few hundred followers), there is a lot of activity around third-party apps that will automatically increase your network with all sorts of tricks. This is a bad thing, because those networks become less valuable as their feeds become larger. You will be adding more noise to the signal, and as a result, miss out on the important stuff.

I am still figuring out Twitter, to say the least. But I can tell you that my Twitter activities have saved me a grand total of $140, which is the overdraft fee that Bank of America initially charged me when I deposited a check to the wrong account. Through the miracle of social networks, I was able to tweet my bank, email them the information and get them to call me and correct the problem, and probably keep me as a customer.

Now, I don't have all the answers here. Or even some of them. And I am glad that I don't have to deal with the hyper social strata that are Middle School today. But I can take some small comfort that none of my 20-something children have Twitter accounts, at least not yet.

The new breed of eReaders

2009-05-04T08:06:00.001-07:00

The New York Times has a story today about progress that is expected on the next generation of eBook readers, but I have already seen this future thanks to a long-time correspondent and independent software developer Hank Mishkoff. The Times story can be found here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/technology/companies/04reader.html

The Times piece talks about the main supplier to the Amazon Kindle and Sony reader, E Ink, and a new entry to the scene PlasticLogic.com who is also mentioned in last month's Technology Review here:
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22490/

I don't have a Kindle, but have borrowed a couple of friends' units for a few minutes. It has its own broadband modem that does the selecting and downloading of content and that is why the initial price of the device is so high (around $350). Instead, I have read several books on my iPhone using the Kindle app. You need to go to Amazon's Website using a standard browser and select and pay for which books you want to receive on your phone, and then the download happens relatively quickly once you bring up the app on your phone. I found the iPhone app to be very satisfying for the pulp fiction trash novels that I like to read on planes and other fill-in time when I don't want to drag around my laptop. It is nice to have a book to read "automatically" – without having to carry something else.

But the Kindle and its ilk only do monochrome and static text. They aren't well suited to the hyperlinked world of the Web, and they require specially formatted books for each device – the version that you download for the Kindle will work on both the device itself and the iPhone, but that is about as cross-platform as you get. These books won't work on the Sony reader. And the books aren't free, although Amazon at any specific time has a lot of sales going on, and indeed I found a new series of thrillers by Lee Childs that I have quickly become a fan of, since one of them was available free on Amazon's store. (Great marketing idea, by the way, and yet another way for authors to seed their content to early adoperts.)

So what about Mishkoff's idea? He calls it the "xBook" and incorporates video, full color pictures, and hyperlinks into his reader. The idea being that an inquisitive reader would want to do the same sorts of explorations and Web surfing expeditions that someone who is used to a browser would perform. He has cobbled together a video that demonstrates his idea here:
http://www.WebFeats.com/xBook/

Note that the xBook is still very much a concept and far from an actual product. Mishkoff wants to try to get someone to help fund a project to build a device, or at least some software that will work with existing platforms.

As many of you know, I am a pretty voracious reader and I welcome these experiments. I still buy lots of books and don't think that will change, even with the Kindle et al. coming of age. And do contact Mishkoff (his information is on his Web site) if you are interested in following up with him further.

Five tips to being more professional on social networks

2009-04-27T09:58:00.000-07:00

As more 30- and 40-somethings login to Facebook, begin to Tweet, add their credentials to LinkedIn and post pictures of their family vacations to Flickr, it becomes harder to separate your work and personal personae. And as more employers begin to use these social networking sites to vet their new hires – assuming that people will start to have new hires at some point in the future once this miserable economy turns around – the situation is only going to get worse.

What got me started thinking more about this was that I am giving a speech next week to show people how to make the most of LinkedIn, one of the leading social sites that is used by a wide variety of professionals to look for work and polish your resume, qualifications and recommendations from previous employers. Granted, this is not a new topic – people have been having problems with what they say online for years. Heather Armstrong, who's Web site dooce.com created the verb that is used when someone is fired over their blog, was fired over her blog many years ago (her new book is a real treat and a collection of some of her writings that is a true joy to read). Now dooce.com generates thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue. That is taking lemons and turning them into not just lemonade, but Absolut Lemon, or maybe even Absolut Gold.

So here are some recommendations for those of you that are new to this whole Internet thing, to pass along to your less-clueful friends and relatives.

First, keep sex, politics, religion, and family out of your online life to the extent that you can. If you feel that you have to tell the world about these things, think about how a potential future employer might react to seeing this stuff in your profile. No one really wants to know that you are a member of the "Republican Party of the Virgin Islands" (as one of my Facebookers put it), whatever that means. Another friend is in a committed relationship with his dog, again, not something I really want to find out the details. And those married folks that indicate that they would enjoy having relations with a third party are just too icky for me. Leave some blanks spaces in your profile in these areas. Too much information!

Second, tell the truth. If you are single and looking for love, then by all means go online and do your thing and misrepresent yourself however you see fit or whatever you think will attract potential partners. But when it comes to talking about your professional accomplishments, don't exaggerate, invent new job titles, degrees, or whatever other credentials that you don't have. It isn't worth it, and eventually it will come back to hurt you or prevent you from getting that plum job that you covet. There is also no need to document every waking and sober moment since college either: just hit the most recent highlights for now. And when it comes to those non-sober moments, leave that info on the cutting room floor. No one really wants to see your expertise with using beer bongs.

Third, if you are one of the unfortunate ones who are presently between jobs, make LinkedIn and other sites part of a daily ritual. Whether you spend a few minutes or hours isn't all that important, just so that you spend some regular time updating your profile and seeking out to expand your network.

Fourth, decide on what your "friending" policy is going to be and be consistent, at least for inside each social site that you frequent. For example, I am most stringent with the people that want to network with me on LinkedIn, and only accept connections with people that I have actually met face to face, or who have been long-time email correspondents. I also routinely refuse connections from headhunters and HR people, because I am not interested in enriching their businesses with my connections. But on Facebook, I have a more liberal friending policy, just because.

Finally, spend some time thinking about how you acquired your existing professional friends: do you like to meet and greet at industry conferences? Are you more of a small group or large group socializer? Do you prefer one-on-one situations? Did you ever co-author anything and enjoy/detest the experience? Do you tend to keep work colleagues around for many years that last past the time on the job? Were you popular in junior high or peaked in sophmore year? Do you still stay in touch with your frat brothers or sorority sisters?

Remember that most of us are still pretty new at MyBook and Friendspace and that even Oprah did her first Tweet in ALL CAPS. Do experiment and try different strategies, and feel free to share what works for you if that is appropriate. Just don't send me any links to those toga party pix.

Buying a cheap 8 GB PC

2009-04-20T10:24:00.001-07:00

What is the cheapest PC you can buy that can sport 8GB of RAM? You would think this was a simple question, and within a few minutes of online shopping you could figure it out. Alas, this has turned into Yet Another Project, and I am nowhere near the answer.

Why would anyone want such a machine? Any 32-bit version of Windows can't use much beyond 3 GB of memory. If you are going to effectively use 8 gigs of memory, you need a 64-bit operating system. I actually have one that I am using right now – my Mac OS. But getting a Mac with all that memory means getting their pricier Mac Pro desktop. And while you can save some money by getting a used Mac Pro, by the time you bulk it up with enough RAM and disk, it isn't much of a bargain anymore.

My reason for all this RAM is to host a collection of virtual machines for testing purposes. VMs consume a lot of RAM, and there are situations where I want to be able to run more than one VM at a time for testing networking products. I have been using the desktop VMware Workstation along with Fusion on my Mac, and have quite a collection of VMs now that I use in my tests. But my Windows PCs only have 2 GB of RAM, so I can't really run more than one VM at a time. I needed something more powerful. A few months I had a client that sent me a DVD with seven different VMs on it to use for a series of tests.

So I thought to contact a system builder friend of mine and I ask him to spec out for me what I called a "white box ESX PC" – ESX is VMware's virtual server operating system, and it is designed for this purpose, to run a lot of VMs on a single physical piece of hardware. And while ESX technically isn't 64-bit, it can run very effectively with lots of memory.

But getting the right configuration was tricky, because it is also not designed to run its VMs on an ordinary hard disk that you would find in your average desktop. There are some discussion forums on this topic, but we were in uncharted territory.

To see what I was getting myself into, HP loaned me one of their Proliant servers that comes with ESX pre-installed. (Most of the major PC server makers have a selection of pre-installed machines with either ESX or Citrix' Xenserver, but these are not low-end machines.) It took me weeks of effort to get the right licensed software from VMware to operate it and put the VMs on the box. I realized that ESX wasn't going to work for me --there was just too much overhead. And while VMware gives away a freebie version called ESXi, I was too fed up at this point to try that route. If you want to learn more, check out this article:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1901

So then I went online and starting poking around to see if I could order a desktop PC with 8 GB of RAM and be satisfied running the 64-bit Vista OS. I first went to Dell, mainly because I buy a lot of Dells and can find my way around their Web site. Back in the day when megabytes were a lot of RAM, Dell was one of the first vendors to sell PCs with 4 MB installed. But despite this history and familiarity, it wasn't easy to search their Web site for an 8 gig PC. Lenovo has one line, the ThinkCentre M58, which sells for about $1200. HP has none that I could find on their Web site, which is odd because when I went to Newegg's Web site I could find more than 20 configurations, some of which were pretty capable HP machines, all for around $1000.

The other issue with running a lot of VMs besides RAM is that you want the right CPU inside your PC, one that supports the virtualization extensions called Intel-VT or AMD-V. Neither company makes it very clear which of its Dual Core Duo this or that processor actually supports these extensions. Check out this discussion here:
http://communities.intel.com/message/9687#9687

What I do know is the aging Dell desktop that I bought three years ago doesn't have this support. Sigh. Here is a link to a discussion forum on Anandtech that goes into more details:
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=29&threadid=2117719

So meanwhile I haven't bought anything yet. If you have any advice, you know where to find me.

Cheap choices for Web hosting

2009-04-15T03:38:00.000-07:00

These days, it doesn't make sense to pay a lot of dough to host your Web site. I am going to give you three alternatives that won't cost you more than $5 a month. All three are great for people who don't have a lot of HTML coding expertise and don't want to shell out the big bucks to pay for graphic designers and programmers. I have built sites using all three methods and while they do have their limitations, they are all acceptable for handling the basics, and in some cases will do a lot more advanced things as well.

Let's start off with GoDaddy. First, we choose whatever dotcom name your little heart desires, and hopefully is still available.. Next, we take a look at what GoDaddy offers for its own Web hosting plans. If you go to their sign-up page online, you will see lots of choices. Pick the Economy Plan for Linux. If you want to host more than one domain from the same server, you would pick the Deluxe Plan. You can get a better deal for two-year contracts if you call their customer support line rather than signing up online. Still, it works out to $5 a month, on top of the registrar fee to register your domain.

Why Linux? Because we will be using their Wordpress..org installation, and that works better on Linux. You don't need to know anything about Linux to run your site, you get the same great features of having a world-class blogging platform that you have with a Wordpress.com hosted site, and you can do a lot more with it as well.

Included in the GoDaddy hosting account are a ton of free applications. Besides Wordpress, you can install Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, PostNuke, various shopping cart applications, phpBB, and dozens more. The Wordpress install is very straightforward and takes a few minutes, and once that is done you can use your Web browser to run just about everything that you require.

Using GoDaddy-hosted Wordpress is great if your content can work within the blogging format, if you want better control over your pages than you would get with Wordpress.com-hosting, and if you want to add ads and analytics to your site but don't want to build your pages from scratch. One thing that the self-hosted Wordpress isn't as good as the dotcom hosted is the ability to stream video content. You are better off using the dotcom hosting and buying the 5GB space upgrade and running your videos there.

Let's move on to the second method, using Microsoft's OfficeLive Small Business hosting account. What I like about OfficeLive SB is that you can buy your domain name through Microsoft, although if you plan on moving it to some other provider later on, that might be difficult. Microsoft also doesn't charge you for the first year that you have the domain, and then $15 a year thereafter. You can't beat that price. You go to the following page to sign up:
http://smallbusiness.officelive.com/pricing

The Microsoft plan is great if you have Windows and a relatively recent version of IE (v6 or later, running on XP or Vista) that you are going to use to build your site. They give you some simple templates for your page design, and if your site is going to be composed of a few static pages, then this is a really fast way to assemble a site and the price is rock-bottom. They will also hide your domain registration from public whois queries as part of the deal.

What about the third method? Check out the site Weebly.com. They offer free web site hosting, ties into Gmail and Register.com for domain registration as part of their package. I don't care for Register.com because they charge $35 a year for registering your domain where GoDaddy and others charge less than $10, but what is appealing about Weebly is that you have a lot of control over page design and widgets and templates as well as integration into Google's Gmail for your domain. The basic service is free, but if you want more than the freebie site – such as password-protected pages, audio players and support, it will cost the same as a more capable GoDaddy account, about $4 a month.

All three will give you more email addresses than you know what to do with, and all are good starting places for your own exploration for other hosting providers, which are overwhelming. Feel free to share your own recommendations here.

How to search for airline travel using Optifly.com

2009-04-06T00:03:00.001-07:00

You gotta like someone who can reel off the three-letter airport codes for such obscure places as Reykjavik Iceland (actually they have two airports, KEF and RKV), the Congo (BZV) and Colima Mexico (CLQ). Then perhaps it is no surprise that Bryan Cooley's latest invention, Optifly.com, is a nice service that figures out which airlines fly between any two city pairs around the world.

Those of us who are frequent flyers know that any business or leisure travel journey begins with the first step of a Web search of potential airlines that can carry our tired and cramped bodies squished into a coach middle seat. And while Expedia, Orbitz and their ilk are reasonably good at computing fares, they don't do as good a job of incorporating the low-cost carriers like Southwest, RyanAir, EasyJet, and others that have cropped up over the past decade. Even Kayak.com, which is one of my favorite sites to narrow down a search of which airlines offer service, isn't as good as Optifly in identifying the various routing paths that are available.

The site, which will launch "real soon now" according to Cooley, is the essence of simplicity. You type in your two cities that you want to travel, and it produces a Google map (or Earth) mashup showing you the connection points. "Most international trips require at least two or three flight segments," says Cooley, and this means it can get complicated. His service will also show you nearby airports too. The site still has some small bugs but works well.

But behind its simplicity lies some very sophisticated search algorithms, and as someone who studied optimization theory in grad school I can appreciate this. Cooley tells me "When you consider there over 40,000 unique flight paths, there are in excess of 100 billion route possibilities to consider for a few hops, and we can handle routes with as many as 10 hops, something that the flight booking services can't even begin to deal with."

What the site doesn't do at all is optimize for costs, but based on its route visualization and transfer points, you can do that research using the usual travel booking sites. Once you find a connection city that will work for you, you can do a better job narrowing down how you are going to book your ticket and probably get a better fare as a result. Cooley says it has saved his early beta users hundreds of dollars in ticketing fees, which is a good thing we can all agree in these penurious times.

Optifly's challenge is to stay on top of the many airline routing changes that are posted each day – while most of these are individual flights they still do change their routing and frequency of service. The site will show you which flights aren't available on certain days of the week, which gets complicated especially when you fly across transpacific and you arrive almost before you depart, or skip a day depending on which direction you fly. Once upon a time I skipped my birthday going to a speaking engagement in Tokyo – that wasn't a fun trip. Another time I celebrated my birthday on a flight to Taipei with a co-worker on our way out to Computex.

How to stay secure in these insecure times

2009-04-01T07:05:00.001-07:00

This isn't any April fool's story, but a rather depressing one about how easy it is to compromise a corporate network. Markoff's recent story in the New York Times got me looking for the research paper by Anderson and Nagaraja that should be required reading by anyone in the email and network security space.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-746.html

The paper describes a determined attack on the exiled government offices of the Dalai Lama by purported agents of the Chinese government. It is a chilling account of how easy it is for hackers to penetrate a network with a little bit of social engineering and a lot of clever programming. While none of this is new, what is new is how it is getting harder to keep the bad guys out.

The Tibetan government contacted the authors of the paper when they observed suspicious diplomatic behavior. The authors found the following disturbing items:
 A number of successful logins were observed to the Tibetan's US-based hosting accounts that came from Chinese IP addresses, none of which originated with genuine Tibetan users,
 Social engineering tactics were used to obtain the email identities of many Tibetan government officials who were then sent a number of phished emails
 The emails contained rootkit programs masquerading as ordinary documents from apparently legit sources
 Once the attachments were opened by Tibetan monks by mistake, the rootkits were then used to obtain more information and compromise other users on the network.

What is interesting about this case was the combination of malware and "good guessing" – which is really what social engineering is anyway -- by doing research on the Tibetan communications, to find plausible email addresses of their correspondents, so that the phished emails would be more likely to be opened by the exiled monks. The guessing was made easier given the nature of the Tibetan diaspora and how open the monks are about their activities and outreach.

Here is the nut graph of the report:

"Until recently, one might have assumed that it would take a ‘geek’ to write good malware, and someone with interpersonal skills to do the social manipulation. But the industrialisation of online crime over the past ﬁve years means that capably-written malware, which will not be detected by anti-virus programs, is now available on the market. All an attacker needs is the social skill and patience to work the malware from one person to another until enough machines have been compromised to complete the mission. What’s more, the ‘best practice’ advice that one sees in the corporate sector comes nowhere even close to preventing such an attack."

So what countermeasures can a typical corporate IT person take? Certainly, encrypted email should be used more, and while this is something that I have written about for more than a decade, I probably will still be writing about it 10 years from now. (None of the Tibetan emails were encrypted.) Second, when possible, use separate networks for external communications that don't contain operational elements of a company: don't put your payroll on your SMTP mail servers, use firewalls or even physically separate networks, and so forth. The authors state: "It would in our view be prudent practice to run a high-value payment system on a PC that does not contain a browser or email client, or indeed any other software at all." Of course, as the Internet becomes more pervasive, this becomes harder to do.

Next, don't open unexpected attachments, and certainly be careful when receiving unexpected documents, even from your usual correspondents. And as we conduct more business over social sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, be wary of what you receive there as well: the bad guys are using fake accounts and expanding their reach to phishing these sites. Just because someone is your "friend" doesn't mean that they are actually legit.

Finally, take a look at data leak prevention appliances and tools. While these are expensive, they can save your bacon and do a tremendous job at detecting abnormal situations. A good place to start is with Code Green Networks, one such product that I review over on my WebInformant.tv series of videos. The company tells me that every installation has resulted in finding someone doing something that they shouldn't be doing within the first week of use.

Five useful social networking tools

2009-03-24T12:20:00.001-07:00

In preparation for a keynote speech that I am giving next month, I took some time to look at a variety of social media consolidation and notification services. You might find one or more of them useful for your purposes, even for those of you that still don't poke, tweet, or know what RSS really stands for.

First is Ping.fm that can post to multiple social networks at once. You sign up, give them your login credentials at Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter, Wordpress and many others. When you want to update your social networking universe, you send one message to your Ping.fm account via an email, a text message, or a Web form, and it goes out to everyone. This can be a big time-saver if you post across different networks and don't mind sending the same information to all these places. I haven't used it as much because I tend to post different things to LinkedIn vs. Facebook, as an example.

Friendfeed.com works in reverse. It consolidates your entire social network "feeds" together in one place, so that your network can follow your posts across your blogs, your social networks, and other sites. You set everything up using the various RSS feeds that these services create, which is pretty clever when you think about it. The downside to Friendfeed is that your adoring public has to sign up separately for this service, which means Yet Another Social Network Request to fulfill. Still, I have been surprised at how many people are following me in this fashion, and how many of them are the A-list blogger types that you want to engage and be at top of mind in any event. Clearly, this is one service to pay attention to if you are trying to get the word out about your products and services.

Twitter is certainly all the rage these days, and a number of services have taken some of the best notification-style pieces out of it in interesting ways. If you like the way Twitter works but don't want to share your updates with the public, such as just with your work colleagues or a special task force, then take a look at Presentlyapp.com. You can use the free Web service or pay to install it behind your own firewall for the ultimate private group. They even make use of the same kind of scrolling interface that Twitter has made popular.

Another take on private discussion forums is from Yammer.com. They cost $1 a person a month. Think of this as one of those old-school BBS's that has been updated for the Gen-T and Web 2.0. I think if you want something quick and dirty and need to have a group discussion to knit your project team together, this is worth a closer look.

Buzzable.com can be used to create groups of Twitter users if you want to send out notifications to all of your partners or customers at once. LinkedIn is finally implementing this feature on their groups, but that is probably too much work to get the initial group assembled, given their still draconian triple opt-in rules.

So these are just five services that I have found that have something going for them. Whether any of these companies will be around next year is hard to tell. And I can guarantee that none of them have received any TARP funds from the US Government. If you have other suggestions, email them or post a comment on my strominator.com blog.

Self-promotions dep't

Since I mentioned my speech, I might as well give you the URL where you can see what I am going to be talking about here:
http://www.ahma.org/HTF/keynote.shtm

I write about a half dozen articles a year for the New York Times, and last week you can read one that I did about various services that help automate meetings and scheduling tasks here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/business/smallbusiness/17meet.html

Also, last week I began a series of columns for PC World that will appear every Wednesday under the title of NetWork, geared towards practical solutions for small businesses that don't have a lot of IT depth. They are collected here:
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/blogs/network.html

Finally, today I gave a Webinar on ten things that you can do on the cheap to improve your security posture for TechTarget. You can reply the seminar here:
http://searchmidmarketsecurity.com/2009priorities

Custom publishing 2.0 with MagCloud

2009-03-17T02:44:00.000-07:00

Not every Web service has to be completely an online operation. Take as an example Netflix – when they started it wasn't really possible to stream an entire DVD across the Internets and they developed a system to mail DVDs to their customers. Now, of course, they have some very innovative ways to "watch instantly" your videos, including to Ethernet-connected Blu-Ray and Xbox players.

But the combination of on and offline components isn't widely exploited by many businesses, either because they are so enamored by Web 2.0 (or whatever we are calling it this week), or because they lack the offline skill sets or institutional memories to be effective in both camps.

Let's take a look at one service that does a great job in both worlds, called MagCloud.com, which is sponsored by HP. As someone who once ran the editorial operations of several computer magazines that have gone by the wayside (no fault of my own in particular, at least so I like to think), I welcome the effort.

It works this way. Let's say you want to produce a small number of copies of a custom published magazine – say something more than a sales brochure that has actual editorial content. You want to approach this project with the same kind of quality that a regular printed magazine would entail – full color printing, nice graphics and layout, and mailed to potential readers. This is the idea behind their service. You create your magazine just as you would with the usual Adobe tools, upload the digital files to their service, along with the mailing addresses of your readers. HP takes care of printing, proofing, binding, polybagging and postage.

You can get an idea of what is involved by browsing their Web site and seeing some of the magazines that are offered for sale there. I got a copy of "Georgia Speaker" – a magazine that is published by the Atlanta chapter of the National Speakers Association (an organization that I am a member). It was well put together and arrived in the mail in a few days and cost about $5 all told.

What I like about MagCloud is that it combines the best attributes of print-on-demand with online access for searchability, marketing and awareness. The price is reasonable and you can set up any number of custom-published pieces. Obviously, HP Is doing this to tout its printing business, but why not?

When I first heard of MagCloud, I thought the service would email me the PDF that I would then print myself. And I was pleasantly surprised when the magazine arrived in my snail mail a few days later. Then I realized the genius of this service. How much stuff do you get in the mail that you actually look forward to these days? Other than paychecks from my clients and my Netflix DVDs, not a heckuva lot. This can be high impact just because it is something so retro that it stands out.

Now, I don't know if MagCloud has a future, but certainly it can bring some bright spots of hope to some of the 11,000 journalists who lost their jobs last year (according to the Columbia Journalism Review). While that is small change compared to the number of idled GM or US Steel workers, it still means that there is a large talent pool to produce custom-published zines. And if any of you do produce your own custom magazines using the service, please let me know and I will post links to them on my blog.

Four better ways to collaborate than Google Docs

2009-03-11T06:44:00.001-07:00

If you are looking for something better than Google Docs to work on a document or a presentation with a colleague, this column is for you. I will touch on four alternatives that are all better solutions and can give you ways to create your work product faster.

I have tried Google Docs in a few different situations, and they have been abject failures for different reasons: either the group of potential collaborators has never worked together before, or is too widely distributed geographically or organizationally to have developed any common work habits. As someone who has written two books with co-authors (along with countless magazine articles that get edited along the way), I can tell you the hardest part about collaboration isn't the technical aspects -- it is the human interactions and developing the various trusted relationships with your co-workers.

The other downside to using Google is that at its heart it still is serial workflow – I write my document and email a link so that you can continue. What we need are tools that can combine the immediacy of Instant Messaging with the viral power of social networks to help a group of content creators to get started to work together.

If your ultimate product is a document, start with the service Etherpad.com. You can bring up a common shared workspace inside your browser and multiple authors can add their comments in a chat window off to the side and compose on screen in real-time. Each author is given their own colored font to keep track of changes, and you can go back to particular versions quite easily. This service is great if you want to work with a writing partner on a proposal, say. Or if you have to assemble a final report from several sources and want all the authors to quickly converge on a series of recommendations.

But that solution is just for text. What about that bane of corporate life, PowerPoint slide decks? Here a service called SlideShare.net has a nifty solution. It goes beyond just sharing your slides by having a layer of social networking on top of things. You can add comments to individual slides, group a series of presentations together (such as all the sessions at a particular conference), add a voice narration track that can be synchronized to the slides, and more. All of this is of course available inside a Web browser. The speaker's notes that accompany each slide is also displayed and indexed by the search engines, which can be a good or bad thing depending on how you use this feature. And you can embed your slides in your blog or broadcast them to your friends on various social networks. The downside is that your builds and transition effects are lost, so if your slides have a lot of these effects, you aren't going to be too happy with the service. It also takes several hours after you have uploaded your files before they are posted to the service.

Moving on beyond slide decks is the service called drop.io for real-time collaboration that is based on an IM-style chat service. You bring up a browser and point to a common URL and off you go. You can drag and drop photos, documents, whatever and they show up in the common workspace, which you can view as a chat stream or a file directory. You can add comments, voice messages, even faxes (remember them?) to your shared workspace. When you have reached a point where you want others to review your work, you can send out a broadcast message to your Facebook or Twitter friends or gather everything up in a Zip file. For collections of files less than 100MB, the service is free.

Speaking of Twitter (isn't everyone these days?), one final service that I will mention here is Yammer.com. If you think of this as a private social network discussion board that combines some of the notification and flexibility of Twitter with that of the traditional BBS's, you got it. You can share files, have a tag cloud and a layer of search on top of everything too.

There are lots of other specialized collaboration tools – Collab.net's free Subversion is useful for tracking software development projects, and Clarizen.com's fee-based project management tool is another one that I haven't tried but seems useful in that area.

The nice thing about all of the services that I mention is that they all have free versions. With drop.io, if you want more room, you can get upgraded for $10 a gigabyte per year or if you want more management for $20 a month plan for 20 GB of storage. Yammer has a paid version if you want a managed private shared space that starts at $1 per person per month. Isn't the Internet a grand experiment in free data processing? Nevertheless, it is great to be able to try something out risk-free. Do let me know of your own suggestions and what has worked and hasn't for your collaborations. And if you want me to come speak to your company about these and other technologies, you can download my slide deck here (it is very much a work in progress) and see if it would be appropriate.

Slow and steady wins online

2009-03-04T12:36:00.001-08:00

While many of us marvel at those Web sites and "viral videos" that take the Internets by storm and quickly gain viewership, I think the sign of truly successful sites are those that more slowly and incrementally gain their fans. The motto for today's essay is that slow and steady will win the online video race. And those sites that are quick to gain attention are also quick to lose it: the longer it takes you to build your followers, the better a chance you've have at keeping them.

Too often we get consumed by playing the numbers game: is traffic for our Web site up from last month? What were the big ticket articles or pages that brought in the most visitors? Did we get anything posted on Slashdot (which has a huge following, and can often spike traffic if articles get the right position)? These aren't the right questions to be asking.

Instead, lengthen your time horizon to the next quarter, and look for efforts that will build interest for more than just the quick hit. Is your site truly useful as a resource and will bring back returning visitors several times over the course of the year? Do you regularly post new content? Are your most popular pages easily accessible from your home page or clearly labeled at the top menu bar? Do you tie in your Web site with social network group postings and with regular (weekly or twice monthly) email blasts that have something of value in them? Do you look at your site logs and understand what they are telling you?

I realize that there are a lot of questions here, more than answers. Too often, Web site operators are easily swayed by the latest trend-let or Search Engine Optimization seminar come-on. It doesn't have to be that way. Here are a couple of examples from my own efforts that you can use to guide your own strategies.

People talk about the power of LinkedIn and other social networks. I have built my own into several hundred people gradually, by adding a few people at a time. Now the whole thing is self-sustaining. And while it seems impressive now when you look at the total members that I can reach, I think it is a much better list because I built them up gradually. I use LinkedIn to find sources for stories that I am working on, or to try to discover new clients from my installed base. After all, these are the people that are most familiar with my work. I also use it as an online resume/reference source, so potential clients can check out what my previous clients have said about me.

The same goes for you, the Web Informant reader. These weekly emails are a great way for me to continue to engage you, because I hopefully send something out of value rather than a marketing blast that is content-free. I hear from many of you that save these missives, or that reply to ones that I wrote months ago, and that is a very potent connection and a great motivation for me to continue to write them.

As many of you know, I began creating my own series of sponsored video screencast product reviews over on WebInformant.tv. So far I have posted 15 videos, and they are slowly gaining viewership on more than a dozen different video sharing and how-to Web sites. While none of them are at the level of the Coke-and-Mentos guys, I am glad to see that day after day and week after week they are getting watched and more importantly, serve as a great resource for enterprise IT managers that are trying to figure out whether they can buy these products.

Another thought: always freely offer something of value on your Web site, even if you are tempted to charge for it. The more people can stop and smell and taste what you have, the more they are going to want to stick around and eventually dive in deeper. Some people suggest that you offer almost everything for free, and then charge them to customize your content. I can't tell you how many Web sites that I visit that still don't do this, and insist on registering you or tracking you or verifying you before you can get inside the front door. You can make money by giving things away for free.

And if you feel like sharing your own thoughts with my audience, please post your comments on my Strominator.com blog.

Sidebar conversations are here to stay

2009-02-26T06:54:00.000-08:00

My question for you today is this: when is it appropriate to have a sidebar conversation during a conference call or in-person meeting? By sidebar, I meet a parallel Instant Messenger chat session or texting someone or posting something to your Twitter feed. Whatever your tool of choice, you are sharing your thoughts about what is going on in the meeting to other co-workers who are bored/distracted/uninterested with the current speaker.

I am as guilty of this behavior as the next person: back in the day when I had weekly staff meetings, we had various ways to amuse ourselves over IM chats. I remember when the precursor to the Blackberry first arrived on the scene and we would hide them under the table and check our emails – now they are so much smaller and easier to pull out and use. So much easier, that even our elected members of Congress are sending out Tweets and texts from the House floor this week during Obama's address. Color commentary at 140 characters at a time, coming to you from those folks that pass bills that most never read. There is some irony in this situation, somewhere.

And this week, the Billerica Massachusetts selectmen passed a law that prohibits people from texting and emailing during town meetings. I am sure more will follow, maybe even our Congress.

There are professors that prohibit Internet-connected laptops (or at least try to) during their classes. Back when I taught a bunch of high school boys computer networking in a PC-laden classroom lab, I had to routinely unplug their machines' Ethernet cables when their attention wandered to the Internet and the call of more important things, like checking and updating their overnight gaming standings. At least I had a cable to unplug: this was in the era just before universal Wifi coverage.

Call it ADD. Call it multi-tasking. Call it sophomoric or just plain rude. But this behavior is definitely here to stay. And as someone who makes part of my living as a professional speaker, I find this trendlet both disconcerting and yet fascinating. Indeed, at a speech that I gave this week, one of the participants suggested that I should show a live Web link to a Twitter feed so the audience could post their comments on screen, for all in the audience to examine. (This was done last at last year's South By Southwest conference, to mixed results, as I recall.) First I thought it was a good idea. Now I am not so sure.

Remember how when we watched TV back in the olden times there wasn't anything on the screen besides the program? Now we have the ever-present logo, sometimes spinning around with the time and temperature. We have little people that pop up at the bottom of the screen announcing some more "must see TV" that will be broadcast later in the week. We have the "crawl" which used to be used to announce snow or other extreme weather conditions but is its own sidebar conversation for many news shows. And Bloomberg TV has so much going on that I get dizzy when I tune in there trying to track all the various windows of data scrolling by. Even "24" shows multiple windows where each character is doing something to get across its real-time effect. (At least Chloe is back in the current season's episode's to save the day, we can all be thankful even if the underlying technology isn't quite realistic.)

I am not sure where this is going, but it definitely is the brave new world of communications. Tweeting and texting during meetings is probably here to stay, regardless of what rules are put in place to stop them. And we as professional speakers will have a harder time unless we learn to incorporate these things and collaborate with our audiences, rather than competing with them. Of course, if we were more engaging perhaps all the sidebar chatter would come to a stop because people would actually want to listen to our speeches.

Can collaboration save our economy?

2009-02-16T03:33:00.001-08:00

Web Informant TK February 2009: Can collaboration save our economy?

The economic news is depressing, and yet I want to see opportunity where others see looming disaster. And I think one way we can try to make things better is become more productive and do a better job collaborating with each other. Think of it as a no-cost stimulus package that even the Republicans can love.

Remember when the PC was first introduced, everyone thought it was such a great personal productivity tool? Sadly, the more powerful that PCs have become, the harder it is to use them to collaborate. This is because we get used to using them as our personal machines, and most of us don't like sharing our computers, let alone our work products from them.

The primary collaboration tool today is still what it was ten years ago: I send you an email attachment with a Word or Excel file. You make changes and then email the file back for me to look at. This is really serial collaboration, because we alternate working on the same file. While this model is okay for two people, when you have a whole group that is trying to add their thoughts it gets very messy, to say the least. Also, one person can hold up the entire process and then the rest of the group has to wait until that person has finished their revisions. And if we don't agree, we pretty much have to start the process from scratch. A friend of mine is ghost writing a book for two of his bosses. I can't imagine what his editing cycle is going to be like under this model.

It is time to realize that serial email-style collaboration is so last year. Consider these trends:

First, the Internet is now ubiquitous and most of us are comfortable using it to connect to our partners, supplies, customers, and colleagues. It has also made email more powerful, and most of us have become addicted to checking our email several times a day and even during off hours too. Some of us have to check email so frequently that we start to get a bit jittery when we are offline for a few hours, let alone when we want to take a week off on some deserted beach where there isn't any connectivity.

Contrast this with Lotus Notes, which has been around for about 20 years and supposed to be the be-all and end-all collaborative tool, or Microsoft's SharePoint, which is more recent. Both Notes and Sharepoint require everyone to run it, and develop to its own programming interfaces. That seems so quaint and outmoded now. And both are very quirky to install and deploy, which makes them less desirable too.

Second, email is a great notification system and a great way to organize your to-do list. You don't have to use it as the transportation system for sending documents around, though. As an example, you can set up a blog to automatically notify via email when someone posts a comment to a particular page, so people can participate in a discussion thread but don't have to continually return to that page to find out what has been posted.

Third, free or low-cost Internet applications have come of age, such as Google Docs, Google Calendar, Trackvia, Tripit, Timedriver, Hourtown and Setmeeting. All of these don't require any software to download, don't have a lot of upfront training or even any dough to use, which means that people can experiment with them and see if they will be suitable for their needs. All of these products can offload some of the tasks that we are used to doing on email and make us more productive in scheduling meetings, sharing work product, and arranging our time. Look for a story from me in the New York Times next month on this topic.

Fourth, instant messaging has become more useful for connecting remote work teams together and can be used as another notification system that is more immediate and more potent in terms of bringing people together. Some firms are beginning to use the built-in IM features of Facebook and Twitter for this purpose too. Again, this takes some load away from looking at your inbox for starting a particular task or trying to get a colleague's attention.

Finally, there are other tools for two-person collaboration that will work better in real time, such as LogMeIn or GoToMyPC, that allow two people to actually see each other's computer screen while they are talking on the phone. My podcasting partner Paul Gillin likes Yuuguu.com, which allows teams of 25 to share the same desktop, no matter if they are on Linux, Mac or Windows.

We still have a long way to go when it comes to collaborating effectively, and I since we are talking about sharing do share your own stories with my audience and post to this entry on strominator.com. I will have more to say on this topic for a keynote speech that I am giving in Philadelphia in April for the American Hardware Manufacturer's Association. If you want me to come talk to your organization, you can send me email, or better yet, just call me on the phone.

The shoemaker's children

2009-02-10T06:25:00.001-08:00

This week I seem to be surrounded by dysfunctional electronics, and I
am not a happy camper. Or maybe they just are attracted to me, or I to
them.

My oven is on its third electronic control panel in as many months. It
has very fancy touch-pad controls, and when we first got it everything
on the panel worked with the sole exception of the on/off switch. And
the fact that it couldn't get beyond 290 degrees — it was a very
expensive crock pot. Cooking the turkey for Thanksgiving took the
better part of the day. But perhaps the third time will be the charm.

Then my stepson needed help with getting his Xbox connected on his
wireless network. I had done him no favors by setting up his wireless
router to use WPA2, which is the one security protocol that doesn't
work with the Xbox wireless adapter. That was luckily quick work to
downgrade him to just regular WPA. Why can't Microsoft support a
protocol that is several years old on its equipment is a mystery to
me.

How about my home laptop, which for some odd reason won't keep its
batteries charged? I guess it is a flaky motherboard power connection,
so the laptop needs to be plugged into the wall all the time. That is
annoying to say the least, but then it is a aging Dell that is due for
replacement, so maybe this a sign. Of course, finding something that
runs XP is an exercise in patience these days.

Speaking of Dell, I was looking for an inexpensive machine that I
could stuff with oodles of RAM to run in my lab. You would think with
all of the machines that they sell that it would be easy to find out
what the maximum amount of memory you could install in one of the
desktops would be. Not so easy to do on their Web site. So I took the
unusual step of calling them and that wasn't much better. I could
order a PC with a 64-bit Windows OS and that was the trick to boost
the RAM on the order, but a 64-bit OS is almost as much trouble as
Vista. I want a machine that will actually run my applications, thank
you very much. When I went into the Dell Outlet store to search for
used PCs, there was one yesterday that had 8GB for sale.

And I was excited to hear about the latest crop of devices that will
accept streaming video from Netflix, including a Samsung Blu-Ray video
player. A friend has been having a lot of fun using his Xbox and
streaming videos to it (you need to have both subscriptions to Netflix
and Xbox Live services though to do this). Trouble is, I bought the
cheaper model Samsung that doesn't do the streaming, even though it
has an Ethernet jack and runs Windows CE and can be upgraded across
the Internet. Another friend has the right model and was singing all
of its virtues and how wonderful his streaming videos were. Too bad
for me. Now I have one more computing device that can get infected,
require periodic care and feeding, and is already obsolete within a
few months of its purchase. I sure know how to pick 'em. At least I
haven't had to replace the front panel and the on/off switch is still
working. But it sure throws off a lot of heat, I guess from all the
graphics processing firepower inside.

At least my iPhone is running without any troubles, knock on formica.
I think I only have had to reboot it maybe 3 times in the past six
months. The fact that I used "only" in that sentence is a sad
testimonial to the state of my electronic life. They say the
shoemakers' children go barefoot. I would settle for a device that
would just operate as intended.

My network stimulus package

2009-02-04T03:16:00.001-08:00

With all the talk of billions for this program or that in Washington, I thought I would put together my own stimulus package that can help your network run smoother. I don't know whether $10 billion to buy steel (domestic preferred) for new bridges or $9 billion to put up new rural DSL lines will really be effective (my initial reaction is dubious), but the idea of spending lots of money quickly by our Congress is a scary one. And despite serving on my local school board several years, I am not qualified to run any cabinet department or national office (I have dutifully and fully paid my income taxes and don't have any dark family embarrassments). But I think I can offer a few ideas for you. So here are a few suggestions that won't cost (much) dough and could save your own bacon if you are trying to impress the boss that your name doesn't belong on the cut list quite yet.

First off, do you actually know what kind of traffic is running on your network? Have you looked at your top applications? You would be surprised. At an event that I attended yesterday sponsored by Blue Coat, they talked about how when they did these assessments they always found ten times the number of applications that most IT admins thought they were supporting. That is a factor of ten. The best story was a company that found out that one of its most popular mission critical apps was a home-grown one running on a box under someone's desk. I am sure this isn't unique, or even rare. It doesn't matter what fancy tool you use to do this apps census, and there are many vendors besides Blue Coat who would gladly come in and do one for you (in the hopes that you will eventually buy their gear). But the more that you know, the more you fine tune your network and reduce the traffic from the apps that aren't business-related.

Second, have you looked at your latency lately? Has someone along the way added a few new router hops somewhere that you didn't know about? I am amazed that we are still talking about a concept that is decades old and should be better understood. Latency improvements are the best bang for your buck short of hiring a DC lobbyist to get some of that earmark money. And you don't have to wait for any Congressional action either.

Third, how many people still have admin rights to their own desktop PCs? This makes it impossible to manage these machines, and allows users to install their own apps. Granted, it may be politically difficult to change this policy now, but hey, change is in the air and you might as well start somewhere.

Next, have you looked at your user accounts lately and seen if anyone that you have laid off is still using your network? You would be surprised at how often this happens. At one hospital that I visited, the IT manager told me that an employee who was laid off went home and started using his girlfriend's login credentials at night. They caught it because the girlfriend was still logged in at the same time at work. And the number of people that I talk to that don't have regular password change policies, or have the same password for all of their critical servers, is amazingly high. Take the time to get this set up properly. Given the number of layoffs these days, this is probably the biggest thing that you can do to fix your security loopholes that doesn't even cost you a dime.

I will have lots of other suggestions, if you are interested; check out my article in next week's Information Security magazine. I will post a link to it on my Strominator.com blog when it goes live. In the meantime, you can post your own network stimulus ideas on my blog if you are feeling a need to share them.

Time for a tune up

2009-01-26T09:47:00.001-08:00

What with Toyota posting its first quarterly loss last month and our new Community-Organizer-in-Chief looking to retool the auto industry, the only good news is that gas is not $4 a gallon anymore. But these items remind me that it is time for different kind of transportation tune up, mainly our data transportation networks.

Most of us have come to rely on email as the main artery of moving data into and out of our enterprises. After all, we are all connected via email. Many office workers bring up email as their first application in the morning and even login from home at nights and on weekends. And as more people have smartphones, sending emails when you aren't at your desk isn't such a big deal now – even our COIC does that too.

I was reminded how lousy email is at transportation when I tried to email a proposal to a prospective client of mine today. First, the email didn't get through. Then I sent him an Instant Message, to confirm receipt. The second email didn't attach the document properly, and finally the third time was the charm. All this to send a 50 kB Word file – imagine if I had something larger that would be automatically rejected.

This reminds me of another story that took place many years ago, at the dawn of the Internet era when we still used gateways to get email from other networks, such as Compuserve and MCIMail (may their memories be honored). Someone had tried to send me a big attachment (at the time, that might have been about 50 kB too!) that literally got stuck in our gateway. No email could be received for several days until we figured out that the "big" file was gumming up the works, and once we deleted it all was well again.

Email is just not the best transportation vehicle. And like our struggling auto industry, we need to look for alternative-fueled methods to move our bits around.

For those of us old enough to remember file transfer protocols, there is that (and the more secure SCP) to move data from point A to point B. But these aren't very elegant, and get trapped by firewalls and other security measures, as they should be.

Then there are the various file-sending services that go by such names as SendThisFile.com, YouSendIt.com and DropSend.com etc. There is even DilbertFiles.com, which I thought was a joke from the comic strip but is actually a legit service that I guess has some license from Scott Adams to use the hapless cubical dweller. These all operate pretty much the same way, taking the transportation over from the email network, and just using emails to notify your recipients that you have a file transfer pending. You authenticate yourself via a Web browser to both send and receive your file.

What is interesting lately is that email is also being replaced as the notification network too: either by IMs or by Twitter. I have mentioned this in my last essay, because of the generational divide and the fact that email is now too slow to notify people that live on Facebook, or just use their cell phones for Net data access, or because people get too much email and they just miss the memo in their inbox.

IMs have a lot going for them. They are easy to use, they are almost immediate, and they are now pretty much accepted in the fleets of corporate communications vehicles. But they aren't any better at transferring data than email is – and in some cases corporations block attachments, or users can't get them because they are running multiple client programs like Trillium or Adium that don't always play well with sending and receiving attachments (does this sound familiar)? And IM is ideal for one-to-one communications, but quickly breaks down when one-to-many conversations are required.

What about Twitter? This seems to have lots of promise as a notification system, although it is still somewhat creaky, sort of like when the first transcontinental railroads went in the 1800s. The network can easily get overloaded, there are all sorts of tricks like using hash tags and business people using Twitter to monitor dissatisfied customers (Bank of America and Dell are two notable examples). They can work really well for notifying a lot of people quickly about real-time events, as we have seen with recent news stories in the past several months.

The trouble is that making the transition from an all-email network to this mixed bag of technologies is proving to be just as painful as what Detroit is going through right now with its cars. Maybe upgrades to Twitter can be included in part deux of the bailout express package. After all, it comes under the heading of critical national infrastructure. (I am somewhat kidding here).

The generational media divide

2009-01-16T12:49:00.001-08:00

I was at a meeting this week that drove home the big generational divide in online and offline media consumption. At the podium was a 20-something CEO of a new venture that is trying to work with new college grads. In the audience were people mostly twice his age of captains of industry. The young CEO was asked what he thought about using content that was similar to the way Consumer Reports rates and compares products. After a pause and a blank look, he said, "I don't know what you mean, I never heard of that publication." That got a big laugh from the audience, but his ignorance was genuine. The Q&A continued, and he mentioned a few moments later how he gets a lot of his information from the Web site HuffingtonPost.com. Now it was the moment of being perplexed for the gentlemen sitting next to me, who leaned over to ask me if I have ever heard of such a publication. His ignorance was also the real deal.

So where do you stand on the Consumer Reports/HuffingtonPost axis? And more importantly, where do your readers stand as well? How savvy are they with using online media to get their information?

There is a growing divide in how we consume media, and it is mostly age-related. But it isn't as simple as everyone older is using this technology and younger is using that technology – there are a lot more subtle sub-groups. For example, 20-somethings that have never been to college aren't using email – they went right to texting and if they don't need email for their jobs they don't use it in their personal communications, and probably will remain away from email for a long time to come. And 50-somethings don't have much experience with social media, unless their kids are on Facebook and they signed up for defensive parental reasons, or they heard about it from a younger work colleague, for example. Almost no one is really using RSS feeds to keep track of Web content, except a few nerds and PR people. Instant Messaging has all sorts of twisted demographics, depending not just on age but also on how distributed the work team is and whether it is blessed or cursed by the corporate IT department. And so forth.

What does this mean for professional communicators? Several things. First, you have to become a master of multiple media channels and methods. Writing, speaking, podcasting, blogging, creating social network groups, filming videos, and more. You have to become omnivorous in what you consume and what you create.

Second, bylines aren't enough. So while I do write for the New York Times several times a year, that isn't enough. I should also post comments on various newspaper blogs (if it is relevant), and participate in various discussion forums.

Third, it isn't just about you but whom you know and who forwards your emails and links to your content. Is it better for the CEO of a potential client to just get a single email from me about a particular subject? Or to have five of his direct reports send the same link to something that I have posted? Or to have the post appear somewhere else that results in three new clients hiring me? You get the idea. Everything has the potential to be viral these days.

Finally, don't be afraid to experiment. The rules aren't set in stone, and while there are differences in the generations in media consumption, no one really knows how this is all going to shake out. One of the great opportunities of the Web – the ability to measure everything – is also its biggest challenge, because you don't necessarily have the ability to link cause and effect. I realized this as I was posting a new screencast video of mine last month to 15 different Web sites. Some of the sites have no traffic, some videos are rising stars. It is the same video on each site. What makes one more viewed is impossible to explain. (And by the way, if you haven't checked out my videos yet, go over to WebInformant.tv and watch one or two and let me know what you think.)

Facebook, the new social disease

2009-01-10T08:18:00.000-08:00

Accompanying the announcement that more than 150 million people are active on Facebook last week (and even more depressing, that half of them login daily) are a new series of security and legal issues surrounding its use. When exactly is your account compromised by a piece of software that may not be acting in your best interests? Or could it be something that is more sinister, or just human error?

Don't you pine for those simple days when the line between software and malware was pretty easy to delineate? Consider these news items:

Last week, Facebook sued the Brazilian site Power.com, claiming that its automated login process violated their terms of service. According to the LA Times, Power has agreed to use Facebook Connect, but the suit brings up all sorts of issues that aren't so clear cut: is Power providing a service for its users, by consolidating several social networking logins? Or is it doing something that it shouldn't, by storing these credentials? How is that different from any number of sites that allow me to cross-post messages to different video or blog sites?
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/01/lawsuit-shows-h.html

Last December, we saw the Koobface trojan that spreads through social network news feed messages, prompting users to download what they think is an update to the Adobe Flash player but is really malware:
http://www.avertlabs.com/research/blog/index.php/2008/12/03/koobface-remains-active-on-facebook/

This was similar to a Brazilain-based attack that plagued Twitter last summer:
http://www.viruslist.com/en/weblog?weblogid=208187551

Earlier last fall over in Russia, we saw email/SMS pitches for people to download a Java applet to their cell phones that was spread via the Russian social network Vkontakte. Once on their phones, the app would automatically text several premium numbers that would be charged back to the user:
http://www.viruslist.com/en/weblog?weblogid=208187582

The trouble is that as these attacks proliferate, it gets harder to differentiate them with legit situations where people are just making dumb mistakes. Consider the situation where a new social networking user doesn't understand the very optional step when he or she signs up and is asked whether or not to send email invitations to their entire address book. In just a few seconds, a simple task of joining the network has turned into an annoying one sending out hundreds of unwanted emails. Sometimes this step isn't explained well in the sign-up process, or sometimes people aren't paying attention. Either way, it isn't malevolent; it is just a stupid user error.

Or take instant messaging, which seems so quaint now that there are lots of other networks out there. Yes, there are malware programs that propagate through IM, and there are security products that protect IM networks too. But nothing can stop human stupidity in how these IM networks are used, particularly if you store your IM login credentials on a family computer that is shared by several people. One of my colleagues has been having IM conversations with the wrong people – some that have gone on for ten or 15 minutes, before he realized he was talking to the intended's spouse or kids. Why anyone leave his or her IM account wide open in this way is hard to understand. But it points out that just because someone is signed into IM, doesn't mean that they are there. Remember, on the Internet no one knows that your dog hasn't logged instead of you.

Then there are sites like omgxd.com that use your login information for IM networks, supposedly to make it easier to connect but in reality spam all of your contacts on your buddy list. Heyxd.com is another one. I have tried to find out whether these two sites are legit or have some sinister purpose. I can't really tell, but I would recommend steering clear of both of them.

So the next time you get an email or IM or text message asking you to download a greeting card, update your Flash player, or do something else, take a moment to stop and think whether this is a request that you should just hit the delete key and move on. You don't need to be the latest victim of a new social networking disease.

Starting the New Year with Windows NT 4

2009-01-06T13:06:00.000-08:00

To start off the new year right, I decided to go back in time and see what I could learn from running an ancient (by computing standards, anyway) operating system and software combination. To appreciate how far we have come (or not), and to see whether I could actually get real work done. The idea came about from some conversations that Jason Perlow and I had. Jason is a fellow blogger and IT consultant who now works for IBM. He and I at one point in our lives (although not at the same time) lived in Port Washington, N.Y. and spent a lot of time with OS/2, but don't let that influence you.

I picked NT v4 as my starting place. This operating system is more than ten years old, and was probably the last OS that Microsoft created that had some real simplicity to it. To get an idea of the power of the OS, there are still many corporate servers running it, even though Microsoft has tried to stamp it out and turn off support and push people to upgrade to something more recent. To get around the driver issues and other challenges, I decided to set up a virtual machine running NT, and I am using VMware's Fusion on my Mac (just to make it interesting).

Jason and I have the hypothesis that the OS doesn't really matter anymore, and that if you can get beyond some of the issues with running older software and applications, you may find that an older OS is perfect for your needs. We also thought that running an ancient OS was a good way to see how far we have come with newer computers, and perhaps a way to extract some additional performance because the older OSs are smaller and theoretically could run faster on the newer PCs.

To get NT working properly, you need find versions of software either online or in someone's attic that are not so old as to be useless. First off, I had to install Service Pack 6, and I also needed to install the right version of the SP too for the encryption level of the OS. You then install the VMware tools software, which supplies the drivers to get the most out of your machine. Then you install Microsoft Office 2000 – which is the most recent version of Office that will run on NT. I messed up by installing the tools package after Office, and VMware didn't like that. Office 2000 has the unfortunate side effect of updating your NT version with an almost-working version of Internet Explorer v5. The reason I say almost-working is that you need another piece of software called the Windows Installer to get other software installed on this machine. I couldn't get past this point, however.

I also put on Firefox v2.0.0.20 browser on the machine, which is a fairly recent version of the browser, but apparently not recent enough as I had some problems with certain Web sites. I had to update my Adobe Flash plug-in too. Finally, I added AIM v5.9, which is an older version of Instant Messenger software. Skype doesn't have any version that will run on NT, which is too bad.

So what I found was that the VM version of NT was pretty snappy. It would boot from scratch in under 30 seconds, and faster still from the suspended VM state. I liked the old-fashioned Windows and the lack of glitz and raw simplicity of the controls. No Aero Glass junk for this OS! Another plus with using VMs is that you don't have to worry about personal firewalls and anti-virus as much – you can set up a protected environment and keep it isolated from your host machine, which is good because most of the AV programs have stopped supporting NT a long time ago.

All of my Office documents – some of which were created on Macs, some on Windows, came up just fine in Office 2000, which is because I am not using the 2007 version that introduced a new file format that isn't compatible with the older versions. Shame on you Microsoft – and I know from hearing from some of you how vexing that version could be.

The other thing I noticed is how important the browser is to today's computing world, and if you aren't willing to stay current with your browser, you quickly get into trouble with many Web sites. The coming of IE v7 is a good case in point, and I know there will be a lot of grief to be had on both ends – the people that adopt the new browser and find sites that don't work in it, and the sites that want to use its new features and piss off the people that aren't upgrading yet.

I will have more to report on this experiment as I spend more time back in NT land. And those of you that want to try this on your own, email me privately and I will give you more specific tips.

Slow down!

2008-12-29T11:15:00.001-08:00

Do you get the feeling that the pace of life is accelerating too quickly for you? I do. I think it all started with instant coffee and TV dinners. In the tech world, there was email because we couldn't wait for telephone calls, or snail mail to be returned. (Don't you just love that term? Talk about slow!) But that wasn't fast enough, so we went to Instant Messages. But even those that take more than a few minutes to answer aren't acceptable, and so now people text each other from their cell phones because they can't wait until they are sitting in front of a computer.

We say that Web pages are called slow to load if they don't appear onscreen in 20 seconds or so before we hit the reload key. And it was too hard to build Web sites from scratch, so we have Wordpress et al. to make building blogs a snap. But even blogs are too much work, so we now have Twitter to send short bursts of information out to the world. Soon we will have nanoblogs, one-word missives that we can transmit to millions of people. Pity that we have become so pithy. The devil is in the details.

Videos that are longer than three minutes are too long to watch. We have Tivo and DVRs that can fast-forward automatically through commercials, because no one wants to watch them in real time anymore anyway – who has the time to wait for a program to start at the top of the hour? It seems so quaint now that was the only way we could all see "must-see TV" back in the day on our black and white sets that were encased in our cherrywood furniture.

We have video Skype calls for instant conferencing and impromptu meetings, even with people that are in the same office, because we can't spend the time to get up from our cubicles and walk down the hall. Software "builds" used to be created weekly, then daily, now they are done hourly, and even that isn't fast enough for the always-connected, hyper-broadband generation. It used to be enough to carry around a few megabytes on a flash drive, now we can take our entire digital repository and listen to music and videos too.

And don't even get me started about social networks, or online dating, or even online breakups (I don't need to know anything more about Jimmy Wales, puh-leeze!).

Maybe it is time to start slowing down. Take a few minutes to re-read that email before hitting the send key and regretting what you said in haste. Call someone on the phone in real time, and turn away from your screen when you are talking to him or her so they have your undivided, single-tasking attention. Interact with someone in your office by getting up out of your chair and visiting with them, not to waste time or shoot the breeze, but to get a reaction and some face-to-face feedback.

Have a nice holiday break, if you are reading this this week. And a great New Year's!