If you're a Google Adwords user, heads up: it's available with audio now. Coming in under the radar, Google Audio Ads has made a softlaunch. If you are already using Adwords, you'll notice a new little "audio ads" tab at the top of your account information.

To stimulate interest, Google is also offering $400 in free advertising to customers who try it out. Not everyone has a speaking voice like James Earl Jones. So they also have professional actors to voice your radio spots for you, as well.

Can Google TV ads be far behind?

A CEO friend of mine in Virginia pointed me to a new concept in
university education. In order to get a bachelor of science in
computer science degree it takes only two and a half years.

The BSCS program is a eight-quarter program. While the calendar year contains four quarters, the academic year is three quarters.

Many complain that our educational system wastes time.
This program endeavors not to by placing you on projects
directly within large IT shops of big companies during
your education so that you graduate quicker with more
experience and a better resume.

My personal college experience caused me to advise
people not to rush. But if you are in a hurry, this
seems like a good program.

Curt is the CEO of a time tracking software company and got a BSCS from Va Tech.

There's Web 2.0 and even Mobile 2.0. So, it stands to reason both are sponsored by Advertising 2.0.

What is Advertising 2.0? It's online ads and then some. Forget banner ads and viral email campaigns. It's corporate blogging that turn your customer base into a community. It's virtual product placement online. It's Google Adsense and rounding up eyeballs through social bookmarking services like Digg and Del.icio.us. It's also dirt cheap compared to buying a :30 second spot on cable television or taking out a quarter page ad in any newspaper.

Microsoft has actually produced a wonderful little video demonsrating the disconnect between traditional advertising and the consumers. It's called The Breakup, with a couple meeting at a restaurant. He is old advertising and she is the consumer. It's great. Check it out! It'll get you thinking.

Wired Magazine is calling it "the biggest reunion since Simon & Garfunkel". Others are breathlessly hyping it as "historic", "much anticipated", etc. etc. You get the idea.

So, what's up? Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are taking the stage tomorrow: together. As in, at the same time. As in, yes they will interact publicly with each other. The last time the two made a joint appearance was ten years ago at MacWorld Boston. Gates dropped by with a $150 million check to invest in Apple (and save it's floundering bacon at the time).

For over 20 years now, the personal computing world has been divided in two (not evenly divided, mind you. But, divided nonetheless): Windows-based PC's versus Apple Macintosh. This is a rivalry we all know well. I've always likened it to dog and cat people. People tend to be rabidly one or the other.

The Gates-Jobs meeting tomorrow, at the D5 conference, is not expected to yield any joint announcements. And despite the hype, it's not exactly a Nixon-to-China moment either (for one thing, I'm not sure who would be Nixon and who would be China).

As usual, the technorati press is making a mountain out of a molehill (they just can't help themselves). This is less like a Simon & Garfunkel reunion and more like "A Very Brady Christmas".

Are Microsoft and Apple still fierce competitors? Of course, and will be for years to come. What's different is we no longer live in a dog and cat world. The PC world is no longer divided into two. It's fragmented into several. In fact, it's not even a PC world anymore. It's not about the desktop anymore, or the operating system, or the browser anymore. It's about the web, itself.

These titans of tech are just not as, well, titanic, as they used to be. The real titans these days are collectively the little guys: entrepreneurs, smaller businesses, the lone innovators, the end user. The web truly has become the great democratizer socially and in the business world, making the old superpowers of silicon a little less relevant.

There is one thing that could make tomorrow more exciting at the Gates-Jobs appearance: a surprise walk-on by one of the other keynoters: Google CEO Eric Schmidt, also on the conference agenda. If that were to happen, Gates and Jobs would likely be speaking more from common ground than different.

Google Calendar - Now Optimized for Mobile Users

With mobile devices outselling PC's four to one these days, it stands to reason that more people than ever are wanting their core web-based applications to be mobile web-based applications. Enter Google calendar, now optimized for the handset crowd. Makes sense!

When do you need your calendar the most?

Exactly!

Ever wonder how your website stacks up against your competitors?

Ever wonder how your subsites are performing?

Alexa is a great tool for this. Here's an example. If you look at the bottom of
this page you can see that technology.inc.com gets about 1/20th of the traffic
of inc.com.

This is interesting data to those of us who write for both sites.

Here's a similar graph of my company's traffic compared to
some of our feeble competitors. (We laugh at them maniacally
sometimes)

Another great site for this is compete.com

The way these guys gather this data is by convincing you to install a toolbar
or similar technology into your browser and you become a ratings generator
sort of like having a box from AC Nielsen sitting on your TV,
except this one is built into your browser.

The difference is that Alexa and Compete's models are all software
and are installed by more people, don't cost much to generate data
and have to grade a million TV stations (websites) instead of 500.

Cool?

Curt Finch is the CEO of Journyx, a company founded to take people
to per-person per-project profitability nirvana...

Heading to the Beach?

You probably don't need me to remind you to bring your sunscreen. But, it's not just you that needs protection. What about your iPod? Consider this, the iPod Outerbox. It'll keep all 20,000 songs safe from wind, water and sand. It will not, however, keep you from leaving it behind. Perhaps a honest soul will find it and call your phone number which you hopefully had engraved on the back when you bought it.

Strange, But True...

Whether it's valid or an urban myth, for years many have feared there's a link between cellphone radiation and infertility. Fret no more. For $24 a pair, you can protect the family jewels with Isabodywear's new line of underwear that fends off radiation with a built in silver lining (like those gloomy clouds that aren't so gloomy after all).

Have a great holiday! We'll get back to business tomorrow.

- Renee

The arms race between the pirates and Microsoft continues with
the latest Vista hack that creates a Vista DVD that installs
immediately without licensing keys required.

Why is everyone always picking on Microsoft?

Curt Finch run Journyx and feels sorry for Bill (but only a little)

The Internet bottomfeeders are at it, again!

Apparantly, there's an email circulating around targeting small to mid-size businesses claiming to be from the Better Business Bureau. You guessed it, it's not. The email warns the business owner that a consumer complaint has been filed against their company, which has been attached to the email in the form of a Microsoft Word document. The whole thing is bogus, of course. And, in fact, there's an embedded keylogging program in the infected attachment that can capture your personal data and then upload it to a mysterious server in Malaysia (not the corporate headquarters of the BBB, by the way).

Here's a link to the BBB's own alert about this latest phishing expedition, including a mock-up of what the email looks like.

After much anticipation and chatter, today's the first day you can actually get a Dell computer with the Linux-based operating system, Ubuntu 7.04. That is, starting at 4pm Central Standard Time (aka Austin, TX-time or Bevo-time).

I'm trying to avoid the temptation of riffing on the 4pm thing. I don't get it. Did the sales people have an off-site earlier in the day? Are Santa's elves still installing the software? Whatever!

There are three models offering the Ubuntu alternative, two desktops and a notebook. Starting prices range from $599 (for the low end desktop and the notebook) to $849 for the higher end desktop.

Dell attributes the marketing move to customer feedback on IdeaStorm, where Dell communes online with it's public. The consumer push for Linux on Dell was one of the first suggestions posted when IdeaStorm went live back in February.

If you've ever wanted to know more about Linux, you'll like this.

A teacher out there has put all his Linux educational materials
up on the web for you to look at for free. These courses would be better
if their was audio with them, but they're useful as is.

If Vista problems have you in a funk, it's not a bad place to look.

Curt runs Journyx in Austin.

Answer: maybe, looking good!

The Internet Engineering Task Force, a leading internet standards body, has formally given it's blessing to what appears to be a rock-solid way to block spammers and phishing types. It's called DomainKeys Identified Mail (or DKIM for short, because geeks love acronyms).

Roughly, this is how DKIM works. Someone like PayPal shoots you an email with an embedded digital signature that you can't even see. Your ISP's mail server verifies the signature against the source. If it matches, you get the email. If it doesn't, goodbye. The digital signatures use something called public key cryptography, which is considered all but inpenetrable.

Let's hope it works. In the meantime, I've amended a little poem about spam (that also doubles as a homage to my hero, Dr. Seuss) that I wrote awhile back.

I do not like you Spam-I-Am.

Perhaps this new standard will make you flee,
I'll just have to watch and wait and see.

You know, being a software support guy is a tough job.

And I know it's tough. I used to do it,
although what I did was more like bug fixing
than one on one customer interaction oriented
support which for my personality was probably
easier than the job that first line support people do.

Nobody ever calls into support and says

"Things are just working great! Thought you should know."

"What's a backspace key?"

I remember back at IBM once hearing my manager talk to a customer saying,

"No ... the backslash key, the one above the enter key that has the verticle bar symbol on it too. Not the one with the question mark. No. No. Not that one. No. Aargh!"

You couldn't always tell from his voice when he
was getting pissed off but you could always
see it on his face. Here's a guy that knows more
about NFS packet loss than
anyone on the planet and he's dealing with
this nimrod who can't find the '\' key.

And it was really funny watching him steam up.
At least I thought it was at the time.

Anyway, that's all just a long way of saying that I know it's not easy.
And just for me personally, it means loads to me when
customers react positively - when they say things or send
notes to us about how great our support is.

So if you've gotten good support from some software company
recently, please send their CEO a note. He'll appreciate it.

Curt runs a project accounting software company in Austin, Texas.

Computers, printers, laptops, monitors don't come cheap when brand new. But when it's time to upgrade to the next model, you can't give 'em away.

You still can't. But for a small fee, it just got a lot easier to get rid of them and without being a bad eco-citizen to boot. It's as easy as dropping off said piece of gear at your nearest Staples.

For $10 a device, Staples will take most types of office technologies off your hands and recycle them according to EPA standards. The service does not include smaller items like keyboards or mice, or those big stand alone printers the size of a Smartcar.

It's also okay if you didn't buy the gear at Staples, in the first place. No questions asked. Some 133,000 computers are chucked each year in this country. Getting rid of one the right way is often very hard to do in many communities. Staples is the first national retailer to offer on site drop offs for computer equipment recycling. For some reason, I feel a need to hit that big red Easy button right about now.

A Clear Case of Over Technology

It's the USB mini-fridge. No batteries. No AC plug. It's a USB powered refrigerator just big enough to house a Coke can (it's even red. Sorry Pepsi.) I suppose you gotta do something with all those extra holes in your USB hub.

A friend of mine running a small software firm here in Austin
recently made a bold statement:

Everyone's sick of marketing. They're inundated. We no longer do any sales or marketing in the traditional sense. Our support team was generating 3 times the leads of sales and marketing just by providing great support and asking for leads in the process.

It seems to be working well for their company. This technique is putting
them in touch with IT directors who you couldn't find on any email
list, couldn't find in Hoover's, and couldn't reach in any other way.

Might be stupid but I'll bet it's brilliant.

Curt runs a timesheet company in Texas.

When we left off on Friday, I was blathering on about terabytes. It's Monday and I'm going to blather some more. I ran across this little posting over the weekend that I just had to share with the class. It's a great little wakeup call about transferring data over the internet. At what point are the files so big, you're better off putting them on disc and sending them out overnight?

Keep in mind, the average pipe to the internet is about 100 megabits. That translates to about 45 gigs a hour. It would take 24 hours to send one terabyte of information.

Back in March, Google took the challenge of moving 120 terabytes of information from the Space Telescope Science Institute (aka the Hubble telescope folks). The 120 TBs were basically the entire database of the Hubble Telescope, including all the pictures. How did they do it? FedEx. That standard 100 megabit connection would have taken four months.

Data storage is cheap. Moving it, less so. Remember time is money before you hit the upload or attach button. You may want to rethink your options, first. Sometimes, technology doesn't have all the answers.

Many law firms have this problem, as do large companies.

You have 10 meeting rooms and scheduling them correctly, avoiding conflicts,
and getting everyone to come to the meetings is handled with post-it notes.

Along comes a company sellling meeting room scheduling software.
I would never have believed you could have made a business out of this
but these guys are publicly traded.

It just goes to show that you should never let anyone tell you your
idea is crazy.

Curt runs an ondemand timesheet company in Texas.

Why? Because, consumer hard drives have officially broken the barrier. Behold, the first terabyte hard drive. It's the Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 (who names these things? I keep wanting to call it the Hitachi Deathstar, myself.). Regardless, if you are so inclined, you can completely geek out about it and read the review on extremetech.com (written by people who geek out for a living).

I'm more interested in the cultural significance of being able to buy a full terabyte of storage for a mere $399. Does that sound like a lot of money? Think of it this way. That's one trillion bytes of information. I tried to calculate the cost of each byte and there were so many zeroes on the right side of the decimal point, I gave up. Let me put it this way, a terabyte equals 1000 gigabytes and that comes out to 39 cents a gigabyte. I paid a lot more than that 10 years ago for my 1 gig hard drive.

More perspective: go back to 1976 and the first Cray-1 supercomputer. A supercomputer, folks! It had an 8 megabyte hard drive. This is one trillion bytes (or one billion megabytes).

Even more perspective: one terabyte of information equals 50,000 trees worth of information on paper.

This is the reason we live in the information age. We have room to store it, organize it, manipulate it and retrieve it at will. No where will you find a more vivid benchmark showing the quantum leap we've taken technologically in just one generation.

What does all this cheap and vast data storage mean to smaller organizations? It's made you bigger than you are. It's leveled the playing field and enabled you to access business tools and richer knowledge that would have been completely out of your reach back as recently as the days of disco. It's why so many smaller businesses don't stay small for long.

Just a byte of information to ponder. One among a trillion. Have a great weekend!

If you want to improve your web rankings
for keywords that are relevant to your
business, you first have to know where you are. Here is
a free keyword ranking tool that will let you keep up with it all.

You can even graph how you're doing vs. competitors on keywords
of interest over time.

If they started charging for it I wouldn't be all that surprised.

Buy some of their stuff or something. They deserve some money
for this awesome free service. I think they sell tshirts or something.
(I am ashamed to admit I've never bought a thing from them.)

Curt Finch is the CEO of Journyx, a time and expense software company in Texas.

To be exact, at his keynote address at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in Los Angeles, Bill Gates said this:

The phone is going to be the PC, and the PC is going to be the phone.

It's already happening. In fact, handhelds are outselling PC's about four to one. In Europe, one fifth of all web surfing is being done from a mobile device. And, in less than nine months, more than 500,000 domains have been registered with the newly available .mobi extension designed for the newly emerging mobile web. The biggest number of registrars are in the United States, followed by China.

While the so-called mobile web hasn't hit critical mass yet. It is definitely coming. While we wait, now is the time for companies to start thinking ahead and preparing. What new markets will open up to your company that weren't there before? How will you connect with them?

Is it time to start thinking of the mobile web as an entirely new distribution channel?

A Plug for Low End Theory

I just love this Thursday feature on Gizmodo and can't resist passing it on today because the information is just so darn useful. Brenden Koerner has a great little round-up today of how to shop various auction sites, etc. in search of bargain basement technology being sold off by state governments.

The State of Arkansas actually hosts its own auction site where you can find everything from old grey metal file cabinets to PocketPCs. And if you're in driving distance to Albany, NY, the State of New York would be happy to sell you five Blackberries for a mere $61 a piece.

Hey, it's not VC money. But, saved money is earned money.

If you sit in front of a computer
all day like most knowledge workers,
consider this.

Imagine if you were burning 50 pounds of
excess weight per year at work instead of
chompin down the twinkies.

I think I need to get me one first.

It's hard to imagine there is anyone left on the planet who isn't a registered eBay user. But for those two or three people left, eBay is willing to pay the affiliate seller who bags 'em up to twice what they are paying now.

Starting June 1st, eBay is significantly raising their payouts in their affiliate program. Payouts come in two forms: ACRUs (a new eBay active user) and a % of eBay's revenue from fees. Here's a link to eBay's announcement where you can compare the old payout tables to the new ones starting in a couple of weeks.

It's just so nutty, it just might work. This just in from Japan: the wired umbrella. And, I don't mean those little bracing wires that flip out the other way in anything worse than 5 mph wind gusts. This is actually a real umbrella with a real connection to the internet with a built-in camera. You can upload and download pictures with your FlickR account and view your own personal slideshow. The Pileus, as it is called, also comes with GPS and partners with Google Earth to make sure you know where you're going. Don't believe me. Take a look at the demo on youtube. No word on when the Pileus will find its way to US business travelers or for what cost.

Looking for ways to attract more eyeballs to your company blog? Hot off the presses (what would be the online metaphor for that?)... the new Top 20 Lists of social bookmarking sites put out by Compete and Quantcast, respectively. Who came in at number one? I'll give you a hint. You'll have to Digg it up for yourself, by clicking on the link.

I've been thinking about the average lifespan of common items all morning. What set me off, you ask? Thank you for asking. It was this endearing little story of a man and his vacuum cleaner.

Archie Cameron is 78 years old and the proud owner of what is believed to be the oldest known working vacuum cleaner. Archie acquired his 71-year old Goblin Triumph electric cleaner from his late mother. Despite having to replace the shoulder strap with one from a suitcase and other minor repairs, the Goblin has been faithfully sucking up dust in Archie's house without interuption since 1936.

Just to take you back, 1936 was the year Jesse Owens showed up Hitler at the Berlin Summer Olympics, the BBC tried out a new medium called television and the Bay Bridge opened in the San Francisco Bay Area. It's the year that John McCain, Mary Tyler Moore, Dennis Hopper and Bobby Darin (of Mac the Knife fame) were all born. It's also the year that Rudyard Kipling, King George V of Great Britain, Ivan Pavlov (yes, as in Pavlov's dogs) and John Heisman all died.

Clearly, a lot has happened since then.

Now let's take a look at some of the average lifespans of common products we all use today.

Desktop PC: two to five years
Car: 13 years, 145,000 miles (note: the average new car owner trades in around 4 years and 55,000 miles)
Bic pen: six months to a year
DVD Player: seven years (For the record, I don't believe that)
iPod: Officially built to last four years (Good luck!)
Cell phone: 14 months

I have long believed, yes, even through the first Internet bubble, that the phone system was grossly undervalued as a business tool. Many people go to great lengths and great expense to make sure their web portals to their business are finely tuned, but I wonder how many spend as much time and effort on their phone system? Interestingly enough, if your business is like most small to medium businesses, more than 60% of your revenue comes via the phone or from outside sales personnel taking orders. While email is very handy and convenient, significant amounts of commerce are still generated over the trusty old phone system. In many cases, the cost of call center applications for small business have come way down, enabling small business owners to generate even more revenue from the phones, and to capture even more information about their customers. Maybe it’s time to take another look at how you are using your phone system and figure out if you are truly optimizing that particular asset. If it’s not being used to generate income for your enterprise, it’s costing you money.

How does Apple continually come up with things that just look better,
feel better and sound better than everybody else? This article says
it's all about dictatorship allowing the brilliance of vision to come
through.

Another of my favorite postings on this subject from the "Fake Steve Jobs"
blog is I think probably pretty revealing about how the dictator thinks.

It's also really really funny.

But I've never met him so what do I know.

Curt runs Journyx in Texas and sells time sheet software.

Who says Microsoft doesn't have a sense of humor...

This is why I love youtube and other similar sites. Microsoft recently hosted web designers and developers at its Mix '07 Conference in Las Vegas. And, it apparantly wasn't all ones and zeroes talk. Poking fun at Apple, Microsoft debuted a video spoof of a new bogus product called the oPhone. The video has found its way allover the web, including youtube and countless blogs. Check it out! It's the silliest thing to come out of Redmond since Microsoft Bob.

What to do with old PCs

Straight from the people-who-have-too-much-time-on-their-hands file, I give you this. This is what I call quality slacker time on the company clock. Note: this video has been viewed well over a million times and has nearly 4000 comments. Confirming what we already knew: slacking is contagious.

This has nothing to do with technology for small to midsize businesses...

But, it's the weekend and I'm posting it anyway. NASA really, really wants to go back to the moon. So much so, they have put out this suitable- for- Hollywood super slick trailer. Check this out! Yes, those are your tax dollars at work. Honestly, I don't mind. I kind of enjoyed it. Notice I took the high road and didn't make one joke about astronauts in diapers.

Have a great weekend! We'll get back to business on Monday. - Renee Oricchio

As well as you think you know 'em - think again, while I share with you this insightful tale.

I have a friend who is a veteran IT professional. She's worked in network security and software development for publicly traded pharmaceutical companies, a major university and one of the most well known medical sites on the Internet. She lives online with a cell phone glued to her ear at all times.

She is a shameless geek.

The other day I got one of those emails from her. This one explaining that AOL and Microsoft are about to merge and for some reason Microsoft is subsequently beta testing a new email forwarding program. For those that participate, hundreds of dollars per successful forwarded email will add up to one really big check coming in the mail from Uncle Bill (Gates, that is).

My friend fell for it, forwarding it to me and her entire address book, including my 67 year old mother.

Dear old Mom emailed her back, cc'ing everyone else on the list, pointing out the obvious: it's bogus and what's more, you can read all about it on snopes.com.

There's a walkaway lesson in here somewhere. The IT pro fell for the email. The 67 year old retiree in Florida who thinks Blue tooth is a dental issue, not only saw through the whole thing - she knew about Snopes, the online resource for urban myths of all types.

Marketing types love to pigeon hole people and group them into demographics. Beware! Beware! Beware!

I am. The drugs are coming soon though according to some research published
in Nature recently.

Let's hope it helps us all soon.

Cheers to tech! One by one, they seem to be getting it. Hardly a day goes by without another press release or two announcing new intiatives to go green. Today, two of the biggest names in not only high tech, but Corporate America, have made announcements to increase their efforts in reducing energy consumption.

Intel's new chips more energy efficient

Debuting its new palette of processors Centrino Pro and Centrino Duo, both primarily for notebooks, Intel is lauding its new lineup as not only faster but better at economizing energy consumption. Two of the reasons why: the use of integrated chip sets requires less juice to run than separate chips and the Intel Turbo Memory feature that makes it 20% faster to power up or power down a laptop.

Big Blue turning green

Yes, I know. IBM is not located in Silicon Valley. Don't get nitpicky on me. I couldn't resist the headline. Regardless, the folks in Purchase, NY at the IBM mothership have committed to investing one billion dollars a year in helping their clients reduce the energy consumption of their data centers by 50%. The company will be launching a portal site explaining the initiative for interested companies in the near future. I will offer a link, when it becomes available.

And props to mobile industry too...

One last green announcement today, this one from Nokia. We all do it, or rather don't do it - unplug our chargers when the battery is actually fully charged. Collectively, this is a huge energy waste. Nokia claims we could light up 85,000 homes if we did just this one small thing. Perhaps we'd all do a better job if we just got a little reminder each time. With that in mind, Nokia is committing to building in a little alarm system into future phones to do just that. The so-called unplug alerts will be available on the upcoming 1200, 1208 and 1650 models.

This comes courtesy Marketing Pilgram, who somehow got hold of leaked screen grabs from Google's new print ad service. The new service is currently in by-invitation-alone beta.

Google adwords, is of course, not new. Expanding the service to newspaper ads is. Roughly, how it works and when it works, it will allow businesses to buy ad space in just about any newspaper in the country through Google through a bidding process. You make an offer on say a quarter page ad in your local paper. Within 72 hours, the paper says yes or no and negotiations go from there. You can manage your ad buys, by setting up start and end dates when the ads will run, as well as by setting a weekly ad budget. The list of participating newspapers range from The Montgomery Advertiser to The New York Times. Once the ad runs, a thumbnail from the actual paper will show up in your cue.

Dell Notebooks Going Green

Dell Computers announced today it is rolling out three new notebooks that can be configured to meet the new Energy Star 4.0 requirements. The notebooks will be available sometime in July of this summer.

Web 2.0 101

I can't resist throwing this in today. I've been immersed in Web 2.0 technology lately and ran across this brilliant video thought piece put together by a Professor Michael Wesch out of Kansas State University. Wesch is an anthropology professor who specializes in digital ethnography. This is his take on Web 2.0... and us! Please take a look.

The Nuance of the Hosted Solution

There is a very strong emerging trend in the SMB space for customers to purchase software as a service. This trend has bled over into the telecommunications arena in the past two or three years on a grand scale. The interesting thing about it, it's not a new concept in the telecommunications business. While the concept may be new to software, it's been around for an eternity in communications. Anyone who has owned a home or a business prior to the 1980's might recall the days when purchasing a phone or a phone system was very rare. You typically rented your system month to month, or longer term for a discounted rate. PBX systems were rare, you either had Centrex service from the phone company or you had a small key system for your office. Of course, back in those days, ATT was "Ma Bell", and controlled most of the access lines in the United States; my how things are different today! Hosted or Managed solutions are now becoming popular again with the SMB crowd. Here's a little more information about them.

My colleague went to the IBM Partnerworld conference in St Louis last
week. She was mesmerized by the brilliance of
some of the speakers who are some of the true
thought leaders in business today.

Looking to each side during one of these great
speeches, she was aghast at the inattentive men
demonstrating their continual crackberry addictions...

It's so simple, there's got to be a good reason why it just wouldn't work. Mikko Hypponen, a chief research officer at F-Secure Corp. in Helsinki, has published an interesting idea in Foreign Policy. Hypponen suggests creating an exclusive domain just for financial institutions, like .bank. One of the things making it exclusive would be the price tag, as in $50,000 to register. Hypponen believes, at the very least, this would automatically weed out the amateurs in fraud schemes like phishing.

Attention Business Travelers...

If you're avoiding the airlines, by hopping Amtrak when you can, then good news. Buying tickets just got easier. Amtrak has announced it is now selling tickets via cell phone through their new Amtrak.mobi web site, especially designed for the mobile crowd. Cool!

Don't you hate it when...

you send out an email from one account and it uses the return address of another, because you have all your email accounts going into one place. Like for example, someone emails your customer-facing address (bill@billsboxsprings.com). Then, when you respond, it uses your personal account (bill@hotmail.com).

Here's a nice little workaround from Web Worker Daily, if you use the Thunderbird email tool. It's a little known feature known as identies. It allows you to assign return monikers to all your various email accounts, as you see fit.

Yup, I barely noticed either. The new Windows Live Hotmail is officially out of beta today (18 months later). I switched over to check it out and, yes, there are a few new features worthy of note.

1. The mailbox has been doubled in size to 2 GB.

2. It's prettier, a more elegant interface, that you can customize a little. I say a little, and mean it. It's a drop down menu with a dozen or so color choices. I picked orange as an homage to my beloved University of Texas. For that reason, I would have appreciated a darker sienna burnt orange, rather than that lighter other-UT shade of orange.

3. It now includes an option to include a view of what's actually in the email without opening it. Some people hate that feature, because they're afraid someone will read over their shoulder before they have a chance to click off. You don't have to use the feature. I happen to like it, because I work from home and like having a peek at the contents before I commit to opening it up.

4. If your hotmail account is a secondary account that you rarely check, no worries. Old Hotmail deactivated automatically after two months. The new Hotmail does not.

5. Uh, hmmm.. I think that's about it.

It's a nice upgrade for hotmail. But it doesn't exactly live up to the Live part, which is supposed to be the new web 2.0 version of hotmail.

I could also do without the American Idol and Nokia ads that take up 25% of the workspace.

"At the end of the day, our attention is all that we have." - Ken Burns

Ken Burns is my favorite filmmaker ever I think. He
understands the value of time.

Time is more fleeting today than it ever has been.

Business people today confront overwhelming demands on
their time. Time has become more critical than money,
but most companies don't yet allocate it with the same
care as they would more traditional assets.

Most managers understand that time must be managed,
accounted for, and invested in ways that maximize
return, but this is easier said than done. Companies
seldom possess the right processes and infrastructure
to make the most of time resources. They often confuse
the core business process of time resource allocation
with simple timesheets or time management calendars.
This is as dangerous as confusing a simple check
register with a companys capital investment strategy.

To allocate and manage any resource, it must first be
seen clearly and then tracked carefully. Time tracking
should be a fundamental part of any business. Almost
every business tracks time at some level, even if only
for payroll.

At the most basic level, some companies employ a
simplistic, homegrown system that is based on
spreadsheets or paper and pencil. Yet even companies
that have fully automated time tracking systems
sometimes fail to leverage those systems to drive
profits up and costs down.

Leveraging such systems is neither easy nor obvious.
Some companies understand the potential gains
associated with managing time as an asset, but lack the
knowledge, tools or resolve to do so. Many others
succumb to a misinformed, unnecessary distrust of time
tracking. Still others mistakenly believe that time
tracking systems are simple, and as a result, they
internally develop or buy inadequate systems that fail
to deliver real value to the entire enterprise.

A well functioning time tracking system should lead to
automation of payroll, client billing and above all,
project accounting. If it doesn't, you're missing out
on much of the value.

Curt runs a time tracking software company in Austin.

What happens in Athens, stays in Athens?

We recognize that the use of a dead goat was in poor taste...

One word: yuck!

Yes, I know there are very serious helpful applications that can come from.... Oh help me, I can't even type this with a straight face. Robotic noses! Yes, yes, robotic noses. In case you didn't know. There are scientists around the world very hard at work right this minute developing robo-schnozs.

It gets better. There've recently been some dramatic new developments in the quest for the perfect iHonker. It works better with a little synthetic, er um, mucus. Nice to know when we all get replaced by cyborgs someday, Kleenex will still have a customer base.

Have a great weekend! We'll get back to business on Monday.

If you haven't heard enough about Microsoft Vista (the latest Windows version released back in January) to make you cling to your XP version for dear life, here's a little more fodder for your fears. Ars Technica (great techie web site, by the way) did an informal experiment on what happens when you upgrade a variety of older PCs with Vista. The surprising part: the fairly new IBM Thinkpad did not fair as well as the five year old desktop for the home user. Sinatra was right. It's just a crazy, cuckoo world.

In 1999, the then CEO of Sun Microsystems said something that infuriated a huge number of people.

"You have zero privacy anyway," Scott McNealy told a group of reporters and analysts.

"Get over it."

Competitors chose this moment to attack everything Sun had ever done or thought of doing as obviously nefarious in light of this comment.

Isn't competition fun?

Well, that was way back in the dark ages in 1999, and Scott probably never considered what Google would know about you in the distant future of 2007:

Go to this link (you will have to login with a google ID which you probably have already but they'll get you one if not)

The June issue of Business 2.0 Magazine will make it to newstands and subscribers on time. Why is that news? Because, it almost didn't. Just two weeks before the issue was to go to press - oops - the entire issue: layouts, articles, advertisements, the whole banana, was accidently deleted off the editorial server. Even bigger oops - there was no back-up copy.

The magazine is catching all kinds of gleeful ribbing on tech sites and blogs. I will not join in. I say kudos to the edtiorial staff that scrambled to reassemble two to three months of work in a matter of days. I'm sure the people involved will one day, years from now, look back on this - and still not laugh.

This is what they would call at my daughter's elementary school a teaching moment. So, giggle all you want. But, then go back up your data.

Another take on Google hell

Forbes has an interesting article on web sites who have fallen from grace in the Google search engine... and left to languish in a world without traffic, views or hits.

The article features a number of horror stories profiling company web sites that somehow hit Google's algorithm tripwires just-so and plummeted from high rankings in their search categories down to oblivion. One jewelry business was stuck in what's called Google Hell for six months and lost $500,000 in sales. Apparantly, it's like the Hotel California. You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.

The story is generating a lot of buzz. Techdirt makes a number of great points about businesses that rely too heavily on Google in the first place, as well as the fine line between maximizing search engine optimization and merely exploiting it. Another teaching moment...

Mea Culpa! Mea Culpa! Mea Culpa!

Okay, so I saw the headlines a few days ago that Google has overhauled it's personalized home pages. It's even be rechristened - iGoogle (citing some speculation in the blogosphere that the new name will surely put Apple on the warpath, or uh, iWarpath). I even thought about putting something about the relaunch on this blog. But, nah, this is more about personal use than business use.

Hmmm.. so this morning I started tinkering with the new feature. Two hours later, during the heart of my business day, I now realize this isn't personal - it really is business. As in lost business - lost productivity! It's bad enough that I'm self-employed and went down this rabbit hole (albeit fun and delightful). I can't imagine having a staff of people chewing up the clock playing around with this thing.

Oh my gosh! The features, feeds and widgets - all customizable I might add - are endless. I picked the tea house theme, set up a separate page of nothing but story feeds from technology blogs and news outlets, found a really cool clock widget, calculator and online radio for streaming directly from my homepage. The to-do list tool is pretty cool. Lessee, weather, a calendar, on and on and on. And all of it customized to match my teahouse palette of colors.

In the end, will this help me motor through my workday. Answer: somewhat. The to-do list, the story feeds and the three or four bookmarks that I use all day long to log into things like my publishing tool, e-mail, etc. - having that all in one place will be helpful. But the other 90% of what's on my iGoogle home page will mostly help me goldbrick further on a daily basis.

Perhaps Google should have renamed it iGoof off. Just a thought.

This is a gizmo you just have to see. It's out of Japan, of course. It's the latest development in earbud technology - an earbud that is also a microphone. The InCore is designed to pick up your voice through your ear. In the process, it dramtically reduces ambient noise from bleeding into your conversations, The idea is that cell phone users calling in from noisy places like airports or sporting events would be able to whisper into their ear buds and be understood on the other end of the line.

If i can soon talk out of my ears, can bending a spoon with the power of my mind be far behind?