Sorry! It's that time of year. Couldn't resist a little homage to Charles Dickens and his seasonal classic "A Christmas Carol".

The Computer Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) surveyed its members about technology past, present and future in honor of all of the innovations of the past 25 years.

I love the questions. So much so, I want to share a few of my favorites, the survey results and my own personal answer. Feel free to chime in your answers in comments.

Who are the top ten most influential people from technology over the past 25 years?

No surprises here, 84% picked Bill Gates from Microsoft, 75% picked Steve Jobs from Apple and a little over half picked Michael Dell of Dell Computers.

I would agree with all of the above and add Steve Case from AOL. AOL is less important now. But ten years ago, it provided the training wheels version of the Internet to make it safe, easy to use and provided lots of easy to find content and chat rooms to entice real people to jump online. Without AOL, it would have been many more years before the Internet hit critical mass with the public.

Which were the most influential pieces of technology over the past 25 years?

Topping the list was Internet Explorer, Microsoft Word, Windows 95 and Microsoft Excel and the iPod.

I don't know that I would put them in that order, but I agree with the gravitas of all those innovations. I would also add PowerPoint, the Blackberry and high speed bandwidth options like cable modems and DSL lines.

Which device do you believe you'll be most reliant on 25 years from now?

Answers ranged from the personal digital assistant, cell phones, something yet to be invented and laptops and desktops - still!

Interesting! I don't know that I agree with desktops or even laptops. I do believe it's something not yet developed. Maybe voice recognition will finally mature into a usable technology for everyday life and with a faster Internet perhaps a virtual world that eclipses the real one.

Which IT-related issue will have the greatest impact on the tech industry 25 years now?

Those surveyed said wireless connectivity, globalization, going green and a shortage of IT skills.

I think wireless will be seamless long before 25 years from now. I agree with globalization and going green. IT staffing will catch up and will roll along with demand.

I would put at the top of my list: legal issues and compliance, security and privacy.

What do you think?

Here we go! When in doubt, monetize it with ad revenues.

Now it's PDF files. Apparantly, Yahoo and Adobe have cut a deal to embed "content appropriate" ads into PDF files. Publishers of the PDF document have the option of signing up for ads and then taking a cut based on pay-per-click. Adobe and Yahoo take their cuts on each ad, as well.

I don't know why this bothers me, but it does. I think of PDF files as internal documents. Advertising on what is often an already moosey size file to save on my hard drive is anathema to me. Is there no place left int the online world or in the real world that has been left ad-free?

Tsk, Tsk Adobe and Yahoo! And Google, how did this one get by you? Sounds like such a Google-ish thing to do.

Here's my site recommendation of the week: Workplace2go.

Workplace2go offers a great way to try out or use various web-based tools as needed mostly month to month without making any big committments to long term contracts.

It's basically a pay-as-you-go model that falls into three categories of services: security, remote access and collaboration tools, including web conferencing.

Businesses can cancel anytime (although there's no pro-rated refunds for dumping out mid-month).

Workplace2go offers some of the most recognizable names in web-based solutions for small to midsize businesses that include WebEx collaboration and web conferencing products, Microsoft Exchange, Blackberry Mobile Service and Macafee.

Also on the list of offerings: lesser known companies like Kaseya that offers remote access to offsite computers and Arsenal that offers web-based backup data storage,

My alma mater, Virginia Tech, came in 3rd in a recent robotic car competition but came in first in spinning off a company that the Hokies own a portion of to commercialize the research. The contestants all used LIDAR, a device with 64 lasers spinning around on top of your car.

Soon we'll all be reading the newspaper while our car drives us to work.

Beware taxi driver - you're about to get fired!

According to a new study by Disruptive Analysis, by 2012 there will be just under 100 million mobile users staying connected via voice over WiFi. That's a lot of cell phone users. But its small potatoes compared to the number of handset users who will be using VoIP on 3G data networks. That number is expected to mushroom to 250 million people in the same amount of time.

What's the attraction? For mobile networks, VoIP is cheaper and can accomodate more traffic on what is an increasingly limited spectrum.

Keep in mind, this is all future talk. Although 2012 doesn't seem so far away.

From Russia with Love

What do Chicago, IL, Santa Clara, CA, Dublin, Ireland, San Antonio, TX, Quincy, WA.... and Irkutsk, Siberia all have in common?

All are future homes of new data centers Microsoft is building out allover the world (and I mean allover the world! Have you seen Irkutsk on a map ? Hint:It's just south of Usole-Siberskoye and just north of Listfvyanka.)

Irkutsk? Isn't that one of the territories in the game Risk?

All I can say to Microsoft employees is don't tick off Steve Ballmer. You can now literally get shipped off to Siberia.

At least there will be no problem keeping the servers cool!

What can we learn from our colleagues across the pond today?

There's a story floating around the press in Edinburgh, Scotland of a man who got fired from his job for calling in sick via text message. An employee tribunal (they have those there) has ruled the firing unfair. The big irony being pointed out is that about a year ago a woman in Wales had been fired via text message.

The woman was apparantly out sick that day with a migraine and had turned off the ringer on her cell phone. Her employer, anxious to give her the boot for a drop in her sales figures, couldn't wait for her to return to work the next day and sent her a text instead kissing off her job.

And I quote...

We've reviewed your sales figures and they're not really up to the level we need," shop manager Alex Barlett wrote in the message. "As a result, we will not require your services any more. Thank you for your time with us.

Source: ABC News

I don't know about the legality of all this on our side of the pond. I suspect it would depend on the state, the circumstances, whether a union is involved, all sorts of things but an obvious regard to simple human decency.

Stepping into the shoes of Miss Manners for a moment, let me say this about text messaging.

Text messaging is not the appropriate way to...

- fire an employee.
- or call in sick.
- or tell someone they've been denied a promotion.
- or they are only getting a 2% raise this year (but they're doing a great job, keep it up).
- or to tell your boss you've missed an important deadline.
- or to announce there will be no holiday party this year due to budget cuts.
- or to tell your boss, you've lost a major client.

Text messaging is appropriate...

- to send a quick follow up message regarding an earlier conversation.
- share a football score.
- tell your admin you're stuck at O'Hare and to please text message back if there's anything you need to know.
- to send a little "I love you" to your spouse, mistress, kids, etc.

In other words, use your head and not your thumbs.

I want Sandy is a virtual secretary. You just send her emails like "Remind me to put the turkey in the oven on Thursday at 9 am" and she'll send you text messages to your cellphone with reminders. I've been using it during this busy season and it's totally awesome.

Combined with Jott, which converts whatever you say on your cellphone into a text email or IM, you're supposedly supposed to be able to just speak the reminders into your phone but I only got that to work once and then it stopped. Maybe because Sandy stopped reading the subject lines of the email or something, I'm not sure. They changed something in the programming because it worked once.

With Jott you can blog entries to Google's Blogger service with your voice now, which is also cool, or to Twitter, to let your friends know where you're going.

I've been having alot of fun with these suckers.

When Curt isn't goofing around on the net he's running a project accounting software company called Journyx.

Several years after I graduated from high school, my alma mater sent me an alumni survey soliciting feedback from my high school experience. I went to a strong academic Catholic school in Southeast Texas (Kelly High School). One of the questions asked was what was the most important class that I had taken during my years there. I'm guessing they were looking for responses like third year French or New Testament.

My answer: typing! Hands down!

Now that typewriters have been replaced with computer keyboards, we don't call it "typing" anymore. We call it keyboarding. And many schools are loathe to teach even that.

Big mistake.

On yesterday's posting, I talked about a recent survey comparing users who text message with an iPhone versus a numeric keypad versus and old-fashioned QWERTY keypad.

For those of you who don't know what I mean by a QWERTY keyboard, it's that old fashioned layout of letters. It's three rows of letters (top row, starting left to right goes QWERTY. Thus, it's name.)

Here's why QWERTY is on the endangered species list.

- More people are relying more heavily on their handheld devices to communicate than their computer keyboard.

- The world's getting smaller everyday through the Internet and global marketplace. QWERTY was developed for the English language. For example, France uses the Matra Alice keyboard . Norwegian's use the Dvorak keyboard.

So is all of this a bad thing? Well, yes, I think so. People don't express themselves in writing by actually writing anymore. It's all word processing. But the increasingly preferred ways to process words don't actually process words. More often, words are abbreviated and mispelled. Sentences are shortened to phrases. Phrases are shortened to two or three words. And then there are emoticons and acronyms.

There's a word for all of this - illiteracy.

So concludes a new study put out by User Centric, Inc.

User Centric conducted usability tests comparing the iPhone to Blackberries and Samsung's E300 phone. The point being to see which is more user-friendly for text messaging: the iPhone, a numeric phone or phones like the Samsung with a QWERTY keypad.

Here are some of the more interesting nuggets from their findings:

- iPhone and QWERTY users text at about the same speed. BUT, big but, iPhone users make more mistakes.

- Numeric phone users go a little slower. But guess what? Duh, they make the fewest mistakes.
In fake, they made fewer mistakes migrating even when using an iPhone or QWERTY keypad unfamiliar to them.

In defense of the iPhone, it does self-correct somewhat. The key word in that sentence, however, is somewhat.

Bottomline: if you rely on your handheld for heavy texting or email, think twice before taking the iPhone plunge.

So, what’s a codec and why do you care?

Technically a codec is a compressor/decompressor, but the technicalities are only useful for some techies. To you and I it means software that is required to view movies. Telling you that you need to install a codec to view a movie is a popular way of infecting computers. Generally this trick has been associated with pornography sites where a message comes up that the person needs to install a codec for QuickTime or some other media player. When the person tries to install the codec they actually install malicious software instead. While this trick is usually used with porn sites, it can and almost certainly will be used with other types of sites as well.

If you are told that you need to install any software for any product, including Windows updates, always go to a trusted and known vendor’s web site for the software.

I would expect to see this type of attack on YouTube, MySpace, and other social sites. Don’t accept software if you don’t know exactly where it is coming from and you will save yourself some serious headaches.

Randy Abrams is the Director of Technical Education for ESET LLC

An environmental consulting firm that is a customer of mine came to me a few years ago with a problem. They had bought our software, so I called them up as I often do and said, "Why'd you buy our software?" and the CEO - Becky - said "I'm hoping you can help me with this huge problem I have."

"What's the problem?"

"Well we're growing really fast, from 40 to 300 people in just a few months - I mean - business is just incredible!"

"Okay. That doesn't sound like a problem to me. That sounds like a really good thing. I wish my business was doing that. What's the problem?"

"Well I can't find the time to get the bills sent out to the cusotmers. I'm looking at a giant stack of paper timesheets on the floor in the corner of my office over there that represents like $500,000 or something. Help!"

So we helped.

By putting an automated timesheet and travel expense mangement system in place, Becky was able to drastically increase the speed of billing, lowering her float and providing cash for the business. Accuracy also skyrocketed, leading to fewer situations where customers were rejecting inaccurate invoices, pushing A/R days-to-collect down further. Additionally since it was all automated it became possible to invoice in smaller increments more frequently, and since small bills tend to get paid more quickly, this improved the cash situation even futher.

All that cash - from the humble and often maligned timesheet. Go figure.

Getting bills out faster is worth a lot of money. If you can reduce your float permanently, it's worth loads.

Curt runs Journyx in Austin, TX.

I realize some folks, at best, associate wikis with Wikipedia. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the wide variety of relatively cheap, if not free, wiki solutions out there making it a lot easier for teams to get work done.

Think of a wiki as an online "war room" where colleagues can organize their projects and strategies in a customized layout that optimizes keeping everyone on the same page (so to speak).

It's all about online collaboration: hashing out ideas, updating each other on progress made, organizing information maximizing accessibility for all, sharing a mutual project calendar and mapping out benchmarks and deadlines, etc.

Using a wiki as a business and communication tool has other benefits. Here are some of the advantages.

1. Remember those email threads from hell. Who needs 'em? Look forward to less email.
2. How much time do you waste playing endless phone tag? Wiki plus instant messaging plus RSS feed (letting you know when the wiki's been updated) puts an end to most of that nonsense.
3. Old way: wading through War and Peace- length memos looking for the one paragraph that impacts you. New way: tagged by topic, just search out what you need.
4. Avoid reinventing the wheel. Search through the wiki for previous similar projects and build upon them.
5. Be exclusive, by controlling who has access to the wiki.
6. Be inclusive, by opening it up to as many collaborators as warranted.
7. Easily track the history of changes and updates. Sometimes the evolution of a project is where the greatest lessons come from for the next time.
8. Use surveys and polls to build consensus or gather feedback.
9. Who sez so? Source everything: data, budgets, deadlines, feasibility
10. Use pictures, maps, graphics, tables, videos to engage and interact with the rest of the team. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what's a five minute training video worth?

Tomorrow... I'll look at some of the wiki solutions out there and key features to consider.

Here's something for small businesses to check out. Intuit has apparantly made payroll a no- brainer. The software is web-based, meaning no software to load and subscription-based at about $30 a month.

The ap allows you to disperse payroll checks, as well as pay and file the appropriate tax forms.

If you're worried about security, just keep in mind Intuit probably has a lot more people safeguarding their network than you do.

You don't have to use Quickbooks to subscribe.

This commercial from Apple says it all.

With so many business types doing their business away from the business; Well, today, I'm making it my business to look at what road warriors worry about when they're away from the mother ship.

A recent survey in Great Britain, for example, by BT Openzone found that the top concern of business travelers (two thirds of those asked) is missing email while on the road.

Other worries included batteries going dead and IT problems.

Here are some tips to head off stress at the pass when away from home base:

- Always have at least one fully charged battery ready to go, just in case.
- Pack an ethernet cable. You can't count on the one in the hotel room.
- Put all the files you need for the trip on a thumb drive. If your laptop fails, you can always plug the thumb drive into your host's system.
- Pack all the above in a carry- on. Never put it in checked luggage. Have you seen the stats lately for lost luggage?
- Think Skype. It's a great way to avoid getting hammered by roaming fees, which can be staggering in certain places.
- If possible, have a cell phone or other after hours number that works for your IT department.
- Look up and print off a list of all the nearby hotspots at your destination. Include location maps.
- If you want to do work on the plane, great. But try to avoid making it necessary. Get the Powerpoint done before you get off the ground. Traveling is exhausting enough without the demands of a last minute deadline.
- Let all the usual contacts you email the most with on a daily basis know that you will be out of pocket most of the time while you're away. If the usual suspects know you're only checking email after hours their time, they are less likely to send you urgent emails about issues that need to be resolved by noon.
- If you don't want to be interupted during your day unless it's an emergency, assign a specific ringtone to the phone numbers that you would give priority too (your spouse, your admin, your boss, etc.).

Bottomline: offload as much of the daily drudge from home, as possible. You're already taking on a full day of business elsewhere.

Redirection is when you click on a link and it takes you to a different web site. This can be very useful and proper when done correctly. Open redirects are when a web site allows you to use them as part of a redirect. This is a dangerous practice that aids spammers, phishers, and other malevolent folks.

Here’s an example. If you go to http://www.esetonlinescanner.com/ it will redirect you to http://www.eset.eu/online-scanner. This makes it so that ESET doesn’t have to maintain separate websites for the same content. Now, if you click on www.linkedin.com/redirect?url=http://www.nasdaq.com/ it will take you to www.nasdaq.com and not Linked In.

The use of open redirects is a very common tactic used to fool spam filters and to fool people who believe they are going to one web site and don’t realize a redirect is in progress. Web sites should not be configured to allow open redirects.

You might want to write to Lined In and ask them why they are helping the bad guys. Multiple security professionals have already contacted them about this practice.

Randy Abrams is the Director of Technical Education for ESET LLC

Research in Motion (RIM), the company that makes Blackberry handheld devices launched a new wireless application this week specifically for small to midsize businesses.

Priced at $499 for up to 30 users (in other words, a little bit more than the cost of one iPhone), Blackberry Professional Software sounds like something worth taking a look at.

Key features include:

- It requires no additional hardware. It installs right on the email server.
- Strong security and encryption. In fact, it's the same architecture as that used on the enterprise version.
- Designed for optimal integration and collaboration with Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Domino, allowing seamless wireless synchronization with email, contacts and calendar.

In other words, it's a baby version of the enterprise solution with the price to match. Blackberry is just one of many companies aggressively targeting the SMB market these days.

Isn't it nice to be wanted?

It isn't easy. As discussed on this blog yesterday, the Internet has made companies hypersensitive about their branding in all forms (even certain colors and shapes).

Here are some tips to play it safe (although if you want bullet proof, get a lawyer).

- Incorporate your proper name (unless it's Oprah) into the company name and thus all the branding.

- Looking good,so far? Get the ball rolling and trademark or special mark that puppy.

Investing a little money in legal advice up front may be an expense you don't want to deal with. but compare it to the potential impact on the business and the cost of redoing all your branding online and offline if there's an infringement issue.

Once upon time, startup businesses thought up a name and a logo for their new company. Unless it was a really obvious rip-off like Coca-Cola or Proctor & Gamble, the chances were good there'd never be a legal issue. Thus, just about every town in America has it's own ABC Plumbing, for example.

Until the Internet, who cared?

Now with the Internet, everyone cares. (By the way, here's another ABC Plumbing, and another, and another.

Even the smallest, local businesses now have a company web site. Oops! That's a lot of plumbers wanting www.abcplumbing.com, a copyright on the name and mits off anything that even comes close to looking like their logo.

In other words, from entrepreneurs to enterprises, everyone has gotten pretty prickly about their brands.

The Internet is a great place to have your carefully crafted logo ripped off by another company. It's also a great place to accidently do it to some other company and get nailed for it.

I say accidently, because in addition to the obvious rip-offs like stealing a name brand or specific logo; there are other ways to get in hot water that you probably haven't considered.

For example, I ran across a little tidbit today that apparantly T-Mobile has a trademark on the color magenta. Read the fine print on their site, yourself.

Sound ridiculous? Personally, I think so. But then again, something like 80% of visual information is directly linked with color. Thus Coca-Cola and red, Target and red, The American Red Cross and, uh, red.

Hmm... So tell me again why T-Mobile needs sole custody of the color magenta?

Other areas where startups can get into trouble: logo shapes (hint: don't come up with anything resembling the silhouette of a coke bottle), certain sounds (like NBC's three bells or Microsoft's startup jingle), or even holograms.

One area where we are still safe for now: smell. Apparantly a French company tried to trademark the smell of strawberries and lost.

Confused? Come back tomorrow and I'll try to put together a list of tips how to play it safe when designing a new logo or company name.

Mac Attack

A trojan horse program that affects newer Apple computers has been discovered in the wild. The Trojan purports to be a program from Apple that is required to view the movies at a porn site.

In order to become infected a user has to click on a few confirmations and enter their administrative password on their computer. Apple fanatics can make ostriches look incompetent at head burying when it comes to acknowledging security issues on the platform. Apple users are advised to learn from history. There is nothing inherent to the operating system that prevents it from running viruses or trojans. Apple has long benefitted from the fact that the platform simply wasn’t of interest to most attackers, especially the financially motivated ones.

History has taught that UNIX, fundamentally the Apple operating system today, can run worms, viruses, and trojans. The first major internet worm ran only on UNIX. History has taught that computer users can be tricked into entering whatever information is required to access malicious code.

The new Trojan is not a major threat at this point, however it does show that Apple computers have caught the attention of an author writing malware for profit. The same attack would probably be successful on a defaced YouTube site as well as in many other places. As Apple gains market share the attacks will obviously increase in scope and frequency.

Apple users are advised to pay attention to the security best habits advised for Windows users.

Randy Abrams is the Director of Technical Education for ESET LLC

We have a free product on our website that you can download and use forever. We get 1000s of people every month doing this. When they do, they get a chance to take a survey, and one person a month (out of typically about 100) gets an Amazon gift certificate in their email. One of the questions on the survey is this:

6. Say anything here. A crazy problem or idea you think we could help you with? A joke. Something you like or don't like about Journyx. Random obscenities. Your vision of the future for web technology? Anything. Something wierd or useful. Go Crazy.

It's my favorite question ever. It's like some sort of internet web software enthusiast random zeitgeist weirdness. Here are some of the best responses (that are printable in this venue.):

Lenovo Thinkpad just doesn't have the same ring to it as IBM Thinkpad. Regardless, possibly the strongest brand in laptops ever will be no more as of next year. It was only a matter of time. When Lenovo bought IBM's Thinkpad division a few years ago, the original deal brokered was five additional years using the IBM brand.

Let's hope Lenovo's not getting too cocky. But sales have apparantly been good lately. So good, in fact, they've decided they don't need the IBM brand anymore and have volunteered to wean themselves away from their Big Blue brand two years early.

Something else that may have to do with the decision: The Beijing Olympics next year. Chinese-owned Lenovo will be flying their corporate banners high at the summer games and can anyone see IBM Thinkpads on their Thinkads?

I'm good at SEO and I have a list of links that I use to help me. One of them is Yahoo's keyword suggestion engine.

People often ask me "What keyword would be good for my company to try to be #1 in Google on in the natural search listings?"

Actually they usually aren't educated enough in this arena to know that that is the question they're asking, but that's the question they're asking. For my company, the most important keyword to work on is "timesheet software". And we do well at it. But that's a really hard one and very competitive and it's globally useful for english speakers. You might be happier with
one that zeroes in on where you live if your business is more local, for example "Austin timesheet software". (Turns out nobody ever searches on that one.)

Working to optimize a keyword set that nobody ever searches for is useless. This is where Yahoo's tool comes in. If you think "accounting" is your keyword, how many people search for that every month? Yahoo will tell you this (but watch out it's really slow). And it will suggest other keywords that may be more appropriate, easier to become #1 at, and are more specific to your business.

Happy SEOing.

Curt runs a timesheet company has a new project management book out and contributes to a project management blog too.

Zoho, the little engine that could of collaborative web aps, is promoting a neat little Wiki this month in honor of National Novel Writing Month. It's formatted to make writing a book, chapter by chapter, a piece of cake.

I'm thinking less of the great American novel and more about you (of course). What a great way this would be to collaborate on training manuals, lengthy procedurals and employee handbooks.

Check it out.

Meanwhile, don't forget Daylight Savings Time this weekend. Here's a little tip on resetting all your chip driven clocks (courtesy Lifehacker). Remember, last spring caused a little bit of havoc with the earlier time change prompting some to turn off their automatic updates and change their clocks manually. I'm guessing most of those folks forgot to put those same devices back on automatic.

Just something to doublecheck.

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

Renee Oricchio

I hope you didn’t open the dancing skeleton from a web page an email directed you to. If you did then I hope your antivirus product blocked the threat.

There were warnings at several sites about the dancing skeleton. This method of warning is not sustainable however. Warning about each specific threat fails to teach the fundamental concepts of safe computing.

If you receive an email from an unknown person that has a file attached, don’t open it. If the email tells you to go to a web site, don’t go there. If you follow these simple instructions then I don’t have to warn you about the dancing turkey, the dancing Santa, or the ecard from an unnamed sweetheart.

If you receive an email that appears to be from someone you know, but contains an attachment you did not request or were not specifically expecting, ask the person about the attachment before you open it.

Some people think that because they have antivirus they can open anything they want or go to any web site they want because the antivirus is supposed to protect them. These people also probably think that if their car has airbags they can ram anything they want without risk of injury because the airbags are supposed to protect them!

Sorry, it just doesn’t work that way.

Randy Abrams is the Director of Technical Education for ESET LLC

Which is just fine, as long as you remember that's all it is. A test drive. Rarely, is it wise to incorporate the beta version of anything into your permanent repetoire of business tools.

That being said, here's a couple of places to nose around.

Microsoft has just released it's SharedView solution in beta 2. It's free to try and allows up to 15 users to collaborate online looking at each other's files, passing them back and forth while chatting it up as they do so.

The Google labs page always has a few interesting toys to play with.

Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 just became available in beta this week.