Today I am attending the public workshop of the Anti-Spyware Coalition (ASC) in Washington DC.

The ASC is an organization that includes member of the anti-virus industry, such as myself, the Federal Trade Commission, ISPs, educators, the press, and many other people. The complete agenda of today’s meeting can be viewed at http://antispywarecoalition.org/events/jan2008.php.

It may at times appear that the menace of threats on the internet is overwhelming, but some progress is being made. In recent times the FTC has successfully sued Zango, who the FTC indicates was responsible for 6.9 billion pop-up ads.

By setting industry wide definitions and standards we are better able to create enforcement, and even defend ourselves against unscrupulous lawsuits threatened by purveyors of spyware and adware who do not want their software detected by anti-virus companies.

I’ll report back on some of the presentations. Of particular interest will be a panel discussion titled “CSI Spyware: Can Investigators Stay Ahead of the Bad Guys?” and, as Director of Technical Education for ESET, the panel titled “Education: What Works and What Doesn’t?”

The fascinating thing about the anti-virus industry is that when we get into a meeting such as ASC workshops, competitors become very loyal allies.

Randy Abrams is the Director of Technical Education for ESET LLC

I'm intrigued by two recent announcements and whether it means anything.

Dell announced this week it's closing all those Dell Kiosks you see in places like shopping malls. Last week, Palm announced it's closing all of its retail outlets. (Caveat to that: There are only seven actual Palm-owned stores. The others are owned by another company that operates storefronts at airports. All this means is that the Palm signage is coming down and the airport stores will just expand their inventory to other wireless brands like Blackberries, etc.)

I think the technology industry, largely run by people who are more comfortable interacting with other people from a distance in the virtual world of cyberspace (i.e. email, IM, web conferences, etc.) than in person, have a bias towards selling from a distance anyway.

Hear me out, before you point out the obvious. Bricks and Mortar stores come with overhead. Why sell that way, when you can reach more customers online and not worry about commercial rents, shrinkage and all the other headaches that come with a traditional retail space?

But just a question; do we see Gateway stores, Dell Kiosks and the likes of Palm stores come and go because there really aren't customers out there who want to touch and test the goods before they buy?

I don't believe it.

My company, Journyx, is looking for a marketing person and a developer right now. So I've been playing with some of the online recruiting tools.

Dice is expensive, and cost us $900 but is supposed to be better for technical talent. The results have not been outstanding, probably due to the shortage of software talent in the world right now.

Linkedin is $200 or so and we just posted there, so we'll see how that goes.

Craigslist is of course free (my favorite price) and we got a bunch of great resumes for the marketing job, but almost nothing for the developer position.

We haven't tried Monster yet this time around but it would cost around $400 to do so.

Has anyone else out there had good luck with other hiring websites? I'd love to hear about it.

Curt Finch is the CEO of Journyx which creates software solutions to track time, expenses & mileage in beautiful Austin, Texas.

of information every owner should have a copy of regarding the company web site.

1. The company hosting your site and the login and password to access the account (You would not believe how many companies hire a freelance web designer who sets up the whole thing and disappears into that good night with the only copy of such details.)

2. All the alternative domain names that the company has bought up to point to the site and all the due dates when they need to be renewed

3. A hard copy disc that includes files of all the logos, artwork, pictures, multimedia, graphics and copy on the site

4. The actual html code number for each color used in the company logo and any other branding graphic on the site

5. A copy of all agreements and account information with third party service providers (PayPal, eBay, Google AdSense, etc.)

Don't leave it to the techies to be the sole record keepers of what's going on with the online store front. IT people come and go.

This may sound like a big "Duh!", until you hear the statistics.

Technology vendors love to offer rebates, especially on software. It sounds great and makes the ridiculous price of off-the-shelf technologies of all stripes sound more manageable.

Then we go back to office and never follow through on the rebate paperwork.

Redemption rates top out around 50% on a good day. According to Professor Tim Silk, a marketing professor from the University of British Columbia, consumer electronics have about a 40% redemption rate.

So the next time you pick up a printer at Staples on your lunch hour and charge it to the corporate Amex, what are you going to do when you get back to the office with that rebate offer?

One last bit of advice: read the rebate requirements very carefully. The people who send out the rebate checks are notorious sticklers for detail. Make a photo copy of your rebate paperwork in case there is any dispute down the line.

FYI... The new Macbook Air will apparantly be hitting the shelves of Apple stores tomorrow.

As long as I am on the subject, Apple has done it again. Here we go with another piece of must-have tech bling from Cupertino (Apple's headquarters in Silicon Valley) that features a battery that can't be replaced by the user. Fry the battery and you have to send it to the mothership to be replaced. The same is true with iPods and iPhones.

It was silly with iPods. But with iPhones and now the Macbook Air, what are users who happen to be grownups with real jobs that rely on their handheld and/or laptop to conduct business supposed to do when their battery does a bellyflop?

p.s. Your iPhones come back with all the memory cleaned off, so make sure you back up everything before... oh yeah, impossible; BECAUSE THE PHONE IS DEAD!

And now if you need to back up your iPhone online, heaven help you if you have a battery issue going on with your Macbook Air.

Apple products are like Italian sports cars: sleek, beautiful, trendy, expensive, status symbols, etc.

And totally impractical when it comes to basic maintenence!

Hey, it's still not as slick as the real thing. After all, Microsoft PowerPoint turned 20 last year. Google's "slideshow" application is less than a year old.

However, the little multimedia app that could has some new bells and whistles to brag about. I found this on Google's official Docs blog.

New features include:

- saving slideshow files as PDF files.
- which enables users to print off up to 12 slides per page.
- cookie cutter diagrams like thought balloons and arrows.

Hey, what do you want for free!

The Google Slideshow team says this is just the beginning. More new features to follow in 2008, including:

- Embedded publishing. Just hit publish and an assigned code pops up. Just send the code to anyone and it can be dropped into a blog or web site for online publication. Looking forward to that one.

- Drag and drop images. All you need is your slideshow open in one window and the Internet in another. Drag and drop any image from the web into your slide show. Cool!

- Rearranging slides. It sounds pretty user friendly to me. The slides line up film strip style and the user just drags and drops slides around in any order, plus deleting altogether.

I'll let you know as they are released.

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

- Renee Oricchio

Mini-Microsoft, perhaps one of the most famous or infamous blogs among techies, has been around since 2004. The author, who remains anonymous, is believed to be a Microsoft employee, loves his employer, but pulls no punches about what's going on inside the walls of the mothership up in Redmond, WA.

I ran across this quote from 2004 this week, while researching another a story and I must share.

"We’ve pretty much won the feature battles and now our main competition is older versions of our own software (you know, that’s just plain odd)."

- Mini-Microsoft
July 6, 2004

Prophetic, no? Keep in mind, this was three years before the launch of Vista. When you think about the consumer outcry to hang onto the older Windows XP, clearly Mini-Micro's words still ring true four years later.

And it is odd!

Alan Greenspan's book "The Age of Turbulence" is unemotional. He teaches us how to improve the human condition, effectively, through economics. His answer: avoid economic populism (doing what feels good but actually retards prosperity) while maintaining enough restraint on income disparity that the rabble who would destroy democratic free market capitalism can at kept on a low simmer. Imbued with a false humility, this transparent attempt to gild his legacy still impresses. Alan is no dummy.

His insights into the Presidents from Nixon to Bush 43, all of which - save Carter - he worked with, are fascinating. Despite being a fiscally conservative Republican he seems to like Clinton perhaps most of all.

I highly recommend this book. I found it to be practical, educational and quite good at stating the case for the necessity of the protection of property rights as a precondition to any improvement in human welfare.

From the time Greenspan became Fed Chairman until today, America has experienced a uniquely happy circumstance of extraordinarily low inflation and low unemployment simultaneously - the opposite of "stagflation". Mr. Greenspan is often lauded as the genius who made this happen but his take is more humble: it was rapidly advancing technology and the fall of the Berlin wall.

The fall of The Wall dumped over a billion people into the global workforce (witness China today vs. how they were when Nixon visited) creating a huge disinflationary pressure on global labor rates. Technology - especially the internet - has enabled that labor to participate more fully in the global economy.

Much of that technology was created by small technology businesses, like yours and mine.

We are therefore an important part of the global force that has lifted hundreds of millions - mostly in Eastern Europe and the Far East - out of the most horrendous kind of abject poverty.

But Alan argues that the disinflationary pressures of the global labor pool are abating now as salaries in China, India and elsewhere rise. Our free ride is just about over. Stagflation will be back soon, just in time for and enabled by record federal deficits.

Prepare to feel nostalgic.

Curt Finch is the CEO of Journyx and an author

It's called the economy.

Just as Apple (based in Cupertino, CA) is starting to make big leaps wooing more business users than ever, it may be shortlived. The problem: pricing.

Case in point, this month's release of the new MacBook Air. The low-end model costs $1800 and goes up to more than three grand.

Regular MacBooks and iMacs start above $1000. The cheapest Mac available is the Mac Mini starting at $600 (which was also the starting price of the iPhone last summer, not including the monthly nut to use it through AT&T).

PCs broke the sub-$1000 price point 10 years ago. I'm writing this posting on a Compaq laptop I purchased last year for $400. Sub-$200 PCs are now the price point to beat.

Apple historically, at least when Steve Jobs is at the helm, is great at marketing if nothing else. You don't see people camping out for three days to get the latest Sidekick or Dell Vostro.

Jobs and company understand how to market to people with disposable cash. But, what if the days of disposable cash for so many are over for the foreseeable future?

PCs, especially with the help of even more Linux-based machines coming available, are priced to sell as we ride out this economic downturn (dare I say it, a recession?). Apple doesn't even come close.

Apple has always relied on its core customer base, the Mac faithful, to open their wallets taking out a little extra of their home equity lines if necessary to follow the one true platform. But now that they've made some real headway expanding that customer base, not all those new customers can tolerate Mercedes prices during hard times when a Hyundai will have to do.

It'll be interesting to see what Apple does.

Apparently, the two don't mix.

A new study published jointly by The Karolinska Institute in Sweden and Wayne State University in Indiana (How often do these two partner up, one wonders?) shows that the small amount of radiation coming from your handset is enough to cause headaches and insomnia.

The study's conclusions recommend using a landline phone for those last calls of the day. It also theorizes the radiation of a nearby handset can disrupt the brain's ability to manufacturer the hormone, Melatonin, which helps the body not only go to sleep, but stay in a deep sleep for a healthy amount of time.

If true, you might want to forgo the alarm clock feature on your cell phone or put it across the room (where it likely will ring too softly to wake you up). Cheap trick alert: try putting it in a glass. The ringer gets a little extra umph from bouncing off the glass.

I picked up this little jewel of a story off the BBC if you want to read it yourself.

The FDA might be interested in hearing more about the study. Although it hasn't formerly found or endorsed any believed health hazards from mobile devices, it's not ruling it out that they might exist.

The FDA recently comissioned the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science to look at the matter identifying possible areas of health risks that have been under researched.

How about car accidents, for starters?

As for the new study linking cell phones to sleep disruption, I buy it. How can anyone believe keeping an electronic device transmitting and receiving wireless signals against your ear for any period of time doesn't come with a medical price tag on the body?

It makes me wonder if this younger generation growing up glued to their cell phones will one day be compared to my grandparent's generation that smoked liked fiends without a care in the world that there were any longterm medical dangers involved.

It wouldn't be the first time that naivete proved fatal.

I can't think of a better day to acknowledge just some of the great achievements of African American inventors.

Otis Boykin

A prolific inventor throughout the 50's, 60's, 70's and until the day he died in 1982. Boykin specialized in electronics, earning several patents in the development of resistors. His 1961 electrical resistor was a breakthrough for IBM, hearty enough and reliable enough to be used in computing. Perahps his greatest invention was the control unit used in pacemakers. Ironically, Boykin died of a heart attack.

Mark Dean

Dean is one of the most prominent black inventors in modern technology. Out of the original nine patents IBM filed in the invention of the PC, Dean holds three of them.

Shirley Jackson

Her patents were instrumental in the development of such breakthrough technologies as the touch tone phone, caller ID and call waiting.

John Henry Thompson

First there were only programming languages in computing that enabled white fonts on a black screen, later a blue screen. Thompson's invention of the programming language "Lingo" enabled those first generations of graphics and animations that made computers a visual medium. Without Thompson, the Internet would be a very boring place today.

Lonnie Johnson

Johnson accumulated more than 40 patents during his years working for the U.S. Air Force and Nasa. He worked on both the Mars Observer project and Galileo Jupiter Probe. However, his more lucrative and most famous claim to fame is undoubtedly an invention we've all heard of: the Super Soaker.

Charles Richard Drew

Drew co-founded the first U.S. blood bank and developed standards for international blood donation and storage.

Rufus Weaver

Weaver invented a wheelchair that climbs stairs.

L.P. Ray

Back in 1897, Ray invented something called a dustpan. That's right! Before Ray, everyone just swept their dirt out the door.

A.C. Richardson

Richardson filed his most famous patents back in the 1890's: the butter churn and a casket lowering device still used in the funeral business today.

If you're looking for a dose of good ole American entrepreneurship and the inspiring dogged pursuit to achieve, look no further than the list above.

Happy Birthday, Dr. King. We'll keep dreaming.

The Enigma machine was most famously used by the German military to encrypt messages in the Second World War. The idea was simple, encrypt messages so that nobody could understand them.

Fast forward sixty years or so, and recall the words of Santayana “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it".

An article in the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7197045.stm) reported the theft of a laptop form a Royal Navy Officer. This should have been a non-story as military people all over the globe have known about encryption for centuries. The problem was that the data was no encrypted and contained extensive personal information. The odds are that the laptop was stolen for the sake of it being a laptop, however the data could potentially be used to perform identity theft.

Encryption is not just about protecting military secrets. If you have sensitive information, even on desktop PCs, you should be encrypting the data. Employee information and intellectual property should be encrypted.

That known confidential information was not encrypted by a military organization, in possession of very high grade encryption technologies is truly an enigma.

Randy Abrams is the Director of Technical Education for ESET LLC

My book is now available on the Kindle, which sold out in 6 hours when it debuted last November.

I had the opportunity to play with a coworker's Kindle and it is in fact pretty cool. It isn't a huge screen but probably equivalent to the text on a typical small book, like the size of a Harlequin romance novel or my equivalent - the trashy sci-fi novel.

So the Kindle is interesting in that it raises the question of intellectual property and how that differs when it is a printed material in your hand as opposed to a set of bits on an electronic device. This is an issue society is still working out. IP is different than physical things, it just is. But in order for humanity to progress, people need to profit from it in my opinion and so such property needs protection of some kind. We're struggling right now as a species to find that balance.

There are detractors as always but I'm not sure how serious they are about it. But then there is the DRM management complaint, which is perhaps more serious.

So check out the Kindle. It's pretty kool.

Okay, it's not just a playtoy anymore and I'm a big enough person to eat my own words.

Last summer when the iPhone made it's big debut, I cautioned the iPhone was a non-story for biz types. One of my primary reasons: IT departments would be resistent to integrate it with their email servers and networks.

Well, big news! IBM is expected to announce this weekend at its annual "Lotusphere" conference in Orlando that they are partnering up with Apple to run Lotus Notes on the iPhone.

Huge!

There are something like 135 million Lotus Note users worldwide. Here's the AP story breaking the news.

But wait there's more...

Apple Insider is reporting (thought admittedly unconfirmed) AT&T plans to announce on Monday that it will start allowing iPhones to go under corporate accounts.

I'm guessing there are a lot of long faces at RIM (the folks who make Blackberries).

I guess it's safe to say Steve Jobs won't be running out of black turtlenecks anytime soon.

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

- Renee Oricchio

I would just like to follow up on yesterday's posting on the petition to save Windows XP - due to be retired in June of this year.

Windows Vista is sort of like a metaphor for the Iraq war. Everyone knows it was a big mistake, but the architects of both continue to live in denial. Why can't Steve Ballmer and George Bush just admit they made a mistake and then we can move on to cleaning up the mess?

Microsoft is kind of in a operating system quagmire. It can't go backwards and no one wants to go forward with Vista. Instead of Neocons, we have NeoTechs.

Neocons claim the surge is working. NeoTechs claim Vista is the highest selling O/S ever (then look at the market share - oops!).

Neocons believe in two views; theirs and theirs. Neotechs believe in two operating system platforms; Vista and Vista. Open source is heresy. It's right up there with Habeas Corpus and the Bill of Rights.

Neocons are lame ducks. NeoTechs are just lame.

Technology is changing, rather the business of technology and the voice of its users. Open source is here to stay and gaining steam. Users would rather give up a few bells and whistles on their software, if it would just load faster and crash less. P.S. The Mac is gaining steam too, making new in roads with business users.

Bottomline: The old operating system war, just like conventional ground wars, is over. The web itself is really The Platform.

For those of you who took high school Latin, you know "neo" means new. Don't be fooled, in the case of both neocons and NeoTechs, it's more like neolithic.

If Microsoft's chairman, Steve Ballmer, had hair; it would definitely be rubbed backwards right now.

While the 'softies continue to spin their Vista sales figures (see Microsoft in Denial About Vista), many, many PC users out there are in a panic that Windows XP will be put out to pasture this June - no longer available for sale or bundled into PCs anywhere.

Windows XP's swan song has already been postponed once, by popular demand (in response to unpopular reaction to the newer Windows Vista that was released a year ago this month).

InfoWorld has started an online petition to forward to Microsoft begging for another stay of execution (perhaps until the next Windows O/S is released in two or three years).

So far, InfoWorld has about 12,000 signatures. Those that signed might be wiser to swamp Dell's IdeaStorm. InfoWorld is a magazine. When they approach Microsoft with a petition, they're approaching one of their advertisers. When Dell does it, they're being approached by one of their biggest distribution channels for their software. Who do you think they're more likely to listen to?

First and foremost, since its the greatest source of disorganization and digital clutter in my worklife; I need an email program that steers me towards better organization and not away from it.

Let me be clear, files don't work. Once upon a time, someone developing Outlook or some other email interface thought it was the perfect analogy and thus the perfect way to organize emails. I'm guessing in those days, the average person didn't get 50-100 emails a day. Many, many biz types get much, much more than that.

Email is in trouble, folks. It's unwieldy and the next generation coming up in the business world would rather text, twitter, IM, do anything but email. I honestly can't blame them.

However, those other options can't replace email. They can't handle in depth communications or memos and, besides, they promote illiteracy. If email goes, so does grammar, punction and any hope of ever sharing a complete thought.

Somebody - Microsoft, Google, Eudora, Mozilla - somebody, please overhaul email as we know it.

Here's my wishlist:

- Make it simple. And, I want the web-based client to have all the same features and buttons as the desktop client.

- Don't bundle in a calendar. Just integrate with other calendaring programs that already exist.

- Lose the whole file folder metaphor. Just give me a toolbar strip at the top with some customized buttons that I can hit and send my emails to specific areas for recall, or to forward to someone else, or to push to an RSS feed to a work team.

- Let me have one simple interface that I can bang out a message of any length and then hit the appropriate button whether to send it out as an email, twitter, text or IM.

- I would be happy to delete more often, if I had a built in IM chat client directly linked to my ISP so I could request emails of old to be brought back from their server grave.

- Instead of filing emails (which I never do), let me tag them and then find them with a search engine built into my client.

- Give me a place to detach my attachments and assign who else can access them for collaboration. In other words, if only gmail and google docs & spreadsheets would have a baby.

- I like the window pane views of email. Let me switch between email and my RSS feeds in that same interace. Let me use the same toolbar tagging my emails for search later to tag postings in my RSS reader.

- Automatic encryption. Period.

- Don't just filter spam. I want a button that forwards it directly to my state's attorney general's office. When he or she gets four bazillion emails from that guy in Nigeria offering money, maybe something really will get done about it.

- I don't want to filter out just spam. I want to filter out entire countries. I don't know anyone in Sweden or Indonesia. If anything originates from there, chances are it's bad news. Nuke it.

- Make it customizable. I'm a chick and I like things to be pretty and personalized. If I want pink breast cancer awareness ribbons along the sides, let me have it. Or Texas bluebonnets. Or burnt orange UT logos. Or a colorful tie dyed look. Something besides the same, sterile boring interface I've been looking at since the mid-90s.

- I want a "mobilize this" button that translates whatever I'm working on in email to my cell phone. As it is, my cell phone, desktop client and my web-based client never have the same emails in the cue.

I don't ask for much. I could go on, but will save the rest of my list for version 2.0.

One word: Omnidrive. Go ahead, click on their link. Yup, the site's down. That's bad news if you're one of those self-employed folks or businesses that has been using Omnidrive as a virtual storage shed for your data.

Cloud computing, for those unfamliar with the term, is one of those tech buzzwords du jour that represents the trend towards storing data or software applications not on an individual PC or network, but instead onto a "cloud" or network of virtual servers.

Sound to good to be true? Maybe it is. Omnidrive is (or was) one such cloud computing service, well reviewed and a media darling among the technorati

Of the thirteen companies that we researched for this post, three really stand out. Australia-based OmniDrive (unfunded but not for long) is the clear leader in features. Box.net and Streamload are also very good choices.

- TechCrunch, January 31st, 2007

What a difference a year makes. Omnidrive should perhaps change its name to Ominiousdrive.

Here's what we know today; which apparantly is information that changes day-to-day:

- The site is down.

- The official forum is down.

- The CEO, Nick Cubrilovic's blog - also down.

What can we make of this trail of broken links?

Other bad signs that the company is defunct.

- The company CTO left abruptly in December amidst rumors of fraud.

- The unofficial blog is up and running with a long thread of anecdotal tales of woe from customers (former customers) who are getting no response and no access to their data they once entrusted to Omnidrive. And this was supposed to be a backup solution for these poor folks!

I'll keep an eye on this one. In the meantime, some tips for safe cloud computing.

- Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Omnidrive is a nightmare, but hardly an indictment on the whole trend. (I have a feeling indictments will be strictly reserved for Omnidrive employees).

- Backup your backup. Data storage is cheap. It's not the craziest idea in the world to backup in two places, even if one of those places is the old-fashioned way - tapes, discs, etc.

This is the best explanation I've seen for mortals of what's really going on with regards
to this debt crisis. It's told from a British perspective, which makes it either enchanting
or irritating, I'm not sure which.

Curt Finch is a project accounting author and project management blogger

I just love reading a good dust-up among bloggers (when I have time to waste).

Let me share:

Mike Moran from Biznology (implying he's more business-oriented than tech-oriented - don't be fooled. He's one of them.), has written a very indignant screed against Gene Marks latest article in Business Week taking a sobering look at some of tech's most sacred cows: Web 2.0 aps like RSS feeds, CRM software and anti-spam filters.

Marks poo-poo'ed allover 'em making the point that these technologies just might - gasp! - be an unnecessary case of over-technology for smaller businesses.

Moran from Biznology had a cyber hissy-fit and all his self-consciously hip hockey chair friends are lining up in the comments cue to back up his moral outrage at such geek heresy.

Duh-Doh! Come and get me, Mike. I'm with Gene on this one.

Don't get me wrong. I've been covering technology for 20 years now and lived in the heart of Silicon Valley during the giddiest days of the tech bubble - giddy myself at times.

But, I don't believe in using technology for technology's sake. It's a tool, folks. Especially, when it comes to a business on a budget (small to midsize companies, in other words). Technology is like any other business expense; it has to have a meaningful impact on the bottomline or making the business more efficient or it's silly, wasteful and irresponsible.

I applaud Gene Marks who, even though he sells CRM software himself, is honest enough and real enough to advise smaller businesses not to get caught up in the tech hype. Moran who not only disses Marks, but Business Week, for publishing the article, patronizingly upbraids one of the most popular, established national business magazines in the country and says he'd still do them the favor of writing for them anyway, if asked.

Don't wait underwater, Mike.

You have to be a real journalist to write for a real news magazine. A self-published blog read by all 214 people on your LinkedIn page is not real journalism; it's just another amateur soapbox on a very large Internet.

Have a good weekend, folks. We'll get back to the business of tech serving small to midsize businesses - and not the other way around- on Monday.

- Renee Oricchio

Google View is a new addon to their mapping system that allows you to see what a street looks like in 3D. You can see people and shops and cars and houses and you can virtually move around in this environment. They've got a video describing it on YouTube

As usual with Google, there are privacy concerns and lately I've seen some interesting auto accidents in Google View. It would not be surprising at some point to see this data turn up in the legal system.

Curt Finch is the CEO of Journyx, a company that sells web-based time tracking software

Forget what the techies are predicting for this year. What are the moneybag people saying?

Merrill Lynch has released its annual Top Internet Themes for 2008,

It makes for interesting reading.

Internet trends to watch:

- Online ad spending goes up due to the presidential election ad ramp up (starting around March).

- The television writer's strike, the Presidential election all leading to more advertising on the web.

Not mentioned.

Three words: economy, economy, economy.

Bill Gates was the opening keynote address for this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas - perhaps for the last time (I suspect that's the Rolling Stones definition of final tour).

By all accounts, it was less visionary and more about Vista sales. Not exactly a big "Don't cry for me Argentina" Evita-esque exit for Chairman Gates who has a long history of wowing geeks with his "in the futcha" keynotes. I harken back to the days when Comdex was king of the tradeshows and took over Las Vegas for a week in November every year. Gates opening for Comdex was as certain as Frank Sinatra opening for the Sands a generation ago.

But I digress...

Apparantly, by and large, it was mostly Vista talk, Vista sales and ain't Vista wonderful that dominated the Gate's keynote.

Microsoft's big party line right now: Vista has sold 100 million copies over the past year since it's debut, outselling Windows XP's first 12 months back in 2001.

The story behind the spin:

- While Vista has sold 100 million copies worldwide, worldwide more than 250 million PCs have sold. Sooooooooo Microsoft's Vista didn't even capture half of the worldwide Operating System market last year. Ouch!

- Back in 2001, XP sold 89 million copies during it's first year. Worldwide, there were half the PC sales compared to 2007. I'll let you do the math on the percentage factor to be considered.

One last footnote: Is it me? It's just that Microsoft relentless comparisons between Vista sales to its own past product (XP) sounds a bit shrill to me. Meanwhile, there's hardly a peep about Mac doing a quiet creep up in sales with the business set, breaking double digits for the first time ever.

And we won't discuss the "O" word, of course. Open source, that is.

It's a new world, folks, and Redmond (Microsoft's corporate headquarters) is no longer the center of it.

Short answer: not really.

CES is the Comsumer Electronics Show being held in Las Vegas this week. For businesses, I suppose that key word "consumer" is a big clue why I think this is mostly non-news.

Notice I say mostly.

CES is a big week for tech companies. Everyone who is anyone in the geek set is announcing some sort of new release this week. Even Apple, not attending CES, had to jump in announcing it's latest version of MacPro. Last year, Apple's PR team pulled a similar trick dominating tech headlines with teasers about the upcoming release (then) of the iPhone.

If you're the sort that likes to know all about the latest and greatest technologies coming out, then CES coverage is for you. I recommend following blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo or CNet for endless roundups of tech tools and toys spotted on the floor of the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Here's why I send you on your way with a few words of caution:

- The big tech tradeshows, like CES, are when you see the industry's hype machine going full tilt. P.T. Barnum lives.

- The economy is shaky right now. This is no time for bling.

That would include me. I still use Office 2003.

This is a classic Microsoft PR gaffe. Routinely, the largest software company in the world forgets it's obnoxious to act like the largest software company in the world feeling entitled to act without sensitivity to its customers.

Microsoft's new Office 2007 is built on its new pride and joy format, Office Open XML (OOXML), designed to be more secure from hackers.

In its enthusiasm to convert us all to OOXML, Microsoft took the draconian step of making it impossible for Office 2003 users to access older file formats. This has gone over like a lead balloon in recent days.

Microsoft gets it and has done an about face. Microsoft blogger, David LeBlanc has a deeper explanation of what happened and, more importantly, a list of links to download the appropriate patches to fix your formats.

Microsoft desperately wants the International Standards Organization to adopt OOXML as an industry standard. Earlier votes taken back in September didn't stack up in Microsoft's favor. Next month, the ISO will review submitted modifications to see if enough members want to change their votes in Microsoft's favor. Clearly, bad press like this wouldn't help.

Every year Google gives me a present. Google likes me. It might be because I'm such a great guy, but more likely it's because my company, Journyx, spends hundreds of thousands of dollars advertising our timesheet software with Google Adwords.

One year they gave me a glowing cube clock radio thing. One year they gave me a beach towel with Google splashed across it. That was a really good towel. It's big, like me (I'm a lotta man - as they say). I don't know where the towel is now, that was many years ago.

Every year they give me something and it's normally pretty goofy. Aimed at geeks you know.

This year they gave us a 100 dollar gift certificate to DonorsChoose. I pushed it towards a school in a disadvantaged section of our city here (Austin, TX). The kids got something they needed (whiteboards) and sent a thank you note.

They were still using chalk before. Chalk sucks. Whiteboards are cool. Everybody knows that.
Duh.

I think this is better than the towel.

Curt writes for a project management blog and has a new book out that's all about time.

Researchers at Indiana University in Bloomington figured out that, at least in theory, Wi-Fi routers could be infected with a virus and spread the virus to other near-by Wi-Fi routers. They are probably right, but if you are doing things right you really don’t need to worry about it.

It would be...

Rose Bowl: Open Source versus Windows. (Windows by 21 points in the end, coming back from losing at the half)

Fiesta Bowl: Dell versus HP PC Sales 2008 (Tighter scoring game then last year's grudge match, but HP wins again by field goal)

Orange Bowl: Web 2.0 versus The hype of Web 2.0 (too close to call, only airs on Second Life, no TV rights sold on principle)

Sugar Bowl: Apple versus Microsoft (Microsoft by 36 points, although 90% of the fans in the stands wear black turtle necks in honor of Apple head couch, Steve Jobs. Windows Vista knocked out of the game in the first quarter, taken off the field in a gurney. iPhone wins MVP, even though its team loses.)

BCS Championship Bowl Game: Google versus Everyone Else. (Google by 63 points. Fans tune out at the half out of boredom and go check their gmail instead. P.S. Google is the sole corporate sponsor of the network broadcast and half time show.)

Here's the stocking stuffer you wish you'd gotten. For $1000, 23andMe will decode your DNA from a saliva sample and put it online where you can figure out all kinds of data about your ancestry.

23andMe discovers how your genes affect your chances of catching a disease, as well as traits such as athleticism. Genes aren't just biological. They're also historical - and 23andMe explains that history - personally, for you. You can compare your genome to those of populations around the globe.

Now they just need to evolve a lower price.

Curt Finch has a new book out about time.

1. Tame your email. I have over 2000 emails in my inbox right now. I had about the same number a year ago and I feel quite certain I will again next January. Who's kidding who? It's a nice idea: purging out the old and coming up with a file folder system that is actually easy to stick too.

2. Backup your data more often. I won't even comment on this one. We all know better. We're all guilty of doing it on a regular basis.

3. Remember company email is not private. Despite the alternate hotmail account, text messaging and let us not forget the phone, still at some point you'll pass on an inappropriate joke email that would make your HR director's toes curl if she saw it. Or, you'll flame your spouse about something really private. Or, you'll discuss your secret job hunt with someone via company email.

4. Not buy into the hype of a new tech release. Last year, it was the iPhone, Vista, Mac OS X (Leopard), Blackberries, Office 2007, just to name several among many. This year will have its share, as well. Hint: several dozen people with no life camped out in lawn chairs at the Manhattan Apple store for three nights doesn't mean it's a product you can't live without either. When it comes to your business, technology is not a toy. It's a tool that needs to earn it's keep.

5. Keep current on new technologies. You'll make smarter business investments in your IT committments, find new ways to streamline the business and maybe even create new revenue streams. Then again, Sports Illustrated is more fun to read.

I predict a very strange year in technology for businesses. Technological innovations are making no signs of getting in a rut. In fact, with Web 2.0 and the rise of web-enabled mobile devices, this is probably the most exciting time in technology since the mid-90's.

Brace yourself. The economy, I predict, is going to bring a lot of that to a screeching halt.

With that in mind, here are my five New Year's resolutions every small to midsize business owner should consider making... and keeping.

1. Invest in wireless. It'll be easier to move all the gear to a cheaper lease if you need to be nimble to weather an economic downturn.

2. Before you start laying off staff, why don't you try letting them work out of their home full-time first. Not having to provide a desk, square footage for cubicle space, utilities to keep their work space lit and online, all will save you a chunk of change. Plus they'll be so happy not having to pay $3.29 a gallon to commute to work, they'll likely forgive you for that whopping 2% raise you plan on offering this year or pay cut if it's really bad.

3. Swear off upgrades this year, unless it's for security or really core aps that will pay for itself by streamlining the business in other ways.

4. Invest in network security training this year with your staff. Firewalls, spam blockers, applying security patches the second they come out aren't much help unless your staff is savvy about protecting company data. Establish some security protocols and make sure they get it. Spot check how they're doing from time to time.

5. Use web-based aps more: Google docs & spreadsheets, Zoho, Wikis, etc. Most are free and really useful tools to make collaborating with offsite colleagues a breeze. Don't forget web-based videoconferencing. It's a dirt cheap way to take a meeting.