Even if you are sitting in a cubicle right now, what are the chances you are actually working with someone over the divider? Is it more typical that you're working with someone not even in your building, perhaps not even your state or country?

The virtual office sits in a virtual workplace and increasingly that is where most of us go to hit the bricks everyday. With this trend, teamwork and online collaboration have become all but synonymous.

Now, let's talk about workflow.

How exactly does it work; working with someone eight time zones away?

If your workflow isn't exactly flowing, it may be time to step back and put some time into thinking about timing.

Here are some tips:

1. Think about who is doing what and create a rough assignment sheet with deadlines.

6. For the asynchronous tasks, this is trickier. First, set deadlines. Then, pick a time zone as the working time reference. Poll the team members and find out when they work. Plan accordingly. If you know that your colleague in Paris has finished their day before yours begins, then you know you have a 24 hour turnaround for a response. This can really slow the flow, if you know what I mean. Plan and adapt accordingly. I highly recommend using a RSS Reader in the asynchronous work environment, so that you are alerted when your faraway colleagues contribute.

The nine to ten inch netbook seems to be the sweet spot. 12 inches is just too much.

The most recent size shake-out comes to us from the Dell camp. Dell recently withdrew its 12 inch netbook (you can still buy one from the Dell outlet store).

So what's wrong with the foot long netbook?

1. Most likely, it's just too close for comfort to the smaller sized 13 to 14 inch notebooks. Customers don't need the temptation of passing up the bigger ticket notebook for the cheaper netbook.

3. Chick's perspective, for what it's worth: a ten inch netbook fits in my purse. A 12 inch netbook would sentence me to a briefcase.

By the way, I've had my 10 inch HP Mini for about a month now. Boy does it get a lot of attention. Everyone asks me about it when they see it. They want to know if it is a good enough substitute for a laptop (Answer: for now, yes. Longterm: no.) They want to know the biggest differences (Answer: no DVD drive). They want to know if its powerful enough (Answer: it's actually got more muscle under the hood than the four year old laptop it has temporarily replaced). They want to know if I take it everywhere (Answer: yes!!!).

Here it is; yet another cautionary tale illustrating that there is absolutely no margin of error when it comes to your company's online presence.

Best Buy has a 52-inch television (HDTV, of course) that normally goes for about $1600. The other day, kerwhoops, it was listed on their site for $9.99. It didn't take long for word to spread and wiseacres everywhere to purchase at said price.

Best Buy cancelled the $9.99 orders citing language in the fine print on their web site that reserves the right to correct boo-boo's even if money has already exchanged hands. In other words, saved on a technicality.

It was a pyrrhic victory.

That faceless online crowd hates technicalities and tends to love complaining about it. Twitter, as we all know, has become the global grapevine where ulcers are born for PR types. Needless to say it was an "Oh Mylanta" event for Best Buy. The only comfort to be taken is that the Twitter pirannhas will move on to the next available food supply soon enough.

What can we learn from this tale of woe?

If you don't have a stringent editing process for updating your site, then get one now.

I know where you think this is going. You think that I'm going to make a case why home is where your laptop is (No! No! No! Quite the opposite!).

I want you to think of your computer, whether its a desktop, laptop, netbook or even your smartphone, as a house for a minute.

We tend to think of our computing device as one unit, especially when it comes to power. Turn it on, turn it off; let me know when the battery is fading out.

What if we saw our homes in that way?

All the lights and appliances are on at once; or off. It's all the same to the electric bill, right?
Wrong, of course. We've always known that. Even my Dad understood that back in 1974 when he made me and my brother pay a dime towards the electricity bill every time we walked out of a room with the lights blazing.

The less time the lights and appliances are on, then the less racked up on the bill at the end of the month.

Your computing device works the same way. The fewer applications and USB devices that you run at the same time, then the less juice that is depleted.

Look at the toolbar at the bottom of the screen. All those little icons are like bedroom and hall lights twinkling all over your house at all hours. Those are applications that are running while you idle.

Ok, science fiction fans listen up...

Researchers believe that the advent of neural technology will eventually lead to very serious hacking problems. Devices that allow people to operate computers and control wheelchair movement with their thoughts could potentially be compromised. "If we don't start paying attention to security, we're worried that we might find ourselves in five or 10 years saying we've made a big mistake," says Tadayoshi Kohno, computer security expert at UW who published these concerns with others in Neurosurgical Focus, an industry journal.

While many of us might wonder what the benefit of hacking into another person's brain is, the past has proven that sometimes hackers will perform actions simply to hurt other people. For example, in 2008 hackers attacked an epilepsy support web site with flashing animations that led many users to have seizures. It seems that as long as there are technological advances, there will be people who seek to exploit them.

Curt's company has software that helps the accidental project manager.

Comscore, the sort-of Nielsen Ratings system of search engines, has put out its latest search engine rankings. No surprises, here! Google is still King of the mountain garnering a 65% share of all U.S. searches. Yahoo! comes in at a distant second at 19.6% and Microsoft sites at 8.4%.

As an aside, when you add up Yahoo!'s 19.6% and Microsoft's 8.4%; that Yahoo!-Microsoft deal doesn't look so very formidable does it?

However, there's more than math involved here, as well.

Google search engine users conduct twice as many searches a month as Yahoo! or Microsoft.

Here's the raw data, as Anderson Cooper would say:

- Google users conduct, on average, 54.5 searches a month.

- Microsoft users weigh in, on average, at 14.3 searches a month.

Add to this that traditionally, user studies have always shown the following:

1. When a user doesn't find what they are looking for in a search, more than half try again changing their search terms.

3. An even smaller minority give up after one fruitless search.

So why do Google users conduct more searches?

I wonder if this says anything about the quality of Google's results in the first place.

I wonder if the demographics of Google users are less versed in how to construct a search query than their competitors.

I wonder if that same demographic is more inclined to use Google as their bookmarking tool. I, for one, do. It's much easier to type in the first few letters of a web site and then click on the whole search query that automatically completes and gets me to the link in a couple of clicks. As tedious as that sounds, it is much easier than scrolling through my disorganized bookmarks.

Am I alone on this one?

September is going to be little less interesting for techies. Apple is slipping out the word unofficially to reporters that next month's iPod event will not include an unveiling of the anticipated Apple Tablet.

Instead, more likely, it will be introduced in early 2010. The tablet is likely to be sort of a cross between a netbook and an iPod touch. In other words, imagine an iPod touch with a ten inch screen and more capabilities to function as a thin client Mac and an e-Reader.

Sound too good to be true? Well, for now it is.

What does a game delay mean? Here are my best guesses:

(At least I'm honest! That's all they are.)

1. Perhaps the delay is because it's not ready for market. However, getting it ready for a highly controlled demonstration for a keynote address does not exactly come with that pressure.

4. It's all about the e-Reader! If you believe the other school of thought, the tablet is supposed to go toe-to-toe with the Kindle e-Reader. Make no mistake, the big money in the e-Reader market is not downloading the latest Dan Brown religo-conspiracy novel (due out this Fall, by the way); it's about textbooks. Textbooks are outrageously expensive and have the same shelf life as raw fish. Subsequently, students have been learning from out-dated textbooks since they were written on papyrus. Whoever owns the e-Reader market will solve that problem at long last by making textbook revisions as easy as a distributing a software patch. This has the potential to be a Gutenberg-level moment for textbook (not to mention technical manuals) publishing. That being said, the publishing industry is not ready for it and until they are; the e-Reader will putter along. Perhaps Apple is taking some extra time to cut some key partnership deals.

Then again, maybe the darn thing just isn't ready to show off yet.

A recent study showed that 7 out of 10 CIOs plan to invest in IT solutions in the next year, despite economic concerns. Of these, 43% said that they plan to invest in information security, 28% in virtualization, 27% in data center efficiency, 26% in VoIP and 26% in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

In fact, according to Projects@Work, "Subscribing to SaaS — rather than purchasing software licenses — is a particularly attractive option for businesses with tight IT budgets. Since applications and data are stored and hosted on the Internet and accessed remotely, this model removes the burden of maintenance, support, software license upgrades and equipment from end users."

In my company we've found that our SaaS customers are 6 times more likely to still be customers 5 years later. I think this is in part due to the fact that many companies overestimate the rigor with which their IT departments attend to backups, virus prevention and other IT security tasks. Additionally I've always thought that SaaS is easier for vendors to support, since they can bring your site up and look at it instantly.

Curt Finch frequently writes for a project management blog.

I got a fun reminder of this while taking a "daycation" yesterday. I stopped for gas at an independent (yes, they still exist) gas station just outside Cornwall, CT. The gas pump was, gasp, analog.

I actually watched the black lettering on metal enamel numbers roll along as the tank filled. There was something, not only pleasantly nostalgic, but reassuring to watch my tank fill in such a tangible way.

Of course, this was clearly a locally-owned small business (God Bless 'em) that is still nursing along the same gas pumps from literally a generation ago (maybe two).

How much money have they saved by not upgrading over the years?

How much longer will they hold out?

It made me think of another item I came across in the news recently. Apparantly, the New York Police Department''s latest budget includes a line item for just under one million dollars in typewriters.

You read that right. NYPD is buying (not fixing or replacing) slightly less than a million dollars in new typewriters.

You got to love the NY Post that dubbed them the "keystroke cops"!

Apparantly, all those police reports that we always hear about on Law & Order (more dreaded than battling crime, at times) still have to be typed up in carbon copies. The forms have not been computerized; which I'm guessing would cost more than just buying more typewriters and dealing with retraining a bunch of cops who would resent computer training even more than typing up police reports.

Naturally, NYPD is getting skewered in the press for spending so much money on antiquated technology. Maybe like the analog gas pump in Cornwall, it still makes the best sense.

As we say in Texas; it ain't brokel, don't fix it!

Why are we so quick to assume digital is better?

Who among us has not wished for our old Smith-Corona to address a quick envelope?

In the end, you have to pick your poison.

CNet's UK labs recently got a chance to test the forthcoming Mac version of Google's Chrome browser. Apparantly, it is smoking hot. In fact, whether it is for the Mac or PC; it's still smoking hot.

According to CNet:

- Mac Chrome is 34% faster than Apple's own Safari browser.
- Whereas Chrome clocked in at 657ms
- Keep that in mind when considering that Safari has been clocked at six times faster than IE8 and 42 times faster than IE7.
- Firefox is also back there in the dust, as well, along with Opera; FYI.

Speed is good. But, what if it comes at the expense of safety?

Keep in mind, this was a Microsoft sponsored test.

However, a recent comparison of browsers showed:

- Internet Explorer 8 detected malware infected code 81% of the time when exposed.

That sounds good, sort of. Although, I have to wonder about that 19% crack in the browser.

I shouldn't complain, however, after looking at the absymal showing of the other browsers:

- Coming in at a distant second place: Firefox at 27% of the time.
- Safari caught 21% of infected sites.
- Chrome 2.0 may be lickety-split. But, it caught only a paltry 7% of malware-laced sites.
- Opera was the worst: 1%!

IBM is patenting a new technology for masking sensitive data, according to InformationWeek. The technology is called MAGEN (Masking Gateway for Enterprises) and was developed in IBM labs in Israel. Unlike other products, this system doesn't change the file. Rather, it scrambles the image of the data on one's screen so that it becomes unrecognizable. "If companies had to create and store modified copies, the process would be relatively expensive and slow," said IBM. This technology can be especially useful in businesses that handle a significant amount of confidential customer data, such as healthcare companies.

Curt Finch is the author of a project management book and lives in Texas.

Could we be fast approaching a time when the desk becomes obsolete?

I think so.

I just gave mine away to my kids' school (they still need them). It has totally changed my home.

What was once a loft dedicated to my home office is now my daughter's room. My "home office" is now a couple of filing cabinets in the corner of a walk- in closet, my wireless laptop floating around from room to room and my wireless printer sitting in the entertainment center next the DVD player and cable box.

I'm not sure how I will do that whole deduction thing on my taxes next year, however. As the need for physical office space shrinks, it doesn't seem quite fair that the deduction should too.

Desk designs have always evolved along with the technology of the day.

From the late 1800's until about the 20's and 30's, the rolltop desk was king with all of its little drawers and slots for the highly compartmentalized executive.

Modern times made the executive too busy, with too much mail to sort into all those little places. Enter the sturdy, battle ship grey steel desk; it was perfect as a wide, steady platform for big, clunky typewriters, inboxes, and adding machines.

As the technology got lighter and smaller, so have desks.

I say it is finally to the point that who needs it.

The desk is a great place to:

- cramp up and develop neck and back pain.

- feel oppressed and depressed.

Hot coffee - hotspot = that's cold. At least that's how I do the math!

We've all seen them (and at times, been one of them); the folks camped out for the duration using the local cafe as a satellite office.

9.7% of the nation's unemployed need somewhere to go. In the thirties, everyone went to the movies to fill their days. Now, it's Paneras or Starbucks.

The debate over whether to ban endless cybersquatting over a $3 cup of coffee is heating up. Apparantly, some cafes are worrying about turning over those tables to keep the customers flowing. It's a fair concern.

It's also ironic that when you consider over the past few years cafe chains, along with their independent competitors, have been falling over themselves to cut hotspot deals and ramp up their WiFi offerings to use as an enticer to increase foot traffic. Well, careful what you wish for, my friends.

I think cafe owners would be wise to think twice about banning laptops, after all it's the laptop user (a.k.a a customer) that is really being banned.

Some other alternatives:

1. Portion off some of the floor space with separate seating for laptop users at communal tables.

2. During peak hours, it would be reasonable to charge a modest fee by the half-hour.

3. Build on it, instead of tear it down. Set up some additional for-a-fee services; like printing, faxing, stapling, FedEx pickup, etc. There's a new revenue stream just waiting to flow here.

4. Get some mileage out of good will. Bill yourself as the cafe helping the unemployed worker/consultant. Offer professional networking get togethers on slow week nights. Get a resume specialist to come in and offer tips or a head hunter to speak on job hunting advice.

Take the lead on giving that 9.7% of the out-of-work work force an assist. When times are good again, you'll be remembered for your support. We've got to work together to get everyone working again.

Gartner continues to predict drops in IT spending for this year, yet they have also found, to their surprise, that IT managers are opting to postpone projects rather than cancel them altogether. Their survey "found that only 12% of IT managers surveyed had canceled one or more projects since October 2008. The survey also found that 29% postponed at least one project and 33% implemented at least one project at a reduced rate." The evidence seems to suggest that IT managers are holding out hope that better times are around the corner, and are keeping top-line growth in mind.

So this would be evidence then that pent up demand will at some point spring into action, driving up prices of project managers, coders and everything else in the moribund IT industry. Like many other
things, buying IT now, if you have the cash, might look like pretty smart timing in just a few months.

Curt has 7 patents and is the CEO of a timesheet software company in Austin, Texas.

The unemployment rate is sitting at 9.7%, with roughly one in ten American workers not working. It's the mean season in business when really talented, loyal workers are cast aside like the morning coffee grinds.

Here's a heartening example of a company doing the exact opposite.

Facebook has announced it will be acquiring FriendFeed for an undisclosed amount of money (trust me, it's a lot). FriendFeed is a tool for aggregating a live feed across all your social networking accounts. It has received modest praise here and there; but, largely it has been left in the dust by Twitter.

So what's the attraction for Facebook (besides the fact that they did try to buy Twitter for $500 million last year and got turned away)?

FriendFeed's got talent!

Yes, it's a handy product to dovetail into Facebook. However, FriendFeed was launched by a team of ex-Googlers that were the original brains behind such no-small-thing products like Gmail and Google Maps.

This isn't the first time Facebook has bought an entire company mainly to get the talent roster therein. A couple of years ago it bought Parakey. Ever heard of it? Didn't think so! Parakey was a little start-up that specialized in tools to better integrate stuff on your hard drive like your calendar, pictures, documents, e-mail, etc. Oh by the way, the start-up came with it's founders who just happened to be the original team that developed the Firefox browser.

My point to all of this: Facebook recognizes, like a good front office of a MLB team, that it pays to pay for talent.

While companies are swooning left and right in this dismal economy, does anyone see Facebook hurting?

My questions for the company putting together it's next round of pink slip lists:

1. Is there anyone on the list you can afford to lose?
2. How much will it cost you when they go work for your competitor instead?
3. If you eat your own young, how will you survive another generation?

I can tell you this; Facebook is going to be around for awhile.

I stand corrected. Months ago, I scratched my head in a posting back then just not getting the whole "netbook" craze.

(It's hard to blog and eat crow at the same time!)

Disaster struck a couple of weeks ago; disaster in the form of lightening frying my laptop.

This put me in quite a dilemma. Here we are less than three months from the release of Windows 7; the last thing I wanted to do is buy a laptop loaded with Vista to dogpaddle by with until then.

Answer: netbook.

I picked up a HP mini for under $350. It has one gig on the hard drive with an Intel Atom processor. It has Windows XP (tried and true) and I have been happy as a clam.

I paid careful attention to battery time. It's supposed to last up to nine hours. That's a stretch. But, I am very impressed that it does last at least five to six hours.

It's also cute. If it were a car, it would be a Volkswagen bug. I find myself wanting to hug it.

Irrational displacement of emotions aside; here's what else I like about it:

1. It fits in my purse.
2. It boots up faster than my old laptop.
3. It weighs about 2.5 pounds.
4. Have I mentioned how cute it is?
5. The keys are not too small, although man-size hands may be another story.
6. My handwriting is awful and now I can use it to transcribe notes at a meeting on the fly.

I do plan to get a larger, full size laptop later in the year when Windows 7 launches (or make the Mac committment). However, I'm not worried about my netbook functioning as my primary computer until then. I wouldn't want to do it long term, however.

Here's what I do miss:

1. Having a DVD/CD drive/burner (that's the biggie!).
2. I miss the bigger screen. I find myself scrolling down a lot on web pages and not getting the complete view that I would like.

Sorry, I can only think of two things.

Tell me again how long we've been using Windows XP, now?

I had to look it up again the other day for another posting. Windows XP was launched to the public in late October of 2001; that's a lifetime ago in technology.

When XP was launched:

- Bill Gates was still running Microsoft.

- Rudy Giulianni was still the Mayor of New York City (he was at the launch less than two months after the 9/11 attacks still revered as America's mayor).

- We were only involved in one ground war in Southwest Asia.

- My family was much smaller and I was paying a lot of money each month on formula and diapers. My daughter can now beat me at Scrabble.

- Facebook didn't exist.

- Twitter didn't exist.

- Ditto for iPhones

- It was the year that Apple introduced the first iPod.

- The West Wing was the hot show on television.

- The first Harry Potter movie was released (the sixth one came out this summer).

- The Rocky Mountain News and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer still existed.

Just a little perspective. It goes to show you how artificial these technology upgrade cycles are for one thing.

Dell is planning to launch a GPS/WiFi card for netbooks that will allow users to obtain driving directions via their computers. The card, at $69, will be one of the options buyers get when they purchase Dell's Mini 10 netbook. It combines the GPS technology from Broadcom with the WiFi technology from Skyhook Wireless. Alan Sicher, senior wireless product manager at Dell, says that the device will be useful in other countries, as well as in areas with poor cell phone reception. This new development will likely provide competition for GPS companies such as Garmin and TomTom.

There will be an annual fee for map updates but whether that's a download or a shipped CD, and how much it will cost is unknown. The screensize of a netbook is just about perfect for use as a GPS
when you're driving so this sounds like a great product to me.

Curt's company has software that helps the accidental project manager.

It's starting to take on an oil and vinegar-like relationship. It's not your fault. Facebook is up to something. It's called boosting itself in the search engines and the less private you are then the higher up those Facebook rankings go with more public entries entering the fray in a stream of real-time postings. Sound like another comapny you've heard of? More on that in a moment.

But first the basics: the higher the rankings, the higher the advertising profits and you get the idea from there.

For us paranoid-types, this would appear to be a direct response to the fast advances of Twitter.

Earlier this year, TechCrunch got hold of some very private meetings notes from an internal staff session at Twitter on strategy. Of course, they published some of them. (It would be hard for a social network site to point the finger at another organization for spilling the beans on priviledged information, now wouldn't it?) One of the more interesting juicy bits were the notes on a portion of the meeting addressing "How Facebook Could Kill Us". The short answer was becoming more public beefing up their rankings in the search engines as a real-time stream of postings.

Bottomline: keep a sharp eye on your Facebook privacy permissions. They've already made some changes earlier this summer. You may be oversharing with more than your 492 closest friends and not realize it.

It's a good thing the "S" in iPhone 3GS stands for "speed" and not "security". Otherwise, Apple might have to rename it.

As it is, the name is the least of the PR Department's worries right now in Cupertino after a recent round of reports claiming the new iPhone's encryption takes only minutes to hack and requires nothing more than easy-to-find freeware tools to get the job done.

When the new iPhone came out earlier this summer, security was a big selling point with Apple desperate to reel in those corporate users who can't afford to sacrifice safety for bling.

You don't see the President walking through the Rose Garden with a 3GS strapped to the First Belt. That would be a super secure Blackberry that would make Q from the James Bond movies jealous.

Here's quite a dis' on the iPhone 3GS from an actual iPhone developer:

“It is kind of like storing all your secret messages right next to the secret decoder ring. I don’t think any of us [developers] have ever seen encryption implemented so poorly before, which is why it’s hard to describe why it’s such a big threat to security.”

- Jonathan Zdziarski, an iPhone developer and a hacker who teaches forensics courses

Ouch!

Cisco Systems just announced that they are planning to launch an internet router into outer space on a satellite. Internet Routers in Space (IRIS) is a project being led by the US Defense Department and can help enable more widespread high-speed web access without worrying about wires and cables. This new venture has been made possible in part by an increase in satellite capacity, which is needed as users continue to load videos and other high performance files.

In the book Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson outlines why some people for financial, security, or other more nefarious reasons might wish to have computers with lots of storage independent of the laws of any particular nationstate. If someone gets some non-DOD computers up there in orbit, there's no telling where that might lead...

Curt Finch is the founder & CEO of a resource management software company.