DexRex allows you to archive all your old chat threads. Here's a list of all the IM and network clients it supports, so far.

Your web-based archive stored wtih DexRex is searchable; meaning you can find that phone number of a contact buried in an IM from last week or reconstruct a conversation on a project with a specific colleague.

This is a handly little tool for smaller businesses and the self-employed crowd. If your company has special compliance issues, I'd take a pass for now.

One woman's opinion: I think it tends to be over-produced eye candy that doesn't deliver the stickiness to your site that one would hope. But, I'll leave that point for another day.

Meantime, the search engine issue has finally been laid to rest with Yahoo! and Google both announcing their search engine spiders can now detect flash sites and index them to show up in their rankings. This is thanks to new technology provided to both companies in partnership with Adobe.

Here's Google's write-up on their webmaster blog.

I still think Flash bits are more often than not over-produced eye candy.

I have no idea what Bill's really up to this week; his first week post-Microsoft. But here are some ideas:

- More time to deal with the blue screen of death on his PC.
- Upgrading to Vista? Nah!
- Calling his geek buddies to see if they want to camp out next week at the local Apple store to be the first in line for the new iPhone 3G when they hit shelves on the 11th.
- Finally has time to see how Halo 3 ends.
- Agitated, with a perpetual caffeine headache; no more free soft drinks from any of the Microsoft employee lounges.
- Crank calls to Ballmer.

I had a hard time concentrating on all the new bling. I was too distracted by the spokesperson hosting the demo.

Question: Does Steve Jobs have a little brother?

We all know the real "Fake Steve Jobs" is really Forbes senior editor, Daniel Lyons. But, I think this may be another fake Steve Jobs: only blessed by the real one.

This Stepford Steve is a bookish white guy with wireless rim glasses wearing a long sleeve black cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Key differences: no turtle neck, less greying at the temples and only a five o'clock shadow with no actual facial hair.

Question: Why didn't the real Steve Jobs do the demo? Did he have something more important to do than promote the new iPhone?

Question: Which is the bigger brand: the Apple logo or Steve Jobs?

Question: Does everyone at Apple HQ in Cupertino wear long sleeve black cotton shirts with the sleeves pushed up?

You know it is chemistry when it stinks and goes boom—and entrances us. “No other application in the field of chemistry has such a positive association for the general population as fireworks,” says Thomas Klapötke (University of Munich, Germany)

If you're fortunate, you'll end up with a show like this one for your company's fireworks fiesta!

To see how different cities were competing to have the best fireworks last New Year's Eve (with movies of the best examples) click here.
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Curt Finch runs Journyx, an employee time sheet software company in Austin, TX.

Mr. Davis' identity may be safe, but one of the LifeLock's main competitors isn't feeling as safe. NameSafe has filed a lawsuit against LifeLock, accusing it of deceptive business practices and corporate identity theft. NameSafe alleges LifeLock purchased sponsored ads on most of the major search engines (including Google, YahooI and MSN) using NameSafe as a key word in the ad.

You can imagine what would happen next.

A potential lead runs a search using the company name, "NameSafe", and LifeLock ads pop up with NameSafe somewhere in the ad copy. Click on the ad and the visitor who was looking for NameSafe lands on LifeLock.

LifeLock claims it wasn't their doing, blaming it on resellers who ran the ads.

We'll see how this one plays out. LifeLock is no stranger to controversy. About a year ago, one of its founders, Robert Maynard, Jr. (Let me get that Jr. in. Dad must be sooooo proud!), was outed by the Phoenix New Times as a guy with a shady past that included allegations of identity theft, a couple of bankruptcies and, oops, failing to pay a $16,000 casino loan taken out at a prominent resort in Las Vegas (in the old days this story would have ended much sooner in a hole in the desert).

p.s. if the allegations are true, one of Maynard's identity theft victims was his own father, who found himself in dutch wtih American Express for $154,000 worth of credit card bills on a credit card he didn't open himself. The bills were being sent to the address of Jr.'s latest business venture at the time, NetShield.

Walkaway lessons from this tawdry tale of loss and little redemption.

1. Businesses should Google themselves periodically (don't forget the other search engines, as well). You never know what might turn up; like your company's name on another company's advertisement.
2. Be aware of your competitors to begin with. By doing business online, it's trickier knowing the other players out there going after the same market with the same products or services. Be aware of them. They may already be aware of you. Remember that old maxim; keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer.

The people who make printers count on selling you those $30-something cartridges. In fact, you can't even find a cheaper brand alternative for most printers these days.

PC World has conducted a comparison test between all the cheaper ink brands (namely Walgreens) vs. the premium name brand ink made by the printer manufacturer.

In addition to the quality of the print, PC World compared the trueness of the colors and whether the cheap ink fades more quickly over time.

You be the judge. Here's a link to their slide show of side-by-side copies.

I see a difference. The question is; does it make a difference?

Microsoft typically releases a new version of Windows every three years. That being the case, we're 18 months into Vista; implying we have 18 more to go. There's also been much chatter over Bill Gates making a very vague comment about Windows 7 coming out in 2009.

Ars Technica makes a very strong case why we shouldn't get too excited (dare I say, hopeful) about that.

Meantime, General Motors has said its sticking with XP for the duration, for example. Even more shocking, Intel hasn't upgraded to Vista yet and the New York Times is reporting anonymous sources within the company that they have no intention of doing so at all.

Intel, folks.

The other half of the nickname "Wintel", as in Wintel machines (what we used to call PC's at the height of the Microsoft vs. Apple rivalry, before Intel starting selling chips to Apple too).

Wintel is sort of the "Bennifer" or "TomKat" tongue-in-cheek nickname of high tech.

Intel, by the way, employs 80,000 people worldwide. That's a lot of desktops sticking to XP. In the grand scheme of things, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the number of Vista operating systems that are being deployed. But the irony that Intel hasn't made the upgrade must be pretty painful for the folks up in Redmond.

Jeff Weiner, Executive VP of the network group, and Usama Fayyad, Executive VP of research and computing infrastructure; Qi Lu, Executive VP in charge of search and monetization, Brad Garlinghouse, Senior VP of communication and communities, and Vish Makhijani, Senior VP of search.

Also, thanks to Real Tech News for pointing me towards the Yahooreziner. It's a Yahoo-customized automated resignation letter generator (say that three times fast!). And, it's pretty hysterical.

Don't feel so bad, Yahoo! executives. (those of you that remain). We've all been there and done that.

In fact, I'm guessing many who visit this site can appreciate the "reziner". Most people who startup their own companies don't start out as entrepreneurs. We start out as tools working for the man and one day just get tired of getting screwed by the hammer (that's an on purpose mixed metaphor, by the way).

Parting thoughts...

I count five VPs that have fled Yahoo! according to Real Tech's count. That's five out of a zillion by the way. But, I wonder how many startups will be born out of those five departures. Are two or more already in cahoots to launch something? How many will just pull up stakes and move on to another technology megalith to continue tool-time? How many will be their own boss and decide they'd rather be the hammer than the nail this time around?

It's still not available for public scrutiny. But, its in beta by invitation only. And a pitch video by AT&T and various screen shots are making the rounds in the blogosphere these days.

AT&T's party line, as explained by the PR tool in the pitch video, sounds like the biggest bunch of hooey ever. To hear him tell it, AT&T just thought it would be a fun thing to offer customers, blah blah blah.

Since when do really, really big companies jump into an overcrowded field like the browser market just to spread the joy of web surfing?

Reviewers who've seen Pogo are pretty much in agreement. It's actually a nice browser. It should be. It's basically Firefox 2 (soon to be upgraded to Firefox 3) with it's own customized features and extensions.

This is a real head scratcher. What is AT&T thinking? I haven't stumbled upon any good theories, so far. So here's my own. I think this is the equivalent of custom publishing in the magazine field; taking a quality information platform and tailoring it for corporate use and public relations.

All I know is I don't want to find out that I'm being charged a dollar a month to use it buried in the fine print of my monthly statement.

PayPal, the largest merchant account provider online, conducted a recent survey among online shoppers asking why they abandon a purchase mid-sale.

Would you like to guess the number one reason why?

Shipping charges!

- 43% surveyed said they had recently stopped a transaction due to sticker shock over the shipping charges.
- Sticker shock over the final tab was a major theme in the survey's findings, with 36% admitting sales flight when they saw the difference in the final tab, versus the initial price tags for goods selected.
- Slightly over one in four bailed because they wanted to comparison shop a little more.

Those are the big reasons for shopping cart interruptus. I think there is more to be learned from the lesser reasons cited.

- 16% said they drop out of the sale because they needed customer service and couldn't get through.
- Another 14% forgot their user names and/or passwords.

Lessons to be learned from this survey:

- Don't require shoppers to register to make a purchase. Resist the temptation to gather marketing data off every sale. It would be nice. But, making sales is even nicer.

- Be more up front about shipping and handling charges. Rather than offering a discount off the product or service; offer free shipping. Online customers take product discounts for granted in the online world. Clearly, they don't feel that way about shipping charges.

One last thought; remind your customers how much they're saving on gas driving to the mall to make the same purchase. These days it may be cheaper to pay for UPS ground than a couple of gallons of regular unleaded.

By the way, here's the story; the new Firefox 3 open source web browser was downloaded more than 12 million times this week (8 million of those downloads happened within the first 24 hours of its release).

I'm impressed!

I'm also impressed with Firefox 3. I like it. It loads really fast and has a number of really cool new add-ons. I pounced on the new bookmarking organizational tools (I'm always in a world of hurt on that front).

My favorite add-on, however, so far is "ClipMarks". ClipMark comes with a green paperclip button on the browser. You click on it to activate it and it then allows you to mouse around web pages highlighting content areas in orange boxes. Click on an orange box and you then have the option to save it (rather than bookmarking a whole site or saving a web page), e-mail it, put it directly on your blog or best of all; print it. I love that; only printing specific parts of web pages and not trying to print the whole thing wasting color ink on ads and logos.

My only word of caution; apparantly there are some 15,000 new features. It would be easy to get lost in all the new bells and whistles offered and over-bling your browser. Pick wisely.

Why do we care? Insertnamehere@yahoo.com has hit the saturation point with some 266 million users (that's the most of any single e-mail domain, by the way. Microsoft comes in second around 264 million accounts and Google is third with 102 million accounts). In other words, if your name is Bob Smith then you are not likely to easily find a handy e-mail address on any of the aforementioned domains. Today's your chance, Bob, to make a play for BobSmith@ymail.com. Tomorrow will likely be too late.

As of this writing around 9am EST this morning, the number of downloads was 6.5 million and counting.

Mozilla is pushing Firefox fans to help them set a Guiness World Record for the most downloads in a 24 hour period. If the current record is on the site, for the life of me I can't find it. Don't think that's not on purpose.

As always, I see the brilliance of marketing in these things. If the record to beat was posted on the site, people might put off downloading the new browser once the magic number hit.

Okay, enough marketing however. Back to Firefox 3.

Mozilla is making some pretty heady claims about their new browser, including:

- It's up to three times faster than Firefox 2.
- It boasts more than 15,000 new features (how is that possible?)
- one click bookmarking (sounds good to me. how about better organization of bookmarks?)
- tighter security
- built-in spell checking (they know me well).
- more customization (I've already got the University of Texas skin on my Firefox 2 browser. I love the OU button with the red slash across it. I really don't need anything more beyond that.)

In the interest of not becoming part of the story, I am waiting until the 24 hour record setting frenzy has past, before I download the new version. Stay tuned tomorrow, I will tell you what I think of the new version then.

I notice Mozilla claims Firefox 3 is 2-3 times faster on Macs. No word on PCs.

Hmmmm...

Summer is a great time to catch up on techie housekeeping.

Here are the five things to put on your to-do list, due by the end of August.

1. Clean up your e-mail. Delete, delete, delete. Organize and archive what's important.
2. Get the sneaker- net activated. The sneaker net is an IT euphemism for actually walking the office; work station to work station checking on each computer. Who needs a memory upgrade? Who needs old applications removed off their hard drive? Who needs patches installed? Who needs their browsers updated?
3. Training (See this morning's posting about self-tutoring yourself with a tech manual). For businesses who can afford it, this is a good time to send your admin to an Office 2007 workshop or train someone on staff to be the back-up web master (learning just enough; like how to post new content, swap out a picture, etc.).
4. Research new technologies. Take inventory. What technologies are working well for you? Which technologies are not? Now is the time to read up on topics like software as a service, web conferencing, cloud computing, online collaboration tools, etc. Involve a cross section of your colleagues to take a look at what's out there that can really help make the business more efficient and then set some goals for implementation.
5. Update contact information; both internally and with key clients, vendors and contractors.With so many modes of communication nowadays (office phone, e-mail, cell phone, texting, etc.), contact information is a moving target. Addresses and numbers change and so do individual tastes for preferred methods of contact. Some people rarely pick up the phone, but will answer a text in a nano-second,for example. Make a note wherever the mother rolodex is housed.