Windows 7 Launch Outed by Acer

I find it hard it to believe this was a honest "whoops". But regardles; it appears the cat is out of the bag regarding the pending release of Windows 7.

Acer's UK Marketing Director (someone who would know better than to blow such a "secret") let it fly during an interview with tech gadget news site, Pocket Lint, that Windows 7 will be launched on October 23rd. It will be bundled onto Acer's new all-in-one PC that is optimized for Windows 7.

Microsoft will presumbably offer free upgrades to Windows 7 for anyone who buys a PC bundled with Vista (insert shiver) 30 days before the big launch.

My question: what will this mean for Fall PC sales?

Hopefully, good things.

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Twitter Today, Flitter Tomorrow

Oprah does it. William Shatner does it. Even the President Twitters. One better, Martha Stewart and Snoop Dog not only Twitter; they Twitter each other.

Everyone seems to be all atwitter about Twitter these days. But is it really the online jugernaut to be, as it seems?

Not so fast...

Yes, we know that Twitter had 7 million unique visitors in February of this year.

But, here is some wet blanket news from Nielson's online arm that measures Twitter's traffic (say that three times fast).

According to Nielson, 60% of all new Twitter subscribers drop out after 30 days. Ouch!

Just to give you a little perspective; Facebook loses about 30%.

Twitter doesn't release for public its number of subscribers. But, let's do the math. They may be growing their subscriber base anyway, for now, despite losing more than half of each new signups a month later. Eventually, however, the number of potential new subscribers just won't be there.

Then what?

Will microblogging do a slow fade?

Can you say information overload?

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Bluetooth Software Enables New Capabilities

Your phone has bluetooth. Your computer probably does too. What should this enable you to do?

Investigating various software packages has led me across the following capabilities:

1. Transferring pictures and movies taken on your phone wirelessly to your computer.
2. Syncing address book data between your phone and your computer.
3. Using your cellphone as a 'clicker' to advance powerpoint slides
4. Texting people through your phone from your computer (after all your computer has a better keyboard)
5. Picking up and dialing calls directly from your PC
6. Auto locking and unlocking your computer screen when you walk away with your phone.

I haven't gotten any of this to work yet, although I tried with one application, the BluePhoneElite for the Mac, but it gave me an I/O Kit Error which I could find no information on and could not resolve.

For the Mac, Romeo is getting good reviews.

For Linux, people are having success with the Bluetooth Proximity Monitor.

And in the cool device section we have the Virtual Laser Keyboard. Gotta get me one of those!

If you're a frequent reader of this column (Hi Mom!) you know I love my BlueAnt earbud. It never judges me, is always there to listen when I want to talk, and always speaks to me in a calming voice.

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Attention Business Travelers: Google Maps Tracking Swine Flu

If you travel for work or pleasure, here's a link you may want to save.

It's a Google Earth mashup showing all the reported cases of Swine Flu.

For companies with farflung clients and colleagues, this may be a good time to web conference more and travel less.

That was the "good" of "the good, the bad and the ugly" of the Internet's response to Swine Flu.

Here's the bad and the ugly, which can be summed up in one word: spammers. (How ironic! That, too, is a word for ham. Get it: swine flu - spam? Just an aside.)

Sadly, you can never underestimate the number of scumbags in the world poised to make a buck off tragedy and fear.

Look no further than this. It's a link to all the domain names registered over just the past few days since the outbreak became the lead story allover the world.

Apparantly, the Swine Flu has turned into a virus online. Cybercreeps are having a field day spamming inboxes with offers "to protect you and your family from Swine Flu" (for just $19.95).

Don't be fooled. Do give your staffers a heads up to delete these if you get them.

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Using "Hash Tags" In Twitter

I first heard about Twitter hash tags from Raven, who came up with a list of project management hash tags.

These tags allow you to search for specific Twitter content, like this.

Twitter tags are a mechanism for identifying content of a certain type to an interested group.

Hashtags were developed as a means to create "groupings" on Twitter, without having to change the basic service. The hash symbol is a convention borrowed primarily from IRC channels.

You can see some interesting usage patterns of hashtags on twitter here.

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Streisand on Facebook: How Not To Do It

It pains me to 'dis my favorite diva. But this is a teachable moment that I cannot resist.

Social networking is an irrestible venue for self-promotion and public relations. There's just one really big cardinal rule; don't look like you're doing it.

Barbra broke the cardinal rule.

I watched Barbra Streisand's concert special on CBS over the weekend. Toss your slings and arrows; but I still love her. And, can she still sing? You betcha! Her voice is as strong and wide-ranging as ever.

I did however find it tiresome that the concert took on more of an info-mercial feel with all the commercial breaks promoting the three cd release of the entire concert. Thank you for reminding me, Ms. Streisand, that you did not sing a great many of your standards during primetime. I will, however, not be purchasing the cd.

After the show, I was on Facebook and out of curiousity did a search to see if she had a celebrity page. Of course she did! And it was an even more shameless infomercial promoting the CBS concert and, of course, the cd set.

Barbra's "What are you doing?" posts were just a shameless string of canned comments from the publicist counting down to the date and time of the show, as well as the release of the cd set.

There wasn't one single message of any kind of personal commentary from Babs, herself. Not one single "Man these shoes are tight? Why can't I just sing in my Merrills?". Something, anything, like that!

As a lifelong Barbra fan, if it turned me off; that's a bad sign!

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How To Create Pareto Charts with Excel

I think I ran across this link from Raven the Maven's site. She has the best project management
blog around.

Pareto analysis is a method by which you find the 80% of the problem caused by 20% of the people, or which customers provide most the revenue, or whatever.

This Microsoft Excel tutorial is fantastic for helping you understand how to analyze and display
this sort of spreadsheet. Take a look.

Curt has a project management blog too

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Does The iPhone Mean Business?

Apple would like you to think so; especially you the small to midsize business executive! Just check out this new advertisement from Apple specifically targeting small businesses.

Apple had a great week this week. Yesterday it hit its big one billionth download from its iPhone App store. Despite the economy and despite that it sells premium-priced tech bling; it had an earnings report this week that most companies would die for.

It's easy to get sucked into the iDazzle of iPhone.

Keep in mind, iPhones still make up less than 2% of mobile handset sales worldwide. Nick Jones offers some thoughtful points about that little fact on his Gartner blog, specifically about businesses rushing out to develop applications for the iPhone.

"When I see people like banks developing iPhone specific apps I'm very cynical for a couple of reasons. One is that the proportion of customers of the average bank who have an iPhone is pretty small. And the second one is that I don't see the connection to bottom line revenue. I might switch banks for a higher rate of interest on my deposit, I'm not going to switch banks so I can do my mobile banking on a different phone."

- Nick Jones, Gartner

Despite all those apps, I'm not really seeing what the iPhone can do that a Nokia or Samsung smartphone can't already do and, for that matter, a Blackberry as well.

It will be interesting to see what the new iPhone 3.0 handset that comes out this summer will offer to woo us business folks further.

It will need to be more than a Youtube ad.

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Hot Pink Keyboard For Blondes

I think I might just need one of these, a bright Barbi-pink keyboard
with 'Oops!' instead of 'Delete' and 'No!' instead of 'Esc'

This is truly a beautiful thing.

From the makers of the keyboard with no letters on it for uber geeks (i have one)

These guys are just awesome.

P.S. I heard Angelina Jolie is adopting one of these keyboards. Really!

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Cutting Costs: Power Strips 2.0

If you're using those el cheapo $15 surge protectors under all the desks in your office, this is one not-so-dear capitol expense you may want to invest in; energy-saving power strips. Keep in mind that so-called "phantom power" (the electricity that is juicing your machines while sitting idle) is likely adding an extra 10% - 15% on your monthly bill.

There are plenty of options out there. But here are what I call "power strips 2.0". Any or all of the three of these will certainly bring you a ROI you can't say "no" to.

1. The Belkin Conserve. The "Conserve" lives up to its name. There are few different models, including the 10 outlet model. The key energy saving benefits include eight outlets that can be shut down, while two others can stay up and running for equipment that must be on at all times. Put out the energy hogs like monitors and printers in the back eight .It even comes with a remote control. No more bending over and crawling under desks to flip a switch (which never happens). With the remote you have a fighting chance employees will actually take the time to hit the surge protector switch on the way out the door. Keep in mind, something like 80% of office computers have their power saving features disabled. Give your employees a nudge to do better... and a remote. Prices range from $45 to $70.

2. The Kill A Watt PS. Plug in any electric device and this surge protector offers a readout to let you know just how many killowatt hours its burning on average. It also detects current leakage, over current and over voltage with a digital readout right on the surge protector. Go around the office and take inventory of which devices are the big juice hogs and slaughter them accordingly. You can find them for sale online for just a little under a hundred bucks.

3. The Smart Strip. There's a whole line of these power strips depending on what area of the office (or home) you need it. It's an insanely simple idea. The outlets are color-coded. One color is for devices that are safe to shut down automatically when they aren't in use. Another set of color-coded outlets works best, for example, with peripherials that need to have energy use minimized when they are sitting on, but idle. The third color-coded sockets are for devices that need to be juiced constantly (like the refrigerator, for example). Cost: $30-ish, depending on the model.

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EBay New, But Not Improved

People used to care when eBay announced new changes and features. Well, this week the online auction megalith announced a laundry list of new bells and whistles that will rollout on June 15th.

Uh huh! I hear crickets too.

The economy is down. Unemployment is 8.6%.Those that are spending money are surely looking for a bargain. Those that don't have spending money would undoubtedly like to unload some of their pre-recession bling to put towards monthly bills. It sounds like a recipe for an eBay boom; and yet, eBay marketplace sales are down (-16% for the fourth quarter of 2008).

(Today should be interesting, by the way. EBay will be announcing it's first quarter earnings for 2009.)

So what's the problem? Let me count the ways!

1. EBay sellers have been fleeing like lemmings over the past year since eBay hiked up its seller fees. All of the new features announced this week are features and tools to facilate sales. But, the fees remain. I been cruising a number of blogs and web sites where sellers go to kavetch to take a temperature on reaction to the announcement. Universally, the response has been disgust that there is no change in the fee structure. The common complaint is that between PayPal and EBay wetting its beak, sellers are shelling out anywhere from 15 - 18% off the top from their profits (information superhighway robbery to hear some tell it).

2. Craigslist is free, local and a great way to get around PayPal and shipping fees by selling within driving distance of home or the business.

3. Amazon is taking a big bite out of EBay.

4. EBay took off when it was still next to impossible to launch an e-tail site without hiring a pro to build a shopping cart feature, etc. on the company site. Now just about every site building tool, social networking page and blogging platform has a shopping cart feature that makes it a breeze to set up shop online. Who needs EBay's turnkey solution anymore?

My parting thought: EBay, in my mind, is like the AOL of online selling. America Online was huge in the mid-90's when mainstream folks went online for the first time. America Online was the easy, safe way to get online for the first time. I always called it training wheels for the newbie. After awhile, the average bear just didn't need those training wheels anymore. AOL hasn't gone away, of course. Neither will eBay anytime soon. But like AOL, EBay once functioned as the training wheels for the first time online seller. I believe the need has all but passed for that.

p.s. Happy Earth Day! Turn off the lights more, recycle your ink cartridges, don't forget to turn off your PC at night.

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Continuous Non-Invasive Glucose Monitors

The Glucowatch is now discontinued. It provided a method to monitor blood sugar levels via a technology that sampled enzymes from the surface of your skin every 10 minutes.

New technologies are appearing including Sentek's ocular insert device (yikes), Cybiocare's optical hypoglycemia detector (yikes), and AIMedics HypoMon (which thankfully doesn't go in your eye.)

None of these technologies are similar to the Glucowatch as far as I can tell. But the progress in this area leads me to believe that we will have a continuous blood glucose monitor that is non-invasive and bluetooth connected to your iPhone or GooglePhone within a few years. Such a device would be useful to more than just diabetics, although there are enough of them to create a market.

Curt runs a time tracking software company in Texas

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IT Spending Cuts: Spare Your People!

No, I'm not advocating that you avoid laying off IT staff for humanitarian reasons. That goes without saying. You don't need me to point out that laying off a staffer is taking away their livelihood, putting their children at risk of losing medical care, possibly putting a family out of their home and in the street and stressing out a marriage to the point of divorce. In other words, if you have one ounce of compassion in your body; don't do it. Find another way.

The other reason you shouldn't do it; it's a bad business decision given the nature of how IT departments work and how they can save your bacon at a time like this.

Let me count the ways:

1.) Cut IT spending? Heck, yeah! We're in a recession. But, make them smart cuts. Cut out investing in new technologies. Now is not the time for a big rollout. You'll get far more out of fine tuning the more recent rollouts already in place, then starting from scratch with a buggy, time- consuming new application or hardware switchout. Who's going to do that fine tuning? Answer: in-house IT people that are interacting with staff who use the technology. It takes boots on the ground to get that feedback and respond to it.

2.) Renegotiate vendor contracts. You want to save money? Have your IT folks go back to their vendors and strong arm them for better service contracts.

3.) Does it make sense to throw out a $50,000 piece of equipment? How about a $100,000 piece of technology or even pricier? Why would you throw out a salaried employee that costs about the same? You've made an investment in your staff with training, team building, developing work flow, etc. Yes, it's true. You can always find a outside consultant that can replace your .NET developer or Oracle applications developer. But you get what you pay for in the end. That consultant won't know your business the way a staffer does. Are you sure you want to throw someone out the door that you've put so much time and money into over perhaps many years? Your competitors may end up having the last laugh on that one!

Bottomline: Now is a time to trim the fat, for sure. But it's also a time to recognize and protect your most valuable company assets. You can't put a price tag on institutional knowledge. Especially in IT, institutional knowledge is what you desperately need to come up wtih creative solutions to get the most out of what you already have, to stretch older technologies until you can afford to invest in newer ones again and to innovate with those older technologies in ways that will streamline the business to new efficiencies.

There's also an issue of compassion.

And loyalty.

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Wireless Glucose & Heart Monitors

What if you had a graph of your blood sugar level, blood oxygen level, heart rate, and location minute by minute for the last month or so? Do you think that might help you figure out why you get tired every day at 4pm?

Bluetooth enabled wireless health monitoring systems are starting to come on the scene that could make this level of personal data collection possible. Tie the data together with a food diary and you might just have some fantastic diagnostic data. The GPS data would let you know if you were at the workout club.

As these devices shrink and become more powerful, a much richer picture of how our behavior affects our health may become clear to all of us.

Curt writes a project management blog from time to time

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Voice Entries for Google Calendar - How To

Jott converts speech to text for about $4/month. Google Calendar is a great online calendar program. My BlueAnt V1 earbud makes my cell easy to use. Here's what happens when I want to create a new entry in my calendar now:

I click my earbud once. "Say a command" says my earbud.

"Call speed-dial 8", I say.

"Calling speed-dial 8", says my earbud. This is the 800 number to Jott which will recognize my caller ID
and know who I am.

"Who do you want to Jott?", says the female Jott robot.

"Google Calendar", I say.

"Beep", says Jott.

"Dentist next Tuesday at 9 AM", I say.

Double click my earbud to hangup.

That's it. And it appears on the calendar just like you want it to. Wow. It took very little time to set all this up, really.

Curt is kind of a geek, and he wrote a book about time tracking and project management

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IT Spending Downturn Worse Than 2001

Gartner recently revised its 2009 IT spending forecast. The news was not cheery, as you might expect.

The drop in IT spending this year, projects Gartner, will apparantly be worse than the drop in 2001 (when the tech bubble burst, 9/11 froze everyone in their boots and companies were still y2k'ed out from ushering in the new millenium from the previous year).

IT spending worldwide is supposed to drop 3.8% percent this year from 2008. That may not sound so badly. But compare it to the 2.1% drop in 2001 that caused a lot of pain for IT departments. That 3.8% drop represents a drop from $3.4 trillion to $3.2 trillion dollars; in other words a $200 billion drop in IT spending.

Forrester Research has also recently updated their IT spending projections for the year, as well. Their numbers specifically project U.S. IT spending trends. They are now projecting a 3.1% dip.

So what areas of IT spending are getting hit the hardest in the United States, according to Forrester?

- Computer equipment; down 6.7%

- Communications equipment; down 7.7%

- IT Consulting; down 1.9%

- Software (almost holding it's own); down .4%

The one area where spending is up; outsourcing. Outsourcing figures for 2009 are expected to go up by 2.1%.

Monday, I will make my case why holding onto IT staff is smart money in lean times.

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Guess When Microsoft Office 2010 Is Coming Out?

As we used to say during my local news days; here's a penetrating look into the obvious.

Microsoft is finally giving out some firm details on its next Office release. The big news, I guess, is that it won't be called Office 14 as widely reported in the past. It will be called Office 2010 and, yes folks, it's coming out next year in, er uh, 2010. More exactly, the folks at the Microsoft mothership in Redmond say it will likely be sometime in the first half of the year.

It is also very likely there will be a leaner web-based version that will be free and ad-supported or without ads and subscription-based. If so, that will surely be an attractive option for consumers, self-employed folks and small business owners who have a hard time choking down the current standard edition price (on the current version, Office 2008) of $400.

If so, it will likely be an attractive strategy for Microsoft to counter Google Docs & Worksheets, a shameless Office knock-off that is offered for free, as well.

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Pirates On The iPhone... and more

Apparently, the Apple iPhone store is not immune from piracy. 20% of the apps have been stolen and
are available for free out on the net, and not surprisingly, it's the most useful 20%.

Meanwhile, cracked versions of Microsoft Office, including those that deal with the hideous new
.docx format are apparently available along with all your favorite movies on Piratebay.org. According to one anonymous source, the viruses and identity theftware prevalent on Piratebay can be avoided by
paying attention to user comments of anonymous downloaders who've tested all this booty.

Let the thieves beware. Surely Microsoft must be watching, right?

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Twitter: Top 5 Rookie Mistakes

Twitter is up to 14 million registered users and you can't swing a dead cat without hearing about some other news network, celebrity or household name brand getting in on the Twitter act.

Tempting isn't it?

Go ahead and be tempted, act even. Just be careful, I say. Twitter can be a great way to market your company. But like all things online, don't be shameless about it and for heaven's sake don't be a rookie.

Here are some of the biggest Bozo no-no's for businesses using Twitter:

1. Don't think of it as a tool to talk at potential customers. Twitter is most useful for listening. You tweet to get them to talk.

2. Having someone tweet for the company owner, etc. stinks like dog poop. If the person in the corner office can't do it herself (or himself), then don't bother. Someone always figures it out and it's really embarassing when it happens.

3. Twitter is 24/7. So you better plan on monitoring it 24/7, if you get in the game. There have been some interesting examples of companies that got slammed by public reaction on Twitter on a late Friday afternoon after the PR department had shut down for the week and by their return on Monday morning - yipes! Case in point, the Motrin Moms from last November who blew a gasket over a recent advertisement at the time.

4. There's no time for vetting copy. If your company is one of those companies that needs to tightly control all public-facing messages with rigorous editing and review by several layers of staff and perhaps, oh say, your corporate attorney; that's cool. Just don't bother with Twitter (or blogging or any other social networking tool for that matter). Responding promptly in real time is not negotiable. Instead make sure the person tweeting for the company is high enough up the food chain to make good judgements for the company (a lower person on the totem poll is likely not much of a drawing card for anyone to follow anyway). See rule #2, again.

5. Don't even think about paying people to follow your tweets or stacking your followers with bogus people planting bogus tweets. It's shameless, its obvious and you will get busted by your true followers.

Happy tax day, by the way.

I know! That's like wishing someone a happy root canal.

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And Our Survey Says...

Who cares? The first question that needs to be asked about any new survey is whether there's a hidden agenda in conducting the survey in the first place.

Here is a textbook example of what I mean.

I ran into a report on a very reputable technology news site this week reporting the survey results of IT professionals and their plans to upgrade to Windows 7. The survey was put out by KACE, a systems management company (clue #1: not a research company or news organization or university, etc.).

The results that other journalists bit on had to do with the very lopsided percentage of IT professionals that supposedly plan on postponing a migration to Windows 7 within the next year (83%, for the record). The top reasons cited was trepidation about operating system upgrades after the disasters known as Vista and the economy.

Hmm... interesting! It got my attention.

But then I drilled down into the report (I need to get a life, I know!).

There were all these other results specifically addressing specific financial concerns about rolling out an operating system upgrade. Namely, it requires too much human time migrating everyone on the company network to a new operating system and dealing with all the inevitable glitches, crashes and application conflicts. The survey highlights some pretty logical concerns. Namely with many IT departments scaled back from layoffs, there are fewer bodies to upgrade all those desktops. True, true!

But guess what KACE sells? Yup, hardware solutions for automating things like, oh, operating system upgrades.

The shame of it is that the survey may actually represent a credible reality of how IT departments will likely react to the upcoming release of Windows 7. However, who would know when the survey is so tainted with bias?

Moral to the story: always, always, always consider the source.

On a lighter note, here's an example of how creativity can be the ultimate survival tool in this wretched economy.

The state of New York's budget, like every other state, federal and local budget, is being cut to the bone. Dire times call for dire cuts. Right?

Wrong! Wrong, that is, if you're talking about cute little animals in confined spaces.

Governor Patterson of New York has been threatening to cut funding for The Bronx Zoo and more than 70 other zoos and botanical gardens around the state by 55%. Yipes!

However, it's not just the Bronx Bombers that play hardball south of the Saw Mill Parkway. The lemurs, the Indian peafowl and the joeys have a message for the governor, "fuhgedaboudit". It turns out that they know a guy.

They sent in their first string PR assault team to handle it; a porcupine.

The above PSA, put out on Youtube (of course), was one of two viral videos using humor to make a point - and tug at a lot of heart strings. It worked. 83,000 signatures later, Governor Patterson has lost his title as alpha dog to a zoo full of critters. And for those of you who have recently been laid off in the state of New York, good news! You won't be competing with a alligator snapping turtle at your next job interview.

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Black(out)berry

Duh doh! Blackberry had another nasty outage today hitting primarily consumers and small businesses (the enterprise clients were spared this time).

E-mail was knocked out nationwide from about 1pm to 4pm EST today.

So, if it affected you and you thought there was something wrong on your end; nope!

Other end of the day tidbits...

Apple is making an effort to reassure the Apple-faithful (and more importantly, its stockholders) that Steve Jobs is still alive, well, planning to return to work and, in fact, still has his hand on the steering wheel.

Apparantly, Jobs has been active behind the scenes during his months long medical leave particularly focused on the recent launch of the iPhone's 3.0 software and the Mac netbook presumbably in the works.

Jobs is supposed to be back on the job by summer. Hopefully, this is true and best wishes for his health.

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Automated Gay Bashing Through Amazon

This hacker employed an interesting technique to get many gay and lesbian books banned on Amazon.
It is a technique that could also be used to cause problems for any set of books or
ideas that you don't like. I discovered it following the Twitter hash tag '#amazonfail".

I don't condone what he did. I'm just pointing out that in our new world there are new
and interesting ways to be a huge pain in the neck.

Here is his post describing what he did. It's fascinating, as are the comments.

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Traditional Media Advertising: We Will Miss You, After All

Unless you've just returned from Mars; you are probably aware that the newspaper business is dying. Television news isn't doing so hot, either.

I've been in journalism for 20 years and most of those years I have heard these very words over and over again. Now it seems to be coming true.

Major newspapers all over the country are folding (The Seattle Post Intelligencer, The Rocky Mountain News, to name a couple). The Boston Globe could very well be next with parent company, The New York Times, threatening to do just that if the paper's unions don't find 20 million dollars in cuts by May 1st.

Newspaper advertising, needless to say, is in the dumper. Classified ads have been eclipsed by Craig's List and other online options for selling that used double stroller or bass boat.

Online advertising has emerged as the darling of advertising for companies who want to make sure they're getting the maximum bang for the buck.

Traditional advertising, like newspapers and television, are measured (and I use the term loosely) by - ahem - imprecise methods. For television, Nielson ratings are all but pure voodoo. For advertisers, you have no idea how many people actually saw your commercial; much less acted upon it. With newspapers, there's a rough idea of circulation; but it's anyone's guess what readers actually read or what advertisements they actually glance at for more than a nanosecond.

Not exactly a reassuring metric is it? But for generations it was the only game in town.

The promise of web advertising is that advertisers can pay by the actual click on their ad, or number of times it's downloaded and viewed, or number of times there's a click through and purchase. Now those are metrics we can all hang out hat on, can't we?

Maybe...

Businesses, I think someday you will look back on this lost era of advertising options and mourn.

Here's why:

1. If you think Nielson ratings or circulation numbers are voodoo, how do you feel about "invisible ads"? This a popular scam being run on online advertisers. You pay for a banner ad by the number of times it is downloaded, for example. Online advertisers are actually able to program banner ads to download that are never seen. The code is triggered; but nothing actually reveals on the screen. One screen can literally display three or four banner ads, but download a hundred more invisibly. So much for rock solid metrics.

2. The water cooler metric. Every ad on the web is hitting a niche audience, so niche that you'll likely never hear about it around the so-called water cooler. Let me put it this way; how many times have you talked about a banner ad or a pop-up ad with your buddies in the Starbucks line? How many times have you talked about a Superbowl ad or started humming a commercial jingle only to have a friend with a silly grin join in, as well.

3. Accountability. We all know where to find our local newspaper or television station (if they still exist in your town) or even national network (starts with a "N" and ends in "York"). Do you know where to find all the web sites hosting your ads? If they punk you with programming Jedi mindtricks to boost the numbers, is there anyone working on your side that has a hope of figuring it out? What is your recourse going after a web site based in Bangladesh?

4. False counter ads. Can you imagine Coke running a commercial on NBC claiming Pepsi is poisoneous or Pampers running a full page ad in the Austin American Statesman claiming Huggies is owned by Al Queda? What's to protect your company from flagrantly innaccurate and damaging slander in the form of an anonymous ad popping up around the Internet?

All that aside, I do think the opportunities of online advertising outweigh the negative. But what about balance and having options? As sleazy as you may think all advertising is, believe me there are at least some standards among traditional media. Who will uphold that yardstick for others when they are gone?

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IT Projects Still In Big Trouble?

A new report by the Center for Business Practices (CBP) that resource management issues (figuring out which people are available to put on which projects) are the number one issue facing project centric organizations today.

Problems include:

* Poor resource capacity planning
* Lack of appropriately skilled resources
* Unplanned resource requests
* Poorly optimized resource use
* Inaccurate effort estimations

What can be done? You can read the report for yourself right here.

Curt runs a resource management software company in Texas.

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Eyeglasses With a Heads Up Display?

I want a pair of these.

Science fiction books (e.g. Accelerando, Snowcrash) have for years been droning on about the near future which involves see-thru virtual reality eyewear that labels objects in your vision or otherwise gives a headsup display (HUD) of any data that would ordinarily be presented to you on your computer screen or on a cellphone display.

Microvision was recently awarded a few million by the DOD to make some progress in this arena. One way of doing this is via a projector that is very small and displays images on the inside of your eyeglasses.

The other method that I've heard of is to have a laser raster the images directly onto your retina.
Both methods have challenges, but bugs in the latter method could burn a hole in your head, I guess, which would be bad.

In the more immediate future, Microvision will be releasing a very small iPhone wall projector so you can show powerpoints with only your phone and another phone sized display device.

I want it all, especially the magic glasses. Who wants to buy me one?

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Is This Still America?

I just can't tell anymore after hearing about this one.

The FBI has gone on the defensive this week after going on what can only be described as bare-knuckle offense on behalf of AT&T and Verizon.

Here's the poop:

The FBI raided a couple of data storage centers in the Dallas area in recent days seizing everything "down to the power strips". The search warrant was presumbably part of an investigation into a number of companies who collectively are in arrears to AT&T and Verizon for some 120 million connectivity minutes.

Granted, if true, that's a lot of unpaid minutes and it sounds like someone is up to no good. The FBI search warrant, in fact, paints a case that goes beyond past due bills and is out and out fraud.

Perhaps, I say.

However, I repeat; however....

1.) Well beyond the companies under investigation, literally hundreds of businesses who are customers using those data centers for co-location services for their own company networks were affected. Many were knocked offline and left with no access to their system, including e-mail access. 911 service was even out of order for some area residents. Estimated financial losses for all those businesses is believed to be in the millions. Thanks a lot Quantico boys and girls. As if the economy isn't making things hard enough these days.

2.) At one location, some 220 servers, along with various routers and switches; some belonging to the data center and some belonging to innocent customers not under investigation were confiscated. One such company had over $30,000 in network hardware seized. When a few customers, not named in the search warrant, showed up at the scene asking that their gear and data be spared; the FBI refused to cooperate and instead threatened to arrest them.

My question: doesn't the FBI have anything better to do than function as "repo man" for corporations? Who's keeping an eye out for the next Al Qaeda plot, while they do this instead?

Literally hundeds of businesses were brought to a standstill costing them lost revenue that could mean the difference between making it or not in this economy. Losses are already estimated to be in the millions of dollars.

What about all the "data" the FBI will have to sift through before sorting what is related to possible criminal activity and what is not? What about the privacy of the innocent companies and, more importantly, the privacy of their customers? How do you feel about the government seizing your corporate data or your records?

Last but not least; AT&T and Verizon have some nerve sicking the FBI on anyone for billing disputes. The telecom industry is notorious for incorrect billing. In fact, there are companies in the world finding a brisk business helping other companies read the fine print of their monthly statements making corrections to recover overpayments.

You live by the sword, you die by the sword.

Some parting paranoid thoughts:

- Do you know where all your corporate data is actually stored and by whom? Then how do you know you might not be next?

- These are the parties that helped the NSA tap the phone lines of innocent-until-proven-guilty American citizens. Knowing that, should we even be surprised?

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Twitter is over capacity.

Twitter is over capacity. Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again.

I'm seeing this alot lately. Sometimes popularity is a problem, isn't it.

Salesforce.com gets slow. Jott.com gets slow. Buy some servers guys!

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Moo! Office 2003 and XP Heading For The Pasture

Microsoft is turning up the heat on those of us still using Office 2003 and Windows XP.

A week and some change from now on April 14th, Microsoft will officially drop mainstream support for both.

Typically, Microsoft offers mainstream support for its products for five years and then scales back to "extended support" for an additional five years. After that, you are welcome to call the Smithsonian and see if they are interested in taking the application off your hands.

What does this mean for businesses and personal users?

Microsoft guarantees free security patches and fixes during those mainstream support years. Afterwards, with extended support, nonsecurity "hot fixes" are only provided to companies who have a service contract. Security fixes and junk mail fixes for Outlook will continue to be provided for free.

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The Domino's Effect Online

Here's a cautionary tale reminding us all that there's no such thing as making a little mistake when it comes to a company's online prescence.

Domino's Pizza made headlines last week after it came out that the king of home delivered mediocre (at best) pizza accidentally gave away 11,000 pizzas.

How did it happen?

Apparantly, Domino's internally had abandoned plans to offer a free pizza deal as a part of their "Bailout" campaign. In fact, "bailout" was to be the promo code for ordering a free pizza online. In fact again, before it was abandoned, the plan had already been enacted as far as to already program in the "bailout" code on their company web site.

Oops!

So when the plan was cancelled before it even launched publicly, no one remembered to make sure the promo code didn't go live anyway.

Big oops!

Pesky online customers sometimes guess at promo codes hoping they'll stumble onto a deal they don't know about otherwise. (Is it hard to imagine a college student doing this?)

Someone did so, successfully.

Bigger oops!

Even peskier online customers and users love to share hacks like this. Believe me; the glory of cracking the Domino's code is a lot more rewarding than the taste-like-cardboard free pizza.

Oops meets critical mass!

11,000 free pizzas later (in other words; in a matter of hours), Domino's figured out what was happening and deactivated the code.

Lessons to be learned from this one:

Commandment #1: Thou shalt not "go live" on your web site before you mean it.

Commandment #2 Thou shalt not assume that if something is active on the web site; but hidden, that it will stay that way. Online users don't need a link or a trail of bread crumbs to find stuff on your web site. Some will root around for goodies in the back forty.

Commandment #3 Offering freebies online is a dangerous business. Think it through. Think it through. And then, think it through again. Then don't do it, unless your pockets are as deep as Domino's Pizza.

Commandment #4 Thou shalt monitor visitor traffic and activity 24/7, if you are a public-facing eBusiness. The web never sleeps and neither should your eBusiness. Otherwise you could wake up and be in the red to the tune of 11,000 pizzas.

Commandment #5 Watch this video and imagine the first domino as the first person who finds an exploit in your web site.

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GoodReads.com Social Networking Bookclub

So If you've ever spent time in a bookclub, you'll like goodreads. You can hook up with old friends and you may find, like I did, that many of your friends are already on there. One of my friends, Patrick, reads so much that if he ends up participating he'll probably flood the site with comments. He runs his own book review site call LitBlog

Curt runs a resource management software company and is currently researching social networking sites for yet another upcoming Web2.0 speech he has to give.

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Skype Hype: One Million Downloads and Counting

It was just three days ago that the new Skype application for iPhone became available for free on iTunes. Within 48 hours, it surpassed one million downloads making it one of the most popular downloads ever.

I don't know about Apple; but Skype has clearly hit one over the back fence on this deal.

Deep thoughts on this one:

- Skype has kind of just skipped along for a few years picking up users, pardon the pun, mainly by word of mouth. Here's how it goes: someone signs up for Skype and then immediately is enticed to persuade others to do the same. Phone calls among Skype users are free. Now iPhone users are downloading it like crazy; as in one more customer downloading it every six seconds. I smell critical mass for Skype, at last.

- What does this mean, in the long run, for telcos. Will Skype become the new way of getting around cell phone bills? Cell phone carriers are setting themselves up for a comeupance. They frequently over price features, screw up billing and use complex plans to bamboozle customers into accidently running up higher bills by accident. Frankly, I wish Skype well.

- What does this mean for eBay? Everyone laughed (except eBay stockholders) back in 2005, when eBay bought Skype for a crazy 2.6 billion dollars.

I wonder how AT&T, the iPhone's official and exclusive cell phone carrier, feels about all of this.

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This Week's Yawners in Tech

Here's this week's batch of not-exactly-lead-story-material headlines:

-Microsoft has announced a new partnership to put MySpace's mobile app on Windows Mobile. (Check my pulse, please. Make sure I'm still alive.)

-In a new survey put out by Forrester Research, America Online has been rated the best internet service provider in terms of customer service and that's without sending me a free installation cd in the mail once a week. I'm getting low on coasters.

-Dell will soon be offering it's Inspiron desktop towers in eight different colors. Prices start at $299 (that's a little more interesting). Problem; despite the eye candy, it's still a desktop and who wants to be tied to a desk anymore?

-Nokia and AT&T announced this week that it's coming out with the world's thinnest smartphone. The E71x (catchy name) is just 10mm thick. The iPhone is just over 12mm thck. The Razr is about 15mm thick, depending on the model. Ooooo.. Aaahhh. Let's see how the E71x holds up in the pants pocket test.

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How To Make Sure You Don't Have The Conficker Worm

It's a sure sign of April Fool's day; we're all under the threat of another #$%#$%$ worm or computer virus attack. Only this time the worm du jour is called the "Conficker Worm" and it's not a question of whether it will infect millions of PCs today; it already has!

All the security experts (worm watchers?) pretty much agree that anywhere from two to ten million PCs worldwide already have Conficker lurking in their system dormant and just waiting to be launched.

The code for Conficker appears to be written to not only compromise the security of its host computers; but turn them into unwitting bots to launch spam attacks and attack other systems for purposes of identity theft. Somewhere in a hollowed-out volcano lair there is a Dr. Evil wanna-be that needs to get a life and leave the world alone.

Here's something you can do other than worry today: check your computer and see if it's been spared.

This is pretty simple.

Go to Google's home page, then Microsoft and then any of the big name security software sites like Symantec or McAfee.

Next, run a Windows Update (Oh yeah, Conficker only infects PCs with Windows - of course!).

If your computer can do all of the above, then you don't have the worm.

If you are not able to do any part of those steps; then click here for a tutorial on how to de-worm your system of Conficker from CNet.

p.s. Today's "In Poor Taste" award goes to Symantec for the following banner pushing their products - "Protect your PC Against the Conficker Worm with award-winning Norton products".

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What You Need Now Is Bluetooth Sunglasses...

Don't you? Doesn't everyone? Sure you do.

Imagine if you could listen to your music constantly and when the phone rings the music automatically stops while you talk to Mom? It's gonna have to be your Mom, cause noone else will ever call you if they see you wearing these butt-ugly glasses.

Fashion disaster duly noted, they are functional in interesting ways.

Curt runs a project and resource management software company in Texas

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