What to do with business cards in 2010?

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

Business cards. How on earth has it got to the year 2010 and they still exist, filling our drawers, cluttering our desks?

The crazy thing is that business cards are more important now than they were a decade ago. Back in those halcyon days Palm Pilots were as ubiquitous as biros, and you could transmit your details to someone else via the wonders of infrared technology. But then other devices started filling our suit pockets, all using different operating systems and proprietary interfaces, and we had to fall back on that cumbersome rectangular piece of card.

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Anglian Windows gets more than it bargained for on Bing

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

By now I expect everyone is familiar with the idea of buying keywords in search engines. Identify a keyword you like, stake your claim to it, and you get a featured listing whenever someone puts that term in the search box.

On Bing, Microsoft’s very handy and super-relevant search engine, it would seem that Anglian Windows has bought a featured spot that pops up to tell you about the new Government scrappage scheme – not the one that applies to cars, the one that applies to double glazing.

Except that “Windows” has to be one of the most frequently searched terms on the web  -  I put it in almost every search because I’m always looking for Network error messages and their fixes, and if I leave “Windows” out then I get five times as many hits about Linux, which I don’t need to see. I am very unlikely to go from my “Windows” search to Anglian for some new double-glazing, so quite why Anglian’s ad appears when I type terms such as “windows trust failure vmware” into Bing is a mystery.

Thank God they only pay when people click on the ad, or the Government may be bailing out another company.

A minute’s applause for the passing of my awful PC

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

My desktop computer is dying. It’s contracted some sort of virulent tech plague that’s sweeping through the components, knocking out my graphics card a couple of weeks ago, and causing my RAM to wobble – though not fall down – over the weekend. It’s even developed a death rattle from somewhere behind the fan.

Computers are like cars in this respect, they tend to teeter on the verge of death for a while and then collapse in a spectacular heap overnight. And while I should be wringing my hands, consulting priests, shamans and witch doctors while tearing the labs apart for replacement parts, I find myself blissfully unconcerned. You see, I don’t like my desktop PC and I’m going to watch it die with a smile on my face and a song in my heart.

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Twitter bomb threat: has the world gone mad?

Monday, January 18th, 2010

I’ve always understood that the world is a crazy place – after all, Westlife had a highly successful career – but this morning’s story that a British man was arrested for a blow-off-steam Twitter comment about “blowing the airport sky high” suggests we’ve moved up a gear.

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Whatever happened to Second Life? Your reaction

Sunday, January 17th, 2010

My recent feature “Whatever happened to Second Life?” certainly struck a nerve.  At least two people called for me to be sacked, Second Life blogs swelled with indignation and one die-hard Second Lifer delivered the finest stream of foul-mouthed insults I think I’ve ever read (click through to The Ephemeral Frontier if  – like me – you’re not easily offended).

There were also more than 50 comments on the feature itself, many of which are lengthy, measured and insightful. They clearly took a lot of time to write and I thank you for taking the time to contribute. Incredibly, some even agreed with me.

Here I’m going to round-up a selection of the comments and issue my response to them.

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Gmail 2010 = Lotus Notes 1995?

Friday, January 15th, 2010

The hissy fit between Google and the People’s Republic of China has been in the news – including the “quality papers” a good deal lately. So, I went to see what’s new at Google for mail users, and spent a while looking around the extended features offered in its Labs, where you can find the stuff Google thinks is going to be cool, neat, and realy useful for those of us who have failed to compress the whole of our existence down to the 140 character limit of Twitter.

It was the sudden flip to using HTTPS which really put me in mind of the comparisons with other email products. HTTPS, Google says, is the answer to concerns over the security of people’s emails, and it had long intended to turn the feature on were it not for the inherent processing overhead to that type of network traffic.

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Do you care about DirectX 11?

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

Before every new graphics card release, ATI holds a conference call to go through the chip’s specification, marketing strategy and future. It’s normally hosted by the head of the team that developed the card and is attended by journalists from across Europe, and normally they’re pretty routine.

During the call to announce the new Radeon HD 5670, however, a comment from Shaila Bansal, senior product manager for the Radeon HD 5000-series, sparked my interest. “There is a lot of demand from customers to have the latest version of DirectX”, she said, referring to a slide in our presentation PDFs that allegedly illustrated that point before going on to say how the new card is squarely aimed at the “mainstream” consumer rather than enthusiasts who might salivate over the Radeon HD 5970.

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How to keep on top of email

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

I admit that I’m a little obsessed by email. Not only have I previously blogged on how I use Outlook, I also wrote a feature on How to Master Outlook for PC Pro last year and interviewed the man behind Getting Things Done, David Allen.

Now David Allen is a man I admire greatly, and I’m sure there are thousands of people who have converted to his way of doing things with huge success. But he advocates a “system”, a complete change in your habits, and the brutal reality is that most people can’t change their ways. And that includes me.

Instead, I seem to have arrived at a way of doing things that can be best thought of as a kludge. It doesn’t always work and it has its faults. Sometimes I drown in so much email that I want to scream, and sometimes I forget things. But in my mind it’s a 20% of the effort with 80% of the result kind of approach, so for better or worse I share it here.

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SketchUp 7.1 – Google does the right thing (largely)

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

It might be minor compared to the whole China issue, but Google has recently tackled another skeleton in its cupboard – and it shows just how difficult it is to live up to the company’s famous “Don’t Be Evil”  code of conduct.

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Two novel ways to power-up your iPhone

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

iPhone owners are never far away from their charger, given that the handset chomps through its battery faster than Dan Brown dreaming up the plot of one of his novels. Two devices I stumbled across on the CES showfloor might help keep the iPhone kicking for a little longer.

The Dexim P-Flip is a superbly designed extra battery cum desktop dock for the iPhone. When you’re at your desk, you plonk your iPhone into the P-Flip cradle and connect it to your computer via USB cable. This both synchronises your iPhone with the PC, and charges the P-Flip’s battery.

Then when you’re ready to head out into the big wide world, you flip the battery pack flat against the surface of the phone and benefit from up to eight hours of extra talktime or 15 more hours of video playback (Dexim’s figures, not mine).

What’s more, the device doubles as a stand for the iPhone (both upright and landscape), allowing you to watch video without having to awkwardly cradle the handset in your palm – although the screen might be a little too perpendicular to the surface to make for comfortable long-term viewing.  It’s reasonably good value too, costing £40 from Play.com. (more…)