Tech News

• 23Sep

  Wireless networks face off in electronic reader battle

  Gadgets, Uncategorized, Wireless No Comments

  Verizon is to provide wireless support for a new electronic reading device, produced by iRex. It means all three of the largest US wireless networks now have an involvement in the market.

  iRex already has two electronic readers, the iLiad and the Digital Reader 1000 series. However, the Verizon deal is for a forthcoming model, the DR800SG (pictured) which will cost $399 and have an 8.1” touchscreen.

  The Verizon deal will mean users can download as many titles from the Barnes & Noble e-book store and the Newspapers Direct library as they want, without any data transfer costs (though of course they’ll have to pay for the content itself).

  Unlike the Kindle, the iRex reader supports multiple wireless technologies, so it should be able to download in any country where the manufacturer has struck a deal with a local network. That may be a useful tool for US buyers heading overseas on vacation, or for people outside the US wanting to import the machine. But its biggest advantage is that it means iRex has less work to do before selling the model in a new market.

  While the Kindle certainly wasn’t the first electronic reader, its deal with Sprint to provide wireless support was one of the major factors in helping the market take off. Wireless support meant users could download books anywhere (subject to network coverage), as long as they didn’t mind splashing the cash.

  The wireless feature also proved a boost for publications: users could now have their choice of newspaper or magazine to read during a commute without having to spend time firing up the computer, hooking up the Kindle and downloading the files before rushing out of the door.

  AT&T has already announced plans to provide wireless support for both Plastic Logic’s supersized reader (designed particularly for newspaper reading) and some forthcoming Sony models.

  Both the iRex device and the new Sony machines will be stocked by BestBuy, unlike the Kindle which is an Amazon exclusive. While the prices are still a little high for the mass market, the Best Buy deal should expand the potential audience and give curious shoppers a chance to play about with the devices before deciding if they are worth buying.

  

  Related posts:

  1. Sony takes classic approach to battle cutting-edge Kindle
  2. Electronic reader study raises serious economic questions
  3. Giant Kindle targets commuters and students

  
  

  

  
• 23Sep

  Fanurio Time Tracking & Billing Software Giveaway – Winners Announced

  Extras, Linux, Mac, Other License, Reviews & Giveaways, Window, Windows No Comments

  Last week, a post at WRD was announcing the giveaway of 5 Fanurio time tracking & billing software licenses ($59 value / license). The winners are selected & can be found at the bottom of the post. But before that, to remind:

  What is Fanurio?

  Fanurio is a beautiful software with an intuitive interface for easily tracking time that is spent on projects & billing them accordingly.

  

  It is possible to define projects & sub-tasks. Then, the time worked on the projects can be tracked manually or with the help of a timer.

  For teams, everyone can install Fanurio to their computers, track the time and export/import reports easily.

  Create the invoices

  From the moment you get a new contract until you are paid in full, Fanurio offers you the right tools to manage and bill all your work down to the penny.

  It covers almost any billing feature you may need like rounding time "up, down or to the nearest specified interval" or applying discounts & more.

  Analyze the performance

  Fanurio helps analyzing the perfomance with the reports it generates:

  • payments: see all your open, un-paid invoices
  • timesheet: time recorded on a certain period, by project or client
  • project reports: howmuch money you made, howmuch money is unpaid, etc.

  Also, reports can be exported to CSV or Excel for further analysis.

  Fanurio works on Windows, Mac or Linux & doesn’t require purchasing new licenses when switching OSs.

  And, the winners:

  Here they are:

  • Matt (comment #75715)
  • Pritish Nandi (comment #75810)
  • christian (comment #77066)
  • GeeniUss (comment #75715)
  • paul rostorp (comment #76381)

  Congratulations to the winners and thanks to everyone for joining this giveaway.

  Special Downloads:
  Ajaxed Add-To-Basket Scenarios With jQuery And PHP
  Free Admin Template For Web Applications
  jQuery Dynamic Drag’n Drop
  ScheduledTweets

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  Tags: Linux, Mac, Window, Windows
  

  Related posts

  • Fanurio Time Tracking & Billing Software – 5 Licenses Giveaway
  • Convert Web Apps. To Desktop Apps.: Prism
  • Automated Browser Refresher For Developing Easier: XRefresh
  • Windows 2008 Hosting Discount Offer: Easy CGI
  • Server Supervisor: 3 Licenses Giveaway

  

  
• 23Sep

  Table Less is evaluating CSS frameworks and blogging about the experience http://deligere.wordpress.com/

  Uncategorized No Comments

  Dion Almaer Table Less is evaluating CSS frameworks and blogging about the experience http://deligere.wordpress.com/ Wednesday from Twitter - Comment - Like

• 23Sep

  Google Sidewiki

  Google Toolbar, Web Search No Comments
  Last year, Google launched a feature called SearchWiki that allows users to customize search results. If you are logged in, you can remove search results, promote them at the top of the search results page and enter comments. While the feature is useful to personalize the results for frequent queries, the "wiki" component was only an afterthought.
  
  Check the SearchWiki page for "google" and you'll realize that the 27511 notes recorded by Google aren't very useful. Comments aren't helpful, even though Google tries to rank them by usefulness.
  
  
  A similar feature is now available in Google Toolbar. Google Sidewiki lets you enter comments about any web page and shows some of the best comments in a sidebar. The feature is integrated with Google Profiles, so you can find more information about the author and read other Sidewiki comments.
  
  
  Google notifies you if there are comments about the current page, so you need to send your browsing history to use the feature.
  
  
  Sorting the comments by date wouldn't be a great idea, because spam and silly comments like "lol" or "cool site" would be prevalent. That's why, Google developed a ranking algorithm that takes into account many signals: user votes, author's authority, text analysis. Danny Sullivan says that "Google has a language sophistication detector now, and one that works in the 14 different languages that Sidewiki supports".
  
  
  Learning some information about a site, finding if a certain company is reputable or reading a comment that corrects some errors from an article - all are use cases for Sidewiki, but it remains to be seen if Google manages to rank comments properly.
  
  As with Knol, Google encourages experts to post comments in Sidewiki: "What if everyone, from a local expert to a renowned doctor, had an easy way of sharing their insights with you about any page on the web?" Unfortunately, experts don't have an incentive to post comments and isn't always easy to distinguish experts from opinionated users.
  
  Larry Page once said that Google wasn't supposed to be a search engine. "We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web--build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank."

  

  
  

  

  
• 23Sep

  if (sysadmin && sysadmin.company.isCrappy && useCrappyActivexStill && refuseToInstallOtherBrowser && canSneakPluginThrough) CFInstall()

  Uncategorized No Comments

  Dion Almaer if (sysadmin && sysadmin.company.isCrappy && useCrappyActivexStill && refuseToInstallOtherBrowser && canSneakPluginThrough) CFInstall() Wednesday from Twitter - Comment - Like Jimminy (CoG of FF) and Matt Mastracci liked this

• 23Sep

  Everyone gets paid on commission

  Uncategorized No Comments

  The Washington Post recently laid off a columnist because his blog posts didn't get enough web traffic.

  Of course, in the old days, the newspaper had no real way to tell which columns got read and which ones didn't. So journalists were lulled into the sense that it didn't really matter. The Times quotes Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU,  “It’s an unusual public rationale for serious newspaper people, that’s for sure.”

  Wrong tense. It's not going to be unusual for long.

  In fact, in a digital world where everything can be measured, we all work on commission. And why not? If you do great work and it works, you should get rewarded. And if you don't, it's hard to see why a rational organization would keep you on.

  You don't have to like the coming era of hyper-measurement, but that doesn't mean it's not here.

  

  
• 23Sep

  Ask [GAS]: Do you really need that netbook?

  Apple, Gadgets, Software, Technology, Uncategorized, geek gadgets, laptop, netbooks, reviews, writing No Comments

  

  By Natania Barron
  Contributing Writer, [GAS]

  I have a MacBook. It serves all of my needs flawlessly. It runs my browser, Scrivener, and a handful of other programs I use on a daily basis. It’s sleek and white, and quite resilient (having survived a few tumbles at the hands of my three year old). Aside from the spot where my wrist has flaked off some of the plastic at the edge, it looks pretty much exactly like it did when I first purchased it.

  We should be happy. But we’re not.

  And I’ll tell you why: for the last two years I’ve been besotted with netbooks. I have found myself inexplicably looking up reviews on Amazon, comparing specs; more than once I’ve been lost in the aisles at Costco, running my hands over the smooth keyboard on the new Acers, batting my eyes lovingly at the HP. Then there was that one time that I nearly bought one at Wal-Mart. A Dell. Because it was $298. For shame.

  I blame BoingBoing. I blame other writers. I blame the whole internet. You know why? Because I don’t need a netbook. I have a perfectly good MacBook, and although it’s a little heavier and bigger than most netbooks, it outperforms them in every aspect imaginable. In fact, I used to have the same iBook that CNet recently profiled, which essentially was a netbook. Before there were netbooks. And we were happy. So why not now?

  Yes, I have fantasies about slipping a Vivienne Tam designed netbook right into my purse, knowing that wherever I go, I can take it out and write. There’s a weird sense of power in that concept. I don’t want an iPhone, mind you. I want a small computer to bend to my will. And it’s silly how much time I’ve spent contemplating what it would be like: a coffee shops, airports, at the park…

  I am not alone. I know of people who own netbooks–some who love them–but I also know a great percentage of people who simply want one. It’s a cheap computer, with limited specifications, only good for a handful of tasks, and yet we are obsessed. We think, somehow, that the netbook will make our lives easier. But that’s the problem. If, like me, you already have a gadget that gets the job done (and better–I mean, when it comes down to it I’m not willing to give up Scrivener) isn’t purchasing an additional machine actually making your life more complicated?

  So why does this itchy wanting feeling persist?

  Because geeks love gadgets, and we have come to love the lies, too. Sure, netbooks can be great; I wish I had one in college, for instance. But now? I don’t need two laptops. And I sure don’t need a laptop that underperforms my current model. So all that leaves me with is the fact that I want something small and cute that fits in my purse and… yeah, that just doesn’t hold up in an argument, does it?

  So where do you stand on the netbook debate? Are netbooks really just bigger smartphones with keyboards? A clever marketing ploy? A viable/necessary device? A fad? A farce?

  Related posts:

  1. Sony Unveils the Much-Rumored Vaio P, World’s Lightest 8-inch Netbook!
  2. $50 netbook not such a bargain
  3. Ask [GAS]: Which gadget is topping your Christmas list?

  
  

  

  
• 23Sep

  Wednesday Geeky Picks: Pirates

  Culture, Uncategorized No Comments

  Talk Like a Pirate Day was of course last weekend, but assuming that some of you are still in the swashbuckling mood, here are some geek-inspired pirates… or pirate-inspired geeks… or something.  Yo ho ho.

  ARRRRRR2D2 – kaptainkobold (CC)

  

  Steampunk Pirate; I think I find her far more frightening than the normal sort, actually. Must be the gas mask. – hypersapiens (CC)

  

  The exclamation point is really useful; how else would you know that this pirate has a quest for you? Well, unless you’re not playing World of Warcraft at the time, in which case it’s just confusing. aseraphin (CC)

  

  Pirate At Work – fullgl (CC)

  

  Pirate of the Corellian – st3f4n (CC)

  

  Pirates are, of course, the chosen people of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Good to know that like every good church they have arts and crafts time. – smiteme (CC)

  

  That pirate has absconded with my Christmas tree! stuartpilbrow (CC)

  

  The Bread Pirate Roberts – rakka (CC)

  

  Related posts:

  1. 5 Geeky Things to Do on Talk Like a Pirate Day
  2. They Hang Pirates, Don’t They?
  3. Wednesday Geeky Pics: WoW Cosplay

  
  

  

  
• 23Sep

  Is Branding Dead?

  Copywriting, Personal Branding No Comments

  

  Sure, there are still some iconic brands. Apple, Nike, Coke.

  But those are giant companies. They go by different rules.

  For the rest of us mortals, does the traditional idea of a brand — an iconic emotional shortcut that lets customers identify with a product — make any sense anymore?

  Won’t smart, lean, agile little companies eat the big, lazy brands up?

  After all, a village business doesn’t need a brand, right?

  Well . . .

  The direct marketing view

  A lot of direct marketers like to mock branding and “awareness” advertising as a self-indulgent waste of time.

  Brilliant direct response copywriters like Eugene Schwartz and Gary Bencivenga were master harpooners. They only had one shot at their prospect, and that’s all they needed to create millions of dollars in sales.

  They didn’t need a “brand halo” to make their products look good. Their copywriting created a complete experience within a single brightly-colored envelope. To rely on a brand to do the selling for you was almost . . . cheating.

  The blogger’s view

  Bloggers, too, like to mock brands.

  Artificial. Out of touch. Irrelevant. Fake emotions created by cynical corporations to manipulate the gullible.

  Except the iPhone, obviously. That’s just, well, better.

  The ad agency’s view

  From the eyes of a good ad agency, the above views are held by sad, shabby people with bad haircuts. In other words, people who Just Don’t Get It.

  If you do get it, you start by articulating the components of your brand identity. From there you build a brand platform, a brand vocabulary, a brand manifesto, and/or a brand bible. Then you’re ready to message a cohesive brand vision of your brand’s identity across a variety of channels until you can reliably generate some decent brand awareness and maybe even some day achieve a brand halo.

  I actually love working with ad agencies, except when I want to shoot them.

  Another view

  I have long been a fan of Seth Godin’s definition of a brand: “a promise made over time.”

  Those of us who are wordier than Seth would probably be tempted to elaborate, something like “a promise made, kept, and believed over time.”

  Does it work for Apple? They promise breakthrough design and stylish, user-friendly products that will make you cooler just by owning them.

  Does it work for Copyblogger? We promise practical advice on the smartest ways to build online business, make your blog more successful, and create competitive advantage by pairing social media with traditional direct response copywriting.

  Does it work for a solo business? Let’s imagine a fictional Etsy vendor selling hand-woven organic baby blankets. They might promise soft, safe materials you’ll feel good about wrapping your baby in, colors that venture beyond boring pink and blue, and fantastic funky packaging that makes them a pleasure to give as gifts. They promise that you can be a mama (or papa) without turning into some tedious Stepford Parent. They promise handmade quality and a human connection.

  Your brand is not your blog header

  Quit thinking of brands in terms of logos or typefaces or what a particular shade of blue communicates to your customer.

  You can make decisions about those things after you know what promise you’re going to make over time.

  To work as a brand, a promise has to be exciting. It has to mean something to your potential customer. It has to turn everyone on — you and them.

  So what promise do you make with your blog, site, or business? Let us know in the comments.

  About the Author: Sonia Simone is Senior Editor of Copyblogger and the founder of Remarkable Communication.

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• 23Sep

  http://bit.ly/NZpJp Google Wave to require Chrome Frame for IE users (via @simonw) Will announce new “Smart IT labotamy” to bypass admin

  Uncategorized No Comments

  Dion Almaer http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2009... Google Wave to require Chrome Frame for IE users (via @simonw) Will announce new "Smart IT labotamy" to bypass admin Wednesday from Twitter - Comment - Like

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