May 31st, 2007

Lenovo X61 details emerge

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 6:08 am

Categories: Hardware, Tablet PCs, Vista, Windows

Tags: IBM ThinkPad, Lenovo Group Ltd., Battery, Marc Orchant

Lenovo appears ready to give its ThinkPad Tablet PC offering a boost with the imminent arrival of the X61 model which features a Core 2 Duo processor, better connectivity options, enhanced displays, and a reported 12-hour battery life with the now-standard 8-cell battery. More info at GottaBeMobile.com. Apparently my fellow MVP Dennis Rice already has his hands on one and will be posting some comparisons to the ThinkPad X60t I’m currently working with.

The thing I find most interesting is the choice of operating systems. Lenovo will reportedly allow you to configure the X61 with 32- or 64-bit Vista or with Windows XP. Hmmm….

May 30th, 2007

Google Gears - the game has changed

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 10:30 pm

Categories: Google, Mobility, Software, Web Apps

Tags: Game, Google Inc., Google Reader, Marc Orchant

Wow!

I’m not often left feeling completely astonished these days. I like to think I’m pretty on top of where things are going. But I just got completely blindsided by Google Gears. There’s already plenty of first-glance analysis to help you grasp the magnitude of what they’ve done. I recommend you start by listening to David Berlind’s podcast interview with Linus Upson, a director of engineering at Google about the back story on Gears and what Google is aiming to accomplish with this broadside.

Then you can pop over to Techmeme and read until you can’t take any more guessing, prognosticating, and crystal ball gazing. There’s a huge thread of posts and counter-posts already piling up and at this hour (10:25 p.m. Mountain time) the pace with which this is pushing everything else off the page is pretty impressive.

Rather than trying to tell you “what it all means”, I thought a quick display of Gears in action would be infinitely more interesting. Here’s what I did in about five minutes to turn Google Reader, the tool I’m using to manage my RSS habit these days, into an offline reader. Follow along because I think you’ll be every bit as blown away as I am at how easy this is.

Step 1 - Install Google Gears (as a Firefox add-in in my case). Windows, Mac and Linux Firefox are supported as is Internet Explorer. Safari support is promised soon according to the podcast interview mentioned above.

Step 2 - Click the offline button in Google Reader (next to the account name in the upper right corner of the window). Google Reader asks if you want to download content before going offline. Downloading 2000 items took only a couple of minutes over a WiFi connection.

Step 3 – Disconnect from the intertubes and read your RSS feeds as if you were still connected. When you reconnect to the network, Google Reader synchronizes your local changes (items read, shared and/or starred) with the server and updates new content from your subscription list. Seamless.

Step 4 – There is no Step 4.

This is big folks. In my admittedly limited testing the offline reading experience is completely consistent with what I’ve come to expect when working with Reader online (with the exception of images which are not downloaded for offline viewing). Google is open-sourcing Gears and, as David points out in the post accompanying his podcast interview, they’ve taken a huge step towards defining a de facto standard for taking web apps offline. The reason I think this isn’t just crazy Web 2.0 hype is that Adobe has announced they are aligning their Apollo efforts with the approach Google’s taken with Gears as there are significant similarities in how the two companies have have approached their online/offline application solutions.

There are probably a few freaked out people in the web and hybrid application worlds right about now. Because the game has changed.

May 29th, 2007

Tim Sanders' PowerPoint epiphany

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 7:40 pm

Categories: Microsoft Office, Productivity, Software

Tags: Microsoft PowerPoint, Conference, Marc Orchant

Tim Sanders ran into an all-too common problem at a speaking engagement. The sequence of speakers at a conference was running behind schedule and he found himself facing a hungry, tired crowd just before lunch.

Faced with these circumstances, he made the snap decision to ditch the PowerPoint deck he’d prepared and interacted with the audience – from the audience.

What could have been a disaster turned out very well. And Sanders says he’s going to limit his slides or go without more often. Based on my experience this is a sound strategy, not only when presenting at a conference but also when conducting a meeting. Use mind-mapping, affinity brainstorming, and other approaches that engage everyone. You’ll get better results and more cooperation.

There are times when a slide deck is just the right thing and there are certainly people who can use them effectively (think Steve Jobs and Tom Peters). Cliff Atkinson literally wrote the book – Beyond Bullet Points – on how to approach presentation building from a storyteller’s perspective. So I’m not saying don’t use the tool. I am saying use it with discrimination and mix up your bag of tricks.

May 28th, 2007

Voice over WiFi - is this a solution?

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 11:10 am

Categories: Hardware, Mobility

Tags: Wi-Fi, voice-over-Wi-Fi, Mobile Marketing, Marc Orchant

I just read an interesting piece in the Orlando Sentinel (via Techmeme) about voice over WiFi and other solutions to spotty cell phone coverage in the home, office, and other environments where signal strength can be anywhere from intermittent to nonexistent. My pal Andy Abramson weighs in with his thoughts at VoIP Watch on how the cell network operators have fumbled the ball on creating this convergence. In typical, no-holds-barred fashion, he writes:

The bottom line is not one USA carrier (other than T-Mobile) with so much to gain, and really nothing to lose, has taken an “embrace the future” approach about WiFi, and instead, through their actions continued to move us all back to 1984 and the pre-divestiture era of monopoly.

The good news is that T-Mobile is, according to the Sentinel article, planning to roll out HotSpot@home (or UMA – Unlicensed Mobile Access) to allow this switching – perhaps as early as year’s end. Other ideas are also in various stages of development.

The bad news, as the article points out, is that WiFi does tend to take a drmatic toll of battery life. I’ve seen this on both the Nokia N93 and N95, the two dual-band mobile devices I’ve had an extended opportunity to use. Also, the number of dual-band phones out there today represents a tiny percentage of the market. But hey… there’s a reason for the operators to convince us mobile folks we need to upgrade and extend our indentured servitude by another year or two.

Having used TruPhone, Gizmo, and Fring on the Nokia devices, I can attest to the fact that calls made using these services over WiFi sound every bit as good (and often better) than calls placed on the cellular network. I’ve been able ot make WiFi pretty ubiquitous in my day-to-day life (home, office, and a number of cafes and public locations offering free WiFi). As long as I have a spare battery and/or charger in my bag (which I pretty much always do – as well as charger in my car), I’m prepared to deal with the power consumption issues.

But it is time for the network operators to figure out a forward-looking strategy. Divide and conquer ain’t going to cut it.

May 26th, 2007

NYC on 2 Nokias a day

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 11:28 am

Categories: Gadgetry, Hardware, Mobility, Productivity, Web Apps

Tags: Trip, Multimedia, Nokia Corp., Marc Orchant

A couple of weeks ago, I took the family on a trip to New York City. We got a pretty good deal on travel in the form of a package deal from Hotwired.com that included four round-trip tickets and two hotel rooms for about $600 per person for a four-night, five-day visit. The purpose of the trip was to attend a family event, see relatives and friends, and spend a bit of time in the city.

The package included two rooms at the Hudson Hotel, conveniently located at Columbus Circle and Broadway, right at the southern end of Central Park. If you’re not familiar with the city, this is a pretty central location with easy access to the subway, cabs, Times Square, and the Upper West Side where the events were held.

The Hudson is a pretty trendy spot with a very loud, boisterous nightlife scene centered around a very attractive indoor/outdoor garden lobby space. The rooms are… well to call them small would be charitable. Reminiscent of the dorm-style Euro hotels, they’re fine for a single person and very, very intimate for two. Wireless access was an additional fee and pretty spotty.

Which leads to the point of this post. Although I did take the MacBook along for the trip, once I saw the close quarters and realized that connectivity was going to be intermittent at best, I made what for me is a pretty radical decision and decided to do the entire trip using the Nokia N95 “handheld multimedia computer” (AKA smartphone) and N800 internet tablet as my principle means of staying connected to e-mail, IM, RSS, and blogging. All but the last were an unqualified success and the only reason blogging failed was that I simply didn’t have time to do any writing.

The Nokia devices performed flawlessly. I got a good solid signal everywhere in the city (T-Mobile) and was able to use WiFi in the Starbucks down the street from the hotel in the mornings when I made my coffee and chai run. I was able to keep up with mail using the Gmail client on the N95 and the e-mail application and browser on the N800 for Gmail and company IMAP mail. Paired with my trusty Stowaway Bluetooth keyboard, I was able to pop off messages as needed.

Although I know my way around Manhattan pretty well, I did use the N95’s built-in GPS to get oriented a couple of times and it worked like a charm (although GPS usage dramatically impacts battery life). Google Maps also worked as expected on both the Nokia devices and it was this app (as well as the multimedia applications) that really showed off the advantages of a phone with a display that can be used in both portrait and landscape orientations.

I used the Ultimate Ears super.fi Pro 5 earbuds to listen to MP3 and streaming music, podcasts, and video on both devices with the amazing sound quality and noise isolation I’ve come to expect form these earbuds and used the Plantronics 510 Bluetooth headset for cellular, Skype (via Fring on the N95) and Gizmo (on the N800) calls.

The entire kit fit into my coat pockets or a small gear bag and was so much easier to carry around the city than a laptop.

This is the new mobile office.

May 25th, 2007

Quantifying the "Microsoft Tax"

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 7:19 am

Categories: Hardware, Software, Vista, Windows

Tags: Dell Computer Corp., Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Corp., Marc Orchant

Eighty dollars. That’s the number (at least for Vista Home Premium) according to this comparison from Coding Horror of the price delta between identical Dell systems configured with Vista and Ubuntu Linux.

The hardware is essentially identical. We can infer that Dell’s price for a Windows Vista Home Premium license is $80. An OEM copy of Home Premium runs about $129, so it’s cheaper to buy the license from Dell than it is to buy one yourself. But if you have no intention of running Windows, you just saved eighty bucks.

Kudos to Dell for doing the right thing and ending the Microsoft Tax. It’s also quite possible today will be looked back on as an important turning point in the history of desktop computing.

Do you think so? Between unbundling their PCs from Windows and announcing they’ll be selling PCs retail through Wal-Mart, it’s definitely a turning point in the history of Dell. The whole “history of desktop computing” thing remains to be seen. Ask me again when a second major OEM announces they’re following Dell’s lead.

Oh yeah… almost forgot. So does a Dell box running Ubuntu avoid the latest Dell-Google “evil” plan to make money off our inability to spell?

Update: Ars Technica says the tax is $50.00 (at least on the high-end XPS system).

May 25th, 2007

Gmail now renders PPT

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 5:28 am

Categories: Google, Web Apps

Tags: Google Gmail, Marc Orchant

Gmail is now rendering PowerPoint slide decks as a playable slide show. I’ve found a few files it’s choked on (seems to be graphic density but that’s very unscientific data so YMMV). It’s very fast and quite useful when it works. I get a lot of PPT files and this is a nice quick way to make a decision whether I need to D/L the file or just leave it in Gmail and reference it there as needed.

This has not shown up on the What’s New in Gmail page so not sure if this has been rolled out everywhere. As I’m generally not at the front of the queue on Gmail’s incremental feature rollouts, I’m guessing this is available in all accounts. In addition to increased file attachment sizes (now 20MB) and direct sign-up, I wonder if maybe, just maybe, that beta tag is coming down soon?

H/T to Steve Rubel for pointing this out via Twitter.

Update: I re-saved one of the files (my own) that was giving Gmail fits and it now renders fine. It was Keynote-to-PowerPoint conversion issue apparently.

May 24th, 2007

Biography meme

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 6:55 am

Categories: Blogs

Tags: Life, Chris Brogan, Marc Orchant

Chris Brogan has kicked off a biography meme – the DIY Autobiography Kit – following a self-revelatory post he published yesterday. Sounds like fun so here goes…

A Quick Sketch Biography of Marc Orchant

The thing most people know me for is… either my passion for gadges or my deep and ongoing interests in personal and team productivity. Oh… and my proclivity for juggling many, many projects and pursuits at one time.

The people I associate the most with are… the network of friends and cohorts I work with around the globe on a daily basis in my professional work and my online life. What’s been truly grand over the past three or four years is how many of the virtual friendships have been consummated in “real life”. Part of this is living away from the epicenter of the industries I’m involved with and part of it is that there are just so many completely fascinating people out there to get to know.

People who have influenced my life are…

1. My parents who taught me so many things but most importantly that the key to living a fulfilled life is to pursue your passion.
2. My wife who reminds me daily about the importance of seeing the creative possibilities in the mundane.
3. My kids who remind me daily about the legacy I’m leaving this world.
4. David Allen whose GTD productivity principles literally changed my life.
5. Jeff P. Van Dyke who taught me more about building a great company than anyone else I’ve worked with.
6. Miles Davis who taught me that there is no percentage in following the crowd.

One challenge I took on and overcame was… quitting smoking (4 years ago). One of the hardest and smartest things I’ve ever done in my life (starting was the single dumbest thing I’ve ever done).

My early years, before you probably got to know me were… spent as a graphic designer, journalist, and managing editor. I’m in recovery.

You might not know this, but … I’ve been a faithful Mac user since there were Macs to use despite many people’s current impression that I’m a “Windows guy”. I’m actually working towards complete platform agnosticism because the world has become too much a place filled people wielding hammers looking for nails to pound.

I’m passionate about… writing, connecting with people and connecting them with others, fixing what’s broken in education and the world of work, and leaving things better than when I arrived.

In the next year or two, I hope to… write more books, travel more, meet more interesting people, and complete my migration from working for a specific company to working with a variety of interesting organizations and people on a variety of projects.

There you have it. Chris has provided a copy-and-paste template if you want to play along.

May 22nd, 2007

Zoho Notebook now in Public Beta

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 6:39 am

Categories: Productivity, Software, Web Apps

Tags: Marc Orchant

At the end of January, I wrote about Zoho Notebook, the latest addition to the company’s stable of web-based applications. At the time, I was very impressed with the concept and initial execution and today, Zoho has made Notebook publicly available as a beta. If you use a product like Circus Ponies Notebook on the Mac or Microsoft OneNote on Windows, you’ll immediately grasp the general idea but Notebook, as I wrote in my original post, has internet-native capabilities that exceed what these fat client apps can do on the desktop. Zoho’s Raju Vegesna has put together a video introduction that highlights some of the capabilities engineered into Notebook and talks bout the release on the Zoho blog.

As you’d expect, integration with other Zoho applications like Writer and Sheet is built in. But since I first saw the alpha a few months ago, Zoho has introduced Meeting, a screen-sharing application that can now be embedded into Notebook pages (as well as Show presentations). Zoho Chat which works across all Zoho applications can also be invoked while working in Notebook. Switch to Writer and the chat session moves right along with you.

With Skype integration (enabled by sharing an object, page, or book) and the ability to embed web pages and applications, video and audio (from a source or directly recorded), RSS, and other media, you get a very powerful palette of information objects that you can use to create very interactive pages that can be shared with others at the book, page, or even object level.

A new Firefox plug-in has been added making it one-click simple to add content to your Notebook while surfing. Notebook also offers version control which allows you to do a side-by-side comparison on the current page you’re working on and a prior version that you can roll back to if you’re unhappy with the most recent, unsaved changes you’ve made.

Currently, you can share and publish notebooks but there is no way to save the content to your local PC. In my conversations with the Zoho team, I’ve been told that this capability is on the roadmap and I expect that, give the pace with which this company rolls out new features, it won’t be too long before this shows up.

This is quite an impressive set of features and capabilities and based on some very preliminary use last night and this morning, the stability and responsiveness of the application is impressive. Watch the video and take Notebook for a spin. I think you’ll find immediate uses for this very rich application.

Update: More coverage via Techmeme.

May 21st, 2007

Does it make any sense to "hate" Microsoft?

Posted by Marc Orchant @ 10:05 am

Categories: Blogs, Mac, Windows

Tags: Desktop, Linux, Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Marc Orchant

Marc Wagner at the ZDNet Education IT blog asks a question that has come up here (and elsewhere) many times. “Why do so many people hate Microsoft?” Marc begins his post exploring some of the antipathy that exists between the pro-Microsoft and pro-*NIX crowds with relative dispassion and points to a general lack of civility in our culture as the meta-driver for the flame wars that seem to spontaneously combust whenever a pro-Microsoft or pro-Linux post or comment is made.

Ultimately though, Marc seems to think that the relative state of market share enjoyed by Windows and Linux, is a major cause of the boorish behavior on both sides of the divide and is a direct outcome of a decision made by Linux vendors not to compete directly for the desktop with Microsoft. A substantial percentage of the comments to his post seem to agree. Not surprisingly, an almost equal percentage don’t. Marc concludes:

Well, it’s time for our readers to realize that Microsoft is not to blame for the small market share enjoyed by desktop Linux. Just as Apple decided over two decades ago not to compete with Microsoft in the commodity desktop, so have the Linux vendors.

Until they decide to give Microsoft a run for it’s money, Microsoft will continue to dominate and nothing Linux desktop users can say will change that.

Personally, I think this is missing the real point in the debate. Whenever I see these arguments burst into flames, there’s more to the contention than market share. It’s obvious, for example, that the Mac ios not destined to be the dominant computing platform. Apple is quite comfortable with this relaity as are many Mac users. Yet the flames continue.

Similarly, I spent many years working with grizzled old *NIX developers and administrators who also realized that railing against the then-emergent Microsoft hegemony was a waste of time. What did they do? Spent hours bickering over the relative superiority of emacs and vi.

Here at Office Evolution, we’ve had some pretty spirited debates about Outlook and Notes. No one is ever going to convince a Notes devotee that Outlook is “better”. The same thing applies in reverse. So what? We almost always see these arguments settle on agreement that whatever works for you is good for you (with an occasional final jab of “even though what I use is better”). Neener, neener.

I think the contentiousness is part of the geek DNA to be honest with you. We geeks seem to like to argue as one of our favorite indoor sports. And that’s all well and good when kept within certain  limits. Geeks have been arguing since the days of Plato and Socrates (yes, I know they were Greeks but they were geeks too).

There’s also a certain undeniable tendency many of us have to be “right”. To influence others to see our point of view. To be in the know. And the majority. On the winning side.

If you equate “winning” with market share, it’s pretty foolhardy to argue that anyone but Microsoft has won. If, on the other hand, you see “winning” as achieving the strategic objectives an organization has used to define success, then I think you get a place where you can let go of the notion that there can be only one winner.

I remember many years ago, when Steve Jobs first returned to Apple and said in a historic keynote that “we have to let go of the idea that in order for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose”. I’m paraphrasing - those might not have been his exact words but they certainly support the spirit of what he said that day. It’s one of the smartest things I think he’s ever said. And I think the company has prospered since then, in large measure, because they’ve left the demonization of Microsoft to others.

That’s not to say Apple doesn’t enjoy tweaking Microsoft’s nose. The “I’m a Mac” ads are a perfect example, as are the banners hanging at every MacWorld event and in Apple’s stores. But these days at Apple, it’s all about being different and better, not bigger.

Bigger just isn’t going to happen. Not for Apple. Not for Linux. Microsoft’s market dominance may change in the future but it won’t be in the immediate future. So let’s move on.