Zoli's Blog

Gmail Themes Go Beyond Cosmetics

Zoli Erdos — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:35:05 +0000

I couldn’t care less when Gmail added those cute smiley, but the newly released themes go beyond cosmetics, they can actually increase your productivity. How? By helping you differentiate between multiple Gmail accounts.

I have branded (Google Apps, using my own domain) accounts for business and personal use, and a few generic @gmail.com types for subscriptions, lists, online purchases. It’s all neatly tied together by Gmail Manager, the excellent Firefox extension. Even then I sometimes find myself typing an email in the wrong account window. Here’s the solution: give all your Gmail accounts its own distinctive theme.

I don’t really care for the fancy themes, but at least the top row are all subtle, minimalist styles. Pick one for each of your accounts, you’ll get used to the colors fast and never mix up your accounts again.

Well.. almost. As usual, Google rolled out this new feature to the generic, @gmail.com accounts only. Google Apps users will have to wait – lets’ hope not too long.

iPhone, the Secret Weapon

Zoli Erdos — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:56:10 +0000

Those damn cell-phones… we’ve long known they tend to fry our brains, then we learned they can also fry our more private parts, down south. (My most scientific dissertation on the subject made it to TED, presented by Yossi Vardi.)

Now we find out some models, especially the iPhone are secret spy weapons: they take snapshot of your most private body parts and email the compromising photos all automatically, without manual intervention. (No, I’m not drunk, it’s all here.)

So beware, fellow male victims: don’t carry this thing in your front pocket, anywhere close to the family jewels.

Oh, The Irony of Reporting on the Stock Market

Zoli Erdos — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 21:20:32 +0000

Dow and S&P turns positive, reports Yahoo, via Reuters. Yeah, right, the ticker next to it proves it.

Your Computers Are Slowly Killing Themselves

Zoli Erdos — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:35:55 +0000

How old is your work computer? – asks the Wall Street Journal.

Mine is a year-and-a half old. The dual-core former screamer (obviously not the one the the pic to the right) has become an average slow machine now that quad-core is the standard, but I could not care less. I don’t need a faster, bigger computer for work, in fact not even for video-conferencing or watching movies.

In fact I (and most of us) don’t even need 1-2 year-old computers, either, now that browser is the computer.

Now, you’ve heard this a zillion times, but let me present another side: the more you use your computers, the slower they get. In fact it gets worse: you don’t even have to use your computers, they get slower by themselves.

Why, and more importantly, what’s the solution? Read the full article on CloudAve – while at it, might as well grab the feed here.

Recruiting by Video

Zoli Erdos — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:16:21 +0000

Originally a little side-project for Atlassian’s FedEx Day, which is their version of the Hackathon, Hack Day, YouNameIt-Day, I bet this video on Atlassian’s Core Values becomes a perfect recruiting tool.

And boy, they have a bunch of openings… have they missed the end-of-the-world-fire-30% memo?

I Hate Fear Marketing

Zoli Erdos — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 02:19:43 +0000

So I’m cutting off Spoke Software who sent me this piece of junk: If you want to keep your job, use Spoke.

Read on for details…

Zoho Status Displays Availability for All Services – You Can Use it, Too.

Zoli Erdos — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 14:46:37 +0000

No service is a 100% available, and of course your SaaS provider’s outage always comes in the ‘worst time’, just when you have a deadline to meet… what really gets painful is when you have no information whatsoever on what just happened and how long the outage may be. Major providers like Salesforce.com and Amazon learned the lesson the hard way, and they both released their status dashboards after extended outages and the customer uproar that followed:

Free services rarely display such level of transparency, but that’s exactly what Zoho is announcing today: they created Zoho Status , a monitoring service which displays the health of all Zoho Applications – currently 24. Here’s a partial screen-print:

If it looks familiar, perhaps you followed my earlier advice on using Zoho’s Site24×7 service on your own site or even blog. I’ve been using it for two years now, and received alerts of outages that neither I nor my service provider were aware of.

Zoho took their own tools and turned it into a public availability display, monitoring their services from six different locations: Seattle, New Jersey, Singapore, London, Germany and Australia. For now the display is rather “boring”, being all green. Obviously we’re all better off if it stays that way and we have no reason to check the status site.

What makes sense, however, is to use Site24×7 on your own site, or on any service you are dependent on (you don’t have to install anything, it’s all external monitoring). As usual, it starts with a free level, adding extra paid services – the new addition today is the Enterprise version, allowing SLA definition, compliance tracking and reporting.

(This article is cross-posted from for CloudAve, the Zoho-sponsored Cloud-Computing / SaaS / Business Blog I am editing. Subscribe to our feed here.)

Business ByNetSuite Goes After SAP, While The Giant is Sleeping - Where is Business ByDesign?

Zoli Erdos — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 15:34:35 +0000

Ben recently reported on how NetSuite is going after Salesforce.com, by announcing their Renewforce program. Today NetSuite is going after bigger fish: the leader in Enterprise Software, SAP.

The aptly named Business ByNetsuite program guarantees at least 50% savings to current SAP R/3 customers relative to - watch this! – the annual maintenance fees they are now paying to SAP. Yes, it’s not a price-to-price comparison. With the perpetual licence model customers pay upfront, but are still forced to pay annual maintenance fees – with SaaS there is only a subscription fee, and now NetSuite proves it can be half of only the maintenance component of traditional software’s TCO.

Read on to find out how SAP’s own blunder around their excellent product, Business ByDesign opened the opportunity for Netsuite…

Live Election Results Here

Zoli Erdos — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 14:16:17 +0000

I realize that only about 55% of my readers come from the United States, but the outcome of today’s US Presidential Elections will have a profound impact on the entire world. I know many of you are watching the process with excitement, in fact a quick look here shows just how much people all around the world care, and that they are quite united.

Well, they don’t have voting rights, so it will be up to my fellow American citizens to do the right thing and help us, help the world leave 8 years of darkness behind. Let’s watch the live results here:

I’m afraid I don’t have a fast-forward button, so it will be just a count-down for a while…

Netbooks or Notebooks? It’s Not Only About Size.

Zoli Erdos — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 13:05:20 +0000

Hardly a day goes by without another new Netbook announcement, at lower and lower prices. The first baby eee PC by ASUS was toy-like ( I returned it after a day), but the current crop are quite usable mobile computing devices.

These new Netbooks are flying off the shelf, so much so that sometimes you wonder if manufacturers rush to re-label their notebooks to netbooks, just to ride the wave. Whereas the first model had a puny 7” screen, the current standard is a minimum of 8.9, but 10” is becoming widely available, and when Dell recently announced their Inspiron Mini 12, ZDNet’s Larry Dignan rightfully noted that the netbook-notebook-laptop lines have just become blurry.

Dell’s divider line may very well be at the 12” screen size, considering anything beyond that a notebook. ASUS CEO Jerry Shen clearly draws the line at 10” – a definition that fits his own eee PC line. I think all these size-based definitions are meaningless. Size truly matters, but for another reason: when you pick a travel n*tbook, you clearly need something small and lightweight, yet with a decent keyboard and screen. But that’s not what differentiates Netbooks from any other computer.

The real divider is how you use it. A Netbook is a light mobile computing device that allows you to process information, access the Internet, and that does not store a bundle of bloated programs or data.

When computers first became personal, most of us only got one at the workplace, then years later the family PC appeared– one expensive computer shared by the entire family. Now we often have individual PC’s for just about anyone at home, including the kids, and are moving to a new pattern, where individuals will have a number of purpose-oriented computing devices, be it a desktop, workhorse laptop, netbook or smartphone. The fundamental change is that we’re not really working on the computer itself, but on the Net: the computer (keyboard, screen) is just our way to access the net. As Coding Horror’s Jeff Atwood says in The Web Browser is the New Laptop :

After spending some time with a netbook, I realized that calling them "small laptops" is a mistake. Netbooks are an entirely different breed of animal. They are cheap, portable web browsers.

We’re getting to the point where for most productivity task the computer’s performance or even the operating system won’t matter anymore: all we need is a decent screen and keyboard to get online.

But computer manufacturers while jumping on this hot new trend, seem to be confused. Minor flavors aside they typically offer two major configurations:

The uber-geek netbook:
- Linux
- Solid-state drive (SSD)
For the rest of the world:
- Windows XP
- Traditional hard drive

That’s not a very smart combination, if you ask me. Statistics show the return rate of Linux vs. Windows based netbooks is 4 to 1. Buyers of the cute little netbooks are happy first, then they become frustrated that they can’t instantly do things they are used to – and a learning curve with a ~~$400~~ $200 device is unacceptable. Let’s face it, Linux is not friendly enough for most non-geeks – including yours truly. But why can I not have a netbook with XP and SSD?

Typical netbook SSD’s are still in the 8-16GB range, while harddisks are up to 160GB. That’s a trap that vendor themselves fall into: my sexy little netbook (an Acer Aspire One) came loaded with crapware, including trial versions of MS Office, MS Works, Intervideo WinDVD (on a DVD-less computer!) and who knows what else. Once the pattern is established, and you have large storage, you will start installing your own programs and data, too, the temptation is just too hard to resist. You no longer have a netbook, it just became a noteboook.

The New York Times ran an article this week: In Age of Impatience, Cutting Computer Start Time, discussing the problem of slow boot times. Anyone who ever had a Windows computer knows this tends to get worse over time. My own Vista desktop had a sub-minute startup time a year ago when new, not it takes 3-4 minute to boot it. The two older XP-based laptops take 6-7 minutes to reboot. This well-known Windows disease can only be cured by refreshing your system from time to time. It’s an ugly process, requires wiping out your harddisk’s content, re-installing Windows, then your programs and data. PC manufacturers don’t exactly help by providing “restore disks” instead of proper OS CD’s: why would you start with a pre- SP1 copy of WinXP and reinstall a bunch of years-old obsolete crapware when the objective was to cleanup your system in the first place?

If you want to avoid the pain, keep your netbook free of applications and data: use it as a NETbook, and it will stay nimble and fast (sort of).

Talk about fast, there’s a neat solution to reduce boot-up time: Splashtop, a quick-load platform by startup company DeviceVM can put you online within seconds, without loading the main operating system. Chances are you’d be using it 80% of the time, relegating full Windows to an as-needed basis. DeviceVM charges manufacturers about $1 per system, so why is it that it’s often found in high-end notebooks, but not in the netbooks by the same manufacturer? Splashtop should be a must on any netbook.

Finally, a word on connectivity and prices: Wifi gets you online almost, but not all the time, so obviously a 3G connection is a useful addition to your netbook. But you will pay for 3G data usage, so why don’t carriers subsidize your netbook purchase, like they do with cell phones? The day will come, as the WSJ reports, HP may be one of the first to introduce such a model: H-P Mulls Service Bundles for Netbooks. When that happens, your notebook will not be too different from a smartphone, just with a larger keyboard and display.

(Cross-posted from CloudAve.)