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Nokia? Forget it …Kim Basinger’s Lifeline Would be an iPhone Today.

Posted on December 1, 2008 ·

The 2004 thriller Cellular features three stars: Kim Basinger, Chris Evans, and a Nokia 6660 video-phone. The kidnapped school-teacher played by Kim Basinger pieces together a broken phone and reaches a random dude, Ryan (Chris Evans) on cell-phone – this call literally becomes her lifeline.

Ryan effortlessly uses his Nokia miracle-phone in the middle of a wild race in his (stolen) Porsche, even produces the video evidence that will put the bad guys away at the Happy End.

But are Nokia phones really so easy to use in real life?   Read on to find out…

Filed Under: Technology · Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,
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Crippled Cessna Lands Safely in LA

Posted on November 25, 2008 ·

This 2-person Cessna developed landing gear trouble, and was shown live on all the major news channels while circling to burn off fuel.  They tracked the plane by news helicopters as well as ground crew.. obviously this is not a scripted scene, but a potential disaster situation.  The CNN video below shows the last few minutes of what turned out to be a very successful emergency landing.

Filed Under: Misc · Tagged: , , , ,
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Google Layoffs May Affect 30k Workers. Sort of…

Posted on November 24, 2008 ·

Google Layoffs – 10,000 Workers Affected reports WebGuild with a bombastic title.  I can beat that: all Google workers will be affected, at least emotionally. 

As to what the real numbers are, several sources point out that while employee headcount is around 20K, Google has about 10K temporary workers, so whichever way you count, laying off 10K workers would equate to:

  • eliminating all the temp positions
  • letting go 30% of the (extended) workforce, which seems to be the Silicon Valley rule
  • cutting the employee headcount to half (if we ignore temps)

Either way it sounds way too dramatic, a step companies in deep structural trouble would resort to.  I seriously doubt this is really coming, but let me be clear: I have no factual information, am simply speculating, or actually responding to speculation.

But there’s something else worth noticing here: the source.  WebGuild had a bit of a clash with Google this spring, when Google withdrew their support of the WebGuild events it used to host.   Their stated reason was WebGuild’s refusal to change the name of their Web 2.0  Conference & Expo, at O’Reilly’s request. Here are the juicy details in a WebGuild post aptly titled Shame On You Tim O’Reilly.  Without getting into details of the original conflict,  suffice to say that WebGuild has been on somewhat of a vendetta against Google ever since.   They’ve been a little bit too trigger-happy with posts reflecting negatively on Google.

Once again, I do not have factual information, but if this indeed turns out to be false information, I wonder if WebGuild went a step too far this time.  (Remember the Steve Jobs death story?)

Read more in  PC World, HipMojo.com, VentureBeat,  ChannelWeb, Valleywag, Search Engine Land,  Google Watch, CNET News, Alley Insider, Beyond Search, Tech Beat.

 

Filed Under: Blogging, SaaS · Tagged: , , , , , , ,
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Gmail Themes Go Beyond Cosmetics

Posted on November 19, 2008 ·

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.

Related articles:
Filed Under: Personal Productivity, SaaS · Tagged: , , , ,
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iPhone, the Secret Weapon

Posted on November 18, 2008 ·

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. smile_eyeroll

Filed Under: Humor · Tagged: , ,
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Oh, The Irony of Reporting on the Stock Market

Posted on November 14, 2008 ·

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

Filed Under: Humor, Misc · Tagged: , , , ,
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Your Computers Are Slowly Killing Themselves

Posted on November 14, 2008 ·

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. smile_shades

Filed Under: SaaS, Technology · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Recruiting by Video

Posted on November 13, 2008 ·

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? smile_wink

Filed Under: Startups · Tagged: , , , ,
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I Hate Fear Marketing

Posted on November 12, 2008 ·

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…

Filed Under: Marketing / PR, Social Networking · Tagged: , , , , ,
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Zoho Status Displays Availability for All Services – You Can Use it, Too.

Posted on November 11, 2008 ·

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.fingerscrossed

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.

Related articles:

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

Filed Under: SaaS · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , ,
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