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12 Feb

Thumbs Down – Techo Twitter Posts week ending 18 Oct

Welcome to the Thumbs Down Edition of my review of the week in tech.

Each week I’m picking out the things that I thought were a stupid idea, a bad thing to happen or just payed out on a tech company deservedly that I submitted via Twitter for you all to read. If you haven’t already seen my Twitter feed of tech tips add me @aholesgrove or have a look at http://twitter.com/aholesgrove and subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets.

I missed out on doing this weekly review on time as it was all hands on deck in Making Life Ezy putting the final touches on HireEzy 2.1 before release that week.  We’re all done now and everything is back to normal.

This week in Thumbs Down I found myself highlighting Google‘s lamo attempt to control the internet and picking out a HUGE problem with Apple‘s new operating system which deletes all user data.  Yeah, you read that right – and people whinge about Windows.  Gosh.

I’ve blogged before about how I think Google Wave is/will be stupid, worthless and pointless.  But don’t just take my word for it, other people are saying it too – as evidenced by this article.  Don’t know what Google Wave is?  Well, who cares.  If you do, it’s supposed to be an email/twitter/instant messaging alternative – replacement, whatever.  C’mon Google, you employ 20,000 of the smartest people on earth and not one of you can figure out that most people won’t want to ditch email because they can barely breathe without having access to it. #FAIL

Well, I know most of you aren’t geeks and won’t read the article, so I’ll paraphrase here to outline why I thought this article was interesting – basically, Google has a direct optical fibre connection to the core movers and shakers that make the internet connect to everybody (in fact, I read recently that Google accounts for 6% of all internet traffic in the word at the moment, an astounding statistic for a company that didn’t exist 10 years ago), which means that Google don’t need to pay for internet traffic.  So, all of those YouTube videos are just beaming out of the place with the computer infrastructure built into the rest of Google’s fortress of computer power, essentially making what most people would think to be an extremely expensive operation in pushing out online video actually cost them basically nothing to run – all those ad impressions are pure profit.  This is an amazing contrast to an organisation like Facebook, which spends $1 million a month of infrastructure to make their service super snappy and fast for users.  What the article goes on to detail is how Google hold so much power already, that instead of internet providers charging places like Google to have direct access to each other so that company’s internet users their their site quicker, Google are so powerful that they can charge internet companies to have better direct access to them to provide their services faster to their users.  In the next 3 years this will be a huge debate in the US as their government is trying to regulate this stuff and don’t really know how to approach it properly.  Public outcry ensures.  It’ll be an interesting development.

I’m sure if I stood in a newsagent taking pictures of each page of a magazine so I could read it later without having to buy the magazine in the first place I’d be chased down the street by the shop owner and probably have the cops called on me.  Google send people to libraries to scan books digially, build a whole online book store full of inventory and they call it a “business“.  This is criminal.  That’s all I have to say.

  • WOW Mac Users should read this – Major bug in Snow Leopard deletes all user data http://bit.ly/10PdGD

So, being the good samaritan that I am, I’ll give you Mac users this tip – don’t allow anonymous logins on your computer.  You’ll have your login that you use and just keep using that – don’t switch to another user and use the anonymous feature, as what happens is that you’ll go to log back into your computer as you and everything will be gone.  Yeah, it’s pretty awful and embarassing problem.  I tweeted this last week and I’m not sure if Apple have patched this problem yet but keep your eyes peeled on the Apple Software Update feature – last I read Apple were looking to put out a 10.6.1 update that addresses this and other problems.

About Us

HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration. For more information email us sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

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01 Feb

Thumbs Up – Techo Twitter Posts week ending 15 Nov

Welcome to the Thumbs Up Edition of my review of the week in tech.

Each week I’m picking out the things that I liked the most that I submitted via Twitter for you all to read. If you haven’t already seen my Twitter feed of tech tips add me @aholesgrove or have a look at http://twitter.com/aholesgrove and subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets.

This week in Thumbs Up is all about handy Windows apps, plus some interesting statistics about social media in the enterprise:

If you haven’t heard of Windows SkyDrive, it’s basically a free online storage solution provided by Microsoft which gives you 25gb to store whatever you want on the internet so that you can access from anyway.  It’s not really pushed at the moment which is why not many people know about it, but that will certainly change once Office 2010 is released, as it is heavily focused on extending the Office experience beyond the desktop allowing people to create and save MS Office documents online using online browsing versions and store them in their SkyDrive using the Office Live plugin.  Personally, I’ve found it really handy and I use it alot.  What this application does (which was NOT created by Microsoft, by the way) is install your SkyDrive as another hard drive on your computer in the Explorer shell, so that you can simply copy and paste to it like any other hard drive – the online difference of course is that you are storing your stuff on Microsoft’s servers.  This is really great for backing up all of your critical information so that if your machine breaks down or is stolen, you can simply replace it and remap your SkyDrive to the machine using this application and voila – you have all your information back.  Highly recommended.

  • Very interesting – Palo Alto Networks: Twitter Usage Soars in the Enterprise http://bit.ly/TBJt1

There is another article of similar theme that I tweeted as well this week, which you can read here – http://bit.ly/1P8llM – which also touches on how social networking usage is exploding in the business and enterprise workplaces.  The reason why?  It is a far more effective way of engaging your audience and getting your message across.  I am willing to bet my left kidney that Google will shell out somewhere in the vacinity of $2 billion to buy out Twitter and position it as it’s newest advertising medium, considering that many businesses are telling the same story as we are – Google Adwords is a WASTE OF MONEY.  Our company stopped using it earlier in the year and we now exclusively advertise our products and services through Twitter (and Facebook to a lesser extent) and the result has been a 700% increase in sales leads.  True story.  We are so happy with the results that we will never use Google Adwords ever again – which by the way supplies Google with 97% of their $16 billion a year in revenue.  You do the math – Google will have to radically adjust their business model or risk becoming irrelevant and having their revenue dry up big time.

  • Good article – Stop Paying for Windows Security; Microsoft’s Security Tools Are Good Enough [Opinion] http://bit.ly/19flzZ

I’ve blogged about Microsoft Security Essentials before – if you haven’t yet heard of this program, it’s Microsoft’s version of a free anti-virus program – and since it’s release I have been surprised about the amount of articles likes these that are getting published which are complementary to Microsoft for this being a great release.  What I would add to the fact that it is a good enough security program is the fact that it DOESN”T ANNOY YOU.  I’ve been running it myself ever since it was released and not once ever has the program prompted me to interact with it in any way.  At first I was a little worried that perhaps the virus definitions weren’t up to date so on the odd occasion I opened it up to check – I was wrong, the program is updating itself almost daily and it isn’t doing anything annoying on the screen to indicate that it’s working in the background.  In my opinion, that is the ultimate security program, as I often forget that it is there.  I have been going through the process of uninstalling AVG and other virus programs on the computers that I come across and have been installing this instead, it truly is a nice, solid release and I’d recommend it to anybody.  If you’d like to try it yourself, you can download it for free at http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials.

Photoshopping has pretty much become a verb now, on par with Googling a search of Tweeting a message and yet Photoshop is an extremely expensive piece of software that only business professionals can afford.  This application – Paint.NET – which has been around for a while, is a FREE program that gives you all the basics of image editing and some advanced options too.  I’ve been recommending this to people who are uploading graphics to their website and want to do some basic image manipulation themselves and this program will do it all for them for the nice price of nothing. I’d recommend this to anybody – it’s a Windows only release, but let’s face it, the majority of Mac users probably have Windows installed as well, or will need to install it soon.  Grab this and enjoy (and check out the article for more tips on how to use the program).

It surprises a fair few people that I talk to when I tell them that I’m a dedicated Internet Explorer user, but truth be told, Firefox is a great browser but still has a ways to go. Do you ever wonder why Google invested a whole pile of money into building their own browser even though they pony up the majority of the funds that Mozilla uses to operate whilst building free products like Firefox? It’s because sometimes in situations like these where the browser is such an important tool, it’s beneficial that it is being designed and built by people who spend all day working in computer security for a wide range of software products, not just one.  This article goes on to detail how Firefox is the most vulnerable browser to hack attempts and general exploits, even above Internet Explorer.  Something else that most people don’t know about Firefox is that it is a memory hog.  I’ve often looked at people’s computers who have Firefox open and 3 or four tabs open and Firefox is using around 180 – 200mb of RAM from the machine just to do that.  It’s pretty ridiculous.  My general advice is to stick with the browser that comes with the computer – IE on Windows or Safari on a Mac, as they are both acutely fine tuned for their respective environments.  What about Google Chrome you might say?  Well, you can always use that browser if you don’t mind the fact that it is butt ugly.

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About Us

HireEzy is the complete business management solution for hire and rental companies. Not only does it include digital marketing, web integration it also includes social media marketing tool integration. For more information email us sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

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10 Jan

What is the Next Generation of Business Software for Hire and Rental

In answering the question, it is worth reflecting back on the History.

First Generation Hire Software and Rental Management Software

The First Generation of Rental and Hire Software really began depending on who you believe in the 1980′s. Certainly there may have been earlier versions written for mainframes, but the packaged software started with the development of the affordable desktop.  The packaged software market, first generation, emerged from the development of point solutions for specific early adopting customers.

These early versions focused on the basic process of managing bookings. Providing no more than a simple process of managing inventory, bookings and client records.  However their effectiveness in bring business value should not be under-estimated.

Second Generation Hire Software and Rental Management Software

The Second Generation of Rental and Hire Software could be argued to have emerged with the growth of Windows, inparticular Win 95. This generation of rental and hire software built upon the popularity of Windows. Utilizing the look and feel of Windows, these systems began to emerge in the mid to late 90′s.

This second generation of hire software and rental software systems expanded the affordability and popularity amongst hire and rental companies.

These second generation systems grew to expand connection to useful business devices such as Point of Sales (POS), License Scanners, Bar Code Scanners and Cash Drawers etc.  Second generation companies stress connectivity to these devices as their main selling point. Whereas as you will read Third Generation systems include such connectivity to devices as standard functionality.

However a major limitation of these older second generation systems was their reliance on interfacing to other critical business systems, in particular Accounting Packages and Customer Relationship Management Systems. Not having fully integrated Accounting and Marketing meant that hire and rental company managers were unable to truly and quickly analyse the true performance of their business.

The final death knell for the second generation hire and rental software systems was the maturity of the web.  The web has grown from a novelty in the 1990′s and a ridiculous new financial business paradigm shift in the early 2000′s (dot.com boom) to a maturing business tool as we approach the end of the decade.

The web is now the primary source of leads for the best performing rental and hire companies.(most cite the web as providing over 50% of new business leads).  In effect the web has created a second shop front, a virtual store that operates 24 by 7.    This virtual store is as much a part of a hire and rental business as is the physical store.

Furthermore the web is also a primary source of incredibly useful business tools, such as Google Maps, On-line Bank reconciliation, Colloborative Event Planning, Contractor Management, Document Storage and Access, as well as communication tools like Email etc.

The old second generation hire and rental software systems were aimed at providing a solution for the physical store .  Most such systems because of their under-pinning technical architecture and technology were in the main incapable of being stretched any further to enable the web to become an instrinsic part of a Hire and Rental business.

This led to the rise of the Third Generation Hire and Rental Systems.

Third Generation Hire Software and Rental Management Software

The third generation systems are Hire and Rental software products that instinsically include the web store and access to web business tools within the software package.  This generation of software enables hire and rental businesses to trade in a physical store and a virtual store all with in the one package.blog insert

Furthermore they enable the use of high value business efficiency tools such as Google Maps, outlook email integration to with client records and on-line collaboration etc.

Finally they are an all inclusive business software system that includes critical business functionality such as Accounting, CRM and Digital Marketing.  This inclusion ensures that hire and rental businesses can finally analyse in detail their businesses.  Such things as profitability by customer or by product, forward cashflow forecasts based on actual bookings etc in near real time.

Third Generation systems reflect the business need of hire and rental companies.  Affordable, easy to use and complete business functionality, the third generation systems are growing rapidly.  One key driver of this growth is the Global Recession, as hire and rental companies seek solutions that both contribute to sales growth whilst reducing operating costs.

Second Generation systems are still available on the market and will be for some time.  However these systems are increasingly being replaced by Third Generation systems.  As this trend continues to gain pace, many hire and rental companies on older second generation systems could be left exposed, not only to business risk but the potential for declining market share.

HireEzy is the Global Leader in the Third Generation Hire and Rental Software Market.  As one recent client who converted from a Second Generation system said

its like going from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age – it is incredible!!!!!

Want more information or an on-line demonstration, then contact us at sales@makinglifeezy.com.au

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27 Dec

SEO is the Yellow Pages Equivalent of Aardvark

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Auckland 2004 Yellow Pages books
Image via Wikipedia

SEO or search engine optimization is a term most people are familiar with.  However for those that are still struggling with the term, an analogy is helpful.

Last century the one of the critical business marketing tools was to have your company listed in the Yellow Pages.

Now from a sales and marketing perspective, the key to Yellow Pages success was to have your Company Name either:

  1. Listed First or
  2. Have a big Advertisement

First Listing Importance

If you still use or can remember using Yellow Pages then you would remember seeing companies with names like Aardvark or AAAAcleaning etc.

Why, because the Yellow Pages listed in alphabetical order.   So if you were in an industry with lots of competitors then being listed in the first few results was really important.  The reason is simple consumers tended to start at the top of a list to find the name and number of a company to contact.

This same tendency still applies with consumers.  However now consumers use the Internet search engines, primarily Google, Yahoo and Bing to find the same information.

And like their Yellow Pages habit, consumers still more likely to select from the first few listings than to keep flicking through the pages of results.

This is what SEO is all about

SEO is about getting your company listed in the few search results.

But this is where the problem starts.  Search Engine results differ from Yellow Pages in a two very different ways.

Alphabetical Listing is not relevant to Search Engines.  Hence having a name like AAAcleaners or Aardvark automotive has no benefit on search results.

Secondly, Yellow pages has/had a strict categorization.  Categories were defined such as Cleaning Services etc.   Consumers checked the index to find the category that best correlated to the service they were looking for.  Then they went to that page with the listing of all companies.

However such categories have no real relevance on search engines.  Instead consumers effectively define the category by selecting the words they think best describes what they are looking for.  The more popular or common words they use to find you business service or type we now refer to as key words.

Ad-words and Yellow Pages Advertisements

If you could afford it, you took could also improve you Yellow Pages effectiveness by taking out an on page Advertisement.  Such advertisements were and still are effective.  They attract the consumer eye over a plain text listing.

Search engines have the equivalent of this through the sponsored and AdWords that appear on each of your search results.  The difference is though, that research has shown that people are more likely though to click on a result that the search engine has returned than an adjoining paid add.  My thoughts are that the reason for this is that people tend to “own” the returned results (organic results) because it was their key words that brought them up.

Social Media Effect could be the New Aardvark

Naming your company by giving it multiple Aa’s etc in front helped to get you listed first in the Yellow Pages.  It was a budget way of overcoming the marketing power of the big companies who could afford to take out the big Advertisements.

Social Media in some ways could be argued as being the new low cost way of neutralising the big budgets of major competitors in SEO.  Corporations and major franchises can afford to spend big to make sure that their companies come up first through SEO and through paid on-line advertising.   Social Media though does appear to have the ability to help neutralize this, through the range of free or low cost tools.

SEO for Beginners

SEO is not a simple science!  The rules change frequently and there are numerous companies that specialize in it.

However here are a couple of starters.

Evaluate your own site using the free tool from WebSEO Analytics, it is excellent;

Secondly, if you are serious about at least understanding it, read through the following slide presentation by Alex Conway:

SEO Basics – The What and Why of SEO

View more presentations from Alex Conway.

Please send back your comments or thoughts.

www.makinglifeezy.com.au

the worlds most innovative hire and rental software

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04 Dec

Thumbs Down – Techo Twitter Posts week ending 25 Oct

Welcome to the Tumbs Down Edition of my review of the week in tech – each week I’m picking out the things that I thought were a stupid idea, a bad thing to happen or just payed out on a tech company deservedly that I submitted via Twitter for you all to read. If you haven’t already seen my Twitter feed of tech tips add me @aholesgrove or have a look at http://twitter.com/aholesgrove and subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets.

I missed out on doing this weekly review on time as it was all hands on deck in Making Life Ezy putting the final touches on HireEzy 2.1 before release that week. We’re all done now and everything is back to normal.

This week in Thumbs Down I actually didn’t find much that surpised me – I mean, there was Apply trying to bag out Windows on the week of the Win7 launch, but that was hardly surprising at all.  There was some news of more Australian Government sensorship ideas, as detailed below, and a great article about how Microsoft actually one upped Google with an announcement they made for their Bing search engine.  Check it out.

This article does a good job of picking out the hypocrisy in Apple’s never-ending bashing of Windows – the fact that Windows 7 is a solid product and works really well.  It’s disappointing that Apple can’t market their products on it’s own merits – they have a fantastic operating system, sexy looking computers that are rock solid and a very VERY devoted fanbase that grows leaps and bounds by the day.  What this article picks up on is the fact that if Apple really did have good products, they wouldn’t have to resort to bashing the competition if their own stuff truly were worthy of customer attention and I totally agree – especially when their product manager is saying stuff in the press like “At the end of the day, it’s still Windows.” So what? A product with problems has been fixed up and that’s a good thing.  It’s the same deal as Mac OS – I’ve mentioned in this space before that the older versions of Mac OS were horribly backward and couldn’t even multi task of all things (which the iPhone still can’t do either).  So should we not use Mac OSX because the older versions were terrible?  Of course not.  OSX is a brilliant operating system and so is Windows 7.  Apple got a free ride of Windows defectors over the past three years with frustrated PC users and they deserved to have their market share increase from about 3% to about 9-10% – now all bets are off and it’s an even fight, the two companies need to bring their A-game now and compete on features.  It’ll be exciting for the end users.

This is a really bold move by the Aussie Government but I have to say I actaully like the idea.  It’s something that needs to happen considering that the iPhone/iPod Touch is a gaming platform and the Australian Government has their own classifications for console and computer games.  There is an uproar in Australia that there is no 18+ classification for gaming which causes excessively violent games to be refused classification (and therefore sale) in Australia and I happen to like this idea because it keeps all the brutal American stuff out of our country (and the subsequent axe-murderers and school gunman they produce).  Apple have built an over-arching approval process for applications which lacks transparency and there are a lot of developers that have been writing about how they think it’s unfair – at the end of the day, it’s up to Governments to police content, not companies, so handing off this process to the government in Australia is a lot fairer – Apple won’t like losing their total control over their eco-system for iTunes, but.. well.. tough.

  • True, makes good points – Well, What Do You Know: Google Is Actually Nervous About Microsoft Bing http://bit.ly/b8KMp

Competition benefits consumers and finally Google has a legit competitor – so much so that they actually got showed up by Microsoft when they announced their content partnership with Twitter and the first beta of Bing’s Twitter search app which you can find here.  As a knee-jerk response from Google a few hours later produced news that they were going to do the same thing (sort of) and that their toold would be available in a few months.  Not to be outdone, Microsoft announce later that day that they are also integrating Facebook into their search engine.  Google had nothing to say to that – Microsoft owns a small chunk of Facebook and would never allow Google to get access to it (and neither would Facebook themselves).  This article makes good points in how Google’s “me too” response to Microsoft’s news of innovation was real proof that there is definately chinks in their armour and a reminder that you have to always compete to stay the best.  just ask MySpace all about that.

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05 Oct

Review of Best and Worst Techo Twitter Posts week ending 04 Oct

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Welcome to my review of the week in tech – each week I’m picking out the things that I liked the most that I submitted via Twitter for you all to read. If you haven’t already seen my Twitter feed of tech tips add me @aholesgrove or have a look at http://twitter.com/aholesgrove and subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets.

This week I found myself not tweeting as much as usual – there was certainly news out there, but it was news that was mostly worthless to the people who read my Twitter posts and this blog.  I don’t like posting news just for the sake of it and I try to keep what I put out there to being stuff that I know the kind of people that we talk to would actually be interested in.  There was somegood stuff out there for sure nonetheless, such as the trial launch of the Google Wave service (which is massively overrated), the official launch of Microsoft‘s free Security Essentials software (which is pretty good) and the emergence of a few HTC mobile phones which are very much blurring the lines between phone and handheld computer and are really demostrating the power of the handheld device (more about that below).  I found a few good tips for enhancing productivity in the office too, one of which is mentioned below.  As always, check out my posts for more info like this every single week.

THE GOOD

Windows 7 launches on Oct 22 worldwide – only two weeks away – and this is definately a topic of discussion that is heating up intensely.  Windows 7 is a extremely needed update to the Windows platform and in our company we have been recommending that all people upgrade to this latest version – especially Windows Vista users.  There has been a lot of talk about how there will be a few problems skipping a version of Windows and going straight from Windows XP to 7 and this article gives you a good idea of how to get through it as painlessly as possible.  In our company, we have a specialist IT partner called Superior IT Technologies whom we have been working with to offer computer support to our customers and we are well equipped to help any of our customers who would like some guidance in making the switch.  Feel free to give us a call if you’d like help with that – it could be a good time to get everything upgraded and up to date particularly for our HireEzy customers, who will be receiving a major update with our next version of HireEzy as well over the next coming weeks.

  • I’m in love with this phone, truly… 1Ghz processor in a phone! – HTC Leo Lowdown http://bit.ly/2kGe2V

I always like to post about at least one gadget each week and this one is quite surprising.  Simply put, this is a phone using the very latest version of Windows Mobile – version 6.5 – which is a huge update making the environment more finger friendly and taking advantage of the latest mobile hardware such as power conservative processors and other technical stuff.  This phone has a 4.3 inch screen which is huge – aside from being a decent size for useful web browsing this would also be great for playing games and video if you like that stuff – and it has a 1Ghz processor – in a PHONE! – to give you a bit of comparison, the latest and greatest “super fast” iPhone 3GS has a 600Mhz processor, so this thing is rocking out at 1000Mhz.  I think that the Microsoft App Store will be great for competition too – incorporating features such as carrier billing, which means that you can buy an app and it will appear on your phone bill, you don’t have to link credit cards or buy credit, which is good for business users who have phones on company accounts and the like, amoungst other features.  In addition to looking at the tweeted article, you can see pictures of the phone here and a video of Windows Mobile 6.5 here to see what this phone is like.  Remember, some companies don’t want people using iPhones because they worry about people bludging at work, so this might be the next best thing to grab as a work phone.  HTC Leo is the project name for the device, the rumoured final name of it is apparently the “HTC HD2″.  Bit of a tongue twister hey.

  • The Microsoft haters are going to love this – Independent tester: Security Essentials ‘very good’ http://bit.ly/msnkD

Microsoft’s new anti-virus program was big news this week – mainly for the fact that there will be a bunch of people thinking that Microsoft’s anti-virus program should have been a decent version of Windows itself, but the reality is that seperate security applications have become necessary for two reasons: Firstly, a huge market for 3rd party security software has emerged, with big players like Symantec, Trend Micro and AVG just to name a few, and if Microsoft built stuff into Windows to make these competing products obsolete there would be another anti-trust trial; secondly, computer security has become more than just viruses – the biggest threat to computer security nowadays is in the form of phishing exploits, malware and Cross-site scripting exploits in websites (known as XSS), all of which Microsoft’s Security Essentials treats and manages in addition to it’s competitors.  It’s a free program and Microsoft are in a good position to know all about problems as soon they happen, so I like the fact that they are getting into this space to help people out – I installed in on my work machine here without a hitch, it doesn’t annoy me at all and for those two reasons I like it.  And, as you’ll see in the article I tweeted, other people are positive about it too.  Feels good to know that Microsoft are doing good things in computer security and it’s definately an overdue service on their part.  Windows 7 + Security Essentials is making for an excellent proposition for everyday computer security.

  • This is a great idea – Copy Path Puts a File’s Location in Your Clipboard [Downloads] http://tinyurl.com/yawvyj2 #Lifehacker

This is a very simple application with a very simple solution to a simply annoying situation – ever looked at a document/picture/whatever and thought “Oh I should email that to [insert name here]” and then launched up your email program, clicked the attachment buttion and then Browse and then find youself clicking through a number of folders to get to that document, or moreso clicking and clicking and clicking trying to remember which folder you viewed that document in?  This tool adds an extra option to your right click menu behind files in the File Explorer to remember the folder path to a document and auto add it to memory, so you can simply open up a new email and PASTE IN the path to that file, and bam it’s attached.  Simple, effective and really handy.  It’s a free program too so it’s worth grabbing it and installing it, I’m already finding it handy – once I get into the habit of copying a file’s path with the tool first of course ;)

  • This thing belongs in every boardroom with a projector connected – Switched On: A keyboard PC seeks to Eee-peat success http://bit.ly/jKbYS

When you look at a picture of this you’ll say “big deal, what’s so special about a keyboard”.  The big deal is that that “keyboard” is a WHOLE COMPUTER.  Seriously.  I mentioned that this belongs in each boardroom because I’ve sat in enough boardrooms where companies have computers hooked up to big screen tellies or projectors, wires everywhere or even worse connected wireless keyboard/mouse combo’s that fail them regularly and this addresses all those problems by being an all in one solution.  You just connect a monitor to it (and optionally, a mouse) and you’re set with a full Windows computer.  This device also has a wireless monitor solution so you can have it connected to a big TV in your boardroom with no cables – VERY handy.  To top that off, the right hand side is a 5 inch touchscreen which shows the numeric keypad by default but you can get rid of that and put shortcut icons there instead for fast access to launching programs and stuff like that – developers can also build applications that purposely run in that screen as well for super tricky stuff and I can imagine that people would do stuff like run a web browser there looking at search results or Twitter posts of whatever whilst not disturbing what is being shown on the main monitor.  The device was designed to be a loungeroom computer but I can see this thing being really handy in boardrooms and removing all the clutter.  Best of all, this thing will be pretty reasonably priced – about $800 in Australia is the best indication I’ve heard so far.

THE BAD

This was an article that I thought people might have found interesting – the writer, Henry Blodget, is a funny character because he’s a guy with share holdings in mulitple tech companies (he’s always having to do disclosures in his articles) and writes from a frustrated investor standpoint about companies all the time.  He’s a notorious Microsoft hater and seems to love everything Apple does.  Anyway… this article goes into detail to describle AOL’s big problems moving forward and it’ll be interesting to see what happens next – I reckon one of two things will happen – AOL will be bankrupted (which is why Time Warner could be cutting it loose at this stage) or once independant they’ll start selling off it’s crappy assets to make itself more attractive to potential acquirers – there is rumbling about deep talks between AOL and Microsoft at the moment revolving around search but I reckon something bigger could happen, such as a merger with Yahoo who could then in turn eventually become a part of Microsoft overall, for example, as that seems to be Yahoo’s long term fate now that they have created a deal to merge search assests (which I suspect is an an interim step towards something bigger, anyway).

  • Just tried multiple times to find a link to MSN’s My Health Info service in Bing. Nowhere to be found. Thanks Microsoft. #FAIL

In my posts I often make reference to Microsoft’s Bing search engine, as its battle with Google for search supremecy is definately going to be a tech battle for the ages, and stuff like I mentioned in this post are just silly if Bing is going to have any credibility.  I use it everyday and I find it realy good, as good as Google in fact if not better, except when looking for Microsoft’s own stuff.  Maybe Microsoft are really trying to make a point that their search engine doesn’t have any bias in it whatsoever towards their own stuff.  Maybe.  Nevertheless, I was interested to play with MSN’s new health service to see what it was like – I spent a few months last year working on a web startup called MiVitals which got me pretty involved in that space at the time.  MiVitals ended up folding because of the financial crisis which was a shame.  If someone can make a decent online health records service that would be a huge step forwards for the medical industry – Google has one but that doesn’t seem to get much respect in the online world it seems.

  • Hillarious – Google Wave crashes on beach of overhype (Robert Scoble/Scobleizer) http://bit.ly/zYo1J

I’ve had a few customers ask me about this thing this week – there is a good 2 min video that does the job of explaining it simply – and honestly I think this thing is dumb and will just bomb.  I’ve always said that the best Google services on the web are the ones that they’ve bought, such as Google Earth, Google Maps, YouTube, their various blogging applications, etc, and the ones that they’re built themselves have been mostly worthless.  Google Wave is designed to be an email and Instant Messaging/Twitter replacement all in one, it’s sort of like turning email conversations into online forums – a good idea I suppose but if Google think they can persuade people to stop using email and use this instead, they have another thing coming.  People are creatures of habit, which Google should know all too well with their continued dominance in web search, and aren’t about to ditch email anytime soon.  I mean, to give you an example, Blackberry users are typically people addicted to email, referred to as a “Crackberry addiction”, and there’s even a whole website dedicated to it, just as an example.  Maybe someone will create applications that blend email accounts with Wave accounts or something, but I just don’t see it really taking off.  I truly believe that Google are pulling shenanigans like this to try and fragment the web, so that people will have to continue to rely on web searching in order to be able to feel like they can get around on the net.  You might not know this, but the reason Microsoft originally thought web search was mostly a waste of time due to the fact that they felt that as the web matured, people would have their 5 or 6 places they would go to look for the things that they want – YouTube for a video, Twitter for interesting things to talk about, Hotmail to look at messages, Facebook to catch up with friends, etc, and this was the reason they ignored they’re chance to BUY Google back in 2003/04 for $5 billion or so when the Google guys were looking to cash in on their idea.  They were sort of right at the time, people search more often in particular areas rather than broadly in a search engine, except for the fact that advertising attached to search results has become a $16 billion a year business for Google and helped them create a net worth in the vacinity of $150 billion.  Whoops.

  • About time someone wrote about this. You wanna advertise? Use social media – Barely Anybody Clicks On Banner Ads Anymore http://bit.ly/MNw9t

Pretty self explanatory in this Twitter post.  We are on a constant education path with our customers discussing the merits of social networking as an advertising medium and this article is just adding to the mountain of evidence that is proving that traditional advertising is continuing to become irrelevant when compared to social media advertising.  We are really looking forward to the new tools we’re launching this year with auto Twitter posting and creating an eco-system of links backs to your site and increasing your search relevancy.  I’ll blog more about this when our tools are live.

  • Ahahaha ROFL!!! – RT @technologynew: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: Chrome And Safari Are Rounding Errors http://bit.ly/SVMs3

You’ve gotta love Steve Ballmer’s un-ending loyalty and dedication to the Microsoft product and the fact that he’s happy to act like the competition is an illusion.  In fact, the ’rounding error’ comment is becoming somewhat of a favourite of Steve’s, but you know, this Twitter post ended up in this end of my blog post for a reason.  Chrome and Safari are legit competitors. And when you see statistics like these published on the internet, whilst somewhat debatle a good indication of the real numbers, there is definately healthy competition in that space which is benefiting the end user in features and end experience and there is definately people abandoning IE in favour or something different.

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28 Sep

Review of Best and Worst Techo Twitter Posts week ending 26 Sep

Welcome to my review of the week in tech – each week I’m picking out the things that I liked the most that I submitted via Twitter for you all to read.  If you haven’t already seen my Twitter feed of tech tips add me @aholesgrove or have a look at http://twitter.com/aholesgrove and subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets.

I found myself tweeting a significant amount this week – there was a Game Show in Tokyo where a lot of companies were showing off a lot of cool upcoming gadgets.  In addition to that, it seems that all the tech titans were stabbing each other in the throat to take advantage of a high news week – Google for example were announcing a new feature each day of the week, some of which were pretty bad actually (as I’ve outlined below).  Microsoft on the other hand were the reoccuring theme in the majority of my good posts this week, who would have thought?  Our friends in Redmond are actually bringing out a lot of cool stuff over the next 12 months and there well be plenty more to talk about as they keep making announcements (and other things “leak” to the press, yeah right – rumours are the new advertising).

THE GOOD

I installed this little app on my netbook last night and I was really impressed.  Whilst I mostly focus on suggesting apps that are productivity related, I found that this really did give a nice, glossed and polished touch to Windows XP – considering my main workstation is a Windows 7 machine this was welcomed eye candy for my little guy.  There are different choices for what icons and themes you want to change in XP and you can even change the welcome screen to something more glossy looking to, and I’m glad I put it on.

  • The evidence keeps mounting, you can’t ignore social media – Social Networking Use Triples from Only a Year Ago http://bit.ly/oynUF

We continually communitcate via our company Twitter account @makinglifeezy and this blog the importance of social media as the new most important advertising platform for your business.  This article is just some of the supporting evidence you’ll continue to find on the net regarding the rapidly growing community in the social media space and the amazing opportunities social networking provides for your business as a way to comminicate to your potential and existing customers like never before.

  • WOW! This is a fantastic idea – TechTracker Scans Your Computer for Outdated Software [Downloads] http://bit.ly/6wvcx #Lifehacker

Frankly, I’m surprised that someone hasn’t thought to do this earlier.  One of the biggest problems in computer security is that people just don’t keep their software up-to-date even as vulnerabilities and the like are discovered in these older editions.  It’s understandable that people don’t have the time to be scouring the web looking to see if their software has been updated, and now they don’t have to.  I ran this on my own computer and it found updates for software that I had forgotten I had even installed let alone a few programs that I didn’t think would have been updated.  Really handy tool.

  • Good read, the best about WordPress I’ve seen – The Beginner’s Guide to Tricking Out Your WordPress Blog [WordPress] http://bit.ly/TNH9Z

We here at Making Life Ezy are VERY big fans of WordPress (this blog is a WordPress blog, in fact), so much so that we recommend to all of our HireEzy.com customers to create their own WordPress blogs as a pivital part of good Seach Engine Optimisation techniques and for creating link backs to their own website content.  This article really dumbed down the concept of setting one up, summarised the really awesome themes there are out there and recommended some of the really good plugins.  I found it really useful even though we’ve already set up our blog.  Of course, HireEzy.com customers can get a WordPress blog set up for them by our technicians for free as part of our web optimisation pack we sell with HireEzy.

  • Highly recommended plugin for #IE, I like it! – Printee Enables Selective Printing in Internet Explorer [Downloads] http://bit.ly/s8QNK

This plugin addresses one of the major problems with the web browser, being that people like to print web pages and they find that the text is split up over multiple pages in an unreadable format.  This plugin addresses this problem by smartly reading the text on the page and creating a printer friendly version of it before sending off the print request to your printer.  Voila, your printing out text all nice and formatted for simple reading off of paper.  Best of all, this plugin is free!

  • OH MAN!! This might just be the most amazing handheld gadget I’ve seen – Announcing the Microsoft Newton [Digital Daily] http://bit.ly/6E4kB

Being a tech person I can’t help but add a gadget to this list, but this device is seriously awesome. There is a video you can view which demonstrates the potential of the device – basically the Microsoft Newton/Courier (there seems to be different codenames used for this device at this stage) is a dual screen device held like a notebook and has iPhone like multi-touch capabilities for treating the device like a real notepad, complete with realistic writing recognition (having come a long way since the original Palm Pilot-style handwriting input) and with instant integration with your calendar, mail and tasks to become the ultimate companion.  I see this device and I imagine the possibilities afforded to software developers and their customers – we LOVE the idea of putting customer’s information immediately in their hands when they want it.  I’ll be watching the evolution of this project with great interest.

THE BAD

  • Shocker! Power Twitter can protect you from this though – Video Demonstrates the Danger of Shortened URLs [Security] http://bit.ly/31b3qA

URL shortening services have become a really handy tool but this demonstration video makes a good point – URL shortening services don’t show to you what website you are being redirected to.  The article basically says that you should only open a shortened URL from a person that you trust, as you can potentially be tricked into going to a malicious website (a technique referred to as “phishing”).  Of course, there are ways around this – firstly, if you are a Windows user, Internet Explorer 8 has excellent anti-phishing technology built into it so even if you opened one of these webpages, IE would warn you that you are going to an untrusted website in the first place and help you beat a problem before it happens.  Also, if you are a Twitter user (this is where a lot of people are being targeted), consider using Power Twitter which scans your Twitter posts for shortened URL’s and auto converts them into their long addresses when showing you your posts on screen so you can see where the link will really take you – this is a really good idea and predictibly other Twitter clients (and perhaps Twitter themselves) will follow suit and offer the same solution as this problem continues to happen.

  • ‘Nuff said right there #FAIL – Gmail More and More Like Late ’90s-Era Hotmail Every Day [Digital Daily] http://bit.ly/cnbmG

You know, I’m really not a fan of Gmail AT ALL.  What I really resent is the fact that Google indexes your mail, trawling your messages for the things that you talk about to people to optimise their targeted advertising and this alone disgusts me and leads me to NEVER recommend its use to anyone.  What this article delves into descibing though is the recent failures of Gmail’s servers, leading to downtime and people not being able to get into their mail.  The comparison to Hotmail from the late ’90s stems from the fact that it took Microsoft three years to figure out how to convert Hotmail’s servers to a Windows NT based platform (it was Unix based at time of purchase back in 1997) and there was a lot of downtime from the service as Microsoft tried and failed multiple times to make the conversion.  Of course, they figured it out eventually and Hotmail continues to be the market leader in web based email – plus you keep your privacy in the meantime.

  • ROFL! It’s open warfare now – Microsoft blasts Google over Chrome Frame plug-in http://bit.ly/tBeub

At first, when I read about this being released I reacted enthusiastically to the idea – old versions of Internet Explorer are slow, a security risk (read: bugs/vulnerabilities) and lack in offering the goodies afforded to people with updated browsers such as fast AJAX rendering for truly software-like browsing experiences, for example.  The problem here is that Google are beginning to try and exclude IE users from their web solutions – the upcoming Google Wave will stop you in your tracks and recommend you use anything other than IE, or install this Chrome Frame plugin for IE before continuing and this is appalling.  Furthermore, There is a new tag that web developers can include in their site which makes IE use the Google Chrome Frame plugin to render their website if a user has the plugin installed – what’s next?  Will Google start punishing websites in their search rankings who don’t have this tag in their website to force people to use Google’s plugin for IE?  Google are already well known for doctoring their search results to spruke their other own online offerings over others in the search results.  If Google did this, secretly or intentionally, I would image there would be an anti-trust suit from the US government for sure.  We really need greater competition in the search market.  Personally, I use Microsoft Bing for this exact reason.

You know, Google just want you to throw all information via them to continue to grow their database of information, as I’ve touched on earlier.  What I don’t like about this tool, whilst a good idea, is the fact that a website administrator has no control over what comments are being attached to their website.  I mean, if you have a website trying to project a positive image of your products and people are posting malicious messages about your company and its services, this can totally ruin your online image.  There might be companies that deserve it, but there will be plenty more that don’t.  Most frighteningly, your competitor could comment against your site that you’re crap and they (fakely) experienced bad service/offerings from you.  What then?  You can’t even program anything into your website to block its use against your site so you’re stuck with praying for the mercy of the internet’s community.  Yeah right.  All the tech websites are bagging this idea and it’s likely that no one will use this service and it will die a deservedly painful death over at Google HQ.

  • ROFL! RT @alleyinsider: Google Can’t Handle iPhone Demand For Push Gmail $GOOG $AAPL by @fromedome http://bit.ly/ZnhUY

I’ve already touched on the failures of Google’s GMail service but this article touches on the fact that Google are trying desperately to pitch their mail service to corpratations and launched this tool to trick Outlook and mobile devices that can sync with Microsoft Exchange to make them thing that you are adding an Exchange account for instant email notification (known as “push services”), when really it’s a GMail account.  This would be particularly handy for iPhone users.  What happened after launch was a whole bunch of people tried to use the feature and GMail went tits up and no one could download their mail.  Just another example of why GMail has no place in the workplace and why you shouldn’t use it at all anyways.

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09 Sep

Meet Our CTO Aaron Holesgrove

Hi, my name is Aaron Holesgrove and I’m the CTO of Making Life Ezy and Ezysoft.Aaron thumbnail

Many of our clients ask our advice on a range of technology matters, from operating systems to even iPhone applications.

Therefore as part of the growth and popularity of this blog (due to the fantastic work of our marketing team) and our software, HireEzy, I’ve decided to contribute to this blog from a technology perspective.   Specifically focusing my thoughts and experience on using technology as the driving force behind the success of your hire or rental business.

Technology Brand Agnostic

In this first post, I thought I would give you all a chance to first learn more about myself, my general thoughts about the IT landscape and to give you a bit of perspective on the kind of things we’re working in on as a team as we continue to innovate in cutting edge software development as well as versatile and powerful online services and solutions.

The first thing I’m often asked when introducing myself as a member of the IT community is of course “so are you a Mac guy or a PC guy?” to which I reply that I’m neither. I believe that to have a true appreciation of the field of IT is to have an objective view of it, otherwise stubbornness will simply lead to you to miss out on things that would otherwise be really fun to be involved with and be a part of. This is particularly true for Making Life Ezy, as we are a platform neutral company working with both Microsoft and Apple database technologies to deliver our technical solutions, whilst using predominantly Adobe development tools and online service tools from Google, Yahoo and Amazon, amongst others.

Unbiased Technology Opinions

With that I mind, I hope that in reading my tips and general advice here that you find them to be similarly unbiased and impartial to any technical platform and simply concentrated on providing the best answer and/or solution to a problem or task. More than ever, diversity in the marketplace is leading to a lot of uncertainty in trying to decide what solution best suits each business and I get asked a lot by our customers about general things such as “is Windows Vista really as bad as everyone says it is?” and “so what do you think about Macs? Is it worth ditching my PC?”. These are fair questions and in my first couple of posts I will be looking to delve into these sorts of topics and many more in great depth to guide you in the right direction and spare you any emotional despair and personal resentment toward the IT companies that have provided us with a lot of our cheers and tears over the past decade or more in the process.

Latest Technology Updates

I am an RSS feed addict and I often spend my nights at home scouring all my favourite IT publications on the web for information about anything and everything. I can argue the merits of any technical platform with the best of them and I enjoy being asked questions that are as broad as “so what do you think will be popular in the next 5 years”, or “who do you think will ultimately have the best mobile phone platform?”. There are so many different things that are truly becoming exciting in IT right now, such as the rise of social media as a marketing platform, the true portability of content with the rapid innovation of the mobile phone as a computer alternative and emerging platforms such as cloud computing and even the continued evolution of development platforms and the sorts of opportunities they provide to both us and our customers.

A lot of these different things are not only technologies that I’m interested in and read about all the time but are areas that we as a company have a lot of fingers in a lot of pies and part of my role in our company is to be the one who can educate the rest of our team on these emerging opportunities and what they mean for us and could mean for our customers, so I look forward to using my blog posts to also help you learn about the sorts of things we’re building that can truly help you in your day to day business activities with case studies of customers who are working with us in our Beta Gold program to develop new systems and services as they evolve.

Feedback or Questions

If you have any questions or queries about areas of IT that you’ve perhaps never understood or would like greater clarity on then by all means I encourage you to write to me with your thoughts and I’ll blog about them here as they arise. I look forward to engaging in greater discussion with you all.

My Background

11 years technical experience in web development technologies and platforms.

Experience includes projects for The Seven Network (formerly i7), Optus Direct, The Movie Network, UKTV, TV1 and The Main Event Wizard Home Loans, I-Max Theatres.

Specialises in the emerging market in Web 2.0 and their application to business problems.

Aaron Holesgrove
Email: aaron@ezysoft.com.au
Twitter: @aholesgrove

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