When travelling, I rely on my BlackBerry for keeping in touch, or my laptop computer for a more powerful version of keeping in touch and for regular work – writing, spreadsheets and the like.

Faced with an upcoming holiday with my wife, I knew the laptop would go down like a lead balloon, so I wondered about getting hold of some kind of small ‘webtop’ device. I figured that the operating system was less important than my ability to reach all my favourite online services easily and quickly. Plus, of course, the ability to write, use spreadsheets, look at images and read pdf files, were I to be awake when she was asleep.

It had to be quiet, reliable and inexpensive (she offered to pay for it as a birthday present). After a fair bit of research, I alighted on the Asus Eee 701 PC. I’d had a lot of experience with Asus motherboards and was more than happy with their reliability and build quality. All the reviews I read were complementary. We ended up paying an astonishingly low £162 for one.

(I could have got one for £150 had PC World in Tottenham Court Road kept accurate stock records. But it would have had 1GB of storage instead of the 4GB I ended up with.) I bought by mail order from another company I’d had good experiences with, Expansys.

To say I’m delighted would be an understatement. Its Thunderbird mail manager lets me handle my three email accounts, including the official hosted Outlook one. The web browsing – mainly Google, Twitter, the BBC and local stuff when travelling – were all fine. The small screen doesn’t seem to be a problem because the resolution is quite high. If something doesn’t fit on the screen, it’s easy enough to slide the display around and extend it. You can also plug directly to an external monitor. I did this when setting the machine up prior to my travels.

There’s no disk drive, so I just kept the machine in a padded envelope inside my shoulder bag. And I bought a bunch of spare 2GB SD memory cards in case I needed some more memory. Not necessary as it turned out, but they’ll come in handy – they work in my wife’s camera and in our laptop computers too, making data transfer very easy. In fact, reviewing the holiday snaps in the Asus was just a matter of slipping the camera card in. Very handy for our old eyes.

The Eee comes with a whole bunch of applications and games. Importantly for me, it contains Skype, which I use for instant messaging, although it does have a microphone and speakers, so I guess I could make phone calls as well.

After years of using Windows, it’s barely noticeable that this (for I am writing on it now) is a Linux machine. In fact, if I’m honest, some aspects seem easier than Windows. Communications is a doddle. Click on Refresh to see what wifi’s in reach, then click on the one you want. Bingo, All done. Unless it’s a secured network, in whch case just add the password. It has an Ethernet port as well for a cable connection. I suspect that installing new programs is a lot more complicated than Windows. But I didn’t buy the machine with expansion in mind.

It’s just an unobtrusive and functional device that doesn’t frighten the natives if you whip it out in public.

Turns out that these devices and others like them – they’re called netbooks – are the fastest growing segment of the computer business at the moment. (According to today’s FT.com, they are expected to capture 11-12 percent of the entire laptop market in 2009.) If you’re fed up with lugging a laptop to do essentially mundane tasks, why not consider one for yourself? The newer ones are a bit larger and more pricy but they’re also worth a look.

Me? No, not interested. I looked at the others but like what I’ve got.

As you may know, I spend a lot of time working with some very knowledgeable people who spend their lives immersed in the computing lives of companies small, medium and large. They are also privileged to glimpse behind the kimono of the major IT and communications companies. Not everything we hear can be repeated, but the accumulated intelligence is exposed whenever possible.

Our beloved leader, one Dale Vile, recently went public with his thoughts on how you might lay your hands on cloud computing services and facilities, should you feel the urge.

He’s been listening to the rest of us banging on about cloud stuff for a while and has quietly done further research and formed his own opinions.

His perspective, as always, is very grounded and gives you the meat of his insights along with the potatoes of the practicalities. You can read the overview and pick up your free copy of his research note here.

He opens with a frank appraisal of the hype around cloud computing and explains how our research paints a completely different picture.

We aren’t on the verge of a revolution (you’ll be pleased to hear), more of an evolution. But he strongly believes that the smaller business is likely to get the most out of the new opportunities the soonest.

Having said that, a gulf exists between the people currently trying to pitch such services (like telcos and ISPs) and the potential buyers who understand neither the offerings nor their own requirements.

They need their local supplier - Dale calls him “Dave the dealer” - to explain and advocate appropriate services. It’s a short step for ‘Dave’ to do this, providing he is suitably rewarded by the service providers.

And, astonishingly perhaps (especially falling from my lips), Microsoft may be best poised to offer the answers with its Software plus Services (S+S) approach.

We don’t need an all or nothing disruption to get more value out of our computer systems. Why not extend our existing desktop solutions into cloud based additional services?

It makes a lot of sense to me.

Sometimes it’s good to see what’s going on inside other companies. It might make you feel you’re not alone. Or maybe it alerts you to stuff that’s going on that you weren’t aware of.

Collaboration software has been getting a darned good airing over the past few years and, to listen to the enthusiasts, it’s this massive new wave that’s crashing over businesses and transforming them in hitherto unforseen ways.

And, in a few cases, it’s true. I’ve recently written elsewhere about GE (General Electric Company) and Wachovia Bank (just being largely taken over by Citigroup as a result of the recent turmoil). Links here and here. Both companies have put a lot of effort into building collaboration software systems. The sort of effort that smaller businesses could only dream of. If we wanted to collaborate, we’d have to use readily-available software or online services.

Recently Freeform Dynamics (disclosure: which buys most of my time) and Macehiter Ward-Dutton did some telephone research to investigate the take-up of collaborative software inside large European organisations. (From 1000 employees upwards.) I realise this is a bit off your patch, but I think you might find some of the results of two particular questions quite interesting.

The first one related to the popularity of officially sanctioned social software. The second related to the take up of the same software unofficially.

You can see that the relative popularity of the various tools is identical, with one exception. The new social media stuff shoots from third to first place in the ‘unofficial use’ chart. And the difference in the ‘broad adoption’ versus ‘partial adoption’ is particularly marked. It does suggest that many staff yearn for this sort of thing and, if the company doesn’t provide it, then they will sign up for it themselves.

This presents multiple dangers. At one level, you can end up with a rag bag of incompatible software and services. At the recent Office 2.0 conference, ‘tool fragmentation’ came up frequently as a theme. At another level, you have no idea what’s going on in your own organisation. If challenged by a regulator, say, would you be able to provide a comprehensive account of your dealings with a particular client? Probably not. It would either be lost in the ether or require a huge amount of expensive digging.

One of the things that GE and Wachovia realised is that real corporate value emerges from collaboration as long as it is business-focused. This is why they unashamedly put it behind the firewall, even though outsiders (business partners and the like) can be invited to participate. In their systems everyone is accountable, nothing is anonymous and everything is stored in perpetuity. If it sounds a bit strong-arm, it’s not really. Users are given the freedom to communicate, coalesce into communities and share information. For the so-called knowledge workers, it acts as a lubricant to their activities.

Whether social software will be right for you depends on the nature of your business. If you have people scattered but having to sustain contact and share information regularly, then it is highly likely you’d benefit. If you have people working as individuals or in non-information roles, then the benefits will be low to non-existent.

Best to keep your ear to the ground and if you find people using Facebook, wikis, blogs and the like in the course of their working day, get them to explain how they see these things benefit the business. If it makes sense, check out the many business-focused and professional offerings and switch social collaboration from skunk works to official policy.

A company called Orthus decided to share with me the results of 100,000 hours of spying on users in different organisations. The statistics were a by-product of the company’s service which looks for leakages of sensitive data. Some of its clients use the information to educate users, others use it to nail miscreants.

Most of the spying was conducted last year, so this year’s results are likely to be different but the underlying conclusions from the results are unlikely to change much.

As I was reading the report, I imagined technical information security measures as a low circular wall. Inside are all the users and the data. All they have to do to defeat the security is to grab the information and either throw it over the wall, or hop over with it themselves.

The report talks about the vectors along which your sensitive data will find its way to the outside world. And, by heck, there’s a lot of them. Last year it was printers, PDAs, MP3 players, USB flash drives, instant messaging (IM), Skype, Facebook, Bluetooth, Wireless and Infrared. Next year it will be different as the company closes old vectors and new ones appear. It’s best to imagine information security as a balloon - you can squeeze one part, but another part will instantly expand.

It’s not necessarily that the users are malicious. They are frequently driven by the need to get work done quickly or conveniently. They might want to get something important on to their laptops to work on at the weekend and, if conventional routes are blocked, they’ll find another one.

Apart from the ‘traditional’ leakage methods of file copying, removable media and corporate email, the three communications applications most likely to carry sensitive information were web mail, instant messaging and social networking websites.

These days, it will often be an online (Web 2.0) service which promises secure data transfer. But what happens at the other end? Does it sit on the remote server unencrypted? Once you’ve downloaded it at home and deleted the online version, does it really disappear or is it part of some humungous database in the sky?

By now, it’s becoming clear that the main issue is a human one. In fact, the report states that, “trusted authorised users are most likely to be the source of information leaks.” You can, and should, throw technologies at securing your information but, in the end, it’s mainly the insiders who are the causes of leaks.

The Orthus report highlights the customer service and IT departments as the most likely sources of leaks. And, furthermore, laptop and notebook computers, were twice as likely to be associated with a leakage event than a desktop computer. The company speculates that this may be something to do with the fact that users treat notebooks more as personal devices. (If true, this does not bode well for the explosion of PDA devices such as the BlackBerry and iPhone that is currently taking place.)

Finally, you might be interested to know that, when it comes to time of day for breaches, 81 percent is during the extended working day of 7am to 7pm but the incidents between 7pm and 6am were all classified as ‘High Severity’.

Never mind all the headline-grabbing stuff about cyber criminals, how certain are you that your own users are handling your information safely? Orthus will happily check you out. But, with the above warnings, I suspect it’s done more than enough to alert you to the issues.

Had a demonstration session from Adobe the other day. It was making its Connect Pro strut itself with a whole bunch of us from Freeform Dynamics. Very impressive it was too.

What is it? Another web conferencing service. Or you can buy it for in-house installation. We were using the hosted service. It uses the idea of meeting rooms to which different groups of people belong and in which various resources are shared.

You can share your whole computer screen or, if you have two, choose which to share. Or you can share a window or an application. Control can be passed back and forth between participants, depending on their authority level. They can be Hosts, Presenters or Participants. A chat window allows you to type little messages to each other IM-style. You can also hold your hand up to attract the host’s attention.

You can also share a variety of documents - PowerPoint, JPEG, Flash and Flash Video, MP3 and Zip. Mostly people use PowerPoint. Connect crushes large files to a fraction of their original size when saving them to the room. This makes for rapid playback, especially useful for complex graphics or video.

Whiteboarding is possible - this is a markup system using highlighters and drawing tools. If you want to make a permanent copy of the markup, you have to print it to an Acrobat (pdf) file or to paper. Shame you can’t just save it. Oh well.

Colour depth can be varied. Some people are happy with 256 colours, others want millions. For radiological scans, for example, the highest possible resolution would be required. It would, of course take longer to transmit.

When you return to a room, it’s exactly as you left it, a bit like a real room. Unless, of course, someone with the necessary authority has been in and changed it. But you’d never get the equivalent of a cleaner walking in and throwing precious files in the bin.

Adobe has 3000 customers using the service and they’re racking up something like 47 million minutes a month at the moment. Although it can use the computer for voice communications (VoIP), our session was run over the telephone, using local call numbers. This was apparently to keep the call quality up. VoIP tends to be used when the sessions are less interactive, more one way, as in a broadcast webinar. (You may remember that Citrix Online had some pretty decent VoIP in its GoToMeeting service, so it’s not impossible.)

You might want to take a look at this page to see the options available. I tried to get some sense out of Adobe on pricing. It was late in the afternoon for the local office and, despite having various people running around, I was unable to come up with any numbers.

Let’s hope they add something in the comments below before too long.