With a 40% drop out rate in the first month amongst first-time Twitter users a great deal of your following could be deadwood. Despite this, Time magazine believes that “Twitter will permanently change American business within the next two to three years.”

So, what does Twitter mean for you as a small business? What are the best practice guidelines?

Twitter in a Nutshell

Twitter, if you’re not familiar with it, is a service embraced by companies, individuals and celebrities which allows users to enter 140 characters of text with which to communicate, share information and chat publicly and privately.

The idea is to build up a following among users that interest you, and for companies of all sizes Twitter presents the opportunity to interact with existing and potential customers.

It’s also effectively a real-time search engine, with live updates on an infinite range of subjects, so typing a keyword in the search box will enable you to see what Twitter users – or ‘Tweeple’ around the world are saying about your brand, industry or geography.

Twitter presents challenges to small businesses as well as opportunities, so if you’re planning to use Twitter for your business, it’s best to do it properly or not at all.

From the outset it’s vital to remember that if you’re tweeting as a company it’s harder to gather a following. Also, be sure to make sure you have objectives clearly marked out. What do you want to achieve via Twitter? How and when are you going to measure it?

The Pros & Things To Do

Twitter enables you to see who in the world is talking about your product, industry or company and interact with them. You can build up a network of potential customers and partners, and promote your news, products, services and offers. Here are some practical tips on how your business could use Twitter

• Make sure a real person is representing your business and don’t be too salesy in your profile or in your tweeting. Twitter’s about developing relationships online, like you would do for your business offline.
• Leaving the default Twitter image is, again, impersonal and won’t encourage a follow back. It’s also best to use a photo of you or one of your team as opposed to a logo.
• Remember if you use Twitter as a sales tool you’ll turn people off and prompt an unfollowing. Use the three Es – engage, entertain, enlighten. Marketing is about conversations nowadays.
• Try using Tweetdeck to manage your tweets and to search for people to follow or “trend”. If using multiple Twitter accounts, Hootsuite is a great tool.
• Never outsource Twitter to a third party, such as a PR firm or freelancer – you need to be authentic and tweet in your own voice.
• Log on in spates during the day. It can become both addictive and a frustrating distraction as you get sucked into conversations. Be disciplined.
• Use hashtags before keywords to help them be found more easily when others search for the topic or trend you’re tweeting about.
• Play around with Twitter using a personal account before committing your company to the service. This will help you familiarise yourself with the platform and the way people use it.

The Cons & Things To Avoid

• Never tweet in anger. It may be tempting if you see something infuriating that you want to respond to, but remember that whatever you type will be available online forever, even if you delete your comment, some traces can remain.
• Don’t set an auto-follow thank you message. This is an option available to you to say “thanks for following” and add your message to all new followers, but this is seen as impersonal and defeats the object of Twitter as an open dialogue.
• Put a policy in place to avoid any off-piste clumsiness from your staff. As with all things social media common sense is a prime currency. If you’ve got employees talking about where they’ve been for new business or what they really think of a customer then you’ve got some fires to fight.
• Although Twitter could help you discover comments about your brand that you may not like, it also presents you with the opportunity to engage positively with the people making those comments. This is the essence of marketing in the Web 2.0 era – it’s no longer a monologue, it’s a dialogue between brands and consumers.

Twitter Impact Measurement

Once you’ve got Twitter up and running you want to know what people are saying about you. Not everyone will use the @ prefix when referring to your name or brand, so if you want to know what people are saying about your company – or industry – log onto sites like Addictomatic or Ubervu, enter your keyword, and you’ll see exactly who is saying what on a number of platforms, such as news and blog sites.

If you’ve embedded Google Analytics and are tracking your traffic, then you should be able to see what percentage comes from Twitter.

Even if it’s not substantial, it’s something which could lead to sales and partnership building, so Twitter is often worth the time investment. Try it on a personal level first before committing your brand to the service.

For more on using Twitter and social media for small business in general you might be interested in a podcast I recently recorded with Jenni Lloyd of social media agency NixonMcInnes.

If you’re using Twitter for your small business, do feel free to leave a comment to share any advice or tips you’ve learned that others might find useful when starting out.

Back in 2005 way before blogging became micro-blogging in what seems like another age, cartoonist Hugh MacLeod drew a seminal picture on the back of a business card.

The diagram represented why blogging was good for business, by poking a hole in the membrane that separates a company’s internal conversation about its products and services from what’s being said in the real world.

Hugh MacLeod the porous membrane

If you’ve not read Hugh’s post on the subject, I’d highly recommend it.

Hugh’s point is that if a business’s internal conversation about its products and services is very different to what its customers are saying out in the wild, there’ll be trouble.  Customers and businesses need to be closely aligned – talking to each other.

Since 2005 the conversational, ’social’ aspects of the web have arguably become its most potent meme and evolution of recent years.

Thousands of companies large and small, from computer giant Dell to Herefordshire-based organic gardening retailers Wiggly Wigglers, have embraced social media as a way of conversing with their customers.

Salesforce.com – control or conversation?

Unsurprising then that last month in San Francisco the ’software is dead’, CRM revolutionary, Marc Benioff should unveil a ’social’ layer to Salesforce.com in the form of Chatter.

Salesforce.com Chatter - a Facebook for business

Put simply Chatter is a Facebook and Twitter for behind the firewalled garden of business. A way to let staff, projects and even business processes talk to each other in real time. A business life-stream behind a thick skin.

More porous, however, is Salesforce’s Service Cloud 2 which is where the real ’social’ action is.

It helps businesses to absorb knowledge and conversations on Facebook, Twitter and other online communities about their brands, products or services, attempting to make customer service more responsive and informed.

So far so conversational, but interaction with the customer or the consumer very much remains in control of the business. It’s all about managing customer relationships, not about letting customers manage their relationship with your business.

Power to the People

And here’s where the next revolution could take place. Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) is CRM flipped to give customers power and more importantly possession over their own digital data, identity and friends.

Espoused by Cluetrain author Doc Searls and others, VRM is initially a little hard to get your head around in terms of how it might work in practice. But a good summary can be found at London-based VRM Hub.

To take one practical example, imagine you as a customer having control of all the data relating to all the purchases you’ve ever made online, whether at Amazon or eBay or Ryan Air. Add to this a complete record of your search history for particular products or services.

This is valuable data and it’s your data. A digital footprint of your own interests, habits and online behaviour. Data many a business would find incredibly useful in terms of really understanding what you wanted from them.

If customers were in control of this information, they could selectively turn access to it on or off for certain brands they were interested in, depending on their personal privacy preferences.

They’d be in control of the relationship with the vendor. In return for allowing access to this data they might receive special offers or information they really valued.

Gone would be the broken model of poorly targeted, patronising advertising – replaced instead by a more mature exchange between equals.

Open, free and commercial?

One of the issues with VRM is where and how individuals would store their online activity data, like e-commerce transaction history and then technically how, if they chose to, would they release access to it.

This is where one could see a company like Salesforce.com creating a new customer-centric, cloud-based service. A VRM platform free to individuals, derived from yet to be agreed open standards.

As long as it ensured complete privacy and portability combined with rock solid guarantees that individuals retained ownership of their data, such a platform could become a practical way of allowing customers to manage their relationship with brands.

Why would Salesforce.com want to do this and do it for free? Because such a service would add value to what it already offers brands in terms of letting them better understand and engage with customers.

VRM might sound like sci-fi – a concept developing in some far off geek galaxy.

But for companies large and small, it may well prove to be at the centre of a much more sophisticated, grown-up and efficient way of doing business on the web.

The web is awash with news that Rupert Murdoch may be about to do a deal with Microsoft to allow its Bing search engine to exclusively index News Corp media properties like The Wall Street Journal, The Times and The Sun.

This would cut out Google and help, so the argument goes, Bing gain market share as well as strengthening Murdoch’s hand as he attempts to establish a pay-for-quality-news model on the internet.

Interestingly the strategy News Corp appears to be adopting was suggested on the 26th October by Jason Calacanis in his excellent, This Week in Startups show, well before any bloggers or other media picked up the idea. Here’s a clip of the discussion:

Was this a leak? News Corp is an investor in Calacanis’s latest venture Mahalo.

That aside, the Murdoch/Calacanis strategy seems on the face of it to be a smart one, until you factor in what’s known as ’social search’.

Social search? Well, the fact that more and more people are finding content and news via links posted by friends on sites like Facebook and Twitter, rather than through search engines.

Increasing numbers of people aren’t searching for news anymore, the news is coming to them in the form of recommendations from their social networks.

The Murdoch Microsoft deal - will social search block Bing exclusivity?

It’s not as if people aren’t going to be able to find the articles they’re looking for in The Times or The Wall Street Journal, just because they’re blocked in Google.

They’ll find the links to the stories that really matter from people they trust on Twitter. People they trust more than Microsoft’s Bing search engine which may, as Rory Cellan-Jones argues, dent its appearance of independence, if it does a deal with certain news providers.

And if you think social search isn’t really much of a big deal, why did both Microsoft and Google recently pay to index Twitter’s stream for search.

Think about the percentage of traffic online news sites are now seeing coming from the likes of Twitter, Facebook or Stumbleupon.

To give you a tangible example – here are some stats comparing percentage share of referring traffic to SmallBizPod over the last 12 months from social search and traditional search.

While the peculiarities of our own online marketing strategy may have an impact on the above, there’s no doubt of the growing influence of the power of social search in the form of Facebook and Twitter.

Then there’s the issue of anti-competitive practices and news pay walls.

If Murdoch does make internet users pay to access his newspapers online, then any exclusivity of search indexing on Bing will become a moot point.

If you search for a piece of news, find it on Bing, but are then told you can’t access it unless you pay, most people will simply go elsewhere.

Unless, of course, News Corp offers users their content for free, if it’s discovered on the Bing search engine.

This seems a highly unlikely outcome and would smack of anti-competitive practice.

So, the combination of social search and paywalls will put the kibosh on any News Corp Bing exclusivity contract.

My bet is the rumoured deal will never see the light of day.

[Picture credit: World Economic Forum licenced from Flickr]

Microsoft’s Windows 7 officially launches on 22 October, but the undoubted appeal of the new operating system for the SMB (small to mid-sized business) market looks set to be tempered by potential upgrade issues.

According to Microsoft in the UK the vast majority of mid-market businesses are still running XP having skipped Vista due to real and perceived compatibility problems.

In a frank interview with Robert Epstein, head of small business marketing and sales at Microsoft in the UK, earlier this week, he told me:

As you start to look at 20 people companies and above where people are more interested in compatibility with their ERP and accounting packages, then there have been a large number who down-graded from Vista back to XP. So we think the actual install base is only 10% running Vista today.

So what’s the problem? Well the upgrade path from XP to Windows 7 isn’t straight-forward. Most would recommend a clean install of Windows 7 on an XP system, rather than an upgrade.

Indeed Microsoft’s own advice says ‘we don’t recommend’ upgrading from XP to Windows 7 and suggests the best option is to buy new hardware.

That’s one way to avoid compatability issues. No wonder Michael Dell is so keen on the new operating system!

As it happens I also think it’s a great operating system as I said in my Windows 7 review earlier this year.

But for businesses of 20-250 users the ‘clean install or buy new hardware choice’ may well cause pause for thought.

Of course Windows 7 includes the extremely useful XP mode which means businesses won’t have to buy new software to replace specialist applications that only work on older machines.

That’s good news in an economic climate where small businesses don’t want to be forking out for expensive software upgrades. But are they ready to upgrade their hardware instead?

Perhaps a refresh of hardware in SMBs is long overdue. Whether now is the time to make those purchasing decisions is another matter.

So it remains to be seen how swiftly XP-loving, mid-market businesses embrace Windows 7. Its penetration into this market may turn out to be slower than Microsoft would undoubtedly like.

I don’t know about you, but every time a new top level domain (the bit after the dot in your web address also known as a TLD) is released, I feel like someone’s pointing a gun at my head.

Just when you thought you’d secured your brand, small business or startup presence online by buying up the .com and .co.uk versions of your domain name, all of sudden someone comes up with .biz, .tv, .mobi, .net or the latest, .tel.

It’s as if the companies behind TLD bloat are saying: buy this new domain now before some squatter or adsense splogger grabs it and trashes your brand, your trademark or your business online.

And that’s exactly what seems to drive demand and create a ‘new gold rush’ in the domain name market – fear.

Add to this the confusion which liberalisation of domain names in 2010 is bound to cause and protecting your business ‘name’ on the internet or mobile all begins to look very messy, not to say expensive.

Telnic and .tel – more of the same?

So when I received a call from someone representing Telnic, the company behind .tel domains, extolling their benefits to small businesses, I was more than a little sceptical.

Interestingly though .tel isn’t just another domain name – Telnic really has innovated.

A .tel domain, which will cost you around £12 a year, allows you to put your business or personal contact details encrypted on servers at the heart of the internet known as the DNS (domain name servers) and make them visible online and accessible quickly and easily on smart phones. So what are the benefits?

A .tel page which allows you to keep your contact details online in a simple .tel template held on domain name servers.

Telnic claims this helps non-tech savvy small businesses get a presence online, assists in SEO (search engine optimisation) through easily updateable keywords and thereby discoverability, creates a distributed global business directory and is very fast, particularly on mobile platforms.

Most of these benefits are highly debatable when it comes to what SMEs want.

Small business benefits of .tel?

Let’s consider web presence, SEO and discoverability. The simple html and javascript template (see above) which creates the .tel web presence is certainly a one-stop-shop for your business contact details and a few keywords, but it’s not much more.

Although friendly to search engine spiders because it’s so simple, the page is very unlikely to appear high in search results other than for your name or the name of your business. And surely you’d want your own website in that position?

Most small businesses online want to be discovered ahead of their competition locally or nationally for more general searches e.g. ‘glasgow plumber’ perhaps.

Making it easy for people who already know your business to find your contact details is fine, but it’s hardly discoverability or a source of new punters.

The keyword ‘benefits’ are also largely irrelevant because search engines look for fresh, relevant content and reputation in terms of in-bound links, something these pages are unlikely to attract.

As for speed, well such simple web pages load rapidly – in less than a second – but the benefit is hardly perceptible compared to well-designed ordinary websites.

If .tel, and it’s a big if, becomes the equivalent of a global business directory online, your business will be competing against thousands of others in the same category.

And because of the lack of information on the .tel pages, it’s going to offer no perceivable benefit in terms of differentiation. No more certainly than you’d get from being listed for free in a directory like Yell.com or FreeIndex.co.uk.

Bye, bye address book?

But in a couple of areas Telnic may be on to something, although they face a catch-22 as do their potential customers.

Browsing the web on mobile phones has seen massive growth as smartphones proliferate. Telnic’s .tel domains make your contact details easily accessible and also dialable on the move.

But then Facebook, Gmail contacts, and Plaxo do this too and Apple’s iPhone allows you to dial numbers on websites by clicking on them straight on the phone’s mobile browser.

What differentiates .tel is the possibility of synchronising contact details as they’re updated by your contact, not you. Always having up-to-date details for business contacts that you no longer have to update yourself is a big potential plus.

I’m a name, not a number

The catch-22 is that this service only becomes really useful, if .tel becomes ubiquitous and you and all your business contacts are using it.

But ubiquity is tough. To that extent .tel is competing against free services like Twitter and Facebook to become a definitive ‘namespace’ for people and businesses.

What’s a namespace? Well rather than everybody having a telephone number, it’s everybody having a universally accepted digital ‘name/home’. An easy to remember ‘handle’ that every man, woman and child recognises.  One click and you’re in touch, online or on the move.

Twitter with its @ symbol and Facebook profiles have come the closest to achieving this so far. Both companies have millions and millions of people on their platforms, with ambitions to grow to 1 billion users.

Your hairdresser knows about Twitter and Facebook. Your hairdresser probably uses Twitter and Facebook. The day your hairdresser asks you, ‘what’s your .tel’ will be the day Telnic is dreaming of.

As the company’s head of communications, Justin Hayward, said to me last week:

We’re certainly aiming for our Hoover moment.

The moment when .tel becomes a generic term, a verb or a universally accepted ‘namespace’.

It may be a long wait.

Four years ago, our beloved leader, Alex Bellinger, interviewed one Greg Gianforte. By then he’d started five businesses – one went to $10m annual revenue, another to $80-85m at the time of interview. The other three experienced enough success to be sold on.

He believes that borrowing money to start a business is not a good idea, far better to ‘bootstrap’ it using the money generated to help it grow. In fact, he advocates trying to sell your wares before you actually have a product. A few hundred phone calls will tell you whether you’re on the right lines and, if not, where you can adjust your vision to match the market. Make sure, though, that you can deliver on your promises within eight weeks.

Trust Alex to have found Gianforte four years before me. He’s the first story in a recent book called ‘Entrepreneur Journeys: Bootstrapping: Weapon of Mass Reconstruction’, by Sramana Mitra (142 pages). You can get it as a paperback from Amazon US for $16.95 or online for $9.99 at Smashwords.

Mitra mixes her own observations with interviews with a bunch of (mostly) hi-tech entrepreneurs who built their businesses with little or no starting capital. Certainly not venture capital, although a few put their hands in their own pockets, tapped friends and family or went to angels. The general tone of the book is ‘the less funding, the better’.

The book reads like a series of business autobiographies, allowing you to understand the interviewees’ thought processes.

I downloaded the ‘.rtf’ version and read it into Word, from whence I could highlight text which meant something to me and add comments. The conversion from .rtf to Word wasn’t wonderful – some sections appeared all capitalised – but it more or less did the job. You can download in a variety of formats to suit your computer software.

I highlighted 454 bits of text and added 81 comments. Essentially, that’s over five hundred separate mental stimulations as a result of a longish day’s-worth of reading. The comments largely referred to how I intend to do things differently in future, plus insights into my own past successes and failures.

The book has an American orientation, but this is not a reason to reject the lessons it contains. In fact, it’s more a reason to be inspired by the ‘can do’ approach over there. (I was a regular visitor to Silicon Valley for 28 years, by the way, and experienced the culture first-hand.)

Gianforte re-tells his story about how he hired a 48 foot billboard to promote his company right outside the company he really needed to do business with. Within six weeks he’d shipped it a $100,000 order. The client had massive credibility in his market place and, by referencing the sale to new prospects, he was on his way.

Om Malik is a well-known technology writer. In 1999, he thought he’d capitalise on his massive knowledge by becoming an investment manager. Within three months, he realised his mistake. He says, “I think a lot of people do things for money, and it’s the stupidest thing we can do for ourselves.” He went on to create a web-based publishing company, the GigaOM Network, which reaches over three million readers worldwide. He’s probably earning a fortune, but from his first love, writing and publishing quality content.

Rafat Ali, of Paid Content discovered, more or less by accident, the power of a regular, informative, newsletter. Although set up as a web-publishing business focusing on news relating to the economic evolution of digital content, he also published an early morning newsletter of the previous day’s blog posts. At the time of the interview, this newsletter had 50,000 subscribers which gives his company a powerful daily presence in the subscriber’s inbox.

These are just three tiny snippets from the book of a dozen stories, plus Mitra’s essays. Each reader will be stimulated by different things. You might be interested in staffing issues, patents, earnout problems, identifying customer needs, raising capital or something else. It’s all touched on and the stories come from the heart.

Of course, if you have no empathy for American stories or an affinity with the hi-tech sector, then you’re less likely to enjoy the book.

When Apple launched the iPhone and its App Store in iTunes, it upped the ante in terms of what mobile phone applications could do. In July this year the number of iPhone apps downloaded hit 1.5 billion.

Competitors followed suit rapidly and the App Store wars broke out.

Blackberry launched its App World, Nokia its Ovi Store and Microsoft is about to unleash Windows Mobile Marketplace.

So I decided to take a look at the top 5 mobile apps for business on each platform and ask has the mobile world really embraced the needs of SMBs?

iPhone apps for SMEs

Here are the top 5 highest rated iPhone apps for business in Apple’s iTunes store.

1. QuickVoice Recorder – in essence an app to record and tag voice memos. Strangely number 1 in the charts, despite Apple having built a very similar app into the latest iteration of its iPhone software.
2. Griffin iTalk – another voice recording app. Useful for recording meetings and memos. A dictaphone replacement.
3. Mocha VNC – a virtual desktop app that lets you access your work PC or Mac. Seems to be difficult to set up.
4. Remote Desktop Lite - another remote desktop app from Mocha. Only connects to Windows XP. Somewhat limited and surprising to find it in the top 5 most popular.
5. Documents (Mobile Office Suite) – word processor and spreadsheets you can create and edit on the move. Integrates with Google Docs. Used to have the advantage of editing which Google’s own iPhone app didn’t have, but that’s changed recently.

The above list and indeed most of the others in the top 50 all focus on memo recording, remote access, documents and to-do-lists.

All well and good and oh so utilitarian. But then maybe that’s exactly what small businesses really need from their iPhone.

Nevertheless, there seems to be a dearth of creative apps for this audience, bearing in mind all the possibilities the iPhone itself offers from a technological standpoint.

To be honest most of the apps look pretty similar to what I remember downloading on both Nokia and Windows Mobile platforms some 5 years ago.

Why nothing creative from all those cool and talented app designers out there?

But, maybe I’m missing some diamonds in the rough. What are your recommendations for business-related iPhone apps?

So today Microsoft clinches a 10 year deal which means its recently launched search engine Bing will be used by Yahoo.

In return for sacrificing its second place in the search market behind Google, Yahoo will be able to keep 88% of revenues (for five years) coming from search ads generated by its now Microsoft-powered search engine.

Microsoft's Bing will power Yahoo search. Competition for Google and curtains for Yahoo?

The search business that was one of the cornerstones of Yahoo from its early years is for all intents and purposes no more.

Some, like one of the shrewdest entrepreneurs currently in the search space Mahalo.com CEO, Jason Calacanis, would argue Yahoo has capitulated and is now dead meat.

In an email to members of his mailing list, copied to his blog, he says:

Aggression and innovation wins. Period … To say it clearly: Microsoft does not enter a market unless it’s important, huge and on the way to becoming even bigger. Microsoft is the buy sign, not the sell sign.

He argues the once innovative Yahoo lost its innovative edge, lost its talent and has now lost the plot.

It’s also repeating history, having once allowed an almost unknown (at the time) company called Google to power its search engine.

The logic of Calacanis is hard to contest. Innovation remains one of the most potent of competitive tools for any business large or small, but particularly small.

And small is what his own search/directory hybrid, Mahalo.com is, with a touch of innovation and a lot of iteration, ironically, of Yahoo’s original directory of the web.

When I interviewed Calacanis on SmallBizPod soon after its launch it seemed he might have his eye on a Google sale exit.

Now one search behemoth has fallen perhaps his praise for acquisitive Microsoft suggests the courting of a new suitor. Stranger things have happened.

For the rest of us, bizarrely, two main players in the search space may prove better than three.

Microsoft will undoubtedly drive even more competitive pricing into the search advertising market, if only to needle arch rivals Google.

For those that aren’t immersed in news about web startups and the world of social media, you might have missed the biggest story of recent weeks, the hacking of Twitter business documents by a Frenchman dubbed Hacker Croll.

By breaking into a personal email account of a Twitter employee, he was able to infiltrate most of the company’s highly confidential documents, email and other details held on their own servers and in Google’s ‘cloud-based’ applications.

He then passed over 300 of these documents to the world’s most widely read blog about web startups, TechCrunch.

For the geeks among you the fascinating details of the hack were revealed by TechCrunch yesterday.

Twitter security FAIL. But how robust are the passwords of your staff?

Lots has been made of the fact that Twitter’s security house of cards came tumbling down because like many a good web startup the company used cloud services.

Their documents, email etc were all held online on other people’s servers, like Google, rather than on their own hardware in a broom cupboard.

But the reality is it’s people that are the problem, not where your data is.

The key component of Hacker Croll’s successful break in was being able to guess the personal Gmail password of a Twitter employee.

Because, like the huge majority of people, this individual often used the same password for many accounts and also had the answers to additional security questions like ‘what’s the name of your pet’ inadvertantly spread around the web on social networks, the French hacker soon had his hands on Twitter’s crown jewels.

Secure passwords are at the heart of the problem. Most people simply don’t use them, because they can’t remember a four digit pin number let alone unique passwords for every application, computer or web service they’re signed up to.

This is a major problem. And it’s not just online security that suffers in this way.

I used to work at a FTSE 100 bank where everybody in the department had their computer password written down in the team personal assistant’s rolodex.

So how do you improve password security online and off for your business? Here are some tips:

1. establish a password policy for your business to which all staff are required to adhere;
2. encourage staff to use unique passwords for each computer or service they use;
3. make sure all passwords have eight or more characters;
4. do not allow passwords to contain real, comprehensible words otherwise guessing is about as hard as playing hangman;
5. suggest ways to make passwords, long, secure, but memorable: for example pick a favourite line from a song, poem or nursery rhyme and use the first letters of each word to form a password i.e. “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes.” could be Yhbiyh!YHFIy5;
6. remember to mix upper and lowercase characters in the password together with special characters and numbers.  In the example above, the exclamation mark is used in place of a full stop (which you couldn’t use in a password anyway) and the last ‘S’ is turned into the number 5;
7. make sure answers to password hints are false i.e. if asked ‘what is the name of your pet’ make sure the answer is the name of a friend’s dog, not your cat;
8. if you really have to write down passwords, don’t store them on a computer, but write them on a piece of paper and put them in the company safe.

Just the above measures will dramatically improve your online and physical computing security, but it’s not an extensive list.

Let us know, if you have any password security tips we’ve missed.

Jeremy Ettinghausen, head of digital publishing at Penguin, and Tom Thirlwall, managing director of small creative agency, MWorks, appeared recently in a session called ‘Alchemy, Chemistry and Collaboration’ at an event run by b.TWEEN. They thought they’d like to create a document about collaboration by collaborating with the audience. This was to be done using a rather nifty online collaborative editing application called Etherpad. The audience had other ideas but, as the discussion proceeded, it became clear why collaboration can’t be forced.

Referring to a 2007 collaborative book-writing experiment as a way of opening the discussion, Ettinghausen explained that Penguin got over 1500 people to collectively write a novel using a wiki. All of the contributions were anonymous so it meant that some well known writers could participate without risking damage to their reputation by association. This was just as well, because the end result was not at all good. He said it has been called, “not the most read, but the most written” novel in history.

However, Penguin learned a lot about collaboration which it has applied subsequently. In the case of the book, though, the question that hadn’t been asked was, “what was in it for the contributors?” And the answer was, “not a lot”. They got to exercise their writing skills and, presumably, saw what others made of them. So they learnt something. But the anonymity meant that no-one could see that they’d participated or, maybe, written a particularly scintillating chapter. The bottom line for these things is that everyone has to be a winner in some respect – learning, revenue, PR value, establishing new business relationships and so on.

Many organisations no longer have all the talents they need in-house, so collaboration with third parties, especially small businesses, is increasingly the case. Project team members can come from several organisations, large and small. And these projects, ideally, have a life of their own which is an obligation to meet certain agreed objectives but remain largely independent of their own organisations.

What turns out to be far more important than the contractual agreement is the chemistry between the participants. Figuring out whether a collaboration is likely to work owes more to flirtation and courtship than to project planning. The participants have to respect, like and trust each other. If not, the cracks will show as the project nears completion.

One audience member drew a distinction between the participants and the organisations they worked for, especially when it came to meeting up. He wondered if ‘neutral territory’ was important. (In the university world, for example, politics gets in the way. Hosting meetings gives a power advantage to the university, even if the project team couldn’t care less.) The speakers suggested that the money spent on such neutral venues, hotels and the like, would be better spent on content and product. They suggested that organisations need to empower people to be part of the project and not be a spokesman for their organisation.

Discussions about the causes of collaboration breakdowns followed and, fundamentally, the issues came down to clear initial objectives, an understanding of the benefits to the individuals, periodic reminders, continuous dialogue and meet up when possible. Not so different to an internal project really.

In wrapping the session, the speakers summarised the key elements for successful cross-organisation collaboration and took a few extras from the audience:

From the speakers:
- A need for the project (collaboration for its own sake will fail)
- A good chemistry between the participants
- Shared needs
- Mutual respect
- Leave egos at the door (acknowledge own strengths and weaknesses)
- Ongoing communication
- The right tools (Twitter, Huddle, BaseCamp, phone conferences, video conferences, phone calls, meeting up. Ettinghausen found phone conferences particularly bad.)

From the audience
- Clear objectives
- Ownership (who knocks heads together if things go wrong)
- Lots of decent human beings

A video of the session is on blip.tv

You may have heard of Salesforce.com, an online service that has been penetrating companies left, right and centre because a) it’s useful, b) it can be paid for by individuals and departments without ringing alarm bells in IT and finance and, c) because it can be slipped inside the company as a standalone application. With some justification it calls itself “the world’s most popular sales tool”. Its 55,000 customers are split about equally across small, medium and large enterprises.

Last week, it published some independent research findings among 1,000 UK SMBs which ostensibly pushed the importance of seeking new business. It defines SMBs as organisations of between 50 and 250 employees and the ‘new business’ seeking behaviour was most intense (at 60 percent) among companies of fewer than 50 staff – companies that shouldn’t have been included. However, while the remaining figures are not as dramatic, they’re still quite interesting. See how they match your reality (and comment if you feel so moved):

Important issues by number of employees (Q109)

The 51-150 (surely that should read 50-150) and 151-250 organisations broadly differ in their attitudes to getting new customers/selling to existing ones and in cost cutting versus revenue growth. All four things are important, of course, but each organisation has its own preferred strategies for getting through the present recession. About 28 percent of these same respondents said that they’d consider themselves successful if their businesses don’t shrink during 2009.

Turning to their cost burdens, you may be interested to see where they lie:

Areas of greatest cost overhead

Again, organisation size makes a difference, but not much. IT appears as something of a headache. And this, of course, is music to Salesforce.com’s ears.

As well as the original CRM service and a ‘service cloud‘, which I won’t bore you with here, Salesforce has a third string to its bow called Force.com which is an application platform.

This means that it provides somewhere to run your applications in the ‘cloud’ (no, don’t get me going), taking away from you all that horrible stuff like backup, restore, disaster recovery, reliability, hardware and delivering applications to connected users 24×7. Applications are easier to write (five times easier according to the blurb) and easier to implement. And you have no capital costs. An associated service, called AppExchange, provides many prewritten applications which could save you at least some development effort.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that it doesn’t excuse you from analysing your business processes, deciding what functions you need, writing and testing them (or finding them) and all the other activities that go into implementing business software. You will probably need to consider how such systems are going to work with those that are still running on your own equipment until, and if, you manage to outsource the whole lot.

UK Force.com user, Nimbus, got a 28 year old person with no IT skills (but, presumably, plenty of business analysis and Force.com skills) to do most of the work involved in migrating its home-grown applications, including spreadsheet macros and the like, out to Force.com.

Many companies might be interested in the idea of getting shot of their computing equipment and associated expenses. But, they are also probably concerned about their ability to do it, the cost of doing it and the danger that they won’t be able to get access to their systems if their broadband connection goes down or the Force.com platform goes off air. The last is probably the least of their worries. Salesforce is highly motivated to fix all problems of this nature very quickly. If it happens too often, it goes out of business. The company provide a ‘briefcase’ facility that allows people to continue working when they know they’ll be offline – travelling etc.

With respect to the other two issues: ability and cost, the first depends on your staff and their skills. But, it has to be said, sources of third party help for small businesses wanting to take the Force route are not exactly thick on the ground at the moment. Salesforce is aware of this.

And, since it represents a great opportunity for systems integrators and the like, I think it’s safe to say that this will change. The second, cost, means that you’d be moving capital expenditure to operational. So you could save big in the short term.

You will, however, incur implementation expenses, which wouldn’t be that different to moving to a different internal system. Then you will have your ongoing monthly costs for the service. These you have to hammer out with Salesforce.com and conduct your own ROI analysis. Its blurb reckons you’d halve your costs.

So, although IT is a large expenditure for SMBs, like all ‘cloud’ type solutions, Force.com is unlikely to prove a magic bullet. So much depends on your exact circumstances and your IT setup. But, equally, when reviewing your future computing options, it would make sense to keep it on your radar, not least because Salesforce itself is an established and reputable provider.

When invited to a Microsoft ‘Voice of the Customer’ briefing, I must confess that I didn’t know what to expect. Software that expects the customer to close their computer by going to the ‘Start’ button obviously doesn’t really understand customer needs.

A search on the internet revealed that ‘Voice of the Customer’ is actually quite an accepted term in software circles. It’s about understanding customer needs through market research in the early stages of a project, then prioritising them in order to influence product development. You can find out more at wikipedia’s entry on the subject.

The briefing went way beyond the voice of the customer though. Perhaps it should have been called ’second-guessing the needs of the customer’ or something. Microsoft wants to get things right, customer-wise, in the first place and then make it easy for customers to get resolutions to problems encountered – sometimes before they’ve even encountered them.

You’re probably thinking what I was thinking; “Microsoft has been in business over 30 years, shouldn’t it have been taking this approach all along?” And I don’t have an answer to that, except that I suspect that programmers (who, in general, have little grasp of the average user’s needs) were left to run wild with their clever but irrelevant and often inconsistent (across applications) coding.

Microsoft seemed to have little idea of, or sympathy for, the hours that users would waste trying to find answers to their problems. As the web increased in popularity, Google probably became the first port of call, with real users in forums or Q&A sites becoming the best source of answers.

Although, having said that, I have a note here that says Microsoft itself participated in 13 million email or chat conversations, took 24 million phone calls and served up two billion on-line self-help requests. I presume that was in a year. It represents a ton of work and a huge cost for the company, over whatever time scale. This is, presumably, part of the trigger for a customer-focused revolution.

So, the new order is determined to design products better in the first place, be made better in the second and be better supported in the third. One of the company’s products that has already gone through this particular mill is Windows Server 2008. In a comparative time period, the incident volume was half that of its predecessor, Windows Server 2003.

Rather than have to plough through arcane knowledgebase articles, online users will be able to hit a ‘Fix it’ button. Later on, an online service will be able to undo something that’s harmed your system. Running applications will be monitored for health and get fixed in the background.

Microsoft has 424 full time employees, plus contractors and vendors involved in this quality process. Even so, it has to prioritise its work, it knows, for example, that Windows Mobile is a pain but it’s still not reached the head of the queue.

However the Windows 7 operating system that our beloved leader (Alex Bellinger) blogged about last week, received the full treatment, and it shows. Half a million individual items of feedback were processed. Five diagnostics and 108 design changes were incorporated as a result. It’s no wonder it’s becoming one of the best-received Microsoft offerings.

The company could have saved users (and itself) a lot of pain had it introduced such processes from the start. But then, without the internet, this would have been virtually (no pun intended) impossible.

Let’s hope that this really does represent a fresh start.

As many of you know, Vista hell became too much for me and I spent most of 2008 using Ubuntu.

And what a very pleasant surprise the open source operating system and all the good (free) things that come with it has been.

But there were a few gotchas: poor multimedia support, no viable Linux accounting package and a power management system that left my laptop hotter than the sun.

These niggles, the fact that I’m a bit of a tech tart, David Tebbutt’s initial reactions, and my never ending quest to find out whether stuff’s good for other small businesses, prompted me to install Windows 7 beta on my main work laptop in February this year.

The following review is based on my experience of the beta and release candidate 1 (RC1) of Microsoft’s new operating system.

Windows 7 wallpaper - Gates & Ballmer ride into a Yellow Submarine landscape, but is Microsoft's new OS blue monster or blue meanie?

Wow, it works now

Remember the Wow starts now? Microsoft’s come a long way since then.

What the Vista launch proved is that a computer OS no longer merits marketing hype. The evolution of operating systems, Apple and Linux included, is now iterative, not revolutionary.

What matters is do they work well? The bottom line is Vista didn’t and Windows 7 does.

Like many others, I’ve found Windows 7 beta and RC1 to be equivalent to or perhaps even a little faster than XP.

A stable, fast, secure operating system that you can forget about is exactly what small businesses want. Windows 7 could be just that …

It’s all in the detail

There’s really not a lot to say about Windows 7. The very fact that people are talking about the new ‘wallpaper’ in the OS is a rather amusing sign of this.

But actually this is great news. It feels lighter and more refined to use and seems to herald a new less is more philosophy coming from Redmond.

Perhaps cloud computing is forcing software vendors away from the bloatware mentality of Moore’s Law where all the extra headroom created by leaps in processing power had to be filled.

What you’re left with focuses on well executed detail and usability. About bloody time.

Windows 7 small business benefits

As a small business owner these are the things I enjoyed about the software:

- at last the desktop search built into the start button works well bringing a touch of Apple’s Spotlight to the PC – this is a real time saver when you want to find a document quickly;

- the ability to mouse over the taskbar and get a peak at files and windows you’ve got open works very well and saves time (click on the image below to see a screencast review to go with this blog post) as do the jump lists which give you quick access to files you’ve been working on;

- Vista was a pig for connecting to wifi networks on the move and Apple MacBooks are also often a pain if you’re trying to get some work done in an airport or down your local cafe. Windows 7 puts that right and is much more intuitive in terms of finding and connecting to wifi networks;

- compatibility is good thanks to ‘XP mode’ which means all your old software should work fine. Much to my surprise my ancient accounting package is alive and well under the new OS, saving me from an expensive forced upgrade;

- with all the data protection legislation around these days small businesses will increasingly value the ability to encrypt sensitive data on computers easily. Bitlocker on Windows 7 does this for an entire hard drive, while encryption on a file or folder basis also works well.

That’s about it, other than general stability and speed.

Similar features are found in other operating systems and arguably Microsoft should have had all this sorted years ago. But it’s here now and it works. Having said that …

Ghosts and the black screen of death

Just like Ubuntu there are some gotchas, albeit I’ve been testing beta and RC1 versions, so some quirks may get ironed out.

I frequently get programmes including Firefox and Microsoft Office documents suddenly freezing and turning a ghostly shade of transparent. Like ghosts they’re then often difficult to lay to rest. This was particularly bad in the beta, but it’s still happened a few times over the last week in RC1.

On much more rare occasions I get what I can only describe as the ‘black screen of death’. Windows 7 doesn’t stop running (which is good), but if a programme crashes I’ve had the background turn a mournful and appropriate black …

Norton Internet Security 2009 has proved extremely problematic to install correctly – but I expect Symantec will rectify this before the RC1 turns final. Windows-targetted viruses and malware remain a pain which Linux and Apple users don’t have to struggle with.

Finally Internet Explorer 8, bundled with the new OS, still feels slow. Firefox is the way to go.

Conclusion

If you’re a sole trader with an XP or Vista computer and you’re sticking with Microsoft, yes upgrade to Windows 7 (assuming Microsoft is sensible with pricing).

If you’re a larger SME, the benefits of Windows 7 are not so compelling that you should shift existing hardware/software upgrade cycles just for the sake of getting your hands on what’s new.

But when you do, you’ll notice a positive difference.

It was with a heavy heart that I set off to the London Climate Change Marketplace, part of the Prince’s May Day Summit 2009. I wasn’t looking forward to meeting lots of people selling things and pretending this was good for the environment. And I was dreading bumping into Prince Charles, a man whose carbon footprint must be very ‘interesting’.

I needn’t have worried. Prince Charles was at one of the other May Day events, but his speech was screened at our event too. And the exhibitors I spoke to were pretty genuine people who were more than happy to share their knowledge and insights. And yes, if you wanted, to flog you something.

What was refreshing to me was getting out of the IT box and looking at the subject in the round. Sure, IT can help a lot with addressing sustainability-related actions, but it’s not the only game in town.

I received my invite through a colleague’s husband, Habib Abdullah, the MD of MITIE Pest Control. MITIE is an outsourcing and asset management company. It had the largest stand by far and, over a drink made of apples from Kent and some cheese from Somerset, a representative talked to me about reducing food miles, ethical procurement, waste recycling and reuse and local sourcing.

You might be interested in flicking through MITIE’s online booklet entitled ‘the little book of big ideas‘ for inspirations of your own.

Couldn’t resist stopping by the 3M stand to tease it about swine-flu face-masks. Poor guy nearly hit me. He’d only got four hours sleep because of global press interest. He pointed out that even the most advanced masks have to be thrown away after a single use. And, anyway, you need to be trained to fit them properly in the first place or they’re useless. However, on the subject of energy saving, he did manage to show me how 3M window film can substantially reduce heat gain through windows, thus reducing the air conditioning work load.

Siemens was interesting because it is an industrial company that has moved to IT, rather than an IT company that’s moving into industry. Its services are probably not up your street but the perspective is worth bearing in mind when listening to potential suppliers.

The University of Cambridge and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development has produced (among other things) a neat e-learning tutorial on the business case for sustainable development. It looks like a great way to inculcate an understanding among employees in a fairly enjoyable way. You can download a PowerPoint guided tour if you’re interested.

Then we come to the Prince and the May Day network. During his speech, Prince Charles reported that about 1000 companies have pledged to do something about climate change in their own operations. About half of them are sending their footprint figures to the network and some of these are also sharing their stories with others. The May Day name was chosen because it is an international distress call (derived from m’aider, it seems). And it was chosen because we have very little time (98 months, in the Prince’s view) to ‘take the necessary action’.

To find out what that means, I strongly recommend you look at the May Day Journey. I’m ashamed to say that I knew nothing of this until last week. It is a great mind-focusing exercise. And it’s not all about ‘doing good’, it’s about doing the right things for your business.

Kevin Misselbrook is customer services director at Access Accounting.  He is also a member of the ICAEW’s IT Faculty Committee, in which capacity we were discussing environmental matters. In passing, he mentioned how few SMBs issue electronic versions of their invoices and statements, despite the unquestionable advantages for both the bottom line and the environment.

For example, if you don’t print stuff then you avoid paper (client’s copy and your copy), ink, folding, envelope stuffing, then franking or stamping. And, while not strictly your concern, the postal service delivery vehicles and sorting equipment all contribute their bit to the energy and environmental costs.

Then, of course, further savings can be made at your client because they won’t have to open the envelope, handle the paper or rekey its contents.

If you issue documents in a special format called XML, they could go straight into your client’s system and automatically become part of the workflow.

But, even if you take the easiest route and ‘print’ invoices as .PDF files and email them, then you’d still be taking a great step forward. This is readable on just about any machine these days. And the capability to output invoices in this way is provided in many accounting packages.

If your package doesn’t provide for this, or you’re using a database, spreadsheet or word processor to prepare your invoices, all is not lost. You can get a printer ‘plug-in’ – sometimes at no cost – which will ‘print’ your document to a .PDF file. CutePDF Writer is the one that both Alex Bellinger (the boss of SmallBizPod) and I use. You might prefer to go to Adobe itself, Scansoft or other companies that offer more sophistication.

STOP PRESS 1: Would you believe it? Microsoft has just made ‘Save as PDF’ one of its file save options in Office 2007 Service Pack 2.

STOP PRESS 2: Would you believe it? I just tried saving one invoice from Access 2007 and it outputs a completely different one. I don’t *think* I’m stupid, but I’m willing to get a second opinion.

A few days ago SmallBizPod was invited to try out a new collaboration tool for designers and their clients. It’s web-based: all you need is a browser. Clients don’t have to register in order to participate. You just nominate them when you create the project. It’s free, it takes no time to learn and it is incredibly simple.

In fact, it’s probably too simple. But this is all part of the plan. The people behind the project are keenly aware that what you cook up in the lab’ can be quite different to what real users want. So they spent about four months building a robust ‘beta’ version and then offered it to allcomers to give feedback. The theory is that they will then respond quickly to the best ideas and the project evolves into something that fits the users’ needs.

This particular project is called redmark, which is a bit of a misnomer because it implies coloured markup of design and it does neither. It simply allows you to click on a spot on a design then comment on it – the comments are arranged down the right hand side and connected to the hotspots with black lines. Here’s a reduced size screen shot:

redmark screen shot

On the left is an image size slider, one of the icons at the top is a hand tool for moving it around and underneath are icons linking to previous designs and their comments.

The designer is emailed whenever comments are made and the clients are emailed whenever the design changes. Two people (the current limit for clients per design) cannot comment at the same time. What’s a little bit frustrating is that the designer can’t comment either, unless they pretend they’re a client (which is what I did, but it’s a waste of an invite.) Two weeks ago, this was added to the ‘planned development list’. It will be a good indicator of how responsive the team is.

If you’re interested in participating in the beta trial, SmallBizPod has been given a code (M27005) which will let you in, providing you’re one of the first 50 to try it. Our beloved leader, Alex Bellinger nicked one. So did I.

To approach an online publication like this was an interesting move for the founders. Co-founder Anton Babadjanov came to us because we’d already written about another online design service called ConceptShare, which he describes as “a good tool, indeed”. But describes redmark as, “a free alternative to it, and we plan to keep it free.” Calling it an ‘alternative’ is cheeky but, as he says, it is free.

I asked him what his business model is. After all, no-one can live on air. He replied, “We believe that by helping the whole graphic community with a widely available and useful application we will be able to explore different monetization strategies.”

Like so many web 2.0 companies it seems to be a case of, ‘build the community first and then see what the options are’. If they want to keep it free, then I guess that leaves advertising or some other access to the user base as the source of revenue. From an exit perspective, ‘get bought’ has to be an option.

The people behind it are young (in their twenties) and enthusiastic. They have squeezed in a fair amount of practical and relevant intellectual grounding while pursuing their graduate and post-graduate courses. They have also recruited others to the team.

Babadjanov started a web design and application development consultancy in British Columbia a couple of years ago while redmark co-founder Deyan Vitanov is an MBA student at Stanford, where he’s been well and truly bitten by the start-up bug. Apart from anything else, he’s responsible for ‘investor relations’ within the Entrepreneurship Club. Smart move.

They have a structured approach to potentially major projects, which enables them to abandon them rapidly if they see trouble ahead. The stages are brainstorming, analysis then prototyping and release. They brainstorm around problems and potential matching technologies ‘that excite them’. They do a first pass filter by consulting as many trusted sources as possible in the hunt for any show stoppers. They aim to identify three projects then conduct further research to find the one with the highest potential. Then they start prototyping their favoured project. Which is where redflag comes in.

Quite whether they should have involved the media at this stage is a difficult one to answer. On the one hand, they collect beta testers and potentially life-saving feedback. On the other, they could simply turn people off if the product is not yet compelling enough or if they are not as responsive as they need to be to sustain the goodwill of their beta users.

As someone who got bitten by the startup bug many years ago while visiting Palo Alto and Menlo Park in Silicon Valley, I know what it’s like. It’s exciting (mine was called Caxton Software). It’s a unique part of the world where almost anything seems possible. Good luck to them. If this project fails, I doubt this will be the last we hear of these two enterprising Bulgarians.

When it comes to software as a service (SaaS) there’s a lot of speculation about small business demand.

But one thing is very clear, there’s no shortage of supply and the SME cloud computing land grab is on. There’s gold in them there hills.

Only today Alibaba.com subsidiary, Alisoft, announced the launch of free internet-based management software known as Shopkeeper.

The service comprises accounting and finance modules at launch and will be offered free to Chinese SMEs – all 42 million of them.

While it has to be said Chinese internet penetration means only a small fraction of that market will have access to Alisoft’s service, there can be no denying Alibaba.com’s ambitions in this area.

According to Reuters, the company plans to spend $146 million on promoting Shopkeeper to Chinese small businesses over the next three years.

Beyond China all the mainstream players clearly see the future of software in the cloud too.

Microsoft has Live and Azure. Google is already there, of course, with Docs, while hosting companies like Amazon and Rackspace also have massive vested interests in seeing utility computing (paying for what you use, when you want it whether it’s software or virtual hardware) succeed.

Meanwhile, the IBM-led open cloud manifesto betrayed a certain cack-handed attempt to regain commercial ground under the guise of openness. [Update: looks like a more harmonious approach may have broken out today after all].

And it’s not just the big guys.  Look at the flowering of SaaS accounting offerings in the UK. 

Kashflow kicked off the trend, but there’s also FreeAgent Central which only last week secured Angel funding, Clearbooks, Bionicbook and Cashboard. Look a little further afield and you could also add WinWeb, Twinfield, Zoho, Quickbooks Online, Freshbooks and imminently Sage Live.

Looking pretty crowded for such a new market, don’t you think?

So I believe supply will create, if not dictate, demand and do so quickly. Cloud computing for small businesses is already a fait accompli.

In just two years over 50% of UK small businesses will be using some form of software as a service, in my opinion.

This despite the fact the self-proclaimed largest UK provider of SaaS accounting software to SMEs, Kashflow, currently has just 3,000 paying customers.

So what’s going to spur such a rapid uptake?

Well, the the benefits of small business cloud computing have been set out well by Davids Tebbutt and Terrar on this blog recently.

But there’s something else – when SaaS becomes invisible, it will become the status quo.

Two years ago now I anticipated google gears before it appeared. Syncing between the cloud and the desktop was always going to be the killer app in terms of SME adoption.

Of course, both Google Gears, Microsoft Live/Azure and Zoho now have seamless sync, albeit a little unpredictable. But once the transition between online and offline, desktop and web are indistinguishable, SaaS to all intents and purposes becomes invisible.

The really big players will roll out adoption by default to small businesses. Several traditional small IT providers I spoke to today who you’d expect to be flogging hardware and software in boxes were already extolling the virtues of cloud computing. The groundwork is being laid.

Synchronisation will also be the key for the plethora of smaller software as a service vendors out there now.

Without rapidly making the online/offline boundaries invisible, they themselves run the risk of disappearing from view.

As a journalist, I used to spend about seventy percent of my time on the ‘bleeding edge’ of the IT world. When PCs, the web, social computing came along, I was there. (Before that, I had a fairly normal IT career for 14 years.) However, as an analyst, I probably spend about seventy percent of my time considering what’s going on among real people. Which brings me to today’s theme…

A SmallBizPod reader, Alexander Deliyannis, had been reading my various posts about social/collaborative software and services but none of them fitted his current challenge, which was to provide an online web-based workspace for a diverse group of people working in different countries of the EU. He was less concerned with the social aspects of the services and much more concerned with simple project-related collaboration.

He approached me for my views and we spent a fair amount of time looking at and rejecting many of what you might call mainstream collaboration software because it was either too social, it lacked a project management feel, it would take too long to implement or, frankly, it cost too much.

He wanted something that he could start up instantly, recruit members from wherever and be productive straight away. And, as he said, “there will be quite a few people in the project that have never heard of, or want to hear of, social networking. This is a game spoiler for us.”

If you’re trying to get strangers to work together, the last thing you want to do is ask them to adopt new working habits. Whatever he chose for the EU project would have to easily slip into their lives and be usable with minimal effort and maximal comfort. He admitted, “If it were for a project performed exclusively in the country I come from I would have taken an altogether different approach.” (In this respect, he is quite seriously looking at Huddle, a service that has been mentioned in SmallBizPod a couple of times.)

Anyway, Alexander’s trail led him to Cork-based Teamwork Project Manager. Slogan: “Project Management Made Easy”. We both fired it up and started loading our own project stuff and it looks as if it will fit the bill. As Alexander remarked, “I find its layout very clean and straightforward to use, though the power is there. It seems to be very well thought out altogether, including small things that an SME would indeed want to do, such as discretely brand the environment for its clients.”

As with any software or service that expects to survive, TeamworkPM is being improved all the time. “Our small team is working flat out adding features and replying to customers.” I usually cringe when I read ‘adding features’ but, having looked through the ‘road map’ and read a lot about the company’s responsiveness to customers, it seems they’re not features for features’ sake. And anyway, because TeamworkPM is an online service, updates are applied at the centre, the users don’t have to do a thing, apart from adopt them if they like them. (The company does have a ‘host-it-yourself’ option, but this post is about the online service.)

The company provides a range of pricing options, starting with free. Yes, you can have two projects and endless sub projects (task lists) and tasks, with unlimited users, for absolutely nothing. The restriction is the number of projects and the amount of memory you use. The ‘Free’ version gives you 5MB, which means that you will probably not be uploading and sharing too many large files. However, for 12 Euros a month the ‘Personal’ version gives you up to five projects and 100MB of memory. These two entry level prices exclude a couple of things that are unlikely to bother the ‘Free’ or ‘Personal’ user.

For 24 Euros a month you can have up to 4 gigabytes of memory and up to 15 projects. The maximum is 50GB and unlimited projects for 149 Euros/month. Pay annually and you get twelve months for the price of eleven. All versions are supplied on a 30-day free trial.

STOP PRESS: TeamworkPM just emailed a discount offer to readers of this blog – 20% off for life on any of the above options – just use the code: smallbizpod

This need-based pricing makes a refreshing change from user-based or other artificial pricing mechanisms. It is more transparent and it gives you the freedom to attach new users without a second thought.

Any pre-written software is going to come with compromises. With online stuff, it’s always a toss up between power and usability. The TeamworkPM developers are widely experienced in project management and other online offerings and they chose the elements that best fitted these constraints. You won’t find a billing element to go with the time recording, for example. And they have always had reservations about Gantt charts but user demand – 56 requests in two weeks – means that it is being added as I write. I know this because the team and product blog keeps everyone in the picture.

Nice.

Until a couple of days ago, I had not heard of INTSPEI – the International Software and Productivity Engineering Institute. But, boy, am I glad I bumped into them. The New York/Kiev company focuses on cranking up human productivity by devolving as much grunt work as possible to computers.

Its slogan is “Humans Should Not Do Computers’ Jobs”. You can read plenty about the vision, aspirations and background of the company on its website. For now, let’s look at what attracted me to it: an extension to searches which presents the most popular words in the results as a ‘tag-cloud’ which appears at the top of the page. (Word size is a reflection of its frequency in the search results.)

Here’s an example of the company’s Search Cloudlet working with Google’s web search results (it also shows up on Google’s News, Blogs, Scholar and Shopping pages) :

INTSPEI's Search Cloudlet atop Google's results

You can see that I kicked the search off with “desktop productivity software” and I can now click on a term in the cloud which helps refine my search. Each new set of results presents a new cloud. You can click on ‘Sites’ to see which websites are contained in the results, or ‘Net’ to find the top-level domains: you might want to refine your results by country, for example.

The software also works with Yahoo! Web and News searches and, a couple of days ago, it was made available for the Twitter micro-blogging service. Here, it greatly enhances your ability to find out ‘has anyone mentioned xxx?’ You get real answers from real people and you can, again, instantly extend the search by clicking on the tag words.

Here’s a Twitter search for CleverClogs a.k.a. Marjolein Hoekstra, the person who first tipped me off about the service:

INTSPEI's Search Cloudlet atop Twitter's results

To enjoy this browser extension for free (or for a donation – your call), you need to be using Firefox. I won’t drone on but I’ve been using it for years and only venture into Internet Explorer when I’m absolutely forced to. You can download the Cloudlet add-on for Firefox here.

INTSPEI is also developing P-Navigator, currently a Windows desktop application, which integrates with existing enterprise, desktop and internet search engines and provides a range of tools to improve the productivity of knowledge and information workers.

At a click, you can refine your searches as described above but you can also find which pages link to the found pages, the pages linked to from them, tree and branch relationships between them, display documents, and more.

Although the product is in closed beta at the moment the information on the P-Navigator web pages reveals the maturity of thinking of this organisation.

Anyone whose products are motivated by “Humans Should Not Do Computers’ Jobs” definitely gets my vote. I’ll be keeping a close eye on this interesting organisation.

Tomorrow sees the start of the huge CeBIT ICT exibition in Germany where 4,300 companies from around the world are expected to strut their stuff. One of them, Fujitsu-Siemens, always likes to announce something new at these events.

This year it’s the turn of the zero-watt PC. Like all machines, it consumes no energy when in hibernate or off mode but, unlike other machines, it can still be woken up automatically for software downloads and the like. This is of most interest to organisations that make software upgrades across the network. However, the machines do have other features which help to reduce energy costs, such as a highly efficient power supply which directs up to 89 percent of electricity into useful work, and displays which alter their brightness according to the ambient light.

Next year, the European Union is putting stringent controls on energy use in what it calls standby mode – a maximum of one watt and, three years later, will drop this to 0.5 watts. With the introduction of the new PCs, Fujitsu Siemens is well ahead of the game. It is also in the process of patenting the technology which, if other manufacturers can’t figure out how to do it, could prove good for the company’s licence revenues. Or, if it were to licence the design freely (in the interests of a greener planet) and with much fanfare, Fujitsu-Siemens could pick up some good PR karma. (That’s my suggestion by the way, not something the company has even hinted at.)

Greenpeace is a good place to look for comparisons between the various manufacturers. And I understand that, from June, it will be looking at the capabilities of vendors to help customers make environmental savings through the application of IT. This would have proved a challenge for Fujitsu-Siemens, being a hardware company but, at around the same time, it becomes fully integrated with Fujitsu which has a lot of capability in this area, albeit primarily for the Japanese market. The transition to a global offering won’t be easy but, over time and with the help of the ex-Fujitsu-Siemens team, we can expect Fujitsu to make a reasonable showing in the Greenpeace guide.

While vendors would love us to change IT equipment just because new products are greener and can save us a few tens to low hundreds of pounds per year in energy costs, this is absolutely not a reason to change. Nor would they really expect you to. It’s nearly always better to work equipment until it has to be changed – after four years perhaps. But then, if price, quality and performance are equal, but running costs are lower, the purchase of a greener PC does make a lot of sense.

This morning my (other) blog emailed me to say that ‘Steve’ had commented on a post puffing a free online service called Manymoon. This sort of thing is understandable but irritating. Before reporting it as spam, I thought I’d better follow the link. It led to details of a free collaboration/project management tool.

After rummaging the company’s self description and, given that I’d never heard of Manymoon before, I searched Twitter for mentions. They started two months ago. I’m guessing this is when the service emerged from private beta.

Concerned about security of the information being exchanged and assuming it was stored in Manymoon’s own (or rented) facilities, I searched Google for ‘manymoon enterprise security’ (without the apostrophes) and scrolled down the results until I saw a name I recognised. I didn’t have to look far. Bill Ives was the second website mentioned. He’s been on my list of ‘credible commentators’ for years. His blog post on Manymoon  gives a decent run down of its capabilities.

In a few minutes, I’d learned plenty about Manymoon, something that would have been impossible in the pre-web, pre-social, pre-search days. And I hadn’t disturbed a soul to gather that information. It was all dropped into my lap because of people’s willingness to put information about themselves online and for others to add their own perspective on, and links to, this information.

The next step was to try Manymoon. My reservations centred around two things: 1) It ‘integrates with’ Google Docs and Google Calendar and I wasn’t sure I wanted that, and 2) I wasn’t sure that having ‘yet another place to work’ was such a good idea. I believe that collaborative software that surfaces inside regular workflows, portals and applications is going to win out in the end.

Anyway, here goes. After registering – easy (you have to check your email to complete the process) you can immediately add colleagues. Then you can create a project and add tasks to it. Bearing in mind that this is done through a web browser and to a remote site, it’s mostly rather snappy. Then, if you want to mess with deadlines or add Google documents, you need to give permission for Manymoon to access your calendar and documents. This permission can be revoked at any time.

If you’re using Google stuff, a click on a document or calendar entry takes you straight over to Google. If you’re uploading documents from your own desktop then reading them is a case of re-downloading them and viewing them with your desktop application.

You can read Bill Ives’ (much more) detailed rundown of Manymoon. It’s another potential tool for you to consider.

My purpose in writing this post is more to show how far you can get in learning about stuff using web and social tools and none of it is disruptive to other people.

The idea of social networking and such might be disruptive, but the processes are actually less so. Even had I grabbed Bill Ives on Skype to ask for clarification, it would have taken seconds of his time to respond.  And the moments spent responding are far less than the time spent on, say, responding to an email or taking a telephone call.

Rackspace is never backward in coming forward with suggestions that help it grow its business. Like many others, it has found the independent survey a good way of generating attention. (Disclosure: most of my work is for a company that has a reputation for well thought out surveys.)

All surveys though, good or bad, tell us something. It might be about the company setting the questions or it might be about the respondents. I’m a sucker for them and find that most of the ones that cross my desk are interesting.

Rackspace commissioned Vanson Bourne to do one on ‘Cloud Hosting Awareness’ among small and medium sized companies in the UK and the USA. It found that UK-based small businesses were more aware of the subject than their counterparts in the USA. (Being an egotist, I’d like to think that this is thanks to SmallBizPod.)

Anyway, the figure is 33 percent. The rest have never heard of Cloud Hosting. And why the heck should they? Why should anyone who’s trying to run a business even need to know that ‘cloud’ anything even exists?

Just to put a bit more meat on the research bones, 28 percent of the UK respondents were considering using cloud hosting. And 34 percent – one percent more than had heard of it – thought they had no need for it or that it provided no additional benefit over their existing hosted service. Cost was the second most cited barrier at 29 percent.

Of course, I’m not privy to the nuances of the research – whether Cloud Hosting was explained before asking the later questions. What I do know is Rackspace’s reaction:

…small businesses may be shying away from Cloud Hosting because they do not fully understand the added benefits over their existing hosting solution and, even more surprising; they may view the cloud as being cost prohibitive. This could be a detrimental mix up for small businesses in that they could benefit from the cloud’s scalability and cost efficiency, especially when coupled with their current traditional hosting configuration. A hybrid hosting solution can make for a truly powerful option.

If a small business is providing web-based services, then ‘cloud hosting’ is probably relevant and Rackspace is probably already on their radar. If it’s just a common or garden small business that’s trying to survive present market conditions, then technical arguments aren’t going to work.

People need to know what’s on offer and how it will help them do better business. And the offer has to relate to business applications, not plumbing.

David Terrar is a decent chap – ex-IBM and all that good stuff – and has a few years experience of providing cloud-based services. Twinfield delivers online accounting to businesses of all sizes, while WordFrame is an online social collaboration and web publishing service.

I asked him to get away from the specifics of his offerings and tell me what additional generic benefits derive from cloud hosting. He came up with three.

First of all, because the services are provided through a web browser, work can be done from anywhere. Or you can get people to do stuff for you from anywhere – data input in another country maybe?

If you have to work with others – accountants, business partners, suppliers, customers – it’s possible to open up (part of) your online system to them, subject to authentication.

Finally, a subject close to my heart, backup and resilience in general is all taken care of for you. (I’m still scrambling through the aftermath of my recent machine crash. I have a mirror of my system but I’m not at all sure I want to buy a replica of the machine that crashed. Ergo, mirror fairly useless.)

Sorry about the last bit. Hopefully this post has given you some things to consider saying the next time someone tries to interest you in buying cloud services. Essentially it boils down to, “Yes, but what’s in it for me?” And get them to answer in business terms.

Last week saw IBM’s annual Lotusphere shindig in Orlando. I was there, suffering the usual headaches and lack of sleep caused by a combination of the time-zone change and information overload. Much of the event was way off the SMB radar although IBM is putting together a really nice set of online services which will all go out under the LotusLive brand. You may recall that I mentioned the ‘Bluehouse‘ collaborative software last year, this has now been formally named LotusLive Engage.

It’s unlikely that you will be buying your services directly from IBM/Lotus. It would be physically impossible for the company to reach the huge potential market for these online services. It is more likely to come from a systems integrator or value added reseller, especially if you’d like it to be integrated to your existing systems. Or it might come from an internet service provider or, maybe, a telco. I think that reaching out to an unfamiliar part of the market is probably one of IBM/Lotus’ primary challenges at the moment.

The other, which is faced by all sellers of social/collaboration software or services, is to get across the point of the stuff in the first place. This is probably an even bigger challenge, although we are all helped (?) by the fact that many people participate in their private lives. The question mark is there because a lot of private social networking is rather different to what you’d expect to see in the office.

A rather strange actor delivered an opening address. His name is Dan Aykroyd and, for someone who knows nothing about Beldar Conehead, his grand entrance was somewhat less than grand. The (largely US) audience thought it was a hoot. For me, he got more interesting when he narrated the tale of a very famous actor who thought that he should question the minutiae of the filming process. He challenged the director, the cameraman, the dolly operator – you name it, he whinged about it. What should have been done in one or two takes, stretched out, costing everyone time and the studio a fortune. He wasn’t popular. He didn’t even bother to learn anything about the production crew. (They might have filmed some of the greatest movies ever made for all he knew.)

Morale was sagging and Aykroyd decided (for the only time in his life) to deliver a homily to the actor, in private. He explained that all these people were interested in only one thing; to make the actors look good. That’s what their craft was all about. So, in terms of importance, in a production sense, the actors were almost the least important. Aykroyd’s punchline related to the fact that collaboration was way more effective than confrontation.

Later, Bob Picciano, Lotus’ newish boss expanded on the theme by relating it to the way many forward-thinking companies are now being run. Employees used to be just cogs in the machine. Decisions were made at the top and executed by employees, no matter how self-evidently daft. To question authority was to put your job in peril. Now, more and more companies realise that the intellectual capital of the employees (my words, by the way, not his) is what needs to be supported, so the tables are turning. The bosses and the infrastructure exist to support the employees. The hierarchical pyramid is being stood on its head.

This is where the social stuff provides leverage. And it can apply beyond the organisation, even more important to the smaller business which quite often collaborates with outside organisations to achieve its objectives. If people with common cause can find each other and share information then they can accelerate their work. Instant messaging and presence can enable contact and eliminate wasted effort. Blogging is a kind of ‘narrating your work’ so that people can pick up on what others have worked on without disrupting them. Wikis are good for team collaboration. And so on. I’m sure you’ve heard justifications for all the elements before.

One of the nice things about an approach like Lotus/IBM’s is that secure communities can be created which can be internal or include external participants such as suppliers. And everything that takes place is work-focused. The company has another system in the laboratory, called Beehive, which adds a personal dimension to the proceedings. It strengthens the bonds between people who have probably already discovered each other through the more formal system. We know from real world social networks such as Twitter or Facebook that personal bonds strengthen more quickly and defy time-zone and geographic barriers.

I’m not saying that IBM/Lotus is the only game in town, but if it can reach the SMB market effectively, it has a lot going for it, not least the sense of security that comes from knowing that it would be hosting your services.

Of course, you have to be the sort of organisation that sees employees as your source of power, rather than the bosses…

Last week, I researched all manner of stuff, some of which I expected to land up in this blog post. Then, on Friday evening, disaster! My main computer failed. Totally and utterly. Could this happen to you or your staff? Would they be as snookered as I was?

“What about backups?”, I hear you ask. Well, I had, very fortunately, treated myself to one of those 500 gigabyte external drives about a month ago. A Maxtor, in case you’re wondering. I’d had good experiences on another machine with a Maxtor OneTouch external drive. Prior to that, I’d been copying important stuff to assorted thumb drives, SD cards and a Seagate pocket USB drive (a 5gb external drive which is no longer available) as and when I got the urge.

As soon as I got the new drive, I created a mirror image of everything on the hard drive. Then I backed up all the files normally. The first would enable me to encode a new drive exactly as if it were the original. The latter enables me to get at all the files through their file names in case I accidentally deleted something or needed to access them from another machine. Each Sunday evening, the computer automatically copied all the files that had changed in the previous week, so I never had more than a week’s work to recover.

I should mention that quite a lot of my work is stored elsewhere – an Exchange server looks after mail, calendaring and suchlike and delivers it to my BlackBerry while a Sharepoint server gets work-in-progress that I need to share with colleagues. This week I did a lot of travelling on the underground, which meant that I had printed some of my work-in-progress so I could work on the train. (Very unusual, but very fortunate as it turned out.)

It wasn’t until the crash that I realised just how utterly inadequate a weekly incremental backup is. Even a daily one is suspect. I was with a pal earlier in the week who told me he backs up his work automatically every hour and, if he’s going out of the house, he makes an extra backup of his current work to a thumb drive and sticks it in his pocket.

His approach struck me as excessive and slightly obsessive. Not any more.

Here’s an example of how I was caught: I needed to check in last night for a flight to America today. I’d already printed the itinerary, complete with booking reference. Unfortunately, this bore no resemblance to the airline booking reference. I was rejected. Then I realised that, to get to the real reference, I had to click on a yard long URL which took me to the booking system. The date of the booking was 27 November. I’d archived my email up to December 1st which meant it was no longer on the Exchange server; it was inside the crashed machine and somewhere inside the backup drive. But I was using an older version of Outlook on my spare machine and didn’t want to start messing around with possibly incompatible software.

I ended up typing the very long URL. Something that should have taken seconds eventually took over an hour (the airline system had its own problems which meant it didn’t recognise me when I tried to ‘early check in’ but it did recognise me when I asked to ‘retrieve booking’, from whence I went to ‘early check in’.)

That example is trivial, of course, but I hadn’t appreciated that clicking the ‘Yes’ button on “would you like to archive now?” would land me with such a lot of unbacked up data. In future, I’ll hit ‘backup’ whenever I do any kind of maintenance operation.

Hopefully, by now, you have a curl on your lip as you sneer at my predicament. But, just in case you don’t, I thought I’d share the tale. It could have been a heck of a lot worse.

How much work can you afford to lose? How much time can you spend recovering from a crash?

Last Friday Microsoft allowed all and sundry access to the beta version of its next operating system, Windows 7. I’m not suggesting you rush online to download it although you might get a pleasant surprise. Everyone I’ve spoken to, including those who have been using the private beta version which preceded it, has good things to say.

What a contrast to Vista, which attracted a fair amount of opprobrium in both its beta and release versions.

I figured that Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, would be the best person from whom to get a top level view. He dedicated 90 seconds to Windows 7 at last week’s CES show in Las Vegas. If you want to hear his words, fire up this video and advance to 21m 57s (just in time to hear him tell how “excited” he is. Is this the most overused, and insincere, word in US presentations, I wonder?)

Anyway, to save you the bother, here are the key attributes that he felt worth mentioning: improved simplicity, reliability and speed; do everyday tasks faster and easier; boot more quickly; longer battery life; fewer alerts; better entertainment and ability to work with other entertainment devices; and, user interface improvements like touch.

You can watch an abbreviated Ballmer and a demo by Charlotte Jones here. And you can watch a webcast demo (on a netbook) by a pre-beta user (last November) here. The first is slick, the second is real. Both will give you a sense of what makes Windows 7 different to what’s gone before.

Anything which helps you start work sooner after switch on and accelerates your work gets my vote. With lower power consumption and less demand on resources, it seems to reverse the trend towards ever greater software bloat and ever higher spec’ machines. Seems to me that Windows 7 has a slight tinge of green about it. Probably as a by-product of recognising that we like to work on ever smaller devices.

I can’t help noticing that the Windows mobile operating system (the one used in some smartphones) is creeping up towards the number 7 as well. I think it’s at 6.1 at the moment. I’m guessing that, with Ballmer’s talk (before the Windows 7 bit) of convergence between devices (phones, PCs, TVs and the cloud), the two operating systems will converge on the same number and feel similar. It would make sense. And going back to simple numbering would move the company away from Vista, which was a bit of a psychological dead end. Even though it now works pretty well.

As I said at the beginning, you’d probably prefer to wait for an official release which is, in theory, due next year. Having said that, I’m hearing very good things about the beta. If you’re on XP and you’re happy, stay there. If you really need Vista, then get it because you’ll find that migrating to Windows 7 later is very straightforward. Moving from XP to either Vista or Windows 7 is very similar, the Microsoft installer will provide semi-automated help. The alternative is to do a clean install, but this means that you need to take responsibility for backing up all your existing data and applications, including some stuff in hidden directories. Unless you have a techie to hand, you really don’t want to do this.

This is the first time I can remember looking forward to a new Windows release instead of dreading it. And anyone who knows me will realise that this is close to a miracle.

I visited two small businesses last week and each had a tale of woe. The first told me that his bank had whacked an additional four percent on top of his base-rate-tracking overdraft facility. He argued, lost, and moved his business elsewhere.Another had been promised funding on the grounds that her business was seen as likely to ride out the storm. This was two months ago. She went back to take up the offer to be told that “circumstances had changed.” In short, the bank had got the willies.

Now these two can’t be alone. Both have fundamentally decent businesses. And they’ve both ridden out previous recessions successfully. But if they want to do anything to improve their performance, they’re going to have to dig deep into their personal resources. Unless they can find another source of finance.

Looking around, who’s sitting on shedloads of cash? Successful IT vendors, that’s who. And if you want to improve your business efficiency and top line stuff, what might you invest in? Software and hardware perhaps? Chosen carefully, a system that improves your sales and marketing efforts, for example, could help you find those elusive customers and buck the current economic trends.

Rather a convenient little picture is emerging. No-one knows the potential of IT nor, in the case of hardware, does anyone know residual values better than IT vendors. And, if customers are having a job securing finance, the vendors could be looking at a chilly few months or years. Doesn’t it make sense for them to use their money stashes to lubricate the purchasing wheels of potential customers? It helps them and the customers and the rates are likely to be low because they are better able than bankers and financiers to assess the downside.

“Ah”, I hear you say, “but they’ll only lend it to people who are buying their products.” Turns out that this isn’t entirely true. Some vendors have financial arms – Microsoft and Hewlett Packard spring to mind – and they are willing to finance projects – a mix of hardware, software and services. And it doesn’t all have to come from them. Although you’d be mad not to enlist approved partners to maximise your chance of securing a loan.

Taking the Microsoft example, it does expect to supply at least part of the solution. It uses third parties to determine credit-worthiness and to facilitate the loans. It offers terms between 24 and 60 months, based on the customer’s budget and fixed interest rates. Loans can start as low as £1,000. And you can get your Microsoft authorised supplier to start the ball rolling. Or start at the Microsoft finance site.

If nothing else, such an arrangement helps you preserve cash and credit lines (assuming you have any left) for other purposes.

Ran into a company recently which has done a rather nice ‘unified communications’ suite and you can have it for free. What’s the catch? It displays adverts to the users. The examples on the website look pretty discreet, so you might find it acceptable.

Alternatively, you can buy the software or pay a per user annual fee and avoid the advertisements altogether. The company’s name is Unison. Yep, just like the trade union.

I tried the software out today, with a colleague. And it looked very good indeed. Very elegant, very smooth and responsive. It appeared very similar to Microsoft Outlook but it adds instant messaging, presence and telephony to the standard elements of email, calendar and directory. It seems not to have an equivalent of Microsoft ‘tasks’. (Which I don’t use, so didn’t realise it was missing until I checked.)

Unusually these days, the software is provided not ‘as a service’ (coming next year, apparently) but as something you install on your local computers. If you’re on the ad-supported version, you install an ad-server and the unified communications server. Then each user has their own desktop application with all the functions on tap. Instant messages are over on the right, with a status light to show which users are online or missing. At the bottom left is a ‘calls’ tab which shows you a history of calls and provides facilities like dial, record, forward, park and so on.

I tried reaching out to some of the staff that were supposed to be present, according to their IM status. It was clear that they weren’t there when I got weird messages back. Try this for size:

Me: 15/12/2008 09:18:42:
Hi Deepak. I’m in the demo’ – can’t see any ads. Does that mean the demo is the paid version?

Deepak Chandra: 15/12/2008 09:18:42:
Are you saying no just to be negative?

You can see from the timings that that was an autoresponse. And one not designed to engender goodwill.

When my colleague got her account, we had a lot of sensible conversations about the product which we fundamentally liked. Unfortunately, we couldn’t make phone calls, even internal ones, which was a shame. I think it was something to do with the test server being in America. Unfortunately I couldn’t reach the Americans: voicemail until after 9:40am their time. So I just have to speculate. Judging from the quality of the software generally, I’d guess that it would work fine on a proper installation.

Looking at the small print for the sponsored version, I got the impression that the company, or maybe the ad-server, could grab whatever information it liked from your emails, IMs, phone calls and suchlike in order to deliver the most relevant ads to you. Here’s the phrase that had me a bit worried:

“You hereby irrevocably and unconditionally grant Unison a nonexclusive, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free license to access, edit, modify, adapt, translate, exhibit, publish, transmit, participate in the transfer of, reproduce, create derivative works from, distribute, display, and otherwise use Licensee Content as necessary to provide Software and Advertising Content to you and/or your end users pursuant to this Agreement under a Sponsor-Supported License.”

It says that this is subject to the conditions in its Privacy Statement, which can be revised at any time. This is the relevant section:

“Unison does not, however, collect or store any personally identifiable information in connection with our sponsor-supported licenses. Unison provides our sponsors only with aggregated data that does not identify specific companies or individuals in any way. Ads are served through Unison based only on abstractions of original content (such as isolated keywords). If these abstractions were somehow intercepted, it would not be possible to reconstruct the original content of emails and other messages. Unison does not own or store a copy of your original content.”

If you’re getting something for ‘nothing’, it clearly pays to read the small print before committing yourself.

The company has no plans to extend the advertising beyond the users of the system. Emails go out unsullied and it doesn’t intend to add advertisements to telephone calls or IMs. It needs to keep the goodwill of its customers, although if the ‘free’ version doesn’t deliver revenues, will Unison shrug its shoulders or try and find ways to up the revenue? No-one knows.

If you have a tame techie on the premises you have little to lose by trying this system out. The company reckons it takes half an hour to get the server up and running. If you like what you see, you have the chance not only to make the user’s communications faster and easier, you can also use the server as a replacement for your PBX switchboard system. You might have to fork out a bit for adapters for your conventional system though.

It’s refreshing to see someone come into the market without a need to protect its historical business (software or telephony). It means they don’t have to compromise. It is using the familiarity of the Outlook interface and a lower cost to entice people to take a look. The risk of looking is low. One to keep on the shortlist if you’re planning to change.

Large organisations sport clever and expensive information management systems. They enable staff to lay their hands on the right documents and other information in a jiffy and work on it collaboratively with other people, both inside and outside the organisation.

Setting up a similar operation in a smaller business lies somewhere between difficult and impossible, depending largely on the depth of your pockets and the quality of the advice you receive from your information system suppliers.

The trouble with information management is that, conceptually, it has little to do with information technology. The first deals with the relationships, linking and access to the elements of information – people, companies, documents and so on – while the other concerns itself more with the storage and processing of data. Okay, there’s a bit of an overlap, but IT and IM are essentially two different disciplines. When people moan about their IT systems, quite often it’s their information management, or lack of it, that they should be complaining about. Information is inherently messy and most computer systems are not very keen on messiness.

Right now, a company called OneIS (pronounced “one eye ess” not “one is”) is trialling its software-as-a-service (SaaS) information management system with small business early adopters. If you fancy having a go, you’ll be able to apply using a form on its website. If you’d prefer to wait for the real thing and avoid the inevitable pre-release wrinkles, then you’ll have to wait until early February. Probably.

The service is secure – it’s being run in a data centre with duplicate equipment, duplicate internet access and, eventually, it will be replicated in another data centre as well. Ben Summers, the technical brains behind the service has been building this kind of resilient system for many years. Jennifer Smith, one of his partners, is an information professional by background and, between them, they tried to hammer out an elegant and usable system.

Examples of information stored are people, organisations, projects, files, equipment, books, contact notes, intranet pages, websites, projects and news items. They all represent the sort of information that you want to get hold of at the drop of a hat. And, quite often, without much idea of where they might be. Everything is indexed so a search will find what you’re after as long as you have something of a clue. And, very importantly, all related things are linked. Thus, you could find a company and see who works there, find a person and see who they work for, find out all sorts of extra information about the person such as events attended, files contributed to, organisations worked with and your own notes about that person.

All the links are ‘hot’ so you can reach stuff by browsing in context. A click on an object – an email address or a file name, for example – will have you in your email client or word processor in a flash. The same goes for pdf, Office and OpenOffice documents. You can also navigate to information by following a classical hierarchy or taxonomy of information. You know the sort of thing: Business > Marketing > Website > Blog and, as you go along, the list of ‘hits’ at the foot of the page shrinks as the criteria narrow.

You will be able to buy the OneIS service in a fully customisable configuration or, if you would prefer something pre-configured then you will be able to sign up for OneNow. Once under way with it (prices will start at zero) you can both move up the scale in terms of storage and number of users and migrate to the fully configurable OneIS system from the off-the-shelf version. The company is in the process of signing up IM/IT professionals to its ONEmarketplace. Just as OneIS is helping its early adopters now, so these people will help new users in the future, especially if they’re going for the full blown version.

The people behind it have put a lot of thought into the usability of their system. For example, if it finds lots of hits in a search, it displays them as a long page rather than forcing people to step through a succession of short pages. This is great for ordered lists when you can scroll straight to a name or date of interest. They also consciously decided against ‘folksonomies’ in which users can tag information with their own key words. These tend to work well in large communities. But, in the context of a small business, the same vocabulary is likely to be used, so they’ve opted for a more traditional hierarchical taxonomy. (And, on OneIS, you can even import your own.)

If you’re an Outlook user, not only will it hoover up your contacts, it will keep both information sets in synch’. Although it does this, it is not otherwise tied to Microsoft. The service can be accessed through a variety of browsers and, therefore, on different operating systems. It does have a special desktop element for Mac and PC users if they want to accelerate file uploads and downloads, but this is optional.

Having looked at a variety of information management systems over many years, I must say that I do like the ‘feel’ of this one. It’s a professional system aimed at small business users. It saves you the expense, complexity and environmental harm of having to run your own servers and it provides easy information access to staff and business partners (if you want this) wherever they are.

There’s more, of course, but if you’re interested I suggest you get in touch with OneIS directly.

A few months ago our beloved leader did a podcast with Alastair Mitchell of collaboration software company, Huddle. As in “let’s get in a huddle.” As you will learn from the podcast, getting distant team members into a physical huddle to hammer out issues was quite an expensive and time consuming process.

The answer was to replace travel with collaboration software and, while they were at it, to make participation in projects as easy as possible. And you don’t have to belong to just one team or ‘birds of a feather’ group. Anyone can belong to any number of groupings, whether internal to the company, external or personal. Or any mix thereof. One log-in gives access to the lot.

These collaboration areas are called workspaces. The program is documented and presented in a number of languages – facilitating collaboration (but not automatic translation) among geographically disparate groups.

Once in a workspace participants can, for example, see what each other are up to, have conversations, share files (collaborative editing involves a check in/check out system to prevent clashes), share screens and share on-screen whiteboards.

It’s easy to get started. One workspace is free. But, as with most online business services, you need to start paying according to the number of workspaces you have and the amount of memory you’re using up. The one thing that you don’t have to worry about too much (except in their use of resources) is the number of users in a workspace. Prices start at £10 per month.

In a nice touch, the company will provide charities with up to ten workspaces, encrypted access and 10Gb of storage absolutely free.

You don’t need an IT department, the service is securely hosted for you. Although if you have one, they’ll be interested to know that they can program access to Huddle through an application programming interface (API). If you are really worried about letting data out of your company Huddle can allow you to host it yourself while still running all the collaboration elements on your behalf.

Although it serves all sizes of organisation, the company provides an enterprise class service and counts some large customers among its clientele. Organisations like Boots and Abeerdeen City Council, which said of the service, “It is certainly refreshing to use a product that doesn’t cause more problems than what one started with.” I won’t even hazard a guess at what that might have been.

The service brings all the usual benefits of social software, not least an absence (or significant reduction) of email. If you want, you can be notified of changes by email or RSS newsfeed. Alternatively you can just log in to your home page through a web browser and see what needs attention.

At the end of October the company made its service available through the LinkedIn networking service. Four more similar arrangements will be announced in the next quarter. December will see a new and improved user interface. And voice conferencing will be arriving soon, through a white label arrangement with a major service provider.

Huddle certainly has the ring of a potential success. Large enterprises need to feel that their suppliers will be around in twelve months time. With the clients it has and a new round of finance in the offing, the signs for Huddle appear to be good.

Update 25 Nov. Three days after my last note, MindJet sent a workaround for my problem. It was caused by a clash with my antivirus system. I am using AVG. Hopefully, you won’t have encountered the problem.

[ Update 18 Nov. You will see a note at the end of this post concerning malfunctioning of the release version of the software. The software has been modified but I still cannot edit Office documents within it on either of my machines (XP and Vista). I would suggest that you stick to the free trial and don't part with your cash until the software works to your satisfaction. If your experience is satisfactory - ie you can edit Office documents within MindManager, then please let us know through comments to this blog post. ]

This is going to be a tricky post because I have strong, and possibly irrational, views about the topic. Feel free to comment if you want to throw additional light on the subject.

First of all, the subject is Mindjet’s new release of MindManager. I’ve delayed this blog by a few hours in order to respect an embargo. The product is being launched today(Tuesday). It gives the traditional ‘mind-mapping’ metaphor a bit of a shake up and, I believe, will give people a reason to consider using it.

Before I explain, you need to know where I’m coming from. I started mind-mapping in 1975. Tony Buzan wrote a BBC book called ‘Use Your Head‘. For me, it was a life-changer. It introduced mind-mapping and a lot of other insightful stuff about the way we think, learn and communicate.

Here’s an example mind map drawn by Paul Foreman, based on Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats:

Six Thinking Hats

(If you’re interested in Six Thinking Hats, take a look at Paul’s information sheet on the subject.)

I used mind-mapping diligently first as a course developer, then as a project manager for International Computers Ltd (ICL). When the PC came along, I even wrote a program called BrainStorm, which attempted to mimic paper-based mind-mapping but in a way that overcame what I saw as its weaknesses: its inability to scale, its rigidity (it was hard to rearrange a paper map) and its lack of self-awareness (I wanted to be told if it already ‘knew’ something).

As you can imagine when outliners and visual mind-mapping programs came along and started grabbing all the publicity, I was mightily peeved. But, 25 years since its launch, people still buy BrainStorm. I’ve been so busy with other things recently that I am in the final throes of handing the business over to an American company.

I still have some of the same issues with my erstwhile competitors, but perhaps I don’t feel them so keenly. Anyway, I thought this backdrop would help you interpret my remarks on MindManager 8.

Yes, it’s a visual mind-mapping tool. And, as such, it helps you lay out your thoughts, manipulate them and tack on new information, in context, as you discover it. And I know many people who are content to use it at that level and be done with it.

But I think that some of the new changes will increase the program’s appeal to everyone. MindManager now gives you a single place to hang out. If you want to turn a map into a bit of writing or, indeed, vice versa you can run Word right there inside the MindManager environment. You can do the same with Excel and PowerPoint. You can drag and drop stuff between the applications.

At a stroke the program becomes more acceptable to the vast majority of PC users. Web pages and PDFs can similarly be rendered within the MindManager environment. This is good stuff. It saves you rushing hither and thither as you switch back and forth between thinking and doing. Although not too quickly or you won’t get much done.

Two other things are worthy of note because, once again, they help the MindManager user engage with the outside world without leaving the program itself. One is the ability to quiz databases and pull the results right into the mind-map. The other is a collection of search capabilities which look inside mind-maps and their associated documents, integration with Google or Microsoft desktop search and the ability to hoover up the results of online searches from companies like Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and others.

Finally, you can share your maps with others even if they don’t have MindManager themselves. You can publish to Adobe PDF files, PowerPoint, Word, web pages and Flash, which you can embed in your own web pages.

Mind maps are easy to understand and these options represent a great opportunity to spread the word. To Mindjet’s advantage, if people like what they see.

This has not been a comprehensive look at the program – I concentrated on the new stuff and, even then, deliberately left out the task management aspects – but it does show that this is a powerful program that knows its place in the world. And, for some users at least, I suspect it will be at the centre of theirs.

<em>Update 14 Nov: At the time of writing, I used an internal build of the software. The release build does not allow interaction with embedded Office documents on my Vista and XP test machines. MindJet has replicated the problem and hopes to get it fixed by Monday. But I’d get the free trial rather than splash out for the time being.

Microsoft has to steer a very careful course into the future. From its own point of view, it needs to continue to deliver value to customers while remaining profitable. From the customers’ point of view it needs to keep existing systems going and grow into new ones without unnecessary disruption.

As you know, Microsoft has enormous power given its installed base and the ecosystem of developers and resellers that surrounds it. It just needs to transition them into a new kind of future from which they can all benefit.

It has ideas, of course. Most notably, at the moment, the idea of software plus services (generally referred to as S+S). This is predicated on the fact that real people in real life actually like the richness of Microsoft applications and they need to be able to work while disconnected from the internet but take advantage of web-based services when they’re online.

Naturally enough, the company was curious to know what customer reactions to this are likely to be, so it commissioned some research from technology market research specialists, Vanson Bourne. This was global in nature and focused on 1300 companies of up to fifty employees.

Assuming that the opening paragraph of Microsoft’s press release contains the most interesting information, I shall reproduce the core of it here:

The research highlighted that many small businesses struggle to compete with big businesses and are unsure of how to get access to higher-quality IT services that could help them. Government support is often widely used and well-received, but in some cases, it is thought to be too limited. Small businesses face numerous challenges with IT but are also seeing the benefits that mobile working and social networking can bring.

As a follow up to the report, a dozen or so interested journalists debated its content with representatives from Microsoft, the Institute of Directors, Rackspace – a hosting company and one of its clients. Freeform Dynamics’ Dale Vile was asked to chair what turned out to be a very interesting session.

The main benefits identified were that high fixed IT costs could be converted to variable ones; the pain of IT (archiving, data retention, security) could be exported elsewhere; and full and professional participation in the supply chain would be made possible through access to professional applications for a per-user per-month fee.

Great sales lines for Microsoft to consider. But a number of barriers stand in the way, not least the fact that the Microsoft ecosystem as a whole is not yet geared up to provide such services to the smaller customer.

You can, of course, find companies prepared to host aspects of your business. Our own small business uses a mix of local applications, web services and hosted services (Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint, for example). But this mix and match approach only works if you know what you’re doing IT-wise.

What’s needed for this new kind of computing to go mainstream is:

a) acceptance that hosted services make sense
b) some trustworthy providers
c) a range of appropriate applications
d) a ‘one stop shop’ for your computing needs

We’re already well advanced with a). Web-based email is the classic. With b), we are going to see many big-name providers emerge from the woodwork, including Microsoft itself. It will bring in its wake some of c) and its developers will also join the party in due course. It really is early days for these people. They were introduced to ‘Azure’, a development platform for applications to run over the internet, just a few days ago.

The last item, d), depends on your own reseller coming on board. (Or you finding a new one.) On the one hand, they will need to be rewarded for shifting from box sales to service sales. On the other, they will need to be good enough to understand your business and its IT needs and present you with a sensible mix of solutions, without disrupting your business. If they don’t talk your language already, you might ask yourself why you persist with them.

Don’t let anyone try to persuade you that we’re in the middle of a revolution. We’re not. It’s an evolution and, judging from the issues raised in our debate, the transition will happen over several years. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore it. Other hosted applications like SalesForce.com will emerge and provide you with genuine leverage. Keep your eyes peeled for such opportunities, but try not to get caught up in the hype.

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.

I spent a very enjoyable day at Small Business 2.0 this weekend. The conference set out to give small businesses plenty of practical information on how to do more with the web.

Will Wynne of ArenaFlowers.com

The day was split into two tracks and there were really two key themes: how to sell effectively online, and; how to use the more social elements of the web to benefit your business.

I’m always saying this, but what’s become known as Web 2.0 is so much more suited to small businesses than it is to large corporations.

The social web is the web with human scale. And SMEs are businesses with human scale. The two ought to work very well together.

Except for one thing. Time.

For any small business owner, the danger of twitter, Facebook, blogging or podcasting becoming a huge time sink with indeterminate results is a very real one.

As one of the event hosts Dan Wilson puts it wittily:

You don’t need to spend a long time on social media – just five hours a day should keep your Facebook presence up-to-date with no problem.

Nevertheless, as Dan pointed out in his own presentation there are quick wins for SMEs online, but you need to plan what you’re going to do, build it into the time you devote to marketing and measure it.

If you take this approach, all of a sudden, blogging, twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, for example, could easily become great ways to engage with existing customers, find new ones, extend your network and even win new business.

Talking of winning new business, one of the highlights of the day for me was hearing Will Wynne (how could he fail with a name like that!) talk about search engine optimisation (SEO).

Savvy use of the web has helped this former VC and member of Ebay’s UK team build a very successful online flower business called ArenaFlowers.com which is competing nimbly and effectively against the likes of InterFlora.

I talked to Will afterwards and hope to have him on SmallBizPod’s podcast sometime soon for a more in depth discussion.

Other highlights included meeting up with some SmallBizPod listeners including Nick Jennings and Andrew Turner who ventured out of his idyllic Italian lair, as well as enjoying the positive vibes and enthusiasm that conference co-host Emma Jones of homeworking hub Enterprise Nation always brings to the party.

Finally, as promised to those who attended my own session on how small businesses can benefit from podcasting, I’ll post here shortly a screencast and links to various resources which I hope you find useful.

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.

Be warned. This blog post is being done by voice. I’m using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10. According to the blurb, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 is faster and more accurate than ever.

Well, the words certainly appear quicker. About 50% quicker. It’s also more accurate. A great thing if you can’t spell is that it spells words correctly. It also needs barely any training.

The new version allows you to format text as well as deleting and copying it.

You can use Dragon with just about any program but it does work rather well with Word and Firefox for example. In Firefox you can jump to a hyperlink by just saying part of its name. You can also control Windows itself and other programs with voice commands.

I have to say that, so far, this has been slower than typing but then I am a touch typist. I have also had to make corrections, albeit verbally. For example, ‘but then’ came out as ‘Batman’. It also offered irritating spaces after apostrophes. (I found out later that single quote commands are better.)

Okay, I give up. I resorted to using the keyboard to remove those pesky spaces. Actually I’m still speaking but I’m about to revert to typing.

It’s a strange thing but, even though I said I was going to type, I carried on talking. DNS really is pretty good until you want to do something weird.

For straightforward text entry, it makes few mistakes. And, when it does, you just say the bit it got wrong – my most recent one was ‘typing’, it kept putting it in as ‘type in’. But all I had to say was “select type in” and it threw up a few alternatives. Number one was ‘typing, so I just said “choose one” and the correction was made.

Of course, I had to be near enough to the screen to see when things were going wrong. But, equally, I could have been in a comfortable chair on the other side of the room, assuming I had a wireless headset. I could have tackled any mistakes later.

Some people don’t like typing, some have disabilities which prevent them using their fingers. Either way, Dragon Naturally Speaking, gives them a way of achieving something that was previously difficult or impossible. I spoke to a couple of people recently, one of whom works with Thalidomide victims, the other with people who have spinal injuries. Both reported how previously frustrated individuals had found DNS a great way of participating more fully in life.

This isn’t the prime use of this technology, but it is interesting to see that it can be liberating for people of all abilities. Except, maybe, touch typists.

Retail prices start at £89.99.

It’s always good when you stumble across free software that does a ‘good enough’ job. Of course, the minute you stick your hand in your pocket, the game changes. You suddenly expect 24×7 support and service level agreements.

Last week at Office 2.0, I met some folk from Yuuguu. It’s an early-stage UK-based company which has come out with a free service which enables you to see when someone’s around, to text-chat with them and to share your computer screen with them. Or you can give them control over your keyboard, mouse and screen. I tell you, watching someone else plunder your files and folders at will can be somewhat unnerving.

A piece of software has to be installed on any computer that is going to participate in the service. The free version allows up to 30 concurrent users. (It says here.) I guess that’s so you can do a presentation. That many people would make for a weird conversation.

The service can incorporate Skype telephony for a per-minute charge. Or you can make your own separate call. It makes real-time collaboration easy and it currently runs on Macs, PCs and three versions of Linux. I tried it between two PCs. And it worked quite well. I have seen other, better, systems but they weren’t free.

The Yuuguu name worries me a little because it doesn’t sound very businesslike, even though it does mean ‘fusion’ in Japanese. But at least it is businesslike in execution. It has recognised that audit trails are important and it stores all activity, including the content of the instant messaging sessions. It does not, however store the content of the screens being shared nor, I’m pretty sure, would it store telephone conversations. Which is pretty much how you’d want it.

Yuuguu plans to introduce advertising into its free edition and will be offering professional and enterprise editions with advanced features and no advertising.

The desktop element takes just a few minutes to install and get running. And it’s a cheap (ie free, apart from your time) way to collaborate or present through screen sharing and IM.

I’d say it has to be worth a try. You have little to lose and much to gain from this kind of service.

Many web startups these days are desperately seeking a business model, hoping their drill bits strike oil before they run out of venture capital money. It turns out Twitter, the micro-blogging service, isn’t one of them.

Thanks to an often overlooked and currently disabled real time search tool called ‘track‘, Twitter has almost accidentally found itself sitting on a veritable internet oil field.

So what’s it doing with its untapped riches? Well it’s locking down supplies, buying up surrounding land and biding its time with a long, but fragile straw.

Now before you ask, let me explain two things:

- firstly, Twitter’s situation is important for all businesses large or small because it is shaping a ‘real time’ web that is changing the way we do business and communicate;

- secondly, yes, I admit that much of what I’m about to say is inspired, stolen or bowdlerised from the terrific conversations in and around Steve Gillmor’s Gillmor Gang and Newsgang podcasts.

So why is track so powerful?  Well, mostly because it allows you to search events as they happen on Twitter in real time, not after the event. As Steve said on Techcrunch IT recently:

Search produces analysis after the fact, while track produces interactions that change the events themselves.

Anyone familiar with the way news feeds like Reuters are used in business and the way trading in stocks, shares and commodities is conducted will instantly understand the commercial implications of this.

‘Now’ is competitive edge. Two minutes later is money down the pan.

The screen above could easily be tracking twitter conversations about a product launch in real time.  It might be measuring intensity based on frequency, but also negative/positive reactions based on keywords.  A click on any of the plots on the graph and you could be taking part in a conversation as it happens.

The potential for more natural conversations with and between small groupings or large swarms of customers across the web is clear.  Focus groups become the stream of conversation – forming and reforming.

And track provides a real time discovery of these conversations on Twitter – a kind of Google as it happens.

You could be tracking your company, your competitors, your product launch, or the progress of flooding as a river bursts its banks a few miles from your shop.

It’s the immediacy of track and XMPP (an instant messaging/streaming technology) which gives Twitter its mojo and why the real time web will mark another massive social, and of course business, shift on the internet.

Much of Web 2.0 has adopted the Cluetrain conversation meme, but truth be told the conversation has been like a stuttering, delayed early satellite link-up. Twitter (with track and XMPP) and its successors bring a more human flow. No more hanging on the telephone waiting for a reply, as Debbie Harry and Aron Michalski might put it.

But there’s a problem. Twitter has closed down, both track and XMPP.  Some would say these were the elements that made the service so unreliable in the first place – something its more open competitor Identi.ca may also be discovering as it reaches greater scale.

Just as likely is that Twitter is protecting its business assets from competitors it thought might end up drinking its milkshake through the straws of its own APIs.

This may be a smart business decision in the short term, so long as Twitter is building a robust XMPP/track infrastructure, quietly behind the scenes.

If it’s not, then the poster child of micro-blogging could rapidly become a prospector showing the way, but never reaping the rewards of its discoveries.

Yet another security breach fo the Home Secretary to wrestle with. This time PA Consulting managed to lose a memory stick containing some rather sensitive information. According to the BBC, “The memory stick contained un-encrypted details about 10,000 prolific offenders as well as names, dates of births and some release date of all 84,000 prisoners in England and Wales – and 33,000 records from the police national computer.”

It’s quite unbelievable that the information was not encrypted before placing it on the stick. Or that the stick didn’t have some built-in encryption itself.

“It can’t be rocket science,” thought I. And, in about two minutes, I’d Googled an answer. It’s possible to encrypt these drives easily and at zero cost, apart from some time, using an open source program from TrueCrypt.

So, for anyone uneasy about securing the information that leaves their organisation on memory sticks, here’s how to protect yours. If it looks too techie, give this blog and your sticks to a techie and he or she will sort you out. A special folder will be created on the stick which, when plugged into a computer, acts exactly like a disk drive. Except, of course, everything in it is encrypted.

Preparing an encrypted drive on your memory stick

1 ) Visit TrueCrypt http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads.php and download the version for your computer type. The instructions that follow are biased towards a Windows PC. (Vista in my case.)

2 ) Run the downloaded program, accept the licence terms and select the ‘Extract’ option. This puts all the TRUECRYPT files into a folder.

3 ) Empty the memory stick of its contents – I copied mine to a folder on my computer and then deleted them.

4 ) Copy across TrueCrypt.exe, truecrypt.sys and TrueCrypt Format.exe from the TrueCrypt folder to your memory stick. They may come in handy when you go to another computer.

5 ) Run TrueCrypt.exe from your computer or from your stick and click on Create volume then, in the dialogue that appears, choose the ‘Create a file container’ option. Click Next.

6 ) In the Volume Type dialogue that appears, choose ‘Standard TrueCrypt volume. Click Next.

7 ) Type the drive letter of your thumb drive followed by : then the name you want to give the folder. I chose f:myfolder. ‘Never save history’ is already checked, so I left it alone. Click Next.

8 ) You’ll be asked to choose your encryption options. Unless you have mugged up on the subject, you may as well accept the defaults. Click Next.

9 ) You’re shown how much space you have and are invited to provide a container size. I was using a 500MB card, so I settled for 400MB, in case I needed to keep some non-encrypted files on the thumb-drive as well. (Such as the TrueCrypt files that I copied just now.) Click Next.

10) Now it’s time to provide the password. Helpful suggestions are provided on screen. Hope you don’t mind if I keep mine a secret! I left ‘Use keyfiles’ and ‘Display password’ unchecked. Click Next.

11) Waggle your mouse over the next box for thirty seconds or so in order to generate an encryption key. Accept the defaults (unless you know what you’re doing) and click Format. Wait until a dialogue box appears to announce that it has finished – it will be a little while after the on screen counters stop counting.

12) A ‘Volume Created’ dialogue box appears. Click OK then click Exit in the Volume created dialogue.

That’s it. 12 steps that need to be taken only once to protect (part of) a thumb drive. Is this too much to ask of government employees and contractors?

Mounting the encrypted drive

Whenever you want to use the encrypted part of the drive, you need to run TrueCrypt. If it’s not on the target machine, run it from your memory stick.

The first thing you need to do is to assign the encrypted folder to a spare drive letter. TrueCrypt provides a list of spares – take your pick. Z is good, and unlikely to be claimed by the system for anything else.

Use ‘Select file…’ to locate your encrypted folder on the memory stick. Click Open.

Now Click Mount.

You will be asked for your password. Provide it and Click OK.

You will see that details appear against the appropriate drive letter. You can open it immediately by double clicking on it.

You will not be asked for your password again until you need to remount the drive.

Using the encrypted drive

Now just use it as a normal drive – you can open files and drag and drop them just as you would on any other drive.

When you’re done, choose the dismount option from TrueCrypt. You should then perform the ‘Eject’ operation if available (right-click the device in the ‘Computer’ or ‘My Computer’ list), or use the ‘Safely Remove Hardware’ function (built into Windows, accessible via the taskbar notification area). Otherwise you could lose some data.

If you have a power cut or the memory stick is removed any other way, the content of the encrypted folder always remains encrypted

A user guide is provided as part of the download. It will give you all sorts of additional clever tricks and advice. But what I’ve outlined here is safe. It works.

Perhaps someone should tip off PA Consulting and the Home Office about this blog …

Good news that Dell has claimed to be carbon neutral five months ahead of schedule. So why do I feel so uncomfortable about the announcement? Probably because I know that it is probably untrue, except in whatever limited sense Dell has chosen it to be so. But also because, for it to be true, it is bound to involve compromises.

Anyone making such a claim is just begging, like Aunt Sally, to be knocked down. And, as an ex-journalist, that is a strong instinct. On the other hand, for a company, any company, to come right out and say that it’s committed to an environmentally beneficial agenda has to be a good thing.

So let’s start by taking our hats off to Michael Dell for saying “we’re driving green into every aspect of our global business.” At least employees, partners and customers know the commitment comes from the top. But, to be honest, IBM and HP could have said exactly the same thing. Maybe they did. Both companies regularly report on their environmental achievements.

I don’t recall anyone actually claiming carbon neutrality though, so let’s look at the Dell claim. It says that its HQ is powered by 100 percent green energy. This is part of the 116 million green kWh that it buys in the US each year, which represents about one third of its domestic energy use. So it is putting money into the preservation of tropical forestland in Madagascar to make up the imbalance. Its neutrality is being bought with these offsets, so the ‘five months early’ achievement looks more like newsworthy financial scheduling than anything else.

Dell is also making additional investments in wind power in the USA, China and India, by the way.

From a customer perspective, the announcements show that Dell’s heart appears to be in the right place. What’s really important to customers, though, is “what’s in it for me?”

Well, if you care about the environment, you’ll be pleased to hear that Dell (along with Acer, HP, IBM and Vodafone) is a member of the Carbon Disclosure Project which demands that the vendors’ primary suppliers report their CO2 emissions each quarter.

If you care about saving money, then Dell can provide power-optimised desktop and server systems. It’s not always easy to know what to do when you have existing equipment, because it takes a long while to recover the cost of the replacement in terms of energy savings. And, of course, the new device comes with an embedded carbon cost, as does the device you’re getting rid of. Find a good home for the latter and you can feel better about the former. And, if you can’t find a good home, Dell will help. See its Pure Earth website for more information.

Other makers offer environmentally friendly computers. Other companies have slashed their environmental impact and bought offsets too. But none, to my knowledge, has dared to claim neutrality. It was a smart, albeit brave, move by Dell. But it seems to me that the company was restricting its claim to power neutrality in its U.S. operations and this is only one part of the whole environmental story.