What’s the Best Approach to Business Continuity?

Business continuity is critical to delivering world-class service to your customers, so it’s important to understand the variety of approaches available. Whether you ultimately decide to employ cloud services or a remote hot site data center, understanding the implications of your decisions may be more important than the actual technologies you deploy.

You can read more about this in my feature story in this month’s Baseline magazine here.

100k apps on Apple’s AppStore (and counting)

And that includes the more than 170 apps that produce rude noises, which just goes to show you that developers can write all sorts of, ahem, interesting code.

Have you driven a Ford lately?

The news this week that Ford is back in the black, and how they did so without becoming a ward of the US taxpayer, is impressive. Coincidentally, I took a look at two of the company’s latest cars to see what they are doing with installing technology there, and came away with mixed feelings. Yes, they are moving in the right direction, albeit clumsily. And while few people buy a car because of the installed computing features, they are becoming a bigger part of the usage equation as we spend more time commuting and working from our cars.

Ford has two very different computing programs underway, and sadly they are mutually exclusive by design. The latest effort is called Ford Work Solutions, and it is only available on its truck line. The system is based on having a touch screen Windows CE 6.5 inch display in the dash, running a wide variety of software programs including a suite of office apps (but not the real MS Office), LogMeIn, GPS, entertainment controls, and more. Yes, that LogMeIn. It comes with a wide variety of confusing options, including a Bluetooth keyboard, printer, and cellular broadband data modem for Internet connectivity. The ideal target buyer is a building contractor who needs to work from the job site, or a delivery service. You can create documents and print them out in the cab, do a remote control session back to your office to pick up some data, and surf the Web to answer customer queries. The touch screen is a bit clunky, because some of the controls are designed for fingers on the screen rather than on the keyboard, but by and large it seemed well thought out.

But I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I was going back to the early days of WebTV, and using technology that was already obsolete before its time found its way into many current hotel rooms. Part of the challenge that car makers have is that by the time a computer is installed in the vehicle, it is out of date. Granted, this is a computer that you don’t have to worry too much about — Ford claims it will withstand brutal environmental conditions — but it still is a Windows CE based device that is closer to my Uverse TV settop box or my mobile phone than the PC that I am using to write this essay.

The in-dash PC comes with a few handy things, though. It has SD card and USB ports right there on the dash so you can import files or connect to external data sources. You can synch up your phone’s contacts and do voice command dialing. It has the GPS display and your audio system controls so you don’t have to hunt around for them. And there is an optional tool tracking software where you can stick RFID tags on your tools and instantly do a census before you leave a job site and make sure you got everything back in the truck before you leave. There is also a vehicle tracking and scheduling software called Crew Chief that one Chicago pizza delivery company is using to match demand with supply, as the trucks have their own baking ovens that can finish the pies and get them piping hot to their customers. That seems to offer the most promise, if you can figure out the options.

Ford has done a mediocre job of getting the word out about Work Solutions. They haven’t any press loaners to try anywhere in the country — I had to find one locally that was being used by one of their corporate dealer trainers.The company Web site has some information, but it doesn’t satisfy anyone who has moderate tech knowledge, and indeed asks more questions than it answers. They could do better and appeal to more IT-minded potential buyers, rather than the big and brawny Joe SixPack contractors. (Actually, the contractor that my interior designer wife currently uses has a pretty sophisticated Web site that tracks his job progress and tasks, but that is story for another essay.) Each truck has to be specially ordered with the computer factory installed, so you can’t just walk in off the lot and drive one home. They aren’t all that expensive as computer options go — the monthly fee for the cellular modem is probably the biggest obstacle just because people don’t normally think their car needs an additional monthly payment for communications. And there are a confusing array of options and add-ons, which is why the dealers need training here. The biggest issue  is that they aren’t available in their sedans. I shouldn’t have to buy a pickup truck, or even their sexy Transit Connects (which you see all over Europe and are just being imported here) to get a measly WinCE PC.

Why not just spend your money on a laptop with a cellular modem and call it a day? You can get a “real” PC with a bigger screen and put whatever apps on it you desire, and still have the connectivity back to your office or Internet access if you need it. The only trouble is that you either have to leave your laptop at risk inside your car or have to tote it around with you. If you are a contractor or a delivery person or someone else constantly on the go, it might make sense to go with the in-dash PC.

What about the other Ford tech package? This is the Sync software that they developed with Microsoft. It is designed for a character-mode display and isn’t a real computer in the sense of even a CE-based device. It can sync up with your cell phone, offer turn by turn navigation instructions (but not a visual display of the landscape), and automatically mute the radio when an incoming call is detected for your cell phone. This is available on most of the newer model cars, and Ford will throw in the navigation package free if you buy other options for Sync. Or so I was led to believe. Again, figuring out all these options is maddening, and why so many of us run screaming from our local car dealers.

Now, you should know that I have rather quirky car buying habits: I have only owned cars for about 25 years, roughtly half my life, and only bought one Big Three American car over that period (my current car was made in Canada and is actually offered by Ford, although I bought the Toyota version). I don’t drive it enough to consider the Work Solutions package even if it were available in a sedan.

While I give Ford credit for trying to add some interesting technology to their vehicles, they have a long way to go before many people will choose to use it. Yet it is noteworthy in that they are attempting to go after a part of the market that the other car makers have ignored: road warriors that want to get work done in their cars, and not just deliver fancy infotainment systems. Now if they could appeal to the nerds they might have a winner.

 

Windows 7 networking controls video screencast

This week I begin a new series of video screencasts for Dell’s IT Expert Voice Web site. The site has all sorts of useful information for corporate IT folks that are interested in migrating and using Windows 7, and my humble part will be to produce a regular series of videos similar to what I have been doing on my own over at WebInformant.tv. Do check out this video which talks about the differences between Windows 7 and earlier versions when it comes to networking controls.

25 Years of PC Week

The scene is a deserted office park in Los Angeles after hours. I am driving around, trying to find the spot that my IT manager friend left an envelope for me. Inside the envelope is a disc with a secret IBM software program that is about to give me one heck of a scoop for PC Week, c. 1987.

It has been a week of memories. Last week was the 40th anniversary of the real beginning of the Internet, and this week is the 25 years that PC Week (regrettably now called eWeek) began publishing its weekly commentary on our industry.

While I didn’t start writing for the publication until 1987, I remember those times very well: back in the early 1980s I was working for a private software developer and we were porting our programs from the Apple to the new fangled IBM PC, and trying to make them work. Given that we were charging several thousand dollars to electric utilities for these products, it was my job to do the quality control and make sure that the code was written properly.

I eventually went on to work in various end-user computing departments for government and private industry before getting the job at PC Week as a writer and analyst. I went on to work there for more than three years when the PC industry was rapidly expanding and corporations were buying truckloads of PCs. Back then we didn’t have networks other than the ones that connected our PCs to our IBM mainframes, and I began to specialize in networking and installed the first one in our company before I became a tech journalist.

Wayne Rash called me last month to catch up and get some input on a story that he has written for the publication about those early days. It made me go back and actually find some of the articles that I wrote and recall some fond memories.

For those of you that were born after this year and don’t remember a world without computers, it is worth taking a moment to remind you that we had 80386 computers that had barely more than a megabyte of RAM and ran at 10 MHz clock speeds. Most of the machines back then had character-mode displays (except for Macs, which were rare on corporate desktops) and Windows and Linux hadn’t yet been invented. IBM and Microsoft were working together on OS/2 and Novell’s Netware was the most popular networking operating system because it could run on 80286s and use all of the entire memory of the machine. Hard disks were rarely larger than 20 MB, and floppies had just increased to store 1 MB of data. Mostly academic researchers were using the Internet and few corporations had email, let alone email connections to the outside.

In a story that I wrote in May 1990, I talk about what corporate IT folks need to think about when upgrading to the latest OS – which at the time was Windows 3 or OS/2 1.2. Some of those issues are still with us as we wrestle with Windows 7 and Snow Leopard.

Here are a few memories from that era. You can see scans of various magazine covers and articles that I mentioned from that era here.

My first story for PC Week (Jan 1987) was about a little-known company in the PC-to-mainframe market called Attachmate and how they planned on unseating the then-champion Digital Communications Associates, makers of the popular Irma boards. Attachmate went on years later to purchase DCA, and is still around in the terminal emulation space, also having bought network analysis company NetIQ.

What really got the IBM PC started in corporate computing circles was a spreadsheet called 1-2-3 from upstart Lotus Development Corporation. For some people, it was the only application that they ran on their desktops. Lotus 1-2-3 wasn’t the first spreadsheet and indeed, here is a brief post on the original spreadsheet called Visicalc.

Years before IBM ironically purchased Lotus, they started a skunk works project to use spreadsheets as a front-end to their mainframe databases, something that was very sophisticated at the time. The sole programmer behind the project was Oleg Vishnepolsky who spent about 18 months writing the software simply called S2. The code was used for internal purposes. I spoke to Vishnepolsky last week and rather than be mad at me for blowing his cover he was reminded that when my article ran his status as a lowly programmer was immediately elevated and he got to talk to the big brass about his project. “I got to rub shoulders with people at the top layers of management, and remember this is when IBM had about ten or 12 managers between me and the CEO.” Still, the S2 project was one of the best ones of his career and the code was used by tens of thousands of IBMers.

At the time this was being developed – say 1987 or so – there were a variety of people who were trying to clone 1-2-3 using the exact same command syntax, most notably Adam Osborne. There were legal challenges going back and forth about intellectual property and Osborne, being the roué that he was, only brought more attention to the whole thing.

Somehow, I got a hold of a copy of S2 from one of IBM’s customers, the setting for my cloak and dagger black ops mission at the top of this essay. I wrote the story about S2 and saw Osborne coincidentally a few weeks later at an industry event. Much as I wanted to give him a copy, I didn’t. But you can see the screen caps of S2 that I found in my archives.

Back then, IBM was very secretive about their new products and had all sorts of established protocols for dealing with the press. One place where they gave out advance information about their plans was at their user group meetings. Since I had come from IT, I knew how easy it was to attend these meetings under somewhat false pretenses. I called up the IT manager for Ziff Davis and found out that we indeed had an IBM mainframe squirreled away in New Jersey. I asked the manager if he could give me their customer number, which is pretty much all you needed to register for the IBM user conference. When I reassured him that it wasn’t going to come out of his budget (some things never change), I signed up and brought home several scoops from the meeting, much to the dismay of my fellow PC Week news hounds. But they were quick learners and when it came time for the next meeting, several of us attended as “Ziff Davis IT managers.” When we came back from the third meeting with even more scoops, Infoworld – which at the time was our main competitor — starting putting together the pieces and called up the president of the user group and got us banned from further meetings. But it was fun while it lasted.

Speaking of fun scoops, one of our younger and more eager reporters was Gina Smith. Gina was out to dinner with her boyfriend (who later married her) at a Cambridge, Mass. Restaurant. Sitting at the next table were two Germans speaking quickly. Little did they know that Smith was fluent in German and as she listened it turned out they were from Lotus’ German office telling each other what the future product plans were for the company. Lotus never knew how we got that story, and Smith went on to write a few books and run a couple of companies in Silicon Valley.

One of my early columns (July 1987) was about how hard it was to use a laptop in a hotel room. Back then modems were the main remote access devices, and they were running at 2400 bps, which was slow enough that you could read the text as it was being transmitted. Most hotels had hard-wired their phones so you couldn’t attach a modem easily, without having to unscrew the wall plates and take out the two wires that you needed to attach the modem to the phone system. How far have we come now with universal wireless everywhere.

Another of my favorite columns (March 1988) was written as if I was Judith Martin, answering questions of network etiquette. I considered it a successful parody when I got a cease and desist letter from Miss Manner’s law firm!

In October 1988, I was promoted to run a major portion of the PC Week. That same week, I was visiting one of my friends, Cheryl Currid, who ran the IT organization of Coke Foods (Minute Maid et al.) in Dallas. One of Cheryl’s staffers had baked a cake in my honor, iced with a simulated cover of PC Week’s front page with various “stories” in icing. Currid went on to write many columns for me at various publications, and is still consulting in the industry.

Yes, those were interesting and fun times. I hope you enjoyed some of these memories too.

Regis discovers the Internet

My stepson told me about this morning’s program that features Regis learning about the Internet. A total scream from the clueless world. Yes, you can pack that little PC with all sorts of information from around the world. It is amazing.

 

 

A new medical journal search tool from DeepDyve

A new search site is in beta called DeepDyve that has some promise. First, they claim that they index millions of medical papers from paid journals and free sites. The problem in the past is that this content wasn’t too readily available. Yes, there is Medline, but not a very user-friendly tool. Second, getting copies of the papers to read has never been easy, particularly for those of us in the lay community that don’t have medical center accounts or access to medical libraries.

This is where DeepDyve comes in. They charge a buck to rent the paper for 24 hours. You can get other “plans” that allow unlimited access for more money. Does this sound familiar, like renting movies? Got it. Their search engine is very simplistic — you can’t sort by date for example. But you can enter an entire abstract into the search query to narrow things down.

Alfred Poor’s new video reviews

My long-time former PC Magazine colleague Al Poor has begun his own series of video reviews of consumer products on his YouTube channel here. You can find a new Epson photo printer, the Buffalo Terrastation, and other products. Like my WebInformant.tv series, they are sponsored by the vendor and are short, fact-packed five minute pieces.

Learning branding lessons from chess champions

Chess may be one of the ultimate strategy games, but marketeers can learn a lot from the game, and they don’t even have to know the moves of the pieces.

A few weeks ago we had the Women’s US Chess Championship matches here. They took place a few blocks away from my office at the St. Louis Chess Club, a dandy new spot in the ‘hood that also was the scene of the US Open earlier this year. As part of the festivities welcoming all the chess nerds was an event that I attended at my favorite local art museum, the Kemper on the Washington University campus, where the women chess champs were going to play roulette chess. It was a great evening, a combination of smart women and interesting ideas. What more could this geek want?

At the museum, I got to meet the current, three-time women’s champion, Anna Zatonskih and the woman who invented roulette chess, Jen Shahade. Both are babes, to say the least. This year’s tournament netted Zatonskih a cool $15 grand, the largest purse of a women’s tournament ever. Granted, this isn’t big money for other kinds of contests, but in the world of chess, it is a lot.

I am not a very good chess player, although I learned when I was much younger only to get routinely trounced by my younger brother, who continues to play and even doesn’t need a chess board to keep track of his moves.

While it certainly was fun to meet the women champions, I was more interested in seeing how Shahade has done such a great job branding herself online. Here are just a few links to get your juices flowing:

First off, she wrote a book entitled, Chess Bitch, about the current crop of women chess players. Apart from the brilliant title, it is a great idea for a book. In chess, many players refer to the all-powerful Queen with that moniker, something that I wasn’t aware of. (For those of you that don’t play, while the object of the game is to capture your opponent’s King, the Queen has the most allowed moves on the board.)

Second, she has all these wonderful ideas about how to invigorate chess by making it more like a sport or like poker, ideas that I have to say I find interesting (and play off my earlier column about making science a spectator sport here).

She even wrote a column for the New York Times a few years ago about it (now that is great branding just right there).

Third, she understands that sex sells, and apart from being a very attractive woman, she does things like play chess while spinning a hula hoop and against a naked (sadly) male opponent. These are two separate activities, but all in the interest of getting more attention to the game. She claims the naked chess is better for her to hone her concentration, as well as to ensure the opponent isn’t hiding any assistive electronic devices. Yeah, right. In any event, you can check out her video on her Web site here:
http://www.jennifershahade.com/

Finally, she does a lot of different events, both demonstrating unusual ways to play chess as well as getting inner-city girls excited about the game. Thus, she combines her passion with some solid volunteerism, which as you should know is a great way to spread the word on your brand.

So those of you that are looking for some new ideas, check out some of these links. The combination of video, catchy titles, and stimulating ideas is enough to give you your own ideas on how to brand and market yourself online. Even if you don’t play chess.

Is Email dying?

Have we reached the point where email’s influence over our electronic lives is waning? It is hard to imagine, especially for those of us who grew up in the minicomputer/PC era. For two generations,  email was the killer application. It delivered information reliably and within a few minutes.

But today the properties that made email so attractive for so long are now a liabiliity. “A few minutes” for a response is so last year, driven in no small part by texting and cell phone ubiquity. At the same time this was happening, wikis, blogs and social networks have begun to erode email’s document exchange role. The notion of sharing photos or a slide presentation using email attachments is becoming quaint.

Now, the Internets have gotten faster, and seconds matter. Amazon offers same-day deliveries in a few cities. Motorola’s new Cliq Android phone aggregates all your messages together. And email just can’t keep up.

Jessica Vascellaro’s WSJ article about “Why Email No Longer Rules” cites that more people are on Facebook and other social networking sites than use email (it is a questionable statistic, to be sure). She claims that email is losing out to the immediacy of the real-time nature of social networks feeds and presence-aware apps like Twitter. Even Instant Messaging isn’t instant or capable enough, since it was designed for one-to-one chats. Today, the real-time Internet means that conversations need to happen with multiple people and happen quickly. The fact that this constant stream of presence information is being collected and sold, eroding one of the few aspects of privacy we control is lost on this generation, apparently.

I asked my friend Dave Piscitello to help collaborate on this article, and we agreed to share our thoughts and come up with the overall piece.

We have begun to notice in the past month or so more of our network is responding to our respective publications – weekly email Web Informants and the SecuritySkeptic.com blog – via Facebook and not via email. Adapting to the needs of our audience, we have both begun “pushing” our publications using email, Friendfeed, Facebook, and occasionally Twitter. We’ve experimented with podcasting, webcasting, and video too.

This is admittedly a shotgun approach to publishing, and begs the question of which of these communications tools, if any, are the right one for publishing? It also begs whether any of these alone are sufficient, and if not, what combinations can be used effectively? More importantly, how do we measure influence and reach, given that people can reach our blogs, Tweetstreams and FaceLinkedNingSpace networks, text or IM us, or heaven forbid, actually speak to us using a phone!

We honestly don’t know for sure, but we asked ourselves some questions and share them here for you to consider for your situation:

If you send out a weekly email newsletter, is it better to have the CEO as a subscriber or have four or five direct reports on a subscriber list who will send the same email to the CEO to act on when we touch a topic near and dear? The former puts your name on the CEO’s radar *if* he makes time to read enough of your messages, while the latter puts the decision of what is near and dear in the hands of a (presumably trusted) underling.

Is it better to post something to our FaceLinkedNingSpace pages, because that post provides personal context, starts conversation that the rest of our friends can follow along and helps you steadily build an audience over time; to blog amid a topic-based community, where a your post may “go viral” on the blogosphere and get thousands of “one time” hits and trackbacks; or is it worth the effort to use blogging and social networks in combination by drawing the attention of your friends and followers to your blog via a post and URL from your social network pages?

Is the link you embed in a Tweet going to pull audiences to your content? If you get 10% clickthrough when the industry average is a couple of percent, what can you learn and leverage from that Tweet or all Tweeted content? Is the viral effect of reTweeting or Tweetstreaming useful in growing your audience or will you disenfranchise long time followers who have become accustomed to receiving email responses “in a few minutes”?

We have a lot more questions than these, and are still searching for ways to meet our individual needs and aspirations. We both agree on how to answer the question at the top of this post: we don’t think email is dying, it’s merely settling into the roles it was always best suited to play. Email is not being replaced entirely for notification, messaging, and collaboration by these other technologies, nor will any of the newcomer applications succeed email as the single killer application. For the moment, there *is* no killer application. We need to experiment more with the existing and emergent set of applications going forward to get a better handle how we all interact online.

In the meantime, please share your thoughts with us both, using whatever technology is appropriate.