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.

Forget the new Pepsi Amp Up iPhone App

There has been a lot of press in the past week or so about a new iPhone App from Pepsi and energy drink Amp, called the Pepsi Amp Up Before Your Score. I tried it out, in the interests of reporting, and can’t see what the fuss is all about. The use case is a single guy on the prowl at a bar, and you pick one of several icons of the woman that you are trying to hit on, to gain insightful conversational banter and nearby destinations. Yes, it is sexist. Yes, it is smarmy. Yes, it doesn’t work well on giving you real-time destination results — searching for nearby ice cream stores in my ‘hood came up with a Ben and Jerry’s franchise that hasn’t been there for years. Is it better than the 9,000 fart apps on the iPhone? Marginally.

Save yourself the trouble of downloading and wasting time with the app. Instead, try these responses to lousy pickup lines from the Car Talk guys here.

CTOedge: Better Collaboration Tools Than Google

Google has certainly been busy building a lot of different software tools that can be used for collaboration, including Google Docs, Google Voice, Google Sites (formerly Jotspot) and Google Calendar. But there are a number of specialized tools that are more useful than these Google services for particular circumstances. These can be big productivity boosts for enterprises.

You can read the entire post in this week’s story for a new IT site called CTOedge here.

How to extract your LinkedIn contacts

If you have spent any time online using social networks like LinkedIn or Facebook, you know they can be difficult to grow your network and add contacts. But even harder is the ability to extract your contacts once you have built up a reasonably sized network. None of the social networks makes it very easy to get this information.

Why would you want to do this? Several reasons. First is the peace of mind that you have control over your own data. Should you decide to leave the network, or should the network decided to leave you (either for cause or for lack of funds to continue operations), it would be nice to have your contacts tucked safely on your own hard drive. Second is the ability to do some targeted marketing emails or just do some research: none of the networks has the right search fields when you need to find everyone that lives in a certain area with a certain job or works for a specific company. Sometimes I can find people on my network using the search tools, but often I can’t. And wouldn’t it be nice to see if everyone that is on your LinkedIn network is also on your Facebook network? Or not, if you are still trying to keep these two separate?

Before you hit the reply key and tell me that there are several different services that allow for you to synchronize your contacts, that isn’t quite what I mean. Yes, there are services such as Plaxo’s Pulse and MyOtherDrive.com that allow for synchronization of your desktop to their cloud-based contact list, but that is usually in one direction only (Pulse offers de-duplication services and better searching tools if you want to pay them for a premium membership.) Say I don’t want to have anyone from my last employer on my LinkedIn network, because I left that job under a dark cloud. (Purely hypothetical, of course, not that I am saying that this ever happened to me!) It isn’t easy to find this out with these networks, even if you do know how to manipulate their complex privacy settings.

So if you are still reading down here, I suggest you take a look at a Web service called Open Xchange, at ox.io. You can set up a free account and within a few minutes have it setup to automatically bring in all of your contacts from Google’s Gmail, LinkedIn, Facebook, and a few other places as well. What is more important though is that you can easily publish all this information (or some of it) to a Web site, or download it to a comma-separated file, so that you stay in control of your data at all times.

OX is the same technology that is white-labled by Network Solutions and 1&1 Internet as their own email services. You can also purchase a software license if you don’t want to run it across the Internet and on your own Linux servers. It has a lot more under the hood, including plug-ins for Microsoft Outlook, import/export of calendar items, iPhone apps and a shared document repository. If you want to get a feel for the software, go on over to my screencast video that I just finished on the product here.

(And while you are over there, if you haven’t seen these videos, you might want to browser around, or better yet, hire me to do one for your company’s product.)

I am glad to see products like OX take hold: all of us need better and more open ways to control our contacts.

Using OpenXchange to manage your communications

A flexible unified communications service for collaborative workgroups that can share files, import and export contacts and calendars from a wide variety of data sources and Web services, including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google’s Gmail. Entirely open-source based.

Price: Begins at $5/user/month for hosted version; $1095/yr for 25 users for server-based software version
Requirements: Works on a wide variety of browsers and operating systems. We tested it on IE 7, Firefox 3 and Mac Safari 4 in October 2009.

OpenXchange Inc.
303 South Broadway
Tarrytown, New York 10591
914 332-5720
http://ox.io

Behind the scenes at the Cisco AXP Contest

Today Cisco announced the winners of its AXP contest. If you haven’t heard of the contest before, you aren’t alone. It was an interesting combination of people, places and events. The goal was to design an application for a relatively new add-on module to Cisco routers called Application eXtension Platform (AXP), a Linux “blade” that allows third-party applications to be integrated with Cisco’s IOS router operating system and network applications. It has its own CPU and can store from 1 GB to 160 GB of data, depending on the model. Here is a more details Q&A about the AXP.

Earlier this year, Cisco announced the contest and a $100,000 prize purse. They received 100 submissions from teams around the world, and the three finalists were announced this week. Check out the winning entry from MAD Network here – it is a very clever use of a variety of materials to explain their innovation, and I am sure one of the reasons why they won.

Brian Profitt, one of the judges in the contest, wrote about his experiences in a blog post here. When I spoke to him, he was very upbeat about his participation. “Initially, I was skeptical that we needed apps there on the AXP, but after seeing the apps from the contestants, I realized that it is a good thing and they made a believer out of me. It is definitely a platform that you can build something that is useful for businesses. Cisco could have kept this all to themselves and developed all of their apps in house. By having this contest, they opened the door for people that probably wouldn’t have gotten to otherwise. They asked people to play with it, and certainly the prize was a big motivation, but this was a very significant move. I am hugely surprised and pleased by the number of international entrants. We had teams from all over the place – South American, Europe, elsewhere. I think this is a product of Cisco’s strength and how well they are known globally. I saw a number of women in the demo videos, which also was good too and runs counter to the notion that all coders are men.”

Profitt, who is the community manager for Linux.com, think that this is a very viable model for how you can really get developers into your enviroment. It also was his first time working with Cisco too.