Ford misses on 2011 Sync

I had a chance to try out the latest 2011 model Ford Edge, a crossover SUV vehicle that comes with the latest electronics package. Usually, I get to review products that I can’t explain to my family what they do (intrusion detection appliances, anyone?) but having a press loaner car was a nice change of pace. My overall review is that while Sync is better than ever, it is still too pricey and too limited when compared to after-market options.

Ford has four different option packages of tech for its cars: There is the Sync features which allow you to connect your cell phone and music players to the car ($395). There is a navigation package that adds graphical maps to the basic turn-by-turn directions ($795). There is a rearview video camera ($240) which shows you what is going on when you are in reverse, and a touch screen for controlling audio, climate, and other cabin operations ($365). That adds up quickly and is also confusing to sort out. So my first suggestion is make it all a single priced option.

I test-drove a 2011 Edge that came with three video screens: two four-inch LCDs on either side of the speedometer and an 8 incher in the middle of the dash. This configuration will also be available in the 2011 models of the Lincoln MKX hybrids, and eventually on other cars too. The car retails for $30,000 and in my driving it was very comfortable and got about 22 mpg.

Ford has sold more than two million cars since 2007 with Sync installed: sadly, they are not available for this 2011 upgrade. The best bits are the phone connectivity and how the touch screen and voice-activated controls work, although it will take some getting used to. When I first got the car it spent more time running in my garage than on the street, as I went back and forth between my office’s Internet connection and gathering various bits and pieces of gear to try out in the car.

The car comes with a plethora of ports: two USBs, one three-RCA audio/video jacks and an SD slot for you to plug various stuff in. If you have an iPod or a USB memory stick with MP3 tunes on it, as soon as you attach it to your car it will start playing the music. All the connectors are located in the console between the two front seats, so you can stow all your gear out of sight too.

As soon as you pair your phone with the car via Bluetooth, it will attempt to download your address book so you can set up speed dialing of your most frequently called contacts. These are graphically displayed on the main screen and with a touch of a button or using voice commands you can interrupt your music and dial or answer a call. The sound quality was acceptable according to my listeners. Again, this isn’t anything all that new, with the exception of the graphical display. To play your music you’ll want to use the USB connection rather than Bluetooth.

Some downsides? If you have an iPhone, you will most likely need an upgrade to its firmware to work with your car. You can’t receive text messages (on other phones the system will process them and speak them to you over the car’s audio) on the car’s screen, which depends on a new Bluetooth profile that is as yet unsupported by Apple but is supported for Blackberry users.

The standard navigation package with Sync doesn’t show you a map of your surroundings, unlike all of the GPS’s that cost about $150 that are sold nowadays. I ended up bringing along my own GPS on a couple of trips, just because the Sync’s features were so abysmal. The $795 upcharge buys you a SD card with the maps included, which is probably the highest price you can pay for an SD card of any size these days.

Also built-in to the car is a Wifi radio, and with the addition of a broadband USB modem you can turn your car into a mobile hot spot, in case your laptop-toting passengers want to be online when on the road. Ford uses the Wifi radio to download software updates and actually provision the electronics software on the assembly line while they are making the car. You can watch this brief video about how they do it here.

If your phone supports tethering via Bluetooth, you can share and drive its Internet connectivity this way. I couldn’t get this to work on my Android phone, however.

Ford makes another electronics package for just its pickup truck line called Ford Work Solutions to run Office applications and Web browsing. This is based on a Windows CE in-dash PC, and a Sprint broadband data modem. Ford has stated that we might see some merging of functionality in the future, such as having a Web browser built into Sync so you can surf when not moving. They are also working on other Sync apps including Pandora radio and Twitter clients that will be available next year.

Speaking of Web browsing, each Sync-equipped car comes with a Web reporting system so you can keep track of any mechanical issues from the comfort of your own browser. (A screenshot is shown above)

This brings up the point of distracted driving, and certainly if you are going to buy this electronics package you should spend several hours understanding what you have before you venture out on the road. The glass cockpit is a bit daunting at first, and even for the geek in me was a bit too much information to deal with on a busy city street, let alone going 65 mph on the freeways. Ford has a “do not disturb” option to block incoming calls and texts, which is a good idea.

While I liked a lot of the features in my Sync-enabled Edge, overall I think it is still has a few rough, well, edges. Maybe if the enhanced navigation card was free I would be more favorably inclined to recommend it. And if you were to collect a GPS, a notebook PC or iPad, and a broadband modem, you can replicate most of this technology for about $600, or about a third of what you would pay for the various Ford Sync options. But you would be missing the integrated voice/touch controls for all these devices.

Using applications whitelisting with CoreTrace Bouncer

My latest video screencast is looking at Bouncer from CoreTrace. They have a new software-only version 6 that provides solid endpoint protection by only allowing vetted applications to run across your enterprise. There are agents for all 32-bit versions of Windows since 2000 and 64-bit Windows 7 and Server 2008.

CoreTrace Bouncer. Pricing begins at $35 per endpoint

Here is the link to the video review.

Screen Addicts

Two of my favorite movies, Blade Runner and Total Recall, have these scenes where their view of the future is filled with video screens hanging everywhere as the characters move about their daily lives. Amazingly, this future has already arrived, and we have become screen addicts. I can go from my home PC, TV, Kindle, cell phone to subway (multiple TVs per car, playing sports highlights and other ads), to restaurant and sports arenas. Our cars have a GPS and seat-back videos for the kiddies. There are billboards that are just large video displays popping up around town, almost to the point of being too distracting with their changing images. Bus shelters and even taxicabs have video advertisements running both inside and out. Even our phones have multiple screens and video cameras now.

Remember those old days when just sports bars were the only ones that had TVs? Now the average restaurant is chock full of video “walls” and even some have TVs in every booth, like the jukeboxes of yore. And watching TV is no longer a passive activity: both my wife and my daughter pull out their phones or laptops to check some random thought online, look up an actor’s IMDB profile, or text their friends while watching a show.

The Cowboys and Giants stadiums are other examples of immersive video environments. I had a chance to tour the Cowboys’ stadium before it was finished the day they actually turned on the gigatron that is hanging over the field between the 20-yard lines, and it was interesting. All work stopped and all eyes were focused on that screen when they starting playing some football video highlights. It was almost like a religious experience. Maybe that was the intent. But the big midfield screen isn’t enough – there are more than two thousand regular-sized TV screens scattered throughout the place, if you ever can take your eyes off the enormous one hanging over the field. Each TV has its own IP address and can be programmed individually to display something during the game, making it an advertiser’s wet dream.

Speaking of screens in cars, remember when you last talked to your kids or played the alphabet game on a long car ride? It required nothing more than your own powers of observation: no batteries or technology needed. Now every passenger has to have his or her own video cocoon to pass the time.

As an experiment, a college in Pennsylvania last week tried to turn off Facebook, Twitter and IM for an entire week across its campus, which is a single 16 story building in downtown Harrisburg. Nice try. During this self-inflicted ban, the college was host to a conference on social media trends and a video game tournament for high schoolers. I guess going cold turkey proved more difficult than they first thought. Of course, students could still have access via their mobile phones to get their fix, or walk over to a Starbucks nearby. That is, as long as Facebook itself is online and doesn’t have outages of its own doing.

It used to be that having one monitor on your computer was considered sufficient. That seems so old fashioned, like looking at a model T now. Today’s geeks have surrounded themselves with at least three screens per PC, and traders have entire video walls sprouting from their desks. Why bother with virtual reality goggles when you can sit inside your own computing landscape?

Yes, we are addicted to screens. How many families sit down to dinner with their devices nearby, just in case they get a text that needs attention? Well, I will keep this column short this week, just so you can get back to more important business. But it might be good to take a few minutes to walk outside and see how far you can get before you see another screen.

Mediablather podcast: Doug Kaye

Doug Kaye is a podcasting pioneer. A successful software entrepreneur whose love of audio engineering dates back to his teen years, Doug launched IT Conversations in 2003, when the word “podcasting” didn’t even exist. He caught a break when his early recordings of O’Reilly Media conferences actually helped boost registrations for that company’s events. Since then, the Conversations Network has grown to encompass recordings of thousands of speeches and interviews about topics ranging from artificial intelligence to smart cities to brain surgery.

You can listen to his conversation with David and Paul Gillin that he had earlier in September here.

Finding the real Tea Party online

There was a story in the NYTimes last week that took me back a few years, about the political candidates who have become good at cyber squatting their opponents’ Web domains. The practice isn’t new, indeed the Times published a story back fifteen years ago by James Gleick about the tactic and quoted from Brooks Talley and how he owned several domains such as Dole96.org, when the “real” Bob Dole web site was something else entirely, where thanks to the Internet Archive, you can view the site here.

Apart from the obvious lack of historical context, there was something else missing from the Times’ piece: that finding the “real” Tea Party Web site is next to impossible. It isn’t just cybersquatters (one of whom that ranks high in Google juice this week is selling a male enhancement drug, which brings up all sorts of amusing quips that I will restrain myself from making), but the very decentralized nature of the Tea Party itself.

Now, I am not taking a position about supporting or not supporting them. Clearly, a lot of voters are interested in their candidates, given the results of the past week’s primary elections. But let’s say for the sake of argument that you want to give a Tea Party candidate a campaign donation, or want to volunteer to work for one of their local candidates. You will quickly find out that you can’t do either of these activities with confidence. Unlike the well established other parties that have carefully crafted sites, the Tea Party folks are a cyber-mess.

Just Googling “official Tea Party web site” won’t get you anywhere, and indeed, some of the listings on the first couple of pages are somewhat hard to pin down without further research into who owns the domain. There is the Tea Party Patriots, which is the work of Mark Meckler. He has a Ning group as well as a regular Web site that asks people to donate $10 a month and be part of the first 10,000 to do so. That seems suspicious. There is another site called Tea Party Patriots Live that is owned by Jason Hoyt. This one looks more legit, but again, who knows?

Then there is the Tea Party Express, which is part of a political action committee called Our Country Deserves Better that has its own separate Web site.  Another PAC is called Stop This Insanity that has a domain JoinTheTeaParty.us.

Going to Facebook, there are a few pages that are devoted to Tea Party causes, but again, hard to say with any certainly which is the authoritative one. And Wikipedia doesn’t offer any links to clarify what is the official site either.

I realize that the very grass-roots nature of the Tea Party makes it hard to have a definitive central site, but still. There are a lot of other grass roots movements that have done a better job branding themselves online. Of course, even the best branding doesn’t guarantee complete name recognition: I doubt many of us could name the chairman of both the GOP and Democratic National Committees. Still, at least you can be reasonably sure that when you go to their Web sites, you are at the real McCoys.

Is Facebook an enterprise friend or foe?

If you work in a corporate IT department, it is a hard call to say whether you want to, in its own argot, de-friend Facebook.

With seemingly everyone you know getting onboard the popular social networking site, IT managers are finding out that Facebook makes sharing information easier, information that ideally should remain within a corporate network.

Probably the most extreme example was a story I heard earlier this year. An Army grunt posted the location of his next mission in Afghanistan as his status update on his Facebook page. Within moments, the mission was scrubbed and the soldier was being sent back home.

How about the Michigan juror who posted her verdict on her Facebook page, prior to ever getting into the jury room to deliberate? Needless to say, she was removed forthwith by the judge. Now it isn’t unusual to hear about someone losing their job because of a Facebook indiscretion.

And the opportunity to track intra-office romances via the participants’ status messages is mind-boggling. Back in the olden times, we just had to rely on misdirected romantic email messages to amuse us. Now we have access to full-color photos and video documentation.

Speaking of entertainment, I am sure you have also noticed the collection of movies and TV shows that feature Facebook elements. And some of them even have accurate story lines, too. It is hard to think about anything else these days.

So what can an IT manager do to protect his or her enterprise? There are a bunch of strategies and products, as security vendors have become more Facebook-aware themselves. You can set up firewall policies, turn on bandwidth controls, or use a variety of data loss prevention and network monitoring products to track what is being sent out to the world.

Certainly, just about any firewall worth its packets can block Facebook access totally, but you might not want to do that. Let’s say you don’t mind if people message each other within Facebook, but playing Farmwille or other games during 9 to 5 is verboten. Several firewalls can make this distinction, such as McAfee’s Firewall Enterprise. Some firewalls, such as Sonicwall’s, have all sorts of granular policies to fine-tune what behavior is and isn’t allowed.

Or let’s say you run IT for a college campus. You can’t block your students’ use of Facebook (you might start a revolt), but during the daytime when faculty wants to get their work done, you might want to reclaim some of this bandwidth and at least slow access down. A number of products such as Blue Coat’s PacketShaper can do this. You can simulate the rate of say, a dial-up line for Facebook from 9 to 5, and turn it back to the full OC-3 pipe afterhours.

And in the world of data loss prevention (which is where the extreme examples cited above can make anyone a bit nervous), you can make sure that customer data or other sensitive information is properly monitored. You can also track who spends the most time on the site too.

To learn more about these and other products, you can read an article that I wrote for Techtarget last month, as well as go to my screencast review site Webinformant.tv where you can see my short videos that demonstrate some of the products that I mention above.

Techtarget: Selecting the right conversion tool for your P2V migration

After you decide that you want to virtualize your environment and you select the products to use, the next step usually involves some sort of conversion process — taking a running physical desktop or server and moving it to a virtual machine. Although you can set up a new VM from scratch, it’s easier — and faster — to begin with a physical machine that is set up with all the applications you want in your virtual world.

In my latest article for SearchVirtualDesktop, I take a look at the tools that can help in this physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration.

New features of Symantec Backup Exec 2010

Symantec has a new R2 version of its Backup Exec 2010 backup software that is easier to install, quicker to make backups, and a raft of new features that include better support for virtualization, archiving, and deduplication.

Symantec Corporation
Mountain View, Calif.

http://backupexec.com

Pricing: $1174 for one media server, deduplication and archiving options extra

Go to my screencast video here.

How to write a stellar computer product review

Let’s say you are a college student taking journalism and your assignment is to write a review of some computing product or service. What do you do? To get things started, here are a few suggestions from someone who has been writing such reviews for more than 20 years, publishing hundreds of them in dozens of IT trade publications and Web sites.

Make sure you have the most up-to-date product version. This seems obvious, but there are many download sites that don’t make it easy for you to determine this. Make sure you are testing a shipping version too: the differences these days between beta and final versions are very blurry (remember Gmail was in “beta” for several years).  And if you are testing some Web service, realize that the code that you test today will change tomorrow, so it is important to check back when you finish review (if some time has elapsed) to make sure that you cover the new features that were recently added. I know, the Web makes for a moving target.

Go to the vendor’s Web site, collect information such as system requirements (which version of Windows, with what Service Pack and what version of .Net Framework and Internet Explorer) and make sure you have a PC that can run the software you downloaded or work with the particular hardware.  If you are testing a network product, make sure you have at least a server and a client or two for your tests. Also find the current pricing information (this is usually the hardest thing to discover), and call the PR contact listed for the company (if indeed it is listed) and tell them you are going to be reviewing the product. You could ask them for a special tech support engineer to resolve any issues, depending on the product and your own level of comfort.

Some professional reviewers shun special tech support, I find it useful especially if you are stuck with a problem that is entirely of your own ignorance and you are trying to resolve the issue and get your review finished.

Don’t write about your installation experience. Even if it was onerous, your readers don’t care. They want to know what the product does. Just get straight into the review. If you must carp about the install, write the graf and then delete it before your final edit to get it out of your system.

Give us a nut graf that sets expectations of who uses what and why. See the first graf of this screed as an example: I tell you who should read this piece and why I am qualified to write it.Most of the times this is the second graf of your review: “Microsoft’s new cloud-based thing is aimed at engineers who can understand how to configure routers in their sleep, but isn’t yet ready for the general IT population.”

Understand the context of where the product fits into your reader’s computing ecosystem. If it is a cloud-based Web application, does anyone use similar premises-based applications of equivalent functionality? Why or why not? If you don’t know the context, this would be a good time to talk to a few IT folks to get some idea of how they intend to use the product, or drawbacks in similar products that they are trying to avoid.

What breaks or doesn’t work when you try to use a Mac or Linux machine? Not everyone uses Windows PCs, you know. Dealing with a mixture of endpoints is part of the challenge of any modern IT department. Same is true for a variety of browsers. Make sure your test plan is rich enough to include these variations.

When you get some unexpected result, it is polite to call the vendor and let them know. It could be something you did. Or didn’t do. They could have a fix coming for this situation, something you might want to tell your readers about. Or you could have found a real honest-to-goodness bug. It happens.

Take copious screenshots for your own reference, as well as for ultimate publication. I prefer to use TIFFs because you can preserve higher-resolution screens. I then create a private photo album on Picasa or Flickr that I upload the screens to and link in my article so my editor can pick the ones that s/he likes. Having this record can be useful if you are going to get paid to write another article for a different publication down the road, because you won’t have to go back and try to re-create your test bed.  Windows 7 (Snap) and Mac OS (Grab) come with built-in utilities to take screenshots. Oh, and include captions on all of your screenshots too.

Look at the previous version, or at least the press release, to understand what is new and shiny and different about the current version. What did the vendor add, why did they add it, and what does that mean for users of the legacy product?

Look at the competition too. If you don’t know which products are competitors, you can ask your friendly vendor PR person. If the vendor tells you that they have no competitors (they often like to say that) and you know this not to be the case, don’t be afraid to call them out on it.

If you don’t know how to use desktop virtualization technologies, now is the time to learn. Virtual machine products such as VMware have made the product reviewer’s job a lot easier. When I began in this business, I had a room full of PCs that were setup for different situations. Now I have a hard disk filled with VMs of different operating systems, and when it is time to test something, I can make a copy from my clean master and not have to worry about reinstalling the OS if something goes south.

Email your PR contact when the review is published. These days, almost everyone has set up Google alerts but you want to show that you care. Thank them for their help, even if they were less than forthcoming. You want to build up a relationship with these folks. Don’t be afraid to enter into a dialogue with the vendor to explain your point of view and take the time to listen to where they think you missed the boat.

Good luck with your reviews and feel free to share here some of your own tips.

For a more detailed missive on how PR people should deal with the press from the press’ perspective, see the very excellent “Care and Feeding of the Press” by Esther Schindler here.

Mediablather: Are Google’s Best Days Behind It?

Has Google’s time passed? A recent article in Forbes Magazine suggests that it may have. Google has been unable to combat the Facebook threat with a social strategy that has captured users’ fancy, despite its recent attempts to acquire knowledge in this area.. The company’s stock has been stagnant for nearly three years and its growth rate is slowing. Does this mean Google is over the hill?

In our MediaBlather podcast this week with Paul Gillin, we talk about this and how Google has failed to capture any juice with social media.  You can download the show here.