Men don’t (need to) ask for directions

You know the old saying, men never ask for directions. But lately we don’t have to, because the number of mapping-related products is just mushrooming. What is interesting is that the GPS is now becoming mission critical to so many applications, as more cell phones, cars, and other Internet-connected devices rely on them to provide position, speed, and geolocation services.

I started thinking about this after trying out a new Ford Fiesta with the latest version of its Sync software. Ford has been playing catch up to GM’s Onstar voice-prompted services and has some interesting new advances with Sync. On the car that I had, it had a small monochrome screen and no mapping software per se. You had to pair the car with your cellphone’s Bluetooth connector to gain access to its more advanced features. Basically, the car was using your phone’s connectivity to get downloaded turn-by-turn instructions, which the voice prompts in the car would announce at the right moments.

Ford’s Sync comes in two basic flavors: one without the mapping software and one with. The Fiesta’s dash doesn’t have room for the maps, sadly, and so you have to go through some gyrations to get the turn-by-turn directions. The best way is to go to Google Maps on your PC before your trip and enter your starting and ending points. Google has been enhancing its mapping software service, and one button that I haven’t noticed until now is labeled “SEND.” You can choose to send it to your Sync-equipped car, to various Onstar vehicles, and a few others, as well as to an add-on GPS unit or to an email account. It is pretty spooky, because if you choose to send it to your car, it waits for your phone to pair up, with your car and then downloads the turns.

Mapquest offers a similar service to send its maps, but for fewer car models.

You can also try to speak your destination to the voice response system in the car. However, this is somewhat akin to talking to a four-year-old child with bad hearing. One of the first places that I was trying to get to had a five-digit address on a street with three names in a city that was based on a French place. I didn’t really try to stump the chump but that is what ended up happening.

Sync of course isn’t the only GPS option available. Most smartphones come with GPS apps, but the default ones for the iPhone don’t offer spoken turn-by-turn directions, and most others will cost money. A new choice is Skobbler, which is based on the openmap interface and is free.

While we are talking about maps, I came across Crowdmap, a new service that allows anyone to mashup their own maps. Think of it like what WordPress did for building web sites. You can see my own primitive attempt to put together a map here.

As you start thinking about GPS and mapping apps, you realize that the weakest link in this process is the GPS satellites themselves. And there are a number of GPS jammers (illegal in US and many other countries), which are now commonly available at numerous online stores for $250, and some for even much less. The issue is two-fold: GPS signals are easy to block, given that the satellites don’t put out much power to begin with. And the jamming sources are very hard to locate, also because they don’t radiate much power to do their dirty work. One jammer located near Newark Airport took months to track down. A trucker who was trying to get around paying tolls on the adjoining New Jersey Turnpike would interfere with a new system that the airport was trying to deploy.

To prevent this, the Defense Department has proposed a smartphone app to detect GPS jammers that people can use to report problems. Of course, then we all have to be persuaded to keep these apps running (and suffer the battery life consequences on our phones too).

In the meantime, my fellow males can hope that they don’t have to ask for directions as long as the GPS system is working.

Taking mobile payments

If you have the kind of business that requires getting paid when on the go, you have probably heard that your iPhone can be used for this purpose. If you have a mobile food truck, or set up a booth at a tradeshow, or need to take credit cards for your business, there are now several different hardware add-ons that can scan credit cards, and several additional apps that can work by typing in the credit card number manually.

In the olden times (say last year), retailers had to go through a lengthy process to accept credit cards and often had to purchase a card reader for $150 or more that could only attach to a land phone line. Those days are officially over, and with these iPhone readers, you can get paid wherever and whenever you might be.

All of these apps are still somewhat rough around the edges. There are usually two different fee structures: one in which the card is physically present and is swiped through the reader, and a higher set of fees charged if it isn’t (this is because of credit card policies that carry a greater risk of fraud for cards not present).

Before the portable readers were invented, there were a number of iPhone apps that offered payment processing. The problem with these apps is that because they didn’t have any way to physically swipe the card, they had to charge you the higher transaction fees.

So what is involved with each reader? First, you sign up online with a Web form (or in some cases within the iPhone app itself) to create your merchant account, the type of account that banks require for anyone to accept credit card payments. Part of this process is to identify yourself and authorize your checking account that will collect your deposits. Once your account is setup, you can begin accepting payments with your iPhone.

All of these apps have the ability to email receipts to your purchasers as well as to yourself, and have Web-based management dashboards that show you the status of your purchases and collections. These are nice features and some users of the typical point-of-sale credit card machine might be interested in switching to the iPhone readers too.

If you already have a merchant account with your bank, you still need to setup a new one on some of the readers because each device is tied to a particular payment processor. In the past, merchant accounts took lots of time and effort to setup and had monthly account fees even if you never charged a single credit card on them. That is all changing now with these devices. In each case it was a matter of hours between getting started and being able to accept payments.

All of these solutions are limited to US account holders, and in some cases will only authorize cards issued to US-based addresses too. For a review in ITworld, I looked at three hardware credit card readers, some of which are free:

• The Square (squareup.com). There are no monthly fees and the reader is free. Fees are 2.75% when cards are present, 3.5% when they aren’t.
• PayAnywhere.com is aligned with North American Bancard, one of the largest traditional credit card payment processors. It costs $20 for shipping and has similar fees to the Square.
• Intuit GoPayment (http://payments.intuit.com/) works with two different readers, the free Roam and the $80 Mophie. They also offer accounts for higher transaction volumes for monthly fee of $13. RoamPay from RoamData also works with existing merchant accounts from other vendors. I didn’t test the Roam reader.

Some of the readers are for v3 or v4 of the iPhone only because of they way the fit around the phone’s data connector, while others like Roam and Square fit into the phone’s headphone jack and can support a wider variety of phones. I liked the simplicity of the Square setup and use, but the additional features of the Mophie reader might be useful. You can see the results of my tests here.

How to teach us to collaborate

Several decades of using PCs and watching reality television have made us poor collaborators. I mean, look at me as a case in point: I sit in my office on most days typing away at my computer, perfectly content to be by myself and create articles and work on my next set of speeches and videos. I don’t need any staff, I can do it all from the comfort and privacy of my desktop.

Yes, I have a large group of people that I work with to produce my stories and arrange my meetings: editors, production people, and so forth. Sometimes the collaboration efforts are better than others. That is just human nature.

But this past weekend I got to see up close how to teach high school kids to work together, and it was an eye opener. Instead of the “Celebrity Apprentice” model where everyone has an ego and wears it on their sleeve, I found these kids enlightening and inspiring to see in action.

I am talking about the regional competitions for FIRST robotics. We actually get two times for FIRST here in St. Louis – in addition to last week, late in April we will also be hosting the international championships where the final teams come in from all over. The prize purse is huge: $15 million in college scholarships from more than 100 universities. Not to mention the bragging rights for the winners, which if you are a teenager, are substantial.

FIRST has been around for 20 years, and if you haven’t seen or participated, you might want to think about doing both. There are more than 2,000 teams from 60 countries. If you are interested in seeing where tomorrow’s top nerd talent will come from, this is a must-see event. You can spend an hour or the entire weekend watching the competition. And while the play-by-play commentary isn’t quite up to the par of say, professional baseball, the real action on the field and behind the scenes is important and exciting to entrepreneurs.

What I found interesting was seeing how groups of kids have to collaborate to work on fairly big projects in very limited time: they have to design, buy, build and market the necessary spare parts to build a robot in just a few weeks’ time, then ship it off to St. Louis and try to make it work under extreme duress during the competitions. And while there is plenty of adult input, most of the real work gets done by the students.

And this isn’t just about having engineers-in-training. The FIRST competitors draw on a variety of interests and skill sets – they have to design their logo, raise money, make sure they understand the design concepts, and delegate tasks to finish the project. It isn’t easy. When I was at the region competitions last week, I got to wander around the pit crews, and I saw one team that was in the process of taking apart their robot and putting it back together again to make it two inches shorter. For some reason, the team hadn’t gotten the right measurements during their design phase. Socket sets and crescent wrenches were in abundance as they feverishly worked, in the style of the best Indy 500 pit crews. It was a beautiful thing to watch. The only thing missing was the sound of the air wrenches the big guys use in the pits.

Later, when I sat in the stands, I spoke to a girl on one team who designed the team’s Web site and other communications. They were complaining that because of the numerous snow days in February, they had to come to school and still work on their robot while the other kids were off. Actually, she wasn’t complaining – she was proud of the fact that her team had worked so hard.

This year, the robots have to maneuver a series of inflatable pool toys and place them on a series of pegs on a wall. It doesn’t sound like as exciting as watching a group of guys kick a small ball from one side of a field to another, but believe me it has its own thrill of victory and agony of defeat just like any other sporting event. And if you want to see how leading edge collaboration is being taught to our next group of entrepreneurs and engineers, come down to St. Louis April 27-30. It is free and open to the public.

I want my MTV!

When I was a wee lad, I remember watching the moon landing with my siblings in my parents’ bedroom on a 20-inch or so black and white TV. Back then we had the simplicity of three channels’ worth of programming. The only portable media devices were crappy transistor radios that had speakers the size of a quarter. Bill Gates hadn’t even dropped out of Harvard, and Sergei and Larry hadn’t been born yet.

Now look at what we’ve got. Portability and personalization have become paramount. People want to watch what they want, when they want it, and have lots of different devices to choose from. And to put this in perspective, each minute a full 24 hours of video content is uploaded from around the world to YouTube, and even more depressing is that every day three billion photos are posted to more than 600 million Facebook accounts. This is certainly more content then one could watch in multiple lifetimes. Forget about having 500 channels and nothing being “on”. Now it is more like 500 million channels and we are buried in cute dancing cat videos and celebrity rants with their own live channels.

This week, we at least got diverted from Krazy Charlie’s Channel and witnessed a UCLA college student’s rant about “Asians in the library” talking on their cell phones. The insensitive YouTube video got millions of hits, and spawned its own meme of commentaries and parodies, one of which showcased a young Asian student with his guitar and well-produced music video. Also in the People Behaving Badly department is comedian Gilbert Gottfried, who is no longer the quacking spokesduck for Aflac thanks to his own Tweets on the events in Japan.

Back in the 1960s, we had TV shows that premiered in September and ran original weekly episodes until April or May, with just a few repeats here and there for holiday breaks. Now that “season” is anything but contiguous. Luckily, thanks to Tivo and its equivalents, we can safely ignore the broadcast schedule and record what we want and watch it when we wish. And we don’t have to worry about setting up our own video playlist when we are just in our living rooms: we have the ability to remotely program our DVRs when we are away from home with a series of smartphone apps from the major providers such as Verizon, AT&T, DirecTV and Dish. We never have to miss a recording again.

It isn’t just your phone, either. With millions of iPads sold in the past year, Apple has invigorated the tablet marketplace and made this the go-to entertainment machine with hundreds if not thousands of apps from games to daily newspapers. Did anyone care about Windows-based tablets two years ago? Having a rich ecosystem certainly helps, along with a drop-dead gorgeous screen. Now even insurance TV commercials feature the “swipe” control gestures that were once the province of “Minority Report” science fiction.

Tablets, along with cheap portable DVD players and more ubiquitous aircraft WiFi have also transformed how we no longer care about in-flight movies. Now you can bring your own content and not rely on what the airlines have scheduled for a movie that you probably don’t even want to watch anyway. Remember when airlines charged $5 for bringing your own earphones? Again, those days seem so long ago, akin to when we dressed up and were allowed to smoke on planes. We truly have come so far (not to mention being more comfortable on longer flights, too).

In the past few years, we have gone from digitizing and capturing content to our hard drives to streaming it from someone else’s. It used to be a sign of coolness when you could boast how many hours of music and video were on your own hard drive, or how you could immediately download whatever audio or video recording you wanted from Amazon and iTunes. That is no longer relevant, thanks to Hulu and various on demand audio and video streaming services such as Pandora, Netflix’ Watch Instantly and Verizon’s Flex View. With these Internet services, you can get the particular episode of a TV show or a movie or a song within seconds – delivered right to your desktop computer. With all this streaming available, who needs to capture content anymore?

Moreover, you can watch these shows not just on your computer, but on smartphones, tablets, and Internet-connected TVs. Netflix now has more than 100 different devices that can receive its streaming content, including a range of DVD players, TVs, all three major game consoles, and iPhones and iPads.

This week I am road-testing a new Ford Fiesta. It sports a new version of its Sync services that treats Pandora Internet radio “channels” as just another audio source to be controlled in the car. You can skip songs or switch channels just as easily as if you were changing FM stations on your car radio with its latest 2011 models. All you need is an app for your smartphone and a USB cable to connect it to your car. Say goodbye to Sirius radio.

Is the living room TV still the epicenter of home entertainment? Perhaps, but with all these portable devices and services that can deliver audio and video content over broadband networks, the tide is turning.

Network World: New tools to protect VMs

As enterprises move toward virtualizing more of their servers and data center infrastructure, the security technologies that are plentiful and common-place in the physical world become few and far between. In this review for Network World this week, I look at five common VM security tools that offer a range of protective features. Included in the review are:

• BeyondTrust PowerBroker Servers for Virtualization
• Catbird Networks vSecurity
• HyTrust Appliance
• Reflex Systems Virtualization Management Center
• Third Brigade/Trend Micro Deep Security

Lend me an eBook!

If you haven’t yet gotten an eReader, you want to think about several recently developments regarding lending eBooks before you make the plunge. Depending on how you feel about lending options, you may want to wait a bit longer.

Why is lending important? I think this is the killer app for eBooks, and sadly, the publishers and eBook vendors are too caught up in their own version of digital rights management to stay out of their own way.

When I buy a printed book, it is because I want to read it. Duh. But as soon as I finish the book (if it is any good), I want to share it with someone else. Maybe it is my wife, or a neighbor, or my sister, or a friend. Sometimes I actually give this person the book. I don’t need a degree in computer science, I don’t need to go to a Web page, I just hand the book over. There are no programming interfaces required.

But when it comes to lending eBooks, things aren’t so simple. Many eBooks can only be purchased for the individual’s own use. The Barnes and Noble Nook was the first eReader to have lending enabled: it still is a very clunky process and very limited. Only certain eBooks can be loaned. If they can, only once and only to others who have either a Nook or the Nook application. While an eBook is out on loan for two weeks you can’t read it, and if your recipient hasn’t finished reading it at the end of the loaner period it reverts back to the donor automatically.

Amazon over the last few months has quietly been enabling its own lending option. When you order a Kindle version of a book, at the top of the page it will say whether or not you can loan the book. For eBooks you have already purchased, you have to poke around in your digital library and examine each book. Typically, you can lend a book for two weeks at a time. The recipient doesn’t have to have a Kindle, they can download the free Kindle app for iPhone, Mac or Windows. The details on how to do it are located here.

But the bigger marketplace for lending books is – surprise – your local public library. Most libraries use an app called Overdrive that manages their digital collections, including music and videos. And this is where the big money has been so far, as libraries buy a lot of eBooks.

In the past, the Overdrive software works similarly to the B&N or Kindle lending feature: the library loans out its digital copy of a book, and a patron has a limited time to read it. While it is out on loan, no one else can read the eBook (unless the library has purchased multiple copies, just like physical books). But that is changing.

Harper Collins last week decided to limit the number of times that their eBooks can be borrowed to a total of 26. Many libraries have already stated that they will no longer purchase any HC eBooks as a result. They don’t want to spend the money on something that has a limited shelf life of a year or so. Overdrive has to now segregate HC books so that you can tell they have these borrowing limits.

Then there is BookLending.com, a trading service that allows people to post the eBooks that they want to lend to others, and make it easier to match borrowers. It is new and I am not sure what will happen: in theory it is a nice idea.

There are numerous new sites that are popping up to handle exchanging information on books, making the reading process more akin to a social network. These include thecopia.com, Digress.it, Bookglutton.com, Librarything.com and MobNotate.com. I haven’t spend much time with any of these sites, but I don’t think much of them: readers want to read, Gen Y is not a reading generation, and the marriage of the two doesn’t seem likely.

Still, it seems with the latest move by Harper Collins that the eBook industry is about to saddle itself with an unworkable DRM eerily similar to what the music industry went through in the early Napster days. Until eBooks get easier to loan, eReaders won’t be common. Imagine pre-loading an eReader with your favorite books and passing them around your book club? Or having an easy way to refer to your library on some Web site that can bulk load it to a eReader? These are just two of the new kinds of use cases that I can think of. Yes, I still want to browse books in my local independent bookstore: but I want to be able to easily share the books that I enjoy too.

Upcoming speaking gigs

Here are the places you can see me at work in the next month. Feel free to email me if you’d like me to come speak at your event.

• March 11, St Louis chapter of the National Speakers Association. Our local chapter monthly meeting I will talk about how professional speakers can benefit from using social media and Web tools to promote their businesses. Joining me is Doug Devitre, who is an accomplished speaker and nerd extraordinaire.The $20 meeting fee can be paid here.
• March 24, Pittsburgh, webinar for MSPtv. I’ll be talking about how VARs and MSPs can use cloud-based alternatives to Salesforce.com to run their businesses. You can register here for the webinar here.
• .April 5, St Louis Gateway To Innovation conference. I will be talking about social media business benefits in this conference, St. Louis’ premier IT event of the year. There is a registration fee and you can find out more about the conference here.