MokaFive, a new take on portable virtualization

If you don’t want to bring your laptop with you but still want to carry most of your environment, tools, and digital documents, MokaFive gives you an interesting and secure way to do this. The software has a nice collection of utilities to pull this off, and while a bit quirky to get installed and operating, it could be a big convenience for people on the go. I say secure because the product is a lot safer than just using a borrowed PC at a public kiosk or library, too. And it is free, too!

You can read my complete review at Tom’s Guides here.

Buying an SSD-equipped laptop

With Apple’s sexy MacBook Air thrusting them into the limelight, laptops with built-in solid state drives (SSDs) are suddenly all the rage. Now they are also available from a variety of Windows OEMs including Lenovo, Toshiba and Dell. While the drives can offer higher performance than conventional rotating storage, they also add about $500- $800 to the base purchase price of laptops, and can be almost ten times as expensive as a standard hard disk.

In this story for JupiterMedia’s IT Management, I discuss the issues and advantages of getting an SSD-equipped laptop.

Bluetooth technology in motion

One of the oldest cold war technologies still in current use has become the leading edge of present-day technology innovation.  The first satellite launched for the Global Positioning System or GPS back in 1978 has in turn launched a wide variety of programs and innovative applications across mining, farming, transit operations, as well as personal navigation.  And a key link between GPS and Bluetooth protocols is pushing innovation even further. You can read more about the relationship in a story I wrote for the Bluetooth.org’s SIGnature magazine (on p. 16) here.

How to host and post videos online

Are you thinking about posting your videos online? There certainly are a lot of different choices, with dozens of providers ranging from the ubiquitous and free YouTube to content delivery networks that own their own pipes and charge starting at $500 a month for basic service. For a project that I have been researching for the past several weeks, I signed up with several of them and tried out the production process to get a better feel for what they offered, the quality of the resulting streaming video, and what they would charge. It is a pretty chaotic world out out there.

First, let’s look at the free players. Besides YouTube, there are: 

• Metacafe.com, limits each video to  <100MB
• Howcast.com  also limits each video to   <100 MB
• Wonderhowto.com  
• ExpertVillage..com
• Google video  
• VideoJug.com    (which doesn’t take flash)
• Vimeo.com, which takes a wide range of formats but limits you to uploading 500 MB per week of total content
• Blip.tv  
• Qik.com, which allows you to upload videos directly from your mobile phone
• Dailymotion.com

Some of these providers (like Blogger) require you to directly upload your video file, while others can link to YouTube and wrap their own content around the video stream.

Why bother with the free sites? Several reasons: First, you get their power of instant searchability, discoverability, and Internet indexing of your content. Second, they make it relatively easy to create and distribute your own “channel” to make branding of your oeuvre more powerful. But the quality isn’t the best, and you have to put up with their page formats, ad banners, and other effluvia around your creation. You also lose the ability to convert and monetize that clickstream.

A level up from the freebie sites are video streaming specialty providers. I looked at several that would sell me their service for less than $100 a month, including:

• Streamhoster.com, which for $25 a month and a free week trial might be the ticket for me. Plus, they have experience with Camtasia, the product that I would be using to create the videos
• Screencast.com, which goes for $70 per year 25 GB storage, 25 GB transfer. Screencast is the same people behind Camtasia, but they are more of a repository than a streaming provider.
• Videohost.com, which doesn’t require a long term contract and for $60 a month covers 500 MB of bandwidth, which isn’t much in the way of storage
• Streamingmediahosting.com basic plan goes for $175 a month, and they have a year contract but liberal cancellation clause. They also offer a multitude of flash players that you can use on your site.

At the top of the heap are the content delivery networks, used by professional broadcasters and people that are very fussy about their video quality. The entry point here is somewhere around $500 a month and quickly goes up from there. Typical sites include:

• Limelightnetworks.com
• Akamai.com
• Edgecast.com
• Cdnetworks.com

This is the level you will need once your videos go viral, or if you are developing your own TV shows and want your advertisers to appreciate the amount of money you are spending in getting your content to your audience. They have servers in multiple cities, and have all sorts of fancy service level agreements and guarantees.

If you are going to pay hard cash money for your video hosting, here are some questions you might want to ask each potential candidate.

1. What is the minimum term of a contract, and can you cancel early without any penalty?  Streamingmediahosting.com will give you up to 30 days to cancel, for whatever reason. Some of the other providers will give you a short trial period so you can evaluate their production and reporting processes.
2. Do you really need multiple servers in multiple cities? If so, you are going to pay a lot for that redundancy. Instead, ask if they own their own data center, and have multiple upstream providers or use multi-homed servers for improved reliability. Better yet, find out when they had their last outage that impacted their video delivery.
3. What are the support hours that you can get someone on the phone? Some providers, like videohost.com offer seven day a week service during the daytime hours that operators are standing by. Most promise email turnaround but as one sales person told me, we have our best support people on duty during the daytime, because that is when they want to work. So having a graveyard shift may not buy you much assurance.
4. How do they report viewers and bandwidth usage charges to you? Typically, with a Web-based portal page that you can login and examine who has watched which video. You may be paying for reports that you don’t need, or conversely get too much information, so it is important to examine these reporting tools before you sign any long-term contract.
5. How much bandwidth do you really need? It can be hard to estimate, because you don’t know your expected traffic, your target encoding rate, and the length of the videos. But if you can do the math, you can get a rough estimate of the bits that you will be paying for. But also understand what happens when you exceed the bandwidth that your monthly allotment entitles you to — with some providers, you can back date and bump up your contract so you won’t be hit with a big bill if your video gets popular.
6. What video formats do they have experience with streaming? In my case, I will be using Camtasia, which has a choice of encoding rates and formats that you can output to. I liked the fact that streamhoster.com had lots of experience with the product, or so the sales person told me.
7. How responsive to your initial inquiry is the firm? I had no reply from limelightnetworks.com, which is supposedly one of the leaders in the field. Most of the others called me back within 24 hours of my inquiry via either email or voice mail.
8. If you are going to use Flash, is the provider part of Adobe’s Premier Partner program and gone through the certification? You can find out real quickly here on their Web site: http://www.adobe.com/products/flashmediaserver/fvss/
9. How are you going to host your overall Web site? Some of the free blogging sites like WordPress are very finicky about what encoder and link and how the player is embedded in their pages. You need to think about how you are going to contain the media player on your pages, and whether you have to upload the video directly to the Web site or just embed a link to it elsewhere. I found LiveJournal.com, a free blogging service that is based in Moscow of all places, to have the easiest video posting production process of the free services, and you can embed videos that are hosted elsewhere. Google’s Blogger.com requires you to upload the video directly to their site, and then place storage limits on you.
10. Finally, don’t be afraid to experiment. Try out a couple of free sites, go for a limited trial with the pay ones, and post a few test videos to see what the quality will be and how the reports will look.

Four steps towards online brand protection

As the Web continues to become a more dynamic and vital part of every corporation, today’s enterprises need to become more proactive at anticipating exploits and abuses that can tarnish their reputation and negatively impact their business operations by consolidating their Internet domain names and putting in place a series of protective measures. This white paper for MarkMonitor shows you the steps you need to take to monitor your total online presence and strategically protect your various corporate brands, trademarks, and domains.

Understanding two-factor authentication

There’s a lot to consider before you implement two-factor authentication, because it touches your enterprise infrastructure, applications and networks. The notion of using something whose only purpose is to help identify you to computing systems is older than the Web, but it’s gaining traction as the number of phishing and hacking exploits rises. 

In my story this week for Baseline magazine, I describe the various choices involved in two-factor authentication. 

Protecting your laptop

With the number of safeguards built into most of today’s computers, there’s no excuse for not protecting your laptop—and your company’s data. It may take a stolen or misplaced laptop for you to realize how easy it is for your company’s data to fall into the wrong hands when you travel. There really is no excuse for this, given the number of protective measures built into most computers these days. The key, of course, is to use these tools before an incident happens.

There are several ways to make your laptop more secure and I discuss them in my story in Baseline magazine this week.

Why endpoint security is still tough

Having tested a number of endpoint security products and lectured to several audiences is still no substitute for actually seeing what works and what doesn’t in the field. And while the products are getting better, there are still no magic, one-size-fits-all solutions. I wanted to share with you some of the things that I have learned from my visits.

First off, most of the vendors are very XP-centric, and some are only now just getting to supporting that other Windows OS that is finding its way on to desktops, you know, Vista? And when it comes to non-Windows, such as Mac OS, Linux, and PDAs, most of the folks are still behind the times. There are products such as StillSecure’s SateAccess that supports both agent and agentless operations, but still many of the agentless products only provide a small subset of protection that their Windows XP agents do. Of course, one solution is to just standardize on XP SP2 for all your desktops, too.

Second, remediation measures are spotty, and in some cases non-existent. When your security product finds a non-compliant endpoint, how do you get it fixed and what does the end user see? Do you shunt them off to a quarantined network, where they can’t do much beyond update their patch levels and browser protection? Or do you block them entirely? How you go about implementing this will impact your support resources, which is why many of you have not gone whole-hog into 100% remediation, even if it were available.

Third, how you manage your entire security policies across your enterprise can make or break which product you end up purchasing. Some of the products require more or less work to integrate with the firewalls, intrusion systems, and other protective measures that you have in place. In one situation, the corporation used its endpoint strategy to control network access by tying in biometrics. When a user authenticates by swiping their fingerprint, they gain access to the network resources and a fully-encrypted local hard drive too. (Seagate has a very nice built-in encryption to their hard drives that was being used in this case.)

Fourth, do you really need to protect everyone? Some of the shops I have seen implement their endpoint software for just consultants, guests, and others that aren’t on managed desktops. Some have to protect everyone, such as on the college campus of my alma mater Union College.  It largely depends on what your desktop population is: the proportion of managed machines, and the proportion of guest workers who are coming in the front door. The theory is that the managed desktop can be locked down and you don’t have to worry as much with these systems as with the random PC that walks in off the street, infected to the hilt. This can also apply to the remediation measures that you implement: you may want to start small here and work your way up too.

This column also appeared in Baseline magazine’s Web site this week.

Lessons learned from visiting Google’s offices

I had an opportunity to visit a friend of mine who works at one of Google’s satellite office (not the main GooglePlex in Mountain View). It was an eye-opening experience on several levels: the number of people still working late at night, the numerous perks, the free food, a fleet of bicycles that anyone could use for their errands, the evening exercise classes, the on-staff masseuse. What you don’t have an on-staff masseuse? Well, that might be a bit much. But it got me thinking about ways that you can make your own shop more desirable and your staff more willing, and most of these don’t cost a lot of dough, either. 

You can read more about this in my column for Baseline this week here.

Five lessons learned from Web publishing

You probably already have a corporate Web site, but it might be time to do a refresh. Having created many Web sites over the years, some for myself, some for professional publishing organizations. I thought I would take a few moments and put together five important principles that I’ve learned from the school of hard knocks.  These appeared as my column this week in Baseline magazine. 

1. If you gate your site, your traffic will drop.

The New York Times found this out the hard way with its Times Select subscription-only service, and had to drop the gate and let everyone in. Today, the name of the game is clicks and eyeballs, and while some people (like the WSJ) can get away with charging admission, you are better off being open and let the world come browse. Certainly, you still need to protect client confidential areas, but if you are trying to put up a site that you want visitors, take down those gates! 

2.   Authoritative deep linking is key.

You want content, and lots of it, and links that come into your site and bring visitors directly to your expertise and authoritative knowledge. In the early days of the Web, we had lawsuits to try to stop deep linking (in other words, site A has a link to a specific page deep within site B). Now, it is just the opposite, and the best way to get Google juice is to have lots of these deep links coming into your site. Encourage this, don’t mess up these links with any site redesign, and you will benefit greatly. I have a page of Web conferencing links on strom.com that I have maintained for more than 10 years, and it has lots of inbound links and as a result ranks high in Google. 

3.   Make your home page dynamic, but don’t overload the links.

Driving organic search is what everyone is after these days, and sometimes it takes over from putting out a dynamic home page. Resist this, and realize that your home page still needs to look uncluttered for humans too. There are sites that try to cram as many links as possible on their home pages, and then have a completely flat site underneath – no sections, no organization, just a mass o’ content that defies human comprehension, all in the service of the Search Gods. Make your home page pleasant, simple, direct, and by all means change it often. The search engines will find you, have no fear, but first people have to find your stuff the old fashioned way. 

4.   Newspapers need unique “hyper-local” content for their Web sites.

Newspapers still for the most part haven’t figured out the Web. The more successful ones know that they have to offer content that is more unique than what they offer in print – for specific neighborhoods, for particular demographics, and for particular purposes beyond selling cars and homes. The more hyper-local they become, the better the job they will do at combating the classified-killers like eBay, Craigslist, and Facebook. Keep this in mind when designing your own newsworthy sections of your site: focus on your niche, your specific audience, and deliver exactly what they need. Archive all your press releases so your customers can find them, because they, not the press, are going to be linking to them and emailing them to their friends. 

5.   The site design should empower, not emasculate your readers, by putting internal search as a priority.

How often do you hear your Web editors say, I can’t find anything on my site? Well, if they work there and live with their content and they can’t find it, how do they expect outsiders to either? I have been on plenty of Web site redesigns where making improvements to the search box was last or nearly so on the priority scale. Search comes first. Don’t expect Google to index your site, spend the dough and make search the best it can possibly be. If your visitors can’t find it, they won’t stick around.

These are all simple concepts to grasp, although not so simple to implement. But they will improve your Web sites dramatically, and I guarantee that they will bring you lots more traffic in the coming months.