INovation

Every year in Feb. there is an event in California called Demo. This event is where startups get to pitch their products to venture capitalists. the catch is they have exactly 6 minutes to do the presentation. There are always lots of great products but the pen from LiveScribe blew me away. Watch this video to see what I mean.

Livescribe Video

OK, I know it has been awhile, but I moved across the country; so I was a little tied up

I have blogged about a couple of other instant messengers for Blackberries before, and have had various amounts of success with them. There is a new player out there. WebMessenger has been around for awhile, but they recently announced that they were offering their personal instant messenger for FREE!

I tried it out and it was a breeze to set up. One of the biggest issues with Instant Messengers has been to get MSN Messenger, or Live Messenger on a Blackberry. WebMessenger does this without a hitch. RIM has been saying for some time that they would have a version for MSN, but so far only Yahoo and Google Talk.

Before you try to get it working on your Blackberry, you need to set up an account on the WebMessenger site. You simply tell them your logins for each of the IM’s out there and then when you login on the blackberry, all your contacts will be there.

…now if I could just get Rogers to offer a cheap data plan.

Meebo is an online Instant Messenger application that allows you to run the application from within your browser. This is perfect for those times when you are traveling and need to use an Internet Cafe, or a locked down PC at work that does not allow you to install applications. I wrote about Meebo previoiusly.

To further integrate Meebo into your browser, Meebo has just released a Firefox extension. This adds a pane to the right side of your browser and lists all of your buddies online. You can also ‘disconnect’ the pane and have it work as if it were a stand alone application.

I have had a Blackberry for a few months now and am finding more and more features for it. This week I finally found an IM client for MSN Messenger. (note to US readers, AIM is the IM of choice in the US, in Canada MSN is the most widely used) The advantage of EQO is that is can do ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) and even Skype via a plugin.

Blackberry does have IM support on its server software, but only if you have the most recent 4.1 version

Now I have email and IM wherever I go…(I just have to figure out if that is really a good thing

A few months ago my company brought in a consultant to teach speed reading. Our CEO is a big believer in it. Now I had heard about people reading a book in a couple of hours. I had seen people passing their finger over pages and saying they were reading a page every 10 seconds. I had always been skeptical, or passed it off as they were savants who had a special trait for speed reading.

But now I am a believer. The trainer took us through a number of exercises to show us that we read slow, basically because we were taught to read slow. No one is ever taught to speed read. It is fascinating to see how both your reading speed and comprehension can increase. The course lasted about 6 hours. In the last 2 hours of the course, I read the Old Man and the Sea from cover to cover and got about half way through the biography of Lance Armstrong.

There are a couple of tools that you can use to help increase your reading speed.

Spreeder

Zap Reader

Tags: speed reading, reading, spreeder, zap reader

If you have been using Outlook for awhile and have not been archiving, then take a look over your shoulder. That’s that IT person getting ready to delete messages in your InBox because you have gone over the limit… again!

There is an automated way to set up your Outlook to reduce your InBox size, and at the same time, not lose any email messages.

The first step is to create local Archive folders. I chose to create a folder per year to keep track of old emails. You should also create the folders in My Documents so they will follow you when you upgrade systems. For example I have created yearly Archive folders in \my documents\outlook\200X archive.pst.

To create these folders, select Tools—Options—Other tab—Auto Archive. You should see the Window below:

Then hit the Browse… button to get to the Window below. Go to My Documents. Once there select the yellow folder button near the top right to create a new folder, in my case I created Outlook. Create several folders within Outlook, if needed.

The last step is to select the folder you just created as your default archive folder. In my case that would be 2006 Archive.pst. Then exit by selecting OK.

The next step is making these folders visible, so you can access them for searching. To do this you select File—Open—Outlook data file…

If this is the first time you are Archiving, then you may want to split up your InBox into multiple folders. To do this select your InBox, then select File—Archive from the main menu.

From here you can divide up your InBox. In my case, using years, I would repeat this step, entering 1/1/2003, then 1/1/2004 etc, in the Archive items older than: box and selecting the appropriate Archive folder using the Browse…button for each year.

The last pointer I wanted to give was that you can have different Archive properties for each folder in you InBox. Let’s say you had a folder that was daily reports and there was no need to keep these for 3 months. You decided to keep them for 2 months, or less. You can right-click on the folder, select Properties—AutoArchive and adjust the time as per below.

The only maintenance that is required going forward, it to create a new folder each year (or as often as you choose) and set the default to this folder using step 1.

For the past couple of months I have been using a blog editor from Qumana. Blog editors allow you to work offline creating posts in a WYSIWYG environment. Qumana is very easy to use and has some nice added features that I will discuss below.

The software will work with most blog software. Whether it is hosted by the blog provider, or if you have your own provider using blogging software, Qumana will recognize most applications during the installation. I had a minor issue on my laptop, where Qumana would not recognize the “end point” or the version of blogging software I was using. Their tech support asked what version of Java I was using. Turns out I had an old version of the Java runtime. Once I upgraded, everything went smoothly.

With the latest beta update, they have made it even easier to add images to posts. Once you hit the add image button, you get the following window. You select how you want the image aligned, then upload it from you PC and it drops right into your post.

The posting editor above is easy to use. It has all the standard formatting options. The software picked up on my Wordpress categories; there on the right. If you notice the 2 green buttons, they offer some added functionality.

The Insert Tags button allows you to list multiple Technorati tags within your post. Technorati is a blog specific tag search engine. In most software, you have to get into writing HTML code to have the tags appear in  your post and have them linked back to Technorati properly. In Qumana, you simply open the dialogue box above and start typing.

The other button is Insert Ad. This allows you to \’monetize\’ your blog. That means you can make money from your posts. Similar to Google adsense, Q-Ads as they\’re called; allow you to put advertisements in your blog based on content. When someone clicks on the ad, you get paid.

Last but not least, Qumana allows you to future date your posts. You may ask yourself, “why would anyone want to do that?” Think about vacations. If you don\’t keep up with new and interesting posts, you will see a decline in your readership. So before you go on vacation, you can sit down and \’powerpost\’ 7 entries and schedule them to appear 1 a day for the next 7 days. No one will even know you were away. Below is the highlighted area for picking the date of each post.

As mentioned above, this review is on their beta product. They have had regular updates, and their tech support have been very responsive. If you are a regular blogger, I would highly recommend taking a look at this software.

In our business, email is both a curse and a blessing. When you get up to 100+ emails a day, it is hard to stay on top of the action items that result from these emails. It is one thing to read 100+ emails; it is quite another to act on the 20-30 action items that could result from those emails.

Outlook 2003 has some great features for keeping on top of your email. The 2 features I will discuss in this post, are search folders and follow-up flags.

When you receive an email that requires you to do something, you can add a flag to that email to follow-up later. Simply click on the flag on the far right of the Inbox window. The default colour is Red, but you can set several different colours by right-clicking on the flag.

If this action is something that has a specific date or time you want to follow up, just right-click on the flag, select Add reminder… and set the date and time.

In previous versions of Outlook, it was a little difficult to find these flagged entries. But with 2003, you have Search Folders. If you notice at the top of the Folders section on the left there is a Favorite Folders section. You can add many different search folders based on criteria you choose. The one that we will discuss here is the For Follow Up folder. Notice that there are 6 items in this folder. There is one entry for each flag that you set.

You can then use this list to work through your action items. When you have completed each one, simply click on the flag, and it will be checked off as completed.

To add more search folders, just right-click on an existing search folder and select Add search folder… or select File from the main menu, then New, then Search folder…