Small Business IT Weekly

Sonata Sounds Like Music To My Ears

A little known company, Boston Power, that makes laptop batteries is reportedly close to announcing its first major customer.

Word is, Boston Power's Sonata battery could be coming to a laptop near you in the near future. No word on which PC maker is in talks to bundle them in, but the buzz is that it is likely Hewlett-Packard.

Here are some comparisons between Sonata and today's typical battery:

- Current batteries (no pun intended) can be recharged about 150 times. Sonata can be recharged about 1000 times.

- Sonata also is greener technology. It uses no heavy metals and less toxic chemicals than traditional batteries.

It's nice to know innovation and entrepreneurship is still alive and well despite Wall Street.

Blackberry Storm Watch

You likely won't see people camped out in lawn chairs (for one thing it's November and too cold) to purchase one, but Blackberry Storm is hitting shelves of Verizon stores tomorrow with much hype regardless.

It's the first touchscreen Blackberry with built-in GPS, Mp3 and html web browser (and yes, it does the turn it sideways thing).

It's also priced at $199 competitive with the iPhone and the Google Android phone.

Am i missing something? The Blackberry Bold launched earlier this month through AT&T stores. It prices out between $299 up to more than $650.

All I can say is poor President-elect Obama. Looks like he'll have to take a pass on both.

My Gmail Is Creeping Me Out

I'm rethinking my e-mail address. It's a huge decision to switch e-mail accounts. But Google you are weirding me out!

You get what you pay for. I understand that. So naturally, there are ads displayed down the right side of my email client (gmail). There's nothing new about this. What's new is my growing discomfort with it.

I've just been paying attention more to the content of those ads (happy news for Google and it's advertisers, admittedly). The ads are clearly triggered by keywords in the content of my e-mails; those being drafted and those being read.

File this under "when intuitive becomes intrusive". There's a line and gmail continues to cross it.

If I'm writing an e-mail about my kids, then toy ads pop up on the right side. If I'm writing a whiny e-mail to a girlfriend about my daily emotional dramas, I get self-help ads. You get the idea.

There's just something inherently wrong about this. It's one thing to cull information from my profile and pigeon hole me into a demographic and market to me accordingly (slimy, but I accept that). Sending bots to crawl through my e-mails for key words to trigger appropriate content ads is too far. It's ingenius from a marketing standpoint. But for a company whose mantra is "don't be evil"; well, memo to Google.

This is evil!

Presidential Requirement: Be a Luddite

Although no firm decisions have been made (forced) on our new President-elect, Barack Obama. It's not looking good. Blackberry is likely to lose its most famous customer. It's likely President-elect Obama is more upset about it than RIM (Blackberry's parent company).

If he kept it, Obama would be our first president that does "the e-mail". In retrospect, we all laughed at John McCain's disconnect with e-mail. But, sadly maybe he was on to something. It appears e-mail presents just too many security risks for POTUS (President of the United States). There's the risk of hacking, of course, of both the e-mail client and the servers where e-mails are archived. There's also a little thing called the "President Records Act", which puts all of his correspondence written or digital under the scrutiny of public record keeping.

Questions that come to mind:

- Aside from the President Records Act, if the Blackberry isn't secure enough for the President; then how is it secure enough for anyone else sending and receiving sensitive data. The President isn't the only one with secrets to keep. His are just more important.

No wonder it's become an echo chamber.

Bread, Wine, Beer and Now Eternal Life

This weekend I was baking bread and experimenting with bread starters, some of which
can require extreme dedication and along the way I came across this research.

Turns out USC scientists have found a way to extend the life of yeast 10-fold in a
way that is applicable to humans. How would you like to outlive Methuselah?

Expect real estate prices to increase as the world gets more crowded.

Curt run a project management software company in Austin Texas.

It’s a Cell Phone, It’s a Boarding Pass

From the "why didn't I think of that" file, American Airlines is allowing passengers to check in with their cell phones, rather than a paper boarding pass. The boarding pass is sent to the passenger's cell with a barcode. Zip, zip, you're on board.

So far, you might say it's a pilot program (pun intended). It's only available at Chicago's O'Hare. However, boarding by cell or PDA will also be available at LAX and John Wayne Airport in Orange County this week.

I expect this trend to spread. I can't resist making a pithy remark, however.

How is it that airlines can roll out new forward thinking services like mobile boarding passes, while the meals on wheels are an atrocity?

The Leakiest Parts of Your Network

Here's some weekend reading for you. Cisco has released an exhaustive white paper on their latest findings on data leakage from a global survey of IT professionals,

Interesting nuggets:

- One third of IT professionals in the survey worry most about data leaks via USB devices. E-mail ranks number two at 25%.

- Nearly half admit they are not properly training their employees about data security.

Where's your weak point? If you don't know, you don't need to conduct a worldwide survey. Just poll your employees. Their responses may surprise you.

Microsoft and Verizon Sitting in a Tree

You know the rest. The two are reportedly very close to inking a partnership deal that would make Microsoft's mobile search engine the default search engine on all of Verizon's cell phone accounts. The two would share the ad revenues, with Microsoft guaranteeing $550 to $650 million in revenues for Verizon over the first five years. Apparantly, Google was also courting Verizon for the same deal. However, it would only guarantee about half of that.

Word is, Microsoft is also negotiating a separate deal to bundle in the Windows Mobile operating system on more Verizon phones.

So much for Google Android showing up at the Verizon store.

The battle lines are drawing up. AT&T has the iPhone. T-Mobile, so far, has Google Android. And Verizon may be jumping the broom with Microsoft.