Skype announced this morning an upgrade to their Mac client to accommodate group video calling (in beta). They’re offering a free trial right now for the group calling feature, but they say that one-to-one Skype video calling will remain free. Link to the 5.0 download for Mac is on the announcement page. The Windows version 5.0 beta came out earlier this year and it can be found here.
Some new features:
Group video calling
Integration with the Mac Address Book
New & improved (read: worse) user interface
Floating dial pad for calls and SMS
To do group video calling, everyone will need to be running Skype version 5.0 or later, either on Mac or Windows.
I haven’t tested this yet but plan to do so soon. Assuming the group calling rates aren’t ridiculously high, this could be a great teleconferencing solution.
Remember, it’s a beta so things might break. Caveat Skypor.
I recently received a box from BMC Software, an enterprise software provider focused mostly on Business Service Management, whatever that is.
The box was a marketing effort, presumably targeted at professionals who would likely be interested in BMC’s offerings, or at least willing to have them in for a dog-n-pony and introductions to other ‘players’ within the organization.
In the box was a 1/10 scale remote-controlled Ferrari Enzo. A cool little toy, I guess, if you’re into that. Even had a sticker with my name on each door. I assume they’ve done their homework and determined that their market is at least partially populated by people who like remote-controlled cars.
So what’s the clever marketing trick employed by BMC?
They didn’t include the remote control with the car—the thing that makes it go. If you want the remote you have to call BMC and agree to a meeting.
So the marketing here is interesting. I don’t know what these cars sell for, but it’s not trivial like a postcard or some other routine mailing that these companies do. They actually spent some money here, which makes me think they needed to be pretty targeted in their approach, right? Know your market, spend those dollars wisely. But this marketing campaign assumes a few things about the recipient:
He/she is likely to be in the market for BMC products and services
He/she is in a position within the organization to influence high-dollar software projects
He/she might be encouraged to contact BMC and maybe even buy something simply because BMC so generously provided him/her with a non-functioning plastic toy car
I’d be interested to see the ROI on this campaign. Is someone really going to be influenced to do business with a vendor because they got this thing in the mail? It doesn’t even work. Maybe this pays off for BMC, I don’t know. Strange bit of marketing though, in my opinion. I gave the car away.
My friend Heather Bellgardt is a talented artist. She does portraits, sketches, murals, original works. If you need some beautiful art for your project – book illustrations, home decor, web design, gifts with a personal touch, whatever – get in touch with Heather. She does terrific work.
I recently began a 60-day free trial of Apple’s MobileMe cloud syncing service. MobileMe has been around for a while but I haven’t looked into it lately, so I thought I would do the trial and see how well it works.
I don’t need sync services for email because I use the IMAP* setup on all of my email accounts. IMAP allows me to access email from a variety of devices and it will remain in sync regardless of what I use – laptop, mobile phone or web client. If I delete a message on my laptop’s email program, it’s gone when I check email on my phone.
What I want is to have my contacts and calendars remain in sync across whatever devices I use. If I update a contact record on my phone, I want that change to propagate back to my laptop and iPad automagically.
Test Results
In my initial testing MobileMe seems to work exactly as advertised. I created a MobileMe trial account** online at www.me.com, and then did the setup in my Mac’s System Preferences. From there you decide which things you want to sync — Calendars, Contacts, Bookmarks, Mail Accounts, Notes, and some other options — I just selected Calendars and Contacts for now.
** (You have to enter a credit card that will be charged if you choose to continue after the trial period is over. If you don’t want to continue after the 60 days, just go into your account preferences and cancel the account and you won’t be charged.)
For testing purposes I updated a contact record on my iPhone, and in less than a minute the change showed up on the MobileMe web site, in my Mac’s Address Book and on the iPad Address Book (the Contacts app). Then I added a calendar event on the iPad, and likewise it updated quickly to my phone, iCal on the Mac and on the MobileMe site.
iDisk & Find My iPhone
The MobileMe service also includes 20 GB of online storage called iDisk. You can allocate some of this to email and the rest to file storage – I’m not using the MobileMe email account so I just set it to allow 19 GB for storage. I copied a few files into the Documents area of iDisk and it all showed up as expected, but I haven’t done any iDisk testing beyond that. The iDisk icon sets up on your desktop and works like it’s just another file system or hard drive mounted on your machine. I’ve been using Dropbox for cloud storage, and while I think Dropbox is more mature as a storage product, iDisk is a nice addition to the MobileMe suite of services. And for most individuals, 20 gigabytes of storage is plenty for a secondary cloud backup.
Find My iPhone is pretty cool, and it also works with the iPad. Once set up, it will display a map with the approximate location of your device. You can push a message to pop-up on the screen, set a passcode lock, or remotely wipe data from the device. I tested the message service, and in about 10 seconds I saw the message on my phone. This service alone might be worth the membership price.
Pricing
The MobileMe service from Apple is $99 annually for an individual, or $149 a year for a Family Pack (up to five users). Apple’s pricing details are here. For what it offers I think that’s a pretty reasonable deal. There are some free services out there for file storage and syncing, but many of them require technical gymnastics to get it all working together. MobileMe is simple to set up and seems to work well, and it appears that Apple is committed to long term cloud services – they recently invested $1 billion in a new data center in North Carolina. There’s a big cloud play of some kind happening there for Apple.
But… you can save some money buying MobileMe through Amazon. Today I see the individual user version offered for $70.89 (30% off) and the Family Pack for $101.98 (32% off). I have also seen it offered on ebay, so you can get it for less than what Apple is charging. (There’s also some speculation going around that Apple might make MobileMe free of charge in order to better compete with Google’s free cloud services (Gmail, Calendar, Contacts), although Google’s products are filled with ads while MobileMe is not.) When my free trial is up I plan to buy it from Amazon if Apple is still charging. Based on my early testing, I’m pretty sure I want to continue with the service. It looks really good so far and does what I want.
MobileMe on Windows
Apple claims that MobileMe supports Windows PCs as well as the Mac, although I haven’t tested the Windows setup myself. They say the service will work with Outlook, Outlook Express, and Windows Contacts in XP and Vista. You can also sync between Mac and PC if you have both systems in your home or office – this is good, because a true cloud sync service should be platform-independent, like the web.
* IMAP vs POP
Most email services support IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) setup, in addition to POP (Post Office Protocol). POP is fine if you always do your email from one machine and don’t have a need to manage your messages from multiple locations. For more on IMAP vs POP, see this article that compares the two.
Melissa Pierce asks the question: is the planned life worth living?
Her documentary film, Life In Perpetual Beta, looks at “the ways in which technology has/is/will change the ways in which we think about ourselves as individuals and a society. It is exploring the cultural shift that technology creates as it enables people to live less planned and more passionate lives.”
She explores the common idea that we need to have a master plan, a Purpose In Life or a Big Goal that drives our lives and our careers — when in truth, many of us live from one moment to the next and are drawn to different things at different points in our lives. What we enjoy at 25 may be far less interesting at 45.
Plans are good. We need to make plans and have goals and a vision of something ahead of us. But if we cling too tightly to the plan we could miss something good.
I like Jeffrey Zeldman’s quote in the film:
There are people who are so professional that they can work on something they don’t care about, and I always feel somewhat unprofessional because I can’t do that.
During an interview I was once asked “Where do you see yourself in five years?” I answered honestly: “I don’t know. I don’t have a plan, I just look for opportunities.” This may have come across as unprofessional or short-sighted, but it was the truth. It’s still true. And I got the job.
Diaspora looks ambitious but worth watching over the next few months. The stated goal is to create a social network that’s distributed, decentralized and open source – kind of like a Facebook that’s not run by anyone in particular. Each participant is a ‘seed’ that communicates directly with other users, rather than running through a central portal. Sounds a lot like P2P (peer-to-peer) networking, like Limewire, Kazaa and other file-sharing tools.
I don’t use Facebook* but I’ve seen news lately about security problems and users’ personal data being shared without their knowledge. I don’t know if the average Facebook user thinks about these things or even cares, but we should. Once we post something to these sites, that data belongs to the site and will reside, possibly forever, on a server somewhere that you can’t get to, despite what their privacy policy may state to the contrary.
I’ll be watching to see what the Diaspora team comes up with. It sounds interesting, and might be a good approach to networking without compromising your personal information.
* I created a Facebook account sometime last year out of curiosity, but I didn’t put much information on there other than the city where I live and the high school and college I attended. I wanted to see what all the hype was about. Then I started getting messages from people who went to my high school who wanted to ‘get in touch’ so I went into Facebook to see who they were, and I didn’t remember some of these people at all. I don’t think I even knew them in high school. One person I did remember though, but when I looked at her Facebook profile I could see that she was now quite weird and wanted everyone to know it. I closed my Facebook account.
A good analysis of the financial crisis from Paul Johnson at Forbes.com, In Business, Simplicity Is Golden. He advocates greater simplicity in our banking system.
I have always been highly suspicious of things that ought to be simple but have become too intricate for me to grasp. And I am doubly suspicious of those who make them so.
I think this is good advice in any business venture — stick with what makes sense to you. If it’s overly complicated, think twice, and ask questions until you get an answer that satisfies you. If it can’t be communicated in plain language, something is wrong.
Here are some pointers: Trust what is simple and can be understood at a glance. Anything more elaborate, investigate carefully and thoroughly; if it’s too convoluted for you to grasp, pull back. Remember, in financial matters the object of complexity is all too often to conceal the truth, to deceive.
Most people hate sitting through business presentations. They tend to be filled with boring facts and figures, graphs and pie charts, bullet-pointed business cases and strategies and ugly slides cluttered with too much text and graphics.
Microsoft’s PowerPoint is the software program commonly used for creating and presenting these slides, and I’ve often heard the complaint that PowerPoint is the problem, that it’s boring and clumsy. But if you’re sitting through a boring presentation (or planning to give a presentation yourself), remember that PowerPoint isn’t the problem. If a presentation is boring it’s because the presenter is boring. PowerPoint is just the tool used to project that boringness to some unfortunate group that’s been asked to sit through this mess.
If a presenter is uninspiring it’s probably because they haven’t learned how to organize their message and communicate in this format. But delivering a well thought-out message and engaging the audience is perhaps one of the most important things we can bring to our communications.
Another dynamic that I think is going on in presentations is this: your audience wants you to succeed. There are exceptions, but generally speaking I think people want to see a speaker do well, to see them inform and inspire and educate their audience, to see them deliver their message with a calm confidence and mastery of the content. They want to stand and applaud.
Presentation Resources
TED Talks (ted.com) – not every presenter is especially skillful in these talks, but many of them are and there are lots of good examples here of how to deliver a compelling message.
