It’s easy to overlook the business impact of Google’s new social network, Google+, at least for the moment. Google+, launched June 28, is still somewhat invite-only, and despite the overwhelmingly positive reviews, even the earliest adopters are still figuring out how it fits into their online and social lives.

But ignore the wider implications of Google+at your professional peril. The future of Google+ as a whole is unclear, but there are pieces and planned features that could definitely disrupt the way you communicate and work with others. Here are four key points to ponder:

Google+ Hangouts are group video chat done right

If you want to impress someone who thinks big about the social web, you’d tell them about the unique privacy and posting features in Google+, or perhaps the intuitive “Circles” interface for separating, say, your bosses and college friends. But if you want to really impress just about anyone, show them Hangouts.

Hangouts are group video chats that don’t require anyone to check their Skype settings. You choose a Circle of contacts (or create one), then enter the room when you want to be available for video or text chatting. Whenever someone is speaking, the screen shows their video feed, and then switches to whoever inevitably cuts them off. It’s done in a browser, it doesn’t require Flash (Edit: Bonus For iPad Users) and it is, as Om Malik put it, something Skype will grow to hate, especially as businesses paying money for such services get interested.

Google+ upgrades other Google Apps you’re already using

Picasa Web Albums was, until last week, a competent photo-storage and sharing service that didn’t have the reach, popularity, or style of Flickr and other photo networks, let alone the up-and-coming mobile photo services. But to those using Google+, Picasa is now the backend of a seamless image flow. Take a photo on your Android device, and Google+ (with your permission) automatically uploads the photo in the background to a private Picasa album. When you’re looking for something to share, you simply pluck a photo from that bucket of recent snaps, and everything else can be easily organized into albums with easy sharing tools.

It’s no far reach to say Google+ will likely tie itself into Gmail, Calendar, and other Google Apps services that businesses use. Whether Google “hammers” it in or simply makes the integration too good to pass up, it’s likely their social service will actually become a value-added “plus” to Google services, not just an additional noisemaker.

Businesses will have “Pages” much faster than with Facebook

As Facebook came to prominence, businesses and brands were ushered through a twisty road with few signs or markers. First they were just like regular people, and could only have a few thousand “Friends.” They could create “apps” instead, but the platform viability was uncertain. Finally, they were offered “Pages,” with just a few restrictions, but the transitions weren’t always smooth.

If Google wants to present Google+ as a social experience that has learned from its progenitors, business profiles is a rich, undiscovered area. Google is already working on “pages”, and if the actual-person experience is anything to go by, there’s a good chance businesses won’t be allowed to be their own worst enemies and intrude too far into users’ experiences, while still keeping a presence.

Much, much better contact management

The lazy way to describe the Circles in Google+ is as the equivalent of Facebook’s lists. That’s misleading, though, because Facebook’s lists are remarkably painful to use, and the company might not even believe in them.

Circles is a drag-and-drop way to classify your contacts without becoming a pro-am librarian. If Jerry is both your former sales representative and someone you see socially around your city, you drag him into the “Widget Co.” and “Wichita” Circles, but keep your human resources rep only in “Widget Co.” That way, the things you see in your social stream make sense in context, and the stuff you share only reaches the right eyes. You can follow anyone, but whether they follow you back is up to them. It’s a good harmony between Twitter’s asynchronous and public relationships, and Facebook’s dorm-like sharing networks.

From a social and sharing standpoint, Circles seems to work for Google’s early adopter crowd. But it’s not hard to see how LinkedIn might be threatened by such an easy network management tool, and how tools like the video chat Hangouts, the group messaging Huddles, and business-friendly pages could create some smart synergy for those with many networks to manage. And, heck, anything that makes managing your Google Contacts more intuitive should get some kind of warm welcome.

Original article written by Kevin Purdy for Tech Republic

When you think about how deeply Google is ingrained in the everyday culture of people across the planet and how its brand has become one of the most powerful names in the history of business, it’s easy to forget that the company hasn’t even been around for 15 years yet.

Despite its relatively recent arrival, Google has a preeminent place among the most important organizations on the planet. Sure, Apple and Microsoft make a lot more money than Google, and there are plenty of older companies and even governments that employ a lot more people, and service organizations like the Red Cross and the United Way that outwardly provide greater services to humanity. But, Google’s primary mission “to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful” is arguably the most important work of the early 21st century. A hundred years from now, when people look back at this period of time, that’s likely to be the thing they point to as the biggest turning point of this era because of its ability to empower people economically, socially, intellectually, and politically.

On Monday, Google co-founder Larry Page took the reins of the company at a time when it has reached a crossroads. After being laser-focused on information search for its early history, the company has strayed in lots of different directions in recent years with many experiments that have largely ended in failure and a lot of head-scratching (e.g. Google Wave).

As Page takes over the CEO job from Eric Schmidt, who navigated the company through its coming of age, it’s time for Google to refocus on what it wants to be now that it’s all grown up. Here are the top two priorities that should be on Page’s mind.

1. Get serious about product quality

Google became Google for two reasons: 1.) The quality of its search results were so much better than everyone else’s, and 2.) The company refused to use display ads on Google.com and consequently rewrote the rules of Internet advertising. Let’s put the second point aside for now, since Google isn’t having any problems in the revenue department.

However, the quality of Google’s search results are definitely under duress. Entire cottage industries and content farms have developed around gaming Google’s algorithm in order to get their (often worthless) pages to the top of Google’s search results. While Google fights a constant war with these “SEO spam” sites, it’s not doing a very good job of keeping up. Experian Hitwise reported that Google’s search success rate (users who visit a site after a search) dropped by 13% in 2010.

Even long-time Google and Web supporter Tim O’Reilly said, “It’s clear that Google is losing some kind of war with the spammers. I think Google has in some ways taken their eye off the ball.”

Page needs to devote more of Google’s resources to fixing this problem and rally the troops around the idea of attacking this issue since it threatens to undermine everything that Google is trying to accomplish.

However, the quality problem isn’t just an issue in search on Google.com. Google continues to release products into the market before those products are ready and let product problems languish for months or years before fixing them or simply pulling the plug on the product. For example, the first version of Android was a disaster when it was released in 2008 (a year later, the 2.0 version was finally acceptable). Google Apps had badly inconsistent features across its various office products for years after it was first released. And, products like Google Wave and Google Buzz were so badly conceived and poorly executed that they should have never been released to the public.

Page needs to rethink Google’s product development and launch strategy and demand a much higher standard of quality before going to market. That doesn’t mean Google should stop experimenting or running beta programs. Perish the thought. It just needs to get a lot more serious and discriminating about the way it launches products. And, it needs to devote more resources to search.

2. Forget Facebook

The worst thing Google can do right now is to get jealous about the media fawning over Facebook the way it used to fawn over Google. So what if magazines want to put Facebook’s twentysomething CEO on their dead-tree leaflets. Google is 10 times more important than Facebook, which is rapidly devolving into a MySpace-like waste of digital bits.

Every few months there’s a new rumor about Google launching its own social network to compete with Facebook — Google Me, Google Circles, etc. The best move Google could make in social is to not react to Facebook but simply play its own game. Continue to integrate social controls into search. Let the crowds help vote down the spam and worthless content in search. Allow people to connect to friends from their Google profile — if they choose — and allow friends’ searching preferences, votes, and favorites to add a social filter to search results (and let the social filter be toggled on and off).

Google is already doing some of those things, but the point is that is the kind of stuff Google is really good at in the social space and that’s the stuff it needs to focus on. On the other hand, building a social network does not play to Google’s strengths. If you look at what the company created with Google Wave and Google Buzz, it’s abundantly clear that this is not the kind of stuff Google engineers and product leaders should be spending their time doing.

If Google gets distracted chasing Facebook, it risks becoming like Microsoft, which has been so distracted chasing Google in the past five years that its core products have suffered considerably and are in greater danger than ever of losing their primacy.

Bottom line

Page needs to remember the mission that made Google great – organizing the world’s information. He needs to re-energize the troops around that goal, launch an all-out assault on SEO spam, and keep from getting distracted by Facebook. The task of digitizing the world’s data is far from complete — even just the public data. If Google can pull off more private-public partnerships like the one it’s doing in Kansas City, Kansas for high speed fiber broadband than it can help also bring a lot more valuable information to the Web — from libraries to public documents to historical archives to government data, for example. This is a service for the Internet community and it enhances Google’s business model by allowing people to use Google search for even more services.

As my colleague Larry Dignan noted, Google investors are going to be pressuring Page to find a big second revenue source beyond search. However, first Page will need to shore up Google’s core mission and get the company refocused on the right product strategy. If he pulls it off, Google has a shot at solidifying its reputation for doing perhaps the most important work of the early 21st century.

Article By Jason Hiner Of Tech Republic

Last week, Google announced plans to release its own operating system, one that will presumably compete with Microsoft. This week, Microsoft responds with a challenge of its own.

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Last week Google announced plans to release its own operating system, one based on their Cloud technology, and one intended to compete with Microsoft’s dominance in the operating system market. It generated a lot of comments in the discussion section, with mostly a wait and see attitude towards how it will affect those in a user support position.

This week, Microsoft responds with a challenge of its own. The Financial Times (on-line) reports in its headline, “Microsoft to step up Google battle.”

“Microsoft is set to broaden its battle with Google this week,” reports the Financial Times, “as it pushes ahead with online versions of some of its core software, including final plans for a ‘cloud’ operating system designed to extend Windows to the internet. The news comes days after Google took aim at Microsoft with the announcement of a PC operating system of its own, dubbed Chrome OS.”

“The rival moves point to an intensification of the battle between the technology giants, with Google trying to extend its internet platform to PCs, and Microsoft moving in the opposite direction. While Google’s PC operating system is not due to appear in new computers until the second half of 2010, Microsoft’s cloud operating system will be launched formally this year.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m looking at this from two perspectives.

First of all, as those who provide support to end users, we always try to remain a step ahead of the next generation of technology. We’d like to know what’s coming. We have to decide whether or not we’ll support it, and if so, what’s the best course of action.

But secondly, I must admit, I’m watching this from the seat of a spectator, not unlike at a sporting event. We see on the field before us, two titans of technology battling each other for market dominance. We all know that a lot of technology support professionals would like to see Microsoft knocked down a few notches and are critical for its reluctance to join the open source movement. Google, on the other hand, has gotten just about as big as Microsoft, but in their own niche of technology. Google, for instance, not only dominates the search engine market, but it has actually transformed itself from a noun to a verb – something not many companies have managed to pull off. (Xerox, of course, comes to mind.)

What’s your take on this Google versus Microsoft challenge? How does it affect your role as a user support pro?

And will Google eventually become a technology demon like Microsoft has become (at least in the eyes of some)? How big will it have to get, and how much of a market share will it have to gain before technology pros want to see Google knocked down a few notches? After all, the public loves rags to riches stories, like Google, but then again, they also love to see the mighty and powerful fall.

Article written by Joe Rosberg of Tech Republic

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/helpdesk/?p=825&tag=nl.e019

Skype on Monday announced a beta that will allow it to connect to corporate telephone networks across the globe.

Technically, Skype’s beta is dubbed Skype For SIP for Business users. SIP stands for Session Initiation Protocol, which is a standard for voice over Internet protocol used it corporate networks. Simply put, Skype will now connect to corporate phone systems so you can Skype fixed line phones and mobiles from a traditional PBX system — your standard phone set-up.

For now, Skype’s pricing once the beta runs its course is to be determined. In the meantime, standard rates—a little more than 2 cents for most global calls—apply. However, it’s likely that the margins might be a little better than its current a few pennies here and there to call a land line setup. If not, Skype may at least get more volume if it’s an official member of the corporate network club. Skype already works with corporate hardware and integrates with Outlook and Salesforce.com, but its latest move solidifies its corporate standing and at least allows for better enterprise support.

Skype’s customer base is mostly consumer, but it has been reaching out to be more business friendly. Call quality and security have been ongoing concerns, but it’s not like Skype has been locked out of the business market — Skype calls for business happen all the time on the sly.

Here’s what this latest move means to Skype:

* Skype can go from being an ancillary product that enterprises support quietly to one integrated into phone systems;
* Click to call will be more of a reality for businesses as Skype 405 million users connect to corporate systems;
* Skype will get incremental revenue because businesses will throw business at it to save on global calling.

For the enterprise, Skype for SIP means businesses can manage Skype calls, use their existing equipment and software to route calls and buy online numbers.

And the key point:

During the beta period all calls will be charged at standard Skype rates. Further pricing details will be announced when the product is fully launched later this year.

That pricing, which is likely to be tweaked for corporations, is likely to translate into more revenue for Skype and its parent eBay, which may be looking to unload it. Perhaps eBay can use Skype to drum up more corporate business.

Further Information:

Yahoo Finance Statement
Skype Blog Article
Original Article on ZDNet

I was surfing the web the other night looking for an updated download and came across filehippo.com.

Eee Gads, I exclaimed, this is like an Aladdins Cave of useful software – I must write a little bit about this site on my blog as other people may find it useful too.

What is filehippo.com all about?

Well …. using their words (not mine) it’s goes something like this:

With FileHippo.com our aim is to provide you with the simplest method of downloading the newest versions of the best software – without the usual excessive popups or spyware and without the low quality software.

Features

* Only the best software, we focus on quality not quantity.
* Very fast servers with 100Mb connections, to make your downloads as fast as possible.
* We keep the old versions of programs, so if you update and don’t like the new version, you can always return to the old one.
* All software is 100% spyware and virus free.
* Filtering feature to allow you to only show Freeware and/or Non-beta software.
* Full support for resuming downloads and download managers.
* Change log and technical details for downloads.
* RSS feeds for all updates, categories and for individual programs.
* New European and US download servers

I’ve taken a cursory glance through the links on the homepage of FileHippo and discovered that some of the software I already use needs updating.

I have also discovered that some of the software archives also contain installers for Linux & Mac boxes in addition to the usual Windows ones – bonus!!

Here’s the link for your use:

http://www.filehippo.com/

Please Note:

This is not an endorsement of any of the software available on the site – just a post about a site that may be useful to you

Alpha and beta test releases of applications provide an easy way to get early, free access to new software. Google Chrome serves as an excellent example of how important it is to be very careful with testing versions of applications.

Google’s new Chrome browser is big news right now. It seems like everyone has something to say about it — and everyone, including me, wants to give it a try. There are a number of reasons I will not use Chrome as my primary browser, however:

• The first reason is the most insurmountable and unignorable right now — the fact that only a Microsoft Windows version has been released at this time. I use Windows, Linux & Mac and would prefer a browser that is cross platform.
• Several minor operating quirks, for which I have not discovered any work-arounds other than using a different browser, exist. One, for instance, is the fact that Chrome inserts “hard” linebreaks when submitting form data in a text area field.
• Being an early beta test release, there are, of course, some security issues cropping up. Some of them are actual design flaws — and such flaws may be significant enough that I cannot justify allowing myself to run afoul of them for my primary Web browsing activities.

In “What are the security implications for Google Chrome?,” I made the point that “Chrome represents a lot of new code,” and as a result of that fact, the potential security dangers of new and untested code will occasionally be realized in very real vulnerabilities. In time, one hopes, the vulnerabilities that arise will be fixed; discovery and correction of such flaws is part of the reason for a beta test, after all.

In the meantime, you have to be very careful — make sure you don’t run afoul of those vulnerabilities in a way that can actually cause any damage to your privacy and your computer’s security. Some of Chrome’s vulnerabilities and weaknesses in design provide excellent indicators of the kind of measures you should take to protect yourself when using alpha and beta test software:

• Not so much a vulnerability as a poor choice of feature design, Google Chrome’s cookie handling configuration is less than perfectly conceived. For example, with Firefox you can configure it to require approval of every cookie you want by choosing “ask me every time” for the “Keep until:” configuration option. Chrome does not offer a comparable option.
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  Of course, this is more a matter of preference for long-term use than of security. The real security concern that should be recognized is that cookies should simply not be accepted at all in an early test version of a brand new Web browser. Until it has been extensively tested, the possibility of cookie management being improperly implemented so that data might be shared across domains is a danger to which I don’t care to expose myself. Of course, this means I can’t use Chrome to log into any Website where cookies are required for authentication (except in carefully selected test cases) — which means I can’t really use Chrome as my primary browser, of course.

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• A download vulnerability in Google Chrome has been discovered, and it’s getting a lot of attention. The problem is that Chrome may download something you don’t want downloaded without checking to see if you actually want to download it. This particular vunerability isn’t any kind of problem for me, personally, at all: an effective work-around for it is to simply configure Chrome to always ask where you want downloads saved because this gives you a chance to cancel an unwanted download — and that is one of the first configuration changes I make to any browser I use anyway.
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  The general problem this points out is that sometimes new applications automate things that should often not even be allowed in the first place — and there may not always be such an easy configuration fix for it as there is in this case. For this reason, when using a testing version, a new application should be “sandboxed” in some way so that the (likely inevitable) vulnerabilities of a significant collection of new code would not be allowed to affect the rest of your operating environment. This may mean running it on a separate testing system (which is effectively what I’m doing) or running it only within a strictly divided environment all its own, such as a Unix chroot jail. This, too, serves to make it very difficult to use Chrome as my primary browser.

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• Finally, there are reports that Google Chrome saves passwords in plaintext. This is, as any security professional should know, a colossal blunder for security software design. Saved passwords should not exist in a readable form in files on the hard drive; if stored at all, they should only be saved in an encrypted form. Because of the way Chrome offers to import settings from another Web browser, and doesn’t let you pick and choose which settings to import, when installing Chrome you should simply refuse to let it import any settings at all — and, once it is installed, configure Chrome to “Never save passwords” for general use.
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  Such reports of Chrome’s mishandling of passwords are apparently incorrect. In fact, it seems that Chrome uses an easily adjustable function to handle encryption, internally, judging by the linked review of the source for Chrome’s password manager. This should come as a significant relief to anyone who has been using Chrome to access Websites that require a password, and allowing the browser to save those passwords. Still, Chrome has a lot of real-world testing to go through before I’d trust its password management too much, since it’s easy to miss a bug that produces a significant vulnerability like this in early stages of development.
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  Because password management is so easy to get wrong for those who do not have extensive experience with such matters of security design in software development, the password handling functionality of a new test release of a brand new application should simply not be trusted. This is not necessarily a deal-breaker for using Chrome at all, but for those who are used to the convenience of secure and effective password management in a browser that saves passwords for us, this can make a new application available only as a testing release very inconvenient for everyday use.

Other potential dangers exist as well, including the possibility of improper implementation of SSL/TLS encrypted connections to secure Websites, cross-site scripting capabilities, and effective privilege separation. Nobody can really predict all the potential problems of a completely new application, such as Google Chrome today, which is why a simple remedy such as sandboxing the entire application is the only really effective solution to the problem of securing oneself from the vulnerabilities of a brand new testing release of an application.

The beta testing release of Google Chrome is worth trying out — but don’t let yourself believe it should be used as your primary browser just yet. It’s called a “beta” release for a reason.

Of course, Google calls pretty much everything “beta” even years after initial release, and not all of it is something that you can’t safely employ for everyday use. As new as Chrome is, though, it has a way to go before it has been thoroughly tested enough to trust it as much as you might trust another browser.

Probability is that your laptop, desktop, server or network attached storage device have a mechanical hard drive inside. Although mechanical hard drives do provide a cost effective way of storing data, you have probably experienced, or know someone who has experienced, a hard drive failure at one time or another – they are mechanical after all!!

To overcome the failings of mechanical hard drives there’s a new device on the block, it’s called the Solid State Drive. The solid state drive has no moving parts to fail and a wider range of operational conditions and is lightning fast. Feel free to watch the full review below:

An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) provides constant power to a computer system when a power fluctuation or power loss occurs.

Built-in electronics constantly monitor line voltages. If the line voltage fluctuates above or below predefined limits, or fails entirely, the UPS supplies power to the computer system from built-in batteries. The UPS converts the direct current (DC) battery voltage into the alternating current (AC) voltage required by the computer system. The change to batteries must take place very rapidly to prevent data loss.

Most UPS devices are one of the following types:

• Online UPS. An online UPS is connected between the main power and your computer. The main power continuously charges the batteries which supply the power to the computer. This method provides power conditioning, which means that it removes spikes, surges, sags, and noise.

• Standby UPS. A device configured to provide either the main power or its own power source and to switch from one to the other as necessary. When main power is available, the UPS device connects the main power directly to the computer and monitors the main power voltage level. When the main power fails or the voltage falls below an acceptable level, the UPS device switches to its own power.

Other options to consider include:

• Whether to use a separate UPS for each computer or have larger capacity, centralized UPSs that protect multiple computers.
• What type of UPS you want to use.
• How big the UPS needs to be to protect your computer systems.
• How long the UPS needs to run before automatically shutting down.
• What other features your UPS needs to have, such as:
• Continuous conditioning of the incoming power to provide clean, steady power.
• Software that produces statistics or logs UPS information to the event log.
• Software for testing the integrity and reliability of the UPS battery.

For robust resistance to power failures, use UPS hardware connected to the computer and software that handles power failures, including shutting down the system before the UPS batteries are depleted. Without such software, human intervention is needed to shut down the system.

Some operating systems have built-in UPS functionality that takes advantage of the features included with many UPS systems. This may include ensuring the integrity of data on the system by providing for an orderly shutdown of the computer system if a power failure lasts long enough to deplete the UPS batteries.

To fully protect your network, you also need to install a UPS on network devices such as routers, hubs, and bridges. For the best protection, install UPS systems on the cables that connect your computer to your modem, telephone, printer, and network equipment. Most UPS systems have built-in surge protection.