Tagged! Picasa's It!

I'm not ashamed to say I don't know everything. It's kind of exciting that I don't - it means there's always something new and exciting out there for me to discover.

I recently (today) discovered how awesome Picasa is. Yesterday, my business partner and I went to Venice, Louisiana. For those of you unfamiliar to Venice, you go to the end of the world. Then turn left.

I love field trips, so in addition to the business recon trip for a potential customer, I also stopped along the way to take pictures of the road less traveled (with my iPhone, of course). I decided to give Picasa a shot - both versions. (There's the PC version and then the web version, both of which can work independently of each other.)

It doesn't quite have the same Google-feel that Google's other products do, but it was pretty easy to download my pics from my iPhone, edit them, and upload them to the web album. I also put them on the business's Facebook page quickly.

Looking at the online album, I noticed "Photo Locations" in the bottom right. Naturally curious, I clicked on it. Wow! A Google map overlaid with thumbnails of my pics at the spots they were taken! No effort on my part! I saw a virtual recreation of our trip right down Highway 23 all the way to Venice. (Technically, you go to the end of the world and turn right.)

Bar Pilots Recon Mission & South Louisiana Field Trip

What an awesome way to share a trip with the rest of the world - a recreation of the entire route along the way. Think of marketing for a marathon, a Chamber of Commerce scavenger hunt, a delivery route for a business, or any number of business uses. Think of a tour business marketing a particular route, or a number of routes. And these are only ideas involving trips, not the whole geo-tagging spectrum. Wow.

Perhaps I should get that uneasy feeling that Big Brother is watching, but I'm too awestruck to worry about him right now.

WorkingPoint Works!

Simple things amuse simple minds.

....or so the old saying goes. Regardless of whether that applies to myself or not, I am amused and amazed at the bookkeeping program my business partner and I are using to keep track of our business.

Program: WorkingPoint

Rating: great! (okay, so that's not really a rating, but it is really great...)

Still in love with the idea of cloud computing, my partner and I wanted a program that was

1. Accessible by both of us 24/7 (web-based)
2. Low-cost/cheap/free
3. Easy to navigate/user-friendly
4. Great to recommend to other small business owners, especially mobile entrepreneurs.

WorkingPoint has received big check marks for all four points from us. In about 10 minutes we were signed up (the "first user is free forever"), uploaded our logo, and had a professional invoice ready to go.

I love the fact we can create quotes and email them directly from the program, which dovetails very nicely with our cloud-computing/paperless orientation. (After all, you have to practice what you preach.)

Caveat: We don't have a large number of users, customers, items, or invoices so I can't vouch for using WorkingPoint for mid-size companies or even small companies with a large database of one kind of another. But I do know we have very please with the program so far.

Did I mention the first user is free!? I love that word.

Big Brother, Big Brother, Send Latitude on Over

I watched Conspiracy Theory and loved it...but mostly because I'm a Julia Roberts fan (and I like Mel Gibson, too). I am emphatically not a conspiracy theory buff. I think it's a miracle that anything gets accomplished on a daily basis, much less an extensive master plan that has been in the works for years by a select group of...I'll just stop.

New web toy: Google Latitude

In Google's words...

See your friends' locations and status messages and share yours with them. Enjoy Google Latitude on your phone, computer, or both.

Not everyone sees your location - only those you choose to share with. I plan to share my wife's location so I don't worry about her when she's driving late at night through cell phone dead spots - as long as I see the dot moving I know she's not stuck on the side of the road.

For small business owners:

I'm not an advocate for Big Brother-like oversight of your employees. If you don't trust your team is doing their job, then you don't have the right relationship or the right team members. I would not use Google Latitude to track their locations for nefarious purposes.

I can immediately think of the benefits for the construction industry, delivery services (like florists or hot-shots), or anyone with a sales force. If you need to keep up with your team members' locations, you can use Latitude instead of having to guess where they are or distract them while they're trying to do their job. It's also one less distraction for them while they're on the road.

And, of course, it's free. I love Google.

(You think they would have offered me a job by now...maybe I need to do a Google SEO, and then anonymously send an email from an Apps account, and then...)

Can You Hear Me Now!?!

Three words: Google Voice...wow!

I've had Voice for a week and a half now, and I'm not disappointed. (See my previous post - One Number for Every Number - about its drop-dead awesome features - for free! I cannot emphasize that this an awesome service I almost feel guilty for using with no charge.)

Example of awesomeness:

Midnight, hotel, iPhone dead, no charger in sight. No prob - just jump on Google Voice and texted (sp?) my wife the rest of my IHOP order.

I tried out the listen-in-real-time feature - it works! If you don't feel like talking, you can send someone to voice mail and listen as they leave the message on your cell phone. It's like having an answering machine all over again.

Left a message for myself and read the transcribed voice mail as an email - not a bad job, even while playing around with a horrible, wispy accent.

Many more features to blog about (like the option to have a call button on your webpage for your guests to call you instantly), but I wanted to get the testimonial out.

Get Google Voice - it works!

eFax - Isn't Technology Great?

Would you believe yesterday I was asked to fax something!? I responded that I could, but...did they happen to have an email? She replied, "Oh, yes, but I'd have to go into his office and start up the program and do all of that to get to it - fax is just easier."

Wow. This is why IT support techs will always have jobs. I mean, we're about to be finished with the first decade of this millennium - can we just agree on email?

If I run into very many more of this situations, I'm seriously considering MyFax or eFax or something of the like.

In a nutshell: they think you have a fax machine, but all you use is email.

They (the unfortunate, email-less soul) fax to a regular number. You receive it as an email. You reply to their fax number via email, and they receive a regular fax. They never know the difference.

Is a service like this perfect for small business? (Hint: the answer is spelled y-e-s.)

Benefits:

• Cheaper
• No need for dedicated fax line
• No stupid fax machine (as a member of Generation Y, I officially despise fax machines)
• No toner, no paper jams, no fax machine repairman bills
• Email-like management
• Search through old faxes just like searching old emails
• Store faxes virtually - no need to keep up with scattered papers
• Send to multiple recipients easily
• Send/receive via mobile device (wow!)
• Save a lot of space on your desk
• Block junk faxes! (I hated checking the fax as an intern - 3 out of 5 faxes were vacation ads)
• Green - no wasted paper and other fax supplies

And all of this for $10/month (or even less, depending on which service you go with).

Disclaimer: I have not actually used one of these services. If you have had experience - positive, negative, or indifferent - please let me know.

The beauty of it all: services like these are, in my very humble opinion, what IT is all about - making life/communication/collaboration easier. Less time, less money, less wasted resources and a more efficient way of going about your business.

I think I'm going to apply as a spokesperson for one of these places...

In Sync

Here's the latest I-love-Google-and-my-iPhone report.

I recently became "separated" from my employer. (Isn't that a nice ambiguous phrase?) I had amassed quite a few contacts during my time there and had become quite spoiled to having them all on my company iPhone. Imagine my dismay when I thought about trying to put them all into my new iPhone (I almost went 24 hours between handing in my company iPhone and getting my own - it was an excruciating time, believe me).

My IT friend came to the rescue and reminded me that I could export my contacts in a CSV file. I came home and imported them into my Google Apps domain in no time, then sync'd (synced? synched? synchronized?) Google Apps and my iPhone.


Awe-sum! All 422 of my contacts were in my iPhone within 3 minutes and all of my calendar events, too. Now, I can update my contacts and calendar events from a regular computer or my iPhone and it shows up on the other within minutes.


Let me be explicit about why this is very, very cool: companies pay thousands upon thousands of dollars plus hours of work to set up Microsoft servers and Microsoft-compatible devices so that you can have copy of all of your emails on your BlackBerry instantly.


Not spending thousands of dollars + not buying Microsoft Office + not waiting for an IT specialist to sync my devices = one very happy Derek


P.S. To be fair, Google doesn't have a sync option for email - my iPhone only checks it every fifteen minutes. I guess everyone around me will have to live with a fifteen minute delay on my emails. ;-)

Netbooks and Notebooks and Desktops - oh my!

Necessity is the mother of invention.

My computer is about to die. More factually, my hand-me-down desktop from my wife's college days is getting too slow to handle the amount of processing it takes to run much of anything these days.

Problem: home PC nearing functional obsolesence

More problems: household budget doesn't allow for a new top-of-the-line...well new anything, really

Solution: go cheap and mobile

I wanted to share the probable outcome of said situation. I plan to buy a $400-$500 netbook. They're the kid brother to a full-fledged laptop, so of course they're smaller, less powerful, less versatile, less everything - but they're a heck of a lot cheaper, too.

I'll get around the small keyboard/monitor/mouse issues by having a docking station in my home office. That way I can still enjoy a full size keyboard, ergonomic mouse, and 17-inch monitor, and the netbook would just be a processor at that point.

In this blog I've been preaching about the virtues of the cloud (read Gool-Aid). I plan to keep everything possible in Google Apps - contacts, calendar events, tasks, projects, files (as email attachments in my inbox) - or in my regular Google Account (bookmarks, Reader, Blogger). That will minimize the files and downloads on my netbook.

So this, then, is what we're talking about:

Netbook: $450

Dock: $60

Monitor: $100

Keyboard/mouse: $50

New toy: priceless

Total: about $700

I could get a $700 desktop - but then I'm chained to the desk. I could get a regular laptop - but I'd pay a lot more.

I like the idea of $700 for a pretty decent home workstation plus great mobility.

Now we'll see what my wife says...