The presentation below was given by all round friendly chap and serial tweeter Dirk ‘The Cow’ Singer at the Social Network World Forum in London on 9th March 2009. They are now incidentally advertising for the 2010 event which isn’t until March 15th 2010 but that’s forward planning for you! The presentation deck is all about Justifying Social Media spend in a recession to ‘internal clients’. Well recommended to anyone working in any way shape or form in that thing we know and love called Social Media.

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I love these new ads. Looking at the number of consumers at the recent IT Show who walked away with netbooks, you know the market is now very much focused on low cost, efficient, light weight machines. It is really hard to consider coughing up $4k to $5k for a laptop in this current economic climate, no matter how much you like a particular logo

I wish there is some way I can participate in this ad campaign…I know it is just an ad but imagine; You find it, you keep it! That just starts my mind wondering…

Laptop Hunters #2 - Giampaolo

Laptop Hunters #1 - Lauren

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Sarah Perez: I had been using the latest and greatest search tool for my XP PC, Windows Search 4.0, but somehow I had missed this: the Filter Pack for searching in Office documents. With the the Microsoft Filter Pack installed, Windows Search 4.0 is able to search within Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Office 2007 documents based on the text they contain. It also works for Vista too, adding new search capabilities which can be accessed right from Vista’s search bar. Now when you do a search, the Windows indexing service doesn’t just search for file names but also knows what’s in the files themselves, and that makes finding the right file so much easier.

IT admins will want to read further instructions found on the download page about how the new Filter pack can be installed into Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server, and other Server products. The Filter Pack also works on Windows Server 2003, Vista, and XP. You can download it from here.

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I’ve spent more than a week in the land of the rising sun and am happy to be back While I was there, I attended the annual Tokyo Game show, met up with the Gamespot folks and met the creator of the Uglydolls, David Horvath. I guess you can say it was a fruitful trip.

I am still busy with processing the 3000 shots I took in Japan and will be posting them soon. But I will post this here first. I have been a fan of gamespot for a long time and you can understand why I am particularly proud of this one.

And also I had a chance to play with the MSI Wind U100 netbook. I am preparing a review but meanwhile you can find a good article comparing the Asus and the MSI netbooks here. If you are in the market of a new netbook, this article will help make your decision easier.

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In an interview with CIO magazine Steve Ballmer confirms that Microsoft is looking to port the software to Windows Mobile devices.

When questioned why Microsoft developed the zune, Ballmer replied:

"At the end of the day, one of the big trends is that all content is going digital. And if we don’t have the software and services that are useful, helpful and valuable for the consumption of music and video, we are sort of not really a player.
Now, we built the Zune hardware with the Zune software - and what you’ll see more and more over time is that the Zune software will also be ported to and be more important not just with the hardware but on the PC, on Windows Mobile devices, etc."

This is the strongest indication that Microsoft will be porting the software. We’re not sure when exactly but you can bet that Windows Mobile 7 will have it included.

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I can’t say I am a die-hard F1 fan but I do love the technology. Besides the skill of the drivers, F1 technology and hardware is the backbone of the race.

Take the electronic control unit (ECU) for example; it might only be the size of a book, but it acts as the brain of a Formula 1 grand prix car. On the car there are a lot of sensors and processors producing data during tests, practices and races. The electronic system has to take all this information in and then process it in order to control different parts of the car. It controls the engine, the gearbox, the throttle-by-wire, the clutch and the differential.

As far as the engine is concerned it drives the primary actuators, i.e. the ignition coils which make the sparks, the injectors which supply the fuel and the pneumatic valve actuation. On the chassis it controls the actuators for the throttle, gearbox and clutch.

The ECU also logs information and sends it to the garage over the high-speed telemetry link. The system has to cope with two million words of data every second - then process and display it in a form that enables the race engineers to digest the information.

This process must be quick enough to provide the quality of information that allows proper decisions to be made. On a high revving Formula One engine, the process of calculating how much fuel to put in and when to ignite the spark is performed 1500 times per second.

Making an electronics unit that can deal with all this is not a simple task. If you take an ECU, there are roughly 3000 components including several extremely powerful microprocessors and logging memory which can store over 30 million values that come from 50 sensors all over the car. The black box has to be small, because there is not much spare space in the car’s tub. And they have to be 100 percent reliable as well.

That’s why I find F1 exciting; it is truly a good blend of heartware and hardware.

For those who missed the unofficial webcast of the race, you can view a short 5 mins recording below.

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If you are a fan of F1 race, you will like this cam. Trust me.

I will talk more about mogulus.com next week. Stay tuned and have a nice F1 weekend.

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Here is a couple of photosynths from the event. You can see photos of Windows Mobile phones in the post before this.

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My team went down to Singtel iLuminate forum at Expo today. Though we missed the keynotes and cool demos yesterday, we managed to catch a few quick shots of some cool Windows Mobile phones coming to retail this holiday season.

Look what I found! The Sony Ericsson Xperia.

Slide out keypad

 
One of the nine available “desktops”

 
Hit the “X” panel button to call up the desktops selection screen.

The Palm Treo Pro. Nice sleek design.

Size comparison between the Samsung i780 and the Palm Treo Pro.

Thickness comparison; i780 on top.

  Size comparison between the Palm Treo Pro and the HTC Touch Pro.

HTC Touch pro on the right.

Size comparison between the Palm Treo Pro and the SE Xperia.

Palm Treo Pro and HP’s IPAQ messenger.

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Like other URL shrinkers out there (tinyurl etc), BudURL allows you to shrink a long URL into something manageable. If you have tried sending links of articles deep within a hosted blogging service, you will know why you would need something like this.

But BudURL does something more; it tracks the click rate of your URL. Though its tracking report may not be as comprehensive as other analytic services like the venerable statcounter.com, it does give you a quick idea on how popular your page is. Which is good enough if that is all you want to know.

I see BudURL as a cross between  TinyURL and statcounter. It is definitely not as feature-rich as both these services but saves you time using two separate services.

Just to test it, here is a BudURL to my photos from a recent trip.  http://budurl.com/ujw5

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