Geek News: Latest Technology, Product Reviews, Gadgets and Tech Podcast News for Geeks

Dynamics Wants to Become Your Only Credit Card

Posted by Alan Buckingham at 8:57 AM on February 14, 2012

Are you getting tired of those multiple cards stuffed into your wallet?  Dynamics is looking to lighten that wallet a bit, by reducing the cards you carry around to just one.  This isn’t just a credit card, but a credit card-sized computer.  The plastic card has a miniature chip built into it that allows you to switch the card’s magnetic strip between multiple different cards you own.

There are several different versions of this new card, depending on a user’s preferences.  These new cards are also completely water-proof, which I assume means washer-proof, which will save some time and stress in our home.  The cards are also much more secure than current credit cards because all data can be erased so that if it’s lost or stolen it will be useless to the person who gets it.

In addition to their innovative credit cards, Dynamics also offers a card that can hold a person’s complete medical records in case of an emergency.  You can find more about all of these by visiting the Dynamics site.

Interview by Jeffrey Powers of Geekazine.

Sponsored by:
35% off your very first order @ Godaddy.com: Promo Code 35off1
GoDaddy Promo Codes always save you money, check out my Promo Codes Today
PlayPlay

Podcast (specmedia): Play in new window | Download | Embed

Tags: , , ,

Posted in business, ces, Special Media

Comments Comments Off

Sococo Virtual Office Space

Posted by Andrew at 8:16 AM on February 3, 2012

Sococo LogoSococo is a virtual office space for distributed teams, teleworkers and road-warriors that uses real-world metaphors to make them feel like they’re in the office. Andy gets face-to-face with CEO Chris Wheeler at CES 2012 Showstoppers.

Sococo Screenshot

As you can see from the screenshot above, Sococo creates a virtual world that is analogous to a workplace, with conference rooms, team rooms, personal offices, cubicles - I imagine there’s even a water cooler. Small avatars then represent colleagues and their activities, so if some of them are having an (online) meeting, they’ll be located in a conference room. If someone doesn’t want to be disturbed, they can close their office door, complete with sound effect!

Sococo has other collaboration tools, such as screen sharing, but even the simple office space representation makes people feel much more included and part of a team.

Interview by Andy McCaskey of SDR News and RV News Net.

Sponsored by:
35% off your very first order @ Godaddy.com: Promo Code 35off1
GoDaddy Promo Codes always save you money, check out my Promo Codes Today
PlayPlay

Podcast (specmedia): Play in new window | Download | Embed

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Posted in business, ces, People, Special Media

Comments Comments Off

The Loss of Tech Know-How

Posted by Andrew at 11:33 PM on August 30, 2011

What do compact fluorescent lights (CFLs), LCD screens, rechargeable batteries, solar cells and integrated circuit packaging all have in common? They’re all technologies that the USA can no longer produce within the country itself and must rely on companies in Asia, such as Taiwan and China to manufacturer. The technology has effectively been lost to the US, having migrated from West to East as part of major purchasing deals.

These deals might be considered as best business practice too. The way it often works is that a US-based company develops a technology and a product, but a small part is subcontracted out to foreign 3rd party. Say a little daughter board. Time passes and the 3rd party comes back to the US company and offers to build not only the daughter board, but also the motherboard, and more cheaply too. The deal happens, it’s a success and profits are up all round. Time passes and the 3rd party comes back and offers to build not only the motherboard but the whole product and more cheaply too. The deal happens, it’s a success and profits are up all round. It’s all good.

What happens next? The once 3rd party contractor goes to a US-based major distributor or retail chain and offers to make them an own-brand version of the product more cheaply than the market leader, now having access to all the technology required to make the product without any assistance. Surprised? Don’t be; this is what happened between Dell and ASUSTeK but it’s a pattern that has been repeated in many industries and continues to be repeated.

If you want to know more, Forbes are running a series of articles by Steve Denning, starting with Why Amazon Can’t Make a Kindle in the USA, on the loss of technological expertise from the USA. I think they’re an excellent read that explains much of the world today, even if you don’t necessarily see the loss of know-how from the US as a bad thing. It’s also worth browsing some of the comments to see other people’s thoughts on the articles, especially those from other countries.

Tags: , , , ,

Posted in business, Information, Technology

Comments Comments Off

Innovating for a Digital Future

Posted by Andrew at 12:00 PM on June 21, 2011

Over the past year, Deloitte have publish a short series on digital leadership and are wrapping it up with the final edition “Innovating for a Digital Future“.  Each publication looks at the different challenges facing leaders in the digital era particularly in the technology, media and telecoms industries.

This last one examines the challenges around innovation and how it’s possible to be innovative particularly within large organisations that feature heavily in the technology and telecoms arenas. Doing the research for the publication, Deloitte found three unexpected paradoxes.

1. Innovation is a social sport. It is not the preserve of “lone geniuses” yet it requires lone geniuses working effectively with others to make it work.

2. Innovation is somewhat anarchic and organisation can impede it. Innovation rates substantially increase when there is a large population of people, yet large organisations do not appear to gain an innovation premium. The construct of the organisation itself is in many ways anti-innovation.

3. “Good” failure is critical to the innovation process. For innovation to flourish organisations need to embrace failure, yet not many chief execs would survive if they made failure a virtue.

The research further suggests that leaders need to work across four areas to develop organisations that can successfully innovate.

1. Strategy and vision
2. Environment and culture
3. Organisation and design of work
4. Leadership and talent

Each of these areas is explored over a couple of pages and there are case studies as well. If you’ve done a Degree or Masters in management, you’ll find much of it familiar but there’s the odd nugget in there. For instance, the question is posed, “Innovation should have real monetary value attached to it. How many executives in organisations received bonuses based on innovation metrics?”

Overall, worth spending 15 mins to run through the material and see if there’s anything of interest. Also might be quite a good primer if you are trying to get innovation off the ground in your organisation.

The previous editions, “New Shapes and Sizes” and “Leadership at All Levels“, are still available for download as .pdfs.

Tags: , , ,

Posted in business

Comments Comments Off

The Master Switch

Posted by tomwiles at 11:01 PM on May 7, 2011

Once in a while, a book comes along that contains ground-breaking insights.  Such is the case with a book I’ve listened to over the past couple of days, the Audible audio book version of ‘The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires” by author Tim Wu.

“The Master Switch” is a compelling look into the history of major information industries such as the telegraph, the telephone, commercial broadcast radio, the commercial movie business, and commercial broadcast television. The book points out an identifiable, slowly-repeating cycle obviated by the fact that these industries were able to gain and hold monopoly status. Each in turn became quite adept at retarding disruptive technological innovations that threatened their respective business models.

Today we take an open Internet for granted, but these same and other forces are looking to take over control of the Internet and turn it into a closed, much more tightly-controlled system.

The book is extremely well written and well researched. The Audible audio book narrator Marc Vietor brings the book to life in a wonderful way.

Mr. Wu does a fantastic job of laying out the often-fascinating histories of companies such as Western Union, AT&T, NBC, etc. As consumers, we think we know these companies through their consumer advertising. The real history of these companies is often quite different and very eye opening.

If you enjoy stories about technology and business, you will almost certainly enjoy “The Master Switch” by Tim Wu.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in audible, book, business, economy, FCC, internet, New Media, Phone

Comments Comments Off

RawVoice to Introduce Media on Demand Service @ NAB 2011

Posted by geeknews at 12:50 PM on April 3, 2011

RawVoice will introduce a media on demand service at the National Association of Broadcasters Show in Las Vegas April 9-14!

The media on demand service will allow content creators, independent film artists, bands, educators and all others who create content to sell their premium content online and through over-the-top (OTT) television. This will give consumers a centralized location to find premium content that is not available through traditional video-on-demand channels. RawVoice MyCast® system will allow consumers to organize and play back on demand all of their purchased media on almost any device at any time.

This service will be introduced through a new channel on the Roku initially, and on its own media portal. Clients will be able to sell their media on a subscription or single play basis. With Roku integration, single click purchases of media will offer the same convenience of standard video on demand service that consumers are accustomed to.

RawVoice will be demonstrating the new media on demand service at NAB, and will sign content creators on site. Those not attending NAB can contact RAwVoice on their website. RawVoice will be formally rolling out the service several weeks following the show.

Source Link: RawVoice

Disclaimer: I am the CEO of RawVoice the company behind this roll-out.

My Comments: We have really worked hard to create a platform that will be good for consumers to find premium content while at the same time making it easy for the content creators to manage, price and get paid for their premium content. Discovery is going to play a big roll in this roll out and our success. Most content creators do not have sufficient discoverability aka Google juice for people to actually find their content. Our new portal of which we are not announcing the name of the site yet will go a long way in helping people find premium offerings.

Posted in business

Comments Comments Off

Wipro: R&D and Business Process Experts

Posted by KL Tech Muse at 3:30 PM on January 20, 2011

Todd Cochrane spoke to Narayan Shenoy GM of Wipro. Wipro specializes in R&D and business process innovation. They have been doing this type of work for over 20 years. They are the largest contract R&D organization in the world. They work in the area of product engineering requirements in several industries, from airplanes to TV and beyond. They can help a company from conception all the way through to the final product. As Todd and Mr. Shenoy discussed in the video the full process from the concept to getting a product to the store can take up to 18 months. Wipro also makes sure the product complies with the various countries laws and standards that the product is going to be sold in.

According to Mr. Shenoy what puts Wipro ahead of its competition that don’t only offer the solution, but also the technical know how to put the solution in to practice. They also have the ability to do product testing throughout the process at low-cost and work with local companies when necessary.   Wipro works closely with both academic and business associations, to keep up with the latest market trends and use this knowledge give their partners a competitive edge in their chosen markets.

Interview by Todd Cochrane of Geek News Central.

Please Support our CES 2011 Sponsors.

Get your 14 day Free Trial of Audible Gold to start listening to great books!
Save 25% on 4GH Hosting 1yr Subscriptions Save 25% Promo Code CES2.
Sponsor: The New Luxor, Las Vegas Deals Start @ $40.00 best rates guaranteed.

Podcast (specmedia): Play in new window | Download | Embed

Tags: , ,

Posted in business, ces, Special Media

Comments Comments Off

Xmarks shutting down? – Well maybe not!

Posted by Mike Dell at 9:30 PM on October 3, 2010

Xmarks (formerly foxmarks) is a bookmark plugin that keeps all of your bookmarks synced up between computers, no matter which of the big 4 browsers you use. (Firefox, IE, Chrome and Safari)  They announced in this blog post, that they were shutting down “..in about 90 days”. A bunch of users (Thousands?) were left wondering what we would use after the shutdown. Quite a few comments for that post stated that the users would pay some sort of reasonable amount to keep the service open.

So, a couple of days later, they announced that they were thinking about changing their minds (see this post) The CEO of Xmarks says:

we’re revisiting the idea of Xmarks as a premium service. We’ve set up a Pledgebank page where you can sign up if you’re willing to pay at least $10 a year for Xmarks. No credit card is required, but please only pledge if you are genuinely willing and able to pay

Go to the Pledgebank page here:http://pledgebank.com/XmarksPremium if you are interested in keeping xmarks going.

I use xmarks to keep all the browsers on all of my computers synced up and it’s the only service that is this easy to use.

Chrome and Firefox now have their own sync services but they don’t work across other browsers like Xmarks does.

Posted in browsers, business, Information, plugins

Comments Comments Off

GoDadddy Business Solutions

Posted by geeknews at 11:21 PM on September 26, 2010

No one likes spending more money than they should. For a couple of years I have been using Survey Monkey to do a variety of surveys and my renewal time is upon me. I currently pay nearly $240.00 a year for the service. Sow  while I was looking around on GoDaddy tonight I ventured into their business solutions section and found that they have a service called GoDaddy Site Surveys that cost less than $3.00 a month. On the surface taking a quick look at it, I know I can replace Survey Monkey with Godaddy Site Surveys.

This sure beats the $240.00 I am paying survey monkey each year for the survey service. The deltas between the GoDaddy product and the Survey Monkey are not significant, and I will save over $200.00 a year if I throw in one of my GoDaddy Promo Codes I can bring the price down 10-20% more.

GoDaddy has a significant number of other Business Solutions as well which I have not investigated yet but plan on doing so.

  • Search Engine Visibility – Drive traffic to your Web site and increase online visibility through search engine listings
  • Go Daddy Contact Manager (CRM) – Boost repeat sales!
  • Go Daddy Marketplace™ – Get your products in front of millions of Go Daddy customers – list them in Go Daddy Marketplace!
  • Incorporation Services – Protect yourself and your business – Incorporate it!
  • Hosted Exchange Email – Get corporate-class messaging at small-business prices.
  • Express Email Marketing® – Bring shoppers back to your Web site with effective, high-quality, spam-free email campaigns.
  • Quick Shopping Cart® – Create and launch a stand-alone store or add shopping cart to your existing Web site.

They have some bundles on these products as well which will save you even more.

Recently I heard Leo Laporte complain about all the additional products that GoDaddy offers. Having been a satisfied customer of GoDaddy now for 5 years, I honestly wish I would have looked at some of these additional services sooner, as I could have saved at least a $1000.00 on just survey services over the past 4 years. So while you may not be in the market for business services now, at least you know that they are their to help small business people get off the ground with a package of Business solutions that normally would be pretty expensive stand alone from all of the one trick ponies like Survey Monkey.

I can guarantee you, with this economy saving money is important. To save even more check out my GoDaddy Promo Codes.

Disclaimer: GoDaddy has been a sponsor of my show for 5 years, and while I have 7 servers with them and over 200 domain names I pay for all of those services out of my own pocket. GoDaddy has not paid for this blog post,  it was written on my observations while visiting their website. I will do a full review of the survey service in a future article after I have implemented it.

Posted in business, Information

Comments 1 Comment

Tricaster TCXD850 Delivery Delays

Posted by geeknews at 10:26 AM on September 16, 2010

As all of you know I have been awaiting on the delivery of theTricaster TCXD850 to date we are still waiting on delivery. Newtek has not been real public on what is causing the delays beyond heavy demand. With record pre-orders it is apparent that Newtek is having significant trouble working off backlog,  as many of their dealers are still waiting on their initial demo units.

In an age of transparency no news is not necessarily good news and leads to speculation on why they are having so much trouble. They knew demand was going to be high, and should have been able to ramp up production prior to the delivery date. Hardware configuration has been locked in for months, as they have been demonstrating the unit since before NAB. Software updates are to be expected up to launch date, but updating hard drives should be a no brainer in that all the drives are externally available.

For many months the new Tricaster has been eagerly awaited by many production companies and small media productions like mine.  How much longer we have to wait is yet to be seen. My only hope is that Newtek start feeding more information to the dealers so at least we can resume our business planning. Having this much cash outlaid, with this long of a delivery period may be ok for big companies but it really hurts small companies like mine.

Tags: ,

Posted in business

Comments 2 Comments

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »