Friendly Technology.........

5 year olds, Ecommerce, and Tablet PCs...

Couple of hours ago, I was browsing though the multitudes of blogs created by Microsoft employees and found this (i am a little peeved at myself I don't remember whose exact blog this was linked on) :

The Helen Cards web site:

Helen is a 5 1/2 year old living in the suburbs of Seattle, Washington, in the United States. Helen loves to draw. She started creating art on her father’s tablet PC when she was three years old. Through the encouragement of friends and family, her drawings have made their way from dad’s computer onto her own set of greeting cards. Helen Cards™ is a tiny, family-run business that was created to share Helen’s wonderful art, creativity and positive attitude with the world.

 

The past year's most friendly search innovation...

Yahoo is testing a search feature - they call it Yahoo Mindset -  that offers people to choose degrees of commerciality and non commerciality (did I just make those words up?) in a search. I found out about this through Robert Scoble's blog and I am very impressed.

Lots of interesting applications for this type of feature. Researching cancer or diabetes drug? Well, Yahoo Mindset will try to filter out pharmacies and drug companies who want to sell it to you. Only once you have done your own pharmaceutical search, should you drag the slider over to the commercial side.

Added Link to Rob Stock's Blog

I forgot to link Rob's blog in my earlier post about it's welcome birth.

Beyond the Basket is well written and informative .

Deleting Files For Good...

Deleting files completely off a computer is an involved business. Had a quick look over at download.com for my client newsletter (every week for clients for the past 5 years) and they give this program 5 stars.

Vancouver Sun gets "ransom ware" story wrong...

Today's edition of the Vancouver Sun newspaper had a story about a new purported computer threat called "ransom ware". The story was in the D section on page 5 - but there was a pointer to it on the front page of the paper. I don't know if it is the same all over the world, but in BC, our media likes to run a lot of sensational stories about the Internet.

Ransom ware is when a hacker gets into your computer, "locks" important documents and files, and then demands money to open the files again. The problem with this whole scheme is the payment. From an security expert quoted in the Sun:

"The problem is getting away with it - you've got to send the money somewhere... if it involves some sort of monetary transaction, it's far easier to trace than an e-mail account."

Non partisan Internet Informaton...

In 1999, Internet research reports almost always had a line (or two, or three) that began, "Experts forecast that online shopping will be an X billion dollar industry by 2003". 

I was never really sure how, only a scant 4 or 5 years into the mass adoption of the Internet, experts could really base their forecasts on any data. And the forecasted year was never 2004 it always seemed it to me - sometimes it was 2005, but mostly it was 2003.

I never took the time to see if these forecasts came true, but I doubt they did even still,

The dot com boom produced all sorts of wild claims. One had to be careful to dispassionately dissect media and analysts reports and to "read between the lines" for all too common bias. Too much stupid money floating around that far too many researchers and journalists wanted a piece of..

Whch brings me to finding trustworthy research about the Internet. Let me recommend the non profit Pew Internet project. Really good stuff here - widely regarded as reputable. Too bad, only in America for now. Worldwide hopefully someday.

Hat Tip to Gwen Harris at the Internet News blog - who also links today to the new Pew report on how the use of health info online.

Learning about Flickr Online Photo Albums

Unlike other photo album services, Flickr does not offer prints. And Flickr also does not have any editing features to speak of.

So why has Flickr inspired so many incredibly loyal users? First, as I have written before, Flickr lets you highlight certain areas of photos and create little annotations. Mouse over the highlighted area, and the annotation appears.

The highlight boxes disappear when you take your mouse pointer off the image.

Second, if you want to find or share photos with certain characteristics, Flickr can't be beat. A photo can be be private or public and, if it is public, the keywords(tags) you add to an image help it get found.  If you want to find photos of a particular place, or a particular thing - no problem. Sometimes, to sustain and improve my mood, I will simply type 'happy' into a flickr search. It nearly always works.

I hope China loses its battle against the Internet...

Gaining unfettered access to the Internet in China is certainly a challenge. I have read about the Chinese government shutting down Internet cafes and blocking a whole range of web sites.

Now, I read today that the Chinese government has put together a clandestine squad whose sole job it is to counter negative comments about the government that are found on the Internet.

I feel they are fighting a losing battle. I am not sure how you can keep a country of over a billion people "in check" when you give them the taste of the freedom available through the Internet.

Unlocking the mind of Rob Stocks, techie pioneer

Where I come from, in the Internet world, Rob Stocks occupies a pretty special place. Rob started the first serious web design company in Kamloops, BC in 1995. That company, now called Idealever, has evolved into one of the premier providers of sophisticated web sites that I have run across.

Rob has just launched a blog where he shares his views on how businesses can more effectively sell on the Internet. It's a great read. One post that particularly caught my eye is entitled "Good Sites need Good People". Here is an excerpt:

When I look at ideaLEVER’s most successful clients; Sport Mart, Rogers Video, Purdy’s Chocolates and of course Robeez Footwear, they all have talented teams of customer service and marketing people behind all of the technology.  No retailer would open a physical store without staff yet many think a web store can run itself. Purdy’s and Robeez both saw online sales jump when full time managers came on board.  I also know this because my wife runs Northwest Passages (www.nwpassages.com) out of our basement.  It is a part time job and when she gets busy with other things (like gardening at this time of year), and does not maintain the site, sales slow down.

Copyright Musings...

very frankly, I don't think this is the best newspaper column I have written but it certainly concerns an interesting issue:

COPYRIGHT BALANCE NEEDED

You often hear, in the business world, people talking about protecting their "intellectual property".

Society offers protection to people who come up with ideas and/or who create original products and services. This protection, as many know, is called a copyright or a patent.

Did you know that copyrights and patents were originally meant to be limited – both in terms of the rights granted and the length of time the rights were protected.

This mean, for example, that students can photocopy pages out of a text book for private study. And, it means, that after a certain number of years, a performing artist would no longer need permission to cover or remix another artist's music.

I think it very important that artists, inventors, thinkers, and creators be compensated for their efforts. But, I also believe the general public interest needs to be considered.

The Internet and technology at large has given us unprecedented opportunities to find and manage huge amounts of information and other content.

Recent Canadian government copyright proposals might, however, limit these opportunities.

One of the proposals, for example, would require educational institutions to pay a fee to use Internet based research where the original researcher has not posted a notice on the web site explicitly allowing that use.

Quoting and commenting is permitted with newspapers, magazines, and books – so why not with the Internet?

Another quite scary thought: in 2001, a Russian programmer spent the summer in an American jail for exposing security weaknesses with a software product made by a company called Adobe.

Adobe claimed copyright infringement. Instead of jail time, this gentleman should have got a reward from Adobe for helping make their product better for its customers.

Canada has so far steered clear of that. My point is that we have to be vigilant. Not only are various organizations lobbying the government to enforce harsher copyright law, the US government has now weighed in  on the side of "stricter legislation".

A great web site to visit with more on these issues is run by cyber law expert Michael Giest  - michaelgiest.com.