Category Archives: Product reviews

Don’t buy the Eye-Fi

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You would think a nifty new product that has been reviewed by the techies for the major daily newspapers would fare better, but I regret buying the Eye-Fi WiFi SD memory card, and recommend that you learn from my mistakes and steer clear of it when you consider upgrading your camera’s memory card.

The card, which sells for about $100, contains two interesting things: 2 GB of memory and a WiFi radio that can send your files back to a photo sharing Web site of your choice. The idea is – once you set it up – you never have to worry about uploading your photos from your camera ever again. As long as certain conditions are met, every picture that you take will be uploaded to your sharing site automatically.

That’s the theory. In practice, I found plenty of gotchas. First, the Kodak camera that I was using for the test worked intermittently, until I found out that digging into the FAQ on the Eye.fi Web site, this brand of camera isn’t supported.  (Their FAQ is very poorly organized, and it isn’t easy to find the list of supported cameras.)

Second, the camera has to be configured to work with particular wireless networks, and this can be confounding, to say the least. It won’t work at a coffee bar or at most hotels, since these networks require you to bring up a Web-based sign-in page. It also won’t work on networks with what it calls “shared WEP” security, which is what I was using on my home network. It will work on networks running static WEP 40/104/128, WPA-PSK, and WPA2-PSK, which is commendable. The product comes with a USB-to-SD reader that is used as part of the configuration process: you need to have your SD card plugged into the computer to configure the wireless network authentication details, and to specify which sharing site you want your photos to end up on. You also have to open up ports on your personal firewall too when you first set it up. And you have to keep your camera on after you snap your photo, to give it time to do the upload. This may be far too complex for the average person, and a lot to deal with to get the ability to automatically upload photos without having to attach a cable or insert your SD card in your laptop and copy the files.

Third, a note of warning. Once you get everything working, every photo is sent to your sharing site. This might not be what you want to do, particularly if you or your subjects value their privacy (don’t even get me started down that path, that will have to be a subject for another column). So you might want to bring along a second SD memory card that is just a plain old card and doesn’t transmit anything anywhere for these situations. (Thanks, Bruce, for this point.)

Despite these issues, Eye-Fi has done some impressive work. The packaging is close to iPod-clever, and the software will work on both Macs and Windows. It does support a great many different camera models (just not mine), provided they have an SD memory slot. And if you are traveling and want to share your pictures with friends around the globe, it is pretty cool that they can be seen almost immediately after you take them. If you upload them to a social networking site or set up an RSS feed, you could have almost real-time photojournalism, which is a very interesting concept. 

My bottom line is that this is way too pricey for the convenience. A plain old SD 2 GB card runs now about $25 and takes almost no time to insert and setup. If Eye-Fi could work out some of the above issues, it might be a more attractive product.

Live Writer, a kinder, gentler blogging editor from Microsoft

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This week Microsoft announced its Windows Live Writer. Here to tell you about is Newt Barrett, who is CEO of Succeeding Today (Newt@SucceedingToday.com). Newt and I worked together at CMP during another era in tech publishing. Take it away, Newt.

Something is afoot at Microsoft.

t has to do with a product that was quietly released in beta in mid-July and announced this past week. It’s called. It’s slick. It’s solid. And it’s free.

Live Writer is an intuitive, WYSIWYG blogging editor that enables bloggers to manage multiple blogs on multiple platforms–either online or offline. In fact, I’m writing this article with Live Writer.
But this week’s release of Live Writer isn’t just about a product. It’s about Microsoft reasserting application dominance in a world of consumer-created content.

Free is a Strategy that Works for Microsoft

Although Bill Gates prefers to get paid for software, he knows how and when to give it away free. Just think back to 1995 when Microsoft first started to take the Web seriously. In May 1995, a few months before the launch of the much hyped Windows 95, Bill Gates wrote a legendary memo, entitled, “The Internet Tidal Wave.”
“It’s the most important single development” since the IBM PC.”I have gone through several stages of increasing my views of its importance. Now, I assign the Internet the highest level.”(as quoted in Business Week, July 15, 1996) What followed within 12 months was a seismic shift in strategy that put the Internet at center stage for the software company and for many of us too.

Microsoft was late to the party, but not too late to crush a once arrogant Netscape. While Netscape was charging $50/copy for its browser, Microsoft readied the launch of Internet Explorer in 1996 at a much lower price: FREE. As Bill Gates cheerfully noted in a press conference at the launch of IE, “It’s priced to sell.”

It looks as though Microsoft is making another strategic move that’s all about the Internet–and about blogging.

What Makes Live Writer So Important?

Microsoft, like the Japanese, tends to take the long view. They may be late to the party. They may appear to have missed an opportunity. But, once they decide they must dominate a market they will do whatever it takes.
“I think blogging is super-important and we’ve got to do a lot more software.” That’s what Bill Gates said in a January 7, 2005 interview on the blog, Gizmondo. Clearly, he was telegraphing what they’re now doing.
Microsoft’s approach with Live Writer is intriguing–not just because it’s a beta product that works with very few glitches, but because it plays nice with others.

Here’s how it works:

You download and install it. (http://get.live.com/betas/writer_betas) LW will work even when you are not connected to the Internet. Next, you tell LW about your blogs. It works with WordPress, Typepad, Blogger, and Microsoft’s own Live Spaces. You show it how you log on and then let it match your style by posting a test blog that it immediately removes. You can submit either a post or a page, and then it pulls down your categories and lets you set a publish date.

You can edit and resubmit your posts, and you can pull down posts that you had made before using LW in order to edit them. Its WYSIWYG tools enable you to format a page easily, insert tables, photos, website images, and videos, and create hyperlinks and tags. It works effectively even on a small laptop screen and works with voice dictation on the Vista platform .It has some nice plug ins both from Microsoft and from third party developers – one notable and symbolic example is “Blog this from Firefox” tool. Imagine developing something that works seamlessly with Firefox!

The Bottom-line

Live Writer is capable and easy to use. It matches the very attractive price of Internet Explorer–free. It works just as easily with WordPress as with Live Spaces. It’s just as useful offline as on. Within a day of using it, Live Writer has become my blog editor of choice.

Microsoft was heavy-handed in destroying Netscape. Live Writer demonstrates that Microsoft is just as determined to win in the blogosphere as it was to win on the Web browser. In 2007 it looks as though Microsoft will do it with a great product that actually plays nice with others. What a nice surprise. Of course, you still need XP SP2 or Vista, maybe someday it will run on a Mac!

New VOIP services

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I had a chance to compare two new Internet phone services from Ooma and MagicJack. Let me summarize what I have learned in the table below:

  MagicJack.com Ooma.com Vonage.com V-Phone Skype.com          
Initial cost $40 for first year $400 $40
$96/yr
         
Recurring cost $20/yr following years None plus monthly Vonage service            
911 features Uses E911 PSAP Uses landline 911 (2) Use Vonage PSAP None          
Headset or analog phone? Either supported Analog Phone Neither needed (mic included) Headset + PC          
Free calling area North America USA North America Various countries (1)          
Mac OS X support Not yet Uses phones Not yet Yes          
Notable features Headset or phone Second line Built in mic International reach          
Drawbacks Few area codes yet avail. Customer support Tied to Vonage account Dicey p2p network issues          
Email voicemail notifications? Yes No Yes Yes          
                   
                   
(1) Skype pro provides unlimited calling in a single country that you receive the phone number for.            
(2) Please note that in order for the ooma system to work, we will add call forward busy (“CFB”) when we provision your line, for which you will owe your landline phone company associated monthly charges

So what are these new services? Ooma is a small box about the size of an answering machine that hooks up to both your broadband Ethernet and your land voice line. MagicJack is a bit bigger than a USB key drive that connects to your computer’s USB port. They have very different approaches, and are not for everyone.

MagicJack is a way to supplement your existing landline or cellular service. If you have a loved one that is living overseas, or someone who travels a lot, then this makes sense. At a fixed price of $40 and $20 for the second and subsequent years, it is a low enough price point that you can send it to someone living abroad, have them register with a US phone number, and then you can have cheap unlimited talk time. The nice thing about the gizmo is that you can either hook up a standard analog phone to it, or use whatever PC-connected sound device you’d like: it can toggle between both. It doesn’t yet have many local phone numbers — when I tried it out, I could get as close as Memphis but nothing in Missouri as yet. But this is becoming less of an issue as many people have unlimited long distance plans anyway.

Ooma is much more expensive, and I am not sure where their market is: at $400, you have to make a lot of calls and the device requires a lot more commitment. You need to make changes to your landline calling features too. Its niftiest feature is the ability to give you a second outgoing phone line, so you can get around a chatty teen who is always tying up your phone. But it has very poor customer support despite some initial buzz and a high initial cost to get their gear.

Both Ooma and MagicJack come with their own voicemail box that can send you email notifications, which is becoming standard in the VOIP world. Both supply unlimited calling in the US or North America, with additional per-minute charges to places beyond. Both support the better E911 services that aren’t the norm with most VOIP suppliers: ironically, Vonage offers a competitive USB gizmo called the V-phone, but 1) you need to sign up for a Vonage service plan to use it and 2) it doesn’t support E911, instead, emergency calls get routed to a Vonage operator.

The other entry in this sweepstakes is Skype. They of course only work on your PC, but they do offer Macintosh support, something neither the V-phone or the MagicJack presently have. They are a bit more expensive if you buy all the various options (you need Skype In to get a fixed phone number so people can call your PC at $60/year and Skype Pro to make outgoing calls at $36/year ) than either USB device, but they do offer local numbers in various countries, should that be important to you or if both of your frequently called parties are outside the US. Their Pro plan allows unlimited outbound calling to phones in whatever country you assign your phone number to your account.

What you pick will depend on a lot of different circumstances: if you are looking for a complete replacement of your landline phone with an Internet solution, I still think either Vonage or AT&T CallVantage is a better way to go than any of these products. If you make a lot of international calls to different places, then probably Skype is your answer. If your teen or traveling salesperson is tying up your phone or racking up cell minutes, then any one of these might be a lower-cost alternative if you want to keep your existing landline.

Clearly, the VOIP market is undergoing a lot of change, and a lot of players will come and (like SunRocket) go. As someone who uses Vonage daily for the past four years, I am watching avidly what is going on. Continue reading →

Radiosophy’s portable HD radio

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You would think that under the category of tabletop clock radios, there wouldn’t be much to attract a Tom’s Hardware Guide reader. Think again, with the Radiosophy HD100, a stylish device that delivers digital HD radio at a very reasonable $99 price. The neat trick with HD radio is called multicast. This means that a single radio station can broadcast multiple signals and programs over one frequency: you can have rock, talk and jazz “stations” all coming from a station that previously only had one program format. And all of this programming supposedly comes at near CD-quality sound with no static.

You can read more of my review that ran today on Tom’s Hardware here.

Video production collaboration

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Last week I wrote about collaborative databases with Trackvia.com. This week I take a look at another collaboration technology from a new company called Cozimo.com that is geared towards video production and editing teams.

Everyone these days is shooting video and thinks of themselves as video producers and editors. And while it is great that more video content is now online, much of it is either unwatchable or uninteresting. But I come here not to judge all these budding Bergmans, but to tell you about a tool that can make it easier to work together with your team and better produce these videos.

The idea isn’t new, but what Cozimo offers is. Let’s say you shoot some video footage and want to show it to a bunch of people who are spread all over the landscape before you release it to the general and unsuspecting public via YouTube. You can email a copy of your video to your team, but this isn’t very satisfying, and especially these days as many filters routinely block big file attachments. Ideally, you’d like your video to be stored in some kind of collaboration system itself, so you don’t have to worry about where the most current copy is housed. And this system should allow your working team to gather together online and view, comment, and make adjustments to the footage.

You want to make comments on particular segments, frames, or portions of the video, and make them in near-real time, such as what might be done via an IM text or voice chat session. That is what is at the heart of Cozimo, and what is lacking in many of its competitors. For those other applications, you’ll have to run a separate IM network. That is cumbersome, because you can’t store the commentary with the actual video footage itself.

Ideally, you’d like your collaboration solution to have some elements of a lightweight content management system that does version tracking – so you can go back and review an earlier edit in case that was more appealing – and workflow elements too. You want to be able to direct the job to a particular person, who must complete some task before sending the video to someone else. General collaboration tools such as Notes and Sharepoint have had these features for a long time, but don’t support video content specifically.

Finally, you want to be able to use just an ordinary Web browser to access this tool, without the need to have any additional desktop software.

As I said earlier, there are plenty of people already in this space, some that come with pretty deep pockets or heavy Hollywood industry following. Autodesk has its Buzzsaw.com, which has one problem because it requires a Windows client to access most of its features. Also, it is really designed for architects to share AutoCAD files rather than general videos.

Octopz.com and Wiredrive.com both offer support for a wider variety of content types than just AutoCAD documents but don’t have much in the way of workflow besides some general email notification features when one person is done doing some particular task.  And Adbeast.com  — which supports just video files — has too many different components to make its workflow component really effective.

I haven’t spoken about the price for these services. Some of them are pretty inexpensive to start out but then the price quickly climbs as you add workgroup teams and start consuming storage. For a gigabyte of online storage Cozimo.com is $50/month for 12 workgroups (but an unlimited number of users and files) and even their most expensive plan is $150/month for 5 GB of storage. Octopz.com is $100/mo for a single workgroup, but then things start to get pricey. Wiredrive charges $250/month, and several thousand dollars for setup fees. And of course Autodesk is at the top of the cost charts with about $1,000/month for 100 users.

If you have any experience with these products or something similar, drop me a line or add a comment here.

Sharing Spreadsheets

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In the past, the easiest way to share a small database was to create a spreadsheet and email it to your collaborators. This time-tested method has withstood more sophisticated competition for several reasons:

First, databases are still tricky for some people to understand. While relational databases can be thought of as tables that have several indexes, this is more than many people want to deal with. Second, the collaboration tools are tough to learn and use. Look at how many people still use Lotus Notes for email and not much else. And since most of us are comfortable with email, using it as the transportation system isn’t all that taxing. Until the day comes when three people are working on the same spreadsheet and make conflicting changes.

Third, building the right kinds of collaborative applications requires some skill and understanding how and what kinds of data are shared. How many people are going to be adding/changing records to your database? How many just want to do queries and reports? And how do you prevent conflicting updates?

Finally, when you add the Web and Internet-based access to the data, you have greatly increased the skill level required to create and manage your database. While there are some really good Internet-facing database programs (Alpha Software, Filemaker, Quickbase from Intuit, and DabbleDb – just to name a few that I know of), none of these are as easy to setup and manipulate as Trackvia.com, a service that has been out for the past year but recently gotten some much-needed improvements.

You can create an account and upload your spreadsheet in about five minutes. If your first line in the spreadsheet contains your field names, you are just about done. You can easily sort any column quickly by clicking on the arrow icons. You can quickly locate duplicate records, create a mail merge template and forms for your Web site, all with just a couple of clicks of the mouse. Custom reports are simple, and what’s more, they can be distributed via email to your collaborators on a set schedule.  Adding different collaborators with various discrete permissions is very straightforward, and in about 30 minutes you can have a project setup and working with your team.

There are other ways to import data into your database, including using Web forms or setting up a special email inbox that will post the information automatically. These tasks will take some skill and some HTML knowledge, however.

Other tools require more programming skill to do what Trackvia does with a few mouse clicks, or are more cumbersome to manipulate, or don’t have the automatic defaults that make setup as easy as Trackvia. Did I mention the cost? $10 per month per user. This includes an unlimited number of databases and up to a GB of attachment storage (meaning that you aren’t charged for the actual records themselves that are stored). If you sign up before October 1 for an account, the company will give you several additional features free.

The company has been around for over a year and has some pretty impressive customers, including people that have built some very large databases. One final thing that I liked: with Trackvia, you have a completely free 14-day trial: you don’t give them your credit card to register. If you are sharing your spreadsheets the old fashioned way, you might want to check them out.

Aventail Mobile Connect review

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PDAs and smart phones are one of the biggest holes in a corporate VPN strategy. The number of users of these devices is increasing rapidly, and they carry with them the threat of infecting corporate networks. Getting a VPN client on your PDA or Smartphone just got a lot easier — provided you use Aventail’s VPN gateway. They offer a Windows Mobile v5 client and you can read my review published today in Computerworld here.

Techtarget/InfoSec mag: Unified Threat Management product comparison

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I put seven UTM products through their paces for reviews published in Information Security magazine. The products, from Juniper Networks SRX, IBM/ISS, Fortinet, Sonicwall, Secure Computing’s Sidewinder, Astaro, and CheckPoint Software, can handle a variety of security tasks including VPN, email filtering and spam protection, intrusion prevention and firewalls. Sonicwall and Fortinet came out on top.

Only a few of these reviews survive, and they have been linked above.