TuneUp Utilities – Version 2011 can help speed up your PC with a new collection of tuning features that is powerful yet extremely easy to use.
Price: $49.95 for three PCs, upgrades for $29.95.
Download a free, 15-day trial here: http://www.tune-up.com/download
VeriSign Identity Protection services provide a simple means of two-factor authentication for a wide variety of purposes such as email and Web logins and network remote access. They make use of both existing hardware credentials as well as newer software credentials that are available on a wide variety of smartphones.
Pricing is based on volume, typically around $7 to $12 per user per
year.
http://www.verisign.com/authentication/
Foglight does real-time performance monitoring for a wide variety of network devices and can capture traffic data too. It is easy to install and setup. Pricing averages $25,000 for most enterprises, with additional cost modules available for distributed networks and Cisco VoIP monitoring.
Quest Software
http://www.quest.com/foglight-network-management-system/
(800) 306-9329
Earlier this year I wrote about ways that you could take credit card payments via the Internet, using a variety of online banking services. At the time I signed up with Intuit’s Merchant Services, and I was generally happy with them.
But I don’t get a lot of my clients paying me via credit card, and the fees were beginning to add up. Fortunately, there is a new game in town (quite literally, as some of the developers are based here in St. Louis) called Square. It is a great service, easy to use, tremendously easy to setup, and cheap. There is no fee for account activation, monthly banking, early termination, or anything other the actual card processing fee itself. You don’t have to buy anything: they send you the hardware gratis.
Most of the credit card machines that you see in retail stores use a dial-up phone line and have a small printer that will reel out your receipt and call the merchant bank to process the transaction. Square uses the Internet and email, which is appealing. So how does it work?
When you go to Squareup.com, you sign up for an account, and link it to your bank checking account. Like Intuit and other online merchants, Square makes a couple of deposits in the next couple of weeks and asks you to verify the amounts so they can be sure it is really your account. Then they send you the hardware in the mail in another couple of weeks.
The hardware is the most curious thing about Square: it a small piece of white plastic a little bigger than a quarter that attaches to the earphone jack on your iPhone or Android phone. Yes, your cell phone. You download the app (indeed, you have to do this first before you sign up, which is a nice touch) on your phone. The plastic has a groove it where you can swipe your credit card and initiate the transaction. The whole process is incredibly simple.
If you have an actual card present, you get charged 15 cents for each transaction plus 2.75% of the transaction. This is about typical for many card processors, and is a bit higher than what Intuit charges. If you don’t have a card present, you can still key in the card number and you will get charged 3.5% of the transaction plus 15 cents.
Square will transfer the funds to your checking account within a few days; again this is typical of many online solutions. They will hold anything more than a $1001 for up to 30 days, but you can get this ceiling raised if you contact their support department. They take any US-issued credit, debit and gift card. When you login to your account using a Web browser, they have a series of reports to show your deposits and transactions.
VeriSign Identity Protection services provide a simple means of two-factor authentication for a wide variety of purposes such as email and Web logins and network remote access. They make use of both existing hardware credentials as well as newer software credentials that are available on a wide variety of smartphones.
Pricing is based on volume, typically around $7 to $12 per user per year.
http://www.verisign.com/authentication/
Twitter continues to be a great way to notify your adoring public, to provide customer service, to connect you with your potential customers, and to keep up to date on your competitors. And while you may not have completely gotten the Twitter ethos, you might be interested in one or more of these third-party tools that I have tried over the past several months. Feel free to share your own favorites. Please note: there is no guarantee that any of these companies will last longer than your average Tweet these days, so the links might be stale by the time you read this.
First are a variety of scheduling tools so you don’t have to be tweeting in the middle of the night or during dinner, as appealing as that might be for some of you. Studies have shown that most tweets aren’t read because they scroll off the feed in a jumble of posts. So it might be better to schedule them for the off-hours when the density is lower. Tweetdeck and Seesmic are two such tools.
Stat, search and research apps. TweetStats will graphically show you when you have Tweeted. Tweetmeme and Wefollow can be used to follow trends and keep track of what is popular at any given point in time. Twittervision can be used to find people in your local geographic area who are active with Twitter. Tools to follow people in a specific industry, or share lists of Twitter users, include Listorious, MuckRack (list of journalists) and Tweepml. Two real time search sites are SocialMention.com, which searches over several dozen sites, and 48ers.com, which will search across Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and Google’s Buzz.
Multiple account posting apps. If you have more than one Twitter account, or want to coordinate Tweets with your Facebook, LinkedIn, and WordPress blog accounts, then take a look at Pixelpipe.com, Ping.fm, or Posterous.com. Each offers ways to send forth your wisdom with a single click. Just make sure you check the post before you distribute widely. Dlvr.it can post your blog and other RSS feeds to nearly a dozen different sites too.
It’s been nearly two years since Microsoft unveiled its cloud computing offering, Business Productivity Online Standard (BPOS) suite. Microsoft BPOS suite offers online versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Office Live Meeting and Office Communications. It is sold by dozens of partners and has hundreds of thousands of individual users.
In this article for Techtarget, I discuss why BPOS is attractive to VARs, where it comes up short, and what Google is doing in the hosted services space.
Yes, I know. Probably any day of the calendar you can find a social media conference somewhere within 50 miles of you. But pay attention, this conference is all meat and little fat. Sponsored by the Social for New Communications Research, it brings together top-flight researchers from around the globe in one place for two days. You will see original research results, thoughtful commentary by practitioners, and make some wonderful contacts with the experts. It is a small, very focused single-track event with some very bright people. You can find the agenda here.
I will be there, of course, and presenting some initial findings from a new study exploring the impact of social media on telecommunications service providers that is sponsored by HP. What, you work for a service provider and haven’t yet taken my survey? Click here now, please! You don’t want to be left out.
SNCR is a labor of love of Jen McClure, who I first met back in the good ole’ days when Ziff Davis ran Interop and when Interop had a lock on the Internet brain trust. Her non-profit has done some amazing work in the few short years it has been around.
Register for the conference here. It isn’t a free event, but well worth your time and money to attend.
A number of vendors have stepped up with a series of scanning tools to help verify PCI compliance, and there are dozens of PCI scanning vendors on their approved list. The hardest part will be picking one that works well for your situation. Many of these programs require you to download some software, but a growing number of vendors are delivering Web-based scanning services. I evaluated one such solution, version 5 of the Web scanning service from Qualys called QualysGuard PCI Compliance.
You can read the review for eWeek here.
This week Paul Gillin and I discuss some tools and tips to help augment your social media methods in our MediaBlather podcast. We touch on more than a dozen different things that you can do to be more productive in Twitter, You Tube and other social media outlets. You can find the podcast here, along with the links to the various services that we mention.
Here is my slide deck that covers similar ground.