Altgate

Coolest 2GB ThumbDrive Ever

You can read the review here.

Mac Vs. PC

Opinion Polls & Market Research

I just saw this post on the LinkedIN blog describing how they exclusively use Macs as their development environment.  I know Sermo also uses all Macs and speaking from personal experience I can't wait to get rid of the last PC I own (I'm down to just one).  I'm not a developer, but it's clear from LinkedIN and Sermo that it's possible to build great sites using just Macs.  And speaking from a business user's perspective, Macs are much more efficient and intuitive. So here's my question, is this the exception or the trend?  Take a second and vote in the poll to the left...do you use Macs or PCs in your company?

Technology & Politics

This weekend I have been following a "debate" on Twitter (read more about it here). It's between representatives of the Obama and McCain campaigns.  Bottom line it's terrible.  Instead of a standard debate which gets reduced to 10 second sound bites, this gets reduced even more to 140 character text strings.

This got me to thinking that it would be interesting to see the candidates actually debate technology policy issues where the moderators of the debate are leading technologists.  That would be interesting.

But then, if this interview of the candidates by Yahoo is true, I think this is unlikely to happen... 

Go Green @ Work

After several months in the oven, I am thrilled to announce the launch of my new venture, Viridus, a community for business professionals to discuss and advance corporate sustainability. 

Viridus is a practical "how to manual" for issues everyone faces at work.  Our belief is that everyone has a "green collar" job and it is how you do your job that actually makes it green or not.  An accounting department working on reducing paper billing, an engineering group designing for recyclability, a purchasing department seeking to reduce the ghg footprint of their supply chain, a facilities department looking to reduce energy or water consumption and especially those who work in corporate sustainability will all find value at Viridus.

Viridus is a members-only site with 100% user-generated-content.  We feel that an environment of business professionals who have responsibility for the sustainability of their organization is particularly valuable.  This way members don't have to worry about being solicited by vendors, press, regulators, NGOs, etc.

We are strongly committed to improving the sustainability of businesses everywhere and look forward to building the Viridus community.  We are currently in invite only private beta.  If you would like to request an invite, please sign up here.  In the meantime, please feel free to send us feedback, comments or questions.

And lastly, over the next few weeks I'll be posting more on my transition from EIR back to entrepreneur, so stay tuned!

What A Coincidence!

So earlier today I did a blog post on Simulscribe and their voicemail-to-text service, and not 10 hours later I get an email from Vonage saying I've been selected for a free trial of their new "Visual Voicemail" service (essentially the same thing but for my home phone).  Weird.

Cool Vmail-to-Text Service

I recently signed up for a service by SimulScribe that converts voicemail messages left on my cell phone into email (with an audio file as an attachment).  It's great for those situations when I'm in a meeting and can't answer the phone (but do have time to look at my email).  Apparently the way it works is that the messages are shot off to some call center in India or China, transcribed and sent back.  There might actually be some voice recognition software in the middle there somewhere, but either way it's all transparent to the end user.  It takes only a few minutes to sign up (surprising given how Byzantine the carriers can be) and you don't have to change anything on your end or on the end of the folks leaving a message.  My only beef with the service is that the delay between the phone call and the email could be shorter (sometimes it's 10-15 minutes) and the service is a bit over priced for what you get, but overall I love it!

WikiFraudsters Beware!

CalTech computation and neural systems graduate student Virgil Griffith (pictured) recently launched WikiScanner which cross references all of the anonymous postings on Wikipedia with a database that matches IP addresses with the organizations that own them and put the searchable results online revealing some interesting, if not fraudulent behavior.

There are over 34 million anonymous posts by nearly 200,000 organizations.  It will take some time, but I'm sure some embarrassing behavior will be unearthed.  Wired magazine already has posted some finds that raise eyebrows including:

• BBC censors excerpt from BBC-commissioned report criticizing the BBC's tendency to self-censor.
• McKinsey & Co. deletes criticisms that they "...restate the obvious with business jargon."
• Blockbuster inserts advertisements into its own page.
• And my favorite, the Baltimore Orioles dis pitcher Sidney Ponson as being a "fat...disgrace."

I suspect this won't be the last we hear from the WikiScanner!

Don't You Love It When Science Fiction Becomes Reality?

The cars in iRobot were cool, but this makes the Segue look like a 30-year old Huffy 10 speed!