Archive for the ‘Tools’ Category

Adobe Acrobat 9.3.3 installation – 240 megabytes

Foxit PDF reader installation – 10 megabytes

Space saved – 230 megabytes

Of course you ask, “why worry about 230 megabytes with today’s terrabyte hard drives?” Have you noticed the system resources the Adobe brand reader consumes at idle? Of course there are functions the Foxit reader doesn’t handle but quite honestly when all you want to do is read the free eBook on optimizing your notepad PC who cares?

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When I was much younger there was a dance called “the bump”. Did I mention that was when I was much younger? Today a new bump craze may be on its way and you may be able to profit from it if your development ideas are the right stuff.

Bump Technologies has introduces a new app for iPhone and Android which, by their own description, “is a quick and easy way to connect two phones by simply bumping them together. Exchange your phone number, photos, or compare friends with just a bump.”

On the Bump blog over at Posterous they give a wish list of sorts for developers to get them thinking in the direction of creating apps using the Bump API. http://blog.bu.mp/requests-for-apps

What could you do with a bump app?

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Several years ago I hired a bright young lady freshly graduated from webmaster school. It was obvious she was a little intimidated by the scope of some of the jobs we had especially when I told her I coded in pico or emacs. I calmed her a bit by telling her she could also use notepad. Since then many things, make that everything has, have changed. Today I want to introduce you to three Chrome extensions you’ll probably find handy.

Color picker EyeDropper

Remember the days of doing a screen shot, pasting that into Paint Shop Pro and using the eye dropper to select the color? Gone are those days if you use Chrome. The EyeDropper plugin works great. Simply install it, go to the page you are working on, activate the extension, find the color you want and click. Seriously – it’s that difficult.

See the screen capture to the right for an image of the pop-up. Read the rest of this entry »

We know how difficult it is to run a business when none of the partners or associates live within 300 miles of each other. In fact our consulting group is spread from California to Texas to Miami to South Carolina’s coast to Atlanta. We rely on video web conferencing to keep up on the same page and going in the same direction. When I say we have tried web based video conferencing systems from A to Z it’s no stretch! Then we found this solution.

100% Browser Based Video & Web Conferencing services. No downloads, no headaches. This system allows companies to connect across the globe with their employees, prospects and clients. Free live demos provided by our sales staff.

What is video conferencing?

Most people will already know what video conferencing is just by the name but what is a better question is “how can video conferencing help a small, medium or large company be more productive?”

One of Inc. 500s top pics for video conferencing is completely web based. There are no downloads, users can have up to 16 live video windows and VOIP is integrated for seamless audio.

Imagine collaborating with a handful of people from across the nation, just like the staff at Social Media Edge does every Tuesday, on a project, plan or strategy and being able to look at each other, share video and audio, and interact almost like being in each other’s presence.

After testing literally dozens of options we came across a video web conferencing system regularly named as the best choice for solutions and now we have partnered with them to provide an opportunity for you to test drive this incredible system.

2009 Inc. 500 Winner
Discover Why MegaMeeting.com was voted The #1 Video & Web Conferencing Company on the 2009 Inc 500 List!

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My Treo was long my favorite smart phone. It did the business things I needed it to do and wanted it to do. It was the first to allow Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, it had a great map feature and was the first with a 1.3 megapixel camera. The first in my collection that is.

The challenge happened when other smart phone started doing something very smart: opening up to open source development and encouraging developers to create applications for their phones.

When the iPhone first came out I had a Treo 750. I had about a dozen apps I had downloaded for it and none of them were “snap”. In fact they were all business applications that really didn’t make the average college student say, “can I see it?” Then came the iPhone – the ultimate Geek Toy.

Blackberry had been around for a while and I knew the business function, speed and power of my Treo was still what I wanted. Reps from other companies would come into the office and show me some cool flash game or mail reader for their Blackberry they had recently downloaded for free. It did not make me want to switch but it did make me a bit jealous. I wanted apps. The appearance of the iPhone and the 10s of thousands of apps really made me jealous. Still, I did not change.

Read the rest of this entry »

The more successful you are the thicker your skin. Or at least that should be the case. Knowing what people say about you or your brand is very important to your success especially if the sayings are outside your scope of intent. Brand awareness is good when it is positive but unless you are Borat the supreme fool you will most likely want only good to be spoken of your brand.

Relax, it is not as difficult as you would think. In fact there are many tools available to monitor the use of your brand name and key words associated with your brand. Some of these are automated and others will require interactive use but are still powerful.

1. Google Alerts – this completely free service is very easy to setup and monitor. I run it on my name, my websites, my company name, and keywords relative to what I am monitoring for. Simply visit http://www.google.com/alerts and follow the very simple instructions. You can choose how often you would like to receive your notices and create as many as you like. If you want the exact phrase be sure to use quotation marks such as “social media edge radio”. You can choose to have the alerts delivered directly to your registered email account or your Google Reader. If you have a staff of people obviously Reader is the way to go. It can also be published to your public reader thereby giving you even more Google juice. Read the rest of this entry »

Twitter not enough for you? Tired of all the social applications on Facebook crowding your stream? Meet Google Buzz. The Buzz reached me today and, being the shy and demure type that I am, I decided to jump in with both feet. Here’s what I found:

1. Google Buzz seems to be a blend of the Facebook live stream and Twitter.
2. Google Buzz allows you to use your existing Google message groups to send messages.
3. It automatically connected to my Google connected sites that are public (see image). That includes both Picasa and Google Reader for me. (If you do not want to share your reader go to http://www.google.com/reader and change the settings.)
4. “People you follow” on Google Buzz also show up on http://www.google.com/reader in the left menu bar.
5. Message on Google Buzz showed up automatically in my Gmail inbox. Not sure yet how to change that feature. Messages show up in the inbox with a Google Buzz logo. Once they are entered you can interact with that conversation inside your web based Gmail.

The intereface (web page) for Google Buzz isn’t that different than other social engagement websites with live streams. You can see posts from your friends and comment on them. One thing I do already like is the comments are more like Facebook than Twitter where one conversation is grouped together. Unlike Facebook you do have some control over the theme but unlike Twitter you are the only one who will get the benefit of it.

I like that you can share multiple photos in your posts as well as videos and apparently audio. Because Google Docs is right there in the same sphere it will also be very easy to link to a spreadsheet or slide presentation you have stored in Docs.

So far definitely thumbs up.

Your words are your thoughts. True enough some people write without giving much thought to their words and those make some entertaining word clouds, too. What is a word cloud you ask? Simple enough – it is a “cloud” created from all of the words in a particular document.

Back in the day before the internet was inter or net a word cloud was simple called a word repetition count and there were done, gasp, by manually counting the words in a document and creating hash marks for each word. Not those hash marks, real hash marks.

Wordle counts the words on any text you paste into the form and can count the words in an RSS feed and creates a graphic representation of the words contained in the document or the feed. Click the thumbnail here to see the Wordle for the RSS feed for Twitterbits.

Give it a try and see if your message is coming out loud and clear!

http://www.wordle.net/

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Plagiarism. So easy to copy and paste. Right click and save.

How about a few tools to help you find your absconded pixels? How fortunate you are to be reading this little post about how to find out who is using your photos or who is copying your blogs. After all, it is a question that hits everyone when they copy someone else … “who is copying my blog?”

Photos and images are easily taken. While embedded watermarks help visually they don’t do much digitally. Digital signatures can be embedded in images to help track them but there are holes even in that protection. Many people who work in copy protection employ multiple tools.

Here is a very simple one, free to use, to see if someone else is using your image even if they have changed the name. While not perfect it can point you in the right direction: http://www.tineye.com

With TinEye you simply upload your original image and the system searches for matching images in their database. From the website, “When you submit an image to be searched, TinEye creates a unique and compact digital signature or ‘fingerprint’ for it, then compares this fingerprint to every other image in our index to retrieve matches. TinEye can even find a partial fingerprint match. TinEye does not typically find similar images (i.e. a different image with the same subject matter); it finds exact matches including those that have been cropped, edited or resized.”