The Netbook Review

InfoGrok Media, a leading media industry suppliers website are reporting that the Atlanta, Georgia-based video and media data and advertising solutions provider Concurrent, will be demonstrating an innovative commercial video application for exchanging personal video content at this year’s CableLabs Winter Conference.

During the companys annual get together, which runs from the end of February through to the beginning of March in Atlanta, Georgia, the company will enable people to record and also upload personal video content from their cell phones to Concurrent’s cloud hosted i2TV technology platform.

Using their new i2TV solution, users will be able to define video sharing profiles and make their personal video content available to family and friends for on-demand playback on any number of consumer devices, including traditional set top boxes, computers, and cell phones.

As both a cloud hosted service and an open system, Concurrent’s solution allows video content to be shared across major service providers, enabling users to connect with other i2TV users wherever they might be around the globe.

Mr James Brickmeier, the current Vice President of Concurrent’s video solutions for cable and telecommunications providers is quoted as saying, “Personal video sharing is the first of a new generation of video applications Concurrent is enabling with our cloud based i2TV solution.”

The b2b news and company benchmarking website goes on to report that Concurrent believes that its new solutions offer operators a convenient way to generate new revenue streams from television-based services as well as differentiate their multi-screen service offering from a growing array of competitors without the need for expensive infrastructure upgrades.”

The company’s i2TV technology solution is an entirely cloud based, online video platform that enables user generated content, premium/freemium content and “Best of the Web” content, as well as hyper-local and national advertising content to be delivered to any device as linear broadcast or VOD programming. i2TV potentially serves as a key foundation for most next generation video apps.

Netbooks Reviewed media, media industry, social media, video

If you just want a laptop for social media then you might want to choose notebook. Notebooks are cheaper than standard laptops and are perfect for those who only want to use the web. There is no point in spending extra money on a laptop when you are not going to use the extra functions that you are paying for. However before you decide upon a notebook, there are a few things you should consider.

- The whole purpose of a notebook and why they were created is to cater for people who only want to use the internet. If you use the computer for many different tasks then this probably won’t be the best choice for you.

- The size of a notebook is smaller than a traditional laptop and they are much lighter and this is because they don’t have CD drives or a lot of hard disk space.

- A notebook is not the right choice for anyone who likes to watch DVDs on their computer. This is because there is usually no CD-Rom drive where you can insert disks. It is important to be aware of this limitation before you buy. Online movies however are still something that you can watch.

- A notebook probably won’t be suitable for those who like to play big games.

- When it comes to notebooks you can find some at really cheap prices but you should know that the quality may not be so good. It is not usually a good idea to buy a notebook from an unknown manufacturer even if it is very cheap. You will have the reassurance that the notebook you buy is good quality even if it means you have to pay a bit extra for it when you buy from a well known manufacturer.

- If you want a computer for work then a notebook might be a bit too basic for this.

Memory cards are products located in lots of things in the current time period, and ±nternet site pages just like www.mobymemory.com are the best sites to get them. Places similar to mobymemory.com are good for alternative products, iphone accessories can give you a great example of this as well. Yet another which you can find commonly obtainable is the ipod accessories, and yet again, you won’t go far wrong than purchasing them online at sites like Moby Memory.

Netbooks Reviewed computer, laptop, pc, social media

Today, social media is a huge part of our every day lives, be it personal or business/work related. Some great advice on the basic points of social media and how it can benefit your business comes from Matthew Trewhella, social media expert for Google. He explains it’s link with cloud computing, and why it is so important for business continuity. Cloud computing can cover a couple of different things. Whether you’re a business or consumer, you will most likely have a different approach to it. The cloud is basically using the Internet for computing. Amazon, Google, IBM and lots of other larger companies employ their own cloud networks, mainly used for IT collaboration. Its big advantage is that you’re not hiring physical hardware so you can scale up and down as you need. So if your load suddenly goes up you’re only paying for what you’re using right now, if the load suddenly goes down again you haven’t got a whole host of machines sitting idle. As a consumer, the major benefit is that none of the data is stored on your computer. This means you can be safe in the knowledge that your data is more secure than it would be on your computer. The beauty of this is if your computer breaks it’s all stored elsewhere, so all you need to do is get a new computer, plug it into the internet and everything you had there is still there. Google Docs is a good example. It allows you to create documents, spreadsheets, reports etc in an online environment. If your computer explodes it doesn’t matter, because the next time you get on the internet that document will still be there as it was stored on Google’s servers. In addition, you can share your documents with other people, and invite them to collaborate on your documents, so it has a great advantage when we talk about IT collaboration. Once real time editing is done, and your document is finished, you can easily publish it as a web page or share it via the network to other users.

Netbooks Reviewed Cloud Computing, cloud storage, it collaboration, social media

Wave?  What is that?What is this thing Google is unleashing in their next step towards total world domination?  Well, in technical terms, Google Wave is a “web based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking.”

In casual terms, it means they want to make one web application (keep in mind this is all based around HTML 5) that will integrate e-mail, IM, your Twitter and Facebooks of the world, wikipedia entries, Photobucket type sharing and more, all in one window.  Plus open it up for developers to take it in whatever direction they want from there.  In short, they want to take over the world.  And I signed up for the beta. (That's all it is right now, 100,000 people will be invited in September).

Err…what?  It sounds like it is a mash-up of everything.  And…it pretty much is.  And it looks like it does it very very well.  And in this blog writer's humble opinion, it will change EVERYTHING.

I bold, everything, because I really do think there are huge social, business and casual implications to a platform that is attempting to merge every one of our major online services into one platform.  And I don't mean they will just have a window here for e-mail, and a window over there for IM, and a window up here for Twitter and put in all in one big window.  No, this goes deeper.

They want to integrate the back and forth threading, forwarding, replies and attachments of email, merge it into an IM style real-time chat system (completely with literal real-time, character by character updates of you typing, instead of seeing “Joe is typing” for an hour), add some VCR features (any new people added to a “Wave” can see a play-by-play of the conversation as it happened), allow users to simultaneously upload, download, and delete pictures and integrate a very sophisticated spell checker into the whole process – with this one Google puts a bid on redoing the damage the last few years have done to our “lol u guz r da gr8tst” youth.  And if you can't read that, don't hurt your brain trying to, I did just writing it.

Add in the fact they are opening this up to development, open source style, and you have something that will be as huge as Facebook, at least in the applications side of things.

Imagine if businesses were to adopt Google Wave en masse.  Pizza Hut gets Wave, and offers it to their customers.  Pizza Hut tweets through Wave a special deal they are offering for the day.  Customer A decides he or she wants to order a pizza based on the Tweet he or she receives through Wave.  Instead of calling, or working through the online ordering system, maybe an application has been developed for Wave that allows the customer and an employee direct conversation for ordering a pizza.  The customer jumps into a new wave with a Pizza Hut employee, the employee takes the order and away we go.

This is a simple example that probably won't even be close to anything that will come out, I'm sure what will come along will be WAY more cool than anything that I could think of.

Imagine for businesses.  You are working in a web based company, maybe providing web design, programming, SEO, and admin services for a business.

Customer A contacts Account Executive A and gets the ball rolling.  Cust. A needs a new website, web design and some basic SEO services.   So AE A opens a new wave between Cust. A, Designer A, Designer B and SEO A, and they all can collaborate between the 4 of them.  Plus if Designer B and SEO A need to talk about something inside the Wave, but do not want to start a new one, they can not Wave Designer A and Cust A and just Wave each other, and then when their conversation is finished, go back to Waving everyone.

The business implications are HUGE for this, especially on large projects, with multiple departments working on one single project, or collaborations through different departments.

Even in my business, if I have a Sony digital camera repair that one of my staff are working on, and I need to change the work order, and I'm at home, I can just Wave it to him, and I'll have a thread based means of replying and seeing it.

So if you are interested even a little bit, get on board, and use the Wave.  I strongly believe this will change the face of things, the same way email, IM or social media has changed things.

This one just does it all.

Netbooks Reviewed chat, Google, Google Wave, instant messaging, social media

How much personal information do you have online? Have you ever thought about that question? Have you ever searched for your own name on Bing? How about the different variations of your name, have you googled them? Take this story that just happened to me as an example of how personal information and data can end up online without your knowledge or permission.

Today I received an email from, Google Alerts telling me that my name had popped up in a new web page. I get these emails just about every other day because I am on various social media outlets and I have my own computer repair blog so I didn’t think it was anything strange. However once I read the email, I had to check it out.

A day or 2 earlier I had written a letter of recommendation for a friend and thought nothing more about it. Then I get the Google Alerts email and I had to see what it was talking about. Apparently the friend needed to convert the Microsoft Word file to an Adobe Acrobat file and used the website http://www.scribd.com to do so. No big deal, right? Well, the website made the letter public and Google had searched it and found my name. This is why I was alerted. So I called my friend to ask her about it and apparently her resume as well as 2 more letters of recommendation were also posted online as well. Thanks to Google Alerts, we were spared the embarrassment of having somebody else find it.

How much of your personal information is online? Have you ever Googled your own name? I highly recommend it, you could be shocked at what you find. And if I were you, I would set up alerts for the different variations of your name. That way, any time something new is added, you’ll know about it.

Creating your own alerts is simple. No account or login is needed.

1. Go to Google Alerts.

2. Input the name or phrase for which you are interested in receiving alerts.

3. Choose comprehensive.

4. Enter your email address.

5. Click on “Create Alert”.

6. Google will automatically send an email to the address that you enter. This email contains a link that says “Verify this Google Alert request” and you need to click on it.

7. You’re done.

Keeping up to date with your information online is a great way to reduce embarrassment and credit fraud.

Netbooks Reviewed data security, Google, social media

Wave?  What is that?  What is Google’s latest bid for world domination?  Well, in technical terms, Google Wave is a “web based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking.”

In casual terms, it means they want to make one web application (keep in mind this is all based around HTML 5) that will integrate e-mail, IM, your Twitter and Facebooks of the world, wikipedia entries, Photobucket type sharing and more, all in one window.  Plus open it up for developers to take it in whatever direction they want from there.  In short, they want to take over the world.  And I signed up for the beta. (That’s all it is right now, 100,000 people will be invited in September).

Err…what?  It sounds like it is a mash-up of everything.  And…it pretty much is.  And it looks like it does it very very well.  And in this blog writer’s humble opinion, it will change EVERYTHING.

I bold, everything, because I really do think there are huge social, business and casual implications to a platform that is attempting to merge every one of our major online services into one platform.  And I don’t mean they will just have a window here for e-mail, and a window over there for IM, and a window up here for Twitter and put in all in one big window.  No, this goes deeper.

They want to integrate the back and forth threading, forwarding, replies and attachments of email, merge it into an IM style real-time chat system (completely with literal real-time, character by character updates of you typing, instead of seeing “Joe is typing” for an hour), add some VCR features (any new people added to a “Wave” can see a play-by-play of the conversation as it happened), allow users to simultaneously upload, download, and delete pictures and integrate a very sophisticated spell checker into the whole process – with this one Google puts a bid on redoing the damage the last few years have done to our “lol u guz r da gr8tst” youth.  And if you can’t read that, don’t hurt your brain trying to, I did just writing it.

Add in the fact they are opening this up to development, open source style, and you have something that will be as huge as Facebook, at least in the applications side of things.

Imagine if businesses were to adopt Google Wave en masse.  Pizza Hut gets Wave, and offers it to their customers.  Pizza Hut tweets through Wave a special deal they are offering for the day.  Customer A decides he or she wants to order a pizza based on the Tweet he or she receives through Wave.  Instead of calling, or working through the online ordering system, maybe an application has been developed for Wave that allows the customer and an employee direct conversation for ordering a pizza.  The customer jumps into a new wave with a Pizza Hut employee, the employee takes the order and away we go.

This is a simple example that probably won’t even be close to anything that will come out, I’m sure what will come along will be WAY more cool than anything that I could think of.

Imagine for businesses.  You are working in a web based company, maybe providing web design, programming, SEO, and admin services for a business.

Customer A contacts Account Executive A and gets the ball rolling.  Cust. A needs a new website, web design and some basic SEO services.   So AE A opens a new wave between Cust. A, Designer A, Designer B and SEO A, and they all can collaborate between the 4 of them.  Plus if Designer B and SEO A need to talk about something inside the Wave, but do not want to start a new one, they can not Wave Designer A and Cust A and just Wave each other, and then when their conversation is finished, go back to Waving everyone.

The business implications are HUGE for this, especially on large projects, with multiple departments working on one single project, or collaborations through different departments.

Even in my business, if I have a digital camera repair that one of my people are working on, and I need to change the work order, and I’m at home, I can just Wave it to him, and I’ll have a thread based means of replying and seeing it.

So if you are interested even a little bit, get on board, and use the Wave.  I strongly believe this will change the face of things, the same way email, IM or social media has changed things.

This one just does it all.

Netbooks Reviewed chat, Google, Google Wave, instant messaging, social media