Tech for Lunch!

Pinnacle, a division of Avid (editing software used in television) offers a beautiful product to the general public, the Dazzle Video Creator Platinum. It allows you to simply capture images of your VHS and video cameras in your computer and then make montages to be transferred to DVD or video to the Internet.

The software comes with a capture card. An external module that you plug into a USB port on your computer. In this unit, you plug your VHS player, your video camera or any other video player connecting with RCA cables or S-Video.

You capture, edit and you create. During the capture, the software scans the video images on your computer. Once this stage is completed, it analyzes the images and divides them into chapters (like a DVD). This will help you when the time comes to create the menus. If you want to keep the images as they are (e.g. a TV show in full or video of your marriage) simply choose the beginning and end and voila!

If you wish to make a montage (best time, remove the ads, etc..), You can choose the samples to keep and paste, reverse them and choose transitions. The editing software allows you to simply create your montage and is suitable for most people. You choose the look of thee DVD menu, it gives a name to each clip and is almost finished.

Finally, you select the type of video you want. A DVD? A Web clip(Real Player, Windows Media)? A digital file in MPEG format?

If you have added several effects, transitions and added several titles, the computer will take some time to compile the video. Burn the result to the DVD itself and you have a true DVD as the ones you rent in video stores.

The software comes with Pinnacle Studio QuickStart, which offers a capture module only. This means that you cannot do anything other than DVDs or videos to computer.

The Dazzle Video Creator Platinum is a module which does not require installation. Just connect it to the USB port of a computer and you’re ready to go.

Be aware that any kind of video editing requires quite a bit of memory and processing power so make sure you have a good enough machine to do it. This will work on older machines but it just takes longer during editing and compilation.

I’m sure a lot of you have other suggestions for video editing software, but this is an easy to use solution for those who are looking for a quick and easy way to convert video to a digital media.

Sony has announced another delay in the launch of PlayStation Home. It is a project for a 3D virtual world for users of the PlayStation 3 console, a sort of meeting place, exchange and encounter for the members of this community.

Initially, the project was announced in July 2007, Sony had stated that everything would be ready in the autumn of 2007, but officials have seen fit to delay the launch to spring of this year. However, Sony now indicates that the first testing service (beta) will be held next autumn.

In a statement issued yesterday, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment, Kazuo Hirai, said that the project is not yet ready: “We are well aware that we once again ask the current and future users of the PS3 to be patient, but we have come to the conclusion that we needed a little more time to improve the product, in order to be able to offer a product that comes out of the ordinary.”

PlayStation Home aroused much enthusiasm in the PS3 community. Any user will be represented by a virtual character (avatar), which may interact with those around him, in a village in 3D, just like life in the community; this environment will consist of public and private spaces.

Each member of PlayStation Home will have its own “apartment” where he can receive one or several people, listen to music, watch television, discuss with your partner or group, decorate the walls with photos, etc..

As for public spaces, they will house cinemas which will be presenting trailers for movies or games, there will be game rooms, where people can enjoy, alone or in a group, different arcade games, billiards or bowling.

Sony has already announced that the virtual world, which will be downloadable from PlayStation Store, should not exceed 500 MB of memory on the hard drive.

Well, I discussed Windows Vista SP1 previously, and now Microsoft has turned on the deployment through automatic updates. This means that if you have automatic updates turned on to download and install automatically, you should be getting SP1 installed pretty soon.

Naturally, the process will be progressive because of the many bugs that were found during the first phases. The most annoying bug is the endless booting loop where your computer simply reboots constantly after SP1 is applied. It’s a bit difficult to get any work done when that happens. Other problems are mostly with security programs which end up broken after the patch is installed.

You can still just go ahead and download the full installation file directly from Microsoft (mostly for administrators) to get SP1 right away if you don’t trust the automatic updates.

Earlier this month, Yahoo! announced “ Onesearch 2.0“. Onesearch is Yahoo’s search software for Internet connected mobile devices. The newly released version allows users to use voice commands to search the web.

Now you can use your voice to get answers on your phone. With Yahoo! oneSearch™ with voice, it’s fast and easy to search for anything you need when you’re mobile. Just speak into your phone and get relevant and accurate results from Yahoo! oneSearch, an industry leading mobile search product.

Onesearch is a pretty cool product because it allows you to find things faster than you normally would on your mobile phone. No need to browse to yahoo, search and then hope the results are relevant and well formatted for your phone. OneSearch runs directly on your mobile phone and lets you launch a search faster and returns relevant results that you can actually use.

Yahoo has partnered with 29 mobile telephone service carriers, representing 600 million customers, since the first version of oneSearch launched in early 2007. The second-generation oneSearch software is free for download and installation to mobile telephones linked to the Internet.

For those of you who have been paying attention, Microsoft is slowly moving towards using the internet as their platform rather than the actual machine you use to access it. Basically, in the long run, we should be able to access all of our stuff from anywhere, using any kind of computer, whether it’s a PC, Mac or even mobile devices. Techcrunch has a very complete article about it and I wasn’t quick enough to get into the first beta round so I’ll just write a summary of features here.

Imagine all your devices—PCs, and soon Macs and mobile phones—working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about. With Live Mesh, you can spend less time managing devices and data and more time connecting with family and friends or collaborating with colleagues.

Live Mesh provides you with an online virtual desktop to which you connect your computers and any other device you want to use to control it. Right now, only Windows XP and Vista are supported but Macs and mobile devices should be added this year, as well as the capability to connect your xbox or even a picture frame.

The current product is definitely oriented towards developers and supplies all the necessary APIs to start building applications that will make good use of Live Mesh. Essentially, you could use it to not only sync files and folders, but entire applications. This would really take the desktop out of your local PC and move it online, allowing you to truly work (or play) from any machine you choose.

I can’t wait to see more of this product, but I will have to wait for openings in the beta which is full right now. In the mean time, the article I mentioned above is very thorough and has some screenshots.

Not too long ago, I covered the Microsoft Online Portal Solutions offering Exchange and Sharepoint capabilities as web services. Microsoft just announced that the Office suite will now also be a part of this approach. This is no surprise since Bill Gates mentioned that we would be seeing more and more of this from Microsoft to keep up with the competition, but also to offer more choices to the customers. The yet-to-be-released product, code named “Albany” will be a bundled installation available on a subscription basis.

With just a few clicks, “Albany” subscribers will be able install the whole package, which includes Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, giving them the latest versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote for their personal and school projects; Windows Live OneCare to help keep viruses at bay and their computer fast and healthy; and Windows Live Mail, Messenger and Photo Gallery so they can connect and share with others. Albany also installs the Microsoft Office Live Workspace connector on the Microsoft Office toolbar, so users can save documents to their own dedicated online workspace and invite friends and classmates to collaborate and share.

Right from the start, we can see that the main difference here is that the product does not run directly in a browser like Microsoft Online, but is offered as a subscription-based download with updates for as long a you are a member. This is certainly a brand new approach for Microsoft who have always offered software on a license based model either per seat or per user.

The target audience for a product like this is limited because it is not for businesses and not everyone is inclined to having a bunch of Microsoft products pushed onto their machine. Microsoft’s point of view is that they are bundling the office software with a software segment that most users are willing to pay to get as a subscription: Security - They also aim for people who like to always have the latest version of everything installed on their machines.

Microsoft will be adding products to this new model to broaden the target audience and to better compete with their closest competitors for the online suites: Google and Zoho. A business version should also become available.

The beta version of Albany will become commercially available later this year and and pricing has yet to be established.

While we are in this line of thought, might as well cover another application that uses the Adobe Flex framework and that deals with financial data. I spoke about Spiceworks.com and iexpenseonline.com in my last two posts, so this application is a bit more for developers, but could have some very interesting results for the end-users.

Intuit has just announced that they are joining the “Platform-as-a-service” band wagon with Amazon, Google and their closest competitor, Salesforce.com. The Quickbase development environment offers developers the opportunity to use intuit’s Quickbase as a platform combined with the Adobe Flex Framework to build applications for end-users.

Quickbase is not the new product, but the fact that it is going to be available for developers to use openly and to publish their own applications directly for all quickbase users to see, is new. One great advantage that Intuit has is that large user base for Quickbooks. The apps developed will be web add-ons for Quickbooks users sold on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Developers not only get the power and reliability of the Quickbase platform, but the visibility to Quickbooks users. Users are already familiar with quickbooks so a minimized learning curve is also important.

Take a look at the quickbase website; there are videos and some demos of applications that can be built using the Quickbase Development Environment.

Everyday I look around the web and find interesting applications. Today, I landed on iexpenseonline.com, and I thought this could be useful to many people out there. If you have been reading anything I’ve written lately, you know that I’m quite fond of well presented and practical applications, especially the ones designed with Adobe Flex. This application fits in all those categories.

IExpenseOnline (or IEO) is an online budgeting solution that helps you manage your budget by assisting you in tracking your daily financial activity. The concept is inspired by a humble notebook, full of daily expenses and income, used by most of us to track and control our budget. IEO is totally FREE and can be used by anyone who wishes to manage budget without a pen and notebook. The data entered into different features offered by IEO is 100% secure, with all the latest technological and manual security parameters in place.

I found the layout very intuitive and easy to use. The presentation is probably what got me hooked right away though. It is very clean and gets you going exactly where you need to go to get things done. There are a bunch of tools and reports you can use to help manage your finances, but I found that the only thing that is missing is the capability to get information directly from your bank account. I had an article about Mint previously and I think that this application might get a portion of users who just need to have a tool for daily management. Best of all, IEO is free!

Take a look at their website to get a good idea of the product and see the interface. You can even give it a quick try without registering if you want.

I was very surprised when I came across this application about a week ago, that I had not heard about it earlier. I have seen and implemented a pretty good number of commercial “suites” that are supposed to be flawlessly integrated and offer everything you need out of the box. Truth be told, most of the time, you need some heavy customization to get the results you are looking for and you usually need to change your business process to fit the “mold” of the application. This is true for most suites that try to take over your entire IT Management activities.

Spiceworks may not offer the entire spectrum of IT Management tasks, but it does what it does very well and offers the most important applications that any IT manager needs in one simple and free package.

Essentially, Spiceworks is setup locally on a machine inside your network and installs its own web server on a port of your choosing. The entire interface is web-based and allows you to do a multitude of things such as:

• Automatic computer and software inventory
• IT asset reporting
• Network Monitoring and troubleshooting
• IT Helpdesk
• Connect to the spiceworks community for IT answers, product reviews and advice from other IT pros

I absolutely love the integration that they have done with this product and the way the interface is designed. It’s simple and intuitive and lets you get things done quickly. I especially like the portal section of the website which allows your clients to log on to open helpdesk tickets directly and gives them a source of information specific to your environment. You can place a message at the top of the page to let your customers know if there are problems on the system and give them a list of places to look for information to fix their own problems.

The software inventory portion is very well done and the best part is that it will run an inventory on your entire network without having to install anything on client machines. You simply supply an administrator username/password to access all the machines on the network and away it goes, capable of detecting Windows, OS X and Linux boxes. Spiceworks lets you complete the information manually to specify, for example, how many licenses of each software you have bought to make sure you are legit and up to date. You can pull out many standard reports so that you are always on top of what’s going on in your environment.

Network Monitoring will let you see all the recent activity on your network and one of my favorites is the “Recent software” section. This one lets you see what recent software was installed by your end-users so you can enforce company policies if needed. There are many indicators that you can use and another very useful one is hard disk capacity which lets you know whenever a machine is running low on disk space. Spiceworks will let you connect directly to a machine (Using RDP) for troubleshooting and has a few other helpful tools to diagnose network problems.

The community section connects back to the spiceworks site and lets you interact with other IT pros to get answers and advice for some problems you may be having and acts just like a portal with a forum, news, reviews, and even a store. I see it as a portal for IT Pros.

So how does spiceworks offer such a complete and well done package for free? There are a few very non-obstrusive ads in the application by IT partners such as HP, Rackspace and Logmein. Quite honestly, this is the kind of package that I wouldn’t mind paying for to use it in a company, but free is always good :-)

Overall, Spiceworks offers a well rounded solution for IT managers with an environment of less than 250 devices and admin rights on all of them. As mentioned on their site, it will work with larger networks, but it might be slower. If you need to implement a quick ticketing solution and/or a network inventory solution, Spiceworks may be just the thing you are looking for.

It’s no secret that I am a fan of Google’s impressive array of online applications and, when it comes to desktop applications, they do an excellent job as well. Google Earth is one of those applications and an even more impressive one if you stop and think about the massive amounts of information that are required to make it possible.

Google Earth 4.3 was released this week and there are number of new features to make this a worthwhile upgrade if you like the application. Google Earth Blog has a great review with screenshots of this version. The best way to get a good look at the features without doing all the work yourself, is probably the videos on Youtube: This one by Google, and this one by Frank Taylor which is embedded below.

The most important new features are:

• Photo-realistic buildings from cities around the world
• Dawn to dusk views with the Sunlight feature
• Swoop navigation from outer space to street-level
• Improved Streetview
• Imagery dates

All of these features a pretty clear in terms of what they offer, but the Streetview feature is probably one of the coolest in its presentation. When you get to the street level of a city(a city which has streetview and pictures to go along) you can see “spheres” representing the images that you can walk into at that specific spot. Once inside the image, you have a picture-quality view as if you were standing there.

One thing I was waiting for and that is now available though, is the imagery dating which allows you to know when the images you are looking at were taken. This way, you’ll know if that’s really your car your seeing!