I was listening to the above Episode 7 of the ‘This Week in Venture Capital’ podcast today, where Mark Suster interviews Dana Settle, a partner with Greycroft Partners.  See podcast summary here.

At the 8:35 minute mark, Mark and Dana discuss a new venture capital market segmenting trend where different funds are available to startups /ventures at different stages of their growth cycle. In this way VC’s can better focus on the different issues that affect startups at various stages.

I found this intriguing. I summarize the segments they discussed below:

Note: [CB] references below link to more info from CrunchBase on the applicable fund and its recent financings.

Super Angel / Seed Funds

• Funds with $25 million or less in capital
• Write cheques from $100K to $500K
• Funding pre-product in some instances
• Representative Firms: Founder Collective on east Coast, Dave McClure’s Felicity Ventures [CB], Jeff Clavier’s Softech [CB]. On west coast, CrossCut [CB] and Rincon Venture Partners [CB].

Early Stage Funds

• Smaller than traditional VC
• Funds with $50 to $125 million in capital
• Write cheques from $750K to $1 million
• They like to see a product launch with first cracks at revenue generation to prove the idea can be monetized
• Representative Firms: First Round Capital [CB], Greycroft Partners [CB], True Ventures [CB]

A Round Funds

• Funds with ~ $200 million in capital
• Write cheques from $2M to $3M
• Representative Firms: Foundry Group [CB], Union Square Ventures [CB], GRP Partners [CB]

B Round Funds (Traditional Growth/Equity Firms)

• Funds with ~ $400 million in capital
• Write cheques in the $10M range
• Representative Firms: Light Speed [CB], Battery Ventures [CB], DAG Ventures [CB], Matrix [CB], Polaris Venture Partners [CB]

Growth Equity Funds
(not discussed in podcast but mentioned in the podcast summary)

• Larger funds writing still larger cheques
• Representative Firms: General Atlantic [CB], Insight Venture Partners [CB], Summit Partners [CB], Francisco Partners [CB]

Of course few venture funds fall absolutely in any one of the above categories.

I’ve been waiting patiently for my Flipboard invite since its launch last week. I received my invite earlier today and have been playing with it ever since.

The generic Flipboard interface is nice, but, for me, its killer feature is its Twitter integration. I feel almost as excited about Flipboard as Robert Scoble .

At the moment I follow 74 terrific Twitter users. About 75% of their tweets contain links to interesting articles on topics dear to my heart. Flipboard turns this curated feed of news stories and blog posts into a beautifully personalized eZine. As I flip through Flipboard, instead of links to the stories in my Twitter feed, the first few paragraphs and accompanying picture from most of those linked stories are attractively and interactively displayed on my iPad. If I want to read the full story, I tap it and am instantly taken to the underlying story on its originating website.  Another tap and I’m back to my Flipboard eZine. See the demo below:

Its fast!

Flipping from page to page is instantaneous.

Until now, Twitterific was my twitter app of choice on the iPad. But, like all other Twitter apps, it doesn’t show the content of the underlying stories linked into my feed. Instead, the Twitterific feed contains clickable/tappable links to the stories. It can take from a few seconds to 30 or more seconds to load the underlying story on an iPad or iPhone. Frequently the story doesn’t load at all. When that happens I need to refresh the link or launch the story in Safari. Frustrating!

Not so on Flipboard. When I click a featured story, the webpage with the underlying story appears instantly. There seems to be some caching going on here. I note, however, that web pages linked into the ‘lesser’ stories, the ones contained in Flipboard’s side-bar tweets with links (ie: the ones not turned into the pretty story boxes in Flipboard), can take longer to load and can suffer the same fate as Twitterific linked stories.

Never-Ending eZine

From the early demos I had worried that there would be some kind of limit on how far back into my timeline Flipboard will allow me to go. There appears to be no limit. As long as I keep flipping, Flipboard keeps going further back. This is particularly exciting for me because unlike seemingly everyone else on Twitter, I like to take up my feed from where I left off and move forward. I can do this with Flipboard. Hooray!  Though, admittedly Flipboard is not designed to be used this way and it takes me some time to find where I left off – unlike the official Twitter app on the iPhone which does take you back to where you left off each time you return.

Emailing Stories from Flipboard

Another gripe I’ve had with Twitterific and all iPhone and iPad Twitter apps, is that when I want to email a story/link to someone, the link is copied into an empty email, but the subject line for the email message is usually something inane like ‘Message from Twitterific”. 

When you forward a linked story via email from Flipboard, the title of the story becomes the subject of the email. Wow, what a concept!

Feed Differences

When I compare my Flipboard feed to my Seesmic Twitter feed, for example, the contents of the feed ‘appear’ to be the same, but the tweets/stories are presented in somewhat of a different order. In Seesmic, like all other Twitter apps, the feed is reverse chronological. Flipboard, however, presents your feed in a quasi-chronological order. Rather than being precisely chronological the Flipboard feed seems to be arranged in an order that presents the feed in the most pleasing manner – remember it presents both the Twitter feed and the content of stories linked into the tweets, not just the 140 character twitter posts. But, it does provide the feed sort-of chronologically. For example, all the tweets in your feed from the last hour will generally appear within the last hour’s feed in Flipboard, but not in the precise chronological order that they were tweeted.

Feed Completeness

When reading the reviews over the last week it appeared as if Flipboard only presented a subset of the tweets in your feed. That did not seem to be the case for me. It was hard to compare my Flipboard feed to my Seesmic feed tweet for tweet because, as I mentioned above, the Flipboard feed is not presented in a strictly chronological order. But it did seem that the entirety of my Twitter feed was ultimately incorporated into my Flipboard feed.

This may be different for me than for other Twitter users though. I follow a relatively small list of Twitterers – 74 at the moment. Most people follow many more – hundreds and even thousands more.  I suspect that for those folks their Flipboard feed would be a subset of the originating Twitter feed. I limit the number of people I follow specifically because I want to read ALL their tweets. I was quite relieved that every tweet in my feed will continue to be fed into my  Flipboard feed. I’d appreciate it if others would leave comments below as to whether the entirety of their Twitter feed is presented in Flipboard.

One Gripe – No Classic RT Feature

While I can retweet a tweet using the new Twitter retweet function (which I dislike), I can’t directly RT the old way. Flipboard doesn’t even include the ‘/via’ RT option. RT’ing can be jerry-rigged however. Flipboard does allow you to reply to any given tweet. You can use the reply box to add an RT before the @name that is generated this way. Then you can copy and paste the tweet into the reply box to create an old fashioned RT.  A bit clumsy, but workable for now – especially since you can copy the underlying tweet with just two taps.

Another Gripe – Stability

In the first two hours of testing I had two problems. For a few minutes the app wouldn’t load my feeds on start. It took about 5 minutes of repeated restarting before the feeds loaded. Also the app just froze on me several times. Clearly there are still some bugs to be worked out.

[Update: Several days in now, the app continues to freeze me out periodically]

Originating Tweet Oddity

When a tweet is ‘featured’ in Flipboard, ie: when a link within it is surfaced to a story block within the Flipboard eZine, the text of the person’s tweet does not appear on the main presentation page. If you tap the story-stub to see more of it, you can then see the originating tweet. From this sub-page, if you swipe from page to page you CAN see the originating tweet above each story. However, this view is substantially less compelling than the eZine format. I don’t like this ‘compromise’. I’d rather have the tweet appear above the featured story on the prettier main page. This limitation is hard to describe. You have to see it to understand.

[Update: A few days in and I still don’t like this. It makes Flipboard less personal than using Twitterific. This design choice arbitrarily cuts me off from the comments my friends are making ab0ut the stories they are linking to. It limits my choices to either a pretty but impersonal feed, or a more personal, but less compelling, even kind of clunky, feed.]

Refresh Oddity

When reading a Twitter feed for, say 20 minutes, once you get to the end, you apparently can’t refresh your feed while within Flipboard. Rather, if you wish to see the tweets that have been posted during the last 20 minutes of reading, you have to close out Flipboard and start it up again. Weird.

Will it Pass Legal Muster?

I worry that the likes of the New York Times (see Pulse controversy) and Rupert Murdoch may try to sue Flipboard out of existence. As I understand it, Flipboard uses a combination of RSS and website scraping and caching to make this service possible. It is not clear whether doing this is legal. Rather than rehash this issue, I refer you to this Gizmodo article on the topic.

More to Explore

I haven’t yet looked at Flipboard’s Facebook integration. You can also apparently construct other customized Flipbook feeds from Twitter lists, RSS feeds and such. There’s lots more to explore.

[Update:  I have now played with the Facebook integration. It’s nice to see family and friends photos on Flipboard, but I do not use Facebook as a primary source of news. So as I figured, for me the Facebook integration is less compelling than the Twitter integration.]

Regardless of any other features, Flipboard will undoubtedly be my defacto iPad Twitter reader going forward. The Twitter integration alone makes it a game changer – or dare I say, a killer app.  Scoble would be proud!

Leo Interviews the writers/creators of the wildly successful ‘I’m on a Horse’ Old Spice commercial. They explain, step by step, how Isaiah Mustafa got from the shower to the horse.

Having recently updated my Adobe Flash Player software for the umpteenth time on two different PCs, I discovered that if you download and install it in the normal way, you end up with a new and unwanted Adobe Download Manager Firefox extension that cannot be removed.

Here’s how to avoid this:

On the Adobe Flash Player download page, uncheck the “Free McAfee Security Scan Plus” option (who knows what that will add to your machine), then click on the yellow “Agree and install now” button:

This will take you to a ‘Thank You!’ page where the little yellow ‘Firefox prevented this site [yada yada from installing something] bar comes across the top of the browser . DON’’T click on the Allow button as normal:

INSTEAD, click on the ‘click here for troubleshooting information’ option’. This will take you to a ‘Common Flash Player download and installation issues (Windows)’ page. Scroll to the bottom of the page where you will find the ‘If you are still having problems…’ option to download the  most current ‘install_flash_player.exe’ executable directly by clicking on the “Flash_Player_10_ Plugin_(All_other_Windows_ browsers)” option.

Run the executable and you will install the latest Flash plug-in, without the unwanted addition of an unnecessary and unremovable Firefox extension.

Note: The narrated video above is hard to see because its dark. It is easier to see it on full screen. See the non-narrated version of the same event (below) taken 5 minutes earlier. It is a bit easier to see.

A few days after a man was arrested in front of my building with gasoline tanks and various items that could be used as weapons (see pictures below), a largish Toronto G20 protest took place under my window.

There were about 75 to 100 sit-in style protesters on Toronto’s The Esplanade, between Scott and Lower Jarvis (about 1/2 mile from the G20 fences). The protestors blocked the road, stretching about 5 people wide, between the Keg on one side of the street and the Novotel (where low-level G20 officials are staying)  on the other. Easily 100 to 150 police in full riot gear showed up in successive waves. While an initial group of police surrounded the protesters (2 lines, 2 officers deep), another phalanx of police organized at Front and Scott. They marched in formation (about 5 x 25), banging batons on shields with each step. After that group arrived, the police arrested the protestors one by one – dragging them into a dozen or so waiting paddy wagons as two helicopters hovered overhead. While all that took place a dozen or so police per street corner blocked all adjacent streets ensuring that no more protestors could arrive.

Non-Narrated Version of Video recorded 5 Minutes Earlier

At first the protestors chanted ‘Peaceful Protest’, ‘Peaceful Protest’. After most were dragged away, the  chant changed to ‘Let us go”, “Let us go”. That didn’t get them very far. All those that were sitting on the road were taken away. There seemed to be a smaller group that had been standing on the sidewalk that were permitted to stay – surrounded by police for hours after.

Of course this shut down our normally happy, bustling neighborhood. During the event, which lasted a few hours, I was a prisoner in my building. I wasn’t permitted to go out the front door – even to go to the convenience store 20 steps away.

The pictures below are of the man arrested three days ago (June 24) for having a weird car with gasoline cans in it and weird makeshift weapons including a cross bow.

Gas tanks, chain saw, cross bow, pick etc.

The man that was arrested

Hazmat Suit Guys
(there ended up being no hazardous chemicals or bombs)

Odd Looking Car and lots of police
(my building in behind)

See Also: TiPb’s terrific iOS4 Walkthrough.

* Requires iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and iPod touch 3rd generation
** Requires iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, or iPhone 4

Be Warned: Downloading and installing the update takes awhile. It took iTunes and my 16 GB iPhone well over an hour to be updated.

—–

This update contains over 100 new features, including the following:

• Multitasking support for third-party apps*
  – Multitasking user interface to quickly move between
     apps
  – Support for audio apps to play in the background
  – VoIP apps can receive and maintain calls in the
     background or when device is asleep
  – Apps can monitor location and take action while
     running in the background
  – Alerts and messages can be pushed to apps using
     push and local notifications
  – Apps can complete tasks in the background
• Folders to better organize and access apps
• Home screen Wallpaper*

• Mail improvements
  – Unified inbox to view emails from all accounts in one
     place
  – Fast inbox switching to quickly switch between
     different email accounts
  – Threaded messages to view multiple emails from the
     same conversation
  – Attachments can be opened with compatible third-
     party apps
  – Search results can now be filed or deleted
  – Option to select size of photo attachments
  – Messages in the Outbox can be edited or deleted
• Support for iBooks and iBookstore (available from the
   App Store)
• Photo and Camera improvements
  – 5x digital zoom when taking a photo**
  – Tap to focus during video recording**
  – Ability to sync Faces from iPhoto
  – Geo-tagged photos appear on a map in Photos
• Ability to create and edit playlists on device
• Calendar invitations can be sent and accepted wirelessly
   with supported CalDAV servers
• Support for MobileMe calendar sharing
• Suggestions and recent searches appear during a web
   search
• Searchable SMS/MMS messages**
• Spotlight search can be continued on web and Wikipedia
• Enhanced location privacy
  – New Location Services icon in the status bar
  – Indication of which apps have requested your location
     in the last 24 hours
  – Location Services can be toggled on or off for
     individual apps
• Automatic spellcheck
• Support for Bluetooth keyboards*
• iPod out to navigate music, podcasts and audiobooks
   through an iPod interface with compatible cars
• Support for iTunes gifting of apps
• Wireless notes syncing with IMAP-based mail accounts
• Persistent WiFi connection to receive push notifications*
• New setting for turning on/off cellular data only**
• Option to display the character count while composing
   new SMS/MMS**
• Visual Voicemail messages can be kept locally even if
   they have been deleted from the server**
• Control to lock portrait orientation*
• Audio playback controls for iPod and third-party audio
   apps*
• New languages, dictionaries and keyboards
• Accessibility enhancements*
• Bluetooth improvements
• Better data protection using the device passcode as an
   encryption key* (Requires full restore.)
• Support for third-party Mobile Device Management
   solutions
• Enables wireless distribution of enterprise applications
• Exchange Server 2010 compatibility
• Support for multiple Exchange ActiveSync accounts
• Support for Juniper Junos Pulse and Cisco AnyConnect
   SSL VPN apps (available from the App Store)
• More than 1,500 new developer APIs
• Bug fixes

Products compatible with this software update:
• iPhone 3G
• iPhone 3GS
• iPhone 4
• iPod touch 2nd generation
• iPod touch 3rd generation (late 2009 models with 32GB
   or 64GB)

For feature descriptions and complete instructions, see the user guides for iPhone and iPod touch at:
    <http://support.apple.com/manuals/iphone>
    <http://support.apple.com/manuals/ipodtouch>

For more information about iPhone and iPod touch, go to:
    <http://www.apple.com/iphone>
    <http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch>

To troubleshoot your iPhone or iPod touch, or to view additional support information go to:
    <http://www.apple.com/support/iphone>
    <http://www.apple.com/support/ipodtouch>

For information on the security content of this update, please visit this website: 
    <http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222>

Until recently I was using:

• iMap to sync email between Outlook, Google Apps Gmail and my iPhone/iPad;
• Google Calendar Sync to sync my calendar between Outlook and Gmail; and
• iTunes to sync contacts and calendar with my iPhone/iPad.

Until Google Apps Sync I had no way of syncing contacts between Outlook and Gmail. When iTunes version 9.1 crapped out and stopped syncing contacts and calendar with my iPhone (this was fixed in iTunes 9.2 by the way) I made the decision to pony up the $50 a year for Google Apps Premier which includes Google Apps Sync.

It was worth every penny. I am rid the sync hodge-podge described above. I now have an end-to end, email, calendar, contact sync solution across my PCs, Google Apps Gmail, my iPhone and my iPad.

The Problem – How to Sync Only Selected Contacts

I only want a relatively few current contacts synced from Outlook to Gmail, my iPhone and iPad – about 250 or so contacts. But, I have accumulated some 800 contacts including historic clients and colleagues from prior law firms, restaurants from when I lived in different cities, old friends I no longer keep in touch with and so on. I don’t want to lose these contacts but I also don’t want them cluttering up my Google Apps Gmail, iPhone or iPad contact lists.

While you can segregate contacts within different contact folders inside the Google Apps Sync account in Outlook, all contacts such segregated contacts continue to sync into the unified Gmail, iPhone and iPad contact lists – regardless of the contact folder structure you set up inside of Outlook.

The Answer – Move Older Contacts into a Segregated .PST File

This solution is essentially the same as the solution I used only to sync certain emails when I was using iMap (for example I don’t want archived emails synced to the server). However, in Outlook 2010, after Google Apps Sync is installed, it wasn’t particularly easy to figure out how to do this. Below is a step-by-step guide to setting up a separate PST file and how to create non-syncing contact folders within that file.

Create the New .PST File

In the Email view in Outlook 2010:

• Click the ‘Home’ tab
• Click the down arrow on the bottom right of the New Items icon
• Select “More Items”
• Select “Outlook Data File…”

• Select ‘Outlook data file (.pst)’
• Click OK

• A ‘Create or Open Outlook Data File” dialogue box will open (not shown)
• Navigate your PC’s C:\ drive (network drives work too) to where you want the PST file to reside.

Note: You can save the file anywhere on your system. I keep it within the hierarchy of directories that are backed-up each night.

• Give the PST file a name. I chose ‘Old Contacts”
• Click ‘OK’.

An empty new account item will appear on the left side of Outlook’s Navigation Panel with the name you gave it (see image on the right).

Note: You will not directly access your contacts from here.  Unfortunately, you can’t see this account as a separate account in the Contacts view panel (in the next image). But you can still use it as I describe below.

Create Non-Syncing Folders in the New PST File

Here’s the less-than-straight-forward part that took me awhile to figure out.

• Click on ‘Contacts’ view on the bottom left of Outlook’s Navigation Panel to bring up your contacts view (pictured to the right)
• Select the ‘Home’ tab
• Right click on any existing ‘Contacts’ group (as pictured) to bring up the required pull-down menu.
• Select the ‘New Folder…’ option

Note 1: Unlike what you see in the picture, you will likely only have one contact group called “Contacts’ under ‘My Contacts’ on the left.

Note 2: Do not right click on the ‘My Contacts’ heading. You’d think that that would be the logical place to right click to create a new contact group, but it isn’t.

In the resulting ‘Create New Folder’ dialogue:

• In the ‘Name:’ section, type the name of the new non-syncing contact folder you wish
• In the ‘Folder Contains’ section, select ‘Contact Items’
• In the ‘Select where to place the folder:’ section, scroll down to the new PST account you created (in my example Old Contacts’) and select it.  Note: This is THE critical step. By putting the new contact group in this segregated PST file, it’s contents will not be synced to Gmail, your iPhone/iPad etc.
• Click OK

That’s it!

You will now have a new contact folder (pictured in the image to the right), that is outside of the Google App Sync account folder structure.

Drag and drop all the contacts from your Contacts list that you do not want synced to Gmail, your iPhone/iPad to that new contact group. They will remain on your PC in Outlook but will no longer synced.

Contrary to what I read and heard on Twitter and multiple podcasts over the last week, I believe that Zuckerberg did not:

• self implode
• have a panic attack, or
• evade questions.

at last week’s D8 Conference. I think he acquitted himself well. Yes it was hot in there and he sweated a lot. Yes, he’s not an ideal public speaker. But at 26 years of age, for who he is, I think he did well.

At a few points there were noticeable gaps in time before he answered a question. Some characterized those gaps as a panic attack. I characterize it as the response of a careful and thoughtful person. Thinking before speaking is an admirable quality.

I understand why people disagree with Facebook’s privacy policies (most notably Jason Calacanis), but I don’t understand the rabid Facebook villainization I’ve  witnessed recently.

The D8 interview was interesting. Certainly the most insightful Zuckerberg interview I’ve seen.

Watch the video above (larger version here) and judge for yourself.

Unfortunately I’ve had to delete hundreds of spam comments over the last few days. Hopefully Disqus will soon get a handle on whatever technique comment spammers are using and put a stop to it. Otherwise I’ll have to seriously consider moving to IntenseDebate. Sorry about this.

This win is Nadal’s fifth French Open title and seventh grand-slam win. Nadal need only win one more French Open to match Borg’s record 6. He also tied Borg’s record of two French Open tournament’s without losing a set.

The first set was terrific. It looked like the maturing Soderling might do it again. But Soderling collapsed in the 2nd and third sets. Despite the tough first set, Rafael easily won the match.

It was a bit surprising how emotional Nadal was after his win. Having lost the French last year, followed by pulling out of Wimbledon, being injured for much of 2009 and having gone through the remainder of the year without winning another tournament, Nadal may have been questioning whether he had another slam in him. Given the caliber of his French Open play, I have little doubt that Nadal  has several more slams in him.

In his post game interview with John McEnroe, Nadal made the point that he is looking forward to the U.S. Open – the only slam he hasn’t won. This is interesting because normally players would say they were looking forward to Wimbledon.

I must admit that I know little about Schiavone.  Turns out she is the first Italian woman to win any grand-slam in the modern era.

Aussie Stosur was rather emotionless. Schiavone played with passion and grit. It was a pleasure to watch. The tennis quality from both was high. The match was terrific.

Stosur did the heavy lifting for Schiavone having previously taken out world #1 Serena Williams 6-2, 6-7(2), 8-6, four-time French Open winner Justine Henin 2-6, 6-1, 6-4 and world #4 Jelena Jankovic 6-1, 6-2.

Ultimately, it was nice to enjoy a well-played women’s French Open final. Something that doesn’t happen often enough.

If, as I did, you do not de-install Outlook 2007 after the upgrade you may find that you cannot run Outlook 2010. In such case you may get the following error message when attempting to run it:

“The file OLMAPI32.dll is incompatible with Microsoft Outlook. Install Outlook again”

It may be possible that had I uninstalled Outlook 2007 or had I never attempted to run Outlook 2007 after upgrading to Outlook 2010, this error may never have appeared. Nonetheless, once this error appeared I was not able to run Outlook 2010 again until I uninstalled Outlook 2007 as described below.

Note: As always, before proceeding, I recommend creating a restore point in case something goes wrong.

According to this Microsoft Answers post, the solution did not lie in ”Installing Outlook again’ as the error message suggested. Rather, the solution required uninstalling Outlook 2007 and repairing Outlook 2010.

So, off to Add-Remove Programs from the Control Panel to Remove Outlook 2007 right? Not so easy.

You can’t directly uninstall any given Office 2007 application installed on your computer. They do not appear as individually installed items in the Add-remove programs panel. As described in this Microsoft knowledge base article (unfortunately written for XP and Vista users), in order to remove just one application from the Office suite in Windows 7, you need to ‘Change’ the features/applications installed in the Office 2007 suite.

To do this is Windows 7 you need to:

• Go to Control Panel
• Select “Uninstall a program” under the “Programs” heading
• As depicted below, right click on the “Microsoft Office Standard 2007 item in the resulting “Uninstall or change a program” window and select the ‘Change’ option:

From there you’ll get the option to ‘Add or Remove’ Features’:

Click the radio button beside ‘Add or Remove Features” then click Continue.

As depicted below, X out the “Microsoft Office Outlook” application by clicking on the down arrow and selecting the ‘Not Available” option. Once X’d out, click on the Continue button:

From there you’ll see this Configuration Process screen:

Followed by this success screen:

After which, Outlook 2007 will be removed from your PC.

Reboot your PC.

Now run your previously installed Outlook 2010 and, if all has gone according to plan, you’ll see this Office 2010 repair screen instead of the OLMAPI32.dll error message:

When done the following warning screen came up:

Since I hadn’t seen this error message multiple times I selected ‘No”

From then on, My Outlook 2010 has run just fine.

May 29, 2009 Update: Well, things didn’t run so fine after that. I had the problem where Outlook 2010 couldn’t reliably connect to the Google Apps Gmail iMap server. So I went and ‘repaired’ my Office 2010 installation as follows:

• Proceed again to the “Uninstall or change a program” window (see first image above)
• Right click on “Microsoft Office 2010” in the list
• Select “Change” (as you can see that I did in the picture above for Office 2007)
• Select the ‘Repair” option as pictured below then press “Continue”

This will be followed by a ‘Configuration Process” notification screen.

When done, Office 2010 should be repaired.

So far, Outlook 2010 seems to be running without the errors I had before. I’ll update this post if more problems crop up. If there are no more edits, you can assume things are working fine again. Well, subject to known Outlook 2010 / iMap glitches that is.

According to a CBC News report that aired on “The National’” on Wednesday May 26, the teen pregnancy rate in Canada has declined 37% in the last 10 years. The report cites improved sex education and access by teens to contraceptives as the primary reasons for this large decline.

Canada now has less than half the teen pregnancy rate of the United States – 2.79% of Canadian teenaged girls 15 to 19 compared to 6.12% of teenage girls in the United States.

There is no better proof that the Bush-era policies of ‘just say no’, abstinence only programs and restricted access to birth control for teens have failed American teens.

Source: The CBC’s source was the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality.

Seesmic Pros:

• ITS FREE
• NICE INTERFACE: It has a terrific and elegant interface.
• CLASSIC RT: It supports classic ‘RT’ retweeting.
• EVERNOTE INTEGRATION: You can now post a tweet to your Evernote database with the click of a button. I love this idea! I hope more twitter apps (iPhone or desktop) add this feature in the future.
• UNLIMITED LOAD OLDER TWEETS: It supports unlimited ‘Load older…” tweets at the end of the timeline (something that the Twitter App also supports in theory but is often buggy)
• WICKED FAST: It is surprisingly fast when loading those older tweets. It is faster than the Twitter app, Tweetdeck and Echofon.
• ADJUSTABLE ‘TWEETS LOADED’ SETTING: I like the ability to set how many tweets it downloads at a time. I always set these to the max – usually 100.

Seesmic Cons:

• DOESN’T REMEMBER WHERE YOU LEFT OFF ON START: I try to read every tweet from the limited number of people I follow. To do this I want my Twitter app to start up where I last left off. The Seesmic iPhone does NOT remember where I left off when I shut down the app and restart it – even if I shut it down for just for a minute and come back. THIS IS A CRITICAL FLAW AND DEAL BREAKER FOR ME!
• DOESN’T REMEMBER WHERE YOU WERE WHEN RETURNING FROM LINK: If you are, say, 5 hours down your timeline, and then you click on a link in a tweet to read a linked story within Seesmic’s embedded browser, when you return, you are returned to the TOP of the timeline – not where you left off. You must scroll down and find where you left off in the timeline. If you left off beyond the 100 tweets loaded, you have to reload the older tweets. VERY ANNOYING & ANOTHER DEAL KILLER!
• NO LANDSCAPE MODE: It’s all portrait all the time. This is especially painful when viewing websites within its embedded browser. THIS WAS ALSO A DEAL KILLER FOR ME (Twitter App & Echofon do landscape – Tweetdeck doesn’t)
• NO USER SELECTABLE FONT SIZE: My aging eyes need this!! Another deal killer for me. I note Tweetdeck also cannot adjust fonts whereas the Twitter app and Echofon can

• CHARACTER COUNT FLAW: When typing a tweet, the counter counts the number of letters you’ve typed so far. That’s not what I want. I want to know how many characters I have left. This implementation makes me have to do the math in my head on the fly. Seesmic, just tell me how many characters I have left to type – like the other major Twitter apps do.
• DOESN’T SHOW WHO RT’D TWEETS IN TIMELINE: It’s bad enough with the new RT system that you are forced to see the icon of the original tweeter and not the icon of the person you follow that retweeted it. But Seesmic doesn’t even say in the timeline which of the persons you follow retweeted it. You have to click on the tweet itself to discover that. Major Ugh!!
• DOES TOO MUCH: I don’t want all those other services supported. I just want a world class twitter client

Tweetdeck iPhone App

At the behest of @Ozark_GeoGeek I also gave the iPhone Tweetdeck app a try. I do NOT like the desktop Tweetdeck client so I had never tried the iPhone App. Here are my abbreviated thoughts on it:

PROS:

• The letter count down while creating a tweet counts down as normal

CONS:

• As with Seesmic, it too cannot view linked websites in landscape mode like the Twitter App can.
• You cannot adjust the font size.
• Unlike Seesmic and Twitter app, the Tweetdeck iPhone app has NO ability to add more tweets to end of timeline. This is truly bizarre and the only iPhone Twitter app that I’ve tested that has this limitation
• It’s slower than the Seesmic and Twitter apps
• The interface is bizarre and ugly.
• There is too much going on in this app. I don’t want a do-everything app. I want a single-purpose, world class twitter app. I have my Facebook app for using Facebook.

Unfortunately none of the many advanced Tweetdeck features (managing multiple accounts, searching twitter etc.) appeal to me.

Echofon iPhone App

On the suggestion of @Nino_Ben I also tried out the Echofon iPhone Twitter app today. This used to be the Twitterific app that I used and abandoned a year or two ago.

PROS:

• The letter count down while creating a tweet counts down as normal
• It permits the old-style RTs
• It has landscape views for reading linked stories
• It has adjustable fonts
• It permits loading more tweets at the end of the timeline

CONS:

• It doesn’t remember where you left off in the timeline, which, for me, is THE critical feature that keeps me using the official Twitter app.
• A rather ugly interface

Conclusion:

The Seesmic app is a terrific start, but until they fix the deal-killers mentioned above, I’m sticking with the official Twitter App – bugs and all.

Tweetdeck gives me nothing I want that the Twitter App doesn’t provide. Echofon would be a viable, though less attractive, alternative if it remembered where I leave off each time.

It’s nice to know I have these alternatives when the inevitable ‘load more tweets’ function fails to work in the official Twitter App – as happens every couple days for me.

What are the cost components that make up the retail price of a typical video game? Put another way, how much does each participant in the video-game development / distribution chain get?

I get this question all the time.

In this presentation to Columbia University students, Steve Perlman, OnLive’s founder, both demos the OnLive system and discusses their business model. At the end of part 3 and the beginning of part 4, Perlman discusses the graphic to the left (click for larger view) which shows the cost breakdown for a typical video game.

As you can see, for a typical console-based video game that costs U.S. $60:

• $15 goes to Retailers: eg: GameStop, Electronic Boutique, Walmart, Amazon
• $7 goes to Returns/PP/MDF: Returns are money paid-out to retailers for product returns. PP stands for “price-protection” which is money paid back through the chain if/when the publisher reduces the video game’s price. MDF stands for  ‘Marketing Development Funds” which are paid to retailers for promotions such as TV ads, local flyers, and in-store marketing displays.
• $4 goes to Distribution/COGs: Distribution = shipping and warehousing. COGs = Cost of goods sale. ie: the cost of the physical DVD, manufacturing, the instruction manual and the case.
• $7  Platform Royalty Fee: For every game sold approximately $7 goes to Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo, as applicable, for whatever platform the game plays on – eg: Xbox 360, PS3, Wii.
• $27 goes to the Publisher. Unfortunately this $27 is not further broken down to show how much of the $27 typically goes to independent developers. The amount paid to independant video game developers can be anywhere from 10% to 70% of the amount paid to the publisher – but often only after the publisher has first recouped any advances paid to such third party developers.

The above graphic is used by OnLive to convince publishers to use their system. Interestingly, you can see that they suggest that for every retail game sold, $12 is typically lost to piracy and another $12 is lost from used-games sales. Publishers and developers hate used game sales. Gamers, of course, enjoy them. Whether these lost revenue figures are accurate is debatable. I won’t delve into that debate here.

Perlman then goes on, of course, to point out that all the red and brown square costs go away when publishing through the OnLive System. They can be split by the publisher and OnLive. In other words, more money to the publisher (and hopefully developers), no money to wholesalers and retailers, no piracy and no ‘losses’ due to used game sales.

Whether publishers will consider lowering prices given that their costs are dramatically reduced was not discussed. However, as you can see in my ‘OnLive Video Game System & Business Model Presentation to Columbia University’ post, publishers will be free to price games in any way they choose.

Part 1 – OnLive Company & System Background

In part 1, Perlman gives a basic introduction to the OnLive system, discusses his history with Apple and the technical limitations (compression/latency) that OnLive had to overcome to make their system work.

Part 2 – The OnLive Video Gaming System Demo’d

The system is demo’d on an Apple Laptop. You get a sense of the interface. Spectator mode is particularly compelling. Users will be able to watch whatever games their friends are currently playing. Users will also be able to watch the best players in the world playing each game. Gamers will also see how may people are watching their play.

Part 3 – Demo Continued on Micro-console and iPhone + Business Model

The demo moves to the micro-console and the iPhone. Members of the audience start playing. Perlman shows how you can watch what the other players are playing on their devices. He also demos how the compression algorithms work, with particular emphasis on graphics that are typically hard to do with video compression.

Perlman then discusses how and why the data centers are distributed throughout the U.S. and the need to be within 1,000 miles of the server.

He starts discussing the ‘Retail vs OnLive Economics’ slide that I discuss separately in my ‘Cost Components that Make up a Typical Video Game’s Retail Price’ post.

Part 4 – Business/Economic Model Followed by Q&A

The business/economics model discussion continue in part 4. This is one of the most interesting parts of the talk. The presentation formally ends and a Q&A begins. Questions get into a more technical discussion of how the system works. Of particular interest is a discussion of how OnLive’s compression algorithm works – how it is different from, say, TiVo’s or Apple TV’s compression algorithm. Less information needs to be transmitted because a video-game will never be ‘paused’.

Part 5 – Q&A Continues – Technology & Pricing is Discussed

More questions are answered. Perlman says there will be a base subscription fee to access the system (like the Xbox Live fee). Demos will be free. Publishers will be free to rent games for a limited time, allow users to play them a-la-carte, buy them outright or subscribe to them like WoW. Pricing will be up to each publisher on a game-by-game basis. The system support any pricing/revenue model.

All-in-all, a terrific, informative presentation.

See Also:

• OnLive Fully Detailed in Columbia University Presentation (the escapist)

As was the case in my earlier post, I still only follow a relatively small, but terrific, group of people (currently 64). When I follow someone new, I try to cull another. All with the view to reading (or at least scanning) most every tweet they make.

Twitter has changed the way I use the Internet. These exceptional 60+ sources feed me almost all of my daily tech news. I rarely surf from blog to blog the way I used to. I have also abandoned RSS feeds altogether. Twitter-sourced news is superior.

I have also abandoned Friendfeed. Despite some strong lobbying by Davis Freeberg, I just didn’t see the point. Everyone is on Twitter. And, since Facebook purchased Friendfeed back in August, its future is uncertain.

It took me some 1700 Tweets to reach 200 followers. I have to laugh at all my new spamy followers who have 60,000 followers and are following 61,000 people – yet they have only tweeted 3 times. Fortunately these spam-bot jokers are continually culled by Twitter. I used to actively block them when they followed me, but with the constant Twitter purges, I don’t bother any more. They rarely last a week.

With the many ways of searching Twitter these days, I have abandoned the use of hash tags. They seem irrelevant now.

My primary Twitter apps are Tweetie 2 and twhirl on the desktop.

I very much dislike the new Retweet feature. My preference would be for Twitter apps to have both the old and the new Retweet functions, but that seems unlikely.  It appears we are stuck with it.

Otherwise, everything I wrote in my July 4 post still applies today.

If the warning above annoys you as much as it does me whenever you open an attachment in Office 2007, here’s how to get rid of it.

The Problem

Microsoft has understandably made security a cornerstone of its recent software releases. Each time you attempt to open a possibly malicious attachment in Outlook 2007, a warning dialogue box like the one above appears. It presents an always-checked, always-grayed-out box that reads: ‘Always ask before opening this type of file’.

Because Word, Excel, PDF and other document types can contain malicious code, you should, as the box warns, only open attachments from trustworthy sources. But, if you have a modern Anti-Virus program such as AVG or Microsoft’s Security Essentials (both of which are free), attachments in your emails should already be checked for malicious code. When this is the case, this warning dialogue box is an unnecessary interruption that becomes increasingly annoying if, like me, you receive emails with attachments many times a day.

The Solution in  Windows 7

Warning: You should only do this if you have anti-virus software installed on your computer that checks for, and quarantines, all emails that contain attachments with malicious code. And, as the warning says, you should never open attachments from anyone that you don’t know and trust! 

OK, you’ve been duly warned. Here’s how to do it:

• Close Outlook 2007 before you start
• Click the Windows ‘Start’ Button
• Click ‘All Programs’
• Right Click on ‘Microsoft Office Outlook 2007’ in the “Microsoft Office’ folder (as shown below)
• Click on the Properties option

• Click the ‘Compatibility’ Tab (shown below)
• Check the ‘Run this program as an administrator’ box
• Click the ‘Apply’ button

• Restart Outlook 2007
• You will get the following ‘User Account Control Warning’

• Click ‘Yes’  -  Don’t worry, you won’t have to do this every time you start Outlook
• Open an email with the attachment type (eg: .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, .pdf) you want to open in the future without this warning
• Click on the attachment
• You’ll get the same warning message as before, but, as you can see below, this time the ‘Always ask before opening this type of file‘ checkbox will not be grayed out
• Uncheck the box and open the attachment

• Open other emails with each of the attachment types that you do not wish to receive this message for in the future (eg: xls, xlsx, doc, docx, pdf, ppt)
• Similarly uncheck the ‘Always ask before opening this type of file‘ check box for each document type and open them.

From then on, you will no longer get the warning message when opening each of these types of attachments from within Outlook 2007 emails.

But, we are not quite finished. If you stopped here, you’d get the User Account Control Warning above every time you started Outlook 2007. To stop this from happening :

• Close Office 2007 once again
• Redo the first six steps above, but this time
• Uncheck the ‘Run this program as an administrator’ box under the Compatibility Tab in the Office 2007 Properties box.
• Click ‘Apply’

From then on Office will remember your attachment-type warning preferences without giving you the UAC warning every time you start Office 2007.

Enjoy!

The Solution in Vista

I found the answer below in this MSOutlook.info post. I have not tested this answer personally, but this post twigged me onto finding the solution in Windows 7 (above) so I’m pretty certain it will work:

1. Close Outlook
2. Right click on the shortcut you use to launch Outlook 2007
3. Choose Run as Administrator
4. Press Continue or provide the logon credentials for an Administrator
5. Restart Outlook
6. Open an email with the attachment of the type you want to be able to access without the annoying warning message
7. Deselect the option “Always ask before opening this type of file”
8. Repeat steps 6 & 7 with emails containing each of the various attachment types you wish to be able to access without the warning message
9. Close Outlook
10. Restart Outlook as normal (not in administrator mode)

From then on, you will no longer get the warning message when opening each of these types of attachments from within Outlook 2007 emails.

Bell offered me a one year promotional deal for their Internet Max 16 service where I would receive (in theory*) download speeds of up to 16 Mbps and 1 Mbps upload for $41.90 a month. At the time, my theoretical 10 Mbps down service from Rogers (with a 95 GB cap) was costing me $59.95 a month.

As with Rogers, all of Bell’s plans have data caps – much smaller than comparable U.S. ISPs I might add. The data cap for the service under the Internet Max 16 promotional offer is 100 GB. 

Periodically during each month, I check my Bell Internet usage meter** (shown below, after the jump) to make sure I’m staying within the 100 GB cap. This becomes particularly important towards the end of the month where I am always running up against the cap.

As you can see in the picture below (circled in red after the jump), Bell’s ‘My Internet usage’ meter contains fine print which reads:

Note: Current total Internet usage activity shown may be delayed by up to 60 hours.

Despite assiduously checking the meter each month, making sure I stayed within the cap, I have twice received invoices from Bell saying I went over the 100 GB cap. How is this possible when I personally verify that I stay under the cap each month?

Until today, I hadn’t noticed this fine print warning – I’m not even sure it was there before.

Now, of course, I know why. Turns out it’s the fault of Bell’s Internet usage reporting tool. The tool shows data that is up to 60 hours (two and a half days) old!

Clicking on the record for Apr-May*** of 2009 the tool now shows an overage for the that period:

As you can see, it shows I used 102.74 GB. 

However, I know I looked at the tool during the last couple days of that period and I purposely lowered my usage during those days to stay under the limit. On the last day it showed me at somewhere around the 98 or 99 GB usage. The 4 GB difference between what it showed me then, and what it shows now, and what I was billed extra for, can only be accounted for by the meter’s delay.

This isn’t right. What good is an Internet usage meter, when the meter isn’t accurately reporting usage on the very days I need it to be accurate the most?

* 16 Mbps Theoretical Download Speeds

I say that the 16 Mbps download is theoretical because I have tested it using SpeedTest.net (among others) several times since March and only once**** did it show I was getting more than 10 Mbps.

**My Internet Usage Page Buried

<Mini Rant Start>

On a related note, I’d like to point out that, just like Rogers, Bell makes it very difficult to use their ‘My Internet Usage’ meter. It is buried a half dozen pages deep on their site. You cannot link directly to it and save it in your browser’s favorites/bookmarks. If you do, the link just pulls you back to a main sign on page that forces you to navigate your way back through their maze to get to it. It also signs you off just minutes after you login. During the course of writing this post, Bell signed me out of the meter three times. I had to log back in, and navigate back through their maze three times to complete this post. Grrrr!

</Mini Rant Stop>

*** Note, for whatever reason my period runs from the 4th day of one month to the 3rd day of the next.

**** It showed 11.94 Mbps once – at about 2 O’clock in the afternoon.

Evernote is the latest of several cloud-based service that I have been experimenting with. See my prior posts on  Google Apps Gmail with iMap, xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) and Dropbox.

The new cloud-based Evernote blows both the old Evernote and OneNote out of the water.

Evernote Benefits

• It’s free. Free accounts permit up to 40 Megabytes of new notes to be added / synced per month. I haven’t come close to using my monthly capacity in the two months I’ve used it (I have used, perhaps 1/4 of that).
• More than Text Notes: With the free version you can keep text, photo, audio clip and handwritten notes (in my case, written with a stylus on my tablet laptop). You can also import PDF files into notes in the free version.
• Multiplatform Syncing: These notes are continuously synced, accessible and editable across my three primary PCs (Thinkpad tablet, Dell XPS desktop and my iMac) and my iPhone.
• Accessible from the Cloud: I can access and edit these notes through my Evernote account in the cloud.
• Notes Backed Up: By virtue of its syncing across multiple platforms and a copy of all notes residing in the cloud, my notes are continuously backed-up across my systems and off-site.
• Tagging & Search: You can tag notes, structure the tags in a hierarchy (if you like – see the picture of part of my tag hierarchy on the right) and sort them how you chose. Or don’t. Instead, you can rely on its formidable search engine to find your notes. Either way, notes I wrote years ago (imported from OneNote) are as easy to find as notes I wrote yesterday.
• Indexes Text in Images: Surprisingly, Evernote can index text in images. If I take a picture of a bottle of wine, a business card, a plane ticket, or even hand written notes on my tablet, it will scan and index that text. That text then becomes searchable when looking for the note containing the image at a later date.
• Clip From Anywhere: Evernote adds toolbar icons in Firefox and IE that allow you to clip webpage contents, text, columns or images into a note. You can clip entire pages or just a few paragraphs. Additionally, pressing Print-Screen on a PC (Control-Command-C on the iMac ) fires up a screen ‘Clipper’ app that can grab a screen shot of any running app or the entire desktop (or portion thereof). You can cut and paste from any app on an iPhone into the Evernote app.

See this ‘What is Evernote’ page for more details on what it does.

Evernote Overview Demo

You can see a slew of other Evernote video demos here.

How I use Evernote

I keep notes on almost everything in Evernote – from gift ideas to car rental reservation numbers. You name it. Evernote keeps notes synched between all devices all the time. As a result, these notes can be created/edited on any device (PC, mobile, web), anywhere I am and can be searched and retrieved from any device, iPhone, Blackberry or Internet-connected computer, wherever I am.

Here are a few notable things I do with Evernote:

• Client Notes: Evernote is always running on at least one of my devices. When a client calls, I can click on ‘New Note’ and type (or on my tablet, hand write) notes during the call. I tag the note by client name and project name. Later, I can access all client notes by client name or a particular project by clicking on the appropriate tag.  [Update: I am assessing whether I will use Evernote for client notes in light of the security concerns. To my mind, all notes should be encrypted on the Evernote website too – so that Evernote employees cannot access them.] 
• Blog Post Notes: I have hundreds of ideas for blog posts. As and when I think of them I fire up Evernote on the most convenient device (iPhone, PC, IMac or tablet) and jot them down. I continue to add to notes from any other device as ideas hit me. When I’m ready, I pull up the notes and write the post. (I used Evernote to plan this post)
• Family PC Support Notes: I support family and friends with their PC problems. I keep critical notes (hardware specs, passwords, tech notes) for each family member and friend tagged by the name of the person. The next time I support them, I click on the associated tag and pull up my notes from previous support calls. If I’m at their home, I can pull the notes off the cloud from my Evernote.com account or access them on my i Phone.
• System Notes: Every time I purchase a new PC, I copy and paste the full hardware specs into a note. I refer back to these constantly as the years pass, particularly when I want to upgrade RAM, hard-drives etc.
• Personal Tech Notes: I keep a long list of personal tech notes for things I frequently forget. For example, how to program the TiVo remote when using two  TiVo’s side by side. How to setup my Harmony remote, the IP addresses I assign to various devices on my network, and on and on.
• Passwords & Software Keys: I keep all software keys and important passwords in a password protected note.
• Finances: I keep all my bank account, insurance, credit card etc. information in a password protected note.
• Wine Tasting Notes:  As you can see by clicking on my wine category, I sometimes write wine reviews on The Daleisphere (usually only for wines I recommend).  I keep track of a greater number of wines by using the Evernote App on my iPhone. I click a picture of the bottle, tag the note, write a note and the note is accessible from all my systems for future reference. Pictures taken with the iPhone are even geocoded so that I can search for bottles of wine that I drank at a specific location (ie: a friends house or a restaurant). Slick!
• Software Development: I am a hobbyist web and iPhone App developer. I keep notes on development projects from code snippets, to Objective-C programming notes, to future development ideas. All tagged for quick access.
• To-Do Lists: What’s a note program without a to do list? I keep a constantly updated to-do list (several actually) – again, accessible from any device wherever I am.

Easy to Install

• Sign up for an Evernote account.
• Download the Evernote App to the devices you want to use it on.
• When installing, associate the app with your Evernote account (userid and password).
• Start taking notes.

It’s that easy.  The Evernote iPhone app is available here.

Obeys my Cloud Computing Rules (Mostly)

As with Dropbox, Evernote obeys my cloud-computing rules. Namely (i) the service uses the cloud but my notes are never left only on the cloud – I am never left at Evernote’s mercy; (ii) I don’t have to pay someone to access my data; and (iii) I am not locked into their service. In the worst case scenario, if Evernote folds, my notes won’t be synced across my devices but my notes will still be accessible and reside on my PCs.

I do have security concerns, however, that limit my ability to use Evernote over unsecured networks – see below.

Free vs. Premium Versions of Evernote

Here is a table (clipped from the Evernote website using Evernote’s screen clipper tool) comparing the free and premium versions of Evernote (as of August 31, 2009):

As you can see, the biggest differences between the two are (i) the monthly upload allowance (I haven’t used more than 10 Megs in a month); (ii) lower security on the free version; and (iii) the ability to sync any file type with the premium version. The inability to sync any type of file (eg: Word documents) as part of a note isn’t critical to me. I use Dropbox for that.

This table sets out approximately how many notes of various types the monthly upload limits permit:

Evernote Oddities and Limitations:

• Timed Sync: Unlike Dropbox, Evernote does not attempt to sync between devices in real time. Rather, it syncs every so often. I have not found this to be a problem. You can, of course, force a sync at any time if you need one.
• Only Plain Text Editable on iPhone: If you want to edit notes on the iPhone, you’ll need to keep them in plain text only. Notes with bolding, bullets, underlying etc. are not editable on the iPhone. While this was initially a bummer, once I got used to the issue, I just make sure that notes I want to edit/update on the iPhone use plane text only.
• Can’t Import from Outlook 2003: Evernote can import your OneNote 2007 notes but can’t import from OneNote 2003 (the version I own). Workaround: Microsoft provides a free 60 day trial of OneNote 2007 that you can use to import notes from OneNote 2003. From there you can then import your OneNote notes into Evernote.
• No Tag AutoComplete on PC: When I tag a note on the iPhone, it will give me auto-complete options (ie: suggest tags from previously used tags) as I start typing the tag. This is handy and ensures tag spelling consistency. Oddly, this feature is not currently part of the PC version of the software.
• Can’t Tag a Fully Open Note: If you click on a note in the Evernote app, that note will open in a separate screen for full-screen editing. Strangely, you can’t add a tag when you open it this way. You can only add a tag when the note is within the never-ending note-pad view.
• Security Concerns: I am concerned about the lack of end-to-end SSL security when using the free version of Evernote (the premium version provides SSL encryption during transmission but neither service keeps the notes encrypted on the Evernote server):

- Evernote login credentials are encrypted when traversing the Internet.

- You can also selectively secure any particular note with a password – but this becomes a pain for routine notes.

- However, all other notes are transmitted ‘in the clear’ over the Internet – like email – when using the free version of Evernote. As a result, I do not personally use Evernote when using a public hotspot such as a wifi connection at a coffee shop.

- And, like Gmail or any third party email hoster, notes are not encrypted while on Evernote’s servers. Theoretically Evernote employees could access them.

- You can create a local notebook of notes that are not sync’d and, thereby kept private.

- I note that the iPhone data network is, theoretically, secure so using Evernote on an iPhone should not create security issues on the transmission side.

- When accessing your Evernote account online be sure to include the ‘s’ after ‘http’ in the https//www.evernote.com URL to ensure an SSL connection when viewing/editing your notes online.

- For more Evernote security details, read this ‘How Secure is Evernote’ post in their knowledgebase.

See also:

• Using Free to Turn a Profit (New York Times article on Evernote)
• How I use Evernote (The Cranking Widgets Blog)
• How Evernote is Pulling My Life Together (Michael Schechter)
• Evernote for Mac, iPhone to make managing information overload easy (AppleInsider)

As usual, Americans can watch live streams of 2009 U.S. Open tennis through the US Open 2009 Website.

Also, as usual, Canadians and the rest of the world can’t.

Below, I include links to two services offering live streamed 2009 U.S. Open tennis matches. When I tested these sites on Monday August 31, I could find every match I wanted to watch in English.

To schedule your viewing, the U.S. Open Tennis 2009 play schedule is here.

MyP2P

You can find several matches on MyP2P. You may have to click around awhile to find one that works and/or is showing the match you want in the language of your choice. Some links require a plug-in to be downloaded. I don’t trust them. I only access those that play without a plug-in.

ATDHE.net

I have had mixed results with ATDHE.NET in the past. It is easier to use than MyP2P because it lists actual matches underway. Everything worked fine when I tested it out today (August 31, 2009) however.

Please leave links in the comments if you now of other reliable places where the matches can be watched online outside of the U.S..

I have recently been experimenting with various cloud-based services. Among the best are EverNote, Google Apps Gmail with iMap, xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) and, now, Dropbox.

As described in more detail below, among other things Dropbox: (i) allows me to securely sync office documents between my PCs and Mac at any location; (ii) unchains me from my office PC; (iii) liberates me from coding on a single PC; and (iv) allows me to draft and maintain my Windows Live Writer blog posts from any of my PCs situated anywhere.

Dropbox Benefits

• Sync: Dropbox synchronizes your key files between any number of Internet-connected PCs, laptops or Macs, effortlessly and instantaneously.
• Access Your Key Files Anywhere: Synced files are also maintained on the Dropbox servers. You can login to your account from any web-enabled computer to securely access your files (download or upload).
• Security: All file transmissions occur over an encrypted SSL channel. All files stored on Dropbox servers are encrypted using AES-256 encryption accessible only by you with your account password.
• Backup: Because your files are synced across at least two PCs, your files are effectively backed-up.
• Real-Time Offsite Backup: Because your files are also copied to the Dropbox servers, they are effectively backed-up, off site, in real-time.
• Undo/File Recovery: Remarkably, Dropbox maintains a 30 day history of every change made to your files so you can undo changes or undelete accidently deleted files.
• Shared Files & Folders: You can share files and folders with other drop-box users. For example, you could set up a shared folder of photos accessible only by friends and family through their Dropbox accounts.
• iPhone App Coming Soon: You can view all your Word, PowerPoint, Excel, PDF, etc. files  using the free Dropbox iPhone App coming soon (see iPhone, Blackberry and other Dropbox mobile details here).

Click here for a detailed list of Dropbox features.

Dropbox Demo

How I use Dropbox

• Office Document Use: As a lawyer I access, edit and annotate Word documents and pdfs all day, every day. When I move from my PC to my laptop, I save the file I’m working on and by the time I shift to my laptop, the changes made to that file are synced to my laptop. Similarly any edits made on the laptop are instantaneously synced back to the desktop. No longer do I have to email the document to myself, save it to a USB key, copy to/from network drives. I simply open and save files on whatever PC, laptop, or Mac I’m using, and the latest version is instantly available on the other synced devices.

• Remote Office (Starbucks) Use: As a sole practitioner I often want to get away from my desk. Since all Dropbox transmissions are encrypted, I have secure file access/syncing to/from my laptop from any hotspot such as at Starbucks (affectionately referred to as my remote office) or through a Wifi connections at my client’s offices.
• Coding Use: Previously, if I wanted to do coding, I was stuck on one PC. Now I can freely move amongst PCs. Code edits made on one PC are automatically synced to the others.
• Moving Files Between Mac and PC: In the past it was a pain to shuffle files between my Mac and my PCs – even on the same network. No longer. So long as I keep the files in my Dropbox directory hierarchy, all my key files and folders are synced in real-time across the Mac-PC divide.
• Blogging: I use Windows Live Writer to write blog posts. My PC and laptop are set up to save draft WLW posts to my Dropbox folder hierarchy. As a result, all draft posts written on one PC are instantly accessible from any other. I can take up where I left off on any PC knowing that the last draft was automatically synced across all the devices.
• My Current Dropbox Usage Stats: As I write this there are 34,250 files in 2,946 folders taking up 3.44 GB of space, that are continuously synced between my primary PC, my laptop and my iMac.  These are almost all Word documents, pdfs and jpeg images. At the moment I have a 3.5 5.0 Gigabyte Dropbox limit [Aug 21, 2009 Update: Thanks to 6 Daleisphere reader, using the referral link (see below) I now have 5 Megs of capacity].

I’m certain I’ll discover more uses over time. But Dropbox has already changed the way I use my computers and access my files.

Easy to Install and Use

After signing up, you download and install the Dropbox applet onto the computers you wish to sync. You tell it where you want the drop-box folder on each PC. From then on, anything you put into any of those folders, and any edit you make to any of those files, is instantaneously synced to the other systems (see the Dropbox tour here).

Dropbox constantly monitors your synced directories. If any file changes, only the changed part of the file is synced. This makes for lightning fast syncs. Frankly, I still marvel at how fast the syncs occur.

Obeys My Cloud Computing Rules

Dropbox works within my cloud-computing rules. Namely: (i) the service uses the cloud but my key files are never left only on the cloud – I am never left at Dropbox’s mercy; (ii) files are securely encrypted as they are synced between computers and as they reside on the Dropbox services; and  (iii)I am not locked into their service. I can leave it at any time.

Dropbox is not a Resource Hog

For Dropbox to function, it runs constantly in the system tray whenever your PCs/laptops are turned on. I was initially concerned that the constantly running app would be a system resource hog. I’ve used Dropbox for over a month and have not found this to be the case.

Dropbox Limitations

• 2 to 5 Gigs Free Limit: The free version limits you to 2 Gigs of capacity on signup. You can instantly increase this to 2.25 Gigs by using my, or anyone else’s,  referral link (see below). If you refer others to Dropbox, you, and the referred person, get an additional free 250 megs of capacity – up to a limit of 5 Gigs. Note: the 2 Gig limit is not an upload-download limit, rather its the cumulative file-size limit. So, as mentioned above, as I write this post my Dropbox limit is was 3.5 Gigs. Accordingly, the cumulative file sizes of all the files and folders contained in my Dropbox folder had to be less than 3.5 Gigs. There are no monthly upload/download bandwidth limits like there is with Evernote, for example.

  By way of comparison Windows Live Mesh gives you 5 Gigs of sync capacity for free right out-of-the-gate. There is no WLM referral program that I am aware of.

• Odd Freemium Pricing: Dropbox’s fermium business model relies on tiered pricing above the free 2-5 Meg capacity level (see Dropbox pricing details here). For $9.99 per month you can increase your allotted capacity to 50 Gigs. For $19.99 per month you can increase it to 100 Gigs. Those are awfully large jumps from the free level. 5 Gigs is about all I really need today, to keep my crown-jewel files synced between my devices. I would personally pay, say $10 a year, maybe $20 a year to increase that to, say, 10 Gigs. But I don’t need anywhere near 50 Gigs of synced capacity and certainly wouldn’t want to pay $120 a year for this. I think Dropbox is missing a big revenue opportunity here by not offering a smaller capacity tier between the free tier and the 50 Gig tier at a lesser monthly price.
• ‘Forced’ Dropbox Directory: By default, you must use a directory named ‘My Dropbox’ on your PC or Mac. This initially gave me heart-burn. To facilitate my nightly backup, I have some 35,000 core files stored in some 3,000 folders in my c:\files hierarchy on my primary PC – the document directory that I have set all my apps to default too. It is that directory that I want synced. When you read this Dropbox support forum post, you learn that in an earlier version, Dropbox permitted users to specify the name of their synced’ directory. Apparently this directory naming freedom caused too much user confusion so Dropbox changed the policy and force new users to use ‘My Dropbox’ for the name of their base directory.

  Happily there is a very easy work around to this limitation. After installing Dropbox, and before adding any files to the newly minted ‘My Dropbox’ folder, download and run the DropboxPath.exe applet referenced here on the Dropbox Support forums. This applet is run from the Windows Command Line as described in that link. You can use that applet to name the Dropbox directory anything you wish. Once the applet creates the directory,  you are good to go. Whoot! It takes 30 seconds to run.

  If, like me, you have a pre-existing directory you want to use, before running the applet:
  -  rename that directory to a temporary name (in my case I renamed c:\files to c:\files.org);
  -  run the applet;
  - set the Dropbox directory to the directory name you want to use (in my case c:\files);
  - then move the files and folders from the temporary renamed folder (in my case c:\files.org) back to the newly created folder with the old name you want to use (in my case c:\files). 

• One Root Sync Directory Limit:  Dropbox allows you to sync only one folder hierarchy – ie: the ‘My Dropbox’ folder, or the folder name you choose with the DropboxPath.exe applet, (including any folders inside of that folder). By way of comparison Windows Live Mesh allows you to sync files from any folder anywhere on your PC or Mac.

Dropbox Referral Program

[August 21, 2009 Update: As of 2:00 pm on August 21, 2009  I have reached my 5.0 Gig Dropbox limit. I do not know if the referral link will now give you 250 gigs if you use it. Please leave a comment below if using my referral link still yields 250 Megs of extra space. I’ll update this post to let others know. Thanks to Janine Haugh, Travis Moser, Charles Phillips, Dave Toerber and Troy Fulkerson for using my referral link.]

If you sign up for Dropbox using my Dropbox referral link you will get 250 Megs more capacity to start– and so do I. Instead of 2 Gigs, you’ll start with 2.25 Gigs. If you are interested in checking out Dropbox, please do us both a favor by using my referral link. (Note: You don’t have to do anything more than click through on my referral link just before you sign-up to get the additional 250 Megs of capacity.)

A Note on Windows Live Mesh

As alluded-to above, Windows Live Mesh is a very similar service. I tried it for several months before using Dropbox. While it has advantages over Dropbox (higher free capacity out of the box – multiple directory/folder sync support), I could not get it to work. Part of the problem was that the instructions for how to use it are sketchy at best.

Since de-installing it and using Dropbox, I have read a few blog-posts on it which shed light on its proper use. I think I know what I did wrong.

Given Dropbox’s 5 Gig free limit (once I max-out the free capacity through referrals that is) I’ll probably setup and use WLM concurrently with Dropbox to increase my syncing capacity.  If/when I get Windows Live Mesh working, I’ll write a follow-up post about it too.

Kim was ranked No. 1 in the world for 19 weeks in 2003. She ‘retired’ to get married and have a daughter.

Whoo hoo! Kim is one of my all-time favorite women’s players. I missed her!  Women’s tennis needs you! Henin, are you listening?