Scaling Business Card Mountain

By | September 11, 2008
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By Jeremy Wagstaff

One day everyone will be beaming/Bluetoothing their business cards to people, or sending them via email as soon as they get home from the Taiwanese Horticulture Convention. But for now we’re stuck with mountains of them on our desk, waiting for that moment that never comes when we might actually do something about them.

I’ve seen a lot of solutions to this problem, and none of them work particularly well. The most common seems to be the ‘Farm It Out to Your Assistant’ routine, which works well if you’ve got an assistant, but doesn’t really help him very much, since he’s going to have to type all those details in somewhere.

I’ve recommended before investing in a scanner, and that’s still a good option. Fujitsu’s ScanSnap lets you scan bundles of about 10 cards in one go, and does a pretty fair job of converting the images to text—what’s called optical character recognition, or OCR.

From there it’s a small step to moving the resulting files into Outlook, or whatever program you use to store these things.

But this still means you’re stuck with waiting until you get back from the convention or kayaking expedition, or wherever it was you gathered the small pile of business cards. By then you’ve forgotten who these people are, or you’re too tired to do anything about filing them away. Soon another convention comes along and the pile builds up.

Your network is rotting before your eyes.

This is made even more absurd by the fact that actually online networks, both for business and pleasure, are blooming. Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster, Plaxo, all operate for the sole purpose of making your network of friends and business contacts more efficient.

But name cards seem to still operate in a analog world of their own.

Here’s how I get around this problem. It’s not perfect, but it saves time and means that the leads and contacts you make are strengthened and you can find all the details you need when you need them.

First off, make sure you get a card or a name from the person. If they don’t have one, which often happens, see whether they’re up to sending you their business card digitally. Most phones nowadays make this relatively easy.

Nokia, for example, let you send a ‘business card’ to other users via either SMS text message, multimedia (MMS, a kind of email), Bluetooth or infrared. Be prepared by making sure that you have your own contacts in the phone, along with (preferably) a photo, your business title and address—all the things you’d hope would be on a business card.

(The photo is a good way of reminding other people who you are. I’m sure you’re a very memorable person and the life and soul of every party, but it’s worth hammering home the point. This photo will eventually sit on their phone and in their contacts program, so make sure it’s a good one.)

Be ready to beam these details to someone else—find the contact, select options and then send business card—and help the other person find theirs if they don’t already know how.

Chances are, however, the other person won’t be up to doing this, so just make sure you’ve got their name right, give them your card and ask them to email their details to you.

Chances are they’ll forget, so when you get back to your computer Google them (or look them up on sites like LinkedIn, or Zoominfo, or Wink.) Grab that data and make your own Outlook entry (a great tool to make this easier is Anagram—getanagram.com—which is smart enough to fill out the fields in a contact file automatically.)

If this person is on LinkedIn etc, connect to them that way to reinforce the link and to make sure that their contact details are automatically updated to your database. (More on this in a future column.)

If they do have a name card, as soon as you get back to your room, into a cab, or somewhere you can sit down, get out your cellphone and take a photo of it. Change the camera settings to close up and make sure it’s in focus (the camera usually beeps when it’s in focus.)

It’s possible, you see, to send that photo to a service which will automatically scan the name card, convert it to text (and to a standard business card format called VCF) and email it back to you all ready to go into your Outlook or other contact database. It’s also free. (The scans will also be saved online, should you ever need them.)

The service is called scanR (scanr.com) and works with most types of phone. And it works well. This means you’re scanning the name card almost as soon as you’ve received it, meaning there’s a much higher chance you’ll remember the guy—especially if you add a few notes to the contact details (“Met at party where he was wearing hostess on his head” or somesuch.)

There’s an even faster way of doing this. If you have an account at Plaxo, a networking and contacts backup service, you can tell scanR to automatically send business cards to your Plaxo account. If your Plaxo account is synchronizing with your Outlook address book  then that’s all you need to do. Once scanned with the phone, that contact wends its way back to your address book without you having to do anything.

It may seem a long way around but until we’ve ditched this charmingly antiquated little custom from our business world, I’d suggest that it’s the easiest way to avoid Business Card Mountain.

Jeremy Wagstaff is a commentator on technology and appears regularly on the BBC World Service. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com or via email at jeremy@loose-wire.com.

 

How to Send Big Files to Other People

By | September 10, 2008
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Here’s probably the simplest and most effective way to share files from your computer with others—without clogging up other people’s email inboxes or having them ask you to resend it because they deleted the email by mistake.

And without having to sign up for an account or anything fiddly. Promise.

First off, go to drop.io (pronounced dropeeoh, apparently).

You have the option of customizing the link your file(s) will be stored at: Type in your preferred name until drop.io finds one that hasn’t been taken already. Your URL will then be something like drop.io/loosewire.

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Click on the green button below it to add files.

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Select the file from the list (to select more than one file hold down the Control/Command key as you select the files).

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Click OK and you’ll see the fuel-gauge-type bar to the right of the green button partly fill. You’re allowed up to 100 megabytes of space.

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The next window lets you set a password for other people to enter if they want to view the files. (You don’t have to include a password if you don’t want to.)

You can also choose how long the files will be available for  (from one day to one year.) And you can choose whether others just view the files, can add to them, and whether they can delete them.

Once you’re done with these settings (or have skipped over them) click on the red Drop it button.

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The button will change briefly to grey and then to a message indicating your files are uploading.

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You’ll see the fuel-gauge bar above change to indicate how far your files have to go before they’re done uploading.

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Once the files are ready, you’ll be asked if you want to add another password—this one’s for you, so you can change settings later or delete the files. It’s also optional.

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You’re done uploading. The only thing left to do is to let your colleagues/friends/family know the link you’ve sent these files to. (Select the link, right click the mouse and copy it to the clipboard. Paste the link into an email or your chat program, or however you intend to alert others to the files’ existence.)

 

Free tip(s)

You can easily leave notes for others on the page of files you’ve uploaded—a neat feature that could be helpful. Just click on the Notes link at the top of the page and type your note:

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If you use the latest version of the Firefox browser (and if not, why not?) there’s an even easier way to do this (for both Mac and Windows users.) (You can see a screencast of this here.)

Install the drop.io Firefox extension (a small piece of code that plugs in to Firefox) and you’ll see a little red dot at the right hand corner of your screen. Drag and drop a file from your desktop or a Windows Explorer/Finder window. You won’t get any pop-up messages, only a moving graphic to indicate the file is being uploaded:

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Pure Web 2.0 – Music Collaboration

By | November 22, 2011
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Via one of my musicial heroes,  Thomas Dolby, here’s a great example of how Web 2.0 really works—for musicians.

A very timely piece of software has become available for me to use on my album. It’s called Virtual Glass and it’s a plug-in you download from a web site/service called eSession.com.

The subscription-based eSession site handles all administrative aspects of auditioning, negotiating with, and recording with, a huge number of top professional musicians, all without leaving the comfort of your own home studio (or in my case, DIScomfort as it’s not finished yet!)

It ticks all the Web 2.0 boxes—free for basic services, allows users to find other like-minded users, and enables them to collaborate together online. In fact, I can’t really think of a purer encapsulation of the Web 2.0 vision.

Here’s how Dolby describes using it:

[I]t enables me to do a recording session with, let’s say Kevin Armstrong, who lives in London which is several hours away from me. Kevin has his own studio and uses the same software as me. So we can connect, open the same song, and Kevin can overdub guitar parts. We can discuss them, agree on retakes and so on, while hearing each other in real time. His face and/or his studio appear in a video window on my screen, and we have a ‘talkback’ system. The experience is actually not very different from me being in the control room and Kevin out in a booth. I can hear a low-res version of his part, then once it’s done he just drops the new recording into a bin online, and I update it on my end in hi-res. The software can keep track of the time we spend and even issue an invoice based on a pre-agreed fee.

Then let’s say I really need someone to play a jaw’s harp. I do a search for that keyword in the eSession talent profiles, and find out that Tony Levin as well as being a killer bassist is an ace jaw’s harpist (?!) and right now he’s got a mid-tour day off and he’s sitting in a hotel room in Nashville, Tenessee. I approach him and fix the fee. We can work together using Virtual Glass in real time over ADSL, or he can just work on it in his own time and send me a few takes to peruse offline.

Thomas Dolby’s Blog » Blog Archive » eSession rocks

How to Manage Your Nokia Phone

By | September 3, 2008
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Nokia has finally woken up to the potential of connecting its phones to a computer. Although you could do it before, Nokia has launched a new version of its PC Suite, that makes some great strides in allowing you to use the computer to manage and monitor your cellphone.

The vision is a simple, and yet elusive, one. We work on our computers when we’re stationary. And on our phone when we’re mobile. But as far as we’re concerned we’re still doing the same thing: working. We can synchronize our data between those two devices, but operating both in real time is more problematic: there are tools to allow us to access our computer data from a phone, but sending and receiving SMS messages, for example, is still considered a phone activity, not a computer one.

It’s a technical barrier, not a lifestyle one. And here’s how to bridge it.

Your Nokia phone should have come with a cable. You’ll need that, and you’ll need the latest version of the PC Suite (this works only with Windows, unfortunately), which you can get from here  (http://is.gd/2aiL). 

Install the software, and then follow the instructions for connecting phone to computer.

When the two devices are connected, a list of options will appear on your phone. Select PC Suite.

Click on the Click here to connect a phone and follow the instructions:

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The new bit with this version of the software is the smoother and more thorough handling of contacts and SMS messages. To try this out, click on the envelope icon and you’ll see a list of messages from your phone:

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This effectively gives you full access to all the messages and contacts on your phone, and also allows you to send and reply to messages straight from your phone, but without the fiddly screen.

Clicking on the Contacts button on the left hand bottom corner of the program window lets you edit, add, and delete entries from your phone:

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This is not perfect. I noticed I couldn’t always delete text from a field, and don’t expect the software to automatically notify you of incoming messages.

But it’s a start, and another good reason to buy Nokia phones.

Another tip: If you’ve got Bluetooth on your computer, configure your PC and phone so they talk to each other. That way you don’t need to carry the cable around with you.

This is the closest I’ve seen to making the phone an appendage to your computer, where it seamlessly integrates in terms of data and functionality. Some steps to go, but kudos to Nokia for pushing the envelope. Hopefully soon enough we won’t notice or care what medium—SMS, email, chat–we’re using, because it will all be one simple interface. That day just came closer.

©Loose Wire Pte Ltd.

Jeremy Wagstaff is a Singapore-based commentator on technology. His guide to using computers, Loose Wire, is available in bookshops or on Amazon. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com or via email at jeremy@loose-wire.com.

When the Browser Grows Up

By | September 3, 2008
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Google this week (eds: Tuesday 3/9/08) launched its own browser. Here Jeremy analyses its significance for the general user.

By Jeremy Wagstaff

Geeks have gotten very excited about the launch of Google’s own browser, called Chrome. But what does it mean for us ordinary mortals?

Well, in the short term, not very much. But further down the track, you can expect all sorts of things to happen that will blur the distinction between what is on your computer and what is on the Internet. This—overall—will be a good thing, for reasons I’ll explain in a minute. But it may also get a bit messy.

Google have kept very quiet about this particular product, despite the fact they’ve been working on it for at least a couple of years. Surprisingly, they managed to keep it more or less under wraps until it was launched. They needed to: By launching their own browser they’re prodding the beast that is Microsoft. Expect open war to follow.

It’s not as if Microsoft still dominate the browser world. Well, they do, in the sense that most people who use Windows don’t bother to use anything other than the browser that comes with it, Internet Explorer. Indeed, a lot of users can’t: At the university where I teach even the teachers can’t download or install anything, so switching to other browsers is not an option for most people.

But there are plenty of better browsers out there: A Swedish company called Opera has been plugging away at its own browser, and, at least until a few years back, has introduced lots of cool new features that have gradually made their way into Internet Explorer (tabs, for example, where you can have more than one window open inside the same program.) And then there’s Firefox, an Open Source descendant of Netscape Navigator, which ruled the roost in the mid- to late 1990s until Microsoft crushed it like a bug. (Oh and Apple have their Safari, which also works on Windows, and is sleek and fast.)

Firefox has made some serious inroads into Microsoft’s market share, partly by harnessing the hard work and great ideas of volunteers, who push the edges of what is possible by developing extra bits called extensions that users can bolt on to the browser to increase its potential. These could be as simple as swishing your mouse to move back pages, to as fancy as using Firefox as a drawing and painting program.

Firefox, or the company behind it, makes its money by renting out to Google its search box—the little window in the top right of the screen—so that the default search engine points to its servers. This helped Firefox and made sense for Google, directing lots of traffic to them, and allowing them to build a close relationship with Firefox developers.

But now the search engine giant has realised this doesn’t go far enough. You see, Google isn’t just about search. It’s not just about entering a few words in a box and hitting Enter. It’s about accessing information. If you take that definition broadly enough, you can see that Google wants to place itself right in the middle of pretty much everything you do. Whether you’re working on a document with colleagues, trying to find a restaurant in Banglampoo, or setting up a corporate web site, you’re handling information. And if you’re doing it with Google, then you’re sitting just where they want you to be to take their ads.

Seen like that, it’s a natural next step to try to move into browsers. The browser—as revealed by its name—was once a fairly passive beast, designed for surfing and reading stuff. Now we spend as much time typing into our browser—email, blog posts, documents—as we do watching or reading stuff. We’re used to every web site we visit giving us the opportunity to comment or contribute. The browser is no longer a browser but—horrible word coming up—an interface.

Now, with a bit of tweaking, we can do all sorts of things inside the browser. Even without doing anything we can use it as a word processor, a spreadsheet, a mind mapping application; we can edit pictures and audio. With some extra bits installed we can even do some of this when there’s no Internet connection. Who needs Microsoft Word when you can do it all in a browser, for free?

Now you might be seeing why Microsoft isn’t happy. It doesn’t really care about having a browser as competition; it cares about Google—a behemoth with deep pockets and some very good programmers—having a browser.

Until now, the dreams of a browser replacing all the other programs on your computer was just that. The browser wasn’t really designed for all these extra things going on inside it. And while Firefox is an impressive beast (as is Opera), both depend on old machinery under the hood. Google realised this, and realised that someone needed to overhaul the browser so it could be a platform in its own right.

Now Google’s other products—its online applications, its  blogging tools, its drawing and mapping applications—can become part of your browser. More importantly, us users won’t need to install anything to move these applications from the web—the cloud, as it’s called, meaning anywhere but on your computer—to your PC. Something called Google Gears did that already, but it was something you had to install, whereas now it comes as part of the Chrome browser. In short, if you use Google Docs you can edit as easily online—where the document you’re editing sits in the cloud—to offline—where it sits on your computer.

It’s not necessarily going to be as smooth as one would like. There are teething problems—the version of Chrome I tested was wonderfully fast and elegant, right up until it started hogging my computer’s resources—and there’s bound to be some tension between Google and its erstwhile comrades-in-arms at Firefox. And yes, we should be a little alarmed that the already powerful Google can now have more access to our data.

But on balance it’s exciting. For you and I it means leaner, meaner applications that do what we want, where we want, and without us having to for them. As Dương Thành An, the Vietnamese founder of Evolus which developed the drawing application I mentioned above, puts it: “What else do we need in our PC?” 

It means a new wave of innovation from developers—since Chrome is Open Source, meaning anyone can fiddle with it and add to it—and from Google’s rivals like Microsoft—who will be forced to come up with responses of their own.

So download it, give it a spin, and let me know how you get on.

©Loose Wire Pte Ltd.

Jeremy Wagstaff is a regular contributor on technology to the BBC World Service and elsewhere. His book-length guide to using computers, Loose Wire, is available in bookshops or on Amazon. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com or via email at jeremy@loose-wire.com.

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