Kevin Rose gave a review of an awesome piece of technology by Square that allows credit & debit card swipe payments. Both the average person and businesses can take advantage of this technology. Below are some really interesting screenshots and a list of features, followed by Kevin Rose’s video on the product.
This is a brief account of one person’s experience after having seen the film Paranormal Activity. Caution is advised when going to see the movie. Strange things may start to occur around you.
jk
I saw the movie, think it’s cool and I just decided to have a little fun with it. Enjoy!!
I’m currently in a mad rush to finish reading an advance copy of a book due out in November 2009 by Darren Barefoot Julie Szabo. This book is a phenomenal read and is titled “Friends with Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook”. Before I go on, I just want to put it out there that I was thrown by the title at first. In other words, I was confused about the authors meaning until I continued reading the rest of the title, “A Social Media Marketing Handbook” after which I grabbed my gut and had a big chuckle to myself as continued reading the press release. Just thought I’d share that little anecdote.
Without doing a direct quote from the book, there is a part that addresses honesty and authenticity on the internet through social media, be it via a blog, YouTube, Twitter, etc. The example used in the book was the lonelygirl15 marketing scheme that was, to my recollection, both lauded and looked down upon (Read this and this as examples). On the one hand it was incredibly cool that this so-called video blogger named “Bree” (16 years old) also known as lonelygirl15 on YouTube, was actually a 19-year old actress–which was astoundingly clever. But on the other hand, this reveal was bittersweet in that it immediately alienated the fans and betrayed the cool-factor of how transparent Bree was and the authenticity of what she talked about in her videos.
The good part of that “experiment” is that it served as a litmus test if you will, for just how people want use the internet and the immensely strong resolve for how people want to connect with others online. The closeness of getting to learn about a person who seemed to have no reason to lie about what she shared was betrayed. Fans were inadvertently made the butt of what effectively came across as a viral marketing trick. The feeling of connectedness with Bree and her honesty was amazing and it made you feel like you (the viewer and fan) were friends with a real person. While the medium (the internet) is virtual the desire to connect with real people real, and the eventual relationships that people do build via the many tools on the internet, (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Viddler, Blogger, etc) are also real–NEVER forget this! (As an aside, other iterations of this marketing scheme were used, but in a way that wasn’t alienating by virtue of the kind of content that was being marketed–in this case a film along the lines of the shaky Blair Witch camera film style. For example, the video clips that were posted to the internet and passed off as if they were real to market the film “Cloverfield”, by my standards, was a sheer genius means of getting the film known and built a strong following before it’s release. Learn more… with J.J.’s Viral ‘Clovefield’ Diary)
A real, genuine, and positive testament to what kind of community could have continued around lonelygirl15 before news broke of it’s falsehood, were she blond, 25 and an even more active video blogger, is the very real, Justine Ezarik of ijustine.com. She has a huge following–primarily young females–and most of what she does is in real time, in that she shoots a lot of video and posts it to the web relatively close to the time she shot it. She essentially streams a portion of her life on the internet, interacts with her fans, or friends as she puts it, via different social networking sites, and even features them in her own mini web show, “Ask iJ“. The majority of the tools that she uses are free social networks that she uses to share and connect. More importantly, I haven confirmed whether she did this on purpose or it just happened this way, but all the internet tools that she uses and what she does with them now serve as her calling card or business card as far as her personal Brand “iJustine” is concerned. Finally, all of this is done in a positive way that is honest, authentic and non-alienating to her fans and business partners, while never compromising her own privacy and safety.
Authenticity goes a long, long way and that is what continues to amaze me so much about this present phase in our age of the internet.
In closing, I’ll give a more thorough review once I’ve gotten through this book.
I regret being slow to talk up this product earlier, but have you ever used a library, school, or company computer and wonder why and how after making changes on the computer, at reboot everything is restored to it’s state prior to use? Well, most likely they were running Deep Freeze or the like. But in any case, Deep Freeze provides this very functionality.
Deep Freeze Mac provides a completely non-restrictive working environment where there is no need to be concerned about system damage or corruption; a simple restart eradicates all changes and ensures that the standard system configuration is available at all times. All changes to a computer are temporary for that working session, including installation or removal of software and application preference configuration.
Now I don’t know about you, but this makes perfect sense to me. In fact I don’t want to get into any technical details about this software as I did install the evaluation download and using it is fairly straight forward, if you’re already in the habit of using data preservation tools. But for clarity’s sake, let’s say you bought a brand new shiny Mac, you install all your additional software and customize it’s settings and features to suit you. Now, obviously over time Macs and PCs alike age, wear and get corrupt preferences, system file errors, and the like. In order to to preserve the perfect functioning of you computer you install and selectively “freeze” the operating system (OS) and software areas of your computers hard drive in their present pristine state. So no matter what you do or what happens from when your computer decides to get screwy, it will always be fixable with a simple rebooting of the system. This is flat-out awesome!
As far as IT professionals are concerned, it works perfectly and is tailor-made, as a matter of fact, for large computer environments with a small IT staff and small budgets. It saves on time-effectiveness in terms of not having to restore and re-image several hundred (more or less) computers repeatedly, especially with high computer usage on daily basis. In fact, this personally hits home for me as I have a friend who is also my coworker as our “IT Guy”. We love him and appreciate everything he does because, first he alone is the IT staff, and his daily duties are staggering.
I checked out the list of key features that this software has to offer and it’s no doubt long, so I will only point out some features that I think are worth mentioning here as a selling point for both standard use (single user) and business/education (enterprise) use.
Guarantees 100% workstation (computer) recovery on restart
Provides password protection and complete security.
Protects multiple hard drives and partitions.
Compatible with Fast User Switching [such as, switching between different user accounts on a Mac]
Supports SCSI, ATA, SATA, and IDE hard drives [support most hard drives, in other words]
Offers silent install option for rapid network deployment
Provides options to deploy on multiple workstations as part of a master image
Finally, Deep Freeze runs on multiple platforms (Windows, Mac OSX, Windows Server and Linux), but recently an updated version of Deep Freeze was released along side the launch of Apple Inc’s new OS update, Snow Leopard.
If I were to rate this software on scale of five stars, I’d give this all five.
Please read more, download and even consider trying out the 30-day trial software at Faronics.com
I received a copy of Wallace Wang’s new book “My New Mac: Snow Leopard Edition”. I’ve gone through this book and it is clearly geared towards new Mac users and switchers. It allows one to scan a detailed list of helpful topics for a quick-fire means to finding answers for your needs, fast.
Additionally, it’s extremely thorough and easy to follow in terms of content format and layout of topics.
There are 5 parts to the book as a whole:
Part 1: Basic Training
Part 2: Making Life Easier with Shortcuts
Part 3: Putting Your Macintosh to Work
Part 4: Touching the World Through the Internet
Part 5: Mainting Your Macintosh
Then underneath each part are a number of easy step-by-step projects for a total of 52 projects (see below).
Basic Table of Contents (excerpt)
Introduction
PART I: Basic Training
1. Turning Your Macintosh On and Off Manually or Automatically
2. Learning to Use the Mouse
3. Choosing Commands on the Menu Bar
4. Loading Programs and Files from the Dock
5. Customizing the Dock
6. Manipulating Windows
7. Navigating Through Folders with the Finder
8. Managing and Viewing Your Files and Folder
9. Conserving Energy While Using Your Macintosh
PART II: Making Life Easier with Shortcuts
10. Working Faster with Shortcut Commands
11. Learning to Drag and Drop
12. Controlling Your Macintosh with Hot Corners
13. Finding Files Fast
14. Organizing Files and Folders by Color and Weird Words
15. Putting Information at your Fingertips with Dashboard
16. Giving a Macintosh Multiple Personalities with User Accounts
17. Slapping Parental Controls on your Kids
18. Making Your Mac Easier to See, Hear, and Control
Believe it or not the author admittedly states that this book does not cover the gamut of topics for learning about your Mac--and it shouldn't. But believe me when I say that there is more than enough help provided in this book to cover the basics.
Two more things I want to mention are the "Additional Ideas for... *topic goes here*" section. Under this section within each chapter it provides additional fix options, web links, and suggested reads. Secondly, if you look carefully at the image of the front cover (above), you might be able to notice that the smiling Mac is made of paper. In other words, at the back of the book it shows you how to make a paper Mac. I highly recommend this book!
I give it 5 out of 5 M’s! lol
(M stands for “MacDavid”)
Stay synced!
Publication Info:
My New Mac Snow Leopard Edition
$29.95 USD
ISBN: 978-1-59327-209-8
Publisher: No Starch Press – www.nostarch.com
