At the office not long ago, we received the visit from a colleague form the States. That means he was a Physics PhD. During the lunch break he took out of his bag his mac book Air and as we were all staring at it and while he was telling to us all about how he got his laptop at work “Because he was more productive that way” he let us play with the gadget for a while.

This has to do with how much can we understand new realities. Productivity facts, and those things.Being productive takes place at the office only occasionally. The idea is to get the most of people in every moment. And being an Entrepreneur and all, best case scenario you end up being at the office too short too little.

I found on This on Digg recently and found the time to read it. It explains a little bit about uhow the world is changing the place and time of work also. The most common thing nowadays is to have two laptops. A big heavy powerful tool at the desk, and a mini laptop for the go.

Of course you can blame it on the UMPCs, and on miniaturization etc. But truth to be told, this micro machines make almost all the work you might need on the street, and they are comfortable to carry as well as light. The Asus EEE has revolutionized the market portability wise. The fact that our main machine is now also a laptop is related to the fact that portability and mobility invades also the office and home space, letting us go from the living room to the kitchen. In the mean time, desktop computers begin their obscure pathway through hardcore resources consumers or gamers.

So, maybe instead of buying a new laptop you could add a UMPC to your lines….

What would you buy for a printer these days?

Let’s just say you won’t buy that dot matrix printer for sale on ebay. If you think anything is as good as anything else, well, you’d be wrong.

First off, you really don’t want to save some bucks with printing cheats. I mean, if you don’t want to throw your money away there are plenty of ways, your printing should not be it. Mock me not on this, cheap cartridges are not a way of saving money.

Office printing should be a quality product of yours, no matter what your printing, it sell a good amount of your corporate image, so don’t go cheap on this.

Try to focus on being effective and efficient. Think about the following: Read the rest of this entry »

This was going to be a really long post about web office suites. but I found this video from common craft that really says it all and I do not want to exceed myself.

This mini post is just to say that I’ll be one of tomorrow’s 215 confirmed attendants at the meeting in Palermo Valley.

As a plus, this is a good article about networking abilities I found at Palermo valley’s blog.

We’ll start  another post series today.

Your car is your life.

The point being that for most entrepreneurs it really is. You’re constantly going somewhere, keeping stuff there, etc., etc.,… You know.

The cellphone is pretty likely to ring while we are on the road and it is not nice (or legal) to pick it up and answer it. You need a freehands device and I will recommend one today.

I’ll say, at least for what I know, your best option is the BlueAnt Supertooth.  And this is why:

1. It is a bluetooth but a speakerphone, (I really hate  the ones that go in your ear)
2. It is not an install required gadget. You get off the car and you take with you. Take it into the (real) office
3. Easy to take calls (really)
4. if there is someone else that uses the car, or maybe you have two phones on you all the time, this gadgets supports multi-pairing, so both phones can pick calls with the same device.
5. excellent battery life.
6. you can get it for $99

In fact it is a pity. For many reasons. But it is a fact that palm is going backwards and it has gone backwards.  for some time now.
Palm has not released an original product for too long now. Their last promising concept, the foleo, was killed, their last smartphone, the centro is not doing half as well of what they expected and is the last standing knight in a battle that is no longer fought in the cavalry fields.
So, let me give you some advice:

1. Don’t buy a palm device unless it’s perfectly clear to you what is it that you’re gonna do with it.
2. If you’re going the palm way, let it at least be smartphone.
3. If you own a palm and you use it as your personal organizer, start thinking about selling it on ebay, the prices are going down really fast.

I mean Blackberry-wise. And here is why: The Blackberry 8700 does almost everything you need and is the cheapest one out there.

No matter how many people tells me about how good is the “SureType” the Pearl has, after a day of trying it out I could not get it to do what I wanted the same way the qwerty the 8700 does.

Ok, I’ll give you the fact that you won’t have video playback, or big storage, but the bottom line is that when you’re working, multimedia is not that a necessity.

The screen is as good as it gets, and it handles images very (really) well.

So start there, with the BB 8700, you’ll have time, in the future, to buy more expensive toys, trust me.

The Asus EEE, for those of you who haven’t heard of it yet, is a UMPC that costs 400 bucks in the US and come (as you read) in Windows and Xandros flavours. It supports a 2 GB expansion and etc, etc etc.

Talking of it like that is really boring, you can read that, by better informed people elsewhere. What I want to tell you is who should buy it and who shouldn’t.

• Salesmen: This is great for you, only thing to care about is battery life. But with a car charger it’ll all be good.
• Designers: You need to buy it if you’re the PowerPoint presentation kind of guy. If not this is not an option, a 7 in. screen is no place to work, and though you could plug in a mouse, it would be very uncomfortable to design on it.
• Bars: no use for you guys
• The integrated camera and the ability to connect to the world via WiFi makes this gadget a must have tool for the average executive.  Word and Excel documents are easily modified and reviewed and your mail will be with you… always.
• If I was a writer this would be my travel machine, it’s really light and maybe the keyboard is too small, but that is not really something that will make you uncomfortable.

So I was wondering the other day how much cheaper can it be to talk via Skype instead of phone. It turns out a lot of people don’t consider the possibility not because of costs, but because of reliability. That’s that! When you don’t trust something is really not likely that you’re going to use it.

But in any case, I think people should give it a chance in the work field, as an alternative to communications of any other sort for a number of reasons and a number of uses, these are not all but are good ones.

• Suppose y need video conferencing, well Skype costs literally nothing and supports up to five lines.
• It is free and multi-platform
• Its really cool (and TV like) to be able to communicate with your coworkers and partners and see each other, it changes the dimension of things, obviously.
• It is a really practical in training programs, distance ones, like learning Spanish.
• It is great to monitoring the state of some remote project, AND ITS FREE!
• Oh! and maybe last but not least, international calls are really cheap.

So I recommend you give it a try, I can assure you’ll like it

Yesterday at the meet up (see this post) I saw a lot of people using their phones as cameras to document the event. I it after all, the typical use a camera phone has. To be a camera when there is none around.

I started thinking of the times, the really big number of occasion, that I was around some people I would like to have a picture for later, and my camera phone was there.

So. Take the shot. Take the shot and don’t make a fuss about it. It is always better to have your contacts with pictures than without.

I know what’s on your mind, “How does this help at all?!”. Well, this may be not for you, but there are businesses where image matters. Restaurants, Night Clubs, or anything PR related.

Taking ones pictures shows you care, shows you’re interested in the other person and ultimately it builds a solid contact.

I insist, maybe this is not for you, but give it a thought.