What’s all the buzz about Google Buzz?

Google announced yesterday its newest public project, Google Buzz.  Google Buzz lets you, “Go beyond status messages,” allowing you to, “share updates, photos, videos, and more.”  It enables you to “start conversations about the things you find interesting.”  Google has placed Buzz as a link inside of Gmail.  To say it best, Buzz is like the lovechild of Twitter, Facebook, and Google Wave.  From the Twitter perspective, Buzz allows you to post status messages, or microblog your life. From the Facebook angle, it allows you to post content, like photos and videos, and share it with your friends. The Google Wave functionality ties in because all the status updates are real-time with no need to refresh the page.

(more…)

Some Apple News

Hey guys, I apologize for the lax updates.  I’ve been incredibly busy starting my new semester and beginning the preparation for the Apple Certified Technical Coordinator exams.  Regardless, speaking of Apple, here’s some Apple news from this week:

- Apple has invited select members of the media to the now confirmed media event on January 27th at 10:00 AM PST.  The title of the event is “Come see our latest creation.”  Will it be the much-rumored tablet, iLife/iWork 2010, iPhone OS 4.0 with true multi-tasking?  We’ll have to wait and see.  I will be writing a long wrap-up at the end of the day on the 27th.

- Apple released BootCamp 3.1 today for Intel Macs and finally includes support for Windows 7.  Apple promised that by the end of the year 2009, but they missed the mark.  It was finally released today.

- A rumor was published today claiming a new version of iTunes, combined with Apple’s recent LaLa acquisition, could allow iTunes users to move their entire library to the cloud so they can play their music on any device on the web.  Neat!

‘Readability’ by arc90

Here’s yet another amazing product I’ve found at the mercy of reading David Pogue’s blog (the first being the Zeo, of course).  Readability is a super cool piece of javascript that turns any webpage with text and/or an article, like CNN, The New York Times, MSNBC, etc. into a nicely formatted page that looks like a Kindle screen or newspaper.  It eliminates all of the clutter around the article and lets you focus your attention on solely that – the content; the article. (more…)

Google Wave Invite Giveaway!

I have 10 Google Wave beta invites to give away. Thats right; 10 lucky people will get Google Wave beta invites, courtesy of myself and Noah Purdy.  Noah is a fellow CIS student at RMU.  He’s a super nice guy, and I thank him for helping to make this possible.

Google Wave is a communication tool aimed at making it easy and simple to collaborate with multiple people. There’s really no other way to describe it besides to direct you to this video, and to the site, which has a nice introductory video on Google Wave and what it’s about.

To be entered in this contest, you’ll need to do one of two things: tweet the post, or comment on it.

(more…)

Google Announces Chrome OS

Google held a rather small event today to announce its new Chrome OS.  The OS isn’t even in beta yet, but they wanted to give developers and members of the open source community a very early chance to check it out.  Rather than type out a really long post about it, I’m just going to give a bulleted list of all the important information.  Much courtesy to Engadget for initially summing up the live event.  I will say, however, that the concept is interesting, if nothing else.  I’m still very wary of our society’s increasing reliance on the cloud.  GMAIL goes down often, for example.  Basing an entire OS off the cloud and storing absolutely nothing locally, quite frankly, scares the crap out of me.  Google said that the limited cloud downtime should equal or be far less in time than that of the average computer downtime due to viruses or other headaches.  Never, ever, have I been unable to access my files on my Mac because it was “down.”  I just wanted to mention that. Click through to get the bulleted list summarizing most of the announcement.

(more…)

TRETC 2009

TRETC (Three Rivers Educational Technology Conference) 2009 was a huge success and most definitely a lot of fun.  Last year, I had the privilege of having the “Presenter” status on my tag.  I gave a presentation on creating a 21st century student technology leadership team in schools. (See this post).  This year, I had the “Exhibitor” status.
I got to demo two Web 2.0 products, Quizlet and Webnotes, in the Digital Playground.  The Digital Playground was new for this year, and I have to say, it was interesting idea.  Unfortunately, it was given a bad location and many folks didn’t really know what they were supposed to “do” there.  To many, it looked like just some more vendor tables.  That was the problem with it.  If the technology council can integrate some more students next year to show off some of their favorite tools, sort of like I did today, I think the Playground will be much more successful.

(more…)

Social Media’s Positive Business Impact

The final research paper for my COSK1221 (Argument and Research) class at Robert Morris University is worth 30% of my final grade.  I chose to argue that businesses that choose to accept and participate in this new form of interaction, social media has a positive impact in the areas of customer communication and connection, customer support, and monetization of brand evangelists.

I’d like to thank all of the companies that spoke with me, including Webnotes, Zeo, Comcast, Verizon, SurpassHosting, Discover, The PNC Financial Services Group, and Robert Morris Univeristy.  You can find all of the interviews here.  The Verizon and Zeo interviews have the most substance – they were hour long phone interviews.

You can download the final paper here.

Please leave a comment on this post letting me know your thoughts!  If you’d like permission to print the paper or copy anything out of it, please contact me using the contact page.

Interview 8 With Webnotes

For those of you who don’t know, Webnotes is a fantastic tool for taking notes on the web.  It lets you highlight and annotate any webpage and/or PDF.  I’ve had professional relations with them in the past.  I made both the PR screencast and the regular Webnotes screencast.  They’re a fantastic company, super nice guys, and Alex King, their director of marketing agreed to answer my questions.

What is your name and official title at your company?

Alex King- Director of Marketing

What is the name of the company you work for, and what does it specialize in?

WebNotes – We provide research tools to academics and public relations professionals.

(more…)