Synching Calendars - Revisited

A few months ago, I wrote about my experiences with online calendars, such as those from Google or Yahoo. Back then, I was hoping to eventually get some easy synchronization between Outlook and the online counterpart, other than by export/import. Well, it looks as if shortly after Google announced its calendar, companies started to build just that: Tools for synchronizing Google Calendar with whatever other calendar was used, Outlook, Lotus Notes, Palm, Groupwise or others.

The first one I'll try is CompanionLink for Google Calendar from a company named, well, CompanionLink Software, another "leading developer of data synchronization and contact management solutions for mobile phones, PDAs and other handheld devices." Yawn. They allow downloading a free evaluation software, and so I did. Kinda interesting that you need to download, install and run the application, before they actually tell you that the evaluation is good for 15 days. Would have been nice to mention that somewhere upfront. Installing is easy, customizing too. Simply enter the Google login credentials and select the appropriate calendar application and time period, click Synchronize and wait.... Wait for a looooong time, that is.

While I'm writing this, the little synchie app has been running for over an hour. The status window seems to count calendar entries that it pushes towards Google, but I'm wondering why this is soooooo slooooooow. It's not that a calendar entry is a lot of data. And I'm behind a 6M DSL line. At a count of about 1200, the synch application appeared to have frozen, so I clicked Cancel, however, the little "companion" seemed largely unimpressed by that. A few minutes later, it woke up miraculously and kept counting, all the way to something like 3000 or so, and then the window disappeared. No "Finished" message or anything. Weird. On the Google side, everything seemed to have been captured alright, so I'm happy, sort of. I'll try a few more days and will check on alternatives before I'll consider shelling out $29.95 for the companion, particularly because it's still not ideal. Instead of launching an application everytime I happen to remember synching, I'd much rather have some little agent sitting nicely in the taskbar doing this without any user intervention. Doesn't sound like rocket science to me, that's why I'd expect to find something similar shortly...


Update: Well, there seems to be an issue with using Outlook and the companion at the same time. Apparently, the little helper locks some Outlook files during synchronization, so Outlook itself can't use them. If that is the case, it's very bad application design. However, the error message itself is strange. It says "Another application closed unexpectedly." Maybe that was the effect of the failed Cancel and the window disappearing without any comment. In any case, the application is closed now, right? So why is the message then saying "... until you close all applications currently using it"? I thought everything is closed already. Or did the little companion turn into some locking zombie? In any case, I won't pay anything for this....

Peoples' True Interests

If I were Google's searchmaster, I'd be reading all day what people enter into the search field. In fact, I'd be surprised if the Googlarians didn't store every single search item and use it for the better of humanity. Or their company's own stock price. Either way, I sometimes get a tiny glimpse of what must be billions of search terms every day, by looking at the referring URL of the anonymous surfer eventually hitting any of my web pages. And while it can be ego-boosting if I find people actually entering my own name, the more interesting searches are when some random combination of words on any given page of this blog turns into a hit for someone looking for the answer. More recently, I noticed the following interesting search words:

• how do I become a spammer
  
• how big should a big screen tv be?
  
• IT vendor taglines
  
• corporate slogans
  
• 14 ways to pronounce "ough"
  
• anita blond calendar 2005
  
• photographic memory
  
• photo business card
  
• the need for manufacturers silly disclaimers
  
• blood at fertile time
  
• climbing eiger
  

This calls for an experiment. Hey, it could even be called research. I will create a content-free posting that includes nothing but vendor names, buzzwords, potential keywords and tags. And then I'll just wait, because Google and Sitemeter do the rest. I will report results.

On Air

This past Saturday, I participated in a WDR 5 broadcast about Web 2.0. The format is called Profit and touches on all kinds of business aspects. This time, anchor Frank Wörner and I talked about the new Web 2.0 bubble (if it is one), new business models, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, and the Google-Microsoft battle. If you're able to understand German (or otherwise want to expose yourself to a foreign language), you can find a downloadable podcast.

The interesting thing for me was the fact that I didn't have to go to WDR headquarters in Cologne, or even our local broadcasting company, NDR, but only to some tiny (half a closet, really) private studio here in the city, only 10 minutes from my house. First I thought I was in the wrong place, going up stairs in a very old appartment building. But there it was, on the third floor, the "studio", including control room and soundproof box, both separated by a car's windshield (I'm not kidding). The owner explained that the curved surface of the glass would do much better to diffuse sound reflections. Well, it must have worked, because the sound technicians in Cologne didn't complain. The sound connection to WDR was the surprising bit. I expected some sophisticated mechanism to establish the voice connection between Frank and myself, which sounded as clear as we were sitting next to each other. Apparently, a single ISDN line is all you need. By having a Codec on each end (in this case an old CDQ 1000) talk to one another, the analog signal easily gets transferred via a standard 64k line. Amazing. I need to upgrade my home studio....

Homeland Security - what's next?

The paranoia continues. I mean, I am all for protecting a country, its people and all the rest, but apparently the US Department of Homeland Security and its ability to screen travellers just went up a notch. The Association of Corporate Travel Executives just issued a statement that highlights the details about those regulations at the US border. As if fingerprinting and photographing every US visitor wasn't enough, it's now apparently possible to seize computers, memory sticks, phones, and basically all data on any device brought into the country.

I don't believe the US Customs officials mean that my memory stick is a weapon (although I could poke someone with it) or I could knock someone down with my corporate laptop. But if that's not the problem, it's clearly only about the data getting into the country. Bad data, that is. Then again, has someone in the US administration ever heard of the .... uh... Internet? Didn't Al Gore invent the whole thing? Reminds me of the old joke where border officials worldwide were searching for CDROMs in travellers' bags to prevent the use and spreading of pirated software. They quickly learned that if someone wanted any data to travel across borders, without any border patrol, they would simply use an email or ftp the data to any place in the world.

So, if the memory stick is not the threat, the data is, but only on devices brought physically into the country, what could it be that the customs officials are after? Not the pictures of Uncle Henry's birthday party, that's pretty obvious. Well, maybe it's all about exactly that corporate data that everyone carries around. In other words, a way to enable legalized industrial espoinage. So much for the common conspiracy theory, but in any case: Nice move, boys, sounds like a golden opportunity for vendors of encryption software.

Reading business cards on Windows Mobile

It's quite interesting how Microsoft made more and more inroads into my personal life. The last barrier (or is it?) just fell last week, when I switched my mobile from a Sony Ericsson P910i to an HTC TyTN. And with that, my year-long Symbian OS liason, which started in the days of the early Palms, has come to an end, and now I suddenly am a Windows Mobile user. Well, an unbeatable Tytanic Vodafone deal (read: high phone bill) made that move relatively easy.

The daily use of the new device needs a little getting used to, even though it's plain ol´ Windows (well, sort of), with Start button, Office apps, media player and all the rest. Now, of course, I need to check out all those funky apps that would make the new toy even more attractive. My friend Gary pointed me to the Gmail midlet, which I would have started using immediately, if it wouldn't have required a new JVM. So now I'm back in the plumbing looking at IBM's J9 to make it work.

Another really useful type of application I found is PenPower's Business Card Recognition tool. This is particularly useful for people that collect (that is, exchange) large numbers of business cards. Just last week alone at our Symposium event in Cannes, I must have gotten about 60 from clients, vendors, and prospects. Entering all those details into the address book is typically a time killer work during long flights. I checked out Penpower's trial version, by which you simply take a photo shot of the card, and the OCR engine generates text, which then gets copied into Outlook. Worked a few times pretty well, but then stopped, although unregistered versions are supposed to work for 30 days. Looks like Taiwanese days are much shorter then European days. Oh well.

Alternatively, I dabbled with scanR, which is an online service of the same kind. You take the photo, send it to an email address, and voila, they return a vCard file, that you simply import into Outlook. Worked alright, but I don't feel that comfortable sending complete details of people I know to a third party, although they claim to follow privacy rules.

>> scanR uses the information we collect to set up and provide the scanR service to you. scanR also stores some or all of the information we gather from processing images through the scanR service in a database for the purposes of improving the accuracy and performance of the service. Unless approved by you in advance, scanR will not provide third parties with access to any information captured from processed images. We may review personal information for the purposes of resolving a problem or support issue. <<

They store all cards to "improve the accuracy"? That's nonsense, they could just as well use hand-scribbles to do the same. Also, there is no information as to how long that data will be stored. What really was interesting is this verbage: Unless approved by you in advance, scanR will not provide third parties with access to any information captured from processed images. I would really appreciate that, however, there is no place on the whole website to opt-in or opt-out, so this "approval" doesn't really exist. Looks like I can only send business cards of general managers of some hotel or the card of my gas station attendant to this service. Then again, why would I want to store those addresses in the first place?