From the desk (and BlackBerry) of Keith Parnell

Yep, I have to say that I like it. Check out the new Outlook Social Connector and LinkedIn plugin for Microsoft Outlook.

Download the Outlook Social Connector here for Outlook 2007 and 2003 (required pre-install).
Download the LinkedIn plugin here for Outlook 2010, 2007, and 2003.

RSS and Facebook readers: click here to view and enter comments.

On Twitter? Follow me at @parnellk63.

Listening to Life Less Ordinary by Carbon Leaf.

Okay, maybe not exactly “dead”. But if Rupert Murdoch has anything to do with it, Google will have no parts of the New York Post’s news.

What happens when Google can no longer spider News Corp websites? That includes the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, Daily Telegraph, and USA Today. Rupert Murdoch, Chairman & CEO of News Corp, says the time is near.

Murdoch says that Google is in the group of people that just take our work and steal our stories. Murdoch also says that News Corp’s family of news websites are very close to blocking Google from gaining access to their content.

That means when you searched “shootings at Ft Hood” last week, none of the major news sites would appear in the Google results.

Many of the news generating websites will be by subscription only or the search engine companies, Google, Microsoft (Bing), etc will have to purchase the ability to spider their news content in order for their news articles to appear in the search results.

I borrowed this quote from Jason’s blog:

So, for a moment, imagine a world where Bing could say in their TV commercials:

“Want to search the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and 3,894 other newspapers and magazine?”

“Well, then don’t go to Google because they don’t have them!”

“Go to Bing, home of quality content you can trust!”

What do you think? Would certain information or certain current (quick) news make you change search providers?

RSS and Facebook readers: watch the video here.

Sky News political editor David Speers talks to News Corporation chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch about paywalls, politics, and more.

RSS and Facebook readers: click here to view and enter comments.

Full story from CIO.com here.

Microsoft says, umm, no. Our product is better and we’re going to get close to making it affordable for small businesses.

Microsoft has cut in half its per user per month list price for Exchange Online services and cut by 33 percent the price of its Business Productivity Online Services suite of online productivity applications.

The drop from US$10 per user per month to $5 for Exchange Online is significant because it brings Microsoft much closer to the price Google charges for its Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) suite that is anchored by Gmail. In addition, Microsoft said allowable mailbox sizes would go from 5GB to 25GB, a move that ups Microsoft’s stake in the so-called “bottomless” inbox war with other online providers.

Good to see Microsoft still pushing forward with listening to its users. First Windows 7, now Exchange Online.

RSS and Facebook readers: click here to view and enter comments.

According to Net Applications via the Macintosh News Network, Internet surfers substantially prefer the Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

Microsoft Windows: 92.52%
Apple Macintosh: 5.27%

Wow! If you listen to the propaganda machine called ‘Mac vs. PC’, the latest Apple advertising campaign, you would think Macintosh is in the game. Obviously they are not.

The point to this message is not to rub my Apple fanboi friends the wrong way but to ask that we all pay closer attention to doing our own research. Don’t take the insinuated word of a well-crafted advertising campaign.

What do you think? Did these numbers surprise you? Do you use Mac or Windows? Or both? By the way, we use both.

Photo credit: pixelzooi

RSS and Facebook readers: click here to view and enter comments.

We have run the course, given open source a fair shake and have come to the conclusion that we cannot resolve ourselves to an alternative solution. Microsoft Office wins.

We (JASE) made a very serious effort to migrate away from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org. We wanted it to work but open source didn’t take care of us in the end. Sad thing is, we love OpenOffice.org. What there is of it, that is.

What do I mean? WHERE’S THE EMAIL / SCHEDULING / TASK MANAGEMENT CLIENT? We can’t move to a solution that’s half a solution no matter how cheap (free!) it is.

We tried Gmail (yuck!). We tried Microsoft’s new Windows Live Mail (better than Gmail but not there yet). We tried Thunderbird. We tried Evolution. We tried several others. None come close to Outlook. Not even close on any level.

So there you have it. Microsoft Office wins by default for being a complete suite of tools for our daily needs.

Funny, that’s what we say about our organization- a full-service marketing and advertising agency. I guess we proved our credence is applicable in most any test case.

Very cool carry, touch devices of relevant sizes. Awesome technology!

You wouldn’t be surprised if I told you it was Microsoft, would you?

Future Vision Montage (1:55)
Envision how emerging technologies, evolving trends, and global change might come together to improve our lives at work and home across multiple real life scenarios. To see and download current prototypes we are exploring to help us realize this future vision, go to www.officelabs.com.

Our marketing, advertising and technology team has published a new videocast for download at http://www.jasegroup.com/resources/videocasts/twitter_101_outliers_and_open_source/.

Stop in and let us know your thoughts. Have a great weekend!

Topic: Twitter 101, Outliers and Open Source
Discussion on a recent Twitter 101 conference with the Hampton Roads Internet Marketing & Technology Group, social media, Outliers book by Malcolm Gladwell, success being a product of a person’s environment and self-drive, new software developments including Internet Explorer 8 and Windows Live Mail, and the cost and efficiency advantages associated with open source OpenOffice.org.

One of our tech guys published this article on our company blog last week. I thought I’d pass the information along to my tech readers.

By David Poole, 2007/04/02
What is the best way to store an IP Address in SQL Server
Imagine that you are asked to design a database for a data analysis team to perform web site traffic analysis. This brief will have many requirements and amongst them will be the need to store IP addresses.

Search engines such as Google have a fixed range of IP addresses so the team can easily separate out traffic from true visitors Vs traffic from bots. Although the team have a good rudimentary knowledge of T-SQL the data must be relatively simple to query. So with regard to IP addresses the requirement is as follows:
- Store IP addresses efficiently
- Allow retrieval of IP addresses in a machine readable format
- Allow simple querying on a range or ranges of IP addresses

If traffic to your web site is high then the choice of data types is going to be important. You could keep the IP address as a VARCHAR(15) but given the nature of what an IP address actually is, 4 integers in the range 0 to 255, this seems a trifle wasteful.

My initial thought was to use techniques described in Lee Everest’s article Introduction to bitmasking in SQL2005 but if you read the forum discussion of the article you will see an interesting suggestion by Joe Celko.

So what possiblities do we have? Let us consider the ip address 192.168.0.5

Method: VARCHAR(15)
Storage: Between 7 and 15 bytes
Comment: Stores the IP address in human readable but this is wasteful.

Method: BIGINT
Storage: 8 bytes
Comment: We can represent our IP address as 192168000005. It is stretching the definition of human readability somewhat but this depends on your audience.

Method: INT
Storage: 4 bytes
Comment: Our IP address is no longer human readable being represented as 1084751877.

Method: Four separate TINYINT fields
Storage: 4 bytes
Comment: Our address is now both efficient and human readable just as Joe Celko pointed out.

SQL 2005 CLR User Defined Types
SQL2005 provides us with one other possiblity. The .NET assembly user defined type.

I was fortunate to go on the Microsoft “Updating Your Database Development Skills to Microsoft SQL Server 2005″ (Course 2734B) which included an IP address UDT. As I am not sure of the copyright issues surrounding the code for the UDT I am not including the source code here but the UDT provided the following functionality.

- Accept an ip address in the form nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn
- Return the individual bytes of an IP address
- Return the string representation of the IP address
- Return a varbinary representation of the IP address
- Return a string with the PING command and the IP address. I removed this from the code as it was irrelevant.

Get David’s full article here.

More cool stuff from Razorfish -

DaVinci is a prototype/experiment that blurs the lines between the physical and virtual world by combining object recognition, real-world physics simulation and gestural interface design on Microsoft Surface.

2009 Advertising Apple BlackBerry blog Brand CEO Christ Christmas CIO Coffee with the CEO commercial economy email Facebook God Google IT JASE JASE Group JASE Marketing JASEzone Javelin Jesus Keith Parnell Linux Lord Marketing Microsoft Norfolk Pearl RSS small business social community Social Media social network T-mobile Technology tv Twitter VA Video Windows Wireless YouTube

photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/pigatto/

Wait. Microsoft doesn’t have a store. Well, according to sources, they will soon.

Microsoft plans to open a chain of retail stores across the United States that will sell computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system(s), Xbox consoles, Zunes and other Microsoft products such as Microsoft Office.

This will be interesting since Microsoft doesn’t actually make PC and notebook hardware. I could see hardware vendors fighting for prime retail space in the Microsoft stores.

Microsoft announced last week that it had hired David Porter, a 25-year veteran of Wal-Mart Stores, as its corporate vice president for retail stores. Mr. Porter was head of worldwide product distribution at DreamWorks Animation SKG since 2007.

According to NYTimes.com, “Mr. Porter, who is set to start work on Tuesday, is charged with improving the PC-buying experience. The company said his first task would be to set the timing, locations and design of Microsoft-branded retail stores, which will sell computers installed with Microsoft software as well as other company products.”

If, and when, you are in the market for a new Windows PC, will you make a trip to the Microsoft store? Or will you continue to go to Best Buy?

Seth Sutel, an AP Business Writer wrote a great end-user article that Yahoo! News published on the topic of RSS feeds. He explains, RSS which stands for “Really Simple Syndication” is a kind of computer code that allows you to “subscribe” to various Web sites.

The nice thing about RSS feeds is that they are so simple to subscribe that anyone can use them to stay on top of their favorite topic. RSS feeds are available from millions of sources on millions of topics such as sports, technology, financial, business, marketing and personal just to name a few.

Among the many RSS feed readers (news readers) are Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google Reader (which I use and recommend), NewsGator and Bloglines. Many of these feed readers are also available for your BlackBerry, iPhone and other popular smartphones.

The RSS feed for this blog can be found here.

The Email delivery signup form for this blog can be found here.

Adam Kinney put together this awesome list of official Microsoft Twitter accounts. See his original blog post here.

Do you know of others?

	@MSWindows – Announcing Windows 7
	@WindowsLive – Official Twitter account of Microsoft Windows Live
	@liveframework – liveframework
	@livemesh – Sync, share, and access the information you care about—wherever you happen to be.
	@SharePoint – The official tweetstream of the SharePoint product group - managed by @LLiu
	@bizspark – Microsoft BizSpark - Software, Support, Visibility
	@zunemarketplace – Zune Marketplace is a store for the way you love music, with brand-new releases every week and a huge selection of music in every style imaginable
	@wmdev – Windows Mobile
	@microsofttag – Microsoft Tag
	@ch9 – listen to the cockpit, help us fly the plane
	@ch10 – Channel 10 is Microsoft’s online community for the technology enthusiast
	@ch8 – Microsoft’s community for students
	@mixonline – Come check us out at www.visitmix.com
	@MIX09 – The Next Web Now, pre-empted by @MIX07, @MIX08 and @PDC08
	@SiteNamedDesire – Want a copy of A Website Named Desire? This li’l birdie will tell you how. Wait for the tweets.
	@MicrsftTech4All – News from Microsoft Accessibility team, which strives for technology to be usable by everyone & complements our physical & cognitive abilities.
	@MSDN – Updates from the MSDN site team.
	@adCenterBlog – News, Tips, Tricks & Best Practices From The Guys At Microsoft adCenter
	@SilverlightNews – Populated by the tireless Dave Campbell
	@ContinuumShow – Exploring the world of the Microsoft Client Continuum
	@projectrosetta – Chronicling the trail from Flash to Silverlight
	@XAMLEvents – Silverlight and WPF events

In an article for CIO.com, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that employees will force companies to move to Windows 7.

He said even though Windows XP is hugely popular, the ‘why old technology’ questions will force IT upgrades and roll outs to include Windows 7.

What do you think? Will companies embrace Windows 7 that easily and quickly?

Source: http://www.cio.com/article/479102/Ballmer_Enterprise_XP_Holdouts_Will_Get_Hell_from_Consumers

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

This weekend we were having issues with the wireless network at home. I think maybe the issue is the lack-of-strength reception from the airport card in the iBook but regardless we had a need to get the machine online while sitting at the dining room table.

Every Windows laptop I’ve had I’ve been able to tether my Pearl to it to use as a modem for the machine. But I hadn’t tried it with a Mac notebook.

I quickly searched (not Googled, Yahoo!’d) for “tether BlackBerry Pearl to iBook” and found Dave Taylor’s article titled “How do I use my Blackberry Pearl as a bluetooth modem with a Mac?” Perfect!

Thanks to Dave, I had the iBook online via the Pearl inside of 4 minutes. No issues. No problems following his instructions. No performance malfunctions through T-mobile. The iBook is online now when I need it.

Thanks RIM. As if this needed to be said, I fell in love with you all over again. BlackBerry is the perfect user device for any smartphone person.