Like many of you out there, I unfortunately have more than my fair share of friends who are trying their best to find a job in this bad economy. And while these friends are working hard to find a job, they also don't want to jump to companies that might not be in the best of shape.
This means that these friends often ask my opinion of businesses they are looking to join. They ask about the health of the companies and their potential for growth. The one piece of advice that I pretty much always have is, if the company you're interviewing at relies 100 percent on online advertising for its revenue, it may not have the brightest future.
Unless you don't watch any TV--or possibly live in a cave--then you know that in mid-February, traditional over-the-air television broadcasts will end and that consumers who rely on antennas to get their TV will need to buy either a new TV with a digital tuner, or a digital converter box.
To help with this change, the government took a small portion of the money it made from the spectrum auction and launched a coupon program to provide $40 to any citizen who needed to purchase a converter box (which tend to run from $50 to $60). Now, because of poor planning, some fraud and traditional government waste, the coupon program is running out of money, and many people who need converters won't be able to get coupons before the analog signals go dark in February.
Now there are plenty of consumer angles to this story, but the part I find interesting is its lesson in poor planning, a lesson that can also be valuable to developers and IT managers.
"Yes, I know. We are once again menaced by that evil villain, Bad Economy. He'll stop at nothing to crush technology spending, humble powerful technology companies and kill all innovation."
"But what will we do sir? I don't think technology can take much more of this!"
"There is hope. In the past when Bad Economy has struck, a hero has come forth who has fought back to protect technology, a hero called, Emerging Technology. In the early 1990's, Bad Economy struck hard, using his evil recession ray to rain woe on all. But Emerging Technology fought with the powers of improved PC technology, powerful networking and email applications, and, most effectively, the early World Wide Web. These technologies helped boost businesses and drive Bad Economy back to his hidden lair."
Right now the incoming Obama administration is working with the Bush administration to make sure that the country has a smooth transition to the new government in January. This is especially important given the many problems facing the nation right now.
Of course, the same problems that the country is facing are leading to lots of transitions at many businesses. And while the majority of people who voted for Barack Obama will be happy to see a change in government, the changes that are happening and will continue to happen in companies everywhere are much less welcome.
Recently, a large number of businesses have seen layoffs--often on a massive scale. We'll likely see more layoffs down the road and, in many cases, employees won't find out about these layoffs until the day they actually happen.
Click here to see screenshots With company budgets tightening up everywhere, more then a few common expenses are disappearing from plans. Typical casualties include employee training, product demo road shows and face-to-face briefings.
But the need to train employees to use new applications and products isn't going away, nor is the need to give detailed demonstrations of products to partners and potential customers. This, of course, makes screen recording products that can create rich demonstration and training videos more important than ever.
A longtime player in screen recording products is TechSmith, which recently released version 6 of their Camtasia Studio. Camtasia Studio 6 builds on the product's already good usability and functionality by adding several interesting new features, including the ability to create high-definition video presentations. And at a $299 pricepoint, Camtasia Studio comes in at less than half the cost of main competitor Adobe Captivate.
Camtasia Studio 6 includes several presets to help users create a video presentation geared for a specific format. These presets include options such as DVD, YouTube, iPhone and TechSmith's screencast.com service.
OK, I have a great idea for a new business method patent. It's a system by which customers can select among a prebuilt list of goods or products, and then choose how they would like these products customized and enhanced.
The system is extremely flexible and can be applied to everything from computers to hamburgers. I call it the "Have it your way" method.
I can't wait to get this patent, and I fully expect to get it. After all, if it's possible to get a business method patent for a way to use a playground swing, this should be rock-solid. And, once I get it, I can send out the legal notices to all those computer manufacturers, burger royalty and others violating my extremely innovative idea.
Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska was recently found guilty of corruption, and seeing him in the news brought back the memory of the senator describing the Internet as a "series of tubes."
For technology experts, this is one of the funniest misunderstandings of technology ever uttered publicly. I mean, could he have been more clueless? As Bugs Bunny would say, "What an ultramaroon."
So, sure, go ahead, laugh it up. But, remember, Stevens isn't alone in his ignorance. There are still lots of politicians, judges and even company CEOs who are just as clueless and unaware of how IT works.
If you don't believe me, spend some time reading the news. You'll regularly see stories about someone being charged for hacking who basically did the technical equivalent of walking by a building and noticing that the doors were open (for example, doing a Google search and seeing documents that shouldn't be public).
At MIT's Emerging Technology conference, I had the opportunity to speak to Matt Glotzbach, Product Management Director for Google Enterprise.
Chief among the new enterprise capabilities we spoke about were the new video features for business that have been added to Google Apps. We also spoke about the potential effect of Android phones on Google enterprise offerings.
Click here to watch the video Among emerging technologies for the enterprise, few have received as much attention and hype as Unified Communications. Unified communications offers the promise of bringing all of a company's communications under control and making it possible to integrate these communications with enterprise applications.
But UC hasn't been growing as quickly as many have predicted. That's because, like most emerging technologies, it faces many hurdles that slow its adoption.
In this video, eWEEK Chief Technology Analyst, Jim Rapoza looks at some of the biggest problems facing Unified Communications. Click here to see the video on overcoming the hurdles for UC.
Click here to watch the video Unified communications has become a very hot topic for enterprise IT operations. The ability to combine and easily manage all forms of voice and digital communications within a company clearly offers huge cost and time savings benefits.
The importance of this field can be seen by the number of major vendors jumping into the Unified Communications arena.
But unified communications has been slow to take off. In this eWEEK video interview, Ashley Daley talks to eWEEK's Chief Technology Analyst Jim Repoza about the future of Unified Communications.
