Click here to see screenshots When it comes to demoing a new piece of software, training users on a new application or teaching employees how to follow a business process, there's no substitute for showing them how to do these things directly.
But it isn't always feasible to be face to face in all of these situations. So the next best thing is to be able to create a video of how to use an application, Web service or process and make that available to anyone who needs to see it.
There have long been products, such as Adobe Captivate and Camtasia, that can capture a recording of an application session, record voiceovers, and add educational icons and directions to videos that can then be distributed to anyone who needs them. But these products aren't inexpensive and, since they are geared toward high-end training and testing, can be a little too complex for staff just looking to make a quick application recording.
Setting up a video monitoring system in your home, office or business can be a tedious and sometimes expensive task, often involving permanent server systems.
Avvak's Vue attempts to solve this problem through an inexpensive solution that uses small, easily mounted and deployed cameras, a central video router that requires no PC or server, and a Web-based service for video deployment.
At DEMO 09, I had the chance to talk with Avaak CEO and founder Gioia Messinger about the capabilities and features of the Vue video system.
For the upcoming Demo show, the key word is definitely change. The self-styled "launch pad for emerging technology" will see some of the most significant changes in its history.
By far the biggest change is the departure of the show's longtime executive producer, Chris Shipley. During this show, Shipley will be essentially passing the executive producer position to Matt Marshall of VentureBeat.
Given the current "25 things you might not know about me" craze, there are a lot of people out there who have to tell you all kinds of things about themselves. This whole thing seems a bit nuts to me, after all, if there are things about me that people don't know, it's probably because I don't want them to know these things.
While I've tended to ignore these lists as they've ended up in my mail or Facebook updates, the one's I have read tended to be pretty positive and good natured. Again, this seems nuts to me. In my opinion, if you really want to know someone, you should find out the things that they hate, the things that really drive them nuts.
So to put my money where my mouth is, I've done just that. Without further ado, here is my list (in no particular order) of the Twenty Things about Technology that Drive Me Nuts.
This week Google finally enabled offline capabilities for their popular Gmail service. For many of us this has been something we'd been waiting on for quite a while.
While many people rely on Gmail more and more for both their private and work communications, it really couldn't be considered a serious mail option until it could work on airplanes or other situations where an internet connection is unavailable or poor.
So when offline support became an option in Gmail Labs, I quickly enabled it for my Gmail account. And while I was happy with some of the offline functionality of Gmail, in many ways it was a big disappointment.
In fact, while the term beta is somewhat of joke when it comes to Google services (Gmail itself is still called beta), this offline capability should definitely be considered beta, if not alpha. In my tests the offline capability proved to be very flaky, when it worked at all.
While in some ways 2008 has been an exciting and historic year, in other ways it has been a year that many people would like to forget, especially those who have seen their businesses, job prospects and retirement savings shrink or disappear altogether.
But when it comes to emerging technologies, 2008 wasn't just a good year, it was a very good year. The past year saw the rise of many new exciting products and technologies and also saw renewed growth in some areas that had become stale.
Best of all, these technologies of 2008 aren't just limited to this year. Many of them are the building blocks that will be used to create and grow the technologies that will be important in 2009.
Click here to see screenshots While many site providers have been intrigued by the idea of adding social networking capabilities, for the most part efforts in this area have been unsuccessful. This is mainly due to the fact that the last thing most people want to do is join yet another social network, especially one that is tied to a specific Web site.
But this week may see a big change in the ability of Web sites to add social networking capabilities. Both Google and Facebook released services that make it possible for Web sites to easily add social networking features that don't require visitors to join a brand-new social network.
For the last couple of days I've had the chance to test out the beta of Google Friend Connect. Google Friend Connect lets any Web site operator easily add functionality to a site that lets visitors join the site, see other users of the site, and participate in social networking activities such as commenting on and rating content.
There are plenty of products out there that make it possible to create narrated walk-throughs of content, but most of these tend to be either static PowerPoint-style slide shows or video-based walk-throughs. What if instead of static images and files, you wanted to walk people through live Web pages, or even a mix of live Web pages and static content such as images and media?
That's the purpose of FlowGram's Flowgrams. Available at flowgram.com, Flowgram is a free beta Web service that lets users combine live Web pages and other content and create a shareable narrated walk-through.
Flowgrams are based on Adobe Flash technology, but users don't need any familiarity with Flash. Basically anyone who has created a narrated presentation or photo slide show can create a Flowgram.
Click here to see screenshots You're a social networking junkie. You can't stand to not know what the status of your friends is, what photos and videos are being uploaded, who is blogging about what, and what your friends are tweeting about right now.
Being this type of person means that you often have to have multiple browser windows and tabs open at all time, or that you are running several special purpose applications and plugins for the social networking sites that you rely on. Or you could just use the free Flock web browser.
Flock, which has been around for a few years now, is essentially a heavily customized implementation of Firefox. And almost all of this customization is geared towards making it simple to view, interact with and directly create content on Web 2.0 and social networking sites. In Flock, social networks like Facebook, video sites such as YouTube and multiple blogging platforms are all integrated into the browser.
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.
