What do you think of when you hear the name Segway? If you’re like many out there, “tech failure” comes to mind. Dean Kamen’s invention of the Segway PT scooter was expected to reinvent personal transportation. The Segway was meant to usher in a new era of errand running and puttering around town.

That vision hasn’t quite come to fruition and it’s pretty rare that you see someone utilizing a Segway. They’re still around and have recently observed their 10th anniversary. So while they may be known as a tech failure, they’re still alive and kicking.

How do they work though? Below we’ll examine the tech behind the Segway.

Powering the Segway

Electric motors fueled by phosphate-based lithium batteries power the Segway. The scooters are easily charged by simply plugging them into a standard electrical socket. Thanks to a combination of two computers, special software, tilt sensors, and five gyroscopic sensors the Segway stays upright and doesn’t tip over.

Making the Segway Move

The user plays the largest role in making the Segway move. By simply shifting your weight in the direction you want to go and moving the handlebars slightly, the Segway’s sensors acknowledge the change in balance point and react appropriately. The latest version of the Segway has a top speed of 12.5 MPH. For obvious reason, it functions best on flat surfaces.

Lowered Expectations

The device never did live up to its hype. Many technology experts predicted that the Segway PT would be a bigger deal than the Internet. As a result, when company officials unveiled the first Segway scooter in December of 2001 in Manhattan, expectations soared.

In the 10 years since its release, the Segway has not completely failed, but its strange overall look and goofy riding style has made it nearly impossible to achieve its expected level of success.

This year’s Tokyo Motor Show exhibited some interesting, wild, and green concept cars. With efficiency in mind, companies unleashed these eco-friendly designs which are both innovative and rather unconventional. Here are just a few.

Volkswagen

For those of us who like to rock and roll, Volkswagen revealed their newest Beetle. They have made friends with Fender to bring an audio system to this car that is ready for the main stage. The system includes a 400W 10-channel amplifier, a subwoofer, and two sets of tweeters, one set in the front and one in the back.

Honda

This eco-friendly design is Honda’s “micro commuter” car. This tiny electric car is merely 98.4 inches long, 49.2 wide, and 56.3 tall and looks like something from a video game. To enhance its arcade feel, it’s controlled with two joysticks. While its top speed is only 37 mph and can only carry three people its tiny size is perfect for the city commuter.

Daihatsu

This design may resemble a bus; it is actually the FC Sho Case fuel cell car. Daihatsu’s revolutionary design contains no rare earth metals, which makes it less expensive to build then other fuel cells. The LCD screen on the exterior play tranquil wave patterns, but when getting into the car, passengers must step high over these to get in, making it difficult for elderly people or those with injuries.

Toyota and Yamaha

We see increasingly more scooters on the streets these days as people search for easy and fuel-efficient ways to get around town. Toyota and Yamaha partnered up to take this a step further with an electric tricycle called the EC-Miu. It has Wi-Fi capabilities and can be recharged at charging stations used by other electric vehicles.

This year’s concepts at the Tokyo Motor Show were very green focused. Each year the designs unveiled at the show seem to get more inventive. I can’t wait to see what they bring us next year.

Business trends change from year to year or even monthly. One of the most debated about trends is telecommuting. There are a number of views concerning Telecommuting; unfortunately, as it is a relatively recent trend there is not much info around it. Does it make employees more productive or not? Does it make them happier, lonelier, disconnected, or more connected? What about the cost for the company? Does it cost more or less? These are some of the many questions businesses must contemplate when deciding if allowing employees to telecommute fits their company’s structure and style.

This study shows there could be wonderful benefits to telecommuting.  Below we’ve outlined some pros and cons:

Pros

• Telecommuters appreciate that there is no wasted commuting time.
• Telecommuters are less stressed when working in the privacy of their own home.
• Telecommuters are happier, as they have more freedom to manage work time with their family lives. Having the freedom to pick up the kids, or work during their prime efficiency time, even if it’s midnight, can be a relief to the traditional structured nine-to-five
• Telecommuters are usually more productive.
• Self-reliance and time management skills are encouraged by telecommuting.
• Telecommuting also gives employers more freedom to hire skilled individuals minus the cost of moving them around the world.
• Telecommuting saves the company and the employee money.

Cons – of course, there is a flip side to every coin

• Telecommuting can lead to burnout and resentment of the company if they work too much.
• Telecommuters often complain of being cut off and feeling lonely or depressed from lack of socialization.
• Telecommuting can lead to a lack of motivation, as there is not a physical tie to the rest of the team.
• Telecommuting can lead to a break down in communication due to distance.
• Setting up a home office effectively can take more time than setting up in-office.

For both manager and employee, successful telecommuting takes strong communication, time management skills, and clarity of job responsibilities. We are seeing more and more people desiring an independent working environment. But in the end, whether telecommuting will work or not, depend on the company’s culture and the employees’ mindset. Tell us what you think; will telecommuting be the way most businesses are organized in the future or will it fade out?

In November of 1971, Intel released the Intel 4004. It was the first CPU on a single chip! This week it celebrated its 40th birthday. This tiny microprocessor changed computing forever, so we want to say thank you. The central processing unit, or CPU, retrieves and sends every bit of information use by a computer making it “the brain” of the computer. Imagine the impact a tiny CPU like the Intel 4004 made in the computing world. It prompted innovations and major advancements in CPU technology.

The Intel 4004 debuted as the processor for a calculator, but as this was the first microprocessor commercially available, it inspired some astounding leaps in computing. While CPUs today are much more powerful than their original ancestor, many common devices wouldn’t exist without the Intel 4004’s influence on computer science, including iPods, cell phones, streetlights, and laptops. Countless technologies that we enjoy in our daily lives today have a CPU. This makes the Intel 4004, quite literally, the grandfather of modern technology. Check out this article to see the evolution of the CPU’s role in technology.

We can’t say happy birthday to the Intel 4004 without discussing the engineers responsible for its development. Federico Faggin led the planning and development of the Intel 4004 with Ted Hoff, and Stan Mazor. In this ever-changing world of technology we can lose sight of its humble origins. The Intel 4004 was no small player in this.

So lets take a moment to show our esteem for the little microprocessor that grandfathered the present day CPU.

The face of business has turned online the past few years. There was once less competition for business and getting your name out was straightforward, hire an ad agency or go door to door introducing your business. Now the number of business that offer similar goods and services is incredible and it’s easy to get lost amongst them. For this reason, small-business owners have had to reevaluate the way they sell. But how do you convice prospective customers that they should choose you out of the many. Developing a strong online presence is a proactive way to do this, below are a few options open to businesses today.

Becoming Mobile

Mobile devices are becoming a lot more common. People carry these to make their lives simpler as they can stay connected to their business and personal lives.. This can make commuting valuable working time rather then dead time. Unfortunatly many regular sites aren’t very readable on a mobile device because of this many businesses have mobile sites. They retain the companies branding while allowing for faster, easier navigation on a mobile device. Mobile site makes your company more easily accessible to consumers.

Social Sites

Social sites, like Myspace, started out just social. But when Facebook came about it had a far more utilitarian interface and business caught the social site bug. Virtually every business you can find has a Facebook page. Social sites allow companies to share fun and interesting content that is related to their industry with potential customers, which creates an online community. Recently Google unveiled its business pages. This walk-though will tell you how to create a Google business page. Social sites allow for such a noninvasive interaction between business and consumer I see the future of social sites as all business.

On-line Education

Offering educational content is an excellent way to reach an audience and stand out from your competitors. This can be done with blogs and webinars. On-line education shows your potential customers that you are knowledgeable and sets you up as a thought leader in your industry. Developing trust in this way can lead to sales down the road as consumers will be visiting your blog for interesting and educational information and think of you when they need a service you provide.

Most people like to visit a local shop where the owner works behind the counter. This is still available to us but that shop probably has an online presence even if it’s a small one. It can’t be denied that businesses are not just street facing but Web facing as well. Being open to the changing face of business will make you a more informed consumer and/or business owner.  Read this article to learn some great reasons for creating an on-line presence.

Email plays a big role in the way people do business. Whether you work from a fixed location at an office desk or from a mobile device on the go, the kind of email you use can define your level of productivity. Are you sure that the email system you are using is the right one for you?

Whether you work from an office or are productive while on the go, email most likely plays a big factor in the way you go about your business. Unbeknownst to many, some types of email systems have certain limitations that by extension can also limit the level of productivity of your business, and especially for people in the organization who must also work while out in the field.

One major issue for many people is synchronicity. Many people need their emails to be accessible on their mobile phones, PDAs, or other mobile devices, and they need them to be properly synchronized with their desktop workstations. The need to constantly update conversations and email threads from mobile devices to desktops with certain types of email can prove to be tedious and unproductive– and some email system types don’t include this ability at all.

Depending on the way you use your email, especially when on the go, having full access and full control of your account can define how productive you and others in your organization can be. Besides providing a much better degree of synchronization and integration with mobile devices, certain types of email systems also have features for sharing and collaboration features that allow you to set schedules and share files from your mailbox, as well as central storage for emails that allows you to access your account seamlessly with any mobile device, regardless of where you are located.

Of course, having a full-featured email system might not be best for everyone. The key is to know whether adapting a more bare-bones system is cost-effective for your business (especially in the long run). Sometimes the top of the line may be needed, and sometimes all you need is a bit of tweaking on your less fully featured system. Not sure which is best? Call us and we’ll be glad to sit down with you and assess what kind of email system is best suited for you and your business.

Someone, somewhere could be talking about you or your company, and—depending on what’s being said—it can be either helpful or damaging to you or your business. This is of special concern in the online world, as the proliferation of websites and social media tools make it easy to share opinions with the world. In this article we point you to tools and online resources to help monitor and manage what’s being said about you or your business—and thereby build or defend your reputation.

Besides your own eyes and ears, there are plenty of tools—for free or for a price—available to help you monitor your presence online. The simplest of these is your familiar search engines such as Google or Bing. By simply searching online, you can find where your name or your company’s name appears in various websites. With Google in particular, you can set up “alerts” which will email you when a specific word or term appears in their website index.

What words or terms should you use? Start with your name, or your company name, then try the name of your products and/or services, and maybe even the names of your employees, directors, and other stakeholders. It might also be helpful to search for the competition as well. As results come in you can refine your search by expanding or narrowing the scope of terms you would like to search or be alerted on. If you want to be able to search across all different search engines and not just one or two, you can use Monitor This.

Next you can use specialized website or social media monitoring tools to search only specific sites or services as opposed to the entire Internet. One example is Greplin, which allows you to search all of your accounts or accounts that you own. This is very helpful to be able to execute highly filtered searches on specific information in your Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn accounts, or your blog. Another option is Rollyo, which allows you to set up your own specialized search engines that cull content from public or open websites of your choosing.

Other more generalized tools include RSS feed readers—which allow you to consume news or information feeds from news sites or blogs. Examples include Newsgator.com, Bloglines.com, Google Reader or Pluck.com. Other generalized tools include those that monitor specific newsgroups or message boards like BoardReader.com, ForumFind.com, Big-Boards.com, BoardTracker.com, iVillage, Yahoo Message Boards, and MSN Money. Still others track changes to content of specific sites (Copernic Tracker, Website Watcher and WatchThatPage.com), as well as their domain information (DomainTools.com and BetterWhois.com).

The really interesting new services actually give you an explicit idea of the status of your reputation—especially if you are a relatively well known name or your business has an established brand. In this category are sites like Amplicate, which monitors general feelings or impressions about brands, businesses, or services; Klout, which tries to measure the influence of individuals based on their social interactions; and SendLove.to, which focuses on celebrities and media personalities.

There are literally dozens more tools you can use to monitor and manage your reputation online. To find out more, a great resource is here at the Duct Tape Marketing blog. If you have any additional suggestions, feel free to let us know!

For companies interested in trying out cloud-based services, email maybe something worth trying. Here’s a breakdown of two options from two industry giants that may be worth considering.

Google Apps
Google Apps is a service from Google that started in 2006, with the introduction of Gmail—a hosted email service, and which later incorporated other apps such as Google Calendar, Groups, Talk, Docs and Sites. Google Apps allow customers an independently customizable version of these Google products under their own domain name. The entry level option is free, but the package offered for Businesses is a paid service with an annual fee per user and additional storage space.

1. Storage. Gmail, Google Apps’ email service starts with a sizable 7GB of free storage. Business users get 25GB. Bear in mind however that this storage space is shared with any data you have in other Google properties such as Picasa Web Album and Google Docs. Extra space can be bought however starting with USD $5 per year for an extra 20GB of storage. E-mail attachment sizes are limited to 25MB.
2. Calendaring and Task Management. Gmail can be integrated with the overall excellent Google Calendar application. Google Calendar allows you to easily share personal calendars with colleagues, or create shared calendars used by groups of people (such as a calendar to track meeting room reservations, marketing events and others). Google Calendar also offers a built-in, but somewhat underpowered task management tool. Tasks can readily be added with due dates, but not readily shared or cannot be nested or linked with other tasks.
3. Spam filtering, security and reliability. Gmail’s spam filtering features a community-driven system. Email tagged as spam by users help identifies similar messages as Spam for all other Gmail users. Generally the system works well, although some have complained that it can get over aggressive in its filters. In terms of security and reliability—Gmail has been criticized in the past with showing ads in its free Gmail service that display based on key words in the user’s messages—potentially violating their privacy. Its paid service offers however the option of disable these ads. Reliability is generally good with very few, but widely publicized disruptions in service.
4. Usability. Gmail offers a host of unique usability enhancements that make it different from most other mail services. For one for a web app it loads really fast, as Google has been known to studiously optimize web page loading performance for their products. Another is that it offers a threaded view of messages by default. It also uses a starring/labeling system to tag and segregate messages instead of using folders. Another interesting enhancement done recently is the ability to sort messages by “importance” where it learns based on your usage over time what email messages it thinks you think are important.
5. Mobile access. Gmail offers a version optimized for mobile devices, as well as support for a variety of devices for their native mail applications such as iOS and Android.

Overall Gmail is a solid mature choice if you are thinking of moving email to the cloud and are not afraid of being on the bleeding edge of cloud services and technology.

Microsoft Office 365
Microsoft Office 365, like Google Apps, offers a host of applications such as online versions of productivity tools which we all already know and use such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Most however work best when they are used in conjunction with your desktop-installed Office applications. Focusing on email, Office 365 offers a Hosted Exchange service, which transforms the mature, business-proven on-premise application to an on-demand service. Compared to Google Apps, it is quite new—being introduced only last June this year, although its suite of products in an alternate form has been around for much earlier.

1. Storage. Microsoft’s Hosted Exchange email service gives users 25GB of storage. Attachment file sizes are limited to 35MB. Additional storage can be purchased for $2.5 per GB per user per month.
2. Calendaring and Task Management. Exchange integrates a mature feature set for personal productivity including calendaring, resource management, and task management. As an example tasks can be grouped, color coded and easily sorted. Emails can be converted as tasks and so on.
3. Spam filtering, security and reliability. This is an area where perhaps Microsoft easily outshines Google with Exchange’s roots as an enterprise-class application. It offers spam protection, antivirus and others via Microsoft’s Forefore Online Protection for Exchange technology. It offers other features such as more full features user management, identity access management, mail archiving, etc. If you are in a highly regulated industry like financial services or healthcare these features may be essential for your business.
4. Usability. While the web apps of Office 365 is not as fast loading or as slick as Google, it does offer familiarity. Modeled after their desktop brethren, or directly integrating with them—they offer a smoother migration experience for users specially if they have been weaned on Outlook.
5. Mobile access. Like Gmail Microsoft made sure to support a variety of devices on launch, as well as integration with a variety of devices—specially enterprise stalwarts like Blackberry mobile phones.

Overall Office 365 is a solid choice if you are thinking of moving email to the cloud but may be hesitant with changing the apps your users already know and use. Also if you are a business with strict policies related to security and compliance—this service may be something your auditors and IT people may be more comfortable with.

Interested in learning more? Can’t decide which to try? Let us know and find out how we can help get you the right balance between your existing IT systems and infrastructure and the cloud.

Smaller businesses usually face the difficulty of having their voices heard in the market today. While traditional marketing and advertising methods cost a lot more than many of these firms can afford, an effective alternative has arisen that is both efficient and cost-effective: marketing through social networking.

One of the most difficult challenges smaller businesses face is having a bigger presence in the market. While many of these companies offer good, quality services at much more affordable rates, they are many times overshadowed by larger firms that have bigger budgets to spend on marketing, advertising, and the like.

Things have changed, though, with the advent of social networking. What was once a simple, social, get-to-know-each-other tool between people on the internet has now evolved into a tool that small businesses can take advantage of in order to get their voices heard.

The gist of social networking for business is the simple concept of reaching potentially millions of people at a mere fraction of what is normally spent on advertising and traditional marketing. The wide reach of social media allows businesses to find their voices and showcase what they can do. The playing field then moves from an unfair balance of advertising budgets to a battle of service quality and value for money, as it should be – and many smaller firms can compete effectively in this arena.

There are many ways to tap into the social networking phenomenon to boost your online presence and aid in your marketing. If you are interested in knowing more about this, please contact us and we’ll be glad to assist you in developing strategies that fit your specific requirements and needs.