new products

Google Goggles may prevent work email regret

Google has introduced its new Mail Goggles – and I love the idea.

The application, once enabled, will check your mental clarity by making you solve math problems after clicking send; then, if you can’t solve the problems, the email doesn’t go through. The default settings make Mail Goggles only active late night on the weekends but are completely adjustable. According to the Google Blog, the late-night default settings are there because “that is the time you’re most likely to need it.” The buzz centers around the midnight drunk emailer, the person who comes home and just has to send the ex an “I miss you” email because all those beers really made everything seem so clear – the email equivalent to “drunk dialing.”

OK, that’s one scenario. But it can provide professional protection as well.

Think about it: Maybe you weren’t pummeled by pints on a Tuesday night; instead, you were working late finishing up a project … alone. You’re at your wits’ end, feeling underappreciated. Upset, frustrated, angry – you decide that you’re going to send an email to your boss (or your co-worker … or whoever will listen at this point). In the heat of the moment, you draft a passionate email and hit the send button – and you’re prompted with math questions. After an attempt at ratios and long division, suddenly, maybe you’re not that upset after all. No harm done, the email is cancelled and you aren’t haunted by the ghosts of emailers’ regret as your passive-aggressive words slip away into cyberspace.

With email being the main form of communication within many companies, people in the organization have to be more aware of their emotions in stressful situations. Why? The online disinhibition effect: People behave with less restraint on the Internet than in real-world situations.

This is obvious in some of the email horror stories I’ve read and heard. What about you? Any “friend of a friend” email tales of regret?

Is Microsoft trying to buy users?

In an attempt to get more users, Microsoft has added SearchPerks to its Live Search service.

But, unless you have Internet Explorer 6.0, you aren’t even able to access the SearchPerks registration form. Yep. In order to test out SearchPerks you need to have IE 6 or higher. That’s a deal breaker right there.

With only a 9% market share compared with Google’s 60%, Microsoft refuses to give up on the search market. And you have to admire that fact – despite the failed Yahoo acquisition (which Google sidled up and snagged), it’s full steam ahead! Microsoft will not quit – but it will pay you to use Live Search.

So what is SearchPerks? Registered users agree to download a usage tracking program and then earn one ticket per every Live Search query (up to 25 tickets per day) until the program ends in April. Users can then redeem their tickets for prizes or donate the rewards to charity.

As interesting as it sounds, the SearchPerks registration page has a bit of a late-night infomercial feel to it. Things like “the sooner you sign up, the more opportunity you have to earn tickets!” are reminiscent of the “act now to receive your second Magic Bullet completely free!” But then again, perks persuade people to buy (or in this case, be bought).

Why hasn’t Live taken off? Is it because Google is so well known as a reliable search engine that newcomers barely have time to make it out of the starting gate? Cuil didn’t get too far, either – and it had pictures included in the results lists. But maybe that’s it – we don’t want the extras, just give us our search results so we can continue on with our task at hand. We don’t have time to register and redeem prizes! I found the added prize bonus to be an incredible turnoff. I want results, not prizes. If I were aiming for the latter I’d open a box of Cracker Jack.

By offering up SearchPerks to attract users, has Microsoft inadvertently proved Google’s strength? The search engine should speak for itself, no gimmicks necessary.

Face-to-face social networking? Nticing

Finally, we may be seeing the end of the business card.

I always forget to bring my business cards to the events and conferences I attend. On the rare occasion I do remember to grab a small handful from my desk drawer, actually handing them out seems … so out of date. If I don’t even like carrying my own cards around, why should I expect someone else to want it? They smudge, they wrinkle (who wants to hand out a finger-printed and bent, tiny white card?) and they’re a bit of a hassle.

Plus, how many do they ship you in a box? A million? Who actually goes through all those? And information changes, you need to get another million shipped out to you and before you know it, you’re sitting on 5 million crinkled-up cards that no one (including you) actually wants.

When I attended the MIT EmTech Conference this week, I remembered to bring along my necessary (professional contact) evil. To my surprise, when I registered I did not get the usual name card on a promotional lanyard – I was handed what looked like a remote control (on a lanyard). When turned up to face me, it vibrated and beeped to life – displaying a brightly lit options screen and introducing itself as an nTAG.

Slightly bulky but surprisingly light, the nTag is built around the world’s first interactive name badge and provides a communication solution for the events and meetings industry. According to the site, the nTag (created in 2004 by Rick Borovoy and George Eberstadt) “pioneered face-to-face social networking solutions via wearable technology.”

Equipped with an electronic agenda, a messaging system, event information, your personal profile and contact information, and a way to wirelessly share this information nTAG to nTAG, you can practically say goodbye to your registration packet and business cards. And those “hello my name is” stickers? Never again. When you get within conversation-distance of someone wearing the nTAG, his name flashes up on your screen with the option to add as a contact.

On top of all that, the reusable devices eliminate all the waste (paper and time) of events packets.

All in all, the nTAG was useful and fun. I didn’t have to hand out a single business card (even though I’m dying to get rid of them) and I could update my profile and check out my contacts during the … umm … slower presentations.

Microsoft’s Midori: Straight up or on the rocks?

Microsoft is planning for the retirement of Windows by working on a new operating-system—Midori.

Maybe.

Well, more than likely considering all the Internet-buzz about it (one of many projects in ‘incubation,’ according to Microsoft).

But, Microsoft is staying tight-lipped and has not officially released any details about the code-named Midori project. According to the BBC, Software Development Times published Midori details after gaining access to some of Microsoft’s internal documents.

Midori is believed to be an Internet-based operating-system as opposed to its hard-drive-installed older brother, Windows. Rather than being installed onto individual machines, the Midori operating system would be similar to a “software-plus-services” approach or “cloud computing.” As the SDTimes put it, the Midori documents show “applications running across a multitude of topologies, ranging from client-server and multi-tier deployments to peer-to-peer at the edge, and in the cloud data center.”

Microsoft may be spot-on with this. Windows was initially popularized pre-Internet — a time when people relied solely on their very large and very stationary PCs. Times have changed. Computers are smaller and easily portable, connecting to anyone, anywhere. If Microsoft can make Midori a (properly functioning) reality, then we may be seeing a much-needed change.

Virtualization is becoming more and more popular and Microsoft will have to do something to keep up and stay on top (every PC purchased may not be pre-installed with Windows some day).

They may have started by building some hype…

It appears someone spilled the Midori, Mr. Gates.

New Firefox browser nearing release

Mozilla has announced that Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is scheduled for the end of May. A code freeze was implemented late last week, forcing programmers to scramble to make last-minute changes and stomp out any bugs that still exist.

Release candidates are typically the final stages of development before the new software is pushed out to users.

The latest beta version – Firefox Beta 3.5 – was released in early April and, in my experience, the results of that version weren’t exactly stellar.

Techworld notes that Mark Schroepfer, vice president of engineering, posted to Mozilla’s development blog this weekend, “The release candidates will move a little slower than beta.” The reason, according to Techworld, is because of “the need to account for more public feedback than with earlier builds.”

Or, as one friend posted succinctly to his Twitter stream: “Firefox 3 beta 5 = fail.”

I wonder if Schroepfer saw a lot of that and decided to urge his company into a more cautious route.

Personally, I’m still a Beta or two behind 5. But even the Firefox 3 beta that I use to surf the Interwebs daily is a little buggy. From time to time it freezes or just decides to shut down on its own. That said, I’m a lot happier with my latest version instead of Firefox 2, which routinely froze and forced me to reset my user preferences: Losing my bookmarks and history several times a day got old quickly.

Skip the goo

Last week I wrote something about how I hate meetings.

I also hate the dentist.

Not personally. My guy’s real nice and all. But he makes my mouth hurt. And he bears bad news. And he costs a lot of money.

My teeth are about 30 years older than the rest of my body, the legacy of a childhood addiction to Pepsi, the vilest of drugs.

So I’m well acquainted with the sinking feeling that comes with a tooth cracking off. Time for another crown.

Thanks to the Lava Chairside Oral Scanner, that whole horrible process just became a lot easier.

Briefly, your dentist can now skip the whole “bite on this goo and let it run down your throat while I watch TV for a few minutes” step of making a tooth impression. Instead, the dentist painlessly waves a small wand to create a digital scan of the offending tooth.

The data gets tossed off to Brontes Technologies, the division of 3M Co. that created the Lava, which sends it to a lab where the new crown is built.

So not only do patients skip the goo, but the crown is both a better fit and is ready sooner than it would be if the dentist had to mail a mold out and wait for the crown to come back.

The Boston Globe put together a nice, to-the-point article about the Lava. It’s worth a read. Right now the Lava is marketed as a way to map teeth to create crowns. But it appears to have a lot of potential for use in other dental procedures.

So why am I writing about this here? Why the excitement?

Two very good reasons:

1. We see so many incremental steps in technology that we sometimes miss an innovation that, though not earth-shattering, will make life both easier and more pleasant for so many people.

2. My cousin is a senior software engineer of research and development at Brontes. I got the overview of this thing a while back (actually, I was almost a guinea pig for it) and I am quite proud, by proxy, to see it hit the market.

Shifting gears here, I must confess to a sentimental moment earlier today when I reflected on the good my relatives do in their professional lives. My father makes wedding rings. My mother works with autistic children. Both teach. My aunt caters barbeque. An uncle has built his small farm into a family destination in an time when the family-owned farm is too often a sentimental memory.

And now my cousin has spared me the goo.