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Emergic CleanMail

Emergic has launched a business focused Spam Solution…

We have launched Emergic CleanMail, an Internet-based spam filtering and virus scanning service for enterprises. Some key features:

# Triple-level Virus Scanning
# Multi-layered Anti-Spam capabilities stops 90-95% of Spam
# Spam Analysis Engine with auto-updates and auto-learning
# Personal Whitelists and Blacklists allow/block emails from specific IDs/domains
# Real-time Blackhole Lists capture data from global spam servers to block spam
# Content filtering
# Reports on email trends, viruses detected, spam volumes, policy violations

We are offering a 2-week free trial for the service. [E M E R G I C . o r g]

There is no pricing yet…

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The Why Cry Analyzer

Penn and Teller ran an episode of Bullshit dedicated to Baby’s and the products marketed to take advantage of new parents… looks like this certainly fits the bill.

‘Why Cry Analyzer’, which Gadget Madness very aptly describes as a ‘BowLingual for Babies.’ If it sounds like a scam product, don’t worry! According to their site, The Why Cry has been “clinically tested obtaining a success rate of up to 90%” [Gizmodo]

Chances are when your child is crying she needs attention, food, a change or is just tired. With time you learn what each cry (yes there are quite a few) means and how to best attend to their needs.

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TiVo killed the rerun

PVRblog points to an article in the LA Times on how TiVO and DVRs are changing the way Networks have to think about programming. It seems a fair number of DVR users (among other watchers) are no longer interested in watching re-run after re-run and choosing other options like cable or even… no TV at all.

Without reruns, networks are trying out new shows in the same slot, or repeating the previous week’s episode in a new slot in case you missed it (long a staple of cable TV). Smaller networks like the WB and Fox are promising to change the schedules to new shows this Summer instead of waiting until the Fall season. There’s also the lucrative DVD market that is saturated with pretty much every show ever made, and reruns would cut into that business. [PVRblog]

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Spam Debate

Scott Richter was profiled not too long ago on The Daily Show as a high volume sender… This should be a good battle.

SpamCop founder Julian Haight and Scott Richter, who reportedly is “one of the world’s most prolific spammers,” have agreed to meet for a public debate next month at the upcoming Email Technology Conference in San Francisco, reports Wired. “The two sides are currently embroiled in a legal battle involving SpamCop’s spam blacklist service,” notes the report, “which Richter says violates the rights of his online marketing firm, OptInRealBig.com.” [MacMinute]

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Bill Gates: Microsoft CEO Summit 2004

Rather than even try to pull highlights from this talk, I’ll just point to it.

Amazing stuff… Be sure to keep the audience in mind — CEOs of major companies. They are not as focused on tech gadgetry and services as some of us, and Bill is able to distill things into simple bits for people to get very excited about. Windows fan or not, this is a must read!

Bill Gates’ Web Site – Speech Transcript: Microsoft CEO Summit 2004

Let me state clearly: these are not things that will happen in one or two years. These are things that over the rest of this decade, through the technical advances that have taken place this last year and will take place in the next couple of years, these things will move into the mainstream, and you’ll really see the impact there that we’re talking about. Very ambitious things, but if you think about it, over the course of the next six years we’ll spend over $40 billion in R&D, so that’s $10 billion per pillar. It seems like for $10 billion we ought to be able to achieve those things. At least that’s what I tell our programmers.

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Comcast’s Media Center

Comcast is testing it all out it seems…

First Moxi, and now Microsoft. Guess we’ll see what works better in the trials and what people seem to want.

Comcast, the largest U.S. cable TV operator, has agreed to use Microsoft’s set-top software for up to 5 million users, the companies said on Thursday. Philadelphia-based Comcast, with over 21 million subscribers, agreed to extend an existing licensing deal with Microsoft, although it did not say when it would roll out services. [Daily Wireless]

eHomeUpgrade has some good detail as well.

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RSS or Atom

Politics aside… who really cares?

There’s been much said from various mucky-muck tech studs (you can search it out for yourself if you care) talking about the benefits of atom vs rss and why the other sucks, or why one is just so superior.

From a user perspective, I want a feed format that lets me subscribe to a site and read it via aggregator (web or local). I only have a few ATOM feeds, and have mostly RSS feeds, though I’d be hard pressed to tell you which flavor they are .9 or 2.0. Once they are subscribed in my aggregator, I have no way of knowing whether I am reading one vs. the other and don’t have any desire to think about it either. All I really care about is the full article… excerpts annoy me since they require that I take an additional step to read something and really break up what is an otherwise efficient process. I still subscribe to excerts though since I like getting informed through my aggregator first. As local aggregators advance and include web browsers, it becomes easier to keep things streamlined within a single application…

The important thing to remember is simplicity. As more people adopt syndication and large media companies offer feeds as well as the existing blogger camp, no one will want to try an sort out what button to press if you offer multiple versions. It’s hard enough to figure out what to do with the link, since browsers either download the file, or display a lovely page of XML. Users (and it really should be about the users) want a positive, easy experience so that they can understand why syndication might work out to be of great benefit to their workflow or reading list.

There is a good discussion in the comments of a post by Scoble to which I have contributed.

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Apple Creates New iPod Division

This seems like a big deal and probably means many more iPod-esque products if not extensions into other areas. It coudl also be foreshadowing of a spun out group ala Filemaker.

Jon Rubinstein, who has led the Cupertino, California-based company’s hardware engineering efforts, will run the new division, an Apple spokesman said.

Timothy Cook, head of Apple’s worldwide sales and operations, will lead a newly organized Macintosh division, Apple said. Tim Bucher, now in charge of Macintosh system development, will head up the Mac’s hardware engineering. [Yahoo! News]

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BuzzWhack: Meetings

Today’s BuzzWhack is great for anyone in business…

MEETINGS: Meetings have become so tainted they now go by a number of other names. These definitions from a recent Jared Sandberg column in the Wall Street Journal were so accurate BuzzWhack decided to share them with its readers:

BRIEFINGS — meetings that last longer than intended

SEMINARS — expensive meetings with handouts

PRESENTATIONS — meetings preceded and followed by many other meetings

VIDEOCONFERENCES — meetings with technical difficulties

CONFERENCE CALLS — meetings with eye-rolling

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Quick Office 2004 Report

As mentioned earlier, I downloaded the demo of Office 2004

So I want to like Entourage…

  • I like the 3 pane effect, though wish there was a better way to move between things with the keyboard.
  • IMAP support is funky! I was hoping it would improve, but I am getting strange errors saying wacky stuff about my server connection when it just works in Mail.app. I do not want multiple inboxes or to be forced into using IMAP only folders for certain rules… but that is how it seems Entourage continues to work.
  • I really like how each mailbox breaks the view into days for quick scanning, but what about threads?? I find that threads are a great way to follow conversations and appreciate that Mail is able to track things as threads even when the subject line changes through reply.
  • Entourage did my import from Mail (not even sure how many thousands of messages I have) in about 10 minutes which is well done I think. I was not pleased to find things from my main Inbox sorted to the trash… emails I sent were also somehow thought to be Junk which is not that cool, but perhaps because my main email is the same as my domain and not a real word.

I’m sticking with Mail. I like some things but don’t like too many other details to endure then to switch. Your mileage may vary, much of my discovery and usage is personal…

I have yet to try the Project Manager and Notes/Outliner which is supposed to be a rip-off of one of my favorite apps Notetaker, but doubt that they will sway me to switch mail clients for now…

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What’s the buzz?

Some good reads on Buzz today…

Word-of-mouth marketing and “buzz” are all the rage these days, but how do you effectively foster idea viruses and viral marketing?

More importantly, how do you measure and track its impact? Boston-based BzzAgent has some solid ideas, and services such as the Viral Charts rank the top 10 viral advertising campaigns.

[FastCompany]

Scoble also tells of his experience, finding the buzz-makers and watching them influence traffic and response.

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WordPress Linkblogging

WordPress linkblogs are getting easier to deal with for the interested… I’ve been debating how to best do it myself since I sometimes post very short “of interest” bits rather than actual written by me bits. Here are two ways you might consider…

Matt, the lead developer of WordPress has devised a simple way which maintains the links within the flow of your blog. Matt’s code as well as other versions are linked at the Weblog Tools Collection. Matt’s asides, as he calls the links, are simple once the code has been added (though it looks like it’s already in the CVS and may make it to release for 1.2) and get included in your main syndication feed which is certainly a nice way to not have to ask anyone to subscribe to another feed to follow your postings. Simple is good.

The second option from RebelPixel Productions uses a plugin which you can expect to see more of as things move to 1.2. I used a previous iteration as a test and found it to work well, though involved a bit of tweaking to get things to work. The plugin resolves that extra work…The site is down at the moment so I can’t download and play, but as I recall these links get added to the sidebar rather than in the main flow. I don’t believe that you get them included in your syndication feed…

The choice is yours… whether you want it and how you plan to use it.

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Mail.app’s Spam Filter

While I personally did not find the spam protection to be sufficient, you might find the following of interest and useful if you are using or deciding on whether to use Mail as your email app. I am still running SpamAssassin at the server level and using SpamSieve locally to pick up things that get missed.

Many myths have emerged about Mail’s junk mail filter. No, it’s not an extremely complex set of rules, no it doesn’t look for keywords, and no, it doesn’t use white magic. To truly understand what makes it so much better than the competition, we’ll have to take a closer look at the recognition engine and the technologies it relies on to do its work. It may sound a bit complex at first, but things will begin to make sense as we work through the mechanics. [MacDevCenter.com]

I do like Mail.app a great deal and hope it gets better in Tiger this fall. Entourage has been probably been updated in the new Office and Thunderbird continues to grow as well.