Hard Drive Encryption

With more people and users moving towards laptops and with the growth of remote workers, I think hard drive encryption is very important.

Most laptops these days contain some sensitive data you would not want a hacker or someone who stole your laptop to get. Some of this data could be pictures, credit card numbers, quicken data, bank accounts.

These days hard drive encryption for laptops is very inexpensive and easy to use. If your laptop is stolen, then it makes it that must more difficult for someone to steal your personal information.

I have placed hard drive encryption on my laptop. I have to much client sensitive material not to have encryption.

Roku Netflix Player

Netflix has just come out with a player that will allow you to download movies and watch them on your TV. The device is going to cost about $99 dollars. It does not yet support HD. You will be able to select the movies from your computer and download them to the box.

I was wondering when Netflix was going to offer this. It is going to save them in shipping costs and make there operations more efficient.

Promising Web 2.0 Applications

I read numerous magazines and an interesting read came from eweek. They had an article on promising 2.0 web apps. The 2 I thought were interesting are Zude social mix and openacircle.

OPENACIRCLE is a collaborative tool for small businesses. It allows you to share documents and create private rooms for collaboration.

Zude is what is called a mashup of social network sites. It allows you to access sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Linkedin from one location.

Microsoft Groove

Microsoft Groove is a great tool. We have been using it to help share documents with our team, which was a problem in the past. We are all consultants that are not usually in the same spot and store much of our data on our laptops. We started to use public folders in exchange, but that requires online access to exchange.

Groove allows the sharing of documents between team members and is available offline. If a change is made or documents added, they are synced to everyone. They also have an forum that you can post messages to and also a chat and the ability to send messages to other people. It is a great collaboration tool if you have remote team members.

We also use it our sales and marketing to help with manage our client collateral.

It is a time saving tool that Iwould recommend to anyone.

Website Links

A nice location to bookmark your website links is del.icio.us (pronounced "delicious). It allows you to save links and access them from any computer. You are not stuck to just having favorites in your browser (I don't use many favorites anymore, I say everything is one or two Google searches away).

Anyway, this is a nice location to consolidate all of your URL's for easy access.