Happy New Year ... Here are some technology ideas for 2010

As people around the globe ring in 2010, the Technology Plumbing team wishes everyone a happy and prosperous new year.

To help get the new year off to a good technology start here are some technology thoughts to ponder:

While the ebook wars heat up, Amazon has quietly provided a software upgrade (version 2.3) for its Kindle readers. While not earth shattering, they do provide a few key improvements as noted below. Click here for Amazon's official description of the changes. It should be noted that the rollout to at least my Kindle was slower then I was willing to wait, so I manually upgraded my Kindle by following the directions specified here.

Key changes:

1. Native handling of PDF files. When I had originally sent myself a PDF file to read on my Kindle it never did show up and there were several steps that had to take place in order to actually read it. With the upgrade, just email the PDF file to your Kindle's email address and a minute later it just shows up, ready for you to read it. This will be quite nice if you need to take business documents on the plane with you to review without having to get the paper documents out (not to mention potentially saving the printing of the document in the first place) or firing up your PC on today's over crowded planes. I won't go into the security issues in this posting, so please no flame mail from the security folks.
2. Longer battery life for Kindle (Global Wireless): You can now read for up to 1 week on a single charge with wireless on. Turn wireless off and read for up to 2 weeks.
3. Manual screen rotation: The Kindle screen can now manually rotate between portrait and landscape views so you can see the entire width of a web page or magnify the page of a PDF file. The page-turn buttons work the same in either orientation, and the 5-way controller movements are switched to match the orientation. Click on the "Aa" key at the bottom of the keyboard to bring up the options.

Intouch Products has come out with an interesting product that competes in the premium digital picture frame market that HP is attempting to market to with its DreamScreen product that I mentioned back in November. Both seem to suffer from 1st generation issues, but it will be interesting to see if they are able to sell to the early adopters while finding ways to add in the missing functionality from the early versions.

Forbes Magazine, not exactly the home of technology, had an interesting sidebar to compare and contrast "virtulization" vs. "the cloud". While technologists are still arguing about the details and the directions of these two technologies, Forbes boils it down this simple premise that I think most people can understand and work with: You virtualize hardware and run your software in the cloud.

• This means that utilizing virtulization products from vendors like VMware you can run multiple virtual servers (or PCs) on large physical servers and users and applications will think they have multiple servers or PCs at their disposal.
  
• This works by leveraging the fact that most technology only uses the physical resources for short periods of time and thus they can be shared.
  
• On the other hand software not hosted directly on your PC (I am using the term PC in general, meaning your personal computer of choice, Windows, Mac, Linux, etc) is hosted by your business, at your data center, or by a third party provider. As these hosting environments are abstracted further and further from a users computer it is said to be hosted in a cloud.
  
• The concept here is that the cloud, if properly done, is made up of many servers in multiple locations protecting users from failures in the infrastructure running the software and driving down and spreading out the cost of the infrastructure.
  
• Given these definitions of virtulization and clouds it becomes easier to think about the various permutations that can occur based on your specific needs and structure. Consider in the extreme you can run cloud applications such as Google's Gmail or Sales Force on a virtual PC running on a thin, inexpensive client.
  

US Air's current magazine has excerpts from Dov Seidman's latest book titled HOW: Why HOW We Do Everything ... in Business (and in Life) , which focuses not on what to do but making sure whatever we do, we do it the right way. In other words, it is the HOW, not the WHAT that matters. After reading the excerpts, I have downloaded the entire book to my Kindle hoping to find better ways of doing things in 2010.

• I have to point out that on the page facing the start of the excerpt Amazon had placed an ad for the Kindle. While the ad featured a different book, the connection was quite clear. Read this excerpt and if you like it, download the book to your Kindle.

As you finish up your various holiday festivities, hopefully you will find some interesting (calorie free) food for thought in this blog post and will come back and read my 2010 posts.

Until then, happy new year!