Network Velocity

Google to launch Priority Inbox

In the next week Google will be launching Priority Inbox. From Google's site: Priority Inbox attempts to automatically identify your important incoming messages and separates them out from everything else. Gmail uses a variety of signals to prioritize your incoming messages, including who you emailed most frequently and which messages you’ve recently opened as opposed to which messages you’ve deleted. The goal is to enable users to spend more time with the emails that matter most. A we...

The Microsoft Store Experience

This weekend's trip to Fashion Valley Mall provided an opportunity to visit The Microsoft Store. I was curious how Microsoft is competing with Apple in the high end retail space. Here are some pictures: Overall The Microsoft Store was somewhat confusing from a retail shop perspective. There was a large space dedicated to XBox. That dedicated space had the strongest presence and clear message. The rest of the Store had a mix of hardware from different manufacturers (Sony, Dell etc) but the...

Time Management via The Pomodoro Technique

The Pomodoro Technique helps you focus on a single task 25 minutes at a time. In today’s world with the constant onslaught of information something simple like The Pomodoro Technique can help you ignore distractions and focus on getting things done. Time management is nothing new, but Pomodoro has some advantages in it’s simplicity. From their website: Choose a task to be accomplished Set the Pomodoro to 25 minutes (the Pomodoro is the timer) Work on the task until the Pomodoro rings, then...

RIP Google Wave

Last week Google announced they would stop development on Google Wave at the end of 2010. Google Wave was ahead of it's time. We wrote about Wave and your business in October of 2009. Although Wave held a lot of promise, we had problems finding the right ways to use the capabilities of Wave. But all is not lost on Google's experiment with Wave. Many of Wave's technologies, such as real time collaboration, have already made it into other Google products. Kudos to Google for being ambiti...

Business of Happiness

I just finished reading The Business of Happiness by Ted Leonsis. I recommend it! Check out the website to get some background on the author and book. To summarize, Ted grew up in Brooklyn the son of immigrant parents. Through hard work and fortunate timing he was very successful at a young age. But he wasn't happy. A near death experience opened his eyes to his second chance at life and he decided to dedicate himself to being happy. Ted's theory is to not confuse being successful with bei...

Staying Human: Google is great, until it isn’t

We blog about Google a lot and up until now it's all been positive. We've run across a problem we can't fix and it revolves around the way Google handles their products. Google is successful because so much of what they do is automated. For the most part this works great as Google excels at knowing what people need and fulfilling that need in a convenient and usable online format. The problem is that even with Google's technical capabilities some issues still require commonsense and a huma...

The cure for software upgrades?

A software upgrade can be a major disruption to a business. We've listed the revisions to Microsoft's core businesss products going back to 1995. Windows Servers Office Exchange (email) SQL (database) Windows 95 Windows NT (1993) Office 95 Exchange 5.5 SQL 7.0 Windows 98 Windows Server 2000 Office 98 Exchange 2000 SQL 2000 Windows 2000 Windows Server 2003 Office 2000 Exchange 2003 SQL 2005 Windows XP Windows Server 2008 Office XP Exchange 2007 SQL 2...

Multitasking is a myth

Courtesy of @rands on Twitter: In a previous blog post we summed up multitasking as: Multitasking is the ability to shift between tasks very quickly. Also known as timeslicing, these transitions happen so quickly it appears like multitasking. However, each time you switch between tasks you must back up just a bit and review where you left off to make sure you don’t miss any critical information, essentially doing the same work over and over. The constant starting and stopping of tasks le...

VMware View with PCoIP – Is this the cloud?

VMware View is a product that provides desktop performance levels to remote desktop clients. VMware View with PCoIP allows companies to deploy inexpensive, power efficient and virtually unbreakable PC's called thin clients to users while retaining a full dekstop experience with multi monitor setup, streaming video and fast video refresh. Company data can be securely locked away in a remote datacenter without users ever noticing a difference in their day to day computer usage. In the video ...

The Internet has a Time Machine

The Wayback Machine at www.archive.org has been keeping a record of web sites on the Internet for years. Go there and check out your favorite site. It can be quite interesting to view a site as it evolved over time. Here at Network Velocity we recently completed a slight reorganization of our site. We tweaked our message, changed the navigation and removed a lot of technical content. We wanted to make our site simpler. We think we succeeded. With that project behind us I decided to look at...