Headworx

Forbes.com has recently published a short story about PI Corporation , being run in a stealth mode by Paul Maritz . Some of you may remember Paul, as his divorce with Microsoft in August 2000 was unexpected by many. It is hard to tell if PI was in his mind back in 2000, but he admits they have been working on the product for several years now. So what exactly is PI and why is it so interesting? PI seems to be the concept that could not have been grasped by Redmond for a reason unknown to me... Unknown, because it seems so obvious. But may be this is just the problem, as obvious things often cannot be noticed by incumbents and create opportunities for small startups. PI aims to break the old PC paradigm. It is not the first one trying to do this. Think Google. Do they care what PC are you running? No, because everything runs on their servers and they need a PC to display and take input from. So PI promises a browser based software suite, with Net storage and other services. They want ...

I am on vacation now and just in time Google has released the Picasa Web Albums . Picasa has been the application of choice for managing the personal library of digital photos. Web Albums is just another great sharing concept from Google. Sergey and Larry and the team really do understand what the Internet is about. Simplicity is first. If you already have Picasa, uploading your pictures to a web gallery is a matter of pressing a single button. The pictures are by default optimized for Web viewing (resolution / file size). Sharing is second. Sharing pictures uploaded to the Web Gallery is a snap. As with the Google Spreadsheets , it is a matter of entering email addresses of people you would like to send a link to your picture galleries to. During just a few days away from home I have shared many pictures with my family and fiends using the service. It is not perfect yet, missing a few functionalities, but the ease of use just blows me away. Looking forward I would love to have the s...

Browser wars are heating up again. You thought you were happy with your IE6 or FireFox. I thought I was happy with my Opera . And then the Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 has just arrived... I thought I was happy with my Opera, but through my curiosity I got attracted to try IE7 and was blinded by its beauty. Love at first sight. Of course the first thing you notice are tabs. I was not that great fan of tabbed browsing until I started using Opera, several months ago. Tabs in the Opera are just perfect. So it was somehow obvious to me they will be at least the same in IE7. But no... I don't know, how many million dollars Microsoft has spent on the design of tabs (or trying to replicate FireFox), but the end result is far from perfect. There are so many obvious areas to improve, it is just hard to imagine they have missed them (probably the IE7 team has been obsessed by FireFox to much). First is the persistence of the session. With Opera you can open many tabs and close the e...

Some five years ago the so called "paperless office" buzz was aloud. We were about to stop using paper, going for electronic forms and electronic storage. Six years later the consumption of paper (at least in my office) is significant. Many printers swallow several boxes of paper weekly. Customers want printed reports, invoices and agreements. Often we print documents, because they are simply easier to read on paper than on LCDs. But there is one important difference - all the paper documents start their lives inside computers. So before they are printed, they already are in the electronic representation. This (electronic storage) is very convenient. Easy to backup, easy to replicate, forward, send over email, archive on CD... Similar things started happening at home. The first important shift (in my case) was Citibank. They used to send me a statement once a month. That is one account statement and a separate credit card statement. I used to pick the letters from my mailbo...