Headworx

Exactly three years ago I noted there was no alternative for Microsoft Outlook . But this is no longer true. I have been using GMail for ages. For my private email address. For business, however, it took much longer to migrate. In my case it even took selling one company (the one using Outlook) and setting up a new one (the one that does not). OK this is a bit of irony. But the truth is at our new startup we are extremely, extremely happy with the Google Apps cloud service. We keep on discovering new things almost every day. It is hard to imagine people are still sending themselves DOC and XLS files as attachments. And that after a long editing work they are being asked "Save your changes"? This 30-year old paradigm of editing FILES looks very arcane today. But it still exists at the very heart of the world's most popular Office suite. But back to the Outlook. As I posted in 2008, the really last thing I was using it for was contact management. It was simply a backup ...

A week ago I did a quick jump across the Atlantic to attend the 2011 Singularity Summit . It was a fantastic event, well worth spending two days on a plane. I arrived in New York late Thursday evening. The Summit was on Saturday and Sunday, so having Friday time to spare, I strolled down the streets of the city. Very crowded streets. Seems like a lot of people have a lot of time to spare on Friday morning. Shops were overcrowded. I was standing for more than an hour in line just to get into the 5th Avenue Abercrombie & Fitch. There was nothing special inside. A&F as usual, only crowded and the crowd storming the shop from outside. I kept going towards the Cube Apple Store, where I saw even bigger crowd. Ah - the iPhone 4S - I realized. But they were lining outside the store, while others were walking inside. I soon realized the store had run out of the iPhones. As I did not want to buy an iPhone, I could get in. It was completely crowded inside. I quickly went out. The crowd ...

Yesterday I spent almost the entire day shopping for a new laptop. And I have to admit this was one of the most difficult research tasks I have had recently. And the results of my research have been most surprising, especially after I found the key element, which is 2537M. Remember this symbol, and here is the story. Up till today I have been using the already famous on this blog Nokia Booklet 3G . The Booklet has been outstanding in several aspects, with its crown features being the 12-hours battery life in a sub 3 lbs, 19mm unibody package. My personal edition of the Booklet has also featured the ultimate storage speed and security solution available - the 256GB FDE SSD drive. Unfortunately the Z530 Atom processor, while responsible with its 2W TDP for the 12 hours battery life, has been too slow for my recent needs, that are now extended far beyond simple Web browsing. Hence the need to upgrade. I started with formulating the list of requirements in form of must-have's: ...

Unfinished products rushed out of the door plague us. We are tired. And not many seem to notice. The accelerated pace of innovation has been what we like. But the problem with the shortening design / products cycle is it does not improve the overall quality and satisfaction. I have posted around this subject many times here on this blog. It is the ROI thing. And being the number one. And delivering value to shareholders. You have to be fast. Or may be not? There are countless examples of products rushed out of the door just because they were expected. Both by shareholders and by markets. Probably the most famous of the last decade was Windows Vista. Delayed and delayed and yet released way to early. Looking from today's perspective, who really needed it? The Vista failure cut the value of Microsoft by a lot. It frustrated customers, accelerating the migration from Windows to MacOS. The opposite example is Apple. The market was disappointed with the iPad 2. Calling it even the...

For years I have been refraining from installing extra applications on my systems. Basically trying to live within a browser. It started long time ago with GMail. GMail has taught me using the browser as an application. Since then I have been typing documents and created spreadsheets in Google Docs. Only occasionally reverting to local apps, like PowerPoint for presentations or Visio for drawings and diagrams. Even for mind mapping I have been using the MindMeister.COM . Web platforms have one brilliant advantage over desktop. multiplatform access, collaboration and sharing. It is much easier to share a Google Docs spreadsheet than its Excel equivalent. And you get versioning as a free bonus. With Excel, you still have to maintain file naming conventions and us email as a transport layer. But one of the big disappointments of the Google Android Honeycomb tablet platform I have been using recently on the Samsung Galaxy Tab has been very poor support for Google Docs. Honeycomb has s...