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CompuSchmooze™ Newspaper Columns: A Monthly Guide to Jewish Resources in Cyberspace

CompuSchmooze

The CompuSchmoozeTM name is a trademark owned bySteven L. Lubetkin, and is the name of a series of columns published monthly in the Jewish Community Voice of Southern New Jersey. These articles and associated podcasts are Copyright © 1996-2010 Steven L. Lubetkin. All rights reserved.

Read the current CompuSchmooze column here.


Any commercial use of these articles or podcasts requires purchase of use rights from the copyright owner. For information on reprint rights to these articles, please send me an email message.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

 

AIIM/OnDemand Show, Part 3

Had a busy morning, and the day continues...started out speaking about podcasting at the Jewish Business Network of Southern New Jersey, networking group of business owners that meets every other Wednesday at the Katz JCC in Cherry Hill. I reminded them about Malcolm Gladwell's "mavens and connectors," and the Cluetrain Manifesto -- Markets are conversations. Pretty good reaction to business podcasting. By the way, take a look at Apple's iTunes Music Store...the top 100 podcasts there by absolute downloads are mainly professionally produced media content by well-known brands like ABC News, NY Times, NPR, ESPN. Make your brand a trusted one and use professional production values in your podcasts and you will gather an audience.

Now, to the AIIM Show. This morning we met with Lotfi Bekhir, CEO of Kirtas Technologies, a company that's developed hardware and software for high-volume digitization of bound, printed materials.

They have what looks like a Rube Goldberg device that uses air and vacuum suction to turn pages of books while two professional digital cameras mounted above the box take high-res images of the pages. Kirtas' software can add metadata and even OCR the entire volume. Bekhir says the system can image a 300 page book in about 8 minutes. You'll hear more from Bekhir in the podcast from the conference.

Last evening we ran into Cherry Hill media maven and America-Israel Chamber of Commerce Past Prexy (always wanted to call someone "prexy") Howard Joffe (Howard, someone is trying to sell a 1980s KYW publicity photo of you on Yahoo! Auctions) at the press party for Safend, a Philadelphia-based Israeli company that is helping customers secure the leaky places where data exits a company, namely, the USB ports where people plug in thumbdrives and download reams of data. Safend's software lets you secure the USB ports, drives, and other connections on your network so that they don't work at all, or only work with authorized devices. We'll have an interview with Safend in the podcast.

More later...off to the show floor!

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

 

AIIM/OnDemand Show, Part 2

Spent the morning at two press briefings, one for Canon, which has announced a whole new series of high-end commercial color printers. Individual announcements are at http://www.usa.canon.com/. These printers are for high quality commercial operations, and Canon claims it has improved the toner technology so that when it is applied to the paper, it takes the look and feel of the paper's surface, appearing more like offset printing than laser printing.

Second one was for Visioneer, which originated the desktop sheet-fed scanning technology that most people use. They announced new high-capacity "production" scanners for corporate environments that can scan up to 33 double-sided pages (66 images) per minute.

Also did an interview with Gadi Aharoni, CEO of a digital signature company called Algorithmic Research, which makes a product called CoSign. CoSign simplifies the implementation of digital signatures and helps streamline the workflow involved. More in the column and on the podcast.

 

AIIM/OnDemand Show, Philadelphia - First Installment


Good morning all. Blogging from the press room at the AIIM/OnDemand Show in Philadelphia. It's a three-day program for document image management mavens, and on-demand printers (AIIM stands for Association for Information and Image Management). We'll try to give you some short takes during the next couple of days, and will write longer report for the column -- and we'll have some good photos and audio for the podcast.

Heard two interesting keynotes this morning, first, Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe Systems, who spoke about the changing landscape of printing and information. Interesting factoid was that people surveyed said 59% of the information that rains down around them every day was irrelevant to them...billions of emails, 23,000 new blogs every day, etc....irrelevant.

He showed those really cool, optimized-for-trade-show demos that work perfectly, including a site where Jaguar offers car buyers the opportunity to customize the features of a car and see its photo change before their eyes, color, styles, options, etc., and then create an offline printed brochure with the customizations intact.

Also had one of his people do an excellent demo of how an online mortgage application process should work, where you can link to online chat with a service rep, and even stop filling in the form online, download a PDF version for offline completion, and when you add info to the PDF, then go BACK online and the new data is grabbed into the online application and you can continue. The program also grabs data from your existing accounts and is linked to your cell phone to notify you when the application status changed...and the completed application is fully password protected and securely emailed.

Second speaker, Charles Pesko, Managing Director of InfoTrends, a consulting firm and part of the group that organized the conferences. He spoke about the "tornado" of change affecting color printing technologies, and how customized digital color printing is entering the mainstream in many companies. You'll begin to see this in personalized, customized statements and newsletters that arrive from the companies you do business with.

More later. Canon has a press conference in about 10 minutes...so does Visioneer.

Friday, May 12, 2006

 

CompuSchmooze Podcast #14: Interview with Bruce Kramer of OneCall PC Help

Bruce Kramer of OneCall PC Help


Bruce Kramer, owner of OneCall PC Help in Mt. Laurel, NJ is our guest on the CompuSchmoozeTM podcast this week.

Download the podcast file here (33mb stereo MP3 file, 34:53length).



Here's the text of the related "CompuSchmoozeTM" column as it appears in the Jewish Community Voice of Southern New Jersey in March:



CompuSchmooze March (2nd column) 2006 – One Call PC Help
By Steven L. Lubetkin
Copyright © 2006 Steven L. Lubetkin. All rights reserved.

If there’s one piece of advice Bruce Kramer wants to get across to his clients and prospective clients, it probably would be this: “Respect the data.”

Kramer, a partner in One Call PC Help in Mt. Laurel, says while many companies make data backups, they often don’t realize that there are different kinds of backup required. A company that makes backup data tapes every night and leaves the backup near the computer has protected itself against failure of the computer itself, but a fire or flood in the office where the computer is housed could ruin the backup tape, he points out.

Kramer is a regular participant in activities of the Jewish Business Network of Southern New Jersey, which is hosted by the Jewish Community Foundation.
He started One Call PC Help after spending years as a consulting engineer at large telecommunications companies. He first became interested in computers while attending Cherry Hill High School East in the 1970s, when the school got access to a time-sharing computer account through a friendly parent who worked at GE. In the late 1970s, Kramer built Altair personal computers from kits and worked with Radio Shack’s TRS-80 personal computer. He graduated Drexel University with one of its first computer engineering degree concentrations in the mid 1980s.

Bruce worked for a number of years in field sales and consulting for companies selling computer programming software, but he tired of the constant travel required, and after the industry nosedived after 9/11, he realized there was an opportunity to provide his corporate-style skills in the fragmented market for computer service for small businesses.

People serving that market were not applying professional, corporate disciplines to the work they were doing, he explained. “People should be centered around preserving the data,” Kramer said. “The data and people’s information is really much more important and much more valuable than the particular pieces of equipment that it’s running on. If you go into a large corporate environment, like Merrill Lynch, they have a whole corporate IT department that backs up their data, but little mom-and-pop shops often don’t do that.”

One Call PC Help works with clients to ensure that their systems and practices protect valuable company data, so that computer failures don’t disrupt the running of the business.

“If your notebook computer gets stolen tomorrow, what do you need to do to get yourself back in business?” asks Kramer. “How much is it worth to not have to go back and recreate five or six years of data?”

It’s sometime difficult to convince clients to buy data protection services, because there’s no immediate payback from the insurance-like investment, Kramer notes.

Kramer warns computer users to be careful about the software they download from the Internet, which can bog down computer performance through the installation of spyware and malware (software that takes control of computer processes away from the computer owner.)

Even if such software is useful, it may not be well-designed and may introduce problems into the smooth operation of a computer, Kramer says.
“You need to make sure you are using a trusted resource,” Kramer suggests, such as software by Microsoft or other reliable major manufacturers.

One Call PC Help has four employees working across New Jersey, with a few larger customers in New York. Kramer makes on-site visits to the far-flung customers, but also has their computer systems configured so that they can perform routine system maintenance remotely. The company can be reached at 856-222-9000.

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