The Palm PPC – the Hotspot in your Pocket.
It has to be the mob mentality: everyone loves the iPhone, a product, that while it is as polished as can be,  admittedly doesn’t use the kind of signal tracking and voice call technology you’d find on even cheaper phones;  and on the other hand there are competing products like the Palm PPC smartphones that come with an overall finesse and honest-to-goodness desire to please, not to mention affordable price tags and features the iPhone doesn’t. And no one knows it exists. Let’s look at two new Palm products on the market, the Palm Pre Plus and the Palm Pixi Plus, two wonders of American manufacturing that really deserve more love.

The Palm Pre Plus only costs $150, when you get it with a two-year contract. It has a tiny wonderfully smooth slide-out keyboard, and it has the shape and feel of a little polished stone. The Palm Pixi Plus(and that name is too cute for its own good) goes for just $100 with a two-year contract, and it’s what they call a candy bar phone, with a keyboard that appears right under the screen. For the $50 you save on this one, you do without some luxuries – it has the cruder camera, and it is slower – the one essential they haven’t touched, is WiFi connectivity. But the Pixi Plus really is as thin as its namesake, and as pleasing as a real pixie (one imagines).

The Palm PPC Web OS is a wonderful product that would be nice to see on competing smartphones that have its surefooted ease – like, say the Blackberry. Palm’s operating system is so pretty and so intuitive, you’d be hard-pressed to see how the iPhone is better. One of the best things about it is the way it can perform more than one task at a time. Do you want to listen to Internet radio as you read through your e-mail? No problem. And the iPhone isn’t the only one with that special toy called a multi-touch screen, you know.

It is what they call a fully loaded product too. You get WiFi, Bluetooth, a simple switch to turn the ringer off – just everything you want. And of course, Palm’s Web OS does multitasking with e-mail accounts and address books like no one else. You can look up your records with Google, Yahoo and Outlook all on the same screen. Of course there is a catch (isn’t there always).

The battery life isn’t all that great on any Palm PPC. There aren’t that many apps available for it at this time – barely a thousand, but Palm is trying to quickly catch up here. Of course 1000 doesn’t look very good next to the iPhone’s 120,000. But ar least, Palm’s thousand are all really great ones, and they expect the number of high-quality apps they have available to double every year.

There is one way in which these two Palm PPC products will outdo the iPhone any day: it can turn into a WiFi hotspot with one touch.

If you need to work on your laptop, you don’t need to carry around a pen drive-sized device or a data card or anything. Your phone is your hot spot. And your phone is in your pocket. That saves you $50 right away, and you and your friends can connect to the hotspot in your pocket any time.

The iPhone can do that too, if you wish to illegally hack into it; but the Palm PPC does this right out of the box, without any fussing about. There is just no other phone that does this fuss free. So what if it costs an extra $40?

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For the Major Fashion Designers Websites and Internet Excitement are Last on their List. Why?

Do remember that Seinfeld episode where Kramer has this whole pointless story about how he wanted to return a pair of pants he bought, but by the time he got to the store “he ended up ruining the very pants he set out to return”?

Apparently, stories about your clothing can be a big deal – and people can come around in a sort of social networking attitude, to share their favorite clothing stories.

That’s the whole concept behind Burberry’s new venture; the company from England has been making raincoats (or rather trenchcoats, if you are a fan of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca), for almost an entire century and their new way to stay relevant, is the new Art of the Trench social networking site. As fashion designers’ websites go this one is an unbelievable creative leap, and a success.

Many of the fashion houses we know and admire, have grown to their present levels of international acclaim from a single basic product that their founder once thought of. For some, like Hermes, it was a handbag, for Gucci, it was trademark fashionable shoes, and for Burberry, it was the coat.

These remarkable fashion icons, haven’t ever tried to market themselves to the customer. They are just too lofty a deal for that. But today, with sales to the ultrarich falling, it just seems to the fashion houses, that presenting themselves to the young urban youth market as an aspirational brand, could make up for what has been lost in traditional sales.

And this could be quite exciting as designers’ websites try to bring their famed sense of artistry and fashion to their online presence. Art of the Trench is undoubtedly the most successful attempt so far. The website, curiously, allows you to get street level portrayals of people going about their business, wearing trenchcoats.

In the beginning, the pictures you saw on the website were just professionally-shot fashion photography. But pretty soon, the idea touched a nerve somewhere, and millions of people have been sending in their own trenchcoat pictures. No other designers’ websites have ever thought of a way to just showcase their products on the Internet, and involve people in a passionate way in that attempt.

It is quite disappointing if you think about it, but these other companies are icons of fashion too – that are supposed to be so able to judge the pulse of high fashion and what people will love in the future; and they have been left on the sidelines by the Internet – the very iconof today.

Prada, the name that launches a million dreams in starry-eyed rich young people seems curiously short of ideas on what to do with the Internet, if you go by the look of their website. When you buy a DVD of a hit movie, you expect a bunch of extras – the process of filmmaking, the bloopers, interviews – you hope to get inside the very skin of the creative process. Prada however, just gives us a drab look into a series of its products from its latest fashion season, and that’s about it.

As they begin to sort their plans out, the future for fashion designers websites is sure to be exciting. The same fashion names like Karl Lagerfeld are sure to exploit their rockstar-like mystique by having their creative moments documented on videos on the site, and live broadcasts of the creative process are sure to attract millions of fashion devotees. Top designers have an opportunity here like no other, to actually become fashion gods on the Internet.

Advertising Agencies and How They Work.

Advertising agencies have changed a lot since their hay day in the 1950s. Back then, as depicted in the hit TV series Mad Men (named for Madison Avenue in New York) chain smoking men dressed in suits and ties came up with slogans and ad campaigns for their nervous clients.

Clients have not changed much and continue to be nervous when it comes to staking all of their money on the ideas churned out by advertising agencies and their creative departments, but they are much more careful how they spend that money. From the 50s until just recently most advertising was either print, television, or radio and not much else.
Print advertising included display ads. Display ads ran the gamut from small two column want ads in the classified section of the local newspaper to full page double spreads in pricey magazines such as Playboy or Vanity Fair. Account executives would place their clientsí ads into these publications in compliance with the media plan that they created and which was approved by the client. The advertising agencies would charge a 15% commission based upon the price of the ad itself.

This was a very lucrative business but in the last fifteen years or so it has changed radically with the proliferation of boutique advertising agencies and smaller design firms who had smaller overhead and basically would do the same job for a lot less commission or for a flat fee. This practice caused the advertising agencies to rethink their basic structures and cut costs across the board.

The ability to create ads using computers did not really come into widespread practice until the late 1980s and the very first computers were not really computers at all but giant Linotronic typesetting machines that took up most of one room and required the use of toxic chemicals to produce professional looking type. A few years later Apple came out with their first Macintosh computers and helped to start the graphics revolution that continues to this day.

Those first Apple computers were tricky and required a lot of maintenance. It was faster many times to do the ad in the old fashioned way by hand using overlays and press type than to actually fiddle around with the primitive Mac. Eventually Macs became more stable and when programs like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator came into being, the way that ads were created was changed forever.

Part of print advertising is collateral work and that includes brochures, catalogs, direct mail pieces, pamphlets, and any other two dimensional graphics piece that is not classified as print ads. Until digital printing took over in the late 90s, most of these collateral pieces were printed by large four color printing houses. The resulting work was beautiful for the most part but would cost a bundle. Four-color offset printing was not cheap but it was high quality. Digital printing made collateral printing much cheaper but the quality really suffered, mainly because the inks would run and the stock that would go through the printers was not very thick or varied.

Todayís best advertising agencies have state-of-the-art digital computers and printers in-house along with teams of top notch copywriters, graphic designers and art directors. If you want to see samples of some of the top work each year just pick up a Communication Arts graphic design or advertising annual. This publication features full color photos of the best in advertising design each year.

Acer Notebook Computers Offer Value and Performance for you personal use and business.

Since I can’t stand being chained to a desk all day long, I’ve always preferred using a laptop to a desktop computer. This allows me to easily take my work with me wherever I need to go, whether it’s across the living room or across the country. I never have to mess around with thumb drives or transferring files to make sure I have what I need on a particular machine. I just toss my laptop into a bag and head out the door.

Right now I’m in the market for a new unit to replace my four-year-old model. I’ve been hearing and reading lots of good things about Acer notebook computers, so I’ve decided to check out this brand a bit more. I’ve never owned something from this manufacturer, but they’ve been around for a long time and have developed a good reputation over the years.

I know Acer notebook computers are generally considered to be a great value for the money, but frankly I’m more interested in performance than saving a few bucks. How do these laptops stack up against other brands?

Very favorably, as it turns out. For example, the Aspire line features some of the best Acer notebook computers currently available.

These notebooks are cheap, but come with specifications that are suitable for my purposes, such as the latest Intel processor, Windows operating system, 3GB (or more) of memory, and a very spacious 250GB hard drive. Moreover, many of the models in the Aspire line are thin, light, and sleek, which is definitely the trend these days. Plus these Acer notebook computers often cost less than comparable offerings from Toshiba, Sony, Dell, and HP. Granted, this type of laptop might not be the best for gamers or those who are heavy users of graphics programs, but neither of those labels applies to me, so I shouldn’t have anything to worry about.

There is a vast lineup of Acer notebook computers for today’s consumers to choose from, so I’m sure it’s going to take me some time to read through all the specs and reviews for each one in my price range. But I don’t mind putting in the extra work because I realize that’s all part of the process of making an important purchase like this.

I use my laptop each and every day for work, which means I need a reliable, functional machine that performs as expected with no breakdowns. If it takes me a few weeks to find the perfect one, so be it.

Anyway, I know there are some people out there who balk at the very notion of buying anything other than a Mac, but I’m not one of them. While it’s true that I do place a premium on performance, I’m not willing to spend three times what I have to just to get an Apple logo on my machine.

It looks like Acer notebook computers can do what I need at a fraction of the cost, so I’m planning to give this brand a try.

Sun Java 2 has everything you need for an enterprise level business.

Java is an object oriented programming language invented by Sun Micro Systems Inc. in the early 1980s. At that time, the virtues of object oriented design and development was just emerging in the computer field while the Internet was taking hold of the imagination of the world.

Java was originally designed to create programs that could be run within a browser, for such applications as games, utilities, and more highly functional programs that simple HTML with a scripting language such as Javascript could not adequately represent. Recognizing its edge in the area of browser contained programs, Sun Micro Systems went full force into developing a complete set of supporting libraries that would reduce programming effort time and enable distributed processing, a capacity that was now possible with the prevalence of the Internet. The result was a package of Java program libraries that would cover the entire spectrum of needs for distributed, networked data processing. The recent results is the Sun Java 2 Enterprise Edition.

Java runs in what is called a virtual machine. This virtual machine appears like a computer machine. It accepts Java coded instructions, segments memory, creates a stack on which instructions reside, and uses a virtual processor to execute these instructions.

The virtual machine is actually an interpreter written for a specific processor. As long as a machine has the interpreter, it can execute any Java program. This means a Java program will run on an Apple in the same way that it would run on a PC or a Sun workstation, making the program portable across systems.

All modules of Sun Java 2 are placed into libraries. Each library will contain related programs and functions. For instance, Sun Java 2 comes with the basic core programs for arithmetic and string operations, file operations, graphics handling and networking.

In addition, libraries are provided with programs to handle audio, images, applets (programs that must be run in a browser). All these programs provide mostly everything you’ll need to write a functional program, such as a general journal, a customer maintenance program, a products catalog program. With the use of its network modules, you can distribute your programs among different machines, such that, for instance, the general ledger is maintained by one server while the general journal is maintained by another, the two communicating over a network.

Sun Java 2 is a perfect solution for your business and it is an enterprise level system because it provides for this distribution while addressing the needs that arise from using a distributed configuration. It comes with libraries for security, for management, for deployment, for messaging, for transactional integrity across multiple systems involved in a single transaction, for logging, and for data base access. It provides a packaging strategy to group applications and a security mechanism for assuring integrity of code and data.

Sun Java 2 is a complete software development system that can be used with one of a number of software development environments. Sun provides its own NetBeans product for development of enterprise level application, while IBM and BEA have also devised development environments based on Java 2. Sun also provides a free reference administration tool to manage an enterprise using the system.

What’s nice about this software system is that it’s all free! You can download everything you need from Sun, even its administration tool. This is the best place to start, to get a feel for it. After some testing, we’re sure you’ll find the Sun Java 2 Enterprise Edition everything you’ve ever wanted out of a software package designed to do enterprise level business.  Give it a download now!

Start your small business accounting with the leader in software, with none other than Microsoft maybe for free!

Small businesses, no matter how small, in fact this because they are small, need to account for their financial transactions carefully: small businesses need accounting software. Since accounting has many subdivisions, such as sales, banking, payroll, but your small business may not require accounting of all these concerns, you will want to obtain that software which satisfies only your business requirements, especially if you’re purchasing the software as opposed to getting free software (which is available if you search for it).

While you’ll start off by obtaining only those accounting subdivisions you must have, you’ll also want to anticipate future growth and diversification; you’ll want to start with an accounting software package that can be expanded from a basic set of necessary functions to include those you expect to need in the future as your business grows and diversifies. When reviewing what accounting software packages are out there in the market, ascertain that first, the package comes in modules that can be custom combined, and, second, that you can purchase and use the modules without having to obtain all parts. An extremely good accounting package that gives precisely this versatility is Microsoft’s Office Accounting Express (2007-2009), an accounting software package you’ve got to see to believe.

When we think about Microsoft, we think paying for whatever software they’re selling, but here’s the good news: if you happen to consider purchasing Microsoft Office Accounting Express when they’re having a market push, you can probably get their basic package for free!

We’re talking about an accounting software system that is tailored for small businesses, that starts you off with a sophisticated basic package what will not only allow you to account for one small company, but for many small companies, that is especially suited for eCommerce (they’ve got a Paypal component that integrates its sales, accounts payable, and accounts receivable with your Paypal account), that is modular, that provides the essential accounting functions, that handles either a sales or services company, and that can be built upon. The last point is the catch (not a regrettable one if the basic stuff is free). You’ll have to pay for additional modules and upgrades thereafter, at least as it now stands.

Still, look at what you get for the basic system: a complete accounting system that handles basic financial accounting, including accounts payable, equity accounting, accounts receivable, sales, fixed assets, banking, vendors, online sales, and all the reports you’ll need for even a medium-size business. This is just the ìExpressî accounting system; the upgrade is the Office Accounting Professionalî. It will allow you to handle employees, inventory, project management, multi-user sharing, and foreign currency sales. This system will take your accounting practices from a small to a medium-size business with ease at a cost you cannot afford to ignore.

Finally, we’re talking about an accounting software system that is so user-friendly, even those who have no experience in accounting will find it easy to use. It’s graphic interface is truly artful, and it’s help and documentation makes it the perfect accounting system for those with little or not accounting background. Go to Microsoft’s site and check it out for yourself. If you’re on time, maybe the free Express edition is still available. Microsoft and free? This must be a revolution in the software industry.