Voice over IP

The Miami Herald today published a primer on VoIP.

VoIP options on the market

VoIP allows consumers to make telephone calls using a broadband Internet connection, offering a cheap and increasingly popular alternative to landline-based calls. But with new providers cropping up, offering different services and complex rate plans, how do you know what you really need? To help you make an informed decision, the Miami Herald offers its guide to VoIP.

Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Produce

http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/001253.php

Is it worth it to pay the premium price for organic produce? I have found this wallet guide (folded paper) a handy reference in the supermarket to help answer that question. It identifies 12 fruits and vegetables that are high in pesticides when conventionally grown so I buy the organic versions instead. When I feel like saving a buck, I can check it to find 12 that are typically lower in pesticides. This list is in my wallet along with the Seafood Watch, reviewed earlier. You too can keep the green in your wallet as well as in your diet.

— V. Seribo

Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce

Free PDF, produced by Environmental Working Group

Backup your cell phone data with BitPim

From Lifehacker

Free, cross-platform software BitPim lets you backup and manage your cell phone data (including contacts, calendar, wallpapers, and ringtones) on a number of popular phones.

It looks like BitPim supports mostly LG phones, but the list of supported phones does include several other phones as well. If you don’t like it (or if your phone isn’t supported), you might also want to try Yahoo! Mobile’s Contacts Backup.

Google/Yahoo/Microsoft Email Compared

http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-9239_7-6526615-1.html?tag=nl.e404
E-mail services
Read a detailed comparison chart of the features

Which Web-based e-mail service should you use? It depends on your personal taste, of course, but a clean page layout, speed, and security are paramount. For now, the next-generation editions of Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and Hotmail are still works in progress and not widely available. You can get a Gmail account today either by sending a request via mobile phone or getting another user to invite you, but you’ll need to join a waiting list in order to try the Yahoo Mail beta or the Windows Live Mail beta.

Yahoo Mail, based on the former Oddpost client, was the first to bring a drag-and-drop, Outlook-style layout to online e-mail. It arranges messages in tabs to help you multitask.
We found only one other Web 2.0 e-mail experience worth mentioning: 37signals’ Backpack is a neat hybrid of e-mail, personal publishing, and to-do lists. However, we found Backpack too awkward to serve as a primary e-mail account, and you have to pay to access the full features.

The trio of big-brand, beta e-mail services offers more features than do the classic, nonbeta versions of Yahoo Mail and Hotmail that you may use today, but if you itch to switch, there’s no easy way to import and export messages and contacts from one e-mail brand to another. We’ve been toying with these three beta tools through several iterations, and we expect more changes as their makers compete and respond to testers’ requests.

Interface

Using AJAX technologies, all of these e-mail apps load messages in a snap because they don’t have to reload an entire HTML page with each mouse click. Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Mail mimic the dual-pane layout of Microsoft Outlook, which squeezes more text onto a screen than online e-mail apps have in the past. Yet only Yahoo’s tabbed messaging makes it possible to keep track of multiple messages at once or to interrupt your work and return to it later.

While the Outlook-style interface is familiar to users of desktop e-mail clients, we’re fans of the uncluttered Gmail, with its copious white space and rounded edges. Gmail’s single-click functions demand less dragging and dropping, so your hands can rest, but only Gmail lacks right-mouse-click functions. All three services do offer keyboard shortcuts.

If you’ve ditched Internet Explorer and are now using an alternative Internet browser, you’ll appreciate Yahoo Mail and Gmail; both work with Firefox, Opera, and others. Windows Live Mail beta works with multiple browsers, but its spell check only works with Internet Explorer.


Gmail presents just as much information as its rivals do but looks less cluttered.

Speed

We found Gmail to be the speediest online e-mail service; our messages seemed to appear the instant we clicked on a header. Delays of up to several seconds occasionally marred our experience with the betas of Windows Live Mail and especially Yahoo Mail.

Ads

Who wants a commercial break within their personal e-mail service? Only the paid version of Yahoo Mail is completely ad-free. Both Yahoo and Windows Live Mail display distracting, animated, graphical ads, while Gmail discreetly displays text ads based on the content of your e-mail messages. Google says that no human actually reads your Gmail, yet we find it uncanny to see paid suggestions for investment, travel, medicine, and more next to inbound messages about the same subjects.


Animated banner ads mar the appearance of Windows Live Mail.

Organizing content

By allowing you to drag and drop messages into folders, Yahoo and Windows Live spare you the manual labor of using a tiny check box to move content around. But Yahoo and Microsoft Live both display mail within a list of noncollapsible folders, which can get a bit unwieldy over time.

On the other hand, Gmail lets you organize content by tagging it with Labels; further, you can collapse the list of Labels along the left edge of the screen at any time. Gmail’s filtering options go one step further than its rivals, letting you designate messages for an automatic Label or Star or to be archived, forwarded, or deleted. We set similar filters within Yahoo Mail, yet it failed to route messages from family members into the Family folder we’d designated.

If you’re unlikely to organize your e-mail into labels or folders, you’ll be at the mercy of built-in search tools to retrieve a must-have message. Yahoo Mail and Gmail not only let you search through messages, you can also look within attachments; Windows Live Mail sifts only through message text.

Finally, if you never delete e-mail, you’ll appreciate that Gmail gives you a whopping 2.65GB of storage. Windows Live Mail comes a close second, offering 2GB, with Yahoo Mail trailing at a meager 1GB. Windows Live, Yahoo and Gmail will keep your saved messages indefinitely.


Windows Live Mail warns you of potential phishing threats in a clearly labeled banner atop each message.

Security

If spam is the scourge of your e-mail, then you’ll want to wipe it from your in-box. So far we prefer Windows Live Mail’s approach to spam and other threats. It displays a banner atop every message that either allows you to accept or reject a sender and further warns you of potential phishing scams based on an analysis of the e-mail’s sender address. Gmail and Yahoo Mail both offer spam and virus filters, but neither make your options so obvious.

Services integration

Yahoo, Microsoft and Google all connect their e-mail apps to their own IM, calendars, and other tools to keep you from clicking elsewhere. Yahoo and Microsoft’s e-mail betas offer contact sharing and instant links to their instant messaging and calendar apps. But Gmail provides the most sophisticated cross-integration; for example, the Google Talk beta IM client allows you to chat within a Gmail page and view transcripts of sessions there. Beyond that, Gmail’s natural-language capabilities flag potential appointments for scheduling on the Google Calendar beta and display a Google Maps link whenever it recognizes an address.

Yahoo Mail is the only one of these three e-mail services that lets you read lots of news via RSS feeds alongside your in-box.

All three e-mail services include hand-picked RSS feeds, but here Yahoo has made the most progress. Yahoo Mail organizes your newsfeeds into folders below your in-box, similar to the way RSS reader NewsGator works within Outlook. We like that you can collapse or expand the Yahoo RSS folder and view a headline and story summary or a full blog post without jumping to another page or opening another browser window. Gmail’s Web Clips component displays a single story from an RSS or Atom feed above your in-box, but clicking it opens a new browser window. Yet unlike Yahoo Mail, Gmail lets you search by topic to add new feeds. Microsoft is planning to incorporate RSS feeds into Windows Live Mail, but its beta currently lacks an RSS reader.

Formatting

All three rivals let you format text and select from multiple font styles when composing a message, but Gmail doesn’t allow you to add cute emoticons or change backgrounds as do its two rivals. If you want your e-mail to look professional, only Gmail’s spelling checker works in Firefox and Mozilla browsers at this point.

Gmail connects you to Google’s other services better than Yahoo and Microsoft do. Here, a friend sent us an apartment listing via e-mail, and Gmail flagged the text so that we could click to the location on Google Maps or schedule the open house on our Google Calendar.

Conclusion

If you’re a longtime user of Yahoo or Hotmail, these upgrades may seem heaven-sent and intuitive. This is especially true if you’re already accustomed to Outlook or Eudora’s multipane layouts, which let you organize messages by dragging and dropping them into folders. But all this dragging and dropping seems primitive next to Gmail’s automated labeling options. We give the Web 2.0 edge to Gmail for thinking outside the box. Gmail’s integration with Google Calendar, Chat, and Maps feels logical and not forced, and if there have to be ads on the page, we prefer Google’s text messages off to the side over banner ads any day. Furthermore, true to the Web 2.0 spirit of sharing, Gmail’s open code enables devotees to hack new features. So if Gmail’s future-forwardness motivates you to give it a spin, you can always import contacts to Gmail from a less compelling e-mail service.


Read a detailed comparison chart of the features

BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP

User-Generated Content Is Called “Priceless,” Yet Many Don’t Back Up Data

http://www.ehomeupgrade.com/entry/2537/user-generated_content_is

We live in a world of increasingly ubiquitous digital content, and we enjoy and share it via a broad number of in-home and portable devices. Often this content is self-generated or created by our friends and family, including personal photos and other media files that are irreplaceable. Yet nearly half of adult U.S. computer users who have digital content stored on their computer run the risk of losing their digital files forever because they don’t back them up to external devices or media, according to a new U.S. adult consumer survey of computer users, sponsored by Maxtor Corporation, the consumer storage innovator.

The poll of 2,604 U.S. adult computer users conducted by Harris Interactive® in early May, finds that based on the six types of digital data and personal files listed in the survey, personal photos are the most valued type of digital content (32 percent), followed by written documents (22 percent) and financial/business records (14 percent). Nearly one third of those polled who have digital content stored on their computer (33 percent) consider their digital content to be “priceless,” but nearly half of them (46 percent) never make backup copies of their data to external devices or media.

The risk of loss increases as the volume of digital content grows, and the new poll shows widespread use of multiple computing and media devices today. The majority of U.S. adult computer users (72 percent) now own digital still or video cameras, and nearly half of them (45 percent) own or use two or more desktop or laptop computers in their homes. The vast majority of those polled (75 percent) store digital photos on their laptops, desktops or other portable computing devices, and nearly one third (30 percent) have 200 or more digital photos stored.

The top method for sharing digital photos with friends, family or co-workers is via email, and over a third of U.S. adult computer users who share digital photos (38 percent) now do so by posting or uploading them to a website. Half of them (50 percent) print out the photos to share with others.

“Educating consumers and small business owners about the importance of backing up their valuable digital content has become a top priority for Maxtor,” said Stacey Lund, vice president of marketing, Maxtor Branded Products Group. “As digital media continues to explode, and the complexity of managing that content across multiple devices increases, we’ve focused on making it nearly effortless to automatically protect and manage files. Why gamble with your digital life?”

Nearly half of respondents (43 percent) have lost important data or digital files stored on computers due to a virus, hardware or software malfunction, or some other reason. When asked to put a price tag on their digital content, including the time it would take to recreate that content if it was lost, more than half (55 percent) of U.S. adult computer users would consider this an investment worth more than $1,000.

The most frequently cited reason by those who said they never back up their data is that they are not sure how to do it or that backup is too technical (cited by 35 percent). Twenty-nine percent said they don’t think it’s important enough to worry about, 14 percent think it takes too much time, and 11 percent don’t back up because they believe that backup devices and services are too costly. Among the survey respondents who said they never back up their data, 11 percent said they never knew they had to do it.

“With today’s affordable, intuitive consumer and small business storage and backup solutions such as our Maxtor OneTouch™ line or the Maxtor Shared Storage™ family of products, many of the behaviors and fears uncovered in our latest national survey can be easily remedied,” continued Lund. “As the consumer backup industry leader, our goal is to educate our customers before their priceless data is lost.”

As part of its ongoing consumer education campaign, Maxtor is sponsoring its 2nd annual Backup Awareness Month (www.backupawareness.com) in the U.S. during June 2006. Through a broad array of special events and marketing programs, Maxtor is promoting a five-step “best practices” program for data protection:

1. Develop a backup schedule. Back up data daily or at minimum weekly.
2. Back up everything. Today, users can easily backup all of their computer hard drive data. There’s no need to spend time sorting through every file or folder. Invest in a storage solution that’s twice the size of your internal hard drive to give your system room to grow.
3. Do it automatically - set it and forget it. Use a solution that’s easy to set up and provides automatic backups.
4. Rotate backups, which provide added protection in case of an earthquake, fire, flood or theft. Use two drives and rotate one offsite.
5. Don’t procrastinate. Unfortunately, the need to back up data is often a lesson learned from an unfortunate experience. Don’t let it happen to you. Back up your computer and save the day!

Maxtor has also launched a new microsite (www.maxtorsolutions.com) to help a wide variety of users – from consumers to creative professionals to small business owners – to better understand and select storage solutions that are a best fit for their individual needs.

To listen to a podcast series that highlights Maxtor’s latest innovations in network storage and backup solutions, please visit PodTech.net, http://podtech.net/?cat=39.