By now everyone should be aware of “phishing” emails. These are the ones which look like they come from a bank or PayPal or Amazon or some other business and ask you to click on a link to verify details or to get more information. We all know to ignore these and never click on the links.

What would you do if you received an email to your business coming from an obvious false email address asking you to reply with personal or business details? You would ignore it just as you ignore the phishing emails apparently from Westpac or PayPal asking you to enter your account details and password.

If you take all this care with emails (and even physical mail), why would you ever answer a telephone call when the caller hides who they are? If you answer a call with Caller ID blocked and the person on the other end says they come from a bank, why would you give them identifying information without verifying who they are? Telephone and mobile numbers are easy to get, so it is very easy for someone to ring you and ask for you by name. If they then ask you to give information such as date of birth or mother’s maiden name to identify yourself you should think twice and hang up, after asking them for a real phone number that you can call back on.

Someone from a bank once told me that they block Caller ID because if they displayed the bank’s phone number then people would not answer. I asked how this was different from people not answering anonymous calls and got no sensible reply.

I no longer answer calls with Caller ID blocked. The “I’m not here” message people hear when I don’t answer my mobile phone tells them this. I pay money to Telstra each month to have Caller ID displayed on my home phone so I can let callers showing “Private Number” ring out without being answered. Yes there are some legitimate reasons for blocking caller identification. I have friends and relatives who work in law enforcement, for example, and there are good reasons why they might need to have silent numbers or protect where they are calling from, but they know how to get in touch with me if they really need to.

I recommend this policy to everyone. Don’t ever answer anonymous telephone calls, and if you accidentally do, do not provide the person on the other end with any information that they don’t already have. I’ve distributed a lot of business cards over the years but none of them have on them the sort of information I’ve been asked to provide to people who just happen to say they work for some organisation I might have done business with. And there is a reason that the date of birth in my Facebook profile is incorrect.

This article is based on a presentation I gave to Penrith SWAP on August 22, 2000. Most of it is still relevant today.

I was rather disappointed that the speaker who immediately followed me used what I had said to promote a pyramid scheme set up to provide “free” web sites. It was some consolation when the promoters of the scam were later ordered by a court in the US to refund 100% of the entry fees they had charged to be part of this “free” service. Australian victims received their compensation through a fund managed by the ACCC.

Anyone who has ever worked in sales or marketing or who has done any formal management studies will be familiar with the idea of the “Four Ps of Marketing” – place, product, price and promotion. In the new paradigm (there’s another “P” word) of marketing on the Internet not only do the traditional “Ps” change meaning, but a whole new set of “Ps” gets added to the mix. We are going to look here at the changes in the old meanings and how the new “Ps” change what we used to do into what we need to do now.

Place

“Place” is where the customer does business with you. This is not necessarily the same as the place you do business. You can have offices, warehouses, factories and all sorts of other locations, but what matters to the customer is where they have to go to trade with you. In the old tradition “place” was the shop or the office or the franchise outlet. It was physical and it cost you money to be there. In the Internet economy, “place” is in all those millions of computers which have access to the Internet. You still need the factories and the warehouses and the back office accommodation, but the transactions can now happen wherever the customers are and you don’t have to be there except in electronic form.

Product

In the real world outside pyramid selling and other kinds of fraud, you have to have a product of some kind before you can have a business. Nothing about this changes if you move your business into the Internet age. Unfortunately, most of the talk about internet commerce (or “e-commerce”) has concentrated on selling across the ‘net as if this was the only use of the technology for business. Whatever your product, you can still use the Internet to help your business find new customers and work better with the ones you already have. Some products lend themselves very well to direct sale across the Internet because the product can be delivered electronically. The most successful at this have been software and, alas, pornography, and music (as electronic files, not on CDs) is about to boom. Other things that sell well are commodity items where the customers know what they are getting because it is the same everywhere – books, CDs, even cars. Services are a bit harder to sell and things where the heart rules the head, like buying your dream home, can be difficult too, but changing technology has a way of making difficult things come true.

Price

Using the Internet changes nothing about the rules of pricing. You still go broke selling things at below cost, you still go broke selling nothing because it is too dear, there is still a market-clearing price where everything gets sold and everyone is happy (or so the economists say). The old adage that you can have any two of price, quality and service still applies. Certainly, you may be able to sell things across the ‘net at a lower price because your fixed and variable coats are lower, and you may be able to charge a premium for better service. You still need to know what your competitors are doing and you still need to know how much a sale costs you.

Promotion

Nobody will buy from you unless they know that you exist and that you have something they want. The traditional forms of promotion meant that you went looking for customers. You told as many people as you could (or could afford to) about what you had to offer and then hoped that they would come to you. You still have to do this, and the biggest spenders on internet advertising have been the sites with the biggest sales. The opposite applies too (and it is not the same thing) – the biggest sellers have been the biggest advertisers. It is not uncommon to hear about companies spending 25% of turnover on advertising in order to build brand awareness. The thing that the Internet adds to promotion is the ability for customers to find you through non-traditional means, and the best example of this is the use of search engines. Potential customers can now find out about you by simply looking for what you have to sell. Promotion of any business on the ‘net, whether to generate online sales or just to let people know what you do, requires that you use the search engines effectively. It doesn’t happen automatically and it might cost you some money and time to get it done properly, but search engine promotion is essential.

People

The first of the new “Ps” recognises that things really are different now. There are new jobs, new skills, new things to know and new ways of doing things. What is in short supply is the people who can make it all happen. The shortage of people brings several other problems with it. One is that it is too easy for people who don’t know anything to pretend that they do. If nobody knows what a “web architect” does, then who can know if he can do it. Another problem is the old one of supply and demand – there is a shortage so prices go up and people become more expensive. Insufficient supply also allows loyalty to be optional for many people as they chase higher and higher incomes. On a really bad day, you can hire an expensive incompetent who will leave before the job is completed. At the other end, some of the work looks easy so bargains are offered by people wanting to learn on your payroll. Remember that if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Don’t despair – there are good people out there at a price you can afford. Sometimes you just have to look a bit harder to find them.

Power

In 1999 it was estimated that $20 billion worth of sales took place on the Internet in the USA. This was about 1% of total retail sales. In Australia, it is estimated that there are 5 million people with Internet access, yet total Internet sales are only about $600 million per year (which represents about 10% of sales for one of the smallest national grocery chains). There is enormous potential to reach the other 99% of potential customers, both for direct sales and to attract them to traditional businesses. The power of the Internet for marketing is its reach. 5 million users exceeds the audience for the highest-rated television program in the country and probably exceeds the number of newspaper and magazine readers. The Internet gives a business access to these people at much lower cost than traditional promotional methods and, in many cases, allows more profitable transactions with them.

Plaintiff

You may wonder why this “P” is here, but the Internet changes the legal environment in which you do business. There are new challenges to intellectual property, where competitors can steal the contents of your web sites or even the product you have for sale on those sites. It is possible for people to register domain names (the part after the “@” in an email address) which look like trade names and then either demand money to hand them over to the rightful owner or to create confusing or defamatory web sites. Laws are being brought in to control the use of domain names (much as trade marks are controlled) but these laws are new and not yet tested. Another legal aspect is that the Internet creates new ways for you to get sued. What you say in a newsletter that goes to a few hundred of your customers or in a local paper that gets read by a few thousand readers can take on a whole new life when the potential audience is in the hundreds of millions. The laws on defamation on the Internet are still being worked out, but it can be very time consuming to have to defend a legal action from France for something you said in Australia even if you have committed no crime here.

Publicity

The Internet is relatively new (at least the World Wide Web part of it is) and can still be news in itself. Just having a web presence can be a news story if you are in a business where such a thing is thought to be unusual. Another advantage for publicity is the speed with which things on a web site can be changed. If you can encourage people to keep coming back to your site, you can tell them things much more quickly (and inexpensively) than you can do through conventional means. Email mailing lists let you speak to your customers when you need to, when it is convenient for them, and at very low cost. The downside of all this publicity is that it can attract people you might not want to deal with, but nuisances can walk into your main street shop at any time as well.

Presence

On the Internet, nobody knows how big or small your business is. Just being there, however, with a good-looking web site gives you the presence of the big operators. Every new person who visits your site each day is the equivalent of a cold call or a brochure hand-out, but they take none of your time or money. Every person who comes back after the initial look comes closer to being a customer. With the right content on your site you can keep them coming back and make it easy for them to contact you. You can also build a virtual community around your business by involving your customers in promotional activities, mailing lists, newsletters, surveys, give-aways and so on at a much lower cost than the traditional ways.

To reinforce the idea that the Internet is a fundamental part of marketing your business today, just think how you would feel about a business without a telephone or fax. Certainly, there are some business which operate without these even today, but they occupy a very restricted set of niches. It has almost reached the stage where anyone without an email address is suspect, and many types of businesses already lack credibility if they don’t have at least a rudimentary web site. Of course, you can continue to operate in the traditional way, but if you keep doing the same things you will keep getting the same results. If you decide to change, you need to recognise that the rules may also change. The old “Ps” were good enough for the old days and the old ways, but the future is a foreign country and they do things different there.

The talk these days is all about being mobile. Nobody is tied to the office, we all have smartphones, tablets, laptops, and we expect to be able to do our jobs everywhere and anywhere. I gave up paying rent for an office years ago because I was rarely there and even when I was clients almost never came in. Now I have a base in my home and my office is held in a backpack and is wherever I happen to be. This is not something confined to small businesses like mine – I worked for a consulting company once that had 130 employees and only six desks in the office for us to use. We were expected to be out working with clients and the only time I spent in the office during the six years I worked there was doing things like tender and quote preparation.

ACT! is obviously a big part of what I do so I need to be able to get to what’s in my ACT! database at all times. There are several ways to do this and they fall roughly into two categories – remotely accessing the database in the office or on a server somewhere or taking the database with you.

Remote access

There are several ways to do this depending on where the database is stored, the operating system on the server, and what functionality you require when away from the office.

Remote login to the server

You might already be using this if your database is hosted on a server outside your office or in another state. In those cases you just do what you always do. If you want to set your own business up to do this you can, but be aware that you should only do it using a dedicated server version of Windows. If you use a desktop version (I use Windows 7 Ultimate in my office) you can only have one user logged in at a time and this could cause disruption and inconvenience if there is someone in the office who needs to use the computer at the same time.

Read about Remote Desktop Connection at Microsoft.

Remote control software

There are several products which allow you to remotely control a computer in your office. I use GoToMyPC because I have been using it for years and it suits what I want to do. It gives the remote user full control over the screen, keyboard and mouse and does not require either a fixed IP address or any firewall modifications.

GoToMyPC using Internet Explorer on a PC

GoToMyPC Android app on Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (iPad app looks the same)

There are other remote control systems such as LogMeIn and VNC (Google can help to find more). These all work in basically the same way, although some might require a fixed IP address (or a domain name that points to one) and firewall changes to allow the traffic to get to the relevant computer.

 ACT! for Web

This is a version of ACT! Premium that allows full access to your ACT! database by anyone with an Internet connection. The specifications say that the user must be using Internet Explorer or Firefox as their web browser, but I have had it working through Safari, Opera and Google Chrome (there might be some display problems with non-supported browsers, but most of the functionality is still there). With Internet Explorer there is full integration at the user end with Microsoft Office (including Outlook). Installation requires IIS (Internet Information Services) to be running on the server, because the database is presented as web pages. The firewall and router also need to be set up to pass traffic to the relevant computer. You will need a permanent IP address or a domain which always points to where your database is stored. Here is my router allowing ACT! for Web to get to the ACT! database in my office.

What you see at the remote end depends on what you are using to display the database. Here is ACT! for Web using Internet Explorer on a PC:

If you access ACT! for Web using a mobile device you see a version optimised for the environment. This is what comes up on my Samsung tablet, and the same appears on iPads and Apple or Android smartphones.

Warning: If you use ACT! for Web you expose your computer and database to anyone who knows your IP address or the domain name you use for access. As these details are stored in the browser cache they are available to anybody who uses the computer after you do. It is essential that all users of your database have passwords and you should implement a strong password management policy (see the Tools menu in ACT!). It is also a good idea to redirect anyone who types your IP address by itself into a browser to a web page other than the IIS default. I redirect to the front page of the Gebesse web site.

Taking ACT! with you

All of the remote access methods rely on the user having Internet or network access to wherever the database is stored. If you want your data to be available when you are offline you need to do something different.

Synchronising phones with Outlook

ACT! can synchronise contact and calendar information with Outlook, so any device which can itself synchronise with Outlook can at least have phone numbers and appointments on it. Some software from the phone maker will be required, but none of these cost money. For the iPhone synchronisation is done through iTunes, for my HTC phone with Windows Mobile 6.5 it’s Windows Mobile Device Center and for my Sony Ericsson dumbphone it’s phone management software that came with the handset. As far as I know there is nothing for Android or Blackberry, and Windows Phone 7 only synchronises through Outlook Exchange which is overkill for a small business that doesn’t use it for anything else. In all cases the phone has to be connected to a computer in the office for synchronisation and there might be some manual intervention required. As most people plug their phones in to recharge the batteries daily this not too inconvenient.

Synchronising phones using other software

Synchronisation directly between ACT! and a phone is possible and the most common program used to do this is CompanionLink. This works with iPhones, Windows phones, Blackberry and Android. The basic program requires the phone to be connected to a computer like the free programs mentioned above. The main advantage is that you no longer have to remember to go ACT! -> Outlook -> Something Else. Just plug the phone in and everything happens automatically.

Synchronising roaming phones

Sometimes it’s inconvenient to have to keep coming into the office and there are several options for keeping data on your phone up to date as you travel. Sage have recently introduced a product called Sage ACT! Connect which works with all the major phone and tablet operating systems and also allows a form of web access to your database through a PC browser. This is a new product and I have to spend some more time with it before I can recommend it to clients. There is a remote version of CompanionLink which provides the same facilities as the office-tethered version, but my preferred option is Handheld Contact. This is available for iPhone, iPad and Windows phone and an Android version has just been released. It can be configured to update and synchronise to a schedule, ensuring that anything that happens at either end is reflected at the other as soon as it is needed. Here is Handheld Contact showing the ACT! My Record on my Samsung Galaxy Tab.

All of these systems have an annual fee (because someone has to run the computers that do the synchronising) and obviously updating can only happen when an Internet connection is available. Data is held on the device in your hand so you can keep working when not connected. One drawback to all of them is that they are fussy about phone number formatting. You need to store area codes with all numbers in ACT! and make sure that the Country field is filled in correctly. (You can see on the Handheld Contact screen above that the phone numbers are displayed in an international format.)

Synchronising PC databases

If you carry a laptop or are based a long way from the office you can synchronise several ACT! databases so they all contain the same data. To do this you have to have ACT! installed on the laptop and synchronisation set up between a central database and the one on the portable machine. (Note – ACT! licensing allows for synchronising between two databases using a single licence registration.) Synchronisation can be done over a network, which works for people who regularly visit the office, or over the Internet. There are three forms of synchronisation called “Application”, Network” and “Internet”. Application synchronisation only works between computers on the same network and requires ACT! to be running with the main database open on the central machine. This is the only method available with ACT! Pro (the “standard” version) and for this reason I always recommend that the Premium version of ACT! be used by anyone planning synchronisation. The additional cost is easily justified by reduced aggravation. Network synchronisation, as the name implies, requires connection between machines on a network. (Using virtual private networks (VPN) for remote machines is not recommended because of performance issues.) Internet synchronisation happens over the Internet obviously and requires IIS to be configured as for ACT! for Web. I never recommend the Internet option (even if the client is using ACT! for Web as well) because it is possible to do network synchronisation over the Internet with a bit of planning. This reduces complexity and the chance of problems arising and still allows synchronisation to work when the machines are connected on a network. It requires a port to be opened on the router and, as for ACT! for Web, the traffic to be routed to the relevant networked computer.

The advantage of this over all the other ways of getting access to ACT! data on the move is that you are running the full version of ACT! just as the people in the office are, with all the facilities and capabilities of a connected PC. The disadvantage is that you have to have a Windows laptop and the weight, cables and battery packs that this implies. Synchronisation can be set up to run to a timetable or just be something you do manually while you check your email.

 So what does Gebesse use?

Almost everything. I synchronise my phones (both smart and dumb) using Outlook. This means I always have the latest contact details for clients and all my appointments right there in my pocket. I have Handheld Contact on my Android tablet so I can look things up and record data in the most convenient manner. I don’t carry a laptop as often as I used to (since I started using the tablet) but the database on that synchronises using network synch over the Internet. I have ACT! for Web and GoToMyPC for those times when I really need to get to the office database but I have to use someone else’s computer. I think that’s enough.

I’ve got a lot of software on my computers which I paid money for. Sometimes it was a lot of money (Adobe Master Collection, Microsoft Office, …) and sometimes it was a little bit of money (WinZip, Forte Agent, Mailwasher Pro, …). As well as those I also have a lot of software that came free with no strings attached (although sometimes a donation to the maker is requested). Here are ten products that I use all the time and which cost nothing. I have deliberately chosen ones where the free version is not crippled if a paid version is also available. Where there is a paid version I will say what it offers over the free one.

Oh, and these are not all the free programs I use, so don’t complain if I’ve left your favourite freebie out.

Smart Defrag

As you use your computer files on the hard disk gradually get broken into multiple pieces. This causes operations to slow down and also increases mechanical activity on your disk drives. Drives are very reliable these days but the less work they have to do the longer they will last. Also, as nobody has a computer that runs as fast as they would like, anything you can do to optimise performance is a good thing. This program runs in the background when the computer is otherwise idle, but can be run manually to do more comprehensive tasks.

Yes, Windows has its own defragmenter but it’s slow, tedious and does less than Smart Defrag.

There is no paid version of Smart Defrag. It is subsidised by sales of other Windows enhancement and performance tools, and small advertisements for these appear at the bottom of the screen when the program is run manually. I found a bug in it once and the suppliers worked with me to test fixes which were incorporated in the next upgrade. I’ve had worse support from people that I’ve paid money to.

Available for Windows only.
Supplied by IObit
Get it here

Spybot – Search & Destroy

Everyone likes to keep their computers free of viruses and programs and settings that can harm your system, reveal your data to others or just tell people what you are doing. I run Norton AntiVirus and Norton Utilities to protect me against these things, but I also run Spybot – Search & Destroy on a regular basis to clean up the things that the others fail to catch, and there are always a few. I should point out that this is not a criticism of the Norton products – everyone has a different schedule for updating and reporting threats, and they also all have different emphases for what they look for. Just as all antivirus programs won’t detect exactly the same threats at exactly the same time, malware detectors will also always be slightly out of phase with each other. S-S&D updates its list of threats every time it’s run. I ran it a few minutes ago and it’s checking for 825,134 possible threats or problems, so it certainly covers a wide area.

Spybot – Search & Destroy is free for private users (businesses have a range of paid options), but you are encouraged to make a donation to keep it going. It doesn’t nag, and as far as I can tell you only get asked for a donation when you download it or if you click on the “Info & License” button.

Available for Windows only
Supplied by Safer Networking
Get it here

Microsoft Security Essentials

You must have antivirus software. I will say that again – you must have antivirus software. The products from the major suppliers (Norton, Kaspersky, McAfee, Trend Micro, AVG, …) all do an excellent job but they all cost money. This free program from Microsoft does a lot of what the paid ones do and the price is right. I have a site licence for Norton AntiVirus but it doesn’t cover all the machines in my home and office. I could buy more subscriptions to Norton, but why spend money when you don’t have to? (I use Norton for historical reasons – I used to have a very close relationship with Symantec when they owned ACT!, and whilever I’m happy with the product I apply the cliched rule of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.)

Available for Windows only (obviously), and the installation checks that you have a legitimate copy of Windows.
Supplied by Microsoft
Get it here

Xenu’s Link Sleuth

If you have a web site with links to other places you need to know if all those links work, particularly if you link to places that like to reorganise occasionally. (Sage changed the links for downloading ACT! recently, so I had to adapt.) Xenu searches through your site and checks all links (including internal ones, and I’m sure that sometimes we’ve all clicked on links to other parts of web sites and been taken nowhere) and produces a report of all broken or unreachable web pages.

Warning – don’t bother with this if you are friendly with the Church of Scientology!

The program is free, but the author suggests that you donate to his favourite charity or buy some books from him.

Available for Windows only (but has been tested with Wine on various versions of Linux and also Mac OSX)
Written by Tilman Hausherr
Get it here

VLC Media Player

You want to play music and videos? Doesn’t everyone? This program works with a very wide range of media file formats and runs on everything you own. It’s free but you are encouraged to support it with a donation of $5. I did.

Available for Windows, OSX, iOS, Android, Linux, Unix and even some operating systems you’ve never heard of (or forgotten – remember OS/2?).
Supplied by VideoLAN
Get it here

Browsers

You need a browser to see pages on the world wide web. You have a choice on most operating systems and the choice generally comes down to picking one of Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari or Opera. I have all of these on my computer, and I use them to check that web pages I make work everywhere. I sometimes have more than one open at a time (such as when I want to be logged into a web site with more than one identity simultaneously). I will not get into a browser war with anyone about this – all of them work, all of them have deficiencies, all of them do some things better than others do, none of them completely complies with standards. Pages will look different in different browsers, but not different enough to make an issue about it, and if they do it’s the fault of the web designer, not the people who made the browser.

Choose whichever one you feel most comfortable with that runs on your computer, and if you have to fight with people do it over something important.

Get them at:
Internet Explorer
Firefox
Chrome
Safari
Opera

Adobe Acrobat Reader

Portable Document Format (PDF) files are everywhere, and have become sort of an industry standard. Acrobat Reader comes from Adobe, who invented the format, so you would expect that they know how to read the files. I’ve seen web sites offering such reviews as “Five free PDF readers”, but I wonder why anyone would bother to write one. Yes, Adobe, like Microsoft, is one of those companies we all love to hate, but this is a case where they probably do something better than everybody else.

Note: Acrobat Reader is not Adobe Acrobat. That is the expensive program from Adobe used to make PDF files. There are free (and possibly legal and non-copyright-infringing) alternatives to that but I don’t use any of them because Acrobat came in my copy of Adobe Master Collection.

Available for Windows, OSX, Linux, Android and iOS
Supplied by Adobe
Get it here

Amazon Kindle

This is software from Amazon which allows you to read Kindle formatted electronic books. It is free because Amazon want you to buy electronic books from them. As far as I can tell you can read books on your PC, Mac or tablet that you have bought for your hardware Kindle device and vice versa.

Available for Windows, OSX, iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry and (for the few that own one of the rare HP tablets) WebOS
Supplied by Amazon
Get it here

Dropbox/SkyDrive

If you have several devices or computers, Dropbox allows you to share files between them. It also allows you access to files stored in Dropbox from any web browser. The free version gives you 2 gigabytes of space on Dropbox’s servers, but you can increase this by getting other people to sign up. If you want more than 2 gigabytes you have to pay, but apart from storage space there is no difference between the free and paid offerings. I’m happy with the free version, but I would probably pay if I felt the need to use it more.

I also have Microsoft SkyDrive, and because I’ve been a user for some time Microsoft have given me 25 gigabytes of storage (new users get 7Gb). The only problem I have with it is that it’s a bit clumsy to use it with my Android tablet.  I’ve been told that this is being fixed.

Both programs work in basically the same way. You have a folder on your desktop and you copy files to it. Those files are then automatically uploaded to the supplier’s servers and downloaded to any of your computers that happen to be turned on. Recognising that for many people the data allowance on their phone plans is either too little or too expensive you have to explicitly ask to download files to your phone or tablet.

Dropbox available for Windows, OSX, iOS, Android, Linux and Blackberry
SkyDrive available for Windows, Windows Phone 7, OSX, iOS and Android
Get Dropbox here
Get SkyDrive here

Evernote

This is a note-taking program, but you can also upload pictures and other files. It’s not meant to compete with file-sharing systems like Dropbox or SkyDrive, but as the name suggests is something to make it easy to remember things. I’ve sat in conferences taking notes on my Samsung tablet knowing that everything I’ve recorded will be on my computer when I get back to the office or on my laptop back at the hotel five minutes after I connect to the Internet. There is a paid Premium version, but this would mainly be useful for people who spend all their time travelling and need to collaborate with someone else. You don’t need to be connected to the Internet to use it and it will synchronise as soon as it detects a connection.

Available for, as Evernote says: “nearly every computer, phone and mobile device out there”
Supplied by Evernote
Get it here

I recently had what I think is the very first Blue Screen of Death I’ve seen since I started using Windows 7. It was not caused by the operating system, but seemed to result from a problem with the computer’s video hardware. Whatever the fault was, it caused the computer to reboot without warning. As I had several programs running at the time there was the real possibility that one of them had been writing to a hard disk at the instant of failure so checking disk integrity was called for. Windows can’t check the boot disk while the system is running (because there are always programs and services running with open files), so when you ask for a check you get this:

The next time you start the computer it checks and repairs the disk before Windows starts. The trap here is that a 500 gigabyte disk with more than half a million files on it takes a long time, so you end up looking at a screen like this for a couple of hours.

When I finally regained productivity I thought it might be possible to find something that would do the job in less time. I have disks from Seagate and Western Digital, so they looked like the obvious places to get what I wanted. Both have free disk inspection and repair software, and here are the stories.

Seagate SeaTools

Seagate have a very attractive web site with a nicely understated design. I found the relevant page and after agreeing to Seagate’s user agreement I was told that I could download the software. The only problem was that there was no link on the page to actually start the download. Nowhere. I even looked at the page source to see if I could locate the link, but it was what could politely be called a dog’s breakfast. Eventually I located a link at download.com and installed it.

The first thing that appeared when I started the program was this informative screen:

Almost immediately followed by:

Remarkably, clicking on the Cancel button did nothing except make the dialog box go away. I was then able to accept the mystery box and the program started.

Do you notice how there is no serial number or firmware revision for the last disk in the list? They were there the last time I ran this program. And you know how Windows uses drive letters? Reading from the top, the drive letters are C:, D:, W:, F:. That makes sense – who cares about alphabetical order.

When you click on a disk in the list the “Basic Tests” icon lights up, and when you click on that you get:

But what do those options mean? Let’s click on “Help”.

This is really starting to make me feel confident. I tried “Short Drive Self Test” on one drive but cancelled it after a very long period of inactivity. I then tried “Short Generic” and it ran in a few minutes but didn’t tell me anything other than it had finished. I have no idea how to actually run a test that will fix errors, and I don’t think I want to try. My data is too important.

And one last thing. You can see above that there is a “System Tools” icon. The first option this gives is to check the status of your antivirus software.

I could have sworn that I renewed my licence for Norton AntiVirus just a few days ago. Perhaps I should check.

Seagate SeaTools appears to have no use at all except to show that bad programming isn’t confined to amateurs and small companies that don’t have an international presence and a reputation for manufacturing high quality electronic components.

I just thought – who writes the drivers and firmware for Seagate disk drives? Perhaps I should be worried.

Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics

At least I was able to get this from the Western Digital web site, so it is already ahead of the Seagate product. This is what you see when you run the program:

Again the drives are listed in C:, D:, W:, F: in the top panel, although they are listed alphabetically in the bottom panel. Why this should be so is a mystery. You might notice that the two fixed drives have a S.M.A.R.T. status of “Not available”, but the two USB external drives have passed the test. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology is a system developed by major disk drive manufacturers to improve reliability.) Remember this set of options for the Seagate test program?

The “S.M.A.R.T.” option only appears when one of the internal drives are selected, and when you run the test you see:

So the Western Digital program thinks that the USB drives have S.M.A.R.T. capability and the internal drives don’t and the Seagate program thinks the opposite. (And did you notice that the Serial Number and Firmware Revision for drive F: have come back?) The WD program returned what appeared to be valid S.M.A.R.T. configurations for both USB drives, but somehow I don’t feel inclined to believe it.

When selecting the tests to run on a drive the following box appears:

At least the Help worked so I could find out how what the options meant, but the Western Digital program inspires no confidence. When repairing disks it stops on every error and if the user says “Fix that” it simply overwrites the damaged bits with zeros, thus destroying damaged files completely. This is not what the user really wants. The “Write zeros” option (which overwrites everything on the drive) might be useful if a drive is to be scrapped, but there are better ways of making a drive unreadable.

The verdict.

Neither program is of any use if you want to detect and correct errors on your hard disks. Neither of them do anything beyond scanning the surface and any repair is rudimentary and possibly disastrous. I’ve added their scores together and the total is zero stars.

It looks like I’m back to Chkdsk. I’ll just have to keep some books handy to read while it does its work.

In case anybody cares:

Seagate web site

Western Digital web site

I have this excellent digital camera. Sure, it’s not your top-of-the-range professional Nikon or Canon DSLR with all the lens options, but it does what I want it for. The only failing it had for me was getting the photographs out to somewhere where I could use them. I had the choice of plugging it into my computer with a USB cable (which was one specific to the camera and not like any of the other standard cables lying around) or taking the SD card out, finding and plugging in the SD card reader for my computer. I then had to manually copy the pictures to wherever I wanted them and remember to delete them from the SD card so that it didn’t get full. I carried a spare SD card just in case.

I thought there had to be a better way to manage all this, and I found it. The product is an Eye-Fi SD card which incorporates an 802.11n WiFi network adapter. Now all I have to do is move the camera within range of my home or office network and any pictures I have taken since the last time I did this are automatically copied from the camera onto the computer. The four gigabyte capacity of the card might look a little low (I was using 16Gb cards before) but the system automatically deletes the oldest pictures when it needs more room. (Only pictures that have been transferred to the computer are deleted.) I’ve got mine set to start clearing when it is 50% full, but that still leaves me room for many hundreds of photos before I have to go back to the office. (Yes, I still carry a spare SD card just in case.) Some versions of the card can hold 8Gb.

The Eye-Fi software can automatically upload your pictures to image sharing services like Flickr, Picasa or Facebook and many others. Installation requires Windows (XP SP3 onwards) or Mac OSX 10.5 or 10.6. The cards can also connect to iOS and Android phones and tablets.

Price is very reasonable. The one I bought is the cheapest in the range and cost about the same as two sets of lithium batteries for the camera. The full range and prices can be found at the Eye-Fi web site, but you might be able to get even better pricing at eBay or Amazon. (Check with the Eye-Fi site before you buy, as you might not get the bargain elsewhere that you think you’re getting. As I am writing this the Connect X2 card is $39.99 from Eye-Fi but there is one selling on eBay for $50.)

Verdict: For the price of eight camera batteries or a decent restaurant meal I save an enormous amount of time and frustration. The card works transparently and I forget it’s in the camera until I see the thumbnails appear in the bottom right hand corner of my monitor as the pictures get transferred to the computer. Five stars.

Eye-Fi web site

You’ve got a wireless network in your home or office. How do you make sure that the information you have on the network is safe from people who should not have access to it and that others can’t use your network for purposes that you might not like?

These are two different problems and have different solutions.

The first one is actually the easier to manage. Make sure that all the computers on the network have secure passwords on all user accounts, allow files to be shared only with known users, and turn off file sharing on all computers that don’t need to share anything with other machines. These are not just rules for wireless networks – you should do all of these even if all the machines are connected by cables.

The second problem is a bit more complicated to fix, but once it’s fixed it stays fixed. I should also note that the suggestions below for securing the network solve the first problem too, but you should still do everything mentioned above.

Why should you worry if you have all the sharing locked down and nobody can get access to your data? Two important reasons – with an unsecured network intruders can use your data allowance to download files or play online games, leaving you with a large monthly bill or slowed access for exceeding your monthly gigabytes (and if they download illegal material it will be your IP address that gets identified), and they can use your network to send data out, again identifying your IP address as a possible source of illegal material. There is also the possibility that someone could monitor the wireless traffic to see what is being transmitted, but this requires a level of sophistication which is beyond the average person who might want to spy on a home of small business network. Even so, it is easy enough to prevent.

So here are the steps you need to take to secure your network. (I use Netgear routers, but whichever brand you have the principles are the same and you should be able to do all of these things. Instructions will be in the manual, but if in doubt ask whoever you buy it from to explain its workings. If they can’t do that, shop elsewhere.) The instructions that came with your router will tell you how to access its setup; in my case I use any web browser to connect to the IP address “192.168.0.1″. (You can change this if you want to, but just remember to write down the new address or you will have to reset the router to factory specifications and start again.)

1. Change the SSID.

SSID (Service Set Identifier) is the network name that the router uses to tell the world it exists. Usually this will be the make and model of the router (“Netgear XC123″, “Dlink ABCD”, …) or the name of the ISP that provided it (“Bigpond-99999″). Displaying the device name is an invitation to people to try to attack you (because factory default router login details are freely available) and who your ISP is is nobody’s business but yours. The SSID can be anything you like but be aware that your neighbours will be able to see it so don’t make it too offensive. You can ask the router to keep it a secret but then you have to remember it when you try to connect to it with any of your computers, phones, tablets etc.

2. Change the login password.

I shouldn’t really need to say this, but I will. If you don’t change the password, anyone who can identify your make and model of router can access it and make any changes they like. The password my router came with was “password”. It is not that now.

3. Turn on encryption.

I’ve said that it’s unlikely that anyone will monitor what goes over the airwaves on your network, but why leave the possibility open? Your router will offer various level of encryption, but you should choose at least WPA (WiFi-Protected Access) and preferably WPA2. Choose the highest level that the router offers, and then set your network card in your computer to the same. If your network card won’t do WPA2 and you lose connection, reset the router to factory settings (there will probably be a button on the device to do that) and start again. You should then immediately plan to upgrade your network adapter to something more modern.

If in doubt, you might be able to set the router to work with both WPA and WPA2. You might have to do this if you have some older devices that can’t use WPA2 and can’t be upgraded. For example, my HTC smartphone is two years old and only works with WPA, but my Samsung Galaxy Tab is happy with WPA2.

4. Tell the router which devices can connect.

This is the way to get real security. Every network connector in the world has a unique identifier called a MAC address (Media Access Control). There are various ways of finding out what the MAC address is, but generally with a computer you can find somewhere in the network configuration that will tell you. For phones and games consoles there will be a menu item that leads you to it. If all else fails, read the manual.

For good security, tell your router the MAC addresses that are allowed to connect to it. How you get to this option varies between devices, but for my Netgear it goes through this button on the “Wireless Settings” page.

This is the list of devices that can connect to my router. As well as the three fixed computers and two portables that are around my home and office there are a couple of smartphones, some USB network adaptors, the Samsung Galaxy Tab, the network card in my digital camera and the Wii games console in the living room. Anything not in this list can see my network but can’t connect to it, even if the user is lucky enough to guess my WPA2 encryption key.

Important warning, and I do mean important – set up the MAC address for the computer you are using to configure the router first and make sure you enter it correctly. If you get it wrong you will be disconnected from the router and it will be time for a factory reset and starting again.

5. Block UPnP

There is a system called “Universal Plug and Play” which allows networked devices to be discovered and used by other people on the network. If you expose this capability to the world you run the risk of people doing things you might not like, such as taking over printers or even computers. You don’t need it, so you should not allow anyone to use it to access your network.

 6. Back up the router settings

It would be a pity to go through all the above and then lose everything because something went wrong and you had to reset the router. Just remember to note where you save the backup file (and don’t store it on a computer that you can’t reach without a network connection).

When you’ve done all that you should be able to sleep well, knowing that if anyone wants to do bad things with your network they will have to work very hard indeed.

There are a lot more settings and ways of configuring your router, but this article is about security. The rest can be left for another time.

A new marketing paradigm is here, from the oldest science of all – mathematics. It is “Conical Marketing” and it is based on conic sections. These are the shapes formed when a cone is cut in different directions. The shapes are the circle, ellipse, parabola, hyperbola and the triangle. I want to share this vision of the future with you, so we can all achieve our dreams.

There have been other attempts to base marketing and distribution on geometric shapes. One was “pyramid selling”, where people were led to believe that unlimited wealth could be achieved if enough people could be brought into a network. You didn’t have to be a salesperson, because the scheme would work if everyone in the network just bought for their own consumption. Pyramid selling is illegal in Australia so nobody does it any more. Some people appear to be doing it, but they must be doing something else.

The Circle

When you look at something from above, the shape you see is called “the plan”. The plan section of a cone is a circle. A major part of conical marketing is the process of “showing the plan”. Also, the circle is used to draw diagrams on a whiteboard or butcher’s paper showing how the plan has made many people rich (some will even be cruising The Bahamas right now).

The Parabola

This shape, with its single focus point, tells us how we must concentrate on the most important goal in life – getting rich so we can achieve our dreams. It is the shape of a headlight reflector, to remind us that the future belongs only to those who can see what’s ahead. If you roll a parabola along a line, its focus follows a curve called a “catenary”. This comes from the Greek for “chain”, a reminder of another geometric sales pitch – rectangular marketing, sometimes called a chain letter. The catenary is the curve across a yacht sail, another reminder of how those up the chain are cruising The Bahamas even as we speak.

The Hyperbola

A feature of a hyperbola is that the curve approaches but never quite touches a pair of lines. This is to remind us that when presenting the plan there are matters which must never be revealed, no matter how closely we are questioned. The name also reminds us of the word “hyperbole”, which is a gentle and harmless stretching of the truth whenever necessary.

The Ellipse

The two focus points of the ellipse represent the dream and the vehicle for achieving that dream. Only if both are placed correctly and our lives structured correctly can the path between them be optimised. To speak elliptically is to talk around the point, a technique essential for showing the plan. Those three dots (…) called an “ellipsis” remind us that something can, and often should, be left out of even the best story. The other name for an ellipse is an oval, from the Latin for egg. This reminds us of the nest egg which will give us the lifestyle we deserve.

The Triangle

The arrowhead shape reminds us that goals and riches are only achieved by those with direction. The triangle illustrates how wealth flows up to those few who work hard to build a broad foundation. Also we are reminded of the Bermuda Triangle, a place where things disappear (like friends, family, self-respect, dreams), and Bermuda is near The Bahamas, scene of much sailing by successful personal business owners.

So what are you doing Thursday night? Nothing? Great, I’ve got a business idea you just have to look at. It’s something else. 8 o’clock, OK? I can’t promise you anything, but it’s a way to make a lot of money. You need to see the whole thing, and your wife needs to be there too. It’s too important for her to miss. See you Thursday. Gotta go.

[This article appeared in The Sydney Business Review on 15 August, 1995. A representative of one of the motivational organisations managing the recruitment and manipulation of participants in a very well-known scheme was quite annoyed at me and at the paper for publishing it. They were particularly concerned about the final paragraph which was an exact quote from the instruction manual for new recruits to the scheme they were running. It was the script for contacting friends to invite them to a sales presentation. They complained to the paper but didn't bother talking to me about it even though we both attended the same business functions, but I would expect nothing more from a crook whose business was building up people's dreams only to steal them away.]

Everyone hates paying tax. Of course, we like roads, bridges, railways, schools, hospitals, universities, armies, police, national parks, pensions, drought and flood relief (sometimes both at the same time), fire services and all the other things that taxes pay for. It’s just the tax we hate, and with the end of June coming up fast it’s time to do something positive to minimise your pain. As a service, I have gathered advice from various reputable sources into the one place so that you don’t have to shop around.

First up, negative gear into property. What happens here is you borrow money to buy an investment property, but you have to be sure that the rental income is less than the interest you have to pay to the bank. This way, more goes out than comes in. This may sound crazy, but the losses are deductible, so you save tax. The more you lose, the more tax you save. Simple, isn’t it?

Next, negative gear into shares. You borrow money to buy shares, but the dividends have to be less than the interest. This is much simpler than property as no lawyers are required, but as their fees are deductible as well as the interest, the tax savings might not be as good because you spend less. If the shares fall in value, you may be able to save more tax by selling them at a loss.

For the brave, who don’t mind high risk for high returns, we can negative gear into futures contracts. Here the interest rates are higher and often there are no returns (don’t tell the tax man or he may not allow the deduction). In fact there is the prospect of large losses which can be used to save more tax in the future.

The problem with all these is that the deductions don’t start flowing until the losses come in. This can be fixed simply, by paying the interest in advance. This is how it works. You borrow, say, $100,000 from someone. You look for a high interest rate (to maximise deductions), so assume 20% per year. You pay the first year’s interest before the 30th of June. This gives you $20,000 deduction for this financial year. Easy. Then you invest $80,000, which will bring in less than the full $100,000 would so your losses will be even greater next year. An even bigger deduction could be gained for a business by buying $80,000 worth of, say, copy paper and claiming the full $100,000 this year. It just gets better, doesn’t it?

All of these are a bit complicated and there is not much time to arrange loans, so I have decided to make a sacrifice on your behalf by volunteering to pay your tax for you. All you have to do is to send me a cheque for the estimated taxable income of your business. Please attach a business card or “with compliments” slip. I will send you an invoice, dated before June 30th and marked paid , as soon as the cheque has cleared. Your business will not have to pay any tax, and you will have the added benefit of not having to worry about accounting for dividend imputation.

I had a terrific investment a few years ago in an avocado plantation combined with prawn aquaculture. Luckily, the project failed because groundwater flooded the shaft in our thousand island dressing mine. We made a bundle on the tax losses, but not as much as we made on the film Seafood Salad Days, which lost millions.

I’ve been using smartphones almost since they were invented, which happens to be before the word was invented. I suppose the first real one I had was a Palm Treo 750 which allowed me to replace my PDA (remember them?) and my mobile phone with a single device. It did everything I wanted at the time – rang people, maintained my diary and contact list, let me interact with Twitter and Facebook once they appeared (with programs, before “programs” became “apps”), played music, did WiFi (if you bought the aerial to stick in the side), displayed web sites badly, took photographs, worked on even the weakest signal. The battery could stand up to at least two days use without needing a recharge and you could drop the thing without doing much more than putting a scratch on it. It had a real keyboard.

My first one was stolen a few weeks after I got it so I bought one new off eBay for $500, which was many dollars less than the price being charged in shops and by telcos for the units.

When bigger screens started appearing I thought about replacing it. The obvious choice seemed to be the Palm Pre, which managed to combine a reasonably sized screen with a slide-out keyboard while still being thin enough to get your hand around. Yes, I considered a BlackBerry but at the time they seemed to be marketed as an email delivery system and screen wasn’t much bigger than the one on the Treo. I had been using Palm devices since forever so I decided I would hang out until the Pre became available; reviews were universally favourable in overseas publications and I wasn’t worried about build quality (I had never had any problem with a Palm device ever).

Then Palm imploded. They pulled out of the Australian market completely and shortly after were taken over and destroyed by Hewlett Packard. (Has any IT company gone from excellence to incompetence as completely and as quickly as HP has in the last few years?)

The options for me seemed to be iPhone or iPhone (Android was in its infancy, where some say it still is), but then HTC appeared with the biggest screen and the thinnest body around. As I was already set up to work with a Windows phone because of the Treo it was a plus that the HTC HD2 came with Windows Mobile, so getting it all working with my PC software should be relatively easy. (Had I got the Palm Pre I would have had the same conversion effort as if I had bought an iPhone or an Android. Inertia is a powerful force.)

I wasn’t the only person who thought the same way and two days after the HTC HD2 had been released I had to try two different Telstra shops before I could get one and even then the salesman had to fiddle the type of deal to get me one at the right price. In both shops the salesmen told me that they had been hanging out for the Palm Pre and it had been mentioned by several customers.

At first I wasn’t too fond of the HTC Sense user interface that HTC put over the top of Windows (they do the same thing with their Android phones) but eventually I got used to it. Battery life was disastrous, but HTC weren’t alone in that. (Friends with iPhones used to ridicule us HTC owners for always carrying a spare battery. The laughter usually stopped when their phones went flat ten minutes later and we said “Why don’t you just put your spare battery in?”.) The camera had a lot more megapixels than the Treo but it was difficult to use with one hand; the position of the button to answer calls made it easy to drop the phone and the “slide-to-answer” feature was a bit clumsy also. All of these are what are known as “first world problems”. It was and is a very good phone indeed. I found ways around the battery life problem (but I still carry an emergency charger) and the rest I just learned to live with.

The improvements over my previous phone made the change worthwhile. I soon got used to a touchscreen without a stylus, the ability to have it become a WiFi access point made travelling with a computer more pleasant, I could look at web sites without needing a magnifying glass, and it told me what the weather was so I didn’t need to look out the window. All the things I did on the Treo now worked faster and there was a wider range of add-on programs, although I neither needed nor wanted more than a handful.

Fast forward a couple of years. Smartphones have improved, with excellent models from Apple, Samsung and HTC, but the real buzz is tablets. Once the dust settled in the courts Samsung had an excellent competitor for the iPad in the stores, and Asus, Toshiba, Acer and others were nipping around the edges. I looked at my Lenovo netbook that I had been carrying around (together with its charger, power cord and 3G mobile broadband dongle) and decided it was time for an update.  An adjustment of phone plans saw me with a Samsung Tab 10.1 and a phone plan with very little data provision. (The data allowance for the Samsung was twice what I had on the phone. Dropping the phone to a lower plan almost paid for the Samsung and its plan.) The Samsung Tab does everything that I used to do with the phone (except make phone calls) and does it quicker on a screen more than four times as big.

An obvious question I’m asked about ACT! all the time is how does it interact with smartphones. I can offer several solutions depending on the particular phone, with some being easier than others to integrate. Something that I had done in the past came back to me – I had used the netbook with its slow processor to demonstrate that ACT! could run on underpowered machines, so perhaps I could do something similar with a phone that’s not as smart as the ones that people are carrying around. If contact and diary can be synchronised to a phone with primitive capability then it would be obviously no problem doing it to one of the latest pocket microcomputers. Now that I didn’t need the HTC for anything except phone calls I could address its greatest fault (one shared with other smartphones) – it’s too big to put in your pants pockets if you want to be able to sit down comfortably without breaking it. A smaller handset would be ideal.

Smartphones cost big dollars. they are complex devices with lots of computer power and memory built into them. My new phone is a Sony Ericsson Cedar. The model has been discontinued (the manufacturer’s name tells you that) and so I was able to pick up a brand new one for $25. Add a USB cable (the same one used for connecting the HTC to my computer) and a free software download and the thing is synchronising contacts and diary like a bought one. The only problems are that I have to ask it to show me my appointments (the HTC put today’s diary on the front screen) and I have to get used to using the abc-def phone style keyboard for text messages instead of a qwerty one, but I used a Nokia (remember them?) for a lot of years and I’m sure the skills will come back. I don’t send a lot of text messages anyway. There’s those first world problems again. Oh, and I have to stop tapping the screen and expecting it to do something.

Call me Ned Ludd, but my new phone rings people up and tells me when people are ringing me. It’s light and it fits in my pockets really well, and the battery lasts three days at least (but I still have the emergency charger and it fits perfectly). Get it talking by Bluetooth to the hands-free unit in my car and electronic life couldn’t be better.