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In last night’s IS 6100 lecture, I mentioned Google Apps. This is a free web-based application suite that offers email, calendar, contacts, word processing and spreadsheet functions. No software installation is required, other than a Web browser like Firefox or Internet Explorer.

According to this Yahoo article and this Google site, Google will offer a business version of this suite for US$50 per seat per year. This version includes customization, support for specific domain names in e-mail addresses, and 10 GB of hosted storage per seat.

Google is aiming squarely at Microsoft Office, which is a major cash cow for Microsoft. Businesses that don’t need a full office suite on every employee’s hard drive can save money by using Google’s web-based apps. Google updates its software on its own servers, as it is operating as an application service provider (ASP), so Microsoft Update isn’t needed to patch the apps.

Google also offers an education version for universities. A university like HPU could offer students Gmail with an hpu.edu e-mail address. Google Apps allows users to share and edit DOC and XLS files, which would be very handy for group projects.

Finally, there are various free office suites available, including OpenOffice. Some of these require installation to a hard drive. I prefer web-based solutions, even when they don’t support PowerPoint files.

BoingBoing has a nice article by Xeni Jardin about an Internet carrier hotel: One Wilshire in downtown Los Angeles. It’s based on a radio report Xeni prepared for NPR. She also posted a set of her pictures in Flickr, and I’ve posted an image under her Creative Commons license.
Last week I mentioned the Internet backbone. While the Internet is composed of many different connections used by many telecom companies, sometimes these companies have to link their bandwidth to share content or provide better service. It’s easier to interconnect across a room than under the sea! Among the amenities in this carrier hotel is the Meet Me Room. One Wilshire is a 30-story building that hosts collocated equipment and connections for 300 different ISPs and telecom companies including AT&T, Google, Level 3, Sprint, Time Warner, Verizon, and many other major companies.

Among other features, One Wilshire provides tenants with 100 watts of high-quality electrical power for each square foot of floor space, and the ability to provide backup power for at least 24 hours. The building has 656,000 square feet of space, so that’s a lot of power for switches, servers, and other equipment. Remember, you can’t do anything useful with a computer without the physical layer of the OSI model.
It’s interesting to note that One Wilshire was purchased in September 2001 by The Carlyle Group, the current owners of Hawaiian Telcom.

A couple of my students have asked why TurnItIn.com won’t accept their documents. Their files were written in the brand-new Microsoft Word 2007.

Students who use Office 2007 are going to encounter problems whenever they share files with students who use older software packages. As part of Office 2007, Microsoft has deployed new document formats based upon XML. In Word, this new 2007 file format has the extension .docx

TurnItIn.com has not updated their submission page to accept Word 2007 documents. One of two things is happening when TurnItIn.com receives a docx file. The site may be rejecting files when it sees the docx extension. This is an example of data validation, a task that computers perform to check hand-entered data. If you’ve miskeyed a postal address or telephone number into a web form, and received an error message, you’ve encountered data validation.

It seems more likely that TurnItIn.com’s server-based system simply can’t read the new XML format that Microsoft has used in docx files.

TurnItIn.com can easily fix this problem when they write and test a new docx filter. Because TurnItIn.com is an application service provider (ASP), it’s easy to deploy this change. TurnItIn.com doesn’t have to compile and release software for personal computers.

I’m not brave enough to try Word 2007 yet. I usually wait until Microsoft releases Service Pack 1 before I’ll try a new software version. I’ve heard reports from colleagues and friends that Word 2007 breaks macros, templates and documents that worked just fine in Word 2003.

The quick fix for Windows users is to use File, Save As and choose the Word 2003 DOC format. Upload that new DOC file to TurnItIn.com and all is well.

TurnItIn.com will also accept RTF and PDF documents.

File, Save As does have an RTF file type choice. RTF is an file format that Microsoft used in early versions of Micorsoft Word. For a simple document without graphics or macros, it should work well enough.

There are several free programs like CutePDF Writer that will allow Windows users to save documents directly to PDF format. I’ve used that program for years. Sometimes I get better results with CutePDF Writer than I do with Acrobat Professional.

Mac users can save any printable file to PDF format by opening the application’s Print dialog, pressing the PDF button in the lower left corner of the dialog box, and choosing Save as PDF…

According to yesterday’s Star-Bulletin, Sirius will start offering its satellite radio service in Honolulu. However, the service will be transmitted from downtown Honolulu using regular radio, not a satellite signal.Sirius uses terrestrial radio in several other markets, because the satellite signal doesn’t propagate well in areas with tall buildings.

Sirius programming has been available in Hawaii through online subscriptions. Of course, this doesn’t help commuters.

Because XM and Sirius satellites use signal patterns that concentrate on the continental United States, Hawaii residents had to work hard to hear satellite programming on XM or Sirius devices, even when these devices were preinstalled in new automobiles.

XM and Sirius announced their merger plan yesterday. The companies still need FCC approval, which is not a sure thing. The FCC rejected a merger attempt by EchoStar and DirecTV several years ago. Industry insiders believe that the merger may be approved if the FCC considers iTunes, HD radio, and other services as competitive rivals to satellite radio.

Traditional radio broadcasters are lining up against this merger. Companies like Clear Channel, which dominates the Honolulu radio market, do not want new competition from satellite radio. Honolulu’s radio stations, for the most part, cannot compete with several hundred specialized channels from satellites.
The merged company would also have to help current subscribers receive satellite and terrestrial radio signals from both services. XM devices are not compatible with Sirius signals, and vice versa. As the New York Times pointed out yesterday, both companies have had an intense competitive rivalry. In some cases each company may have overpaid to hire on-air personalities (Oprah Winfrey, Howard Stern, Snoop Doog) and get exclusive programming deals (MLB, NFL, Nascar, college sports). (more…)

“Flaming” is, according to this article in today’s New York Times, “thoughts expressed while sitting alone at the keyboard [that] would be put more diplomatically — or go unmentioned — face to face.”

This article is an excellent discussion of some reasons why e-mail and IM users flame each other:

• The perception that the Internet is “anonymous”
• The use of anonymous user accounts
• Lack of face-to-face contact
• Time lag between sending a message and receiving a reply

I’ve taught online courses for over a year now, and I’ve developed a new appreciation of these reasons. That’s why I do my best to respond to student e-mail within 24 hours.
The only exception that I have is the weekend and holidays, when I try to take some downtime and recharge.

Response time is one reason that I don’t use WebCT. It’s much easier for me to respond via Gmail, especially if I’m on my PDA. Pipeline and WebCT just won’t work on a PDA.
Also in today’s Times is an article on the European Union’s Data Retention Directive, which will go into effect in 2009. Several European countries are already modifying their laws so that governments can easily track Internet and mobile phone users.

The Netherlands has developed a draft version of their data retention law that would force telecom providers to store GPS information for all mobile voice and data calls. This has become much easier to do with the widespread adoption of GPS technology in mobile handsets and cell towers. Data would be stored for at least 18 months.
A draft version of the German law outlaws anonymous e-mail and forum accounts. Google and many other webmail services require only two pieces of information to open a Gmail account (user id and password). The German law would require a verifiable identity, and the law may be difficult to enforce. As the article points out, this draft is a major surprise as Germany has long been considered a bastion of consumer privacy rights.

As I have often warned students, e-mail and forum posts might be retained for years. It’s always a good idea to save a reply as a draft, and then review it a few minutes later. Writing and sending a caustic reply might seem efficient, but if the message cannot be recalled or canceled, the results may be dramatic.