Monday, January 8, 2007

A blog posting from my former manager, mentor and friend Charlie Kindel has held the top slop on Techmeme all day long.  You see, Charlie is the brains behind Microsoft’s new Windows Home Server, announced yesterday.  Congratulations buddy!  You deserve it.

Windows Home Server combines storage, streaming, network management, automatic backup and remote access in a single headless box for home.  It’s easily expandable, too, so that as your storage needs grow, it can accomodate them.

Speaking selfishly, I can hardly wait.  I’m one of the many who has cobbled together solutions like this over the years.  My current “home server” is an old PC with 250G of disk in it, tucked into my wiring closet in the basement, running headlessly.  Automatic backup is done by running Foldershare on all the PC’s that need to be backed up.  It’s not perfect, but it’s the best solution I’ve found to date.  A real solution is far preferable.

Judging by the torrent of postings in and around the net, a lot of others have similar opinions.  A server for the home as Microsoft’s top story out of CES?  Who would have guessed…

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I'm no Steven Spielberg but…

by alec on January 8, 2007

With no prior knowledge of non-linear editing, and indeed, not having ever edited video before in my life, I dove into the deep end yesterday to produce a short video describing iotum Talk-Now, the Blackberry application which we’re previewing.  It ended up being a late night as I ran into the shortcomings of the various tools I was using.  However, I think the end result “not bad”.  The video was produced using Camtasia for screen captures, AVS Video Editor for non-linear editing, and Powerpoint 2007 for the intermediate slides and clip-art.  The live video was shot using the Project-A-Phone ICD-5000, with Blackberrys clamped on the stand. The background music is Janos Starker playing Bach’s Cello Suite no 1.

Judge for yourself, and feel free to critique, or suggest production tools.  I liked the result enough that I may just do it again.  With a better quality video camera, and a little practice with Camtasia, the results might be very compelling. 

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NextAlarm: The Broadband Alarm Co.

January 8, 2007

What could there possibly be “new” in the alarm business?  More than you might imagine, it turns out.   This morning NextAlarm made two announcements at CES.  First they launched VoIPAlarm, a new channel program designed to bring their broadband alarm services to alarm systems resellers, and then they announced V-Notify, the industry’s first automated alarm station — [...]

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