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The good folks at Dell were kind enough lend me a new Vostro laptop for the next few weeks to see how I liked traveling and using it.  I have a Dell desktop and traveled a long time with a Sony Vaio.  I traded the Sony laptop in last year for a iPad.

I am excited to travel again with a device that has a keyboard and can accept USBs to see how it impacts my productivity.

More posts to come!

Today, the day after the Volt was named Motor Trend Car of the year, I was able to participate in General Motors: Unplugged Tour.  I drove the car for over 4 hours from Detroit to Chicago.  Watch my video on driving and recharging the electric car:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I think that Chevy has hit a home run with the car. There aren’t a lot of new gadgets inside because they wanted to focus on the getting the implementation of the electric technology right and add things later.  This was absolutely the right strategy because if it does not work as an electric car, then the add-on gadgets don’t matter.  This is similar in your business.  Be great at solving THE customers greatest need and then expand your focus from there.

Chevy also implemented the most practical version of an electric car. It can go up to 50 miles on an electric charge alone.  If you need to go farther, then the small gas engine kicks in (which you don’t even know when it happens unless you are looking at the dashboard) so you can drive another 300 miles.  Forget the “range anxiety” that other purely electric car owners will feel (like Nissan’s Leaf).  The Volt owner can be all electric for those days filled with short trips around town.  They can also take the Volt cross-country!

We made a few stops on the way to Chicago and the people we met were in awe to see an electric car.  I even stopped by the Chevy Dealer in Bridgman, MI where I have my name on the list for the Volt and gave Mike his first personal test drive.  We left him smiling ear to ear!

Here are some more of my photos of today’s Unplugged Tour on Facebook.

I am 50 years old and have owned many new cars.  This is the first new American car I ever wanted to own!

This was until Brian Solis told me about Flipboard which seems like an advantageous way to look at all of your social media feeds. I am having a hard time keeping up with the information I want to read from the people I am connected to.

Flipboard helps convert social feeds into a digital magazine layout.  It looks at your Facebook, Twitter, and other social feed sources and turns them into a digital display.  Flipboard not only pulls out social feeds, but also crawls the sites that links refer to and then indexes them so that the display has some additional information around it.  Wow!

Have you used Flipboard?

This is what I want for the holidays. It is something every business owner needs. The seond generation pink pogoplug connects a USB drive or any external hardrive to the Internet through your router so you can access your files from anywhere. There’s an iPhone application so you can always “phone home” to get what you need.

I like this because I never want to keep my home computer on when I traveled for security reasons. Now I can get to my data without that problem.

Although this is the must have gadget for the holidays, the newer version won’t be available for a few weeks. Get over it guys, it’s pink.

What tech gadget does your business want for the holidays?

Listen Now!

One of the big decisions we make in all our businesses is infrastructure- what software do we use to run our businesses. Those of us who have been their know the implications of choosing the right solutions or the difficulties of having to migrate from the wrong solutions. My next guest today on Business Insanity Radio is an expert at this. Jonathan Sapir is the founder and CEO of Silvertree Systems- a Chicago Based IT firm. He started his career with IBM, then built his own companies over the last 25 years. Jon talks about dumping all that software on your desk and handling it all using cloud computing- applications that exist only on the internet! Give a listen.

I got my iPhone on Friday. I plugged it in and synced it with my computer and guess what? It all worked perfectly. The only way I could describe the feeling was: iHappy. I am just not used to things going this way with Microsoft devices. Maybe I need to now buy Macs for my house?

Meet the disgruntled customer:

We’ll call her, oh, let’s say, Katherine. Katherine sees the infinitely shiny and appealing new application store on iTunes. Katherine wants. Katherine eagerly downloads applications and proceeds to cry a bucket of invisible tears when she realizes that she must wait (oh no) a whole ten hours for Apple to release iPhone software 2.0 (the worst sort of tease).

Katherine eagerly goes to sleep, wakes up, and, lo and behold, the infinitely shinier and OMG1!1!! iPhone 2.0 update is available! She plugs her iPhone in and clicks ‘check update’ followed by ‘download and install.’ Fail. She tries again: more fail. Katherine is a little distressed, but she perseveres. Everything now insists Katherine has the latest update (which is NOT 2.0), so Katherine unplugs and reconnects her iPhone to the computer, and tries again, only clicking ‘download’ instead of install. At last the sparkly new update downloads! But then it does not install, and mysteriously disappears from her hard drive. Katherine tries downloading the software again and updating.

Uh-oh. What. NO. NO. MY BABY. WHAT DO YOU MEAN ERROR, APPLE?!

Katherine tries doing a restore (because the iPhone still thinks it has the latest version of its OS system). All seems to be going well, it’s been restored, the firmware is updating–error. Katherine’s phone can’t find the iTunes store.

Katherine’s phone has NO OS, no contacts, no ANYTHING. Katherine effectively has no phone.

Dear Steve Jobs,Thanks for your extremely unshiny update that has just Black Plague’d my means of communication with the outside world to death. I really wanted to spend my entire morning trying to clean up your aftermath.  I’ll use my iPhone as a doorstop, because that is about all it is useful for, and it even stinks at doing that because it’s too small.

Sincerely,
Katherine

What have we learned from this? (Besides the fact that not all updates are shiny, and being technologically at the front of the line is not always worth it.) If your business deals in technology, you better make it easy for your old customers to update. Do NOT force them to connect to your ONLINE STORE in order to activate the update: I guarantee you that your bandwidth cannot handle it unless you have under 10 customers. (This is made more frustrating by the fact that I can access the iTunes store via iTunes–but apparently not with my phone? What?) Not everyone buys the new and shiny things right away.

Barry says to be there when your customers are ready to buy. Katherine says to be there when they’re ready to update with something that WORKS, and if it doesn’t, send an update–if you have no problem sending me 3726 emails about the iPhone 3G (or *insert shiny new product here*), how about one apologizing for messing up, or one that says ‘we’ll have everything up and running in an hour, your updates will occur then.’ Just because you are a large corporation with many customers does not mean you can ignore your old customers (unless, of course, it’s a plot to make us all fed up and buy the new product, in which case, all hail capitalism at its finest). But don’t just give me error messages and direct me to support pages, I want to know WHY you have failed to provide me the service I paid for. Communication is important.

Being there when they want to throw bricks (better known as useless phones) at your head, is, of course, up to you.

Ah, edit: Apple fails to provide because they didn’t learn from their failure last year. Barry says that there isn’t always something to learn from failure–let’s all remember to always make sure that there isn’t.

“Twenty percent of people say they’re spending less time having sex because of the amount of time spent online or with other [technology]gadgets, according to a September 2007 survey conducted by advertising agency, JWT. The bliss that comes from interacting with technology and staying connected matched or in some cases, even replaced the pleasure of sexual arousal.”

In the same article, David Greenfield, a psycologist says that the brain is condition to go where there is a chance of a good result. “That’s why people check their email 20 to 30 times a day, because every once in a while you get one message that is really great!” He says that the chemical released when you check your PDA or laptop is the same as what is released during sex. “There is a release of dopamine, what is a neurotransmitter. It’s a pleasure chemical..people find themselves chasing that dopamine rush by checking their Blackberrys…”

What can I say? I feel the rush….too.