centre{source}

In the fall of 2008, the Strategy team at centre{source} set out to create a plan for expanding the firm’s reach and involvement in the local Nashville Interactive Community. Over the course of a few months, a strategy was formed that involved looking inwardly for personal development opportunities and looking outwardly for ways to become more active and connected with community members. The cornerstone and most valuable component of this strategy has quickly become our practice of hosting a monthly mixer at the c{s} North Fourth office on the last Thursday of each month.
As the “hostess” and organizer of these events, I was initially unsure of what to expect as far as turnout and reception. As we geared up for the first mixer, held in January of 2009, I must have refreshed our Pingg invite list at least 50 times a day. As we got closer to D-Day and RSVPs began rolling in, I quickly realized that what we initially expected to be an event with attendance of around 30-40 was going to become much more!

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Ok… so we haven’t had the best of luck with Sprint (see here, and here) and while our company is slowly moving toward AT&T due to “some device” that came out in the last few months, I do have to hand it to Sprint for be one of the first companies to actually release a “why hasn’t somebody thought of this sooner” product.

What Is Sprint AIRAVE^TM?

Sprint AIRAVE^TM is a device that creates a CDMA signal for your mobile phone (like a miniature cell tower). AIRAVE provides enhanced and reliable mobile phone coverage in your house or office even if your existing wireless coverage is poor.

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A few days ago, Seagate released a statement about some new technology that they have dubbed “DAVE” (Digital Audio Video Experience).

From the release:

Using Bluetooth or WiFi connections, DAVE is the answer to providing substantial storage capacity without impacting the design or cost of mobile handsets. Built for portability and about the size of a centimeter-thick credit card, the DAVE mobile platform slips conveniently into a shirt pocket, backpack, or purse - anywhere up to 30 feet (9.1 meters) from the phone. In addition, the mobile storage platform is open source, enabling third party software developers to create new applications for the mobile phone utilizing the hard drive’s unmatched capacity and performance. The DAVE technology is offered to telcos and mobile handset OEMs for sale under their respective brand names.

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Are the seemingly never-ending Instant-Messaging wars finally coming to a close?

Jabber/XMPP has gotten another big shot in the arm this week, with the announcement that Livejournal has launched a Jabber server for its users, complete with the friends-list pre-loaded as the Jabber roster. They will be incorporating s2s communication, along with lots of other features.

This comes on the heels of Google Talk, which last year launched its XMPP-based Google Talk service, opened it to XMPP s2s on the Internet. They also incorporated an (optional) user-friendly AJAX-based IM client into the gmail web client — look for Livejournal to do the same, as well as integrating the blogging/comment-notification functions into instant messaging as well.

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Well, we were and are giving Comcast a shot for our new office’s internet access. While I am personally averse to Comcast’s service and reputation, their product offering of 8Mbps/1Mbps throughput with a static IP is too much to resist. That is, it would be if we were actually seeing that. We’ve only had our firewall up for 6 hours, and here are the speeds I am seeing to our server in Dallas:

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Nearly everyone that has worked in tech support before (or even those that haven’t) has a joke or story about some naive end-user calling about a routine problem but describing it as “the Internet is down!” — when really all they needed to do was reboot or something. It’s funny, and we nerds all get a laugh, but what happens when it’s true and you have to explain it to a customer?

This happened to me a few months ago. We had a customer calling to ask why they were being flooded with calls from their users about their web application (which we host) was down.

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One of our clients called and reported an issue with a MS Access database. The user was able to open a network based .mdb file, but when they tried to click on a switchboard button they received the following error message: “Disk or network error.” There are many resources that deal with this error, but none of them provided the needed solution. The TMP/TEMP directories were set properly, the JET Engine was updated, and the .mdb file was not corrupted (verified on another computer).

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We had and have a lot of non-profit clients, and this article at TechSoup is a great primer on planning for technology needs for non-profits. Check it out.

If you have an FTP server that you’re constantly uploading to and downloading from, it can be a pain to use an FTP program to manage everything. Novell’s free program, NetDrive, let’s you instead map your FTP server to act like a local hard drive, so that all your remote files are accessible through the file manager that you’re used to. All of the uploading and downloading will be done in the background — almost seamlessly.

Due to licensing restrictions, Novell cannot provide a direct download from their site, but you can easily find netdrive.exe through a little Google search. Also, you can check out a step-by-step tutorial over at Engadget.

My hometown of Madison, WI has just announced that they’ll be rolling out a free Wi-Fi network to the whole city. They join just a few other cities nationwide (San Francisco and Philadelphia included) to move in this direction.

While I’m all for the offering of free internet, I continue to be a little weary of the possible issues involving safety and privacy with a wide open system. Additionally, I also wonder what the impact of an open Wi-Fi network will do to both the ISP’s in the area, as well as the cellular companies who are hoping that their EVDO technology (wireless broadband) takes off to become the industry standard. I guess time will tell what impact these remarkable decisions will make.