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Saturday, January 10, 2004

Show #3

Broadcasting Live from the show floor at CES today. It was pretty much all guests.

Ken Sander, the Technomaniac for Penthouse Magazine, and TechTV Best of CES Judge

Zach in Santa Monica called to ask about DVD burners. 8x is the current top speed for burners (I like the Plextor) but Lite-On has announced a 12x burner and 16x burners are on the way. That’s about the theoretical limit since if they spin any faster the discs tend to shatter!

He also wanted to turn off the Outlook 2003 preview pane. Jim from Irvine says it’s called the reading pane now and you’ll find it under the View menu. Click the “Reading pane” menu and select “off.” (you have to do it folder by folder). The preview or reading pane is a potential hazard since Outlook uses Internet Explorer to render the email as a web page, exposing you to all sorts of potential privacy and security holes.

Dick DeBartolo, Mad Magazine’s Maddest Writer and Giz Wiz

• Timex Smart Pass
• Buttkicker subwoofers
• Royal $10 organizer

Scott Jordan, Scott-eVest showed his geek-wear including a blue blazer and a solar powered vest for all your gadgets.

Dale Coffing, PocketPCPassion.com* Pharos GPS 360 bluetooth for PocketPC

• iPaq 4150
• Pocketpctechs.com
• Spotwatch from Fossil and Suunto

I mentioned the very cool portable keyboard from iBizCorp, just $99.

PC Mag Columnist John C. Dvorak, Venture Capitalist Will Hearst, and John Markoff of the NY Times joined us for a round table.

John Markoff, Leo, John C. Dvorak, and Will Hearst

Patrick Norton of TechTV’s The Screen Savers

Milo Medin, network guru talked about Wi-Fi and how networking and broadband enables consumer electronics.

Zack from Silverlake is starting a new business and was looking for a simple invoicing program. He also wants to keep track of names for a mailing list. He said he didn’t want Quicken - too complicated. Intuit’s Quickbooks has an excellent invoicing module and I usually do recommend it.

I don’t know of any standalone invoicing programs and certainly none that also can help you manage a mailing list, too. For something like that I’ve always used Filemaker Pro for Windows or Macintosh. It’s a very easy to use database program with excellent forms design features - I use it for my own invoicing system. If you don’t want to cobble your own database together, there are many capable Filemaker developers out there who can offer a solution in addition to hundreds of free and shareware templates.