Internet access on the move
It has been four years since I first wrote about accessing the internet on the move. Interest in the subject is still running high, although from conversations I have I know that a lot of people still find the subject a bit of a black art.
I thought an update might be a good idea.
If you have wi-fi capability in your laptop or PDA being out of the office no longer means being out of touch. Wi-fi (Wireless Fidelity) “hotspots” – places where you can use your laptop or PDA to connect to the internet at broadband speeds, without a hard-wired connection - are now commonplace.
When out and about you can search for a hot spot in your vicinity. Just make sure your wi-fi is switched on and then start your internet browser – it should lock-on to the strongest signal.
You then log on using a password and surf away. But the costs can vary. BT Openzone was one of the first providers and I have been using them or the past four years with few problems.
One quick tip, if you sign up for BT’s Total Broadband package they bundle in 250 minutes of BT Openzone use a month completely free. Alternatively, you can pay for your access pay by the minute, the hour, the day or take out a monthly subscription for around £25.
But BT isn’t the only provider and many hotels and airports offer alternatives – Cloud wi-fi being one of the most prevalent – see
http://www.thecloud.net/.
Some cities even have free public wi-fi – I’m proud to say that Norwich was one of the first. It is sometimes flaky, but I have used it a lot. Bristol has it too.
You can search for other hotspots in the UK at
http://www.hotspot-locations.com/.
In theory you can also connect to other private wi-fi networks that are not secure. That is, that haven’t been set up with a security WEP/WPA password. I would advise that you don’t. Two people in Redditch were recently cautioned for using someone’s wi-fi broadband internet connections without their permission. This is a legal minefield.
But what if you don’t have access to a wi-fi hotspot? For many years I have been using my mobile phone to connect to the net using what is known as a GPRS connection. With GPRS speeds are slower than wi-fi and you pay for the amount of data you transfer, typically around £1.50-£2.50 per Megabyte.
First, you need a phone with a Bluetooth facility to connect to the laptop. Then you need to make the phone connect to the net. The way you do this will vary from network to network. For example, on Vodafone you make the laptop dial *99#.
GPRS is fine for the odd e-mail, but pretty useless for transferring large files. You may also need to check with your operator that GPRS has been enabled. For more details see
http://www.filesaveas.com/gprs.htmlThe next step up involves using a 3G phone or plug-in card, such as the T-Mobile “Web ‘n’ Walk range. The benefits are a much faster data transfer rate. Typical costs for the T-Mobile Flext 20 (which gives you the equivalent of £34 worth of phone calls per month) with web 'n' walk, which offers unlimited web surfing and e-mails, is £27.50 per month.
A Vodafone 3G card for your laptop, either Mac or PC, offers you faster speeds than GPRS, but will fall back to GPRS if the 3G network is not available. Typical costs are £25 per month including 250Mb of data, but I suggest you shop around. Orange and O2 have similar schemes.
Alternatively, you buy one of the latest 3G phones such as the Nokia N95. These have built-in browsers and e-mail, plus the ability to connect to wi-fi networks. But they are not cheap – you are looking at about £200+ for the phone on a new contract. My favourite is the SPV-700 from Orange which is a full-blown Windows PDA and phone for about £50 on a new contract. I have used my PDA to update websites and upload features from the wilds of Cornwall and Yorkshire and my laptop and wi-fi to do the same from the Norwegian lakes. Sad, I know!
I hope this update helps. I find the ability to access the internet on the move invaluable. I think you will too.
A sound investment
Dictaphones or pocket cassette recorders can be a real boon to professional communicators. You can use them for taking audio notes, tape interviews or even record telephone calls with a suitable adaptor.
Taping interviews is no substitute for decent notes or shorthand, but can be a useful back-up.
But in the old days it meant keeping an eye on the tape to make sure it didn’t run out, you could never find the recording you wanted and well, they were sooooo last century. But not any more.
The latest recorders are now, you guessed it, digital. Instead of tape you have a memory chip. And instead of being able to record only 45 minutes you can record hours and hours worth. But the good news doesn’t stop there. The latest generation of digital recorders can be plugged into your PC and Mac and the sound files transferred across to your hard drive.
This means that you can take your precious recordings with you or back them up to CD or DVD.
As an example of what you can do I recently tested an Olympus WS-200S digital voice recorder. This has an integrated stereo microphone for high quality recording, four recording modes - SHQ and HQ mode for superior quality and SP and LP for extended recording
Its recording time is 4 hr. 20 mins in Stereo High Quality (SHQ) mode and up to 54 hr. 50 min. in LP mode. But the remarkable thing is its size, or lack of it. Measuring about the size of a small chocolate bar (94 x 40 x 15.1 mm) and weighing 54 g it really is pocketable.
Powered by a single AAA battery, that lasts for about 13 hours, I can’t think of an easier way to take notes. You can even plug an external microphone in too, which does give noticeable better quality.
You can change the speed by pressing the PLAY button while the recorder is playing back. If you press the button once it will play 25% faster if you press it again it will play 50% faster. But this isn’t like the old days. It doesn’t sound like Mickey Mouse, the person you recorded just seems to talk a lot faster.
You can also vary the microphone sensitivity – the highest position works well for lectures and presentations while the lower setting is better suited to one-on-one interviews.
But the great thing is that once you have finished recording you just pull off the end cover and plug it into your computer’s USB port. This mounts it like a memory stick and you can now drag and drop all your sound files across to your hard drive.
You don’t need any other software or cables, which is great when you are on the move.
The files are stored in Window .wma format that plays with no problems using Windows Media Player. If your machine can’t handle .wma files there are plenty of utilities that can convert them to other file formats.
I used a PC program called WinFF to convert them to wav files, although it could quite as easily convert to MP3.
But this got me thinking – in HQ stereo mode just how good are the sound files? Could this little recorder be used to produce quality recordings for podcasts?
My normal recorder for these is a Sony MiniDisk, which offers Hi-Fi/CD quality, but you then need to stream them back to the PC in real time to digitise them. You can get solid-state recorders now, such as those made by Edirol, but they start at about £300.
Tests shows that with an external microphone and the highest quality settings the sound files were in fact pretty good with only the slightest signs of compression/clipping. In other words, as long as you accept the slight decrease in audio quality the Olympus WS200S can be used to record audio interviews for podcasts.
If you want to hear for yourself listen to the podcast I recorded at the 2007 CiB Conference on the CiB website at www.cib.uk.com.
At just £75 that makes it a bargain, but even if you don’t want to stretch to podcasting it still makes an excellent little recorder.
Video killed the in-house newspaper
If you are not using online video as part of your internal communications mix then you are probably missing out. It has become so much easier to stream video on corporate intranets and it needn’t cost the earth to produce either.
But start to look at streaming video and the myriad of different formats and jargon can bamboozle you. So what do they all mean and what should you choose? And do your end users have the right Codec?
Codec stands for coder/decoder and is the software that enables your media player to understand the various formats used for streaming video.
If you try to view a video and don’t have the required Codec the video will either not play or you will be prompted to download it. This is why it is important to run compatibility tests with your IT department before releasing your streaming video masterpiece on the world – only to find that no one can view it.
Let’s start by taking a look at the most popular formats available and their pros and cons.
Windows Media
This is probably the most common format for people using PCs. You can virtually guarantee that most PC users will have a copy of the requisite Windows Media Player installed on their machine. But unfortunately it isn’t that easy. There are various versions of Windows Media files (.WMV) and they are not all compatible.
Corporate intranets are notorious for not keeping their software up to date so the chances of your employees having the latest version are slim. If you are counting by the way the latest version is nine. WM9 gives an approximately 20 to 50 per cent improvement in quality compared with Windows Media Video 8.
QuickTime
Generally found on Apple Macintosh machines QuickTime is a good format, but the QuickTime player isn’t usually found by default on PCs. This makes it a difficult choice for corporate environments. But don’t despair, the Macintosh and OS X are an excellent environment for creating and editing videos, thanks to the bundled iMovie in the iLife suite of software. Upgrade your copy of QuickTime to QuickTime Pro (it only costs £20 to upgrade) and you can convert your QuickTime videos to many other formats including MP 4 and Windows Media.
MP4/MPEG- 4
You may be familiar with the ubiquitous MP3, as used for compressed music files, but MP4 or MPEG 4 is fast becoming one of the video standards that you can’t afford to ignore. Technically, MP4 is a “container”. That is, it is a standard format that can contain videos that have been encoded in a number of different ways using different Codecs such as H.264, XviD, Div X and others.
I like MP4 and not without good reason. The quality is superb and the file sizes are quite small. H.264 offers fantastic quality with none of the awful squiggly artefacts you used to get with low bit-rate Windows Media files.
Now this is where it gets confusing. H.264 is a video format, but it can be contained within an MP4 file. QuickTime also uses the H.264 standard, so when you talk about wanting your videos in the H.264 standard you also have to say what format you want it in – Quicktime, MP4 or Flash. Which leads me to….
Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash has come a long way since it was first introduced by Macromedia. It certainly offers a great way to view video as you can build the Flash player right into the web page, complete with fast forward, rewind and stop buttons. You can also include a volume control.
But once again it can get sticky. The latest version of Flash is version 9 and if you encode your videos to the Flash 9 standard people using Flash 8 or earlier won’t be able to view them properly. This means it is important to find out what version of the Flash plug-in people actually have.
Flash is rather like MP4 in that it is a “container” – you can embed videos encoded to the H.264, MPEG 4 or Windows media or other formats.
Flash is probably the most end-user friendly of all the formats and is the one you see most often on the net. You can always tell if a video is Flash-based – when it is playing just right-click over the image and it will tell you if it is a Flash file.
Conclusion
There are other video formats out there, including Real Media as beloved by the BBC, but for corporate use I think Windows Media and Flash are the way to go. As always, talk to your corporate techies before deciding on anything.
If the Facebook fits
There is a new social networking phenomenon taking the internet by storm. If you haven’t heard about it yet, you soon will. It’s called Facebook and you have to see it in action for yourself to see what all the fuss is about.
Facebook (
www.facebook.co.uk) was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 and was initially restricted to students of Harvard College in the USA. It was subsequently expanded to other Boston area schools, but since September 2006 it has been available to anyone.
As of July 2007, the website had 34 million active members worldwide with networks set up for geographical regions, interests and much more.
But what exactly is Facebook and how does it work?
Once you have registered you have your own page, listing as much or as little about you as possible.
Now the fun starts. You can then search for friends and acquaintances, join special interest groups, post photographs and generally have fun. You may have read last month that CG Business Communications was the first CiB member company to have its own corporate cartoon character on Facebook. Called “Chandler Gooding”, he lists his interests as: “Coming up with great ideas, bike riding, watching Star Wars, social networking and computing the molecular mass of various minerals and metal oxides.”
Nick Andrews of CG says: “Internal communicators have traditionally been seen as controlling the information that employees receive, but the advent of social networking sites has changed things - and we have to recognise and embrace the concept.
“Harnessed correctly, social networking media can mark a sea change in business communication. We can learn from sites like Facebook in terms of the way we share best practice and encourage thought leadership.
“On a different level, CG recognises the marketing potential of Facebook, and also, its actually fun to communicate!”
A quick search around Facebook revealed a whole lot more CiB members use the system too, including Paul Brasington, Alan Peaford, Geoff Thomas and Amelia Clark.
Each of them lists their interests and who their “friends” are. And this is where the real point of social networking starts to come into play.
Within five minutes of playing with Facebook I had rediscovered people I had lost contact with years ago. They were listed as “friends” of people I know and a few quick clicks and there they were, with all their contact details on the screen.
This may sound trivial, but Facebook will let you find people that you hadn’t even realised you had missed!
So what else can it do? You can post videos and photographs, have virtual foodfights, play poker, nominate bumper stickers for people, dare people to do things and generally play silly devils all day long.
According to some users they are now using Facebook to e-mail their contacts rather than use conventional e-mail software. One user even reports that his company’s competitors are using the system to try and poach staff – it’s a brave new world out there.
And it gets worse. According to the BBC, workers who spend time on such sites could be costing firms over £130m a day. According to employment law firm Peninsula, 233 million hours are lost every month as a result of employees "wasting time" on social networking.
The study - based on a survey of 3,500 UK companies - concluded that businesses need to take firm action on the use of social networks at work. One, Kent County Council (KCC), has banned its employees from using the site.
Paul Brasington thinks: “I can see that in its original incarnation as a way for students to mess around in an online gang it could be fun, posting pictures and comments. But that has limited appeal at our age I think.
“Having said all that, thinking about it in the light of CiB, I see you can create administrator-controlled groups and I think that would be a much more potent way of operating because people could share pictures, and functionality like the Facebook “Walls” gives more flexibility than posting emails.”
So is Facebook and social networking a communications boon or a recipe for lost productivity? The answer is I don’t really know – and neither will you until you try it.
