Sprint Services Eclipsed by Social Media?

Image via WikipediaOn Wednesday, December 31, 2008, Sprint will discontinue its PCS Mail and PCS Calendar services.

Because social media tools such as Twitter, Plurk and Utterli are making it easier for users to communicate, many legacy communication systems are finding themselves greeting retirement. With the popularity of easy-to-access mobile and free webmail options available, Sprint has found that many customers simply do not need its PCS Mail and PCS Calendar services. Therefore, these services are being discontinued. According to Sprint representative, Brittany W, "Picture mail is not being discontinued."

Although the PCS Mail product is being decommissioned, the outbound SMTP server will remain. Customers will still have the ability to send Outbound PCS Mail via Sprint's SMTP server. This means that not all of Sprint's email accounts will be discontinued. Only PCS Mail email is being decommissioned as of December 31, 2008. Depending on your device, you will have other email options such as Versa mail, Picture Mail, Sprint Mobile Email and other 3rd party providers.

If you are a Sprint Smartphone user (such as a Treo 755p) your Smartphone email client that you downloaded to your device will not be affected. Additionally, the 2 way SMS Text Messaging service will not be impacted and POP email accounts from any of the other 3rd party email providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Microsoft, Thunderbird, etc) will not be affected. Most of these email services are free, but check the POP email provider's agreement information before signing up for a new email account.

If you use PCS Mail as your mailbox (pop.sprintpcs.com and imap.sprintpcs.com), you will need to migrate your mailbox to a new POP/IMAP mailbox provider and reconfigure the client to use the new mailbox. If you use PCS Mail to send email (authenticated SMTP mail server smtp.sprintpcs.com), you may continue to do so without any problem; or, you may reconfigure your client to use a different provider. To get your saved emails and contacts moved to another provider, follow the instructions to create a new account and migrate your emails
and address book to your new email service. Review the Sprint PCS Announcement page for additional information.

Note that although Sprint's PCS Calender services are being decommissioned as of December 31, 2008, Sprint is unable to migrate your calendar to your new provider. If you regularly use the tasks and calendar services on your device, your best option is to sync your device to your computer, then sync to your new provider for these services. For example, Google Calendar supports syncing and has mobile set-up capability.

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Contact staff writer JC Lamkin at 215-843-1039 or jclamkinpmp@gmail.com.

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The New *improved* salesforce.com - Fact or Fiction

Image via CrunchBase, source unknownAs salesforce.com's Success in the Cloud Tour touched down on Philadelphia's Columbus Boulevard earlier this week, Customer Relationship Management (CRM ) gurus, admins and trainers began to wonder if this tour would huff, puff, or blow the CRM house down.

Turns out, it did none of the above. The Success in the Cloud Tour simply reestablished sf.com's position as a "force" to be reckoned with. With over 8 kiosks, salesforce showed off its mobile, training, AppBuilder and foundation products. As heard here, salesforce.com has embraced cloud computing and mashables:



By taking full advantaged of Google Docs, salesforce.com has made certain that non-profit organizations can perform day-to-day operations as efficiently as for-profit entities.

The feature that impressed this reporter the most was the opportunity splits. Having planned CRM implementations, customized salesforce.com and trained sales managers in a previous life, I've noticed that many sales people are very territorial. If they do not get credit for bringing home a sale, things could get ugly fast. With opportunity splits, no one will get hurt. So, salesforce.com in its own way is promoting non-violence in the workplace :-)

Users are always looking for a way to easily organize, access and report on their contacts and projects. salesforce.com is a great way to manage all of these tasks. Don't believe me, try salesforce.com for free, but don't fall in love with it until you have checked out its ticket price. If you are a micro-business owner, take a look at my review of OfficeInteractive. As far as pricing and ease of use goes, it may be more your speed.
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Contact staff writer JC Lamkin at 215-843-1039 or jclamkinpmp@gmail.com.

Employment Opportunity: New Media Coordinator

New Media Coordinator
Kor Hotel Group
Los Angeles, CA

Kor is seeking a New Media Coordinator to assist the marketing team with current online marketing efforts/campaigns. Kor is seeking for an individual who has some knowledge in search engine optimization / marketing, 1-3 of experience in managing pay-per-click campaigns, paid inclusion, or organic search marketing campaign, and strong analytical skills. Kor is seeking those who have experience in blog creations and those who have relationships with key on-line media reps

Desired Skills: Among the main responsibilities include researching and developing Internet Marketing strategies, submitting website content to search engines and directories, writing / modifying meta tags, monitoring online campaigns regularly and making recommendations to improve performance, maintaining relationships with various online partners and teams, collaborating with the SEM team to propose changes and enhancements to search marketing strategies, and keeping current on the latest trends in search marketing space.

Additionally, qualities needed:
- BA from an accredited college or university required
- 1-3 years of on-line/media marketing of the above mentioned experience
- Strong demonstrated writing and research skills

If you are looking to join an expanding company with endless opportunities for growth, please forward your resume to recruiter@thekorgroup.com or fax resume to 323-930-3785. Please visit Kor at www.thekorgroup.com.
EOE

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What is Scroogle?

Did you know that you can delete most spam and blogs by adding -com to your search terms? Scroogle does. No cookies. No search-term records. Access log deleted within 48 hours.

Scroogle, a proxy search engine, is a self proclaimed Google arch-nemesis. Campaigning for internet search freedom and liberty, Scroogle allows surfs to search minus the Big Brother Monkey on your back. Scroogle enables Wi-Fi internet user to surf securely. Scroogle cuts down on the profiling of service providers. If you use the internet while at work, Scroogle will eliminate your employer's ability to monitor your web surfing. This stealth-mode search leader is a big hit among youngsters who use public computers.

For Scroogle, SSL is used to hide your search terms from anyone who might be monitoring traffic between your browser and Scroogle's servers. This encryption happens when you send your search terms to Scroogle, and it also happens when Scroogle sends the results of your search back to you. No one snooping between your browser and Scroogle can figure out what you were looking for, because the information is encrypted and looks like gibberish. The connection between Scroogle and Google, which still must happen for every search, is not encrypted because Google doesn't use SSL. However, this connection is not associated with you at that point, and only Scroogle knows who entered those search terms. Your IP address is dropped before your search terms are sent to Google.

Most employers monitor the websites visited by their employees. There are impressive "employer spyware" packages such as Websense that they use to do this. Because the GET method is preferred by almost all search engines (see this page), even if the employer sees only the web address that you used to arrive at Google, he already knows the search terms you requested. With a record of all the search terms you've used while you were at work, each with a date and time recorded in his log, your employer has a pretty good idea of what you've been thinking. There are no laws that prevent employers from doing this sort of snooping.

If you use Wi-Fi and you haven't set up your router for secure operation, your neighbors could see what you are doing on the web. Again, your search terms might be interesting to them.

In some countries, the government could be monitoring your web activity by requiring your service provider to log the sites you visit, and make the logs available on demand. In fact, most governments wouldn't even have to ask the service provider for this information. They could tap the line upstream of the provider, and just look for packets containing www.google.com/search. Next to this are your search terms in plain text, with your IP address in the same packet. Government spies salivate at the thought of data-mining this information. With your search terms revealing what you are thinking, and the email you send revealing your network of associates, that's almost everything they need to know about you.

Besides encrypting everything between your browser and Scroogle, there are other details that may interest you about SSL. We prefer the POST method over the GET method, but if you use SSL, even the GET method is secure. You will see the Scroogle address and the search terms in your browser address bar with the GET method only because the browser displays this before it starts the SSL negotiation with Scroogle. Those search terms don't go any further than your browser. The SSL in your browser strips off the portion of the URL after the question mark, and then provides this information to Scroogle only after the secure connection has been established.

When the Scroogle results come back from an SSL search, and you click on any of the links shown on that secure page, there is another advantage. SSL does not allow the browser to record the address where that secure page came from, and attach it to any outgoing links on that page. Normally all browsers do this, and it's called the "referrer" address. But SSL blanks out the referrer, so that any site you click on from a Scroogle SSL page won't even know that you arrived at their site from Scroogle. The referrer will be blank, and your log entry will look like any of the hundreds of bots that crawl the web all day and night with similar blank referrers.

All of these are good reasons to use Scroogle's SSL option. It increases the load on our servers because the encryption handshaking is complex, but so far it hasn't been a problem for us. If it does become a problem, we hope to get more donations so that we can add more servers.

Top Searched Tech gadgets of 2008

Image by via CrunchBaseWith 2008 coming to an end, Yahoo! has generated a list of the most-searched-for terms in the world of technology. After another banner year of exciting new gadgets and huge strides in mobility and gaming, these products were the most buzzed about by Yahoo! users.

The top searched tech gadgets of 2008.

This list includes:

1. Digital camera

2. iPhone

3. Wii

4. Xbox 360

5. PSP

6. Blackberry

7. Skype

8. PS3

9. iPod

10. Garmin

Here is the full list of top searched tech gadgets of 2008

In addition, Yahoo! has a host of other top searched for categories that are available, including the top ten overall searches, politicians, news, economy, celebrities, women and final farewells, as well as additional top searches in select areas throughout Yahoo!, such as on Yahoo! Green, Yahoo! Tech and the most Buzziest stories/topics of the year.

Time is Money: PCMag.com Names the Fastest ISPs in America

Nevada, Virginia and Pennsylvania Have the Fastest Internet Service—
In a world where time equals money, slow Internet connections have real-life business and quality-of-life implications. Fiber optic connections have proven themselves the fastest way online, but they're still rare—and expensive. Which Internet service providers (ISPs) offer the fastest broadband? And in which state? After conducting over 200,000 individual tests as part of its third annual study, PCMag.com found that Verizon's FiOS fiber-optic connections are indeed the fastest overall service, and Cablevision's Optimum Online proved itself the fastest cable ISP in the United States. Likewise, Nevada, Virginia, and Pennsylvania are home to the fastest surf speeds—the full state ranking is below. PCMag.com’s “Best ISPs in America” list hits PCMag.com on December 2.

To uncover the nation’s best ISPs, PCMag utilized the custom-designed SurfSpeed application (a utility that grabs pages from several popular Web sites to measure actual Internet surfing speed) and pored through data from over 17,000 profiles (that is, unique IP addresses).

Cable vs. DSL: DSL and cable lines were for a time synonymous in people’s minds, but cable has clearly taken off in terms of sheer speed. Cable connections are 47 percent faster than DSLs. Cablevision’s Optimum Online tops the list, with an average nationwide SurfSpeed of 839 Kbps. And 61 percent of users declared themselves satisfied with the service. Even the slowest cable service provider (Earthlink, averaging 565 Kbps) was faster than some DSL providers, from CenturyTel at 520 Kbps down to Alltell’s measly 357. FrontierNet is the fastest DSL provider in the nation, averaging SufSpeeds of 724 Kbps. And, perhaps most importantly, just 27 percent of DSL users reported themselves satisfied.

State by State: Analyzing regions offers insight and challenges, but the region with the fastest Internet service—the West—is just 14 Kbps faster than the slowest, the South at 551 Kbps. The difference between states, on the other hand, is shocking, with No. 1 Nevada offering residents Internet more than twice as fast as bottom-ranked New Mexico.

The PCMag Fastest ISPs in America 2008 - State Ranking:

Ranking State SurfSpeed (Kbps)
1 Nevada 781
2 Virginia 765
3 Pennsylvania 747
4 New Jersey 727
5 Connecticut 716
6 New York 714
7 Nebraska 707
8 Oklahoma 695
9 Massachusetts 695
10 Maryland 691
11 Illinois 681
12 Georgia 679
13 California 666
14 Oregon 665
15 Delaware 646
16 Washington 625
17 New Hampshire 615
18 Minnesota 609
19 Texas 605
20 Ohio 600
21 North Dakota 593
22 Colorado 564
23 Florida 562
24 South Dakota 560
25 Alabama 556
26 Kentucky 547
27 Michigan 544
28 Missouri 539
29 North Carolina 534
30 Kansas 528
31 Indiana 524
32 Utah 517
33 Rhode Island 516
34 Arizona 505
35 Tennessee 474
36 Louisiana 470
37 Idaho 461
38 South Carolina 457
39 Montana 455
40 Maine 427
41 West Virginia 417
42 Mississippi 413
43 Arkansas 405
44 Arizona 402
45 Wisconsin 402
46 Iowa 398
47 Vermont 391
48 Wyoming 379
49 Hawaii 378
50 New Mexico 322
National avg 557