Tim Howell’s Weblog

Microsoft Outlook is much maligned in the technical community, with critics lamenting its occasional lack of robustness and its variable performance.

The undeniable fact is that most information workers use Outlook. The product is installed on 350 million desktops worldwide, and represents a fertile market for third parties who can take advantages of its weaknesses to add value. Where there’s weakness, there’s always opportunity.

In the past few days, there have been a couple of developments that have really added to my Outlook experience:

• Xobni has been made available to a broader beta community. With all the recent discussion about the “social graph,:” Xobni (which is “inbox” spelt backwards) acknowledges that there is a significant amount of this data contained within email: the people you send email to are often those with whom you have a close relationship, more so than many “friends” you may attract in Facebook or elsewhere. Xobni makes it easy to make the most of these relationships, analysing the messages to pull out contact information, email messages and documents relating to an email address/contact. Very nicely done, without a performance hit.
• NewsGator also announced its entire range of RSS readers are free. I used NewsGator’s Outlook reader years ago when there were few options around. For a period I also used FeedDemon, but gave up because it was sometimes less than stable. Now these clients are both free and updated. And, as an aside, this is a fantastic strategic move by NewsGator who can use their client products to drive interest and use of their enterprise RSS offerings.

Lastly, I’d be remiss to not mention the Outlook support we provide at ActionThis. We’ve supported Outlook 2007 since launch, and quietly released our Outlook 2003 client at the end of 2007. If you’re looking for a service to help you get more things done, that works the way you do, then look at our free trial.

Last week, Google announced an update to its mobile mapping software which, in addition to providing maps, also provided the user’s location – without the need for GPS.

Enthusiastically, I installed the software on my iMate JasJam and showed colleagues our location, even though it was working to a range of +/- 1700 metres. Fantastic.

Next day: It couldn’t locate me. And I’ve not been able to get it going since.

There’s a bunch of speculation as to how this service works, all of which essentially require the cellular network to provide some data. There was talk of Google having arrangements with networks to make this data available, but there’s been no confirmation if that’s the case, especially here in New Zealand.

To me, it appears that Vodafone was allowing this data to be transmitted/received and then turned it off – for whatever reason.

Has anyone else used the latest Google Map application on their mobile device, and have you been able to get location information? Any other thoughts as to how this works?

UPDATE: This service still works, although it’s variable.

Shipping is the goal of any software company. Tonight we pushed the button, flicked the switch - however you want to put it. ActionThis is now live.

The team’s worked fantastically hard over the past few weeks, not to mention the 10 months of effort that had already gone into the solution.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be listening to what people say about ActionThis. Thanks to Read/WriteWeb and Mashable, amongst others, for their support and coverage.

We believe we’ve got a great foundation to help people get things done, and this is just the start - there are a lot of ideas as to how we can add more capability, develop our community, and drive growth through partnerships.

It’s been a busy time up until now, but this work has largely been behind the scenes. Now our service is out there, our focus changes: we need to make ActionThis a compelling and useful service that helps people get things done and go home early. Does that sound interesting? ActionThis trial for a free trial.

There has been lots of discussion and debate around our need for faster broadband, better network infrastructure and a more open and competitive market (not to mention who should make the required investments).

Many proponents are arguing that by having faster broadband, we New Zealanders will have improved access to overseas markets and be able to access, market and sell ourselves and our products to the world. 

Surely this is only one benefit of improved infrastructure?

Why not take a broader view, looking at what else would be possible by having a more robust and better performing network infrastructure. Such infrastructure is an enabler for more than online applications and services.

Quoting Paul Budde:

“These commentators are missing the point – that the need for new infrastructure has little to do with high-speed Internet access – that the major usage of this new infrastructure will be to deliver healthcare services such as video monitoring of patients at home, remote healthcare for aged people, education services, smart energy meters, allowing home owners to monitor and better manage their energy usages, e-government services and so on.

A mindshift is necessary in relation to the use of this infrastructure. It should be looked at from a social welfare and economic benefit viewpoint, rather than the present discussion about how fast our Internet access or video downloads need to be.”

These arguments don’t contradict what’s being sought by many people; rather, they provide further justification for what’s being discussed.

A few locals have blogged about Sam Morgan speaking at the elite TED Conference held last week. TED is a conference now run by Chris Anderson, a man I used to work for and with in the early 1990’s. Chris’ initial claim to fame was founding Future Publishing, a UK-based magazine publishing company that achieved great success during the 1990s and into the early part of this decade. You may have heard of some of their titles including PC Plus, PC Format, MacFormat, Future Music and many, many others.

Like many startups, Chris founded the company from a garage using a bank loan, and over several years the company grew into being one of the largest leisure magazine publishers in the UK. The company went public in the early part of the decade, and for a while Chris was on the Sunday Times rich list, worth hundreds of millions of pounds. Since the tech wreck, his fortune shrank, but he’s obviously mixing in the right circles at TED, his latest venture.

I’ve always found the Future Publishing story inspirational, especially given my early association with the company, and it’s great seeing how Chris is now giving so many others inspiration through TED.

(For Wired readers, it’s worth mentioning this is a different Chris Anderson than the one who is responsible for The Long Tail and who is editor in chief of this publication.)

Reports are coming through that New Zealand once again had a strong prescence at CeBIT, to the chagrin of the Australian exhibitors, it seems.

Putting national rivalries aside, we found CeBIT a useful exercise back in 2005, which also received strong support from NZTE. The takeaways for us, at our first international show were:

Use the event as a launchpad into Europe and, in particular, the German-speaking countries. What they require from you: German language versions of your software and, ideally, all associated documentation.

The event is also a useful one to research other companies and, in particular, competitors, who are most likely to be there. We set aside a couple of days for competitive research, and found it worthwhile understanding how our major competitors positioned themselves, promoted themselves, as well as observing the questions they were asked - assuming the questions were in English, of course.

Lastly, depending on what you want to get out of it, the event is also useful for partnering, with resellers, distributors and technology partner candidates all available.

Dealing with the volume of people is key, and taking good notes about any useful conversations will prove invaluable later on - this is the case at any tradeshow. During the busy periods, we were scrambling to write details on the backs of business cards - anything to keep track of who the person was and what they wanted, so that we could make meaningful contact later on.