Connecting the Dots

Multiple “Froms” Using Gmail on iPad & iPhone

August 29, 2010 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

One thing I’ve learned over the last several years is this: virtually every technical problem I’ve encountered has likely been experienced by someone else and they’ve asked about it or discussed it online.

Case in point: Like many of you, I manage several email accounts within Gmail. If I receive an email from someone to my steve(at)iconnectdots.com account, when I reply it comes from that account when I use Gmail in a web browser on my computer, iPad or iPhone. Same thing if I receive a steve(at)minnov8.com email, replying to that person comes from that Minnov8 account…and so on and so on.

The problem comes with using the Apple Mail app in iPad or iPhone (a faster client than a Safari-based use of Gmail) and that I had to either setup EACH AND EVERY EMAIL ACCOUNT separately or generically reply to the sender from my @gmail.com account. The former was time consuming and clumsy to setup (and a real pain since I periodically change my Gmail password), the latter not terribly professional.

Yesterday my daughter bought a 32GB Wifi iPad for this college year (from a colleague for the amazing price of $350) and, since I don’t need the storage nearly as much as she does, I swapped her my 64GB for the 32GB. That necessitated re-setting my various email accounts and I thought, “I wonder if someone has figured out how to easily setup a single Gmail account on iPad where one can send from multiple Gmail-managed accounts?”

The answer was, “Of course someone else has wondered about this problem!”

Four minutes after entering the search query, “set up multiple gmail managed accounts on ipad” I found “Solved: Gmail, iPad, iPhone, and multiple from addresses” from a guy named Nick Cernis who writes a tumblog called “Modern Nerd.”

Nick laid out the solution, complete with screenshots, and it took me moments to get this setup and running on both my iPad and iPhone 4. I broke in to a grin as I saw how simple it was to send from any of my Gmail-managed email accounts, so now I’m on the hunt to locate a method to automagically insert the correct signature when one of those other email accounts are selected.

Friends, family and colleagues continually to tell me how amazing I am when they can ask me a question and I can pull the answer out of my brain or quickly discover it online. Partly this is due to my strength of input and learning (I constantly am in “seek mode” reading and storing tips, tricks, strategies and tactics) but mostly it’s due to the power of search and the collective input of people like Nick Cernis…those who take the time to solve problems, package up the answers and deliver this value online for the rest of us to discover and leverage.

Thanks Nick!

Filed Under: Social Media, Technology, Web/Tech

Why My Business Uses RingCentral

August 26, 2010 By Steve Borsch 2 Comments

Over the last couple of years we’ve focused on two areas in our business: maintaining and growing revenues while simultaneously cutting costs. Sound familiar? If you’re in business for yourself or leading an organization, you’re obviously hyperfocused on the same two in these challenging economic times.

Since I ‘live’ in the web and internet space I’ve leveraged multiple technologies to both sell more and do things less expensively in our business. My mantra has always been “better, cheaper and faster” as I examine whether some technology will allow us to sell more or do something for less, and as bandwidth grows we’re using more and more web and internet based services. After reducing our cost base dramatically over the last two years, the last one I tackled was replacing Qwest and AT&T for our telephone services.

With four lines in our office we were spending several hundred dollars per month. Not a huge amount of money for most companies, but saving even $100-$200 per month is important to us. I was convinced that I could save dough by using some sort of hosted private branch exchange (PBX) for our telephone service and poked around analyzing several of them. PBX’s have historically been expensive, internal switching centers that companies installed to run their phone systems inside their buildings and also to tie together offices in other geographies. We didn’t need dedicated equipment and Qwest acted as our switching center, rolling over phone calls to the other lines if Line 1 was in use.

The problems we faced that I wanted to fix were these:

Qwest and AT&T were expensive and we were spending hundreds per month for just voice
Qwest had NO capability to notify by email, SMS, etc. This became painful as we used other services like Google Voice and Skype with their ability to notify you by email of a voicemail (and even send it as an attachment). Qwest was stuck in the 80′s and we had to call a number to retrieve messages or pick up a handset to hear a stutter tone indicating a voicemail was present
No expansion capabilities without spending more money per line which limited our flexibility
No ability to manage a “call tree” with an outgoing company greeting, extensions callers could choose or we could transfer to, a company directory and things like that which would make us look bigger than we are and make life easier for our callers
No capability to provide extensions that would ‘call’ a remote number, important for us since we are increasingly virtual and our correspondents have primary phone numbers that ring their mobile, Google Voice, Skype or landline phones.

After looking at all the major services and options, I hit a home run… [Read more...]

Filed Under: Technology, VoIP, Web/Tech

Why Google Voice in Gmail Will be a Hit

August 26, 2010 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Yesterday was the official launch of Google Voice in Gmail and is one more reason that Google is slowly-but-surely planting themselves squarely in the unified communications arena.

“Unified Communications…wha? Huh?” you may ask. Unified communications (UC) has been the vision of many companies who’ve tried to get companies and individuals to use all of their products and services to meet their communication needs. Microsoft, Cisco and many other companies have acquired companies and built integrated platforms with modest success.

This Wikipedia article on UC says it best, “UC is the integration of real-time communication services such as instant messaging (chat), presence information, telephony (including IP telephony), video conferencing, call control and speech recognition with non-real-time communication services such as unified messaging (integrated voicemail, e-mail, SMS and fax). UC is not a single product, but a set of products that provides a consistent unified user interface and user experience across multiple devices and media types.”

So think about what Google has already delivered: email; chat; start page; docs, spreadsheets, presentation; calendaring; and now voice (free for a time in US and Canada along with amazingly good international calling rates), all in an integrated hub in the ‘cloud’. Add to that their offering of this integrated footprint as enterprise/education/small to midsize business ‘pro’ applications and you’ve got a winner.

At Google’s announcement yesterday they had this British-style phone booth (via Mashable) and I talked with a buddy who is in the telecom space about it and he offered up his opinion if I kept him and his company name out of my post. “What a joke,” he said. “Phone booths are dead and voice has no value. It’s all about data. Google won’t make any inroads with voice.”

The reason I beg to differ is this: voice is a commodity and of ever-dwindling value. It’s all about data and multiple channels of communication. Voice is data and to be a player today in communications, you have to offer every channel you possibly can. Google has nailed it with voice and now has an unified communications platform that everyone can use whether you’re an individual,tiny business, educational organization or multi-national enterprise.

Filed Under: Innovation, Technology

Adobe Gets 1st Prize for WORST Customer Service EVER

August 25, 2010 By Steve Borsch 2 Comments

Got a new Macbook Pro and used Apple’s Migration Assistant to bring over all of my applications and settings last night. Just to be sure everything went smoothly with various applications—especially Adobe’s apps which need reinstallation—I reinstalled InDesign CS4 and Photoshop CS3 but received an error launching either of them after installation with a box that stated, “Licensing for this product has stopped working.” No big deal, I thought I’d just launch a call to tech support and get it fixed up in a jiffy.

I had NO idea I was in for 1.5 hours of HELL and the WORST customer service adventure of my entire life.]

Since I had a couple of hours to get everything setup today, I was in no rush and was atypically cheerful going in to this adventure. I usually go out of my way to be nice to tech support people since they get hammered on all the time. That’s how the call began as I got connected with a senior tech support guy in India, Dipanshu Joshi, and he began to walk me through trying out different fixes.

Dipanshu Joshi

My demeanor quickly went from open and pleasant to a just a bit agitated as Mr. Joshi’s tone became more and more dictatorial and condescending. “Listen to me. Stop talking. Do what I tell you to do.” were just a few of the commands he began to bark at me.

I asked him (very nicely) several times to repeat himself—since he was speaking quickly, his enunciation wasn’t clear and his VoIP connection deteriorated during the call—and he made sure I understood, “That I am speaking english so you should know what I am saying so you should listen.” To be clear, if he’d worked for me and spoke to customers in that way, I would’ve fired him on the spot.

He told me to be polite (I was until the 50th time he was a jerk to me and then I got mad on the phone). He chastised me several times for “clicking on the wrong link. I told you to click on the other link.” He repeatedly told me what a huge favor he was doing for me since they don’t support CS3 installation anymore (even though one of the products was InDesign CS4 they DO support) and more.

It was clear that he didn’t know the Mac and was following a script. He knew the basics and even wanted me to redownload the 1.5GB’s of installers “since they might be bad.” It’s clear this guy is fairly clueless and needs more training.

As I always do when calling in and am told by the announcement that my call, “May be recorded for quality assurance purposes” I record the call too. I have the entire thing recorded and played back some of the more interesting aspects before I wrote this post. If anyone at Adobe would like to hear it, I have a 1GB WAV file I can send you and yes, about 1 hour and 20 minutes in to the call I’m screaming at Joshi since he will not let me get a word in edge-wise and I was fed up with his more than one hour of crap.

The punchline? THE SOFTWARE STILL DOESN’T WORK. After Joshi had me delete everything Adobe, I reinstalled and still get the box that states, “Licensing for this product has stopped working” so I can’t use either InDesign or Photoshop on this new Macbook Pro and feel like I just flushed 1.5 hours down the drain.

Adobe’s complexity, inflexibility and treating me like a criminal when I’ve paid them THOUSANDS of dollars over the last decade alone is why I’m weaning myself completely from anything sold by Adobe.

UPDATE: Tonight I decided to see if I could fix this issue on my own. After seeking and finding others who’d posted in forums and their own blogs, I was referred to a non-obvious page at Adobe’s site with steps to fix the licensing problem. 15 minutes later the apps were running. Makes me even more convinced Mr. Joshi needs training.

Filed Under: Technology

Have I Got a Deal on a Candidate for You!

August 21, 2010 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

So many of us were stunned when the US Supreme Court decided—in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission—that corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections cannot be limited under the First Amendment of our Constitution.

Regardless of your political persuasion, transparency in the electoral process is vital. One consequence of this Supreme Court ruling is that corporations can now spend unlimited sums of money to drive their candidate of choice in to office.

With transparency, corporations contributing to people like Minnesota Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer—someone who is anti-gay and received considerable contributions from Target and Best Buy—will quickly feel the wrath of a citizenry segment who feels betrayed (Target is scrambling to recover from what they undoubtedly saw as a benign contribution and may now carefully consider their contributions before making them in the future).

Without transparency we will have NO idea who is funding a candidate, who that candidate is beholden to or even whether the money contributed came from a foreign government. This is NOT how a democracy should work and crosses every single belief patriots hold in the ideals our Founding Fathers tried to imbue in our Constitution.

Since the Republican Party has blocked attempts by the Democrats to drive toward transparency and instead allow this funding to remain hidden from view—and who could blame them since they’re going to try any tactic they can to win in November even if it means subverting our democracy for short term gain—President Obama used his weekly address to bring this to our attention (and I had to chuckle when I saw the title as, “Weekly Address: No Corporate Takeover of Our Democracy” using the Republicans favorite high school tactic at naming everything the Democrats are trying to achieve as a “government takeover”).

This is serious stuff kids. Don’t take the cable news talking heads/entertainers from Fox, MSNBC, CNN, Comedy Central or wherever as your information sources. Watch for yourself, read and THINK, and make up your own mind.

Filed Under: Current Affairs

Wish It Was a Movie

August 16, 2010 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

One scientist I greatly admire, and someone who has written extensively about the future and exponential change, is Ray Kurzweil. Though I’ve read several of his books (and his original paper on the topic of exponential change (The Law of Accelerating Returns), it wasn’t until he wrote The Singularity is Near did I find that the arguments he made, and case he built, meaningful.

In the book, Kurzweil describes the Singularity this way:

What, then, is the Singularity? It’s a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. Although neither utopian or dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself. Understanding the Singularity will alter our perspective on the significance of our past and the ramifications for our future. To truly understand it inherently changes one’s view of life in general and one’s own particular life.

Ray Kurzweil: Scientist, Author (and Doomsayer?)

In his book, which I’ve found to be a daunting read at best, Kurzweil lays out so many seemingly irrefutable data points that the evidence is overwhelming. Though his arguments have been dissected and countered by other scientists, futurists and technologists, I’m still a believer and have often thought, “Sure wish this was a movie…”

…and now it is. The Singularity is Near, A True Story about the Future, based on Ray Kurzweil’s New York Times best selling book, will be a full-length motion picture slated for theatrical release in 2010. I’ve pinged the media relations person to find out about distribution, but I’m fairly certain they’d have announced something if a deal had been struck and theaters lined up.

You can read more about it here or download a brochure (PDF) or the Q&A in PDF form here. I’ll definitely go see it. You?

Filed Under: Brain/Mind, Nanotechnology, Science, Technology

Script Kiddies Hacked CTD

August 15, 2010 By Steve Borsch 4 Comments

If only it were just script kittys rather than script kiddies!

In geek parlance a “script kiddie” is someone who has a lot of time on their hands and uses scripts to maliciously insert code in to websites and perform all sorts of mischief. Eight of the fourteen domains I host at Media Temple (MT) were attacked a week and a half ago by the WordPress Redirect exploit as well as the Pharma attack.

My first inkling something was up came from a Google malware warning. A subsequent search revealed that Google had inserted a “Visiting this site might harm your computer” underneath all of our links. Our primary ecommerce platform was the one we cared about most and it took me 40-50 hours to get the site back online after extensive troubleshooting and rebuilding. This blog took a back seat to that adventure and just came online yesterday.

Google has now removed all warnings.

MT claims it’s NOT a WordPress issue and several tech bloggers I’ve read concur. MT is also not taking the blame for what some describe as “script jumping” from MT Grid Service (GS) account-to-account (GS is their shared environment hosting many accounts on the same infrastructure). Instead MT is indicating that the access could’ve come from not current or up-to-date versions of WordPress, 3rd party plugins, captured passwords from someone’s computer that was compromised and so forth.

In my case that is highly doubtful, though one of the domains I host for a friend was quite out of date, version-wise. In some respects figuring this out is like trying to determine where you caught the flu.

People that possess deep technical acumen are puzzled over how this happened since databases WITHOUT a WordPress front-end were compromised as well as other software packages. I suppose anything is possible—especially in light of this security breach at Media Temple that was CLEARLY their screw-up—but my only option now is to move everything off of Media Temple to a significantly more robust infrastructure (and go from $20 to $150/month). I’ve already started.

My sites are back up or the ones I didn’t care much about I nuked. I’ve also done the security equivalent of putting a Sherman tank on my front lawn to protect my house along with security cameras, automatic lights and landmines. It’s made me appreciate why the Dept of Homeland Security has such an emphasis on cybersecurity. With so many script kiddies out there in Russia, China and other places where too many people have nothing better to do than destroy other’s value and digital assets, we’ll need a way to fire that metaphorical digital Sherman tank if necessary.

Filed Under: Gadgets & Hacks, Technology

No iPhone 4 for You!

July 7, 2010 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

I’ve got a pretty sad 15 year old son who is using his own money to buy an iPhone 4. Unfortunately, there’s no iPhone 4 for him and here’s why…

When pre-ordering/reservation time came for the iPhone 4, I happened to be at the Mall of America (MOA) Apple store. After an hour of attempting to consummate my order, I gave up thinking I’d try again later that afternoon when I had to return to MOA.

My daughter snagged one as did I that day. My wife was traveling and I ended up ordering one online for her a few days later. When iPhone launch day came I was able to get my pre-order and buy a second phone activated for my wife. Thinking I still had one on order for her—and we’d get that one and activate it for my son—I was dumbfounded to get an email forward from my wife today within which Apple stated there was a problem and they couldn’t ship and to call AT&T.

AT&T was clueless on how to help since the phone number attached to the incoming iPhone was the same as my wife’s…and you know Apple is trying to restrict the gray market or people buying multiple phones and that’s why it was cancelled.

Being reasonable, an Apple fanboy, someone who owns far too many Apple products and once worked for the company, I figured it would be trivial to change the phone number on the order and have that device be “attached” to my son’s phone number.

Not a snowball’s chance in Hades my friend.

After half an hour on the phone with Apple customer service, the “contract” I “agreed to when pre-ordering” was “non-transferable”, even though *I* am the primary account holder for all four of our family iPhones, my son is a minor (without a credit card so I’d have to order for him anyway) and that I could give them whatever they required to switch just the phone number.

Basically telling me to go pound sand, the order was cancelled. So rather than get his new iPhone 4 on July 14th, he’s back in the queue for an August 3rd delivery. I understand that Apple can’t make exceptions when selling/activating millions of devices, but this seemed so easy to do that the end result is me pissed off and my son one sad little guy.

Thanks Apple.

Filed Under: Technology

Adobe “Hearts” Apple? Like a heart attack maybe…

May 13, 2010 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

Like many of his fellow Adobe bloggers suddenly free to support Adobe’s new position on why Flash is so “open” and “good for consumers”, John Nack at Adobe had an interesting post which he started off like this:

“Today Adobe ran a full-page ad in various newspapers articulating key company beliefs, and company founders John Warnock & Chuck Geschke–whose PostScript innovations were instrumental in the adoption of the Macintosh & desktop publishing–posted their thoughts on open markets & open competition:

Adobe’s business philosophy is based on a premise that, in an open market, the best products will win in the end — and the best way to compete is to create the best technology and innovate faster than your competitors.

John continues on in his post talking about why he loves Apple, how he wants to “…build the most amazing iPad imaging apps the world has ever seen” but “who will decide” if he can get them accepted in the Apple App store? He then goes on to pontificate about innovating, the good of competition, and that his reader should care about this debate, “…because these issues affect your choices as a customer & a creative person.“

No they don’t. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Web/Tech Tagged With: Adobe, flash