Category Archives ⇒ Technology

Using digital barcodes on your business cards

· Brandon Hann

I was sitting here the other day thinking about creating business cards for myself and I started thinking of a unique way to provide the same information that every business card offers, but in a way that people are more likely to remember. As I was thinking about this, I was playing with my iPhone and an app called RedLaser. This app allows you to scan the barcode of any product and it automatically searches the Internet for competitive pricing.

Anyway, I thought about how great it would be to have a business card in hand and rather than typing all that information into your phone, you could just scan a simple bar code on the card and have the information sent right to your contacts list.

Photo from NevilleHobson.com

I began a search to see if someone else had a similar idea and I found Neville Hobson’s blog and he had a post a while ago discussing just this topic! Well, without the iPhone app per se…at least in the incarnation I envisioned.

Essentially what he was talking about was that business cards have been a huge part of social interaction in the last some-odd number of years, but they suffer in today’s technological world–and frankly, I couldn’t agree more. When someone offers me a business card, I’m forced to comprehend the information it contains and then write it manually into my phone or other device.

Subconsciously, I also tend to “size-up” the person based on the design of the card. Too much flash and I’m thinking they spend more time on their image than on their business. Too little and maybe they don’t care enough. Now, if someone handed me a business card with bar code on it, this would make me feel like they’re on par with today’s technology. I feel much the same way when someone is able to offer me a v-card for download.

In a perfect world, business cards would be gone and vcards and iPhone apps like Bump will be the mainstay. But let’s face it…not everyone has an iPhone or even a smartphone and there’s something to be said about the old school business card–it still works.

In fact, people expect them when you’re at a conference or meeting with customers and not having one could mean a loss of business for you. What people don’t expect (at least now anyway) is the ability to copy your information simply by scanning a barcode right off your card.

How do I get this?

It’s easy and cheap to get cards printed, but here’s what you need to get barcode images printed out so you can integrate them into your card design. I wrote a separate post all about Microsoft Tag that goes into much more detail about their service.

  • Know your codes – There are different types of bar codes out there. You’re probably more familiar with the standard barcode you see on everyday products, but these won’t work because they can only store small amounts of data–namely numbers and a few letters. What you need are the kinds that shippers like FedEx and UPS use. The two most common are QR and DataMatrix. Microsoft offers a new color barcode called High Capacity Color Barcode that allows up to 3,500 characters to be displayed per square inch.
  • Get software – You’re going to need software to create the barcodes. If you want to make the Microsoft color tag, simply go to this website. Other barcodes have to be made using barcode software. Do a Google search for some.

Test it out

I created a tag that takes you to my website using the Microsoft Tag site and it only took 3 seconds! First, you need to jump on your mobile phone and visit this website: gettag.mobi. It’ll redirect you to the right software based on your phone. iPhone users: there’s an app for that. Once downloaded, you can load it up and take a snapshot of this picture:

It will automatically take you to my website! Isn’t that crazy?? As you can see, it works right off computer screens, so it’ll work anywhere you can print it–including business cards. To read more, check out my article about how to use Microsoft Tag on your business cards.

UPDATE – November 18th, 2010

I just wanted to update this post to include a picture of the business card I made for myself that includes both the Microsoft tag and a QR barcode on the front. Alongside their functionality, they also look great within the design. Originally, I planned on adding the barcodes to the back of the card, but I figured who looks at the back?! Check it out and let me know what you think!

Brandon Media business card
Brandon Media business card

Microsoft also introduced the ability to create the Microsoft tag in black and white as seen above. More on that over on my article about the Microsoft Tag!

Yet another URL shortening website!

· Brandon Hann

UPDATE (Oct 26, 2010) :: I disbanded my original URL shortening service and have created a new one with an even shorter URL! I’m leaving this page up for posterity, but I’ve changed the links where applicable. Also, I wrote about my new URL shortening service, so you may want to head on over there first!

This time, it’s mine!! After I got onto Twitter and Facebook, I starting noticing all these little weird looking links and came to realize they were just pointers to much longer links. URL shortening services have sprung up just about everywhere. The issue of really long links is more of a problem to Twitter users because you only have 140 characters to type your message, but they’re starting to gain traction for just about every use. Use my new URL shortener to shrink you long urls today!

You would want to/need to shorten a url when you don’t have much space to post one or you want to make it easier for someone to remember. Now, there are tons of sites out there that can shorten long links into something tiny, but I didn’t want to trust my links in the hands of some fly-by-night service. Instead, I opened my own service and now I’m offering the service to everyone.

xi.io URL shortener

What is it?

Take this link for example: http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FKindle-Wireless-Reading-Display-Generation%2Fdp%2FB0015T963C%3Fpf_rd%5Fm%3DATVPDKIKX0DER%26pf%5Frd%5Fs%3Dcenter-1%26pf%5Frd%5Fr%3D0Y2V14K8W4X1MTQ9XB9B%26pf%5Frd%5Ft%3D101%26pf%5Frd%5Fp%3D1253201642%26pf%5Frd%5Fi%3D507846&tag=ledfrog-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325. It’s a direct link to Amazon.com’s Kindle page. Now, imagine you’re on Twitter and you want to send that to your followers. It’s not going to happen.

Instead, you drop on by my new site and create a link that looks like this: http://xi.io/8m. Much nicer, wouldn’t you agree? In fact, this URL went from being 358 characters long down to only 15! That’s a difference of 343 characters!! You can use these links for any purpose and the best part is, you can also search for keyword text, so instead of getting a randomly generated number, you can get a text phrase (if available).

How is this site different?

It’s not so much different in features as it is in name. Other services such as goo.gl, bit.ly and u.nu all offer the same services, but as you can see, they all use International domain names.

Personally, I find two things wrong with this. The first reason is that the links are not universally recognized by a lot of Internet users. If fact, I’ve talked to some people that say they never click on links like that at all! This can provide low click-through ratios for your links.

The second reason is that these domain names are controlled by the countries who own the extension. This can, although probably not likely, lead to the domains becoming obsolete or even being taken back by the local government.

What can you do with a shortened URL?

The uses for this service are only limited to your creativity! Here are some ideas:

  • Use shorter links for Twitter posts
  • Cloak affiliate links
  • Mask a long URL for marketing materials
  • Use a shorter URL for your site to make it easier to tell your friends how to get there

This service is free and allows you to make an unlimited amount of links. Check it out by going to xi.io now!

No more Google in China

· Brandon Hann

I must say that I think this is great. To clarify, I think the business end of it sure looks grim, but what did China expect after forcing Google to censor it’s web search? For those of you that aren’t aware, China censors the country’s Internet access to block all “offending” subjects from entering their citizen’s computers. What the exact definition of “offending” may be is anyone’s guess, but all the standards are sure to apply.

All this is controlled by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and in total, there are over 60 regulations just on the Internet, which not only includes content blocking, but also the monitoring of Internet usage directly into people’s homes. This is all accomplished by enforcing these regulations at the state-owned ISP level. According to Wikipedia, in December of 1997, these regulations were entered into law:

No unit or individual may use the Internet to create, replicate, retrieve, or transmit the following kinds of information:

  1. Inciting to resist or breaking the Constitution or laws or the implementation of administrative regulations;
  2. Inciting to overthrow the government or the socialist system;
  3. Inciting division of the country, harming national unification;
  4. Inciting hatred or discrimination among nationalities or harming the unity of the nationalities;
  5. Making falsehoods or distorting the truth, spreading rumors, destroying the order of society;
  6. Promoting feudal superstitions, sexually suggestive material, gambling, violence, murder;
  7. Terrorism or inciting others to criminal activity; openly insulting other people or distorting the truth to slander people;
  8. Injuring the reputation of state organs;
  9. Other activities against the Constitution, laws or administrative regulations.

Of course, nobody really wants to promote that kind of stuff, but the idea of a government controlling this content is disturbing to say the least. Imagine how many doors this can open (or close for that matter). It is said that China has the strictest laws about what kind of content can be seen in its country and because of this, they also have the largest number of journalists and cyber-dissidents in the world!

Google says, “no way”.

Google’s position stems from their will to keep the Internet free of censorship and to provide a freedom of self-expression and free speech environment for the whole world to enjoy. And frankly, they do a damn good job of it. At this time, it’s not completely official, but the plan is to be out of China by April 10th. Currently, Google is operating under the Google.cn domain name with censored search results and if the site does go dark, it may still be possible for Chinese web surfers to access Google through our Google.com domain–that is of course if the PRC doesn’t block all of Google entirely.

This is what the homepage of Google.cn appears like today:

Google.cn homepage on April 11th,

Let’s just hope this whole thing isn’t powerful enough to complete sever ties between our two countries.

::UPDATE:: Google.cn is now forwarding traffic to Google.com.hk (the Hong Kong Google) which was supposed to allow Chinese surfers to view uncensored search results, but it looks like it’s backfiring on them because China is till censoring Internet traffic at higher levels. I have a feeling this virtual war is going to be bad.

What happens if a trademark becomes genericized?

· Brandon Hann

I was reading the article about Google™ getting denied on their trademark application for the name Nexus One. To quickly summarize the story, Google™ wanted to trademark the name Nexus Phone because of their new phone to be release, but apparently another company had already registered this name over a year ago.

The USPTO has denied the application and now we all await to see what happens. I don’t think Google™ will have any problems with this, but the whole story got me thinking about trademarks in general and the ensuing battles between stakeholders. More specifically, I started thinking about trademarks becoming genericized and what would happen to if Google™ simply became, google…

Genericizing is when the mainstream public starts using a trademark name as a generic word to describe a product or service. This usually happens by mistake, but it’s root cause stems from a company that has maybe done too great a job at marketing! Or maybe they just left a much larger impression on the public than previously expected.

Trademarks that can become genericized

To better define what I’m talking about, take the following list of brand names and ask yourself this question: Do I refer to every similar product by these names?

  • Kleenex® – The proper term for any facial tissue not made by Kleenex® is simply facial tissue.
  • Q-Tips® – Off brands are known as cotton swabs.
  • Xerox® – You didn’t make a “xerox” of something unless you did it on a Xerox® copy machine.
  • Adobe Photoshop® – People always attribute all photo editing as “photoshopping”, but this is incorrect. (Side note: I was reading an interesting page on Adobe’s own website outlining the proper usage of the term and all of their trademarks and it’s very specific.)
  • Band-Aid® – What else would you call it? That’s right, a bandage.
  • Blow Pop® – Not every sucker is one–just the ones made by Charms® which is now owned by Tootsie®.

I’m pretty sure you get the gist by now. So, what might happen if the brand name Google™ became a generic term for searching? If you really think about it, how many times a week do you tell someone to “google it” when they ask you something you don’t know? How many times a day even?!

I was watching an episode of the recently cancelled show, The Forgotten and in one of the scenes, they are searching Google™, but the logo was replaced with one of similar colors and simply titled ‘Web Search’. The rest of the page was google and it was clearly obvious. Ok fine, they didn’t want to pay for the use of the name, but…

In another scene, someone asks this woman how they got their information and she clearly says, “We googled it…” For anyone who knows anything about the trademarking process, you know that part of your responsibility as a trademark owner is to protect your brand and part of this protection is to ensure that it does not become a genericized term (as Adobe® outlines on their website above).

Trademarks that lost their trade value

To further clarify my point, here’s a list of some terms that were once valued trademarks:

  • Aspirin – Bayer® used to own this as one of their trademarks until it was declared generic.
  • Cellophane – Originally owned by DuPont®.
  • Dry ice – Believe it or not, the Dry Ice Corporation of America once owed this term!
  • Escalator – Once owned by the Otis Elevator Company.
  • Yo-Yo – Declared generic in 1965.
  • Laundromat – Once a proud brand, now a generic term for all coin-op laundry facilities.
  • Heroin – Another trademark taken from it’s original owner, Bayer®.

Whether these trademarks lost their “trade” value or not is open for debate, but what is clear is that each term has found it’s way into our very vocabulary. In fact, just looking at the list above, you may not have even known that these were once brand names.

All this talk about trademarks and losing them got me thinking about registering my own company name and logo for the sake of protection, but even then, nothing is guaranteed, right? At any rate, I bought a book on the subject and I must say, it has a wealth of information about all the ins and outs of trademarks and such. One of these days, I’ll actually get around to reading the step-by-step guide!

Ultimately, nobody can predict the future, but I ask again, what would the world be like if Google™ appeared in the dictionary without the capital G?

Spammers don't work on weekends

· Brandon Hann

I don’t know about you, but over the years I’ve acquired and/or used over seven or so email addresses for various reasons and although I only use one at a time, I keep the other ones “active” because I never know if someone from my past, who has an old email of mine might want to get a hold of me.

Anyway, across all these emails, I probably get about 50 spammed emails every day. It’s hard to say just how these people got my email(s) in the first place, but it’s a sure bet that all those companies that I’ve signed up for their mailing lists have sold my info to unscrupulous misfits out there.

Above and beyond all that, I started noticing one thing; spammers don’t seem to work on weekends! Here I sit on Sunday evening and just about the time I’d be watching 50+ emails download to my inbox, I get nothing. Maybe one, maybe 2, but generally I only get real emails. I won’t say that I’m complaining, but it reminds me of a line from the movie Layer Cake when Daniel Craig says “England. Typical. Even drugs dealers don’t work weekends.” What’s even more funny and ironic about that statement is that most of the spam I get seems to come from the UK.

Has anyone else experienced this same thing?

PhoneDetective.com Review

· Brandon Hann

My friend had some issues with a random caller on her cell phone, so I decided to try out one of those reverse phone lookup services online to see what, if any, kind of information I could find on someone. Of course, all of these sites allow you to search any number for free, but if you want more information, you must pay.

Anyway, this site touts the availability of all this information:

Search results include:

  • Owner name and address
  • Phone type – landline or mobile
  • People search results
  • Household members
  • And more

At any rate, my intention in this operation was to at least get an idea of who might be behind these calls, so I opted to pay the $14.95 (I believe the site changes its pricing often because right now its saying $9.95). Here’s what I got for my fifteen dollars.

tracer-report
I’ve blocked out the “sensitive” information, but you can get the idea of what kind of information I got. Now, since running this report, I’ve gotten more information on the caller by simply talking to my girlfriend about it and I must say, the person who was on the other end of the phone does not match the person that showed up on the report! Also, the links you see only point toward more services you can pay for. These come in two flavors: a one-time, one-search charge or a monthly, unlimited searches charge.

I also want to point out that the report listed three addresses from persons with the same (or similar) name. To me, this was nothing more than a name search you’d do in the white pages of the phone book. In other words, useless. Imagine how long the report would be if the person’s name was John Smith?!

In conclusion, I didn’t particularly find any useful information from this website and I’m sure no others would be better. However, the site does NOT guarantee any amount of information you’ll get on the report, so I can’t complain too much. It was a crap shoot to begin with. This ‘review’ isn’t intended to sway you one way or another on using PhoneDetective.com or any similar site–I just wanted to share my experience.

Good luck!

Last words: Aside from you being a private detective where you might actually get some use out of the unlimited searching membership, I doubt you’ll get any real value from these services.

Wine+MacBook=no fun

· Brandon Hann

My drunk roommate decided that she hadn’t had enough wine so she leaned forward and attempted to grab her glass that was still half full from the table we were sitting around and just as I had imagined it happening, it happened. I watched red wine fly through the air and land right on my MacBook! There’s not much more devastating than seeing wine start to seep through the gaps in the keys on your $1500 (in October 2008) investment.

Fortunately, by nature, I’m not a person that panics and I’ve been through a similar situation with electronics when I was pushed into a swimming pool holding two cell phones. Anyway, because of this, the first thing I did was turn off the computer by holding the power button. I was smart enough to NOT push any of the wet keys for fear of shorting something out.

Right afterward, I removed the battery and began my decent into the computer’s internals in hopes of cleaning out every drop of wine. I was up until 3am removing many, many, many tiny screws to open this bad boy up. For those who have ever taken apart one of those new aluminum MacBooks, you know what I’m talking about. Here’s the gallery of pictures during the cleaning process.

I knew there was no way to get all the wine out by simply blowing air into the keyboard, so I had to completely submerge it in water by washing it in the sink. After I washed all the layers of the keyboard in water, I blew them dry to get the majority of the water off and then let them dry for 1 more day.

Meanwhile, I washed off everything else that got wine on it and when I was at work the next day, I bought some Monster screen cleaner and I must stop and tell you that that stuff is amazing!! If it wasn’t so expensive, I’d wash my car with it!

In the end, I was able to salvage my MacBook and give it a massive cleaning from the inside out. Everything is still working great and it’s not sticky nor does it smell like alcohol.

Fix Windows XP Log On/Log Off Loop

· Brandon Hann

I’ve run into this issue so many times while fixing client computers and it seems like every time I do a search for a fix, I get a different answer each time and sometimes, the fix works, sometimes it doesn’t. Well today, my troubles are over! And hopefully yours as well.

I found this ridiculously organized and thorough tutorial over at DanFischbach.com that should fix this problem 99% of the time. In fact, if it can’t fix this issue, you’re better off restoring your system. When you’re done with that, give your pc to your little cousin and buy yourself a Mac. 😉

Anyway, moving on…this guide was written by Dan Fischbach way back in 2006, but for all you Vista-haters out there, it’ll still hold up today. I’m not going to re-post the multi-page guide here, but I will provide a mirror for at least one of the large downloads required for the repair to work.

To see the guide, click here. To download the needed disc images, see below.

Windows Vista Recovery Disc (Direct download removed due to Microsoft copyright claim) — 120Mb
Save Me Disc — For good reasons, I won’t be posting a download of the second disc. As it often changes, it would be a much better idea to download it directly from the source.

*If the link above is not there, the mirror is not available at the moment. Try again later.

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The New Apple MacBook Wheel

· Brandon Hann

I just wanted to share with you the coolest video I have ever seen!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

This is seriously the future of laptops my friends. The thing that gets me the most is that two people have messaged me after they saw this video and told me that this product is a stupid idea. And they were serious…

Anyway, my favorite part of the video is when he says that the next gen MacBook Wheel will be 4oz lighter due to it not having a monitor, hard drive or wheel!

New Mac Stuff

· Brandon Hann

I just installed Parallels on my Mac and I have to say, without a doubt, this is the sickest software I think I’ve ever used in my entire life!

To put it in perspective, I am currently running my Mac OSX and then on top of that, I have Windows Vista Ultimate running as a virtual machine. However, unlike previous versions, I have it set up in what they call ‘Coherence’ mode which allows for the Windows system to be integrated right into Mac. What does this mean? As an example, I have Internet Explorer open right now within Mac and it’s running as if it was a Mac program.

Another cool feature is that I have a fully usable Windows Start menu at my disposal at the bottom of my screen. Anyone using a Mac and wishing to still utilize Windows should seriously get this program.