Dave Courvoisier's Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Microsoft’

Every day I’m reminded that we live in swashbuckling times.  Not that we should have parrot on our shoulder, or a snarl on our breath…rather a swashbuckler — in the truest sense — is an adventurer.

Every generation has it’s opportunities for adventure.  Think of the explorers, the railroad or oil barons, even Bill Gates.  Each met a challenge on the frontier — be it Cape Horn, the Wild West, or a threshold of digital technology.

What is the world-changing opportunity lying right under our noses, that history will look back on in 50 years and say:  “Ya know, it really began in 2010…starting small with _________.”?

THE OUTBACK

The last such frontier was computer technology, the internet, the dot.com bubble…each building on the platform of the technology preceding it.  Microsoft and Apple were revolutionary outcomes of electricity, the phone system, and vacuum tubes.  And THOSE advances were built on advances in metallurgy, glassware, and the assembly line.

Make no mistake, THE NEXT BIG THING is forming right now…right here in the US…its nascent stem cells so defying prediction that we can’t see the thing-it-will-be.

Here’s my take on it anyway:  that “next big thing” will be some sort of paradigm, cultural revolution, or gizmo that binds us even more to one another — almost telepathically…and it’s being born in Social Media.

Ah…so that’s what you’re getting at, CourVO!!!…too many late nights on FaceBook!

…JUST AROUND THE CORNER!

But hear me out.  Three little recent developments — perhaps just insignificant baubles in the corporate world — that will be swallowed up by a Google, or a Lenovo, or a Zappos, may be the harbingers.

Gist.  This golden little software/cloud/assistive chunk of digital awareness will help put online social connections in perspective.  You can join online at Gist.com.  You can download the add-on version to MS Outlook, and you can further utilize Gist on your smartphone.  Gist is quietly amazing.  In Outlook (which BTW is not-so-slowly embracing social media itself: see the new OutLook Social Connector), Gist immediately adjusts to each email highlighted, telling you more…much more, about the person who just sent you a message, in the form of links, contact info, and social media sites.  Another great program of this ilk is XOBNI (inbox backwards).

StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit.  I group these together, ’cause they share a similar approach, which is to let YOU choose the headline, the trend, the hot topic. NewsVine is in this category.  Digg — a surprising survivor of Social Media competition — is about to launch a whole new site revamp that everybody is anticipating, and StumbleUpon just launched it’s new iPhone/Android app.  Actually, mobile is EVERYTHING.  Forget, radio, TV, computers…the trend is all towards personal info & communication on the go.

THE NEW WORLD

Which leads to the capper of my little diatribe today:  GeoLocation services.  This sector is going wild. Yelp and Loopt and a hundred other start-ups launched into this sector, built upon the capabilities of  GPS (remember the history lesson above?)   FourSquare popularized it, but over the weekend, FaceBook got on the bandwagon, and Google is right in the mix too, with “Google Places“.

Detractors caution about too freely sharing your whereabouts.  But advertisers are lovin’ this one…offering incentives, coupons, and special buys for those who check-in, reach out and take-advantage.  Amazing stories are emerging of people finding the very person they’re looking for (!) in the next store over, all because they both checked into FourSquare within minutes of each other on their smartphones.

WITHER VO?

Don’t ask me this question!  I’m just a blogger, not Rasputin…but let’s brainstorm for a minute.  Gist is easy:  it puts lots of handy information about possible voice clients and leads right where you can use it… on your computer and your smartphone.  StumbleUpon, Digg, etc. are like mini RSS readers that keep you up on business trends, and might give you ideas for warm-calling certain leads.

But Geo-Location?  I’m coming up blank on this one.  I gotta call my VO bud Terry Daniel who is absolutely rabid about this technology, and have him explain the big advantage for my voice-over business.  Will it help me to know, for instance, that the production supervisor hired by McDonald’s advertising agency is having coffee at the Starbucks just down from where I’m picking up my dry cleaning?  Hmmmm.

Will there be “places” barons in our near future?

CourVO

Xobni is this great Outlook plug-in that analyzes your e-mal in ways that helps you glean the most information from that never-ending torrent you find there each day.

Here’s the catch:  I hate Outlook (and that’s coming from me, Dave, an unabashed Microsoft fan).  Here’s why: Outlook is an incredibly feature-rich program that practically bogs your computer down in excess code.

But I use it when I have to, and since Xobni integrates SO well, I end up using Outlook JUST FOR Xobni.

Case in point:  I began examining WHEN Voices.com and V123 leads came across with e-mail notices, and found an interesting trend.  (Yes, Xobni tells you that kind of information)

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Here’s Xobni’s graph of time-of-day Voices.com e-mail notices.

Tell me if I’m wrong, but it looks like a pretty good spike at 3am PST (6am EST).

The rest of the day is essentially a plateau with maybe a mini-spike at 11am PST (2pm EST).

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Now here’s Xobni’s graph of time-of-day V123 e-mail notices.

I’d say that’s a peak at roughly 10amPST (1pmEST).

The rest of THEIR day is all over the place.

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What’s my sample?  Since October 10th I got a total of 2,863 e-mails on my CourVO@CourVO.com e-mail account.  As you can see, Voices.com and V123 constitute my 2nd and 3rd most prolific incoming mail source.  I say all this to underscore that this is NOT a small sample.

I haven’t quite figured out why Xobni ranks V123 2nd with 64 incoming per day, and Voices.com 3rd with even more emails per day.  I may be reading that wrong, but I stand by my claim that this is a large sample, and a trend that should not be ignored IF you choose to wait by your computer for the hottest leads.

IF you’re doing that…then your leash from the computer is a short one regardless.  If you want to maximize the greatest possible hit-time to check out Voices.com and V123 leads, then, well…there’s your data.

The argument for and against pay-to-play sites rises to the level of Mac v. PC flame wars.

Then the secondary debate about V123 v. Voices.com rises to the level of mules v. elephants.

That’s another conversation.  I just thought this was a novel set of data no one had published before.

CourVO

Everybody loves to bash Microsoft.  Not me.  ’Been with ‘em since DOS.  I’ve always liked their scrappy, overbearing style…catching up to great ideas, stealing them, and making them their own.  I’ve re-booted, reconfigured and re-installed every major product they’ve had out since 1992.  But I think finally, the end is beginning for Bill & Co.

Windows 7 is their best operating system yet.  Vista was good, but Win7 reaches the pinnacles to which Vista could never quite arise. The upgrade install was brainless.

I’ve been running Win7 on my laptop and my audio studio desktop computer for about 2 months, now, and the RC version (release candidate) is SOLID.  I swallowed hard when I installed on my studio computer.  I even dual-booted so I’d have my old XP to fall back on.  But I can’t remember the last time I booted up to XP.  I don’t get the blue screen of death anymore.

Win7 is fast, reliable, intuitive, forgiving, and innovative.

The following is list of VO-related software programs I run on Win7 with nary a hitch:

AudioTX ISDN
Sony SoundForge Audio Studio 9.0
Adobe Audition 3.0
GoldWave 5.52
Audacity 1.3.9
SKYPE 4.0
MS Office 2007
MS IE 8.0
FireFox 3.5
Opera 10.0
Google Chrome 3.0
Flock 2.5.2
Tweetdeck
WinZip
…and more

In fact, I haven’t found a program yet that runs on WinXP that won’t run on Win7…WITH TWO NOTABLE EXCEPTIONS:

-Pro-Tools (and I have the 7.4cs version)
-Source Connect 3.1 (which I use through it’s Source Elements Desktop interface — it doesn’t like Vista or Win7 either)

Win7 also happily accepts my legacy audio drivers for an old Soundblaster card, my USB-connected Alesis Multimix8, my M-Audio FireWire Solo, and my LexiconPro I.onix U42S audio interfaces.

So why, with all that going for it, do I feel like Microsoft is going down?

Redmond has gotten so big, and so dependent on legacy software-related solutions, that it hasn’t been agile enough to adapt to the new Google-driven paradigm of online software, cloud-computing, and  network-driven, New Media runaway hits.  Open-source was never something MS could understand.  They made their fortune on expensive, bundled, license-protected software.

Oh, it’s got a few tricks left, and some form of Microsoft will endure for many years…but it’s dominance is waning, and more quickly than most of us realize.

But I digress, and I don’t have the chutzpah to launch into a full-fledged diatribe about tech-giant wars.

I’m just tellin’ ya… if you’re feeling pressure to continue in the same vein for a while longer, Win7 is a very safe move.  The release is scheduled for October 22nd, and I’ll be there…in fact I’ve petitioned to hold a launch party.

Click HERE for the latest from MS on Win7.

CourVO

    Voice-actor, friend, and fellow-blogger Lou Zucaro in the Chicago-area, came to my rescue the other day while I was seeking some specialized software.

On the VO-BB, Lou is always quick with helpful technical tips…and I just knew he’d have a suggestion for me.

     I needed to back-up saved soundfiles to a USB HD.  This is something I need to do on a regular basis, and it means transfering a whole directory or sub-directory of files.  But I may have already transferred some of those older files, and don’t need more copies at my destination drive…AND I don’t want to answer endless qualifying questions from XP about whether I want to over-write certain files.

   Lou pointed me to SyncToy.
SyncToy is avaiable at the Microsoft Website, but is not supported by the company.  However, it’s a very robust and feature-rich program that did just what I needed, and it’s offered at no cost.

Later, Lou wrote back to offer yet another link to a program called Goodsync, which is not free.

CourVO

Microsoft’s Bill Gates is now 3rd on the list of the world’s billionaires…but who’s counting?  He’s not really in charge anymore.  Steve Ballmer is, and he’s been in Las Vegas this week at the 3rd-annual web-developer’s converence called Mix08.

Apparently, one of the big announcements to come out of the conference is that Microsoft is releasing the Beta version of it’s Internet Explorer browser 8.0. 

Read more about the new version HERE.  MS seems to be ready to play nice, and join it’s competitors in common standards for browsing protocols.

More HERE from one of the presenters at the conference.

Download the new browser HERE.

CourVO