Read/WriteWeb Network

When the first iPad launched in 2010, critics were quick to lampoon the device for being geared too heavily toward content consumption. The criticisms weren't entirely without merit, especially considering that the first-generation iPad didn't even have a camera, and external media slots are still nowhere to be found. 

Over time, the iPad has evolved into something that's much more creation-friendly. It still doesn't compare to a desktop or laptop computer for many things, but it's great for quite a few others. Writing is one of them. 

I happen to write things for a living, but the practice is far from limited to those who earn a paycheck by doing it. Some of us just enjoy emptying the thoughts from our heads, while many others have a professional obligation to be good at communicating with words. Whatever one's purpose - journaling, drafting stories or composing work-related documents - the iPad is a pretty good place to put words together.

It's Easier to Focus

One of the aforementioned early criticisms actually turns out to be part of what makes the iPad ideal for writing. Unlike a desktop computer, the device is designed to allow the user to focus on only one thing at a time. When one needs to focus on stringing together words without the distractions that so easily flood a desktop computer, the one-task-at-a-time nature of the iPad is a blessing. 

To be sure, there are distraction-free writing apps for Windows and Mac desktops, and it's not exactly rocket science to simply close one's IM, email and Twitter clients for an hour or two. Still, fine-tuning the desktop for optimal focus requires effort, while tablets just sort of work that way by default. It's a great alternative to the desktop, especially with the right tools. 

From Apps to Accessories, the Tools Make the Experience 

When you unbox an iPad, it's not necessarily ready for an optimal experience of sustained writing. It's pretty close, though. The native Notes app is fine enough, and the touchscreen keyboard gets the job done, but to really make the most of the device's potential, third-party accessories and writing-specific apps are required. 

To turn the iPad into a true writing machine, a physical keyboard of some kind is necessary. I've always been happy with Apple's own Bluetooth keyboard, but there are, of course, other options, including cases that come with a built-in keyboard.

For personal journaling, DayOne is is a fantastic app. A few of us here at ReadWriteWeb use it and love it. It sports a sleek design, helpful writing prompts and cross-device syncing via DropBox or iCloud. Other popular options include Momento and Maxjournal.

There's still something to be said for keeping a paper-and-pen journal, but taking one's journal into the digital realm is nice because our devices tend to be integrated a little more seamlessly into our lives than paper-based books. It's easy enough to keep a paper journal in your bag, but have you ever tried jotting down your thoughts with a pen on a moving subway car? Not so smooth. You might not carry your iPad everywhere you go, but most good writing apps for iOS can sync across devices, enabling access from virtually anywhere. 

For less personal writing, apps like iA Writer are worthy of their hype. I often use iA Writer to draft stories on my iPad and then return to them later on my laptop, where I put them into our content management system, do some basic formatting and publish them. 

The formatting ability is a crucial distinction between tablets and desktops/laptops. When it comes to loading content into a print layout or website CMS, or adding images and other formatting, those things are still best handled on a "real" computer. 

iA Writer's "Focus" feature greys out every line of text except for the one you're currently typing. The Mac version does the same thing, but with more potential distractions chiming and buzzing in the background. There are several other distraction-free writing apps out there. For the iPad, ByWord, OmmWriter and CleanWriter are popular choices. They're all very sparse on features and formatting choices, but the best ones support MarkDown syntax. 

What's the takeaway from Yahoo's recent CEO fiasco? Don't lie on your corporate bio, for one, and make sure no one else has lied on your behalf. But the real lesson has nothing to do with falsified credentials.

Sure, the world will remember Scott Thompson as the Yahoo CEO who got fired over a fake computer science degree, but the context is crucial: A battle with Yahoo shareholder Dan Loeb for control of the company. If not for Loeb, we may never have found out about Thompson's juiced resume, and he might still be CEO. The real lesson is: Beware the activist investor.

Four months had passed since Thompson's appointment as Yahoo CEO, and no one had questioned his education. His relevant experience at PayPal? Sure, at first. But not his computer science degree. In fact, many of us actually thought that especially qualified him for the Yahoo job.

In hindsight, Yahoo obviously should have investigated Thompson's background more thoroughly. (And shame on us in the press for missing this one!) But even if Yahoo had found the discrepancy after Thompson was named CEO, it might have quietly corrected the mistake and hoped no one noticed.

It is possible to survive a scandal over a college degree you wish you'd earned but didn't. When RadioShack CEO David Edmondson resigned in 2006 after a newspaper reported that his two supposed degrees were invented and that he was facing a trial for DUI charges, the company said its board had known about “some, but definitely not all” of the issues. (I suppose it makes a difference which ones.) But former Bausch & Lomb CEO Ronald Zarrella stayed around for years after he was busted for falsely claiming an MBA from New York University.

In this case, there was no pushing anything under the rug. it was Loeb himself who outed Thompson, in a letter to Yahoo's board that he made public in a press release.

"According to the Yahoo! Form 10-K/A, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 27, 2012, newly-hired Chief Executive Officer, Scott Thompson, 'holds a Bachelor's degree in accounting and computer science' from Stonehill College," it read. "A rudimentary Google search reveals a Stonehill College alumni announcement stating that Mr. Thompson's degree is in accounting only." Whoops.

Did Loeb actually care about Thompson's level of educational attainment? Probably not. This was a power play, pure and simple. And it worked. (Note that Loeb's activist website, ValueYahoo, is already taken down.) If Loeb hadn't hit the jackpot with the degree accusation - or if Thompson and Yahoo successfully brushed it off - he would have come back, again and again, until either he or his adversary crumbled.

But with the mess Yahoo is in - even after Thompson's four months on the job - Loeb finally had the mob on his side. And now he's on top.

Email, instant messaging, forums, code forges and other collaboration tools make it possible for distributed teams to get work done - but they're not great tools for making decisions. The team behind Loomio wants to solve that with a new Web-based tool for focused, concise discussions that allow all team members to be heard. 

If you've ever worked with a distributed team, you know how difficult it can be to make decisions as a group. Discussions are unstructured, rambling affairs with dozens of messages flying about and no good way to track consensus. Even worse, requests for feedback can go without comment entirely, or with only a few stakeholders raising a voice.

Agree, Disagree, Abstain, Block

Discussion in Loomio starts with a discussion and specific proposal, and members have the option of voting on the proposal. A group can define the options (defaults are yes/no, abstain and block), and each member can give their view summary. As votes are tallied, everyone can see get a chart that shows how many folks are in agreement, how many aren't, how many have abstained, etc.

This sounds pretty simple, but most of today's collaboration tools don't provide a good way to focus a discussion. The key to Loomio is that it provides a central tool for discussions and (if used properly) narrows things down to decisions that are easy to vote on. Central is key here. It helps a lot to confine activity to one tool rather than making users look all over for information.

A lot of online teams communicate in several ways, including email, IM, IRC, over the phone and face to face. Stakeholders who prefer one medium (like email) lose out if discussions are held in IRC, or vice-versa. Even worse, stakeholders may be totally unaware a decision is being made at all. If a group settles on Loomio, it would enable the group to say "decisions are made here and nowhere else." If something isn't put up in Loomio (or another approved tool), then a decision wouldn't be legitimate.

Settling on a decision tool like Loomio should also help cut down on noise in other communication channels. It's popular to have discussions in email and CC everyone who might have an opinion or might need to vote on something. An active team can inspire email fatigue pretty quickly with discussions that are neverending. Loomio would allow users to visit, vote and get back to work.

Actually, Loomio isn't only for distributed teams. There's no reason it couldn't be used in any organization, but its especially appropriate for situations where team members or stakeholders are far-flung.

Can Loomio Solve the Problem?

Like any tool, Loomio would only be effective if used properly. The early design could probably do with some modification - a more obvious start and end date for votes, for example - but the initial design is solid. The Loomio team says it's already in use by some organizations. New Zealand companies or organizations like Enspiral and BuckyBox are among the first adopters - though no one seems to be providing a public instance that we can point to.

If you want to help, the group is looking for contributions from Ruby on Rails developers, as well as a little extra cash (NZ $5,000) to help the volunteer team devote more time to Loomio development. The project is sort-of open source and already on GitHub. It's "sort-of" open source because the site says it's open source, but if you look at the license text on GitHub it's basically a stump saying: "We need to add the license. GPLv2?" The pledge drive (through the Pledge Me platform) ends on May 18th. The developers have already raised more than their target, but more money might mean more time spent on development.

If adopted a bit more widely, Loomio might help take distributed teams to a new level - much like GitHub has helped with development. It is a simple concept, but bringing order to decision-making could help teams communicate better and make better decisions, no matter where they happen to be located. 

For many young entrepreneurs, getting their parents’ support for a new venture can make a huge difference - emotionally, practically and even financially. But it’s not always easy to explain to Mom and Dad why, instead of getting a “real job,” you’re putting everything on the line to create a new technology startup. It can be done, though, and these youthful startup veterans explain how:

Tip #1: Don’t get too full of yourself. “Show your parents that you have thought [your idea] through to the long term, not just what you hope happens in six months,” says Kelsey Meyer, Vice President of Digital Talent Agents. “Also, do not try to compare yourself to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram - those are the exceptions, not the rule, and parents know it.”

Tip #2: Do your homework. Scott Thompson left a comfortable career with a good salary and excellent health benefits to start a business 5,000 miles from home as part of the entrepreneurship program Start-Up Chile. “After their initial reaction of shock, sadness and worry, they quickly came around to being the #1 fans of my startup, Bungolow.com,” Thompson says. His parents provided expertise in graphic design, including helping design the company’s first logo. “Their support was influenced not only by unconditional love, but also the fact that it was clear I had done my homework, and that it was not just a spur-of-the-moment decision,” says Thompson. “I was thorough in explaining why I wanted to do it, and why this was the time to do it.”

Tip #3: See their perspective. “Until my third year of being self-employed, my parents - who are baby boomers - thought I was out of my mind,” says Faiyaz Farouk, whose company, S2 Leadership Consultants, advises businesses on working with Gen X and Gen Y employees. The strategy that won them over? “Understand and respect where they are coming from,” advises Farouk. “Use their values, and talk from their perspective, without losing your ground on your decision.”

Tip #4: Keep them in the loop. The concept for Eric Dresdale’s startup, a prepaid debit card launching in July, is all about seeking support from your family. “I wouldn’t have been able to launch this business without the help of my parents,” says Dresdale, Managing Member of Next Step Network. “They have supported the idea financially and emotionally from its inception.” Garnering their support required clearly outlining the business plan to them as if they weren’t parents, but investors. “I also keep them apprised weekly of headway being made with clients.”

Aron Susman, co-founder of TheSquareFoot Tip #5: Convince them of your passion. “My parents are in their mid-60s, and I believe with age comes an appreciation for life,” says Aron Susman, cofounder of TheSquareFoot, a site that helps small businesses find office space. “Even though I had spent five years at school to obtain my degrees, and my parents had sacrificed financially to make that happen, they knew that life is about the journey. They saw the passion I had for becoming an entrepreneur and wanted to support me in any way possible.”

Tip #6: Be completely honest. Seeing the hard work and dedication, Susman’s parents invested in TheSquareFoot about a year after the business began development. “Getting investment from family can change things very quickly,” Susman warns. “Make sure you have a strong enough relationship that this will not put on undue pressure. You must have ultimate trust between each other and talk through all the risks. Make sure they understand there’s a chance the investment won’t pan out. Lastly, make sure losing the money won’t impact their livelihoods or retirement.”

Wade Benz of USimprints.com

Tip #7: Show them what you bring to the table. When Wade Benz launched USimprints.com, an online provider of branded promotional products and imprinted giveaways, his parents not only let him live at home, but also let him work out of their basement, helped him with packing and shipping, and even financed most of the initial startup costs.

What convinced Benz’s dad, who had decades of experience in the industry, that his son could make a go of it? “He saw that I brought valuable qualities to the table,” says Benz. “My dad brought knowledge of our industry, initial contacts with vendors, some early customers and overall maturity. I brought a fresh perspective on the industry, forward thinking about where it was headed and an overall knowledge of technology, e-commerce and Internet marketing.” A year after launch, Benz’s father joined the company full time.

Tip #8: Explain your idea on their terms. “You have to instill confidence in them, not only that your idea is a good one, but also that you are capable of actually creating it, and convincing people to use it,” says Tashfeen Ekram, whose startup, SchedFull.com, helps physicians and other professionals fill cancelled appointments. “Selling it to them on their own terms is key. I had to explain the usefulness of the product from my father’s standpoint. We are trying to reduce wait times for doctors, and when he realized it could save him time and allow him to see his doctor sooner, he was sold [on its usefulness].”

Tip #9: Don’t gloss over potential problems. Ekram’s father is currently running his own startup, and has started other businesses in the past. This made winning parental support both easier - and harder - for Ekram. “My dad understood what it takes to be successful, and he knows that most startups fail, so I really needed to know what I was talking about,” says Ekram. When dealing with your parents, there’s no place to hide: “They know you very well,” says Ekram, “so you have to be honest about your shortcomings, where you might go wrong or potential problems in the business. My dad appreciated that, because someone who doesn’t have a good grasp of his shortcomings can never address them, and thus won’t realize when he is about to fail.”

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Looking to tap Amazon S3 storage for your WordPress blog? The WP2Cloud plugin lets you store all your WordPress data - not just media files - in S3.  

The WP2Cloud plugin was developed by OblakSoft as a solution for Yet Another Picture Sharing Site (Yapixx). Yapixx is provided as a preconfigured Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for EC2 that uses WordPress and several extensions to provide an S3-hosted picture-sharing site.

But you don't have to run Yapixx or use Amazon EC2 at all if you prefer to use hosting elsewhere. All you need is the WP2Cloud plugin and the Cloud Storage Engine for MySQL (ClouSE). Note that ClouSE is mandatory. The plugin will error out if you try to install it without ClouSE available. Naturally, you need an AWS account and an S3 bucket to put files in, too. The full instructions are on the OblakSoft site.

Once it's installed, you can decide whether to go full monty or store only a portion of your content on S3. The benefit of using WP2Cloud is that you take a load off your Web server and let S3 serve up some or all of your content. That includes full posts, if you decide to use ClouSE to put MySQL data in S3 as well. As far as I know, WP2Cloud is the only plugin that puts post data in S3 rather than media only.

While Amazon is the only service that's supported right now, the WP2Cloud documentation indicates that support for other services may be on the horizon. It would be excellent if you could tap other cloud providers or open-source cloud stacks as well.

Other Options

The WP2Cloud plugin might not work well for some users. For example, it requires MySQL 5.5.19 or higher, but plenty of sites have older releases of MySQL. And it might be overkill if you only want to store large media, like videos, in S3 and leave the rest on the WordPress host.

The Amazon S3 for WordPress with CloudFront plugin stores files in S3 transparently and offers the option of using CloudFront. CloudFront is a content distribution network (CDN) that can be used to distribute content more quickly and mitigate traffic spikes.

If you're looking to offload video only to S3, you can use the S3 Video Plugin. It does what it says on the tin, though you may need to tweak some PHP parameters to upload large files to S3.

For sites with minimal traffic (like my personal blog), WP2Cloud is not necessary. But if you're trying to scale WordPress for a lot of traffic, particularly bursty traffic, then you should take a look at some of the cloud storage options to see if they'll help you reduce site load times and server load.

It's the single greatest dilemma of modern society: How much freedom would you trade to get more security - or vice versa? Since Windows XP became the most exploited operating system in history, Microsoft has taken bold moves - not all of them very popular, but usually very effective - to sever the routes of exploit. User Account Control, though controversial, eliminated perhaps 90% of account-elevation exploits. Now the company makes another bold security move - changing how Windows 8 boots to increase security, potentially at the cost of some freedom for certain users and non-commercial developers.

Microsoft Windows 8 will fully embrace a computer security architecture that has been a very long time in the making: the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), created in the 1990s by Intel, and developed later by a consortium that also includes AMD and embedded processor developer ARM. Essentially, UEFI performs the functions that ordinary BIOS used to perform (getting the components of your computer up to speed), but rather than following a set agenda, UEFI works like more of an operating system in itself, making sure your Windows (or Linux, or whatever other) OS is accessible, intact and legitimate before booting it. As with most security changes, though, there are side effects - particularly when working with some dual- and multi-boot Windows 8 machines.

Microsoft has made several demonstrations of UEFI support since announcing Windows 8 last September. The most convincing demonstration involves a thumb drive. Many computers, especially in the office, are geared to look for the presence of operating systems on thumb drives before hard drives, especially for purposes of recovery. Malicious users can plug thumb drive-based OSes directly into victims' systems, and perhaps gain access to the entire office network. But that's only if the computer's BIOS clears the thumb drive's operating system. With UEFI installed on the motherboard, it won't.

Many newer PCs already have UEFI in their firmware, and there's a good chance you're using it now. But with Windows 8, you would begin using it for what it was built for in the first place: restricting the loading of OSes to those that can prove themselves legitimate and untampered with. Once you install Windows 8 (as our tests with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview confirm), the OS-clearing capability of UEFI kicks in. With some firmware, you can turn off this option. Yet with quite a few systems, once this feature has kicked in, OSes that can't sign themselves are locked out.

One example, ironically, is a copy of Windows XP that was installed on a hard drive attached to a non-UEFI system. With UEFI fully engaged, you cannot boot to that XP-based drive in a multiboot system. The photo above shows a UEFI screen (not Windows 8, but system firmware) from an Intel Core i5-based 3.3 GHz PC I built. Note the UEFI banner attached to the drive where I've installed Windows 8 Consumer Preview. On this particular PC, I cannot (successfully) disengage secure boot. So I cannot boot my Windows XP disk - a fact which gives me only minor trouble with respect to testing software.

What the Lockdown Means

Trusted computing is what the entire commercial computing industry wants... the keyword here being "commercial." Not all computing is accomplished by commercial entities; and many would argue that some of the most important advances in computing in the last 10 years have come from developers who shunned commercial interests. At any rate, there is a considerable plurality of free software and hardware developers (free as in "free"), many of whom are in the Linux community, all of whom are legitimate artisans. They build computers and systems because they can, and because it's fun.

Because their community is not centered around vendors or commercial interests, there is no nucleus of authority responsible for what they build. This is how the community wants it. But it becomes a problem when the hardware platforms they rely upon adopt a protocol that equates legitimacy with commercial responsibility. Put simply, if you're not a vendor, there's no way you can "sign" your operating system for UEFI. And that may mean you can't set up a dual-boot system that includes both Windows 8 and a free Linux distribution.

By "free Linux," I'm referring to any noncommercial distribution, and Red Hat and Canonical have warned their distros (Fedora and Ubuntu, respectively) may be among them (Intel disagrees with respect to Fedora). This is not exactly the swap-meet crowd we're talking about, but a sizable bunch of legitimate PC users.

As Red Hat mobile Linux developer Matthew Garrett first explained last September, "There is no centralised signing authority for these UEFI keys. If a vendor key is installed on a machine, the only way to get code signed with that key is to get the vendor to perform the signing. A machine may have several keys installed, but if you are unable to get any of them to sign your binary then it won't be installable."

Over the years, companies such as Microsoft and Intel have maintained that enthusiasts are free to build their systems using platforms that are not UEFI-enabled, and to install free Linux on them. This is becoming harder and harder, as the motherboard industry (Asus, MSI and Gigabyte, among others) has already embraced UEFI firmware. Almost by definition, a motherboard without UEFI is a cheap motherboard. Enthusiasts may like "free," but they abhor cheap.

More than once, Microsoft has reminded me of the relatively small size of the enthusiast community. But despite their numbers, they are an extraordinarily influential group. Commercial vendors that disrespect them are committing a blunder akin to a politician uttering a racial slur in front of a fellow with a cell phone camera.

Trust, UEFI and How We Got Here

At some point, Microsoft - now one of the co-architects of UEFI - had to take the plunge and support what's essentially its own work.  The reason why concerns one of the most dreaded threats that every installed copy of Windows still faces.

In fact, for any computing device - be it a PC, a smartphone or a garage-door locking system - a malicious program could overwrite the contents of its operating system kernel, substituting what's come to be known as a rootkit. In this scenario, when you reboot your device, it isn't exactly what you think it is anymore. Just how easy it is to accomplish this was demonstrated at the RSA security conference a few months ago, by a team led by McAfee's former CTO.

When security problems are caused by software claiming to be something it's not, the solutions usually involve authentication - the implementation of some type of trust system. (Just the word "trust" sends up red flags among veteran IT workers.) In any chain of trust in a computer network, there must be some unimpeachable root that is capable of vouching for the authenticity of everything else. Operating systems are typically vulnerable, and thus serve as poor roots of trust. Engineers prefer the root to be inside the computer hardware, at a more tamper-proof level.  Installing trust in any deep level has rarely been without controversy, mainly on the part of users who have learned from experience that, given the choice, both hardware and software vendors tend to trust themselves above a competitor.

The concept of building a root of trust in the BIOS traces back to 1998, with Intel's Extensible Firmware Interface created for its Itanium processor-based servers. The idea there was to build a more programmable shell that could effectively manage the system's transition between powering on and readying the main bus and peripherals, to launching the OS. When regulatory agencies' scrutiny of Intel began to intensify, Intel turned over EFI to an industry consortium including AMD Microsoft, and embedded processor maker ARM.

From the very beginning, the UEFI group had stated its intention to load operating systems other than Windows. And the first successful field implementation of secure booting with UEFI in consumer-grade equipment was in the first Intel-based Macs. UEFI is already a reality in PCs sold today, and especially in motherboards sold to enthusiasts and system builders (like me). So the issue isn't that Windows 7 doesn't already "support UEFI," or that UEFI by definition locks out Linux. The tools for Linux makers to adopt UEFI protocols are available openly today. So it's wrong to say UEFI is technically incompatible with Linux. Instead, there's a kind of "social gap" that the commercial vendors are not willing to help fill.

The Decision

The real question, of course, is does the UEFI flexibility tradeoff affect you? Specifically, does the disablement of your ability to have a dual- or multi-boot system that includes Windows 8 and one or more operating systems that do not support UEFI, impact your ability to work or use your computer the way you want?

• If you are a part-time Linux user and part-time Windows 7 user, the answer may be "yes." You may not want to upgrade to Windows 8 until you know for certain you can dual- or multi-boot to your preferred flavor of Linux as well as Windows 8.
• If you use Linux occasionally, perhaps for testing, then you might consider running Linux from a virtual machine instead of creating a dual-boot system. If you're testing Linux hardware reliability, though, a virtual implementation probably isn't a good solution for you. If you're just interested in the software or in the development tools available with Linux that have no counterpart in Windows yet, you may be perfectly comfortable running Linux from Oracle VirtualBox in Windows 8.
• If you use Windows XP, and you want to upgrade to a modern PC but keep your XP-based hard drive, the UEFI lockdown could affect your ability to work with XP. You'll be better off keeping your XP drive where it is, and running it from there.

For everyone else, though, UEFI brings an enormous benefit: the confidence that a rootkit will not be able to substantively change the kernel of the operating system, with the aim of enabling malicious software. In my opinion, for most users, the benefits far outweigh the tradeoffs. 

Of course, I said that about UAC in Vista too, and I found my point of view caricatured in a legendary Apple ad campaign.

One of the iPad's more intriguing business uses is making presentations before a live audience. The device is portable and fun to use, and the swipe and pinch gestures can make for some dramatic presentations. Sadly, iPad presentations haven't lived up to their potential - especially for users of Microsoft PowerPoint. But the lastest version of Brainshark's free SlideShark app could help change that. 

Normally, the latest version of a mobile app wouldn't merit coverate on ReadWriteWeb, but this is a game changer, especially for experienced speakers who are used to running their PowerPoint presentations with "presenter" mode. This is the ability to see your speaker notes and adjoining slides on the computer monitor at the podium, while the audience sees only a separate screen with the slide content. It is how I usually like to give my own speeches.

iPad Presentation Problems

There are several issues with giving a speech using an iPad. First is the actual connection to a digital projector. There are two methods you can use: either a wired connection with a special VGA or DVI dongle that fits to the bottom of the iPad, or with a wireless AirPlay connection to an Apple TV device. If you go wired, you better make sure your iPad is fully charged iPad, because you can't connect it to a power source while you have the dongle in place. Using an Apple TV means you have to cart around yet another device and get it set up properly. Neither is very satisfying.

A second issue is that Microsoft doesn't yet make an iPad version of PowerPoint, although Apple has an iOS version of Keynote. If you're a PowerPoint power user, there are a number of products that can display iPad presentations. VMware's Sliderocket is another free iPad presentation app. Or you could use the offline iPad app from Prezi.

Of course, you could junk the whole Powerpoint-style presentation ethos and move into a new era: this is what Alfresco is trying to do with its occupymeeting.com ebook manifesto here, along with a collection of tools for those that are interested. But many business people have years of deep experience with PowerPoint presentations and may not be quite ready to give up their slide decks. Many companies still prefer them, as well. 

The Power of Presenter Mode

Most of these iPad presentation apps don't support presenter mode, and just show everyone whatever you have on your iPad screen. That can be limiting for speakers used to seeing their notes and their current position in the entire presentation. That's where SlideShark shines. iPad 2 and 3 users can plug into a projector or TV to simultaneously view slide notes, view separate timers for time spent on individual slides and the overall presentation on their mobile device - while the audience sees only the slides. There is also an animation counter. Of course, speakers can also choose a full-screen mode for both the presenter and the audience. In either mode, animations display on both screens. You can see a sample screenshot below.

Brainshark's newest SlideShark isn't going push the world of presentions in some brand new direction. Instead, it finally makes it possible to comfortably give an iPad PowerPoint presentation using the tools and views experienced presenters already count on. SlideShark version 1.6 is available today for a free download here from the iTunes App Store.

General Motors Co. said on Tuesday that it would stop advertising on Facebook because the platform didn't generate enough sales. It is certainly not a great day for the social media giant, as it looks to float its initial public stock offering on Friday. Before you heed the naysayers, though, consider what Facebook is really good at.

Need proof that Facebook will weather this and countless other storms? Look no further than the comments section of the very Wall Street Journal article that broke the news. The newspaper spurs logins by riding on Facebook's coattails.

Facebook, in other words, is seemingly everywhere online. CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg admits that his company is lagging behind archrival Google in advertising revenue, but the loss of one big advertiser is not enough to upend a company that could be worth more than $100 billion by this time next week. More importantly, the automaker is depriving Facebook of only $10 million in direct advertising buys; it will continue to spend about $30 million annually on Facebook content, agencies that manage that content and daily maintenance of its Facebook pages, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Jeff Dachis of Dachis Group, which uses data to help clients get the best return on their social networking campaigns, said Facebook’s power lies in engagement with brands, not generating sales through display advertising, meaning the GM decision isn’t a death knell for Facebook. Dachis said Facebook advertisers need to look at the platform as helping to build long-term brand loyalty.

“Although many will latch onto this news in the next few days as a reason for the skepticism around Facebook’s advertising model to continue, we believe that this proves that Facebook’s power lies in engagement, not display advertising. According to the WSJ report, GM is still spending approximately $30 million on Facebook. They’re not abandoning ship,” Dachis said.  “Engaged users on Facebook - whether they’re on mobile or the browser - will monetize better than throwing mobile or display ads at them.”

GM signaled that it would continue to develop a strategy for using its brand page on Facebook. GM marketing chief Joel Ewanick told The Wall Street Journal that the company "is definitely reassessing our advertising on Facebook, although the content is effective and important."

The newspaper reported that GM had begun reassessing its Facebook strategy earlier this year and made the decision to pull its advertising after several executives met with Facebook officials to address their concerns. We've asked Facebook for comment and will update when we hear back.

While the timing – just days before Facebook’s IPO - stings, people purchasing shares are theoretically looking to become owners of Facebook. Without discounting the people who will quickly try to flip their shares, other shareholders are looking at Facebook as a longer-term investment. They understand any business has good days and bad days.

There’s no denying that some advertisers are concerned about how effective Facebook advertising is. But, as we reported earlier this month (and, incidentally, in the wake of another Journal article questioning Facebook’s advertising strategy), a lot of advertisers are happy with the returns they’re seeing from Facebook.

In fact, GM's decision may have more to do with the fact that Facebook just isn’t the right medium for an automaker.

“Although some large brands and agencies may be grumbling, not everyone is unhappy," said Michael Nicholas, chief strategy officer at Roundarch Isobar, a digital marketing and advertising consultancy. "Brands whose business is more performance-oriented and predominantly e-commerce-based are seeing quality results and good service from third-party companies. Thinking about it from an ad spend point of view, it’s this ‘vocal majority’ that's fueling all the headlines about ‘large brands and agencies question Facebook’s ad model.’”

The killer app for the social Web is the one that will filter the signal from the noise. In the Facebook age, even casual Web users hold tons of conversations at once. Engagio, the conversation discovery company, pulls them all into one place. It also leads you into new ones. And with a new dashboard view released today, it lets you click one button to figure out what's actually going on in all these conversations.

Engagio's dashboard breaks out articles, sites and other links from all your social networks into separate panels, and lets you reply, share and like straight from there. But the best part of this section is the "context" button.

The button doesn't really have a halo, but it should. It puts an end to that feeling that you're seeing a snippet of something that's relevant to you, but you don't know what it is. If a message part of a larger conversation, click "context," and the whole message expands. This is a great way to discover things that are interesting to people in your networks.

Inbox

Engagio's original component is its inbox. As of today's update, you can now add unlimited, multiple accounts for all of your connected services. Those include the usual social networks, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Foursquare. It also follows conversations centered around blogs, connecting with Tumblr and Disqus, as well as with Hacker News, a popular news aggregator for people in the tech industry. It also connects to your Google contacts, so you can track those email conversations.

There's also a new Chrome extension for Gmail users, which brings some of Engagio's powers into the inbox where millions of people already live. It gets people used to the idea of an inbox for all conversations.

Contacts

The final key component is the contacts section. You can use Engagio for what Mougayar calls a "deep follow," identifying friends from various networks and following their conversations, not just your conversations with each other. By inviting users to connect on Engagio, you're saying, "I like your stuff. Will you join Engagio, so I can see more of where you hang out online?"

This is a fairly intimate connection, as social media connections go, and Engagio is great about handling that. You have to deliberately connect to someone and reveal your email address to them in order to be able to watch each other. For those Internet friends who seem to be constant sources of new and amazing things, Engagio provides a way to open up each other's worlds.

Stay away from social networks and people won't know who you're hanging out with or what you're doing, right? Wrong. When it comes to social networking, a recent study suggests, you can run but you can't hide. 

A paper published last month in the journal PLoS One shows how researchers were able to learn about nonmembers of social networks based on information their friends posted online. Using machine-learning models, German researchers Emöke-Ágnes Horvát, Michael Hanselmann, Fred A. Hamprecht and Katharina A. Zweig were able to predict whether two nonmembers of a social network knew each other based on information shared by a mutual contact on the network.

In other words, even if you’re one of those holdouts who refuses to join Facebook and other social networks due to privacy concerns, the data your friends share is enough to let anyone with access to that data draw conclusions about you. And while the initial research in the area focuses on the relatively innocuous facts surrounding who you do and don't know, it will become increasingly easier to draw profiles of people based on what their contacts share on Facebook.

“To our knowledge these are the first results on the potential of social network platforms to infer relationships between non-members,” the researchers wrote. They also noted that the relationships were predicted with an “astonishing” rate of accuracy simply by scanning readily available information on Facebook for students at five U.S. universities. 

And the authors were working only with publicly available information. Social networks may have a vast trove of data about members that isn't generally available. “Social network platform operators typically have access to much more detailed information on nodes such as the age, sex and (approximate) location of their members; and if they provide messaging services they can infer the quality of an acquaintance from its communication pattern,” they wrote. 

Researchers have long known that studying real-world social networks is a good way to predict individual behavior. We've previously reported on how online social networks can be used to predict a person’s risk of contracting a sexually transmitted disease. But the latest findings suggest a path toward an all-encompassing model that may one day be able to predict much more than who you know.

“Ultimately,” the study concludes, “it evokes the question of the ownership and exploitation of relational data in the information age.”

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.