Bath Web Designer

I subscribe to Martin Lewis’ Money Saving Expert email newsletter. It regularly alerts me to some great offers.

For this week only, 3 are offering Mobile Broadband at £5 per month on an 18 month contract with a 1GB download allowance. There are no set up fees. 5GB allowance is £7.50.

I do not have lots of use for mobile broadband, but it in the past, it would have occasionally been useful. So, for £5 per month, I have decided that it is worth buying.

I ordered it on Wednesday and it has arrived today. It is a neat USB device, the size of a memory stick.

On a Mac, despite what the leaflet says, you do need to load additional drivers. However, this is simple. You can download them from the 3 website and I was up an running in 5 minutes.

I have not used it much, but the speed on the BBC website seemed very good and more than adequate for me.

So, if you are interested in no longer being dependent on expensive WiFi hotspots, I recommend looking at this offer.

I have had a quick look at Google Chrome.

My first impressions are good. It is clean, simple and uncluttered. It looks as though it has some good functionality such as suggesting search terms as you type, shortcuts to your Google Apps and easy bookmarking. It also very fast.

So will it take over the world? I think inertia will prevent most people form swapping their Internet Explorer default browser on their PC’s. At least in the short term.

If anyone can challenge Internet Explorer’s dominance, then Google are the brand that could do it. However, that will rely  on either getting it pre-installed on PC’s or making it a logical next step for the millions who use Google as their search engine (as over 80% of web searches are in the UK).

Early reports suggest that Chrome is building up a significant share but much of this will be people trying it out. It is also likely that the biggest loser will be Firefox at least in the short term. It will take longer for it to eat into Internet Explorer’s market dominance.

What Is Fire Eagle?

Fire Eagle was recently launched by Yahoo and stores information about your location. This could be an important step towards the next phase of the internet.

This information can be shared with selected websites and applications to do various things such as locate nearby friends, find local information, or search for a local business. Each time you update your location, all of your enabled applications are also updated. 

Your location can remain private, visible to friends or visible to the general public. Informing the world wide web of your location is clearly open to abuse. Therefore, you always retain control over your location. You can be as precise or as vague as you like, and you can decide who should know.

Which Applications and Websites Can Use Fire Eagle?

Bright Kite enables you to check in at a location, tell your friends and join them. It is a location based social networking website.

Map My Tracks accurately tracks your sporting activities via GPS on your mobile phone.

If you have an iPhone, then take a look at Metosphere. It finds out events near you by linking to Upcoming.org, and Eventful Events. It also links to Wikipedia and finds our entries relating to your current location. 

You can also update your locations with Facebook and MySpace.

For more applications, you can go to the Fire Eagle Applications Gallery.

How Can It Benefit Your Business?

It is still early days for Fire Eagle and so actual business benefits may not be immediate. Adoption of the software is still at the early stage and there will be a significant number of people who will be uneasy about making their location public.

However, I think there are a number of ways this application could develop and be beneficial.

• You could use it as a very powerful business networking device. If you discover that one of your LinkedIn contacts is nearby, you could arrange to have a cup of coffee with them, or recommend them a good cafe.
• You could promote your talks, seminars and events via Upcoming and these can be sent out to people who are currently in the locale.
• There is potential in the future for very targeted location based adverts. 

This technology is certainly something to be aware of and we shall see whether it is the Next Big Thing ….

Adobe Air allows you to run internet applications as desktop programmes. They are fast and as new applications become available (most are free), the usefulness becomes more apparant. I have a few that I already use:

Thwirl enables you to post to multiple Twitter accounts and keep updated with your friends tweets all from the comfort of your own desktop.

Shrink O”Matic - this is a neat application for resizing your images for the web. Like so many Air applications, it is quick.

Google Analytics - I still go to the website, but if you prefer you can have all your data on your desktop.

Web Snapshot - you simply type in the web address and this application will take a picture either as a thumbnail, the full web page, or a specific area. It really makes taking pictures of websites very easy.

Kuler - an easy way to get inspiration on colours. Which go with which and the like.