July 3, 1999

·        I’m giving away three more copies of my new book, “Personal Computer Secrets” today and during every show for the next few weeks. In addition, don't forget the live radio broadcast and book signing on Saturday, July 24 at the new Barnes & Noble bookstore in San Mateo, right near the Hillsdale mall. You can find more information, including directions, on my web site.

·        One of the more interesting trends that I expect to see happening over the next few years is the movement away from having applications stored and locally from your own computer and towards applications being run on the Web. In other words, instead of having to deal with the hassles of buying, installing and running a program from your computer’s hard drive, you’ll simply go to a particular web site and be able to run applications on an as-needed basis. One big benefit of this approach is that if the application is built with Java or another cross-platform tool, then anyone with a Java-capable browser—whether they’re using a Mac, a Windows-based PC, a Linux-based PC, or whatever—can all use the same application. Another plus to this type of scenario is that it’ll probably save you money because you’ll only need to pay for applications as you use them. In addition, you won’t have to worry about keeping the program updated and dealing with the potential software conflicts that arise whenever you start adding more programs to your system. Already, for example, there are applications available on the web for doing your taxes, filling out employee evaluations, creating certain types of specialized graphics and more. In most instances, these are programs that you only use on an occasional basis—you’re not going to want a word processor that requires going out to the web for—but there are lots of applications that fit this category. In fact, this past week, I came across a new application that takes this approach. Javu Technologies’ VideoFarm is a web site that allows you to do video editing through a Java-based application within your web browser. Essentially, the company is a web site hosting service that also provides software and services to put together videos for web sites. For $89/month, which isn’t cheap, the company will digitize up to 30 minutes of video that you can send them on standard video tape formats, as well as provide up to 1 GB of storage space and access to their JavuNetwork video editing program. You can use the digitized video, as well as other stock video they provide, to put together your own online videos and then put together a web site based around those videos. The company is also attempting to build together a community, by providing discussion groups geared for members of the service.

·        A somewhat related program is RealSlideShow from Real Networks—the company that created the RealAudio and RealVideo players. RealSlideShow is actually a free application that you must download and install on your system (it’s only currently available for Windows 95/98/NT). As its name suggests, RealSlideShow is for creating and then viewing multimedia-enabled presentations over the web. Viewing RealSlideShow presentations is easy—all you need is RealPlayer G2, which is quite popular and widely available. To create the presentations, you use a simple time-line-style interface, where you can place individual images, chunks of video and/or audio so that you create a complete slide show/presentation. The program also includes built-in transition effects to move from one slide to another. Once you’ve complete the slide show, the program also walks you through the process of creating a web page that includes the presentation and publishing it to your web site. If you’ve been looking for a way to add something like family slide shows to your personal web site, or training materials to a business site, this looks like a neat new tool.

·        Another interesting trend that saw some new developments this apst week was the “free PC” concept. While numerous online companies have dove into this, retail stores have shied away from it. This week, however, Best Buy, Circuit City and CompUSA all announced programs which would allow people to get PCs very inexpensively (or, in some cases completely free) if they agree to sign up for extended ISP contracts. Best Buy, for example, has deal where if you sign up for $21.95 monthly ISP charge with Prodigy, you can get significant rebates on virtually any PC. If you sign a 1-year contract you get a $150 rebate, two years saves you $250 and 3 years saves you $400. The Best Buy program, which is being test marketed in three cities this month (although none in the Bay Area) is expected to be rolled out nationwide next month. In the case of CompUSA, the company has a $400 rebate if you sign up for three years with CompuServe. IN addition, this weekend some CompUSA stores are offering a $400 MaxTech PC—which would be free after the rebate—that includes a 366 MHz Celeron. So, if you’re leery of going with one of the online free PC deals, you might want to check out one of these options.

·        Not surprisingly, Apple Computer this week announced that they were suing Future Power, the Taiwanese company that introduced an iMac-like PC clone at last week’s PC Expo. It’ll be interesting to see if this machine ever sees the light of day….

·        America Online announced that version 5.0 of their software will be available later this year, first for Windows-based PCs and later for Macs. The new version will be based around Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 5.0 browser, despite the company’s recent purchase of Netscape.

·        Chipset manufacturer Via Technologies this week announced the purchase of the Cyrix division of National Semiconductor. As a result, the Cyrix line of PC processors, including the MII, is expected to survive. The move is interesting because now Via can compete directly with Intel by offering both CPUs and chipsets, which are the two critical components in PCs and motherboards.

·        Congress passed a Y2K bill this week that promises to reduce the amount of money wasted on Y2K-related legal issues. Included in the bill is a 90-day cooling off period where companies can try to fix any problems that may arise. Even though some consumer advocates are upset about the bill, saying it doesn’t provide enough protection, I frankly think it’s a good idea because I trust the legal community and its ability to control itself a lot less than I do the computer software and hardware business who may be affected.

·        Microsoft admitted this past week that there’s a bug in the Windows 98 System File Checker that can prevent systems from booting after you’ve used the utility. It turns out that the utility—which is designed to reinstall System Files that may have been corrupted—may inadvertently copy over the wrong versions onto your hard drive. The bottom line result is that your system may not be able to boot after you used the utility and then restarted your system. The company has fixed the problem in Windows 98 Second Edition and should have the fix in the Service Pack for Windows 98, when it becomes available. In the meantime, I suggest you find out more about the details of this problem before you use System File Checker. I’ve got a link to more info on my This Week’s Links page.