No birthday invitation?

Free software guru Richard Stallman has his knickers in a twist about the way in which 'ebooks are "technologies that could have empowered us [but] are used to chain us instead".

He cites Amazon's use of proprietory software and the way in which you have to register your name with them before you can buy an ebook. "...printed book buyers can walk into a bookstore and make a cash purchase anonymously, " he says. I'm not sure that most people have ever thought this was a big deal...the only kind of concern it might have brought is if the book you were buying was one that came in a brown paper wrapper, and I think that idea has long since vanished in the current society.

I find the long comment by someone called Deano (rather curiously, it appears twice) brings the whole down to a sensible level. This comment is well worth reading.

Stallman, by the look of his bio, has some good things to say about the sale of software and what have you, but in this instance I think, like many people who focus on the extreme, he's let his ideas carry him away somewhat.

By the way, all those who didn't get birthday invitations to my most recent birthday, don't worry. There'll be another one next year. And if there isn't, well you won't have to read any more entries on this blog. So there are two consolations for ya.

The price is right!

I’ve mentioned before how we used to sell books on the Net when I ran the bookshop, and how we never quite found the ideal software setup for making direct sales available to people via the Net. Everything had to be handled by email: the customer’s initial inquiry, the acceptance by us of the purchase, the information about when the book would be sent out, and how it would be paid for, and so on.

This was fine in one sense, in that it meant we had real contact with the customers, and they knew they were dealing with a real person. For many people that’s preferable to dealing with machinery on the Net. But equally, if we’d been expanding, we would have needed to make sales via some sort of shopping cart software, and that would have meant finding a system that was economic, would accept major credit cards online, had tech support, had a design that fitted in with our ‘look,’ and that was user-friendly. Rather like the company that’s provided me with this nice big logo!

I always look at the price of things before I look at the features. If the price isn’t right for me, nothing else much matters. In this instance, this product would have suited us down to the ground, as the price for the most basic level is still very good. Or to put it another way, what you get for the basic price is most of the software.

In Collaboration

My IT son has been behind the production of a number of projects in which collaboration software is involved. This means, as far as I can gauge (and I’m only an amateur geek, remember) that software provided online by the host company can be accessed by various other businesses. Each business, and each person within that business, will have their own information stored, but it will be separate from everyone else’s – except where a business requires employees to share information. And of course, the host will change the look of the software to suit each individual company’s needs.

Epazz.com is one such company, and they are at present offering a 30 day free trial of their software. (I’d take them up on it if I was at home – but I’m not, and I don’t think my host would appreciate having it on his computer!). Everything from website content management, group scheduling, and business email solutions to improved workflow and in-depth personalization of your own information can be managed by this software. There’s a lengthy video available on their site to give you plenty of info about what the product might look like. (Though it’s interesting to see that the person they take as their example appears to have changed her name during the course of the making of the video: perhaps she got married!)

Turnkey for the third time

The word turnkey has started to haunt me. Either that, or else an awful lot of US copywriters use it far too readily. Anyway, I came across it again today when I was looking at a site that is promoting a new system of dealing with cheques (though, of course, they spell the word, checks).

Before I talk further about that, I must mention the wonderful machines they have at the evening job I do. They’re imaging machines which are used to image all the cheques that are processed each night so that they can be worked on by the data entry people. This imaging is done at high speed – a speed so high in fact, you wonder how the machine can register anything at all. When you consider that photocopying machines these days merely blink at the thing they’re copying and it’s copied, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at the speed the cheques are copied at. But I am. I could stand and watch this amazing machine for hours.

Check Vantage is talking about a similar electronic check processing system, but one that would be available to businesses. Furthermore, this process not only images the cheques/checks, but it ‘reads’ even handwritten figures! Now, this is quite extraordinary. The humans at the place I work at have considerable trouble reading many of the cheques that pass before their eyes. I have to wonder how a machine can do it. Yet they say in their blurb: Our CAR/LAR technology actually ‘reads’ the handwritten amounts of each check, and creates a posting file to export into your billing system.’ So obviously this software can do the job. It’ll be putting all of us data entry people out of work!

Not only does it read the handwritten stuff, it images 180 items per minute. That sounds at least compatible with the machines at our place. The point of installing this sort of software, of course, is to increase the speed at which the cheques are processed. Instead of having to be handled by an accounts department, they can be virtually processed electronically from whoa to go. Scary.

Software you can get to grips with

I talked about AIMpromote’s customer relationship management a few days ago, which they provide by using their CRM software (CRM: customer relationship management – get it?). I also talked about turnkey marketing yesterday, and it seems to me that that’s what AIMpromote is all about: making the thing as simple as possible to set up, so that the customer isn’t spending days figuring out some new system, but can get to grips with it straight away. At least that’s what their site tells me, and who am I to gainsay them. (Yay, haven’t had a chance to use ‘gainsay’ in a good while.)
There’s nothing worse than a program that takes forever to get to grips with, as I’ve mentioned a couple of posts back. And doesn’t it bug you when a software specialist walks in the door of your business, loads up the software and then proceeds to go at a great pace through something he understands but you can’t get hold of for the life of you!
disclosure statement

SAP and one other

In my job, a temporary one, I’ve had to work on a new system called SAP (I won’t tell you what some of the other office workers claim this stands for). I thought I was usually pretty quick to pick things up on software that was new to me, but I’ve had a major learning curve with this one. To me it doesn’t at all seem to be user-friendly; in fact, there’s one report that, if it crashes for any reason, (and it has done at least twice in my experience), will cause you to lose all the data you’ve entered. What system doesn’t save, or isn’t saveable as you go along? Fortunately this is the only report on it I’ve found that’s like this, but I wonder how many other reports – of the hundreds that it’s capable of – function in a like manner?
Still, this program isn't as frustrating as another we use - I won't mention it's name. It reacts so slowly on our servers, that you can be typing along and suddenly discover that the program hasn't at all caught up with you, and is asking you to re-enter a screed of stuff you've already entered. And make the slightest mistake on this program, and it will make you suffer: by becoming increasingly slow. One of the other office workers the other day got so frustrated she started bashing the keyboard with her fists and screaming. Not a healthy scene!