Computer Info

The world feels like a better place when developers work hard to create amazing free software that does the job just as well, or even better than the paid versions.

Here are 20 free Windows 7 applications that stand out in terms of quality of results you get of them. Ninite is a quick and easy way to download most of these applications into a single customised installer.

1. GIMP

The Paint application got a much needed improvement in Windows 7, but it doesn't cater to the needs of professionals and by no stretch of imagination can it be considered a Photoshop replacement.

GIMP, a diamond of freebies, is simply remarkable in terms of quality and quantity, with an array of options. From 3D perspective tools to eye-popping render effects, GIMP impresses throughout. (For a less professional based image editor, Paint.Net is a good alternative).

GIMP

2. VLC Media Player

VLC Media Player is not about the cool menu colours or the glow of the play button seen in its rivals. The developers of this fantastic piece of software have focused on the core aspects of a media player, and it succeeds by being able to play virtually any video and audio format with impressive quality. Great ease of use makes this media player a must-have.

VLC

3. Handbrake

Converting video from one format to another is child's play with Handbrake, which accepts practically any format as a source. Handbrake also includes chapter selection, basic subtitle support and audio embedding. With tree diagrams and tabs in the interface, Handbrake is a pleasure to use.

Handbrake

4. Firefox

The browser war is pretty fierce and everybody has their favourite browser. However, the star of open-source development is undoubtedly Mozilla Firefox. Does your browser look dull? Then download one of the many themes from the Mozilla website. Increase functionality and productivity with add-ons such as Sxipper and Firegestures.

Firefox

5. Picasa

Created by Google, Picasa gathers and organises all your photos to make them easily accessible. Adjusting and fixing your photos, posting them online or viewing a timeline are just a few clicks away, and amateurs will appreciate the simple yet very effective layout in Picasa. Included with Picasa is the excellent Picasa Photo Viewer to preview pictures in Windows explorer folders.

Picasa

6. Fences

Windows 7 might bring a brand new taskbar, but it doesn't do much to improve upon the main desktop itself. Fences is a great way to make your desktop organised, by arranging and sorting icons into various 'fences' or labelled shaded areas in a well-presented manner. Fences make life a lot easier.

Fences

7. CCleaner

Like its predecessors, Windows 7 will tend to run slowly on lower end computers. One way to speed up a slow computer is to clear up unnecessary junk files that pile up in your hard drive, and CCleaner does just that. And with an added uninstalling feature that removes annoying programs that refuse to leave your computer, CCleaner is strongly recommended.

CCleaner

8. Enhancemyse7en

From Cleaning up registry problem to detecting system clutter, Enhancemyse7en notifies you about improvements that could be made on your computer. However, the supreme aspect of this program lies in the insane amount of data and tools provided, including hard drive monitors that measure 'Work Time' and 'Temperature' and helpful options such as 'Time to wait when a program hangs'.

Enhancemyse7en

9. Adobe Reader

Adobe Reader might be an unnecessarily larger download than its rivals, but it manages to keep a constant footprint on resources (unlike Foxit PDF Reader that has a constantly increasing footprint) and with a browser plug-in included, it's a good idea to stick to the software provided by the creators of the PDF format themselves.

Adobe reader

10. Notepad ++

Unlike Paint, Windows 7 makes absolutely no improvement to the Notepad application. Fortunately, the freebie, Notepad ++, expands on the functionality of the default notepad by including tabbed windows. It's a programmer's dream, with support for various programming languages. This program justly deserves the name 'Notepad++'.

Notepad plus

http://www.techradar.com/news/software/applications/20-essential-free-apps-for-your-new-windows-7-pc-648954?src=rss

Developer Mark Pilgrim has posted a fascinating look at how the HTML img tag came into existence. The history Pilgrim digs up — mailing list conversations between the creators of the first web browsers like Marc Andreessen and the webs early pioneers like Tim Berners-Lee — show that far from being a carefully planned specification, the lingua franca of the web evolved a bit like the early universe — out of a murky chaos.

That from the chaos we got a workable — some would argue good — solution for creating the web is proof on some level that conversations and not abstracts, proposals and design by committee are the key to HTML’s success.

As Pilgrim writes:

HTML has always been a conversation between browser makers, authors, standards wonks, and other people who just showed up and liked to talk about angle brackets. Most of the successful versions of HTML have been “retro-specs,” catching up to the world while simultaneously trying to nudge it in the right direction.

You might be wondering, why did img succeed where other proposals, like an include or an icon tag failed? The answer is simple, because Marc Andreessen shipped code — Netscape Navigator — while those backing the other proposals, for most part, did not.

Of course that doesn’t mean that just shipping code is always good plan. Shipping code before a standard doesn’t necessarily produce the best solutions, as Pilgrim says. Or, put another way by a commentator on Pilgrim’s post, “shipping doesn’t mean you win, but not shipping means you lose.”

From those who shipped without the official blessing of a standard, we’ve come to have an img tag, the basis for AJAX, all of the HTML5 tools available in browsers today and much more.

Critics of HTML’s disorganized evolution will be quick to note that we’ve also come to have the blink tag, cross-browser rendering issues and other pains of web development.

Indeed we’re not suggesting that shipping features without at least engaging in the conversation is a good idea, but, when it comes to the future of HTML, if browser makers don’t ship HTML5 features before the standard is official we’ll be waiting until 2022 to use the new tools.

But while the future of HTML5 might be moving at a rather slow and convoluted pace. Pilgrim’s post is reminder that HTML has always progressed that way.

Perhaps the truly remarkable part is that, for all its flaws and convoluted evolution the core tech behind the web remains essentially the same now as it was then. “HTML is an unbroken line… a twisted, knotted, snarled line, to be sure… but still… Here we are, in 2009, and web pages from 1990 still render in modern browsers.”

Tim Berners-Lee Sees Promise, Challenges in HTML5
By Michael Calore November 4th, 2009 Categories: Web Basics


SANTA CLARA, California — The man credited with founding the world wide web is both excited and cautious about its future.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British physicist who first designed the way web servers deliver pages to web browsers nearly 19 years ago, sees great promise in HTML5, the much-anticipated rewrite of the language used to build web pages.

“I think (HTML5) is great,” he said at the Worldwide Web Consortium’s (W3C) annual member gathering, taking place here this week.

HTML5 is a mixture of several different technologies that allow content creators to do more with web pages. It defines rules for presenting video, audio, mathematical equations, complex layouts, 2-D animations and non-standard typefaces. Each bit of technology has its own working group within the W3C chartered with developing that one component.

“We’ve had the pieces for a while,” he says. “Seeing all these things finally coming together is exciting, and it multiplies the power of each one,” Berners-Lee says.

HTML5 also enhances the way browsers can store and process data, which has led to the creation of more complex and rich web applications that run in the browser like Gmail, Facebook and apps that allow real-time data sharing, like Google Wave.

“Yes, this is a markup language for web pages,” he says, “but the really big shift that’s happening here — and, you could argue, what’s actually driving the fancy features — is the shift to the web becoming a client-side computing platform.”

The HTML5 specification is close to completion. The most recent releases of browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera all support most of the technologies being rolled in to HTML5. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer supports fewer of HTML5’s advancements, but it’s catching up. HTML5 is expected to become an official recommendation by late 2010 or 2011.

Now that the web has been elevated to a more powerful computing platform by HTML5, Berners-Lee says it has also given rise to complicated security issues.

“You got a piece of code from site A, and you’re person B running a browser you got from company C, and that code wants to access data stored with company E for the purposes of printing it on a printer owned by company D — How do you build that so that it’s not susceptible to all kinds of nasty attacks?”

“The technology is very exciting, but there’s actually a lot of work to do in these corridors to make it work on the real web in a secure way.”

See Also:

* W3C Drops Audio and Video Codec Requirements From HTML 5
* Google Throws Its Weight Behind HTML 5
* Google Waves Goodbye to E-Mail, Welcomes Real-Time Communication

http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/category/Web+Basics

SANTA CLARA, California — The man credited with founding the world wide web is both excited and cautious about its future.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British physicist who first designed the way web servers deliver pages to web browsers nearly 19 years ago, sees great promise in HTML5, the much-anticipated rewrite of the language used to build web pages.

“I think (HTML5) is great,” he said at the Worldwide Web Consortium’s (W3C) annual member gathering, taking place here this week.

HTML5 is a mixture of several different technologies that allow content creators to do more with web pages. It defines rules for presenting video, audio, mathematical equations, complex layouts, 2-D animations and non-standard typefaces. Each bit of technology has its own working group within the W3C chartered with developing that one component.

“We’ve had the pieces for a while,” he says. “Seeing all these things finally coming together is exciting, and it multiplies the power of each one,” Berners-Lee says.

HTML5 also enhances the way browsers can store and process data, which has led to the creation of more complex and rich web applications that run in the browser like Gmail, Facebook and apps that allow real-time data sharing, like Google Wave.

“Yes, this is a markup language for web pages,” he says, “but the really big shift that’s happening here — and, you could argue, what’s actually driving the fancy features — is the shift to the web becoming a client-side computing platform.”

The HTML5 specification is close to completion. The most recent releases of browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera all support most of the technologies being rolled in to HTML5. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer supports fewer of HTML5’s advancements, but it’s catching up. HTML5 is expected to become an official recommendation by late 2010 or 2011.

Now that the web has been elevated to a more powerful computing platform by HTML5, Berners-Lee says it has also given rise to complicated security issues.

“You got a piece of code from site A, and you’re person B running a browser you got from company C, and that code wants to access data stored with company E for the purposes of printing it on a printer owned by company D — How do you build that so that it’s not susceptible to all kinds of nasty attacks?”

“The technology is very exciting, but there’s actually a lot of work to do in these corridors to make it work on the real web in a secure way.”

The underlying language used to build web pages is being substantially re-written for the first time in a decade.

The W3C, the web’s primary standards body, is revising HTML with an eye on improving the performance and capabilities of rich, browser-based applications. One of the great promises of HTML 5, the emerging standard, is that content creators will be able to embed video and audio files on web pages with the same simplicity and ease as images and links.

The tools being used to power this behavior are the Ogg Theora and Vorbis codecs maintained by the non-profit Xiph.org. Currently, most video and audio on the web is presented using either Adobe’s Flash Player, Microsoft’s Silverlight or Apple’s QuickTime. These are proprietary technologies, which means they come with various restrictions — licenses, patents and fees — attached.

Ogg, being open-source and patent-free, has no fees and very few use restrictions. Ogg has been around for a while. It was beaten out by MP3 in the Napster days as the audio format of choice, and has remained obscure ever since. It’s also gotten a bad reputation because of poor quality and large file sizes compared to competing tools like h.264, which is used by both Quicktime and Flash, and will be used in the next release of Silverlight.

However, in the past year, the quality issues dogging Ogg have been largely solved thanks to the increased interest and involvement of developers who want to see support for open video on the web become a reality.

At a recent developer conference, Google showed off how it was building Ogg support directly into its Chrome browser to handle video playback without using any plug-ins. Mozilla’s Jay Sullivan was then invited on stage, where he announced the next version of Firefox would also include built-in Ogg support, all part of a grand plan among browser makers to, in Sullivan’s words, free video from “plug-in prison.”

Webmonkey got a chance to sit down with Mozilla director of Firefox Mike Beltzner and Mozilla director of platform engineering Damon Sicore to talk about web video in Firefox 3.5, the next version of their company’s browser, which is due at the end of June.

We asked Mozilla how its full-force adoption of open video standards will free video from the so-called “plug-in prison,” and why it’s attempting to do so even though the browser used by some 60% of web surfers, Internet Explorer 8, doesn’t support any of the standards that make this scenario possible. [Clarification: As reader “redvine” points out in the comments, Theora plug-ins do exist for IE8 and IE7. There is no native support for Ogg or for the

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California — Vladimir Vukićević was working at the Mozilla office when Firefox was first released into the wild.

“All of our servers melted instantly,” Vukićević says. “We spent an hour trying to get the downloads back up.”

Indeed, the anticipation around the release of Firefox 1.0 on November 9, 2004 — five years ago Monday — was electric.

Mozilla had already produced its own eponymous browser based on open source code in 2002, but it was largely considered a failure. Firefox was the organization’s great re-do, and its second attempt to unseat its biggest nemesis, Microsoft Internet Explorer.

A half-decade later, Firefox is no longer a scrappy upstart but a dominant player. Old rival IE still commands around 60 percent of the market share, but close to a quarter of the web now uses Firefox — a formidable number which speaks to its success as an open source project. At a time when nobody wanted to go toe-to-toe with Microsoft, thousands of disparate programmers rose to the challenge, landing Firefox on the short list of other open source triumphs like Wikipedia, Ubuntu Linux, WordPress and the web itself.

Successes aside, Firefox is now at a tipping point.

Five years ago, it was all about beating Microsoft. Left unchecked, the company was free to dictate what shape the web would take. Firefox’s popularity created a new market for web standards and forced Redmond to take open-web technologies seriously.

Now, Firefox faces a bigger struggle. It needs to continue to innovate and remain relevant in an ever-changing, and ever-more-competitive, landscape.

“When it was just us and Microsoft, the story was very simple — it was the little guy versus the giant,” says Mozilla’s Mike Beltzner, who oversees Firefox’s development. “Now you’ve got heavy hitters like Microsoft, Google and Apple all competing, which make the stories a lot more interesting.”

The web itself has changed significantly in the last five years, as well. It’s no longer just a network of connected documents, but a full-fledged platform filled with real applications that run in the browser and share data with one another.

“It’s hard to cast your mind back and think about what the internet was like in 2004,” says Beltzner. “Five years ago, there was no Google Maps. Gmail was very new. All these things — applications that are now parts of the web that we would never think couldn’t be there — were just not there. Most of the reason was that browsers weren’t yet being designed with all of these advanced capabilities.”

Firefox was one of the first browsers built for this new web filled with applications. As a result, it gained favor with developers and users. But it also encouraged fiercer competition.

“It’s not just that the platform has changed, there’s a whole ecosystem of great browsers now,” says Mozilla’s Johnathan Nightingale, manager of the Firefox front-end features team.

We’re in the middle of the second great browser renaissance, and Firefox is no longer the sole leader. Feature-wise, Apple’s Safari browser is neck and neck with Firefox. Internet Explorer is catching up quickly. Google released its Chrome browser in September 2008. Much like Firefox, it arrived with a huge fanfare and quickly proved to be the web’s new golden child — simpler, faster, better than everyone else.

Along with Chrome, Google launched a public relations campaign highlighting the benefits of using its browser to run web applications like Gmail and Google Docs. Google’s PR push underscored the importance of things like browser performance and speed among developers and the general public alike.

In short, Google brought sexy back to the browser.

“One of the things Chrome did is make the way everybody communicates about browser development more energetic and public,” Vukićević says. “Before Chrome, we were doing a lot of really interesting things, but we were having a hard time communicating that.”

Nightingale agrees that since then, Mozilla has gotten a lot better at building up excitement around new features in Firefox. The company has launched a Hacks blog that shows demos of all the latest technologies, and it posts videos — sometimes as many as three or four per week — showcasing the innovations coming out of its experimental Labs office.

“Compared to the world that just had IE6 in it, we’re able to generate excitement about what we offer much more clearly,” Nightingale says.

In response to the increased interest in new technologies, Mozilla has stepped up its release schedule, too. The wait between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 was close to two years — an eon in web time.

“When Firefox 3 neared completion, people were tremendously Angsty that it was such a superior experience to Firefox 2, yet we hadn’t shipped it yet,” Nightingale says. “That’s what stung the most. There were all these great features, and we weren’t ready to give it to people yet. We had to change that.”

Mozilla took another year to push out Firefox version 3.5, which arrived in June. But now, the team is committed to delivering a new release every six months. Firefox 3.6 is due by the end of 2009.

“We can’t have another two years where we’re sitting on awesome stuff that the rest of the world doesn’t get to have,” Nightingale says.

Another cause for Angst around the release of Firefox 3 was its abundance of features, which some users saw as unnecessary bloat. Version 3 fixed many of the stability and performance problems of its predecessor, but Firefox’s transformation from 2004’s svelte browser to today’s full-bodied machine was only made more obvious by Chrome’s debut as a bare-bones speed demon.

Still, Chrome’s arrival has put increased support for open web technologies on everyone’s road map. The next versions of Firefox will continue down that path.

At the top of the list for Firefox’s future is better support for HTML5, the set of technologies — already heavily supported by Firefox, Chrome and Safari (but not IE) — that define how web pages are built and how web applications function. Also, Mozilla has thrown its weight behind two open source technologies, the Web Open Font Format (WOFF) and the Ogg Theora video format. Both enable new methods for displaying fonts on web pages and for playing videos in the browser which don’t rely on proprietary technologies like Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe’s Flash and AIR.

This commitment to tools that let developers build better web experiences without using plug-ins was one of the project’s core principles when it was first launched.

According to Nightingale, openness will continue to play a key role in shaping the browser’s future.

“We always ask, ‘What is it that people on the open web can’t do right now? What’s pushing them towards things like Adobe AIR and Silverlight, or other technologies that are single-vendor silos?”

When a developer loses the ability to view a web page’s source code (something you can’t easily do in Flash) they can’t see how web applications and complex interactions function. And, he says, that stymies further experimentation.

“The web is going to be an awesome place to innovate in five years, because we’re going to chase down every awesome development in the proprietary world and make sure it happens on the open web as well. If we fail, then we’ll end up in a place that’s less recognizable than the web today, a web filled with a bunch of internet-delivered Flash executables.”

source=
http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/After_Five_Years_on_the_Web__Firefox_Preps_for_the_Next_Round

And a few things we don't love about Motorola's forthcoming Google-powered phone.


Droid does (and doesn't) wow our writer.
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sources=
http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/11/03/five-things-we-like-about-droid/
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The Droid is a fierce phone. Motorola's newest smartphone has a number of features that match and even best its biggest competitor, Apple's (AAPL) iPhone. It has a fast processor. It’s got a large display with almost double the resolution of the iPhone as well as a slide-out keyboard. And it’s got a five megapixel camera with flash and zoom and a video camera that renders your Flip camera unnecessary. Add to that a new sharp-edged form factor straight out of Star Trek. And the marketers have given their campaign a bunch of attitude with their “iDon’t” commercial that pits the Droid directly against the iPhone.

But is any of that going to be enough to woo iPhone fans to Motorola's new device? As I wrote in a September feature, the company has a lot riding on it. Thanks to a massive marketing push by Verizon Wireless (VZ), plenty of excitement is building for the Droid’s November 6 launch. But just a year ago there was a lot of similar hype around RIM's Storm, which was also going to take on the iPhone. Though initial sales were pretty good, the smartphone received lukewarm reviews.

Motorola's new offering will have to prove itself once the hype dies down. And with so many Android-powered devices coming to market in the next few months, it may be hard for the Droid, which Verizon Wireless will sell for $199 after an $100 rebate with a two-year contract, to stand out.

Fortune received a Droid to test this morning. I powered it up, and a monotone robotic voice uttered “Droid.” Here are five things I think Motorola (MOT) has done right with the Droid…and a couple features I miss.
THE NAME Motorola’s first smartphone had too many monikers. Launched on T-Mobile (DT) and powered by Google's (GOOG) Android, it was called the Cliq with Motoblur. The Cliq was the name of the phone and Motoblur was the social software. The launch event left some members confused, and minutes after, I asked him directly whether he thought the jumble of names had been confusing. Jha agreed it was confusing, saying, “The feedback is good but it has taken ten or fifteen minutes to have the ‘aha’ moment.” He said Motorola would improve, and it’s clear that with the launch of the Droid, it has. In one syllable, the “Droid” signals a new type of device.
THE KEYBOARD Motorola’s slide-out keyboard is durable and intuitive. It doesn’t have the loud click that the first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, had. (Try checking your emails on the sly during a meeting, and that clicking sound will blow your cover.) A toggle pad to the right of the keyboard allows you to navigate much like a BlackBerry trackball. In fact it’s the keyboard that makes the device an attractive alternative to RIM’s BlackBerry for the enterprise market. On November 2, a Citigroup analyst made headlines for cutting his ratings on RIM (RIMM) while upgrading Motorola after he reviewed the Droid.
GOOGLE MAPS NAVIGATION The Droid is the first phone to have Android 2.0, the newest version of Google’s operating system. There is not a lot that differentiates it from the earlier version, but these few changes have a substantial impact. This new product is one example. It’s a free beta version of a new navigation service (like TomTom’s or Garmin’s (GRMN)) that offers realtime directions, turn by turn, with Google Maps. My colleague Jon Fortt just wrote about paying $70 for a similar application for his iPhone.
APPLICATIONS Sure, the iPhone has nearly 100,000 applications and right now the Android Market sports just a tenth of that. But quality matters more than quantity. And with so many Android devices expected to go on sale in the next year, many developers are taking resources away from other operating systems to invest in Android applications. Mint.com CEO Aaron Patzer saw a major boost in users after his iPhone application was featured heavily in Apple’s initial advertising campaign for its App Store. He estimates he added 100,000 users to the site, which he sold to Intuit (INTU) this fall for $170 million. Because his application is so popular, many companies have approached him to develop for their operating systems. “ Microsoft approached me seven times, and they’d offer free support like dedicated engineers,” he says. But Patzer prefers to concentrate his resources. When Mint.com releases its Android application in March, it will be the only other operating system he plans to support. “I’ll get a lot of leverage with so many devices being released,” he explains. “And the programming language is fairly straightforward."
SEARCH One of only four buttons at the base of the Droid’ screen is the magnifying glass icon that denotes search. It searches both the Internet and your contacts to compile information. Hold the icon down for a couple of seconds and the phone will prompt you to speak your query. I tried this with several names and each time, the phone actually returned search results for the correct name on first pass.

There are a few things I’ve come to expect in a smartphone that are absent in the Droid. For one, there’s no pinch zoom. Also, there are no “send” and “end” keys. Instead, the Droid offers four new buttons at its base. In addition to the search key, there is a home button, a menu button, and a back button.

But what I miss most is purely aesthetic. It’s black and heavy and sharp-edged. A smartphone is an incredibly personal device, and this one isn’t really my style.

Then again, last season I swore off horizontal stripes, and this year I’m wearing striped sweaters nearly every day.

New motto for sales: Always be (virtually) closing
November 3, 2009 10:00 AM


Can an online connection replace the personal touch?

By Zvi Guterman, CEO, IT Structures
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sources=
http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/11/03/14354/
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The economy may be improving, but corporations are still acting like we’re in the midst of a downturn, especially when it comes to their information technology decisions. Companies are slashing IT budgets, delaying purchasing decisions, and executives are taking a more hands-on approach to evaluating new software offerings.

Technology vendors have reacted to this new world by doing some cost-cutting of their own. Ironically, at a time when buyers are making it harder for tech suppliers to close deals, vendors are making the situation worse by eliminating marketing budgets, reducing sales staff and restricting travel.

In short, sales organizations are expected to not only sell to a tougher audience, but to do it with fewer resources.

Some leading technology vendors are re-examining the way they sell in order to emerge from the recession as not only survivors, but as agile, dominant players. But with everyone focusing on making cuts and putting out fires, it is easy to overlook the larger strategic shift in how enterprise technology is used, sold and paid for.

The mammoth enterprise software deals that required millions of dollars upfront in licensing fees are being replaced by more agile business models, such as software as a service (SaaS), on-demand availability and pay-as-you-go purchasing. These dynamic purchasing trends have not stopped or slowed down because of the weak economy. On the contrary, they’ve accelerated.

Of particular interest are a series of virtual sales-engagement solutions, also known as cloud-based collaboration tools, that allow vendors to place fully functional copies of their products in a cloud environment, and share these now-online ”virtual” products with leads, prospects and customers.

Pitching in a virtual world

The economics of evaluations change significantly when demonstrating, pitching and closing the sale are done in a virtual environment. Instead of days, a product demonstration can take minutes to set up. Instead of requiring the salesman to install a sample product on some dedicated hardware, everything is done on-demand in the cloud. Much of the overhead cost and unnecessary hassles of software sales are simply cut out of this process.

Consider the real-world example of a salesman at a well-known Fortune 1000 antivirus-software company. Traditionally, John and his 200 colleagues’ sales cycles would take six months, cost an average of $20,000, and the company would still lose a significant percentage of prospects even after the initial promise. The process would involve scheduling client site visits, obtaining hardware and cooperation of their networking and security teams, and installing a “proof of concept” – sometimes returning multiple times to complete the evaluation, not to mention ongoing calls to understand the client’s usage and experience.

Today, using cloud computing tools, John can show a product off the minute he gets an interested prospect on the phone – he simply tells the buyer to direct his or her browser to his company’s demo site and starts showing off the service online – even using data routed securely from the prospects’ own servers. The average sale takes closer to four weeks to close, at a cost of less than $1500 – eliminating the need for travel, while gaining the ability to monitor client usage without disturbing them.

John also found that using the demos earlier in the sales cycle can be a good qualifying tool, by tracking which prospects are spending more time with the demo on their own.

Just as Web and teleconferencing have replaced face-to-face presentations, virtual sales engagement tools will oust on-site installations, demos and training, especially when a prospect was a lower priority to begin with. While a vendor may always be willing to allocate human and travel resources to land a $5 million deal, virtual sales will help companies capture the numerous smaller deals that often go untapped because the sales staff and budgets are stretched too thin.

Virtual sales engagements conducted in fully-functional, online IT environments remove the cost and pain of conducting numerous hands-on demos, setting up on-site customer evaluations, extended proof-of-concept projects and post-sales training. It is only a matter of time before these tools move from best practice to standard practice. In the meantime, early adopters are enjoying shorter sales cycles with markedly lower costs. So perhaps it’s time to ask yourself, as you watch the mammoth deals vanish – where will you be when the downturn really ends?

Perhaps it’s time to jump forward – and leverage the latest technology to sell your technology.

Guterman is the CEO of IT Structures, a venture-backed company that is helps corporations extend their infrastructure to the Internet cloud.

Just three days were enough to push computer sales for the week up 40%


Click to enlarge. Source: Morgan Stanley, NPD

The sharp spike in the chart at right is the Windows 7 effect PC makers have been waiting for.

In a note to clients issued Monday afternoon, Morgan Stanley's Kathryn Huberty reports that NPD data for the week ending Oct. 24 — which included three days of Windows 7 sales — show PC sales jumping 40% year over year.

This was particularly encouraging, she writes, because sales in the early part of the week likely reflected the same pre-Windows 7 declines as the previous two weeks. PC buying for the weeks of Oct. 17 and Oct. 10 was down 29% and 2%, respectively, as consumers waited for Microsoft's (MSFT) new operating system to launch.



Click to enlarge.

Huberty dismisses concerns that computer vendors over-shipped ahead of the Windows 7 launch, demonstrating in a second chart that PC inventory levels are still below average.

So which computer maker's shares are likely to benefit most? In a separate note issued Tuesday, Huberty singles out Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), whose potential for growth she says is under-appreciated by investors.

She also likes Apple (AAPL) as an investment, but less for its computers than for the new distribution agreements that are driving iPhone sales.

http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/11/03/pc-sales-spike-with-windows-7-debut/?CNN=yes