The e-book war is heating up…

In the past few weeks, it seems like the big box stores have begun to notice that e-books are hot.

In the meantime, Barnes and Nobles purchased Fictionwise, a small e-book retailer that boasts a ton of different formats including the Amazon elusive epub.  Why there isn’t one master format, I will never know.

Amazon.com bought Lexcycle, the makers of Stanza, which I previously wrote about.  Now I love Stanza, however I am not yet sure what this will mean for the currently free product.

In addition to this, Amazon.com pre-released the Kindle DX today.  At a whopping $489, here is what you are getting in the 10.4″ x 7.2″ x 0.38″ device.

• a9.7″ diagonal e-ink display
• storage space for up to3,500 books
• native PDF support (FINALLY)
• a rotating display
• 3G wireless (not sure yet if this is built in or by contract)
• text to speech
• whispersync

I for one am excited to see a “textbook” sized e-reader hit the market.  I am wondering how long it will be until they are under contract with the textbook companies and start handing these bad boys out to students when they are accepted into colleges.

Other Tech Divas, and foul play on the blogosphere

Here are a list of some other Tech Diva’s that I have been scoping out on the web.  Enjoy!!

• TechieDiva: From the site: “Techie Diva is technology blog with an undeniable feminine twist”
• Daily Tech Diva: From the about page: “Jessica Fritsche is a blogger, writer, instructional designer and project manager living in Dallas, TX. She has been blogging actively (and inactively) since 1995.”
• Womens Tech-Diva: From the site: “Your guide to everything technical. Includes many features such as building a website, downloading software, Social Bookmarking, Installing RAM, and more! “
• Techdivas: From the site: “Meet the real TECHdivas of our industry”
• Article from BlogHer: Confessions of a Reluctant Tech Diva
• Happy Web Diva: From the site: “My beat is the intersection of the Web, work and life. My goal is to build the best websites I can, and blogging is part of this. It keeps me on my toes.”

In other news:
I received an email this morning from a friend who works as a web producer.  The article is by Toni Bowers over at Tech Republic.  It’s entitled: “Sure she’s a good tech blogger, but what does she look like?”

You can click on the link to read the article, however the rundown of the article is that female bloggers and content writers tend to get rude, or just plain sexist email and comments from some readers based on how they look.  I would love to hear from any bloggers who have had issues like these, be they male or female.  At what point do we start to carry over appearance issues to our writing?  I also wonder if literary and technical writers in the publishing world go through the same thing. 

The US is a very appearance focused society and often we see ugly people as being dumb, and attractive people being smart, unless they are doctors, technologists or other professionals.  At what point is this okay?

Erica is participating in the  31 Days to build a better blog project

My personal Gmail Solution

One of the things I hate about living in the cyber-age is how many email addresses I have accumulated over the years. I am going to share a secret with you. I have 9 non work email addresses. It’s an addiction and I have to say I may need an intervention.  I am always curious as to what features you get, and I sort of like having my handle tied to every domain I can find.  There has to be some support group I can join for that.

Well, my addiction aside, I had to come up with a way to consolidate all of them so that I would be able to actually find the things I was looking for and read messages when people sent them to me. One solution that I came up with was to use two gmail accounts. I created my first gmail using my old chat alias from way back in the prodigy chat days. I also had a gmail account for business purposes using my full name. (Read Resume email address) Lastly there is the one for this blog.

The solution was easier than I thought it would be. Here is the breakdown:

Gmail account #1 Personal Email

• Forwarded 2 AIM email addresses (one for family and one for friends)
• Forwarded 1 Yahoo email addresses (this is my oldest email address and I have a ton of granfathered Yahoo features)
• Forwarded 1 spare gmail account used for junk/craig list and other social media email (more on why I created this address coming soon)

Gmail account #2 Professional Email

• Forwarded my gmail from my First.Last name account  (for resumes, bills, etc)
• Forwarded 1 AIM account (work IM)
• Forwarded school email account (it’s also Gmail)

Now, I only have two email addresses that I have to check.  The benefits of using Gmail for this are that I can respond to someone using any of the accounts forwarded to it.  Also, I am able to tag and sort email by what address they come into.  Also, and this is a major bonus, LESS SPAM.

How many email addresses do you have and what do you use them for?

An MBA in Technology Management

Technology managers play important roles in their companies by coordinating technology plans and supervising a staff of other technology experts. They often hold the vital responsibility of online and network security. An online MBA program in technology management prepares you for these challenges by offering coursework in economics, financial analysis, management analysis, marketing, and systems analysis. (Source)

I am now at the tail end of my MBA in Technology Management.  I started my degree in August of 2007 through the University of Phoenix and will complete my program in just two weeks.   I am often asked questions by people I know about my decision, the process and what I have learned.  I want to share some of that with you.

Q: Why did you choose to go to University of Phoenix (UOP) as opposed to a brick and mortar school or another online school?

A: First, let me start by saying that UOP is accredited by The Higher Learning Commission and is a member of the North Central Association, and is an accredited for-profit organization. Since it is for-profit, it is also un-ranked and considered a “specialty” school by US News and World Report.   I did my research, I knew what I was getting into and I understood that not everyone was going to take me seriously when I said I am going to school “online”.  I selected UOP for several reasons.  The first and most important was that I was trying to go back to school and maintain my job full time because, I was not in a position to take time away from work to go back to school.  Also, I was already in a management position and had a little more experience than people going to B school the first time out.  Basically my decision was based on the following factors:  Could I keep working? Would my experience be enhanced at work through my education, and would the program be accredited.

Q: What is an MBA in Technology Management and what can you do with it?

A: Technology Management, is a fairly new program for many schools, including MIT, UCLA and NYU.  The curriculum for my degree is based on various roles that IT managers have had to perform over time.  The most important of which is to become the mouth peice for their IT department in terms of relating information and planning back to the business people in a language and format that they can understand and then sign off on.  My studies have been based on MBA level material that is geared toward all of the technological planning, strategic initiatives and information system management that technologists go through.  The difference is that instead of following everything through a strictly technical level, it’s presented in business language, and I have learned things like how captial budgeting effects technology planning.

It’s been an incredible journey and it seems that every time I start one of my six week courses something happens at work during that time period that directly correlates to what I am learning in school.  I will say that it’s made me a better writer, and allowed me to experess myself in a more effective way both at work and in my personal life.

I would like to know what questions you have for me, and I would be glad to answer them.

A quick and dirty list of events and articles…

There are a lot of resources available for women in the technology field, part of the problem is that we often are not sure what to look for.   Here is a list of events, articles and even role-models that I have found that might help get us started.

Events, seminars and webinars:

1. EmTech09 – Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT: 9/22/09.  The conference is held at MIT but you can watch complimentary videos or pay to view everything.
2. If you are in the San Fransisco area in April, you can go to the Women in Telecommunications presentation on E911 business drivers.
3. WITI, or Women in Technology International who’s mission “is to empower women worldwide to achieve unimagined possibilities and transformations through technology, leadership and economic prosperity,” often lists workshops, seminars and events in regional areas.  Here are some of WITI’s events for NY.

Articles about women in top technology positions:

1. CIO Update has an interesting article by Allen Bernard about female CIO’s and states that 15%-20% of all CIO positions in the US are filled by women.
2. Over at Fierce CIO.com, there is an article by Andy McCue that discusses the challenges that female CIO’s face both in the US and in the UK.
3. Need more inspiration? WITI has an excellent article on building a better foundation for women in business as it pertains to technology, written by Melissa Solomon.  The catchy  title “No Girls Allowed” is what grabbed my attention.
4. This article by Tabitha Creighton of the B.C. chapter of the Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance’s Women in Technology Forum, discusses how women can shape the future of technology.  It’s important to focus on strengths as well as look at the challenges we face in the industry

If you know of any events in your area, be they summits, informational events or just workshops on leadership, programming, or any other aspect of information systems, please let me know.  I am especially interested in events in the Tri-state and NJ, Philadelphia areas.

This post is part of a series, as I am participating in the 31 Days to build a better blog project.  For more information click this link: Day 2 – 31DBBB

The big little pitch

Today is the first day of the problogger.net 31 days to a better blog project.

When I started this blog a year ago this week I as unsure of what it would become. I knew I wanted to write about women in business, technology and about my experiences as an online MBA student. So far I have been pretty scattered in my writing. I don’t mind since I’m having fun and seem to be attracting readers. However it’s always good to set down some roots and be focused on whoever may be reading this.

I started this blog in order to talk about technology as it pertains to women, especially in the relam of management and information technology. My goal is to inform as well as foster discussion between IT professionals that are female and those that are aiming to become IT professionals.

Did you know that there are less women in IT than there were ten years ago? Can you belive that it’s nearly ten hers now since the dot com bubble busted? What happened to all of those women? Why am I only one of a handful of female technologists in my company? Are you?

I would like to be able to help more women get into technology. The best way for me to do that is to talk about my own experiences and my own love of what I do.

When I started working as a technologist it was just a job. Now when look back at the past 7 years I see how much I learned about business and how companies need IT in order to build and grow there business. I do have a cheesy passion for what I do even if it’s not there every day. At some point my job stopped being a job and started being a career and here I am today.

For more about what it is I do I will be updating my profile page.

We all have a passion for something and if you are a girl geek or tech diva yourself I would love to hear from you.

The Tech Diva: leading women back to IT.

Gearing up for April

In trying to find a work/life/school balance I have had some difficulties adding the blogging part to my life. So I am going to try something different.

I am an avid reader of ProBlogger.net and was excited to see that Darren Rowse actually wrote about just that.

In addition, there is also going to be a “31 Days to Building a Better Blog” event on the site.  I admit to having had some writers block .  I am still looking for things to write about and am having trouble saying what I want to.   I decided this was the perfect opportunity for me to get some help with my writing.  If you would like to learn more, click here.

One of the other reasons why I haven’t been writing regularly is that all I have had time to write lately are my papers for school.  I am three weeks away from my MBA and I am so ready for school to be over, so excited to be done with my program, and so happy that I can go home from work and veg out once in a while again.

I keep telling myself that I will have more time once school is finished, and I have a feeling that this may not necessarily be true.  However part of my plan in starting this blog was to make time to create writings based on my education and observations about technology and in particular women in technology.  So far, it’s been a hodge-podge of subjects ranging from my own personal rants, to my new gadgets.

So, for April, my goal is to touch on some of these topics in addition to my everyday writings.

I have also enlisted some friends to write up reveiws of some of the technologies that they have been using.  I will post links to either their blogs, or set up a reviews page so that they can post directly as guest writers.   If you have anything you’d like to share with the class, please feel free to email me using the address in the upper right-hand corner of the page.

My Kindle Drama

As most of you already know I have a Kindle.  After playing with Sony’s first generation reader at both Target and Borders when they first came out I was a little put off of e-books.  So, when my boyfriend got me a Kindle for our anniversary I was surprised.  He had seen my sneaking peeks at it on the internet and then quickly closing the browser tab when he walked by.  We did this dance often.  I would look at it, and read the propaganda and listen to Maya Angelou talk about how she loved it then he would walk by and I would Alt-Tab out into a knitting page.

For a while, the Kindle page was my porn.

So I was sort of thrilled and surprised when he handed it to me on our anniversary.  I never looked back, that is until the Kindle 2 came out.  Again, the bulk of Amazon’s hits came from my IP address.  However, I already had the item that I coveted just not the shiny new iPhone looking one.  Sigh…

One of my co-workers, has the new Kindle 2 and we got to compare our Kindles and let them have a little play date.  We both busted open our copies of American Gods and turned pages to see what the difference was in both layout and in page turning speed.  To be honest,  a mili-second is too fast for me to measure.  It’s like when a packet on the network takes like 1 less mili-second to load.  No one notices.

I did enjoy playing with the new Kindle, and if mine ever broke, I would replace it with a new one.  That said… MY KINDLE BROKE this week.

So, I keep my kindle in a M-Edge case, and in my Levenger bag.  I can’t even remember what the name of the bag is, because it’s really old.  I love it though, it’s green suede and brown leather, it’s aged really well and cost me a fortune when I had my very first job.   Anyway, I keep it there, and well that bag gets thrown around a lot.

My screen stopped working and started doing some funny stuff.  I started to curse the gods of technology while simultaneously checking to see if Mercury was in retrograde while my boyfriend goes online to automatically get me a new Kindle.  We order the Kindle 2, and then I go to bed.  I lay down for a moment and then start thinking, well isn’t there some sort of warranty.  I mean really this thing cost like $400 bucks when he got it for me, and I will be damned if we spend another $400 to replace a broken one.

Mind you that this is at like 11:30pm and I am laying in bed.  So I call up Amazon, and would have probably called up Jeff Bezos himself if I had to, and guess what? They have 24 hour support.  Now I always knew I loved Amazon for many reasons, especially lowering their prices at 2am when I’m shopping, but this was awesome.  Not only were they open 24 hours, but so was Kindle support.

I told the representative that my screen broke and said, well you are still under warranty so we will send you a new Kindle 1.  He took my information and then gave me a confirmation number.  He said it would be shipped overnight and be to me by Friday afternoon.  I canceled the K2 order, went to sleep, book deprived yet sated in the knowledge that this would all work out.

Low and behold it is now Friday and not only did they send me a replacement K1, its Brand Spanking New as in NOT refurbished.  I am really impressed and just wanted to share that.

Tech Bytes: or my short stories

February was really busy and went by sort of fast. I really had a lot of material to post and just never had time to sit down with my blogging hat. I have learned several things about customer support this past month and a week that I will both cherish and loathe forever.

Apple Care Support:
If you ever buy an apple product, please spend the extra dough for the Apple Care plan. This thing is invaluable. My iPhone went wonky and started to give me a white screen. I called them up and also looked online to see if my device was still under support. It was!!

So I made an appointment, and this past week, my friend Joan and I went down during our lunch break to go replace it. I mentioned to her that I was worried they wouldn’t take it. I also mentioned as we walked through the heavily secured doors of the all glass Flag Ship Store that if they didn’t replace it I would throw a fit that would be epic. In my head “epic” meant that it would be better and more powerful than both Joaquin Phoenix and Christian Bale with low blood sugar, since all I had eaten that day was coffee and I hadn’t had my music force field on the way to work in two days.

We go in, and in the time that it takes for me to be seated on the counter, I sort of calm down, even though the phone is exuding not one symptom of a week’s worth of anguish. Leave it to an iPhone to be more loyal to the motherland than to its owner. My Genius Bar acolyte got the information from me and was like, yeah I’ve heard of that problem but never seen it before. He takes the phone from me and starts to do stuff to it. I was starting to get pissed off because 1. the phone betrayed me, and wouldn’t malfunction in front of him and 2. it had just done it in front of Joan on the way to the store. Then Mr. Genius Bar asked me if I had ever opened it up. Let me premise this with the fact that I have never once successfully opened my iPhone, and I only started to try the night before I decided to take it, and well I couldn’t figure out how to get the damned thing open so I stopped trying after like 2 minutes. I didn’t even google it, nor did I try to force pry the damned thing open to like I wanted.

I began to tell me that this happens (this being the white screen of death for which Apple has no official company line on) when people mod their hard drives. Now, don’t get me wrong, if I had the inclination, I would totally mod a hard drive, but really, it’s already an SSD flash drive, what’s left to do?! Who would be that stupid? So, in order for him to STFU and stop asking me questions, I did something I am not proud of. I went all doe eyed and acted as if he had just uttered something to me in ancient Sumerian. I blinked a few times and said to him very deadpan “you can open an iPhone?”. He looked at me, and sighed and then got the replacement phone for me.

Please don’t get me wrong, I honestly did not open my phone, nor did I go there with a phone that was not broken. My phone had been acting up for like a week and I had to constantly reset the thing and then reformat it, and the hard drive was bad. I may have dropped it or banged it around in my bag, but I did not open it. I just wanted my phone replaced as per my apple care plan. Karma on the other hand, had her way the next day when my boyfriend dropped his face down on cement and cracked his screen.

Kindle 2.0 is out! Should it go back inside now?

Happy Monday to everyone.  Today is K day!  The new Kindle 2.0 is out and is practically everywhere on the net.

Let’s take a look, shall we?

The Good:
Kindle 2.0 took a bite out of Apple’s marketing plan by making it’s Gen2 device:

• A little more sleek, a lot more sexy and very easy to use. 
• It now comes with an internal battery, which provides longer life, and more EV-DO web time with less battery drain.
• The on-board memory has been increased to 2GB of space.  This translates to about 1,500 books on the device.
• 16, COUNT THEM 16 shades of Gray, which is more than the 4 that K1  has.  That’s more black and white than even the justice system can handle.  The screen can be it’s own Film Noir.
• The price appears to have remained the same at $359, but it’s still within the range of competitors.
• Let’s also not forget the sexy new silver back, improved navigation with a new 5-way controller (because it’s easier to move the buttons on the device than just move our hands…)
• More power efficient as it now uses integrated power and USB
• Includes a text to speech converter, in case you have a fetish that includes robots reading romance novels and other illicit fiction to you. (oh yeah!) Or if you just happen to be visually impaired (neat addition then) or just too lazy to read (Steve Jobs)

The Bad:
As with every device there are some downsides, let’s list them out for the sake of argument.

• The first is that the price does not include a carrying case as it did with the first edition.  I can live with that, since there are more features, and there are Oh So Many New Cases. 
• They got rid of the SD Card slot!!!!  This really pisses me off as a consumer.  When nearly all other  major competitors have an SD Card Slot.  No, really the SD slot removal is one of the way’s we lose control over how we manage our own content and become slaves to DRM materials. I get it, I do, but I want to control my own documents without interacting with the device sometimes too.  Also, it’s how I can share my non DRM books with another Kindle owner. (if I ever get to meet one IRL, ha!)
• The new 2.0GB hard drive is really 1.4GB after OS, and other software are included.  Still not bad, but I have a 4GB card because I am a greedy book hoarder.
• The scroll-button, which I have personally come to love is no longer there.  It’s an asthetic that I can learn to live with, but only after a sort mourning period.
• It looks more like an iPhone now… I just have to complain about that once so that people will know that not everything needs to look like a new iPhone.
• Still no support for ePub or other files like PDF out of the box.  Personal conversion or pay for conversion methods will still be needed, and PDB, PDF, ePub and other formats still not supported.  This will be a big one in terms of competive advantage, since Sony has learned to play nice with their local public librarys now. 

There are, however no ugly parts in the release.  There are still some features that need to be worked in, but for a generation 2 device, it’s not that bad.

That said, please note that unless my own Kindle fails to work, or gets smashed, or otherwise expires, I will not be purchasing any new e-readers.  I am curious to how durable the K1 is and just how long it will last. I had my Gen 1 iPod for three years before the battery even needed replacing. Four, before I got a new one, and now, it’s a 20GB hard drive that I still use sometimes. So, let’s see what Amazon does next, but let’s also take a moment to say, early adoption isn’t that bad, and just keep reading.