I was recently approached with the opportunity to participate in the creation and launch of a new international network of blogs focused on emerging technologies, the explosive growth of mobile computing and application development, and coverage of important industry events. The network, blognation, was conceived by Sam Sethi, a blogger and entrepreneur based in the UK as a way to generate more awareness of what’s transpiring globally in the burgeoning world of 2.0 technologies by covering the important work being done around the world on a country-by-country basis. When my good friend Oliver Starr, the mobile guru and original voice at Mobilecrunch, told me about what Sam was planning and that he hoped I’d partner with him to launch the US site, I found the idea awfully compelling.

I like building things. “Getting in on the ground floor” is a special kind of thrill I have come to really enjoy and the chance to have another go at participating in the birth of a network of blogs was impossible to resist. So this is my farewell as the author of Office Evolution here at ZDNet as I begin another chapter in my bogging adventure.

It’s been a terrific experience. The opportunity to work with talented people like Dan Farber, David Grober, Larry Dignan, and David Berlind will always be a high-water mark in my personal history. Establishing or enhancing my relationship with great folks like Ed Bott, Matt Miller, and Ryan Stewart has been a highlight as well.

To the many readers who’ve been interacting with me during my tenure here and who have become an invaluable part of the conversation, thank you. Your comments, e-mails, and IMs have been a real inspiration and have challenged me often to reconsider my opinions and perspectives on the impact of technology on the way we work (and play). I hope you’ll come by to check out what I’ll be writing about at blognation USA technology and consider it another great resource for keeping abreast of the ever-changing landscape in which we live and a forum for great conversation and debate about the implications of the technological revolutions occurring all around us.

And, if you have plans to attend the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco (September 6-7) or DEMOfall 2007 in San Diego (September 25-26), look me up. You can reach me at marc [dot] orchant [at] blognation [dot] com.

I've been using the new Virtual Phone Booth from Plantronics for the past few weeks and it has utterly transformed my Skype (and Gizmo and Google Talk) experience. Formerly, I have either relied on the built-in microphone and speakers on my laptops (with the attendant howling and echoing that too often seems to plague VoIP calls) or used the excellent but too-bulky-for-travel Plantronics DSP 500 headset. That big unit has been a great solution for voice recognition and podcasting but is not exactly comfortable or convenient for all-day work.

The Virtual Phone Booth is a pair of noise-isolating earbuds with an integrated microphone boom on that connects either directly through the microphone and headphone jacks on your PC or using an included USB adapter. The sound quality is excellent and the comfort is all-day, forget-you-have it-on. Folks I've been talking to via Skype and other services have repeatedly remarked on the excellent sound quality and in local tests with Audacity, the recording quality is more than sufficient for podcasing and screencasting duty. Volume and muting controls are built into a slim tub on the cord which also features a small clip to attach to your shirt.

The Virtual Phone Booth packs into an included hard case that's about the size of a candy bar so it slips into the gadget bag with no problem and gives me a completely portable solution with no compromises when I'm out and about or on the road. This unit is a definite keeper! The Virtual Phone Booth retails for about $110.00 and is compatible with both the Mac OS and Windows.

I've also been using the latest Bluetooth headset from Plantronics, the Voyager 520. I've used the Voyager 510, an over-the-ear boom style headset, for years as it's one of the most comfortable headsets I've used with excellent battery life and the relatively uncommon ability to multi-pair which allows me to use it with both a laptop and a mobile phone or with two mobile phones (yes, I am a gadget freak).

The 520 is a more conventional pod-shaped design that offers the same benefits and even better battery life. Plantronics has designed a new molded rubber earpiece that does a great job of isolating outside noise so that even in noisy environs on on a windy day the saound quality is excellent. The ear hook, unlike many headsets I've evaluated, is made from a very soft and flexible material that does not chafe or scratch. It's a single button design which makes adjusting the volume or using other functions very easy. Plantronics has also designed a nice desktop stand (pictured here) that makes it very convenient to pop the unit in for a quick charge.

The Voyager 520 retails for $99.00 and worked perfectly with my MacBook, Lenovo Tablet PC, Nokia N95 and Apple iPhone.

At $29.95, the price is right and the unit is compact and light enough to fit in my gadget bag with no problem. This unit is ideal for more compact laptops like the ones I'm using. If you have one of those honking big 17" desktop replacement units, you might want to look at another model - LapWorks offers a number of different products for both mobile and desktop use.

We are taking our first steps towards offering Zoho Writer offline. With this update, you’ll now be able to access all your documents offline (Mac or PC) in read-only mode. We will offer offline editing capabilities in the coming weeks.

Zoho Writer Offline capabilities is based on Google Gears. Many thanks to Google for a great open source project. We plan to support and contribute to this project.

A new commenting feature has also been added. A video showing the offline capability is available in the blog post announcing the new features.

While I think that there's the germ of a good question in his piece, it was asked in far better fashion by ScottMcNulty over at TUAW. My response is that Gilbertson is barking up the wrong tree and makes a horribly flawed analogy. Here, in a nutshell, is why I think so:

• The iPhone is a fringe device used by a couple of hundred thousand people. IE4 was one of the dominant browsers of its day on the dominant operating system platform that, through the implementation of proprietary tags and features, broke the browsing experience for Netscape users (the other big gun at the time). Netscape "lost" as a result and IE became the dominant browser. There is zero chance that optimized for iPhone web sites will have the same effect on the market.
• Most iPhone websites/apps are variations on existing web properties so no one is being excluded. When they do provide something unique, it's generally (in my experience) been to address the perceived deficiencies in what Apple has shipped in version 1 of the iPhone and so of little or no interest to users of other mobile devices.
• You can view an"optimized for the iPhone" site in any browser unless the site designer has specifically chosen to prevent this which is their prerogative (unless they're providing an essential service that cannot be accessed in any other way which would be a ludicrous decision for anyone to make).
• Aside from Flash and some JavaScript, the WebKit-based browser on the iPhone is highly standards compliant. The optimization being done for the iPhone is largely visual enhancements to make the touch screen UI experience better.

What do you think? Is Apple guilty of the same sort of behavior Microsoft engaged in back in the IE4 era? Are they forcing anyone to do anything to ensure their web presence is viable? Do they get a pas just because they're "cool"?

I thought we'd gotten past this but apparently not. Even venerable tech journalist and unabashed Apple fan Walt Mossberg fell into the trap of trying to compare iWorks '08 to Microsoft Office calling iWork "elegant but wimpy". It's a bad idea because they're simply not the same thing. Walt goes so far off track as to slam Apple for not including an Outlook-like PIM in one sentence and them almost immediately points out that, well, Apple really doesn't need to make an Outlook clone because, well, they already have a very nice set of applications for e-mail, calendar, and contacts built right into every Mac they ship. So why, oh why make bones over this. Why not just say so?

This, my friends, is a classic case of fomenting controversy where none needs to exist.

iWorks is not an Office "killer". In fact, if you take Apple at their word, that's never been their intent in producing the suite. According to a very lucid quote in an analysis piece at MacWorld from Apple's Rob Shoeben, the raison d'etre behind iWorks is pretty simple:

“One of the things that you’ll see in some of our materials is, ‘Productivity the Mac way,’” said Rob Schoeben, Apple’s vice president of applications product marketing. “That means, ‘I bought a Mac on purpose. I bought into the idea that things should look right and be well-designed and really easy to use.’ They want to enjoy the way they work, they want their work product to look great, and [they want to be] fundamentally integrated into iLife. If you buy into all that, that’s going to be appealing.”

And if you don't, because you need (or want) the compatibility and feature full Microsoft Office experience then you go buy Office. Office:Mac is a decent product, if a bit long in the tooth. Even though the new Universal Binary Office 2008 for Mac has been delayed until sometime next year, the current version works pretty well. And it's very compatible with it's cousin on Windows. If you want compatibility with Office and don't want to go the Microsoft route, you still have options. NeoOffice, a Mac-friendly version of OpenOffice is available at the nice price (free). You can also use ThinkFree Office which comes in both web-based (free) and desktop (commercial) flavors and will soon offer real-time sync between documents in the cloud and on your desktop with their Premium offering (disclaimer: I'm an adviser to ThinkFree).

It is what it is – a decidedly different approach to constructing documents, presentations, and spreadsheets nicely integrated into the Mac OS experience. Gee. Thinking different. From Apple. Go figure.

Update: Thanks to the MacWorld review of Pages I just learned that the Track Changes feature in the new version is compatible with the MS Word feature of the same name. Because Apple does not make this clear in their marketing messages or the small manual that comes with iWork '08, I assumed it was a proprietary approach to change management. This is huge for me as that's one of the gating factors for me preventing me from seriously considering using Pages in more of my work. Sweet!

Update: Service appears to be restored as 5:25 pm MDT.

I've been unable to access Skype all day and it turns out it's not just me. User from around the world are reporting the service is down and impacting personal and business communications for potentially millions of people. There's not a lot of information available at this time. Here's what Skype posted on their blog earlier today:

Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologise for the inconvenience.

As of this writing – 10:40 am MDT (GMT -7), service is still not restored. Here's hoping whatever te cause is gets discovered and dealt with quickly. Skype has had performance stutters from time to time but this is the first global outage I can recall since I first began using the service and it's bound to undermine the confidence many people have had in their availability and viability as a replacement for a conventional land line.

And yes, for those who are curious, I did see the movie a few weeks ago. It was good – not great – but I must say the effects were wonderful. As my son said, this movie should be required viewing for all marketing students as a classic exercise in over-the-top product placement. That having been said, the new Chevy Camaro is one hot looking ride.

Hat tip to Merlin Mann for the link.

How I got there is a long story – the short version is I made reservations while working full-time for a startup software company on the West Coast and by the time I got to Seattle last week I was engaged in working with a decidedly different, established, and successful software company based on the East coast. One of the big goals in attending Gnomedex 7, as it turned out, was to share with a number of my blogging buddies and software industry friends what I'm engaged in doing these days.

If you're the type that reads disclosure pages, you may already know that I'm consulting with Curl, Inc., a company I first learned about this Spring at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Jnan Dash, a good friend of mine, has been engaged with them for a few months in planning their relaunch into the North American market. He excitedly showed me the technology they've developed, born in the fertile ground of MIT in the mid-90's, for developing and delivering Rich Internet Applications (long before anyone had uttered the three letter acronym RIA).

Today, we've officially announced I'm working with Curl to design and launch a Developer Center and to cultivate a community of developers and information architects looking for a way to deploy enterprise-grade applications over the web. Curl has an impressive list of customers in Japan who have built more 300 of these applications, used by tens of thousands of people in organizations whose names are very familiar – companies like Toyota, Panasonic, and others. You can learn more about Curl at the company's web site and on the Curl blog where I'll be a contributor. InfoWorld just gave Curl 5.0, the current release, a stellar review and called it "the best development language you don't already know".

So back to Gnomedex and why I didn't do any event blogging. The content was generally quite engaging and ranged from marvelously entertaining (Guy Kawasaki) to poignant (a bedside chat with Gnomedex community hero Derek Miller who's battling cancer) to controversial (Jason Calacanis whose presentation ignited a very public argument about conference etiquette). When it was on, it was riveting. Between (and during) sessions, there were any number of ad hoc conversations going in the hallways and side rooms and in multiple channels online.

The thing that really jumped out for me was how integral the Twitter stream during the event was to my (and many others') participation. I did not attend South by Southwest when Twitter had its breakthrough moment but had been using it even before that event and have used it at all of the conferences I've attended this year as a way to locate and engage with others at the event and to discuss the goings-on with people unable to attend. But what happened at Gnomedex was on a completely new level. Rather than hanging out on the IRC back channel, I spent almost all of my time on the Twitter "front channel".

The real-time commentary and analysis was dramatically different from the often anonymous and frequently trollish commentary on IRC. And many of the people I follow and who follow me on Twitter were engaged in the proceedings in a way I've never experienced before. With a UStream live video feed and the Twitter stream, people around the world were "there" in a delightfully "in the moment" way. So whether the moment at hand was the standing ovation given by the audience celebrating Derek's heroic spirit or the spat that erupted between Calacanis, Dave Winer, and others in the audience about conference spam, there was a meta-dimension of discussion and commentary that was something like watching Bloomberg or CNN.

I think the way we interact with these events, whether we're onsite or participating from a distance, just underwent an evolutionary leap. I can't wait to see how this trend continues to manifest itself in the coming busy season for conferences that, for me, continues next with the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco and DEMOFall 2007 in San Diego next month.

If you're not familiar with Media Temple, here's their self-decription from their About page:

(mt) Media Temple, Inc. is an industry-leading, privately held, profitable web hosting and software application services company based in Los Angeles, California. Since 1998, our company has provided businesses worldwide with reliable, professional-class network environments to host websites, email, business applications, and other rich media content. We are a friendly, accessible group of "technology agnostic" engineers, support professionals, and business developers focused on the continued financial success of our company while adding value to the services we provide.

I particularly like the "technology agnostic" statement. It aligns well with my personal opinion that the tools we have to choose from today, – Windows, Mac OS, or Linux – are all highly evolved, mature, and useful. It comes down to personal preference, experience, and what kind of work (or play) you're interested in accomplishing.

What impresses me most about Account Center for the iPhone is how well the folks at (mt) have captured the touch screen experience. Out of all of the iPhone-focused web apps I've tried, this one looks and works most like the built-in applications on the device itself.

• Guy Kawasaki
• Cali Lewis
• Bad Sinatra (aka Steve Gillmor)
• Justin Kim
• Jason Calacanis
• Brady Forrest
• Darren Barefoot
• and many more

Gnomedex is sponsored this year by: Microsoft, Live Search Maps, HP, AMD, Edgeio, b5 Media, Eyejot, Polar Rose, Google, Palm, Yahoo!, Ustream.tv

SpeedFiler replaces the built-in Move to Folder command in Outlook with a much more powerful version that word-wheels to a selection of matching folders as you type. It's an intelligent agent in that it learns from your behavior which folders you're filing into most frequently.

Here are the notable enhancements in version 2.0:

• File most incoming messages with a single click.: SpeedFiler analyzes your messages,and predicts where you want to file them.
• Auto-file original messages when you reply: File your outgoing replies and the original messages in a single action.
• Improved Folder Selection Dialog: Theranking of matching folders takes into accountthe match quality and your past behavior.
• Load Time Reduced by Almost 100%: SpeedFiler now scans the folder tree in the background, so there is no longer a delay when Outlook starts up.

SpeedFiler is available in two version - Standard ($24.95) and Pro ($39.95). A feature comparison can be found on the Claritude site. Upgrades from version 1.x are $14.95 and $24.95 respectively. If you need to process a lot of e-mail and value an empty inbox, this is a utility you ought to take a look at. It's saved me countless hours of time.

I updated some of the drivers on the Toshiba the other day so maybe that's what's going on. I know there's a specific order these drivers need to be installed in or else "things can go wrong." What those things are I don't know. Maybe that's the problem I'm running into. The only cure I understand is to do a clean install and there's no way I'm going to set aside a dozen hours to reinstall everything and get this machine back in order. I'd rather limp along until I find another Tablet PC. Right now I have my eye on a Lenovo with dual digitizers and the forthcoming Dell Tablet PC.

Sorry in advance if this doesn't align with your experience and you're a huge fan of Vista for whom everything is working just fine. IMO, this is yet another indication of how far Microsoft has to go to get Vista to a position of equivalent performance and stability to what we've come to expect to from XP SP2. Again, this is not an isolated incident or a case of PEBKAC*. Problems like this are all too common and are being widely reported and discussed in the tubes. Do a search and you'll see what I mean. It's increasingly evident that Vista is not a ready-for-prime-time operating system yet.

* A lovely acronym favored by tech support people which stands for Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair.

Update: my buddy Ed Bott takes me to task for using weak evidence and he's right that a lot of hits on a search engine from a query like the one I suggest is hardly conclusive. And, as I commented on his post, there are really two issues here. One is an IE7 problem that further investigation reveals is affecting users of XP and Vista. The other is the larger issue of whether Vista is ready to be a shipping product for the millions of people who were led to believe that their late-model PC was Vista-compatible or Vista-ready and have since discovered that this is not the case. If, as Ed argues in his post, the best scenario is Vista installed on a new PC at the factory and upgrades even on Vista-compatible or Vista-ready machines are a problem waiting to happen, then Microsoft needs to come clean and say so.

Microsoft will delay the release of Office 2008 for Mac until mid-January 2008, representatives of the company’s Macintosh Business Unit announced Thursday.

The long-awaited Intel-native Office, featuring programs such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Entourage, was originally scheduled to be released later this year. Instead, Microsoft said it hoped to release Mac Office 2008 to manufacturing in December, which would allow it to release the product at the January 2008 Macworld Conference and Expo in San Francisco.

This is bad news for those of us who need some of the advanced functionality in Mac Office to collaborate with folks in the Windows world. Track Changes, in particular, is a compatibility issue that keep from from switching off Microsoft entirely on the Mac. It's so commonly used in the work I do that I simply can't afford to rely on another suite or set of products. I was pretty excited about the changes I've been hearing about in this next release but I guess I'll just have to continue muddling along with Office 2004 on my MacBook a while longer.

That, or I need to just bite the bullet and use only Office 2007 in Parallels (serious overhead) and just remove Office 2004 from the Mac. Once Leopard arrives, I plan to reevaluate my Bootcamp thinking and may ultimately end up partitioning and dual-booting. Or I may just throw my hands up in abject defeat and do this kind of work on my Tablet PC and forget about everything-on-one-PC scenarios entirely. I've already found a solution for cross-platform, work from any device, online/offline productivity for less complex documents and where the use of Track Changes is not mandated. I'll be posting about that sometime soon, once the software/service I'm using is officially announced.

I know that Office is a big complex product and I'm sure there are legitimate reasons why MBUmade this decision but I'm increasingly feeling like Microsoft has some deep-rooted issues they need to address. More and more, it feels like everything they produce has a very good likelihood of slipping from its announced ship date. That does not bode well for them in the long run. The impact on SOHO and SMB customers is significant. The implications for Microsoft's relationship with the enterprise is potentially catastrophic if they cannot hit their dates and provide a reasonable level of predictability.

UPDATE: On the virtualization front, VMWare has announced that Fusion, their Mac OS product will be released on August 6th for $79.99 (same price as Parallels). Between now and August 5th, you can pre-order Fusion for $39.99. You'll get a license key instantly which can be used with the Release Candidate currently available or you can wait until the official release is available next week. Either way, it's a sweet deal from a longtime leader in the space.

I've been using touch screen devices for a long time and have always valued the protection a high quality screen protector can provide to protect the sensitive display from developing scratches that inevitably come from regular use. If you've used a Palm or Windows Mobile device for any length of time, you know exactly what I'm talking about. The menu area of the screen, for example, tends to be accessed a lot with the stylus and eventually a foggy patch of tiny scratches starts to develop. Solitaire and poker players tend to develop these patches where the deck is drawn from.

Given that the iPhone is essentially a big display on its front face, the idea of protecting it, hardy though the glass surface might be, had a lot of appeal.

So when I was offered a chance to try out the BodyGuardz device wrap made by NLU Products, I jumped at the chance to see whether a thin, clear plastic film could provide the protection I wanted while allowing the iPhone to be seen and used in all its unwrapped glory. Having used the company's ScreenGuardz products in the past, I was pretty confident that this would be a good experience.

There's a lot more involved in wrapping and entire device than there is in simply overlaying a screen and I admit I was a little nervous about getting the full body wrap onto the iPhone without picking up a lot of dust or fingerprints in the process. The BodyGuardz product includes a small spray bottle of application fluid (water and a bit of baby shampoo) designed to make the application and positioning of the film an easy process. The directions said that you cannot use too much fluid so I was very liberal in its application to my hands prior to peeling the film off its backing and on the film itself when I applied it to the phone.

NLU offers a step-by-step video that nicely demonstrates the entire application process as well as one that shows BodyGuardz-clad phones being skidded along a rough asphalt street surface.

I'm happy to report that the film was die-cut very precisely and fit around the various ports and buttons on the iPhone perfectly. The entire process took about 20 minutes (I was trying really hard to be slow and deliberate) and the results are simply extraordinary. The iPhone is now encased in a virtually scratch-proof plastic skin that is crystal clear. As an added bonus, the BodyGuardz material offers better surface adhesion that makes holding the iPhone feel a lot more secure than the slippery finish of the device itself. It slides in and out my pocket with ease and I can still use the Speck case when I'm venturing into hostile territory.

BodyGuardz are available for a number of phones, PDAs, and MP3 players and the iPhone model costs $24.95 for a kit that contains two sets of skins, a squeegee, and an ample supply of the application fluid. I'm seriously thinking about getting a BodyGuardz for my Nokia N95 as well.

I don't pretend to be a historian where such things are concerned but I can say with no reservations that my personal experience with both Win 2K and XP was nowhere near as disappointing or frustrating as what I'm going through with Vista. I recall that when Windows 2000 was first available, the company I was working with at the time had a mix of NT Workstation and Windows 98 SE machines and the upgrade was a huge improvement in both performance and stability. There were, of course, the Service Pack releases that continued to improve things (well, at least until the last one which was a freaking nightmare that we mostly avoided as we had already moved on to XP).

Windows XP was a big UI change – hold the Fisher-Price jokes please – but was also a significant change in the interaction design dimension as well. I remember being very excited about the improvements to the shell experience when I first dove into XP and, despite the changes in Vista, many of those core ideas live on. XP Service Pack 2 was a watershed release in my opinion. As a Tablet PC user, the updated Tablet PC bits in SP2 were a smashing success and made that form factor more than a curiosity and "cool but I don't really need that" feature set. The way Windows updated and protected itself was also radically changed during this time.

Getting back to the original topic of discussion, all of these releases made me feel more productive which, to date, Vista really has not. As a number of commenters noted, it seems that many of the decisions made related to how controls work and where they were moved to were made more for the sake of change than a comprehensible improvement in user experience.

It's also all too easy to send Vista into a weird fugue state simply by getting a little "mouse happy" and trying to perform too many operations quickly. The system almost always recovers once it's caught up with all my clicking but it's distracting and irritating to see all of my windows dim out and watch that spinning circle thing spin around and around. And no, there's nothing that's in any way less than up-to-date about the system I'm using Vista on – it's a recently released and well-configured Lenovo ThinkPad X61t Tablet PC with 2GB RAM, a big hard drive and a Core 2 Duo processor.

The jury's still out and I have no doubt that ultimately many of these issues will be resolved with the now-rumored performance releases and ultimately a SP1 release sometime in the future. Right now? I'm still wrestling with very mixed feelings.

At last year's event, attendees were handed an iPod Nano loaded with conference information. This raises the bar to unprecedented levels and represents a real coup on the part of the conference as it will create the largest concentration of iPhones in a single location ever in San Francisco on September 6 and 7. Of ourse simply handing out iPhones isn't particularly innovative, although the logistics for pulling this off are interesting and well detailed in Ismael's blog post. No... what's really compelling is how the iPhones will be used at the event:

Handing iPhone devices out to all attendees is nice in and by itself, but it gets really interesting if we can match them with the right set of applications. For this purpose, we are working with Etelos, our Diamond Sponsor, and are developing applications to support what some people might eventually call Conference 2.0. When you will meet someone at the conference, instead of handing out a business card, you will just locate her name on the conference’s directory, then click a ‘Send Contact Information’ button. On the Demo Area, you will use a similar interface to share your contact information with exhibitors. And during presentations, you will be able to give real-time feedback and ask questions to the moderator directly from your iPhone.

Very cool indeed.

These will be 4GB units. Attendees can opt to upgrade to an 8GB model and additional information on how this will all work is on the IT|Redux blog. We'll all be posting on the Office 2.0 Conference blog to provide additional details on the Mobility and Productivity track content as we get sessions and presenters lined up. As a sneak peek, I will say that I've been working on assembling a panel of representatives from the major players in the RIA space to discuss the intersection of Office 2.0 and Rich Internet Applications which I think will be a most engaging conversation. I promise no vendor pitches will be allowed – this will be an "unpanel" discussion in that sense and more of a roundtable discussion by thought leaders and active participants in the space.

Update: Brain has some excellent thoughts about the implications of this announcement on his PR 2.0 blog.