A brand new PC for €100?

Do you remember your first 1MB SIMM memory, which you got for $100? Yeah, it was around 1992.

A new PC for €100

Yesterday, while asking a friend supplier for a small web server component, I found a mini treasure with the new dual core Intel Atom onboard.

Interested in what Intel D945GCLF2 is capable of, I got one and it turned in my first PC under 100 euro!

It’s much faster than we need it for the new on-demand web service processing box.

97 euros dealer's pack

Well, I agree that most of you will need a full-featured netbook with financial analysis processing power, but that’s not the current case (although you get 14.8 score for Business Winstone) and 5x faster MP3 and video encoding!

Others may say that it’s a bulk recession-friendly piece of hardware, but actually it’s more than most of us currently use in our daily work:

• 1 x Soldered Dual Core Intel Atom 1.6GHz 45nm processor
• 1GB DDR2 up to 2GB
• Intel 945GC chipset: 82945GC on the Northbridge, 82801GB ICH7 on the Southbridge
• GMA 950 integrated graphics
• S-Video output with HDTV encoder
• RealTek ALC662 codec with HDA and 6 channel audio
• SPDIFF header on motherboard
• 1x PCI slot, 8 USB2.0 ports, 1 x IDE, 2 x SATA2,
• 1 x VGA, 1 LPT, 1 RS232, PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports
• Rapid BIOS boot, Express BIOS Update
• 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet, wake on USB, PCI, PS/2, Lan
• Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows XP Home and Pro, 32/64 bit support

…although my new industrial friend boots Linux from a USB flash…

the IOs

All of that on a 17×17x3cm board with a maximum total power draw of 8W! Let’s see how it will perform in the web services controller.

Wow, that was a sunny and eco-friendly Sunday! Cheers and see you at the Room full for Mirrors movie tonight

Hosting ($4/month) or Top Brand Performance ($400/m)?

The choice is yours. Wherever you land on the planet today, you pay for what you get.

We are in the brand performance management business. It’s not cheap and it’s not for every business. But it’s worth. Some just look for dirty cheap “hosting”, they google for ‘free’, ‘cheap’ and ‘discounted’, next month they look for even more cheaper. Customers? No, thanks. Popular doesn’t mean valuable, it means inferiority complex and big headache.

Hosting providers such as BlueHost (and most others for that matter) have a particular target market in mind for the services they provide. If the type of website your company has fits their target market, then you will rarely have any problems with their service. Maybe. If you don’t host your brand with 740 blacklisted link farms and adult websites on the same IP. If you don’t rush the shared server’s CPU to manage or archive your database. If…

If the type of website you have doesn’t fit their target market then you will have problems. Lots of them, on a daily basis. BlueHost give people the opportunity to find out if your site fits their target market by offering to refund your money if you are not happy after the first month. You can get all your “money” back and move elsewhere, month after month. Year after year. Someday you will even find free hosting, full of big-breasted banners, which will please the eye of your customers, for free.

If several hundred commodity static websites can share one server without overloading the server’s CPU, then it is much cheaper for your website to host on a server that places several hundred sites, than it would be to host it on a dedicated server that only hosts a dozen or so sites in order to make available a much higher CPU usage that the static sites don’t need, but a dynamic website that gets and serves thousands visitors and customers per day, executing millions service, sales and support transactions in real-time and doesn’t cache pages – it definitely would need.

If you have a supercharged V12 engine, then you don’t buy a small car and expect the engine to fit, you’d buy a large car or SUV that has space for a large engine. You can’t reach the top with a Micra or Golf, or even VW Country. You drive a Land Rover. Or LandCruiser. Or PathFinder.

The same applies to websites and hosting as applies to engines and cars. You need to choose an advantage environment, which supplies the resources that your website AND BRAND requires and if you need more than minimal CPU for your website to run you need to buy more expensive hosting that puts fewer sites on each server so that the required CPU is available. And most of all you need rock-solid, fanatic, real-time support.

However, the server CPU performance is just one of thousands Brand Performance metrics, which you have to master and monitor. But it’s very important, as well as other mission-critical factors like:

• Brand Architecture and Strategy
• Business Process Reengineering and Change Management
• Web 2.0 strategy
• CRM, Website & Database Performance
• Business Intelligence dashboarding
• Search Engine Optimized and Friendly, usable website
• Google top5 presence
• Competitive Intelligence and web analytics metrics
• Conversion rate (CR), Customer value (RFM, LTV)

Performance management

Whoops, ten years ago we were happy with 100 visits and 10 bookmarks of our website daily. Shift happens.

It’s snowing today! Let’s grab the ski tomorrow. See ya at the top!
Yours BrandMover

Where next? Travel 2.0 with Dopplr and Tripit

At the top

Spending your time away from home for 1/3 of the year definitely broadens your horizon and presents lots of opportunities to meet great people, exploring new cultures and outdoor activities in the real world (it’s getting too virtual lately, isn’t it?).

While in 2007 I spent less than 100 days on the road, 2008 was pretty active with 120+ days abroad (Austria, Germany, Slovakia, Switzerland, Ireland, Italy, Greece and the USA, to mention some of the destinations.) I will try to keep the trend for 2009 with more business and exploration trips – mostly between February and July – from SES to Northern Ireland to Everest base camp.

All of this could be easily tracked with Travel 2.0 web services like Dopplr and TripIt. You can forward your booking confirmations to plan@tripit.com and automatically sync your iCal with a feed, that has useful info. You get notifications when you will be in the same city as your friends, controling who can see your trips and collaborate on them.

The Dopplr annual report is real fun and almost real picture of your trips, especially if they are linked with flickr.

Dopplr report

” You took 15 trips in 2008, which added up to 14,134 km or 3% of the distance to the moon. Everyone on Dopplr travelled a total of 1331.4 million km in 2008: the approximate distance to Saturn from the Earth as of January 2009. Your personal velocity for 2008 was 1.61 km/h, which is about the same as NASA’s crawler. The 5 most popular cities in your network are Stockholm, Lisbon, Zürich, Cairns and Brussels. We couldn’t calculate the carbon footprint of your travels for 2008 because at the moment, you’re not using that feature. In 2008, the average carbon of those who are tracking the impact of their travels on Dopplr was 6,413 kg CO2.”

So, where you gonna go next in 2009?

Smart & Creative gadgets 2009

After a deep research for my smart tools upgrade, Santa brought me a new smartphone, camera, monitor and MIDI controller.
They all share a common trend for 2009:  slim and stylish design, hundreds of consolidated features, precise touch control and web-native applications.

Smartphone

HTC Touch pro

If you need mobile office power, fast clickable touchscreen, QWERTY keyboard, GPS and Wi-Fi,  you probably will check the top5 business smart-phones: BlackBerry Storm, Palm Treo Pro,  Nokia E71 and Sony Ericsson Xperia X1, Tmobile G1 …

…but you may end your holiday with HTC’s Touch Pro, like I did.

All you need – wherever you are.

Digital Camera

Canon PowerShot SX1

Recently gone through some hunting, I  decided to compare Canon EOS 450D with the new Powershot SX1.  The pictures from the dSLR were comparable to the ones by the SX1, which is a great hybrid – crisp macro and enormous telephoto zoom in a one-hand package was a perfect fit.
If you wanna get rid of your old and heavy SLR,  Canon SX1 is empowered with features never seen before on a compact camera:

• 20x wide-angle optical zoom
• 10 Megapixel CMOS
• new DIGIC 4 processor for fast performance
• 4 fps continuous shooting and
• full HD movie capture!

2009 will be the year of the rich, detailed, crisp full HD images in a wide ISO range of shooting situations with full manual control on the move.

All-in-one LCD Monitor

Samsung T260HD

I was tired of messing with 3 screens in the studio, so an upgrade to a full HD, crystal clear LCD monitor with integrated DTV tuner was a perfect fit.
The Samsung T260HD is a 26″ Widescreen full HD+ (1920×1200) resolution with embedded DTV tuner, 10000:1 dynamic contrast, 2 invisible built-in SRS TruSurround speakers and 5ms grey-to-grey response time.
The viewing angle in both axis is over 160 degrees, so I can follow what’s is going on literally from everywhere, even from the bent glass bathtub. Finally all video cables go to the same unit – Analog RGB, DVI, HDMI, Component, and TV.  The only problem I had was, that there is no VESA wall mount, so I had to mount it on a wall TV swivel/ tilt stand.

MIDI controller/ Stage piano

KAWAI mp5

8 years later I’m happy to get back to daily jam sessions with hundreds of native sampled instruments, played on an advanced hammer action professional stage piano. After testing CME VX8 and Yamaha Motif XS8, I decided to stick to KAWAI and their 80 years of piano sound experience. The new KAWAI MP5 is sure to satisfy the most demanding performer’s need for impeccable sound quality, responsive touch, 4 zones and powerful control.  Not to mention using it as master 88-key MIDI controller in your  home-based studio. Boasted with 256 high-quality instrument sounds,  including Kawai’s famous Concert Grand piano, the sound is awesome! Hope to find a KAWAI K1 library, which was my favorite 12 years ago.