TechWatch: Toolbars, Mail Scanners, Whitebooks
Nifty and Newsy Toolbar
There are tons of add-in toolbars for blocking browser pop-up ads, including ones from Yahoo and Google and built into browsers, such as Opera and Mozilla. My current favorite is from Dogpile. Not only does it block those annoying ads--at least for the time being until the pop-up people move forward in their never-ending arms race--but the Dogpile folks have added an interesting twist: design-your-own-rich-site-summary (RSS) news feeds, coming directly to your browser and customizable with just a little bit of effort. RSS is an Internet standard that allows sites to publish pointers to their freshest content and is a way for news syndicators to easily distribute their wares. I was able to incorporate my own RSS feed (which is just a text file that sits on my Web server) in about 30 seconds, and quickly add content from major news sources such as ABC, CNN and others.
Dogpile Toolbar, www.dogpile.com/info.dogpl/tbar Price: Free
Scan That E-Mail!
MessageLabs has an interesting take on how to contain and control spam: Outsource your antispam and antivirus protection to its servers so the garbage e-mail never reaches your corporate network. This saves on bandwidth, time and frustration, and could possibly save your customers' networks from being swept away by the latest script kiddie's dastardly work. MessageLabs scans both incoming and outgoing e-mail--a good way to stop viruses from spreading, even when you think you have enough protection. (The company uses a combination of several different commercial antivirus tools in its scans.) I tried the service on my strom.com domain, which gets several thousand messages a week, most of which are garbage. Setting up the product was easy. All it took was a change in the MX record, which is the information your ISP uses to track what e-mail gets sent to your servers. Happily, about 85 percent of the e-mail has since been blocked, so I feel like I have some control over my e-mail again. MessageLabs offers a great solution for VARs looking for recurring revenue in the form of billing and provisioning services.
e-mail protection service, www.messagelabs.com Price: About $1 per user, based on volume
Thin and Cheap Whitebook
The latest rage for VARs is the whitebook, a notebook that can be branded with a VAR's own logo to help increase the product-line breadth to mobile computing. And D&H has come out with a real contender, the MB02, which weighs in at just under 5 pounds and uses a 1,400-MHz mobile Pentium-M processor with 256 MB of RAM and a 20-GB hard drive. The unit I tested came with a 14.1-inch TFT LCD display with three USB v 2.0 ports and connectors for an internal modem, Ethernet, VGA out and Firewire port. It also had a single PC Card slot and tray-loading DVD CDR-W optical drive. But innards aside, the most interesting thing about this whitebook is that D&H offers service and support as part of its one-year warranty. A VAR can either do his own component replacement, with D&H cross-shipping the spare parts, or D&H will perform the service within a 48-hour turnaround time. VARs can purchase a fully configured unit or assemble their own from components. D&H offers several configurations of cases and screens, including one configuration with an external serial port, something of a rarity these days on many notebooks.
MB02 Whitebook, www.dandh.com Price: $1,290