.The Best Technology As I Find It .

Information overload in Outlook with Xobni

My neighbor Ben told me about this really cool bit of software called Xobni (That's Inbox backwards) that put all the information available for your contacts at your fingertips in Outlook. The cool thing is that all it is doing is gathering information that you really already had into a format that's easily viewable and searchable. Specifically, it retrieves info from signatures within emails, online via facebook, Linkedin, and Hoovers, and Yahoo mail and displays it as a pane on the right side of Outlook. It also gives you interesting stats like who do you exchange the most email with, what times of day are contacts emailing you, do you send more email to them or them to you, and much more. For a currently free product, I find this pretty amazing. Their current revenue model seems to be via a small ad in the side bar with hopeful future sales to the enterprise space. They are also soon releasing a Blackberry client.

Labels: information management, Outlook, software

OK, its been a very long time since I've posted but I'm going to get back in gear now.

One of the coolest things I've found lately is the Yubikey. This cool little key is a one-time password (OTP) generator that is small, durable, and easy to use. That is the key: easy to use. It provides a 2nd factor authentication without the hassle you usually get with a token or card. That is because when inserted into a standard USB port, it connects as a USB keyboard and types in the 32 character OTP for you. Additionally, the way it generates the OTP is very cool. It actually uses public/private key cryptography to encrypted a small payload of random stuff including a counter and a timestamp and sends that as the OTP. The OTP is then decrypted by the Yubico servers who then verify that the OTP is valid and even who has it. Very elegant.

You can get them from the Yubico website for around $30 or I found Mashed life offers them for less and will even put a colored label on it for you! Mashed Life is an example of a service that uses the Yubikey. They store all your other passwords on their web based service which can be accessed securely using the Yubikey. I tried to get Roboform to support it but they have not yet committed to doing that so I've moved over to Lastpass which is like Mashed life but has browser plug-ins which are very nice. I really like how it works. More on that another day.

Thanks it for now! Get your Yubikey and get secure!

I've been looking for a way to send notifications from a Cold Fususion Server to people using IM. I've found several options. The best looking one, although I do not yet know the cost, is Zion Software :: Enterprise Instant Messaging Solutions. I've also found some articles that descri be how to build IM gateways using COld FUsion. Here's a good one: ColdFusion Event Gateways: Building an eCommerce Bot for iChat and Google Talk

Labels: IM Communication Gateway for Cold Fusion