Do you want to make presentations more interesting?

A little longer than I care to admit I was sent a new presentation gadget Papershow to trial and blog about.  Well after looking at the box under a massive pile of paper on my desk for a few weeks and a new business pitch on the horizon decided I would give it a go and boy, am I glad that I did.  This gadget is very cool. 

I had looked on the website which shows the demo above showing a chap drawing on a pad of paper with an actual pen and everything you see on the pad appears on the computer screen and ultimately beamed onto the wall.  When I told some of my colleagues about this they couldn’t believe that it would actually work in this way as fast as shown on the clip.  They were wrong.
 
It is incredibly easy to set up, you literally pop the dongle into your laptop/PC and away you go.  You simply draw or write on the pad and as you do, it automatically appears on the screen.  The pad of paper you receive has a series of symbols down the right hand side which if you tap the pen on, allows you to change the thickness of the pen, the colour of the ink, delete lines or create perfect shapes.  All very impressive and easy to use.

The range is also excellent – you don’t have to be positioned right beside the dongle.  In fact this is one of the nice features as it is possible to pass the pad around the room or even allow you to stroll around the room while you write.  A feature my boss particularly likes as he doesn’t like to sit still during a presentation.

For those of you who have used flip charts will also be pleased to know that you can save each page directly onto the computer and it is easy to scroll back and forth through the pages should you choose.

An additional feature I have not had a chance yet to play with is the ability to print out PowerPoint presentations onto its paper and as you run through the slides you can then circle around or highlight points you are discussing.

As you may gather, I love this gadget and am quite upset that I have to send it back to them but will definitely be making sure Berkeley buy one when they are finally available.  When it is available you will be able to get your hands on one for around £99.99 excluding VAT and Papershow expect it to be available from www.datamind.co.uk and www.paperiq.com from mid-October, then all leading office stationery suppliers from January.

See how easy you can log your expenses

I am terrible at logging my expenses every month and am quite sure that like a lot of other technology PR professionals I routinely diddle myself out of a few quid each month.  I always seem to lose my receipts and I am sure I am not the only person to experience this problem.

This is why when I came accross SnapExpense I thought a few of you out there might be interested.

How does it work?  You simply take a picture of your receipt with your phone as soon as you recieve it and e-mail it to your office with a note on what the expense was.  This is then filed into what ever accounting system your office uses.  The cool part of this is that you can then throw your receipts away as HMRC has stated: “Your company will not need to keep the original records if all the information they contain is kept in a legible and acceptable alternative such as on an optical imaging system”. 

Worth a try.

Are you in ATM mode?

I read an interesting blog on Edelman Digital about living in ATM mode.  Appartently this is a concept coined by Ernie the Attorney, a blawger. The story goes that Ernie lost a great deal of his belongings when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and since that disaster has moved a lot of his stuff from physical assets to bits.

Now Ernie is taking this a step further by keeping a lot of his data online “in the cloud” so that he can get access to it from any connected device, similar to the way that you can get your money from any ATM without going to the bank. This has freed him up to travel with just his smartphone.

Cloud computing is currently getting a big push with the recent launch of the 3G iPhone but before you get carried away take note of the story covered on the BBC today about how Apple has set up an apologetic blog devoted to solving the problems of its recently launched MobileMe service. 

Two weeks ago Apple launched the new service to coincide with its 3G iPhone and pitched it to users as its answer to cloud computing.  All well and good so far, but many users found that they were not able to receive or send emails while others were unable to synch their devices at all.  Not so good.

With the criticism mounting in the blogosphere Apple has decided to launch its own MobileMe blog to help users with any teething problems.  Regardless of the problems its customers are facing, I quite like the fact that a large brand is using the medium of blogging to combat problems in the blogosphere.  Are we about to see more of this?

The name is Stallard, Paul Stallard

There were a couple of stories on El Reg which caught my eye this week, not least because I watched the excellent Casino Royal for the millionth time last weekend.  Apparently in little over a week’s time it will be exactly a hundred years since the birth of Ian Fleming, wartime intelligence officer and creator of cultural icon James Bond 007.  To mark the occasion, the Imperial War Museum in London has opened a special Fleming and Bond themed exhibit, For Your Eyes Only , which will run until May ‘09.  A must see exhibit for those of you like me who love all things bond.  I am curious to know if my favourite James Bond gadget will be on show – the miniature motorboat disguised as a crocodile that Bond used to get to Octopussy’s island.  So rubbish it was brilliant.

This story was also followed by the announcement of a German company introducing a self destructing disposable DVD that can be viewed for 48 hours, then thrown away. The DVDs will sell for just £3.20 and incorporates a self-destruct chemical coating to render them unreadable after a pre-set time. The process begins as soon as the discs are removed from vacuum-sealed packaging. After 48 hours (or longer, depending on the price) the DVD gives a ‘No disc’ error when put into a DVD player or PC.

As you can imagine it was the self destruct part of this story which caught my imagination but I have to say I think there are few flaws in this plan – not least why?  In an age when everyone is waking up to the environmental concerns, this sounds like a PR disaster.  Even if they are recyclable plastic you have to ask how many people would actually recycle them?  On top of that I am a firm believer in the advent of on-demand online rentals, something which I personally believe will eventually kill the DVD rental market without them having to self destruct.