David Friend, CEO of Carbonite is all over the blog post answering questions and solving problems for people - and impressing the hell out of me.

I can’t use his products so I cannot say much about them… Why? I used external fixed disk drives and Carbonite doesn’t support right now.

I use Mozy - but now have a far better opinion of Carbonite since watching this guy and if they ever add the support I need, I’ll be in the right mindset to give it a try. It looks to me like they are taking care of consumers and that is terrific to see.

But I now have a new example of doing this right.

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another two photos after the break

Information dashboards are all the rage. I’ve seen executives with 5 plasmas on their wall, each displaying a few data points (and helping to heat their office) My parents would never use this, but for upwardly bound news junkies, having feeds show over Bloomberg, CNN or other incoming information sources might be the perfect office jewelry. It reminds me of what was cool about Pointcast, but using the latest tech.

RSS can of course carry rich media (it’s really just a list of pointers in a package) so there is no limit to the types of textual, audio, video, and interactive information that can flow this way.

“USA TODAY is excited about this innovative and groundbreaking partnership with Samsung,” said Jeff Webber, senior vice president of advertising for USA TODAY and publisher of USATODAY.com. “The ability to deliver up-to-date news content to Samsung’s customers is just one more way USA TODAY is working to expand how people get news and information.”

USA TODAY is a multimedia brand with print, digital, video and mobile platforms that reach millions of readers each month. USA TODAY will provide national and world news as well as keep viewers in touch with the latest in money, sports, life, weather and politics news for the InfoLink™ RSS service. The Weather section will allow viewers to personalize current temperatures and seven-day forecasts by zip code and will also feature weather alerts. Markets data will offer market summaries and individual stock quotes.

Consumers need only to press the special RSS button on the Samsung HDTV remote control to bring up a semi-transparent menu overlay featuring selectable newsfeeds covering a variety of customizable topics. Consumers can then either browse through headlines to catch a quick glimpse, or select a specific story to view full story. Content already playing on the HDTV will remain on-screen, ensuring that moments from a favorite show or a fantastic play during the big game will never be missed, all the while having the most up-to-date news, weather and more just a click away.

Video Here

The big question for me is what happens when you click.

What About the Search and Social Media Players?

Google is probably watching this space, given its hopes to enter the TV Market. Imagine this being integrated into MySpace via the Developer Platform. Amazon sure blew it with Kindle as a “walk around RSS reader” by charging people to subscribe to RSS feeds, and my Blackberry Google Reader is not that great for monitoring things due to battery drain and the small screen (not to mention a clunky interface with lots of “next page” clicks required.)

I think that RSS advertisers may perk up when overlay based feeds start to become more popular.

Customization at the Source

Using Yahoo Pipes or other tools, you can customize company data feeds, or mix and blend data so that it’s perfect for your morning cup-o-joe or for watching the blogosphere while you enjoy Family Guy. Or, if you want, you can use your Plasma to display famous works of art and stream news over the top when nothing’s on.

I can imagine people connecting their TV to their myspace friends or LinkedIn profile. Perhaps the TV RSS Space will develop like Flock does as a social media browser, making it all neat and tidy.

Connecting TV Programs with Interactive Content and Advertisers

But think about how this could be integrated into channel surfing. Using keyword-based RSS feeds, you could be notified when something interesting has shown up on another media source (video, podcast, blog) and just “click to go” to that source. If you are a publisher, you could synchronize RSS feeds with the programs you’re broadcasting so that commerce and interactive features could be tied into specific video segments. What’s more, the feeds could still work with time-shifting.

The other idea is that these feeds can be hooked to software which slowly learns about the person watching the TV and delivers high quality web content along with the TV shows they’re watching. This is media marketing gold, especially when many users skip commercials or simply ignore them.

If you watch a home improvement show, what if you could have the television automatically grab relevant RSS feeds when you press the button, and allow you to subscribe to them. Then, when you next watch this show it would update the feeds. Some feeds could even refer to alternative shows / videos / podcasts which might interest you.

I Hope They Don’t Build a Walled Garden

But in a major step for the living room, the remote control has an “RSS” button. Wow. Just another way big media is losing it’s grip over the screen. Let’s see if they try to build a walled garden, or let it flow. At CSS it was USA Today Feeds Only. It would be tempting to try to monetize this early like Kindle - but I hope they’ll let the platform develop on the shoulders of the Social Media explosion. Let people fall in love with it and then look for ways to integrate it into your bottom line.

Amazon Prime - This returned probably 500%+ ROI. Worth every dime.

Fujitsu ScanSnap - This was the year I went digital on just about everything. This was the reason.

Products that weren’t right for me:

• Blackberry 8300 - The 8800 would have been so much better. I’m going to get a 3G IPhone next year.
• Dell Precision 360 - Actually bought in Nov 2005, this noisy, finicky machine will hit the heap as soon as I can replace it. Dell put me through three on-site calls with a talentless hardware technician who screwed up 2/3 of what he did. No more Dells for me!

The weather was crappy this last weekend, we were all a bit under the weather, and I wanted to leave the TV and video games turned off.  So headed into the electronics graveyard and pulled some CDROM drives.  And the fun begins.

Those old electronics parts are fun to disassemble, and it is a terrific teaching experiment for kids. But the key to me is that it takes the “mystery” of out technology. I see that as one of the major obstacles to the professional advancement of so many out there. “I don’t like computers” or “I don’t understand those things” is such a common excuse for people who are stuck in today’s economy. Get a small electronics screwdriver set before you start.

I don’t have an agenda with the kids. They can stop whenever they want. I don’t do lectures. I just answer questions. Like… what a belt drive is for. What’s amazing is how many questions there are. It’s a terrific bonding experience.

In many cases, you should seek out a recycling solution for working computers. I know which parts are going to be useful and which are not, and if they ever get a decent recycling program here in Kentucky for PCs you bet I’ll participate! As for now, they want you to take stuff for >1 hour drives unless you live in Louisville. Someone chime in if I missed something.

If you have good stuff to get rid of, use a Manufacturer’ Take-Back Program

Dell Corp. - Dell Recycling
Gateway Corp. - Trade-In Program
HP/Compaq - HP Planet Partners
IBM Corp. - IBM PC Recycling Service for individuals and businesses.
Toshiba - Trade-In and Recycling Program

Oh yeah, don’t forget. Some things have hazardous materials in them. especially monitors and batteries (yes, even flat screens.) Other things are sharp and so forth. So use common sense in what you take apart. Look online for information about this. And never, ever break hard plastic or do any hammering without safety glasses on. This you knew, but I had to say it. Be smart about this stuff. And if you’re smart enough to do this with your kids, you’re smart enough to know that little bitty parts do not belong in toddlers’ bellies, right?

But from what I can tell they’re on the right track. So, since Amazon is into Wish Lists big time, let me make mine for Kindle 2.0, now that we’ve all seen the first version.

RSS Freedom - I don’t want to hear any more about a “special” RSS feed format. The ability to arbitrarily subscribe to any RSS feed is critical to me, so let’s stick with the standard XML. This way the authors can maintain blogs about their books and use standardized Blog Creation tools like Wordpress.

Blog Reading with Offline Mode - I want to be sure that I can read books on airplanes, but RSS feeds and blogs are equally important. I love Google Gears and how it works with Google Reader and hope that Kindle 2.0 will have something like it.

A Full Web Browser - Port Firefox to the thing and I’ll be thrilled. This will benefit Amazon, too so people can both shop their site and click on ads in the Amazon Clickriver system, leading to landing pages of advertisers. Ad-supported books will be a terrific concept.

Larger Screen, In Color - This will become more important for magazines, blogs, and such. I’m personally just hoping the screen gets more paperwhite, but I know its success will depend on color. If Apple does an e book, you can bet it’ll be in full, gorgeous color.

Audiobook Alternative - I would like to have Audible (protected) audiobooks and podcasts available for the device. Since Amazon already has tons of audiobooks to download they will surely be doing this for version 2.0. I already use my iPod for this purpose, but there would be something cool about consolidating the two.

Better Battery Performance - I would think that they could figure out a way to batch wireless sessions (e.g. put wireless to sleep) when it’s not needed. Charging every day is not acceptable. I would get tired of this and hope that Kindle 2.0 has better technology.

My new eStarling Frame arrived from amazon.com. I had low expectations after trying the last version, and hearing about the first. For those of you saying “this is old news” keep in mind that this is a new, bigger 8″ 800×600 eStarling, not the low-res little one that Gizmodo reviewed back in May.

NEW COUPON CODE : ThinkGeek Has The eStarling Frame: Click Here to Get it.  Use Coupon Code RAMEN

Some observations:

• Setup is cake, assuming you have a wireless network already. 10 minutes.
• If you haven’t tagged your images in Flickr, get cracking because the RSS function is the main reason to own this… but it has one caveat… you can’t just let it stream unlimited images - it limits to 40 unique images in 12 hours. Go figure.
• The viewing angle is huge, you can almost see it edge-on.
• It is bright! Really nice. The color isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty darn good.
• The picture quality is very good, as good as any I’ve seen. (800×600)
• It’s sleek … more MOMA than Radio Shack
• The controls are simple, except for having the pause the slide show before you can do many things (hey eStarling… pause the damn thing for us, will ya?.)
• It has a message function for giving the kids notes via the web. But see below, cause it’s lame.
• Your flickr images must be marked public. I DO NOT KNOW WHY. It’s possible to set up trusted feeds with Flickr.

Some wishes:

• Tie the message function into SMS so I can message the frame.
• Include a motion sensor to turn the frame off when nobody’s around. Note: it does have a power save function to turn it off at night, but it is not weekday/weekend aware. Bah!
• Bigger bigger bigger.
• Ability to do “ALERT ALERT” screens so kids will come over and read messages.

Postscript: Looks like eStarling is unloading its old frames on ThinkGeek. (10/12/07)

Postscript: Issues with the frame after 1 month (11/11/07) If eStarling folks would like to chime in and give the real answers to any mistakes I’m making, I’ll be pleased to try them.

• You cannot directly copy photos from a media card onto the frame memory. You must leave the memory in the frame. The on-frame memory is only for retrieving stuff from on-line. So… get ready to dedicate a portable media card to the frame.
• The online refresh from RSS is s-l-o-w.
• The best thing to do is take an old memory card, fill it with your best photos, and use it to shuttle images from PC to frame and leave it there. The Estarling will then mix photos from your card and online sources.
• The “message” function sucks. Why it doesn’t put messages in the center of the screen eludes me.
• Estarling support, thus far, has been horrible. Each email takes days to get replies, there is no support forum, the online demos are marginal, and answers are over-brief.
• The “upload to frame” from PC feature is A JOKE. One at a time you say? Right. I have hours to spare. Let us select a folder of images and queue them!
• Inserting media “errors” on me 50% of the time. As far as I know there is nothing wrong with my CF cards. If I get this error, I have to reboot the frame.

More Tips after the jump

Picassa Users:

Get a cheap, dedicated CF card. 128-256 MB and consider it “dedicated” for the frame. Format it once, and run scandisk on it to be sure the FAT file system is fine. This will hold 250-350 images at 800×600.

Use Picassa’s “Hold” tray to select images for your frame. Select all of your favorite images in Picasa by selecting them and clicking “hold” to put them in the the tray for exporting. When you have all of your favorites in the tray, “export” the photos to the drive letter for the CF card (assuming you have a card slot/reader on your computer.)

Use Picassa’s Batch Editing function to adjust the color for the placement of your frame. Try taking one image and tweaking the colors of it until you have 5-6 examples. See which looks better. Then, you can do the same edit via batch on subsequent frame loads.

Mark 800×600 as the size for exported images. This makes things faster and uses Picassa’s resize algorithm which I think looks better than hardware resizing. I’ve also done a batch edit on the group while they’re in the hold tray to reduce the contrast of all of these images before using the frame. I often do a cropping to make vertical images horizontal before the resizing also. This all depends on your images.

Picassa Crashes Suck. Since it takes a while to mark them all for the Hold Tray, and Picasa has been known to crash at the worst moments, occasionally hit the “starred” button. This information is saved immediately in Picassa, and you can always get your pictures back in the tray by sorting by “starred” images and re-adding them to the hold tray.

If all goes well, you’ll have around 250 images / 128 MB that you can leave in your frame. Your RSS images will be mixed in over time (at a slightly lower priority.)

Wow, today I went to change the flickr search on my eStarling frame and found that the previously awful seeframe.com site has now been totally re-worked. Now, a simple drop-down interface allows you to manage image stream sources, such as Photobucket and Flickr via integrated search.  Tags and Playlists are far easier to understand and adjust.

Playlists are cool. Here, you might have your family’s flickr collection for the holidays queued up to start after Thanksgiving. I currently have the RSS feeds from flickr set to show me interesting autumn color landscapes as shown in these screen grabs.  It’s so nice to see new photos on the frame each time I walk by!

One thing is definitely missing for Flickr - feeds for sets and groups, so an absolute must for users wanting to pipe Flickr photos into the estarling frame is the Greasemonkey Script that allows you to see feeds for many more combinations, such as tags. While the seeframe search has definitely improved, it’s still nice to be able to customize your feed even more on Flickr.

“….Lexmark, Lexington, Kentucky, is in the midst of a difficult year in which it has seen sales and earnings under pressure, an underperforming consumer business and pressure in the part of its business that makes and sells printers to OEM customers, like Dell….”

Lexmark reports its earnings Tuesday. It is one of the largest employers in Lexington, and the biggest employer of high-tech talent in the city. It has been the subject of increasing takeover chatter in recent weeks despite stock upgrades by some analysts last month.