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Google wants even more of your virtual life
Should you care about Google Lively? The comparison with Linden Lab's Second Life is inevitable; but Lively is not (yet) a virtual world.
Google calls it "a 3D virtual experience", which is just about right, though you can forget high definition; this is more like being in your own cartoon.
Lively depends on a browser plug-in that is currently for Windows XP or Vista only, and lets you design virtual rooms from a catalogue of furniture. You can't create your own furniture in the current beta, but crucially you can embed YouTube videos or images from a Picasa web album, Google's answer to Flickr. You can also add hyperlinks to items of furniture. The next step is to create an avatar, jump into a room and interact with other users through chat or other expressions from laughing and waving, to kicking and punching.
If Lively has a killer feature, it is the ability to embed virtual rooms into other web pages, by copying and pasting a few lines of HTML. Now it is trivial to offer your users a virtual meeting space, or an engaging way to view a video.
Lively is not done yet. Rooms are slow to load, usability is only so-so, and important features are missing. It has potential though, especially if Google works out how to adapt it for business use. One idea is to link it with Google's other collaboration tools, so you could create a presentation in Google Docs, schedule it in Calendar, invite participants with Gmail and hold the meeting in Lively. It might just work.
That said, Google is currently pitching Lively squarely at consumers, and Linden Lab has a head start in an enterprise context. Earlier this year, I spoke to Gene Yoon, vice president of business affairs at Linden, who told me that, "You're going to see the client get integrated with high-end business collaboration tools." Another interesting development is the recent announcement by IBM and Linden Lab of successful porting of avatars between virtual worlds. It would be great to see standards-based virtual worlds, rather than the all-Google approach which seems to characterise Lively.
Author: Tim Anderson
Testing LogMeIn's new service
I've been trying out the beta version of LogMein's updated remote control service, which is due to go live at the end of this month. It adds a number of new features that make life easier when accessing a computer remotely.
LogMeIn's service is useful if you need to access your computer remotely, whether to fetch some documents you need or to use an application that you wouldn't otherwise have access to.
I've found the service extremely useful when working from home. Our company email system uses Lotus Notes, and web-based access to this is rather primitive and unsatisfactory. Rather than install Notes on my home PC, it's easier to remotely view the screen of my office computer instead.
The new LogMeIn version makes the controls clear and easier to find than before. You can go into a remote control session or open the file transfer window at any time by clicking a single button. When in a remote control session, a pop-up control panel lets you flick between the browser view and full screen mode, and select various other options.
New features include support for drag and drop file transfer. If I've written an article at home, this lets me copy the document file to my office PC as easily as you would move a document between folders on the same computer.
However, LogMeIn also seems to have improved the performance of the remote control viewer itself. A year or two back, most remote control tools suffered to a greater or lesser degree from network latency, meaning that when you moved the mouse, the pointer on the remote screen took a fraction of a second to follow.
Using the new LogMeIn, I didn't experience any of this. When in full-screen mode, I found it easy to believe that the Windows desktop I was using belonged to my home PC in front of me, and not the remote office system. However, there is a floating status message and a toolbar at the top of the screen that gives the game away.
My only gripe is that I couldn't get LogMeIn to bring sound from the remote computer to my home PC, but this is likely to be an issue that is sorted out before the updated service goes live at the end of September.
Remote PC access from a USB drive
The LogMeIn service is an incredibly useful tool for anyone needing to remotely access files or applications on their PC from elsewhere. I can speak from experience, having used the service to retrieve documents from my office computer when transport problems forced me to work from home.
While LogMeIn can easily be accessed through a web browser, the company has now released a software client for the service. Called LogMeIn Ignition, the application can be downloaded and installed onto a removable storage device such as a USB Flash drive.
The advantage of this arrangement is that users such as IT managers may have remote access to a long list of Windows PCs, and Ignition enables passwords to be stored on the drive to make connecting easier. The application can also be installed directly to your Windows desktop to give speedy access to remote systems for IT helpdesk staff, for example.
For test purposes, LogMeIn kindly supplied me with Ignition ready installed on a USB Flash drive. The software is designed to autorun when you plug the drive into a PC USB slot, or can be manually launched. I tried Ignition on both a Windows PC and a thin client running Windows XP Embedded, and it worked perfectly on both systems. It even downloaded an update to the Ignition application from LogMeIn's web site.
New users will have to set up an account before they can use LogMeIn, for which they get a 30-day free trial. Existing users can type their existing email and password to get access to PCs they have previously configured with the LogMeIn host software.
Once logged in, the Ignition client displays your online computers and lets you click a single button to launch a remote control or file transfer session.
The LogMeIn service is much improved since I first started using it, and now offers a view of the remote computer's desktop that resizes to fit into the browser or viewer window, saving on the constant scrolling and panning that you previously had to get used to. You can still switch to full-screen mode, where there is little to give away the fact that you are using a remote computer.
Another big improvement is bi-directional clipboard synchronisation, which enables you to copy text from a document on the remote PC and paste it into a document you are editing on the local one, and vice versa.
Vonage V-Phone may be stymied by security
Vonage's recently announced V-Phone is a USB memory stick with a difference; it has a built-in voice-over-IP (VoIP) client, and a jack socket into which you plug an accompanying headset to make voice calls.
The concept behind V-Phone is one of those ideas that seems brilliantly simple with hindsight; you should be able to make a VoIP call from just about any Internet-connected PC, if the software to do this were more widespread. But just about
every PC has USB ports, so why not put the software on a USB device, and carry it around with you? This way, you don't need to install anything, and you don’t leave a data trail behind you, either.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about V-Phone is that it actually works; my previous experience of Internet phone calls led me to expect a crackly, hissing line, with frequent complete breaks in the sound.
Instead, V-Phone provides perfectly good audio quality. At times it was a little quiet, but the Vonage Talk client provides separate volume controls for both the incoming audio and the mic level, allowing you to adjust the sound to suit both you and the person at the other end of the line.
However, anyone hoping to get cheap calls wherever they go in the world should be aware of two things that can get in the way; privilege levels and firewall configurations.
I found that you need administrator rights on a system in order to run the Vonage Talk client, or even to access the V-Phone's built-in Flash storage. I don't know whether hotels and Internet cafés routinely leave their public-access PCs running with full admin privileges, but locked-down systems will prevent you from using the V-Phone.
Then there are firewalls. The Vonage Talk client needs access to a number of UDP ports to make IP calls, and these may be blocked by a firewall on both the PC and the Internet gateway of any network you are connected to.
I was unable to make a connection to the Vonage server from the network in IT Week's offices, for example. At home, I had to temporarily disable the firewall on my Windows 2000 system in order to make calls.
The V-Phone costs £19.99 in retail, with a subscription to the service costing £7.99. This lets you make unlimited calls, and Vonage also assigns your V-Phone a number so that other people can reach you whenever you have the device connected to a computer.
