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

Posted by Madeline Bennett on July 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Even though it was released  last summer, I've only recently got around to properly trying out the Opera Mini browser from Opera Software, but I found that it actually gives a really decent web experience on a mobile device.

Opera Mini works somewhat like the Safari browser in Apple's iPhone, in that it shrinks a web page so that the whole of it is displayed on the handset's screen. Of course, this makes it too small to actually read anything, but you can easily zoom in to any part of the page you are interested in.

It doesn't feature the gesture-based controls of Apple's browser, but a simple tap on the screen with a stylus is arguably quicker, and the browser's back button zooms out again just as quickly.

Unlike Safari, Opera Mini is a thin client browser. This means that web requests are handled by a proxy server operated by Opera, which renders each page and compresses it before sending the resulting page image down to the phone. This means that less data gets sent to your handset, and so browsing eats up less of your monthly data plan.

I tested Opera Mini on a Windows Mobile 6 device, and found it handled many common web pages such as BBC News Online very well. However, it does trip up on web-based applications that test for supported browsers before proceeding.

Browsing was reasonably fast, even over a GPRS connection, and even faster when we switched to a Wi-Fi access point. Best of all, Opera Mini is a free download, and works on a broad range of handsets that support Java.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on February 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on September 14, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

You can get email in a web browser, and even edit documents in a browser using web-based applications such as Google Docs, so why not go the whole hog and have your entire Windows desktop accessed via a browser?

One company that will soon offer users this option is Nivio. Its service lets users subscribe to access a Windows XP desktop through a browser for £7.99 per month. The desktop is hosted by Nivio, and accessed through any browser supporting Java or ActiveX.

Anyone who has used a service such as GoToMyPC or LogMeIn to view their PC desktop remotely will be familiar with the concept, but in this case the system you access isn't a real physical PC, but a virtual one living in a datacentre.

The drawback of this approach is that you can't install your own applications. Nivio provides a selection of free applications such as those from the OpenOffice.org suite, plus others such as Microsoft Office 2003 applications, which cost extra. Once you subscribe to an application, its shortcut appears on your desktop and the app itself is streamed in when you access it.

As you can see from the screenshot, a Nivio hosted desktop is nothing really exceptional to look at – it looks pretty much the same as any other Windows XP desktop, as it should.

Nivio believes that this service could save smaller companies on the cost of owning and managing their own PCs. Customers could instead use terminals or outmoded PCs to access a Windows XP desktop remotely. However, you would have to be pretty confident about the reliability of your internet connection to follow this route.

Another drawback is the difficulty of getting data files on and off your virtual desktop. Nivio provides an application to let you upload and download files, but for this you need….a Windows PC.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on August 31, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1)

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.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on March 22, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nokia's N800 Internet Tablet is available from the end of January, and IT Week has obtained a sample model for review.

Like its predecessor the N770, the new model is a lightweight device about the same size as a large spectacle case. This makes Nokia's web tablet fairly easy to slot into a pocket, but it also makes text somewhat difficult to read on its 4.1in 800 x 480 touch-screen display.

Because Nokia is at pains to distinguish its Internet Tablet brand from mobile phones, the N800 cannot connect to a mobile network. Instead, it relies on Wi-Fi hotspots or a Bluetooth data link with a phone to get connected.

Fortunately, Nokia has made it fairly easy to find and connect to Wi-Fi hotspots, and I was able to get connected and surfing the Web within minutes of powering on the N800. A pop-up on-screen keyboard appears whenever you need to enter some text, before disappearing out of the way again when you have finished with it.

The N800 runs an embedded version of Linux and comes with the Opera browser and Flash 7 player, which enables users to view pretty much any website. It also features a media player, PDF viewer, and client software for email, IM, and IP telephony.

I found that web sites such as the BBC's news pages were often difficult to read without using the magnifier tool, and not all video files I tried to access would play in the built-in media player.

While the N800 is not a replacement for a smartphone, it is a device that could find a niche in business, especially as Nokia has made available an open source development platform to enable applications to be built for it.

A full review of the N800 will appear in a future issue of IT Week.

Posted by Daniel Robinson on January 29, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1)