Lets talk about this little modern Marvel known as the iPad. This device seems like it has some interesting potential although I haven’t quite been able to pinpoint exactly what it is.  Now that I think about it, I’m not even sure if “iPad” was the smartest choice for a name as it sounds more like a high tech feminine hygiene product.

Lets start by describing this device. Its a lightweight, touch screen tablet which runs the iPhone OS. It is App Driven and highly dependent on the development community to come through with functional & practical (or maybe just plain fun) applications for this device to be a success.

I WOULD suggest staying away from the first generation of this product however and in 10 seconds heres why: It’s unwieldy, no forward facing camera for video conferencing, no USB ports, no HD support (only 480p), no widescreen support (cinema vide0), and last but not least, the ridiculous price.

The iPad starts at $499 and the high end (64GB) model finishes at just over $800. Lets look at the second part of the price model, the 3G cost. Although you can buy a Wi-Fi only version, why would anyone? Apple boasts a 3G cost of $14.99 with no contract. The part the DON’T tell you is that there is the severe limitation of 250MB on that plan. For most of us, this is but a few YouTUBE videos and then your done. The real word requires (yes, it’s a necessity) unlimited 3G to be effective. This will set us back $30/month.

So, the bottom line? It’s a great concept with some pretty severe limitations. I would say, lets hold off on this one and hope we see some significant improvements on the second generation iPad. When we look at Apple’s history, I would say that a second generation with major improvements is right around the corner.

Cloud computing is a wonderful thing and Google proves this with great fervor. During my travels as an IT professional, I have noticed that most residential users only recognize Google for searching and email.

Google docs is a wonderful set of tools that can not only boost your productivity, but allow you collaborate or even share your creations with co-workers or family members.

Lets take a brief look at the basic apps within the Google docs suite:

Google Documents (word processor): Google’s online word processor.

Although this app is no MS Word 2007, it is a powerful and handy tool nonetheless. It has some pretty good formatting tools, saves diretly online or in a variety of formats (HTML, OpenOffice, PDF, RTF, Text, MS Word) when you download your document to your local system, has the ability to share and allow direct real time editing with multiple contributors.

Google Spreadsheets: This is Google’s online spreadsheet.

This is another powerhouse that allows a very strong set of spreadsheet functions as well as the same collaboration and save options expected of this online office suite.

Google Presentations: This is Google’s online presentation tool.

This is a VERY cool presentation tool that comes complete with themes, online presentation playback (great for creating a killer sales pitch and then emailing a link to all of your prospects. and of course the same collaboration and save options expected of this online office suite.

All apps come with a great set of document creation templates and here the best thing.. it’s FREE! for those that are still skeptics regarding it’s usefulness (as I was in the beginning), try it out. You can find this (and I can’t stress enough) FREE office suite at http://docs.google.com.

Announced two days ago on the Google Voice Blog, Google has acquired Gizmo5. This company provides internet based calling software for mobile phones & computers (similar to SKYPE) The Gizmo engineers will be joining the Google Voice team, so I can only speculate what this now means. Currently Google Voice is free, but it is a safe bet to say that you can expect the addition of full VOIP calling services as opposed to its current offering of call routing, voicemail & transcription of voicemail to sms services.

The addition of a full VOIP client will make them a formidable opponent to the SKYPE empire (which SKYPE now claims there are over 405 million registered users). Currently SKYPE has some very interesting perks that Google does not. Specifically the fact that it is a well supported platform with a wide range of SKYPE hardware support in the market. SKYPE has USB phones, office phones, WiFi phones and client software for PC, Mac, Windows Mobile, iPhone & Blackberry.

There are however, some things that I never really cared for with SKYPE. SKYPE charges extra for transcription of voice mail and most other services. Well, not actually SKYPE, but third party vendors. SKYPE has a lot of third party plug-ins available, however 99% of them are NOT free, nor do they work very well. I would like my VOIP service to have as little “nickel and dimimg” me as possible. Google voice on the other hand has performed both flawlessly and very impressively. Google has also done an excellent job integrating voice services into the Google cloud since it’s acquisition of Grand Central which is the originator of the Google Voice technology.

So, let the games begin. Maybe some healthy competition will force SKYPE to add new FREE features and maybe even come up with some new tricks.

What are YOUR thoughts? Talk to TechLISTEN and share your opinion on this article.

Google Analytics is a another great Google tool that generates statistics (detailed statistics) about the visitors to your website. Google Analytics can gather statistics about visitors from various referrers and provide tools for analysis.

So, what does this mean to you, the webmaster? For Starters, you can use this knowledge to adjust your websites content based on the geographic origins of your audience, the content on your site that they seem to gravitate to most and how long they stay on certain pages within your site.

You can also get statistics on how they were referred (ex. from search engines and other sites). This is the type of data that can help you decide what type of information you need to add to your sites description, keywords and even how you may modify your sitemap.xml file for search engines crawling your site.

If your interested in trying out Google Analytics your starting point is: http://analytics.google.com. Here is where you will set up your initial account and receive your Google Analytics “API Key”. You will also get the embed code required to add to your HTML pages that you would like to be tracked by Google Analytics.

If your a wordpress, Drupal or Joomla developer, never fear! You can find a multitude of Joomla Extensions & Wordpress plugins to add Google Analytics support to your site. They are usually free and fairly simple to use within your site.

What are your experiences with Google Analytics? How do you find its features? Easy? Difficult? Be sure to comment to this article and let us at TechLISTEN know what you think of it.

OK, some of you may remember Microsoft Windows Defender back on ‘07. It was a somewhat lame anti-spyware offering from Microsoft to protect your Windows PC against malware. I want to put special emphasis on the “lame” adjective. Lets fast forward to 2009. Microsoft has actually put in a pretty decent bid this time around with Microsoft Security Essentials 1.0.

This anti-virus/anti-spyware solution is actually a pretty decent (and FREE) alternative to Norton, Mcafee, AVG, Kaspersky.. (and the list goes on). It will only occupy about 10MB of disk space which is a pretty nice, small footprint. I have found that where other anti-virus applications can be a little heavy on a system causing slow performance, MSSE (MS Security Essentials), tends to be somewhat light on it’s feet and not only runs nicely but does a pretty decent job at protecting your system also.

If your interested in giving this great (and I say again) FREE anti-virus/anti-malware application a test drive, you can pick this gem up at: Microsoft’s website.