Cleankeys Keyboards 99% bacteria free

Did you know that your run of the mill keyboard is basically a gigantic apartment complex for bacteria? Gross, no? Thankfully there's Cleankeys, a keyboard that bulldozes the bacteria and replaces it with a sleek, sterile touch-sensitive slab.

Wiping a standard keyboard with a disinfecting cloth kills about 5% of bacteria. Cleankeys claims the same test kills 99% of bacteria on their keyboard, simply because they have nowhere to hide.

The wireless keyboard trades actual keys for touch-sensitive ones, so in exchange for a much more sanitary experience you'll be giving up that satisfying clickity-clack you've grown accustomed to. It's intended for use at hospitals where keyboard-germs are a serious issue, though I'd imagine it might pique the interest of regular old germaphobes too.

The Cleankeys keyboard includes a trackpad for clicking about and uses patent-pending technology to keep it from registering keystrokes when you're just resting your hands on the thing. That way your doctor doesn't accidentally diagnose you with alsdfjasgyboxicyuixccccccccc.

A molded model costs $400 and a glass version will run you $50 more. No one said your campaign against germs was gonna be cheap. [Clean Keys Inc]

Disaster Recovery Tip #8

Don't be Afraid to Fail.

It's a common misconception that your continuity plan can fail a test exercise, when in reality the only failed test is the one you don't perform. A test exercise is a great way to validate the strengths and expose the weaknesses of your plan while providing valuable practice for employees to prepare for a real recovery. Remind your management team early and often that a test exercise is meant to find "failures" now, so they become "successes" during a recovery.

How Roger Ebert Will Get His Voice Back

Years of battling cancer have left film ubercritic Roger Ebert without a portion of his jaw, and consequentially, his voice. Esquire's superb profile outlined his efforts to regain a voice—his voice—but left us wondering: How will that work?

From Esquire:

"Ebert is waiting for a Scottish company called CereProc to give him some of his former voice back. He found it on the Internet, where he spends a lot of his time. CereProc tailors text-to-speech software for voiceless customers so that they don't all have to sound like Stephen Hawking... CereProc is mining Ebert's TV tapes and DVD commentaries for those words, and the words it cannot find, it will piece together syllable by syllable. When CereProc finishes its work, Roger Ebert won't sound exactly like Roger Ebert again, but he will sound more like him than Alex does."

CereProc is headquartered on the sixth floor of an imposingly ugly tower in Edinburgh, Scotland—I'd know, because it was in the five floors below that I spent most of my undergrad career at the University of Edinburgh, which owns the building. By all counts, it's a small operation, and a relatively new one, started about five years ago.

But I checked into CereProc's work online, and their sample voice sets speak for themselves, so to speak (sorry and sorry!): Obama sounds like a slightly more hesitant Obama; Arnie, whose verbal tics are his trademark, sounds like almost exactly like Arnie. (You can listen to both, and others, here and here.) Listening to what they can do with publicly available voice data sets is heartening, so the prospects for a man with such a broad catalog of vocal recordings, from radio broadcasts to his TV show to old podcasts, seem fantastic. He felt the same way when he discovered CereProc back in August:

I have my fingers crossed. I have launched an e-mail to Edinburgh with my appeal. I can see my own voice hosting online or telecast video essays. I am greatly cheered.

CereProc got that email, and answered his appeal. So!

The first step would be a desktop software system, which would dictate text in the same way that Mac OS does natively. While this would be a great bridge, but a mobile solution would really change things. CereProc's software is licensable for just about anything, and has already been incorporated into an iPhone app, albeit for simple news dictation.

In other words, a voiced Ebert is something the he (and we!) can realistically look forward to. And by this, we too are greatly cheered. [CereProc, Esquire]

Disaster Recovery Tip #7

Lay your cards on the table.

Every test of your recovery plan is a chance to improve it. For your first test, you can find great value in a "Tabletop Exercise." This usually consists of a day-long meeting with the employees that make up your disaster recovery team. The goal is to simulate each of the steps taken during a recovery in order to test the plan, identify shortcomings, and help employees practice their recovery responsibilities.

A tabletop test can be a great way to test your plan without any cost at all. Once your team is confident in their responsibilities and your plan, you can begin adding hands-on elements to your tests.

Medcom overcomes snowstorm’s adversity to keep running

Medcom Professional Services doesn’t have the luxury of taking a snow day.

The Levittown company provides telephone answering services, primarily to doctors’ offices, 24 hours a day and seven days a week.

With so many doctors’ offices closed because of the snow, Medcom’s call volume has skyrocketed.

“We normally answer 4,000 calls a day,” said Chris Bell, Medcom’s president and owner. “Wednesday we had more than 12,000 and today it’s just as busy.”

Bell said it’s been challenge to get the company’s 45 employees into MedCom’s offices in Levittown, Allentown and New Holland near Lancaster.

Tuesday night, he discovered a problem with the company’s back-up generator and was fortunate enough to get a service provider from Cummins Power Systems in Bristol to make an office call. The only problem was the Cummins service man pulled into the wrong parking lot about a quarter-mile away and got stuck in the snow.

“I had to run up there with a snow shovel and help dig him out, and I’m not a spring chicken anymore,” Bell joked.

A bad cell in the generator battery was replaced and sure enough, before the night was over the area lost power. Bell said Thursday afternoon the office was still being powered by the generator.

Bell said he can’t recall a snowstorm this bad since one that hit the region in 1996. Since that time, he said, the technology has advanced to the point that some answering services his company provides can be handled by e-mail. In addition, the company now has employees answering calls from eight remote locations in workers’ homes. “We’ve been relying heavily on the remote locations,” Bell said.

See Full Article Here by John George

Disaster Recovery Tip #6

Ease into testing.

When testing your recovery plan for the first time, simplicity is key. Build out an annual testing strategy and gradually add layers of complexity to your test program each year.

Start by reviewing your written recovery plan with leaders within your company. Walk through a mock disaster scenario and review the responsibilities of key personnel. Once you've established a comfort level, then move on to testing technology, server recovery, and communications.

To learn more about the value of testing view another blog post, "Practice Makes Perfect in Disaster Recovery Planning."

What Is Google Buzz?

So what exactly is Google Buzz? Used on a PC or mobile, Buzz reminds us of an RSS combined with all of your social networking—all within the existing Gmail and Google.com infrastructure.

Buzz's five key features include:

• Automatic friends lists (friends are added automatically who you have emailed on Gmail)

• "Rich fast sharing" combines sources like Picasa and Twitter into a single feed, and it includes full-sized photo browsing

• Public and private sharing (swap between family and friends)

• Inbox integration (instead of emailing you with updates, like Facebook might, Buzz features emails that update dynamically with all Buzz thread content, like the photo viewer we mentioned above)

• "Recommended Buzz" puts friend-of-friend content into your stream, even if you're not acquainted. Recommendations learn over time with your feedback

Google Buzz is available today, and it should creep up as a new tab in Gmail any minute.

But What About My Cellphone?

Of course, Buzz also works on mobiles right from Google.com on Android and iPhone browsers, and it locates your position from a one button press. From here, Buzz can tailor your feed to their information on things like businesses and restaurants. More on mobile Buzz here. [Google Buzz]

The Future of Google's Translator

Google already runs a successful online translator, Google Translate, but they've got far-loftier ideas than simply converting the written word. They want to translate languages spoken over the phone, according to their head of translation services.

Speaking to The Times, Franz Och, Google's head of translation services, said:

"We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years' time.

Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that's what we're working on.

If you look at the progress in machine translation and corresponding advances in voice recognition, there has been huge progress recently."

It's not really clear as to whether Google wants to translate a phone conversation, or conversation around you (for example, ordering food in a Japanese restaurant). If it's the former, I'm unsure as to whether I'd actually use the software, although booking hotels in other countries might be one example.

But then, when everything's done online these days—and effective online translation services like Google Translate and Babel Fish exist—Google might find that by the time they launch translation software on a phone (presumably Android), it's too late and everyone can speak English by then anyway. I hope that's not the case, though. [The Times]

Prepare for Blizzard Conditions this Weekend

Nor'easter Threatens Blizzard Conditions

A major nor'easter will strike the Mid-Atlantic states producing major snow accumulations and strong winds beginning midday on Friday and lasting through Saturday evening. Portions of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey and southeastern Pennsylvania will likely all experience big snow totals. A foot or more is expected in the Washington D.C. and Baltimore areas.

High winds are also expected to contribute to blizzard conditions. Wind chill throughout the weekend will also be a major concern.

Click here for specific information to your area.

Disaster Recovery Tip #5

Strengthen your plan via testing.

Testing annually is the crux to creating and preserving a viable recovery plan. Test every aspect of your recovery plan, from internal and external communications to regaining power to rebuilding networks. Take the insight gained during this exercise to make your plan stronger, so that when an event does occur your business will recover smoothly and as efficiently as possible.

To learn more about the importance of testing as well as some best practices for getting started, register for our upcoming educational Webinar on February 24th at 2pm EST, "Put your Recovery Plan in Motion – Test it Today!"