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The best two tech ads this holiday are from Apple and Google

Publié: décembre 19, 2011, 7:01pm CET par Joe Wilcox

Unsurprisingly, they promote smartphones -- iPhone 4S and Google Nexus.

Yeah, I know, this is a bit fluffy stuff, but I'm flu-stricken today and barely able to sit up to type. Besides, these are both really great ads that stand out for creativity and how well they demonstrate product benefits. Good marketing is often about great storytelling and, with smartphones like these, communicating a single benefit watchers will remember. You'll remember both these commercials, surely.

Apple TV spots are bland, as of late. There's no creative juice. They all look the same. But the Santa commercial is standout, and the kind of clever, memorable marketing Apple is known for. It's also timely. Santa's ride is Saturday, after all. He uses Siri to navigate across the globe. See, even Saint Nick is high tech. The ad is memorable in so many ways, with iconic Santa being first among them and Siri punchline at the end being another.

Thanks to Mike Elgan, who posted a link to Santa Siri at Google+ yesterday. I might have missed it otherwise. Elgan writes: "Cute ad. The truth is that old Saint Nick would probably be met with, 'I'm sorry, Chris. I can't access the network right now'". I include this so BetaNews commenter woe will have another reason to call me anti-Apple. :)

The other TV commercial is as good, but dramatically different. It's not holiday themed, either. Last week, Galaxy Nexus finally went on sale here in the United States. Google and Verizon are both running ads, but the search and information giant's Bohemian commercial is stand out.

With no technical mumbo jumbo, the commercial communicates clear benefits using Google+ Hangouts. I described Hangouts to my teenage daughter yesterrday, and she immediately asked: "Why would you video chat with nine friends at once? Here's the answer.

The Google ad uses an iconic song -- that and the girls singing it are memorable. Okay, "Wayne's World" is more so and part of the cultural lexicon.

By the way, I posted my Verizon Galaxy Nexus first-impressions review, yesterday.
Protect your personal info with Identity Finder

Publié: décembre 19, 2011, 5:54pm CET par Mike Williams

User names, passwords, credit card numbers, personal details: your PC may contain all kinds of personal data, easily accessible to malware or anyone with physical access to the system. You know this already, of course, which is why you probably protect your system with a firewall, antivirus package, maybe an encryption tool and more.

But what you maybe don’t know for sure is exactly how much data might be exposed on your system, should an attacker actually be able to penetrate your defences. And that’s where Identity Finder comes in. Tell the free version of the program to scan your system and it will immediately identify any passwords that might be stored by your browsers, for instance. You can then selectively delete all or just the most sensitive of these, and perhaps turn off password storage entirely if it seems too risky.

The program will also scan common document formats (Office, text, PDF, HTML) in your Documents folder, looking for credit card numbers. It works, too: we added some numbers to a few text files and they were picked up right away. And once again Identity Finder offered to securely wipe or just encrypt the offending files (although the default is just to do nothing, so don’t worry, it won’t trash your documents if you’re not paying attention).

And Explorer integration provides easy access to a few handy privacy functions. So if you spot a file that you know contains sensitive data, then a quick right-click and you’ll be able to securely delete it, or store the document in an encrypted “vault”.

Identity Finder Free does just about enough to be useful, then, but unsurprisingly the really powerful features are reserved for the commercial Home and Pro versions. These can search for more details (social security numbers, bank account details, phone numbers, addresses, dates of birth); recognize more international data (Canadian SINs, UK National Insurance and NHS numbers, Australian TFNs); and can search far more widely, being able to scan all your drives, your Registry, compressed files, emails and more. And that’s just the start. Prices start at $24.99 for a 3 computer, 12 month subscription, and you can find out more at the author’s site.

Gary Paul Lewis/Shutterstock
Make Windows run faster with JetBoost

Publié: décembre 19, 2011, 5:41pm CET par Mike Williams

Utilities developer BlueSprig has released the first full version of JetBoost, its free PC speedup tool, which aims to optimize system performance by temporarily closing down unnecessary processes. And while this kind of application can get a little complicated, JetBoost’s emphasis is on simplicity, with the program doing its job in just a click or two (although if you’d like to take control, then you can get more involved in exactly how JetBoost works).

At its most basic, then, you can use the program just by choosing whether you’d like to optimize your system for a work-related application, or a game, before clicking the “Start to boost” button. JetBoost will then close down surplus Windows services, clear the clipboard, activate the High Performance power plan and apply a few other tricks to free up system resources. You can run your game (or whatever) to take advantage of this, clicking the “Stop” button when you’re done to restore all your services and settings and carry on where you left off.

This kind of Windows service tuning generally won’t deliver major benefits; our test system saw an increase in free RAM of around 50MB, for instance. Still, our PC was already fairly well optimized, so you may see better results in some cases. And other options used here, like turning on the High Performance power plan, can help to make a very real difference.

If you’d like to free up even more resources, though, you can always switch JetBoost to “Custom” mode. And then you’re able to choose running processes and third-party services which you’d also like to be temporarily closed whenever you click the Boost button. You need to be careful here, of course, as closing something important could cause all kinds of PC problems. But choose wisely and JetBoost will be able to free up many more system resources, so delivering a more significant speed boost for the programs which really need it.