When it comes to surfing the web there’s one thing that we all have in common – we’re using a web browser.  Unfortunately, that’s about where the similarities come to an end.  Everyone surfs the web differently, with different personal settings on  their machine and on their web browser.  I often get ask, “Which browser should I use?”  Every time I get asked that question I cringe because like so many things in the IT/Web world there really is no “right” answer.

When we talk about browsers there are essentially 4 that we’re referring to:

1. Microsoft Internet Explorer
2. Mozilla Firefox
3. Google Chrome
4. Apple Safari

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If you’re an iPhone user you’re very familiar with the “feature” known as Auto Correct.  Essentially its a feature that tries to determine what you’re saying and attempts to replace your words for you as you type.  As an example, if I typed “a-c-r”, Auto Correct may assume that I’m typing “Acroment” and it will fill it in for me.

Note in that last sentence that I said that Auto Correct “may” assume I’m typing Acroment.  In MANY cases, the feature doesn’t quite hit the mark and give you an incorrect word.  As in this screen shot, iPhone has incorrectly assumed that I was going for “acromegaly”.  I didn’t know the word so I had to look it up (courtesy Wikipedia): Read the rest of this entry

I’ve been a user of an online money management site called Thrive (http://www.justthrive.com/) for some time now.  It’s marketed as “Free online money management, just for you.”  I’d previously used their main competitor Mint.com but had a couple of bad experiences which is why I went with Thrive.  As I was going through my email this morning, I saw this subject line which concerned me: “URGENT: END OF SERVICE NOTIFICATION”.

Here’s the content of the message: Read the rest of this entry

Cloud computing is all the rage these days.  Every time you turn around you’re hearing something about how it’s the wave of the future and how it’s cheaper, better, faster, etc.  For some businesses, the “move to the cloud” can be a good thing, but in other cases it can be a very risky proposition.  You need to ask yourself – can your business rely on the cloud?

Recently, Amazon’s EC2 cloud server service went down for more than a day.  If you are/were an Amazon customer using this service you lost service.  In some cases you lost data and in some cases the data that was lost was NOT recoverable.  Some major players in the social media landscape (Foursquare, Reddit, Quora, Hootsuite and Moby) were completely unusable.  Additionally portions of CNET’s functionality was compromised.  CNET’s response?  “We’ll be back shortly, we hope. Sorry, it sucks for us too. We’d point fingers, but we wouldn’t be where we are today without EC2.” Read the rest of this entry

NOTE: Since this post was originally created, Dropbox experienced a serious security issue for a small amount (less than 1%) of users.  The issue has been addressed and corrected.
Full details can be found here.

With one of the questions on our yearly Customer Satisfaction Survey we asked our customers for suggestions for blog topics that they’d like to read about.  Several customers indicated they’d like to know more about “The Cloud” and specifically applications such as Dropbox.  You asked for it and here it is!

(While this may sound like a commercial for Dropbox, I assure you that Acroment is not getting compensated in any way for this post.  In addition, I only review products that I’ve used.)

Dropbox is an application that allows you to access your files from multiple computers, devices (such as your smart phone) and websites.  You no longer have to email files to yourself, carry a jump drive or portable hard drive or have multiple copies of a file.  Sounds pretty good right?  Wait… it gets better.  It’s completely FREE.   Read the rest of this entry