To get an understanding both of the tool and its capabilities, I had to get one, which I did after a lot of research on the net, reading magazines and visiting Apple shops. I am writing this article on the iPad on one of the many downloaded tool (apps). I bought a 16GB WiFi model not the 3G model. The base version to my mind has to be capable of delivering a business result. If its not then it doesn’t matter which version you buy, the outcome will be the same.

There are some basic functions that you want on the road:

• Email
• Browser
• Access to your documents
• Create, edit documents
• Access to the internet without the 3G version and now wifi

Before we get too fancy in our requirements lets examine each of these basic needs.

Email:

The built in email system, similar to Apple Mail and the iPhone version, is a good email client. Sure it misses some features from desktop clients but it works well. Especially if you combine it with GoodReader / QuickOffice / DocsToGo or similar programs to work with attachments. There are free versions of these programs which have some restrictions.

There are some paid for email apps, I’ve tried Altamail and found it to have good features. EXCEPT for send mail where it got stuck more often than not. The ability to flag bulk changes is a real bonus in this app.

Browser:

The iPad comes with Safari, a perfectly adequate browser. It can sync bookmarks with its desktop brother and allows you to have many browser windows open simultaneously. Of course it can’t render flash content, the bug bear of many, Many, MANY iPad and iPhone users. I wont rant about this here, but its a major shortcoming from a business and end user perspective.

There area range of browser alternatives on the iPad becoming available from the App Store, Mercury and Atomic to mention just two. The 3rd party apps, all have their own tweaks and focus to improve your browsing experience. To help overcome the Flash limitation, I tried two approaches:

- Access to hosted desktop

- Jailbreaking and installing Frash

There’s a new app on the iPad called iSwifter which does the job very well, not a free app but with the money and even on my iPad-1 its performance is quite satisfactory.

To be continued…

How can I use Twitter for my business? What makes it special? There's so much written about the use of twitter already but "what does it all mean?".

Twitter offers a completely different method of communication.  It mixes social networking with instant messaging.  Posts are a very brief 140 characters each allowing you to answer that burning question, “What are you up to right now?”  

In order to answer this question you must make every word count.  You need to grab your readers’ attention quickly with each “tweet” (how a post is referred to on Twitter).  Twitter allows you to sign up and send messages to your subscribers and friends.  You can update your audience as frequently as you wish and they can respond to you quickly and easily.  

The way it works is that people follow your “tweets”, so the more followers you have the more you are likely to get as their friends see your details on the profile pages on others and choose to follow you too.  Each time you post an updated tweet, it will be transmitted to your group of followers immediately to their computers and cell phones if they have chosen that way of communication.  

If you send out regular tweets you will start to gather a faithful group of followers.  Make each tweet count and add value.  If you write reviews on computer games or create accessories for Avatars, then you can tell your followers when you have been working on something new or have something new to tell them.  

It is possible to grow a fanatical following who are so interested in what you are doing and offering that they look out for every new tweet from you.  For information marketers such intensity can quickly develop into a faithful band of buyers who react to any new offerings you put their way. 

Friends that want to arrange a meeting can tweet everyone to let them know the time and location of the meeting.  You can also send tweets that give notice of a latest update to your blog or lens update.  Remember to work your tweet carefully so you have enough room to include the link to your site. 

This is essential if you want to create interest in your website and branding yourself successfully.  Even a very brief post can give you an identity in such a way that followers are attracted to your particular niche.  Some people love Twitter and others just do not understand it.  

To understand how it works you really need to use Twitter every day.  Look at what other Twitterers are up to and how they use tweets to market their brand, build an identity, display their expertise and generate website traffic.  

Twitter is addictive and this is mainly down to instant gratification.  It is easy to use and allows you to get your message across to lots of people quickly.  Once you have chosen to use Twitter for your niche, hobby, profession, business, or sport, you will start to see how it is a great way of dispensing huge amounts of information quickly, one tweet at a time. 

It's more than just this though, you can use some of the social bookmarking tools mentioned in a previous post, that will make the tweet for you automatically, for example when you update your blog, or publish a new article. From a business perspective you can send information instantly and also get it back just as quickly. Remember though it's instant gratification and so you need to act fast if a customer contacts you. It's great for support issues, combine Twitter with your support desk and you can have a very effective result for your customers problem resolution and they will be thinking great customer service.

Firstly, what is social bookmarking?

To be successful on the internet, people, customers, prospects, have to be able to find you. To find you they often use a search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing to look for the "thing" they are interested in. To be found on the first page of a search engine is vitally important as most people, actually more than 95% of people never look at more than the first 3 pages of results. Some of the popular social bookmarking sites are Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Facebook and Twitter. 

How is this relevant to social bookmarking?

Well, in short if you have provided items of value, like an article, a book, a video and put it on the internet then the more references there are to that piece of content the better. The social book marking sites, and there's more than 150 of them, create a link back to your article. The search engines love to see this link, they give you credit for having all these links to your content, and presto you climb up the list of results in the search engines. We want our business to be as high up on this list of results as possible, preferably the first page. This isn't an article about search engines or SEO but it is very relevant.

Lets look at this in a bit more detail.

Social bookmarking is a way of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs online.  You might have the best product in the world, but if you can’t generate the traffic you’ve just got a nice website on your hands with no customers.  Even if you have a loyal mailing list you will still need to constantly update this by attracting new online visitors.  

There are many options for making connections on social bookmarking sites.  To find the best you need to take your time and surf around.  Once you have researched the best start to set up some social bookmarking accounts that you can use regularly.  

StumbleUpon is one of the most popular of the social bookmarking sites which is both powerful and easy to use. First you need to create an account and then create a toolbar interface.  All that’s left to do is click on the Thumbs Up icon (which is found on your browser after you install the StumbleUpon tool) in order to recommend a website.  This can be done for any websites you own and you can also ask your friends to give you the Thumbs Up.  In addition to these ratings you can also add comments about your website.  

Can you Digg it?  Sounds like a line from a 70s song, but it is actually a very popular social bookmarking site. Digg works very much like StumbleUpon in that users are allowed to push up the ratings for a particular site so that it reaches the front page.  If you can make it to the front page you will be presenting yourself to thousands of potential visitors and more and more people will start hitting your site to see what you are all about.  

To assist you in publishing your information out onto the web there are a number of services available to you. There are both free and paid services and those listed here are the free services. They require a bit of effort from your business to maintain but the effort pays off over time. You will need to register yourself or your business to each of the social sites you want to be profiled on. This can take a little time at the beginning, though once done you don't have to worry about again.

• Clipmarks markets itself as “scissors for web pages.”  This site lets you submit items that are transmitted to the Internet – including to an iPhone and to Facebook.  It provides a one stop shop and can save a lot of time.
• You can sign up with services like OnlyWire to get similiar capability to Clipmarks. OnlyWire has a free and a paid option. 
• Another option is to use a site called Socialmarker. Using your social site accounts it steps your through the creation process of entries in each of these sites. You would repeat this process for each new piece of information that you want to promote out onto the internet.  
• Alternatively you can use ping.fm to connect to all your social media accounts. 

Some of these services provide a small application for your browser. Just install one or more of these plugins for your browser. These "plugins" allow you to carry out a multitude of functions such as clicking once to submit your item to many sites in one go.  In order for this to work, you will need to join any social bookmarking sites you want to use.  

You will need to ensure that visitors to your site know how they can rate your site.  It is not possible to bribe or reward them for bookmarking your site.  This is the social bookmarking equivalent to stuffing the ballot box.  

You can publish links to bookmarking sites as a gentle and polite reminder to your visitors.  Don’t be coy about submitting any updated information to these networks yourself.  You will just need to ensure that you do it in such a way that it doesn’t appear as spam.  If you tell people what you have got and where they can find it there is a good chance they will pass this information on to others.

In the spirit of this article there's a button just below that says "Share / Save". Go on, click and and social bookmark this article and see how it works.

I had been making some calls and put it back in my pocket. I heard it give the message received beep and retrieved it only to find a totally blank response. Almost like a teenager on a Sunday morning. I tried all the things known to man and Apple Support to resurrect it, without any luck.

Taking it to the Apple Genius bar on the Monday, initially nothing, then please make an appointment with one of our techs. So with appointment made I left and returned.

In the meantime as I couldn’t be without my phone I put my SIM card into my slightly older phone, my Nokia N95. It’s a great phone, but seriously, after using my iPhone for 12 months it was like going back in time. Sure it did it’s stuff well, made calls, had the GPS, could send and receive all manner of messages, but the interface was just, well, clunky. So after being a Nokia advocate for such a long time I knew I had been converted.

Back to my iPhone. At the Genius Bar in the Apple Store, the guy there was very helpful. Checked this and that, ran some diagnostics, and actually got a glimmer from the device. I felt there was hope. He thought it might be a faulty connection to the screen or the screen itself was failing. It was only when he opened it up to reseat the connection did he find the real cause. The connector was indeed not seated correctly, but for the past 12 months or so it had been burning the logicboard (motherboard) and it was slowly frying itself.

Outcome: I was given a brand new device.

Thoughts: If I hadn’t had my extended warranty then I probably wouldn’t have even gone to the Genius Bar. To then find out it was a faulty unit all along made me think, would have the unit been replaced so quickly without the Extended Warranty. Probably not without a fight as the 12 month warranty was just passed.

I am happy with the outcome, two iPhones as I had already gone and upgrade to the 3Gs as I didn’t think my 3G would be fixable and I couldn’t live with my N95.

Yes the iPhone is a great bit of kit, but more than that “it’s my preferred tool of trade”.

Some moment between going to lunch and returning from it saw a pack of malicious byte devils enter my site and gobble up a file. One simple little 18 line file, INDEX.PHP

I went and typed in the website address and saw nothing except a file and diectory list. My heart sank while beating just a little faster.

“I have a backup. It will be fine”. Only to find the backup wasn’t what I thought it was…essentially useless. “Ok, so what next? Where to get another copy of an index.php?”

Fortunately for me I had another wordpress blog site I could look at, so I copied the file across and re-entered my site URL and fortunately all was fixed. I had been VERY lucky.

My next step, I made a complete backup of my site. Better late than never right!

Backups are important, but only when you need them. Until then they are an administrative PITA. My advice to myself is make them regularly. My suggestion to you is to follow my advice. Not doing so maybe at your peril.