BHF put on a great day for us all, well organised, and despite the hills and stop-start-stop on the early bit it turned into a real scorcher Chariots-of-Fire ending with lovely sunshine and a sprint finish.  Saw a nice Chopper on the way too.

Thank you to all for sponsorship, Total raised £417.97 plus gifting aid.!  Thank you.

Tommy.   PS. Pictures here, and more here.

Tutus have it!

Suggestions for added coverings on the day include;

• A neon pink tutu
• Leg warmers
• Jean du-Coconut rides pillion
• Pink socks
• Hotpants

You decide!  click below and see your vote added to the total.

Ciao-for-now!

To sponsor Tony click here.

Last week I got my hands on the iRex Digital Reader 1000 to try out some features and get a feel for what value this device could offer for firms in the UK and Europe.  Business entrants have to differentiate themselves from the Kindle, they need to do this by putting in new features such as notes / annotations and they have to offer the kind of flexibility required by organisations today.  The key is not so much in the physics of the devices (most use e-ink developed by Philips and Philips spinoffs) it’s more about the way people can use them to acquire content very easily, consume and use that content quickly and share their output with colleagues to get work done accurately.

The iRex builds on previous features offered through their iLiad range; I like the screen, the clarity and USB / Ethernet connection; WiFi would be great and is coming soon.  For lawyers and business professionals who read and mark-up large documents the iRex provides annotation features to with the stylus to allow users to mark-up sections for later work by document production teams.  This is, at present, limited to PDF format but it does represent a good improvement on work process out there today involving, as many will know, a liberal use of coloured post-its, riders, pencil mark-up and then scanning/faxing to oneself before running through OCR or a colleague to produce the next version.  Menu icons on the iRex are tiny, but at least, using an e-Reader like this, one or two messy steps are removed and the mark-ups kept in a digital system as a record, potentially mitigating legal and regulatory risks around provision of client service.

Alternative devices from Sony, Netronix, PlasticLogic and FirstPaper are making ground in the market, expect to see support for animation soon and colour with full video by 2011 or so, particularly on the Sony.  Social networking and book-sharing features will also become widely offered as content publishers start fighting for revenue share.  It’s too early to tell who will build the biggest slice in the legal market but I expect to see a client for iRex amongst UK law firms soon.

I remembered BlackBerry can “Send my location” via SMS or E-mail and so, whilst still on the call I fired it up.  One swift pick-up later I was back home and great though that feature was running GPS whilst on a voice call really chewed through battery!

Perhaps one day time-recording software companies will add in location based features to prompt for billable info, so long as the battery pack keeps up.

For some applications it may help, like reviewing physical objects,  but for plain business meetings? hold on, I don’t look my best on any camera, and I don’t want a more detailed system picking up the glare from my receeding hairline so that, as some systems require, people at the other end will be forced to squint whilst wearing cellophane glasses.

If you’re looking to save travel budget and enable more meetings happen in a timely way (it’s surprising just how many meetings fail to happen at all) then invest in conventional VC, or even better, rent telepresence in London;

Try London Video Conferencing or Cisco rental.

Just to indulge ourselves here’s couple of 3D systems available now;

• Cisco Telepresence in 3D – yes it’s true and it works! 
  Check out Musion.

• Minoru 3D webcam – just plain wierd

Since that era the advent of the Internet has connected Law firms with all potential clients, trainees and lateral hires whether they like it or not.  Websites removed almost all granularity of interaction leaving many client enquiries untested, uncharted and free to go off into the black-hole they came from for somebody else to pick up.  These missed opportunities are usually visitors to your website, unknowns who move in at odd hours to visit a few pages and steal off into the night like a ghost ship without a trace. How many visits could have been converted into opportunities if only it was known what these visitors wanted, where they came from and why?

This week my good friend Hendrik from Webstuff introduced me to Woopra, a new website tracking and analytics solution which recently started in beta. Woopra connects enterprises with their customers in new ways allowing direct interaction with visitors using tools like pro-active chat, their software also brings together a bunch of features you’d expect to see in a market leading web analytics package – but not in a new entrant. At Toucari we’re looking forward to seeing how the features perform and gauging visitor reaction to proactive interventions like chat on sites which choose to use it.

Using Woopra it’s possible to get live visitor tracking information, tag visitor activity and receive live notifications when they enter specific sections of a site. This type of functionality should be on the radar of professional services firms who are wanting to increase the level of client contact from their website. Firms should get going with this information now as each opportunity becomes more valuable to qualify early in this current economic downturn.

Clearly, as a new entrant, Woopra has a great deal of promise but will need to perform exceptionally well to compete with more established packages available; Clicktracks Pro is great tool but it does lack a certain enterprise clout, Webtrends is a market leader but can be priced per visitor which may not suit all organisations budgets.  We’ll be interested to see how vendors respond to Woopras offering going forward.

That’s why we started the Toucari blog with the purpose of signposting items of interest which may help professionals research their options in todays business technology marketplace.  We’re not intending to use the blog as a showcase for our services  - that’s what the rest of the Toucari site is for – just a helpful resource.

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