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Ever get frustrated trying to convert Component to HDMI or convert from one video connector to another because your TV is 10 years only and doesn't support HDMI? Even if you are a home theater guru, the number of converter options and cabling options can be immense and downright confusing.

Well, StarTech.com, a manufacturer of hard-to-find connectivity and technology parts, launched the ConXit Connection Wizard, an online tool that helps users find the right converter, extender, splitter, interface card, cable and more. The search tool will help you find the right connector for Bluetooth, BNC, CameraLink, Coax, Compact Flash, Component, Composite, Digital Coax Audio, DVI, eSATA, ExpressCard, HDMI, RJ-11, RJ-45, and more.

This online tool recommends the best products for connecting IT and/or audio-video peripherals after just two easy steps.


Step One - Select the type of connector for the peripheral or device you wish to connect from a drop down list of options.

Step Two - Select the connection type on the host computer or component. The ConXit Wizard will then recommend the best options for making the connection.

Check out the ConXit tool.

Who knew that a Facebook status update simply stating "Where's my pancakes" would provide an alibi for a man charged in a robbery. Rodney Bradford, a 19-year-old resident of the Farragut Houses, was arrested on robbery charges, but was let go when the district attorney subpoenaed Facebook and verified that the status update had actually been typed from a computer located in his dad's house in Harlem at the time of the robbery. When the IP address info and timestamp was confirmed, the charges were dropped.

Of course, now every criminal will simply ask their friends or spouse to logon as them and post stuff to Facebook, Twitter, etc. at the time they commit some crime. Or the really crafty criminals will write sophisticated computer programs that automatically post stuff to their social networking accounts during the time they commit crimes.

Or you could simply commit the robbery, then a minute after your getaway just Remote Desktop to your home PC using a RDP client on your iPhone, Windows Mobile, etc. and then post stuff to your Facebook account, which will record the IP address of your home PC and not your mobile phone.

The article doesn't state where the robbery took place, but a source told me it was the International House of Pancakes (IHOP), which has notoriously bad service. Where's my pancakes, indeed!

Read

One of our sales rep's has a Blackberry and his email stopped working. Our MIS team looked at the email settings and they were fine. After contacting technical support, they told us that there is a BIS (BlackBerry Internet Service) outage in all of North America. Yikes!

It's enough to make a Verizon Blackberry user want to switch to AT&T. Ok, maybe not...

Information technology is critical to the success of any business. It's the heart and soul of most organizations. Ok, maybe I'm a bit biased since I'm in IT and maybe it's not the "heart and soul" of the company. But it certainly is the "engine" that helps the company going. Without good IT staff and good IT procedures, you open yourself up to costly mistakes, business outages, and loss of corporate reputation. It today's cost-conscious economy, it's even more critical that you maintain good IT practices, including visibility and auditing to determine who can access your unstructured data, who is accessing it and who should have access.

Well, TMC is hosted an interesting free webinar on Wednesday you might want to check out.  Raphael Reich Sr. Director of Marketing, Varonis will be speaking about this various IT concerns. The precise webinar details are Wednesday, September 23, 2009 @2:00pm ET 11:00am PT.

Here's the description:

Doing more with less is the new reality for most IT departments. If protecting unstructured data on file shares and NAS devices falls within your responsibilities, these 10 tips will help make life a little easier.

During this LIVE webinar we'll review the 10 Things IT can do today to protect and manage unstructured data faster, better, and with fewer resources.

What attendees will learn:

• The latest advancements for managing unstructured data
• How to perform instant File Share and NAS audits
• The fastest process for finding data owners in a few clicks
• What are the 10 Things IT can do today....

Who should attend:

• IT Staff, IT Managers, IT Directors

You can check it out and register for it here.

Maybe the end of Skype is not near? The plot thickens as Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, both founders of Joost and Joltid, today announced that they have filed a lawsuit against Mike Volpi, Joost's former president, CEO and chairman. The suit also names his current private equity firm (and Joost investor) Index Ventures. The legal documents say that Volpi obtained confidential information in his role as CEO of Joost about how to circumvent Joltid's intellectual property - the very same intellectual property needed to run Skype.

According to Newteevee.com, "The gist of the lawsuit is that Volpi learned how to modify Joltid's proprietary software to run on the web without the aid of peer-to-peer software when he was transitioning Joost from a peer-to-peer service to a web-based Hulu clone. With this knowledge, he was able to pitch a version of Skype that buyers could take over from eBay while side-stepping ongoing litigation."

The lawsuit reads: "A source code version of the GI Software (Global Index Software) is licensed by Joltid to Joost, allowing Joost to be the first company to successfully deliver television and other video content in real-time over a peer-to-peer network. An executable-only object code form of the GI Software was licensed by Joltid to Skype, a well-known Internet-based company that providers users throughout the world with free or low-cost telephone services over the Internet. Skype did not obtain a license to the GI Software source code, however, and the license it did obtain was terminated based on Skype's breaches of the license agreement."

It goes on to say that "Volpi has repeatedly failed to comply with Joost's demands that the return his computer and all Confidential Information he obtained in the soruce of his fiducisary relationship with Joost." Wow, holding onto a corporate computer with trade secrets? Doesn't look good if this in fact true. Volpe apparently began working with Index Ventures back in May to try and acquire Skype, before stepping down from Joost in July.

So the gist of this allegation is that Volpi worked for Joost, attained the "secret P2P sauce" (source code) used in Skype, then approached Index Ventures with this trade secret, (no doubt in exchange for millions of dollars) and then with this "secret P2P sauce" in hand, Index Ventures purchased Skype for $2.75 billion. I knew there was no way someone would waste $2.75 billion without having an ace up their sleeve! We shall see if Index Ventures has a royal flush to beat Joltid's four aces.

The lawsuit is below (ditto Newteevee's thanks to TechCrunch for posting an embeddable version):


For more read Techcrunch and NewTeevee

According to the Skype blog, new data released by the exo.performance.network shows that Skype has eclipsed Windows Live Messenger as the #1 IM application. Skype just squeaked by with 17% vs. 16.7% for Windows Live Messenger.

Nicely done Skype! I just hope the end is not near.

At TMC's ITEXPO, Digium and Skype announced the official launch of Skype for Asterisk, which was launched as a closed beta back in September 2008. Well, now anyone can now download Skype for Asterisk and make & receive low-cost calls leveraging Skype.

According to Digium, "Now businesses can take advantage of Skype's low-cost calling to landlines and mobile phones and free calling to more than 400 million registered Skype users around the world. Skype for Asterisk allows businesses to access the world's largest community of people communicating over the Internet, natively encrypts all voice calls and lets companies manage their Skype user accounts via Skype's Web-based Business Control Panel. Businesses already using an Asterisk-based phone system can add Skype as another complementary form of communications by downloading Skype for Asterisk, without additional costly hardware. Skype users can benefit from the advanced call features of Asterisk, including call transfer, interactive voice response, automated call distribution, flexible call-routing and many more."

"Digium has been using Skype for Asterisk for the past few months while the product has been in development," said Danny Windham, CEO of Digium. "We created Skype accounts such as Digium Sales and Digium Support--a convention I suspect many companies will quickly adopt. Now, our customers all over the world can call us for free using Skype and our Asterisk PBX processes the inbound call just like it would a normal call. This is going to save Digium and our customers a lot of money."

DATUS Corporation is a Digium Select Partner with nearly four decades of experience designing and implementing communications networks in Germany. The company has nearly completed an Asterisk installation at 2,100 sites for LVM Versicherungen, a major insurance firm, and also works with Digium to design features for Asterisk that are of particular interest to European businesses. "Adding Skype for Asterisk to the DATUS indali OBX, our IP-PBX, will offer our customers inexpensive and secure international calling that, for instance, could be used for toll free customer services," said Jonny Kueppers, vice president of sales and marketing at DATUS. "We believe that the price and cost savings will be welcome with today's budgets."

"The combination of Skype and Asterisk gives those companies that have relied on Skype the advanced call management capabilities of Asterisk, while Asterisk users get free calling to more than 400 million registered Skype users and low Skype rates when calling landlines and mobiles," said Stefan Öberg, vice president and general manager of Skype for Business. "We believe the product will bring together two of the largest groups of users that value flexibility and cost savings in their PBX systems."

Foehn Ltd, Digium's U.K. Solutions Partner, has been designing and implementing Asterisk-based solutions for more than five years. The company's technical director, James Passingham, commented: "With Skype for Asterisk, we can offer our clients even more freedom in business communications. The ability to unlock the lower call costs of Skype provides a huge savings opportunity, especially for those with offices and customers around the globe."

Skype for Asterisk Features
Skype for Asterisk, which is compatible with the free and open source Asterisk versions 1.4, 1.6 and AsteriskNOW™, as well as the commercially licensed Asterisk Business Edition™, is unique in the market today. It is the only solution that integrates directly with Skype, enables multiple concurrent Skype calls from a single Skype account, and supports both G.711 and G.729a calling.

• Make Skype-to-Skype calls.
• Receive calls with online numbers (SkypeIn).
• Make world-wide PSTN calls to landline and mobile phones (SkypeOut).
• Make and receive multiple concurrent Skype calls from the same Skype account.
• DTMF support for incoming and outgoing calls.
• Read Skype profile fields from incoming calls.
• Set and retrieve online status.
• Set privacy settings.
• Handle incoming Skype calls using Asterisk applications such as voicemail, ACD, MeetMe conferencing, etc.
• Simultaneous access from both Asterisk and the Skype desktop client.
• Trunk calls between Asterisk servers over Skype.
• Supports G.711 and G.729 (included) codecs.

A judge has ordered Microsoft to stop selling Microsoft Word over a patent dispute with i4i, a Canadian-based company and to pay more than $290 million in damages.

Judge Leonard Davis, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, ordered a permanent injunction that "prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX (Word 2007) or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML."

I didn't realize something as 'basic' as opening XML files, an open industry standard could be patented. I smell a patent troll. Apparently from what I read, the East District of Texas is notoriously friendly to patent holders even if the patent is frivolous.

Well, Microsoft could simply change the next version (Office 2010) to NOT open those file types. Then offer a free converter that doesn't "open" these file types, but simply converts them to some new format and extension. Perhaps go back to the old Word .doc extension?

Problem solved!

James Stine has released a cool utility called "Office Communications Server Remote Connectivity Analyzer". It's a great online tool for performing testing, troubleshooting, and diagnostics on OCS 2007 deployments. James said, "Following on the heels of success of the Exchange Remote Connectivity Analyzer (created by Shawn McGrath and Brad Hughes), Premal Gandhi, Matthew Fresoli and I have been busy designing and writing a complimentary tool: The Office Communications Server Remote Connectivity Analyzer."

I was happily surfing the Web reading the Google News Top Stories when I saw a headline that said "No public viewing at Neverland, but Michael Jackson may get laid". Say what? I had to do a double-take. Then I couldn't help but laugh at how funny this headline was.

No public viewing of Michael Jackson getting laid? Bummer, I'm sure that could have been a pay-per-view event. It's The 40 50 Year Old Virgin movie come to life! Course that might be a problem unless it's some sick necrophilia action going on. Then again, Michael Jackson did play the undead / zombie in Thriller.

Ok, we'll let Michael Jackson Rest in Peace, though I'm sure he too would have laughed at this Google News headline.

Check out a screenshot of it below. Click for Full-screen. Look on the right-hand side. I drew an arrow as well as a box around it. The article in question can be read here. The full article headline is "No public viewing at Neverland, but Michael Jackson may get laid out at Staples Center". Obviously, the Googlebot abbreviated in a very bad spot. Perhaps a human editor might be in order, Google?

Lastly, since Google News changes the Top Stories home page often, you too can view this news story (in its funny abbreviated form) by clicking this Google News search link. It's abbreviated there too.