IT Geeks

I am a big believer that Skype is a critical business tool for small businesses. However I had an intriguing discussion with one of my friends who works for a franchise for a big multi-national insurance company and was told that the “powers that be” had banned the use of Skype from the system because it was draining bandwidth from the group.

I make no claims to being a bandwidth expert but Skype for text chat (i.e. no video or voice enabled) surely cannot cripple any small business and probably uses up less bandwidth than e-mail on a day to day basis?

This is a message being sent down from the head-office of a massive organisations with their choice of technology and if they are saying that a franchise operator with less than 10 staff is having their IT systems slowed down by Skype – surely they are barking up the wrong tree?

Any experts out there want to agree / disagree with me or fill in some of the blanks?

One of my mates showed it to me last night and I think it is quite a cool application.

HOWEVER I tried to download it on to my phone (Nokia N70) and it keeps coming up with a message that my security settings do not allow the installation of the application. I can’t seem to find anywhere to change security settings so I’m stuck. About to browse their support forum to find an answer but if there is a smart person out there who can provide me with the answer sooner, then that would be good!

Any takers?

What’s fring?
fring is a free mobile application that lets users communicate with friends on popular networks over their mobile phone’s internet connection.

fring users make free mobile calls, video calls, live chat & more, from their mobile phone with all their friends on fring & other internet services like Skype®, MSN Messenger®, GoogleTalk™, AIM®, ICQ® , Facebook® & Twitter, all through one central, integrated phone book. See the full feature list here.

fring is completely free. It’s free to download and free to use to make calls, video calls, instant messages and more, all via your mobile phone’s internet connection (over ‘IP’).

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Yesterday evening I downloaded Mxit Evo (Beta) for my new laptop and all in all I have been happy with it.

First impressions are that it is a big step-up from the original MxitPC which I had running on my other computer. A bit more functionality and a bit “prettier”. Definately an application I would keep as I’m a sucker for communications technology such as Mxit, Skype and the various other IM applications.

One thing that is concerning me though is whether it is not a bit resource hungry? I accidentally left it logged in last night and this morning I started using it and it was helluva slow.

Went into the task manager and it was chowing up plenty of the system resources.

Anybody else used it? Thoughts?

I am just reading a story on TBI about an Irish start-up called Goshido which used social networking site LinkedIn to raise $230000 in financing for their small business.

I have been meaning to blog about LinkedIn for a while and this story jumped out at me as a good one to look at LinkedIn.

Truth be told – until January this year I haven’t really used LinkedIn as a networking tool. As much as I despise a lot of these social media tools, I’ve been keen to use things like Twitter, Facebook and Skype to communicate without necessarily building my online LinkedIn presence.

I’m starting to get into it now and beginning to make some nice contacts on the platform which I wouldn’t make through the other tools. The main takeaway for me is that LinkedIn seems to offer more professional credibility.

What are your thoughts on using LinkedIn to grow your professional network?