Earlier this month, TechWorld posted a fantastic article on mobility in business. They describe the important of on-the-go access to your work, and with the surge of smartphones internationally, the new wave of business strategies is upon us.

With the advance of mobile technologies creating converged mobile devices, specifically the Apple iOS-powered hardware of the iPhone and the iPad, we have small yet powerful devices with a big impact in the city. The next wave is already upon us.

Read the full article on TechWorld

Dell recently launched a VoIP product – Dell Voice (powered by Fongo), and it’s only available in Canada (for now). Some might say this in direct response to Google Voice, which is only offered in the United States.

According to an article on datajournal.com:

“New users can get a randomly assigned local number upon registration, or pay $25 to have their existing phone number transferred. The service includes free incoming calls, with calls between Dell Voice members also costing you nothing. The Verge reports that while free calling to select Canadian cities is available, calls to other parts of Canada will face a $.04 connection charge.”

Similar to another VoIP provider, Skype, it’s currently available for Android, iOS and Windows (Desktop), and Blackberry as soon as next month.

As long as you’re calling another Dell Voice user, you won’t get charged. They provide you with  a local phone number that’ll let you call to most cities in Canada, and includes caller ID, voice-mail, 911 service and long-distance calling for no additional charge.

Dell answers many of the Frequently Asked Questions on the Dell Voice website.

The application can be used on WiFi networks and on cellular data networks (3G, 4G). In some cases, it is being used to completely replace a monthly cell phone plan.

“[It] Turned my old iPhone with no mobile plan into a free wifi phone with a local number,” noted a user in a comment on the iTunes App Store page. “Very excited for the BB app! This app works great!”

UPDATE: If you want to use Dell Voice on your Windows-based computer, do NOT sign up for the account using your iPhone. Instead, sign up using the Desktop application, then you’ll be able to use it on Windows and your iPhone.

An estimated 75% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the border to our friends to the south, United States of America. This is why we often travel there for various reasons from business ventures to vacations or shopping and dining. Our Australian and South African clients are also frequent international travellers.

One painful inconvenience of international travel is the high costs of mobile phone operation – both voice and data. Here’s a text message I received as soon as I crossed recently into USA:

Quick math tells me that 100 minutes of talk time will cost me $145 – wow! My main smart phone in Canada is with Rogers, and they do offer Travel Paks (www.rogers.com/roaming/). With one of those purchased in advance, you can get as low as $0.50/minute if purchasing a bundle of 100 minutes. Still very limiting and costly if you plan on staying for several days or weeks.

Value of Unlocked phones

The value of unlocked phones becomes obvious when you realize you can purchase a pre-paid or monthly plan from a number of carriers for about the same price as 100 discounted roaming minutes with Rogers. If you purchased a smartphone at a discount with a contract extension, likely your phone is carrier-locked. It means that using a SIM card from another carrier will not work. In Canada/US, iPhone 4 and 4s models are unlocked only when purchased from Apple directly or authorized retailer (not mobile phone stores). SIM locks vary from country to country, but generally speaking, unlocked phones do not qualify for purchase subsidy, and therefore cost more.

If you are an international traveller and plan on purchasing a new phone, make sure it is not carrier-locked, but rather a complete unlocked phone in which other carrier SIM cards will function.

The next step is to simply purchase a pay-as-you-go SIM or MicroSIM card for your phone when you reach your destination. In my specific example as a Canadian travelling in the USA, the best option was to purchase a $60/mo T-Mobile plan with unlimited talk, text, web up to 2GB of data.

For the frequent international traveller

These guidelines apply if you travel internationally frequently and don’t find it is practical to give a large group of people a temporary foreign contact number at which to reach you while away. You want international travel to be possible without disruption to your important circle of associates and friends and family to be able to reach you.

1. Establish your main contact number to be PBX-driven, not your mobile phone. Having your main number be a virtual number is important for you to establish customized call routing rules. In the US, a popular service is Google Voice, and in Canada a similar set of features (except SMS) is available via RingCentral. If you have an established network of people who only know your mobile number, many countries offer number portability. In Canada, see http://www.wirelessnumberportability.ca/.
2. Use Find-me, Follow-me features on your PBX (or virtual PBX service) to forward your main phone number to the country and mobile number you’re currently at.
3. Avoid SMS messaging from your mobile phone directly as it starts to fragment your phone number identity. Many countries now have services of virtual SMS numbers that integrate with email. It means that SMS messages you receive are translated via email, and you can use email or web interfaces (or apps) to respond. Google Voice does this well (available only in the US).

The difficulty in seamless international travel is that phone systems have their roots in a geographically-zoned world, but the modern virtual and international entrepreneurs don’t know such borders, so it’s a major problem still to be solved.

Have I missed anything valuable in international travel that you want to contribute in the comments?

[this post is from Dennis Houseknecht, a Nerd in Virginia, USA]

‘Tis the season – well, almost. Gadgets and cool new technology are high on the wish lists of many shoppers. Here is a list of pitfalls and scams from McAfee that shoppers should be looking out for.

Some of them include mobile malware, phony Facebook promotions, phishing scams, holidays screensavers, coupon scams, mystery shopper scams, among others.

 Give you friends, family, and clients a early holiday gift and remind them that not everyone out there has that “holiday spirit”. The scammers, thieves, and hackers look forward to the holidays, too.

The 12 Scams of Christmas

‘Tis the season – well, almost. Gadgets and cool new technology are high on the wish lists of many shoppers. Here is a list of pitfalls and scams <http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=11924>  from McAfee that shoppers should be looking out for.

Give you friends, family, and clients a early holiday gift and remind them that not everyone out there has that “holiday spirit”. The scammers, thieves, and hackers look forward to the holidays, too.

We are thrilled to be working with the folks over at London LAWN (@londonlawn) to bring free WiFi to downtown London, Ontario. Local businesses are working together to make downtown London a WiFi enabled area, and here is an article from their perspective.  A BIG thanks to our London computer repair team!

Here is a page showing real-time usage of the London LAWN WiFi network. In the past week along, 544 clients transferred 68.14 GB!

“Launched in September  2011, LAWN (The London Area Wireless Network) currently covers three blocks of Dundas Street, from Talbot to Wellington Streets,” mentions the article. “It is an open and publicly accessible WiFi network that provides free access to the core’s growing population of smartphone, tablet, and laptop users. Whether you work, live, or shop in the city’s core, or just welcome an extra incentive to make the downtown experience better, LAWN is providing a viable and valuable service.”

We helped with a similar project in Lethbridge, Alberta.

If this sounds like something your city or town would be interested in, please let us know!

[this post is from Jonathan Arnoldussen, a Nerd in Lethbridge, Canada, and co-leader of our Online Services Team]

Great News on NerdSpotting! The response to this new app & website has been incredible! Our team has been working extremely hard on this since we launched it, and we have even more updates to report.

First, all posts are now automatically posted to our blog (yep, this one right here!), which then appear on our Facebook fan page and our Twitter account!

Second, you can now visit NerdSpotting, and on the right column you can now filter the images based on geographical location.

Thirdly, our Android app is currently in testing and will probably be submitted to the Android App Store within the next couple of days!

This week, we launched NerdSpotting.com, which is a fun (and free!) iPhone app (direct link to App Store) that lets anyone instantly take a photo of a Nerd from Nerds On Site, of their NerdMobile, or both! It’s a cool way to show that we have Nerds helping business owners with their technology around the world!

Nerds On Site is a GLOBAL team, and now you can see just how global we are! Check out the website to see some of the places our Nerds and NerdMobiles have been spotted!

[this post is from Dennis Houseknecht, a Nerd in Virginia, USA]

QR codes are popping up everywhere – and they are very convenient. Not surprisingly, they are also an opportunity to send users to malicious websites.

This is a significant risk, especially for Android users. Whether you love and Android or “not-so-much”, there is not doubt that the wide-open nature of the platform makes is more susceptible to attacks.

Norton recently released a new free scanner that helps mitigate the risk. It checks the URL first, even if it is obfuscated behind a shortened version. An IOS version will be coming soon.

“If you’re like us you are seeing QR codes everywhere these days”, explains Symantec’s website. “They’re on TV, on the subway, on your mail. There’s a good reason — they make it easy to get more information using your mobile phone or tablet. But the problem is that a QR code can point to a website, and it’s often impossible to tell if the website is safe.”

This will not eliminate all risk, but every little bit helps.

Note: The QR code above links to the Android marketplace application page.

Thousands of people will be downloading iOS5 today and excitedly activating the iCloud features, especially the iCloud Backup feature, which everyone should enable!

However, what many will experience is that their entire office or home Internet connection will slow to a crawl and that is very frustrating.

The iCloud backup activates when both of these occur:

1. iPhone/iPad/iPod screen is locked
2. Device is plugged in (to electrical outlet or computer)

If that’s what you tend to do when you’re at home or the office, the iCloud Backup will start working hard and will consume all of your available outbound bandwidth to send the backup to the cloud.

Most consumer-grade routers (which are commonly used in offices, too, by the way) don’t have any intelligent traffic management capability. The result is that when your outgoing capacity is at its maximum – what we often call saturated – it affects your incoming traffic as well, because part of the protocol of Internet data transfer is the continuous outgoing confirmation packets your computer sends to acknowledge to the source that you received what you were looking for. When those acknowledgements are wedged in between the iCloud Backup packets, it slows them down, and therefore your downloads and just plain web browsing are dramatically impacted.

Here is a traffic graph example of a fairly common North-American Business Grade Internet connection with 6Mbps download and 640kbps upload capacity. When a file is uploaded with absolutely no traffic control (some aspects referred to as Quality of Service or Traffic Shaping or Bandwidth Control), this is what it looks like. All the available outbound traffic in this particular example is consumed by a Youtube upload. Astaro’s Traffic Graph is great for simple real-time visualization of where traffic is going to and coming from.

So what can you do about it?

The simple answer is: get a better, smarter router, or even a Unified Threat Management appliance. Three products that we provide with guaranteed results are:

• ClearOS as a gateway with Bandwidth optimization subscription and optimization
• Cisco Routers with Quality of Service features enabled and tested
• Untangle as a Unified Threat Management (UTM) appliance with Bandwidth Management subscription
• Astaro Security Gateway appliance – even the Free Security Essentials offers Quality of Service features

This may seem like too many options, but of course we have nerds standing by to help you choose which product is a better fit.

What can Apple do about it?

Most products that consume significant amount of outgoing bandwidth have a bandwidth throttle feature where you can specify the maximum number of kilobits per second to consume. It would be great if Apple could include that in a future iOS5 update.

What’s your experience so far?

[UPDATE: added ClearOS as an option with some additional details]

We’re putting together a list of Blackberry, Android, and iPhone apps that members of Nerds On Site use, which we will feature in future blog posts. Right now, though, we want to know what YOUR favorite apps are, and why you like them so much. We’ll make a random list out of the suggestions and put them in a blog post each month.

Please leave suggestions in the comments. Thanks!