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Lexmark Pinnacle Pro901

The Lexmark Pinnacle Pro901 looks a bit similar to the Lexmark Platinum Pro905. Both printers are meant for copying, printing, scanning, and faxing documents. The Lexmark Pinnacle Pro901 sports a coloured 4.3 touchscreen. Like the Platinum Pro905, the angle cannot be adjusted, but users won't have difficulties looking at the screen.

The Lexmark Pinnacle Pro901 isn't ugly to look at either. It has a black and silver colour combination, giving it a very sleek and professional look. It's not only the looks that are commendable about this printer. The touchscreen is responsive. Printing speed is fast, and ink costs are low. It even has wifi capabilities that lets users access web-based applications like Smart Solutions. Moreover, connecting between the printer and the server is fairly easy to do. You just need to look for your network, input the network's password, and you're connected!

Lexmark Pinnacle Pro901 offers various PC connection solutions. PC connection with this printer includes USB host,IEEE 802.11n, Ethernet 10 Base-T/100 Base-TX, Hi-Speed USB, IEEE 802.11b, and IEEE 802.11g. Also, it supports various operating systems like MS Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, MS Windows XP, MS Windows 7, Apple Mac OS X 10.4.4 – 10.5.x, MS Windows Vista (64-bit versions), Apple Mac OS X 10.3.9, MS Windows Vista, and MS Windows 2000 SP4 or later.

The printing resolution's not bad either. This printer boasts of 2400 x 1200 dpi for mono and 4800 x 1200 dpi for coloured prints. Also, a single tray can be loaded 150 sheets. An additional tray can be placed to double the paper loading capacity.

Aside from being able to save on ink, the Lexmark Pinnacle Pro901 is awarded the Energy Star. This means that this is an energy efficient product. Usually, products with Energy Star ratings are 10 % to 20 % more energy efficient compared to non-Energy Star rated products. It also means that using products with the Energy Star symbol means that you are not only saving money, you are also protecting the environment. You might want to consider purchasing Energy Star-rated products. It can definitely save you some cash.

The Lexmark e260d is One Mean Printing Machine

Lexmark e260d laser printer is a budget-friendly and compact-sized printer. It can easily fit in any small space as it only measures 16 in x 15 in x 10 in.

Aside from its compact size, the Lexmark e260d laser printer has several other great features. For one thing, it has Quiet mode, which is perfect either for the home or office setting. This feature will come in handy when you need to focus on some other tasks besides printing your documents.
Another feature users will love about this product is that print quality is good. It features a 1200 x 1200 dpi maximum resolution. Printing speed is also acceptable at 35 pages per minute. Also, it has a fast fuser warm-up letting you print in about 10 seconds just after turning on the printer. This will also equate to saving energy—a feature that eco-conscious consumers are going to adore.

Other printing related features include the capacity to easily hold 250 sheets with just a single paper tray. This is a great feature as opposed to printers having the capacity to just hold 150 sheets of paper with a single paper tray. Next, users can efficiently print double-sided documents.

The Lexmark e260d laser printer is best for users who will be printing a high number of black and white documents, but images can also be printed on this inexpensive Lexmark product. In fact, it sports a 400mhz processor. This means that images will be printed faster due to the fast processor feature. Incidentally, you can use several types of paper with Lexmark e260d. It is compatible with card stocks, envelopes, transparencies, and plain paper.

The e260d laser printer is also compatible with several operating systems like Apple Macintosh, Linux, and Microsoft Windows operating systems. Hence, you will find no difficulty setting up this printer with any operating system that is being used at home or in the office. You can also use the parallel port for connecting in case you are using older machines. On the other hand, there is also a USB port that you can use for newer machines.

Lastly, the Lexmark e260d laser printer comes with a one year exchange warranty. This will definitely come in handy on the off chance that something goes wrong with your printer.

Acer ICONIA Tablet A100: 7-inch Tablet Worth Looking At

The Acer ICONIA A501 Tablet has been reaping good and bad reviews. First off, its price range is more affordable compared to other tablets sporting similar features. On the other hand, some specifications like its battery life could do with some improvement.

Before buying an Acer ICONIA A501 tablet, ask yourself if you want the 7-inch gadget or if you’ll need a device with a slightly larger screen. If you have decided that 7 inches is the way to go, read on for a review of the Acer A100.

Let’s deal with performance first before the aesthetic design of the A100. Using this Acer ICONIA Tablet is a snap. The 7-inch gadget comes equipped with Android 3.2. You’ll see that reaction time is commendable whether you are taking photos with the camera, using some applications, or perusing the galleries. On the other hand, it looks as if resolution could do better. Colors on the screen do not look as vibrant as when seen through your own eyes.

On other features, the Acer ICONIA A501 also comes with 1 GB RAM. Not only that, it also boasts of Nvidia Tegra dual core processors. Of course, no tablet will be complete without WiFi, and Acer has made sure that the A100 carries this feature, too. As for those dependent on Bluetooth, rejoice and be merry for the Acer ICONIA 7-inch tablet also supports this feature.

If it’s GPS you’re looking for, look no more as the Acer ICONIA Tablet A100 has this and a digital compass, too! That also goes without saying that it’s got an excellent accelerometer. As for the home button, it’s easily accessible and quick to bring you to the home screen if you need to do so. On a less positive note, you could end up in the home screen button when taking photos. So watch out for that home button!

Another thing that puts us off with the Iconia Tablet A100 is that the Twisted Nematic (TN) display used sort of makes viewing a lot narrower. It could have been better if Acer used IPS screens for this gadget, too.

 As for aesthetics, the Acer Iconia Tablet A501 is not bad to look at. It has sloped edges that makes for a comfortable feeling when holding the Acer gadget. On the other hand, the texture will remind you of holding plastic. Other than that, everything seems to be A-Okay.

 Somewhere along the bottom part of the gadget, you will find several ports for the adapter, connecting dock, usb, and hdmi. At the side, there are also slots for headphones and mic. Other ports or knobs to be found are the lock switch, which you can use to lock the screen from turning; volume knobs; and it also has a space for a microSD card.

 As for the finish, the Acer ICONIA Tablet A501 comes with a glossy black finish. Expect fingerprint marks all over the front. The back portion, however, comes in a gray and silver combo that sports the Acer logo.

Overall, the ICONIA A501 is one of the best 7-inch tablets available. The price is worth what you’re getting for. However, you can also opt for larger-sized tablets that could go for a more affordable price.

Brother DCP J125 Printer Review

The Brother DCP J125 is an entry-level machine, but it still offers a good range of features, which has made these printers so popular.  The finish is  of the high-gloss black plastic that, to our way of thinking, is starting to look dated.  The flatbed scanner itself is a fairly conventional device, but the scanner lid is on extending hinges, so you can scan books as well as single sheets. Lift the whole scanner section and the USB socket is located near the front of the machine, so you have to feed the cable around inside.

The controls themselves are pretty straightforward, reflecting the comparatively simple feature-set of the machine. Set into the front face of the printer is a combined memory card slot, which can take SD, MemoryStick and xD cards, and below this is the 100-sheet plastic paper tray, a design common to most other Brother inkjets and one which always feels a little flimsy. This particular tray doesn't have a photo tray set into its lid, so to load photo paper you have to first extract the cartridge and remove any plain paper that’s loaded.

Our five-page black text print achieved a speed of 2.9ppm and in draft mode it rose to 9.1ppm. The 20-page document produced a speed of 3.2ppm and the black text and colour graphics test gave 2.6ppm. Even taking the draft mode test and reducing it by the 15 seconds it takes the DCP-J125 to process the data before starting to print, still only gives a top speed of 16.7ppm, just half the claimed speed.

A single-page colour copy took a reasonable 43 seconds and a 15 x 10cm photo on an A4 page took 3mins 17secs at the highest print quality. At normal print quality, it still took 3mins 3secs, though, which is slow compared with all the competition.

Black text print quality is fair and in normal use, it would be perfectly acceptable. In comparison with machines from most of the other makers, it's not quite as sharp or as lacking in ink spread, though it still beats most Epson prints. Fast, draft mode print is quite faint and shows some misalignment between successive passes of the print head.

Colour graphics are smooth and fairly well-saturated, though colours could be a bit brighter. This is especially true with a colour copy, which came through in very insipid colours, compared with direct prints.  Photo prints are reasonable, with lighter colours well-reproduced, but dark ones tend towards black, a reasonably common failing with less expensive inkjets.

This Brother printer represents better value for money then several others in the same range and does well against similarly priced rivals from other makers. It's cheap to run for an entry-level machine and while it doesn't produce the best quality print and is certainly not the quickest, it does have a good range of facilities at a very affordable price.

PowerReviews vs. BazaarVoice

I had a chance to sit down with my friends Robert Chea and Andy Chen, the two original founders of Fogdog, now onto their next adventure, called PowerReviews. PowerReviews provides retailers a turnkey solution for managing consumer product reviews, it’s tagged based and requires almost no work from IT to get up and running. They compete with BazaarVoice, founded by Brett Hurt, who left Coremetrics last year (he was one of the three founders there).

From what I can tell it’s a close tie as far as technology, quality of services, IP, even funding (though PowerReviews has 50% more capital than BazaarVoice, dollarsignr6.2M vs dollarsignr4M) - but the market approach is radically different. If you want to see Web 2.0 collide with Web 1.0 - then read this:

- BazaarVoice charges a few thousand dollars/month. I suspect ASP to be ~dollarsignr40-50K/year based on conversations I’ve had with my former Fireclick clients
- PowerReviews is FREE

- BazaarVoice is positioned at the top of the pyramid serving reputable retailers (CompUSA, Petco.com, etc)
- PowerReviews’ targets the long tail - so to speak (they actually have top retail properties signed up)

And now the real kicker… PowerReviews aggregates all the product reviews it’s getting from the “long tail” retail sites, and features these back to consumers through powerreviews.com, to be launched later this year. Andy and Rob want PowerReviews.com to be the reference site for product reviews - and monetize the traffic through CPC programs similar to PriceGrabber or Shopping.com. WOW.

I was commenting the other day on how different it is to start a business like Perenety in 2006 compared to my experience with Fireclick in 1998. Here’s another incarnation of that fact. Andy and Rob could have decided to charge for PowerReviews and compete with BazaarVoice with traditional, entreprise software rules. After all, this is a new market and there are plenty of customers out there for both companies to thrive. Not to mention PowerReviews has the tech, the talent, the experience and the backing (obviously). Rather, Andy and Rob decided to disrupt a business that doesn’t even exist yet.

Still, I think we’re up for an interesting battle since this market it too new to call for a winner yet.

The strongest possible foundation

For years I’ve been evangelizing Web analytics to retailers, content sites, and even software companies (I founded a Web analytics company called Fireclick, acquired by Digital River in 2004). And even though more and more people now understand the value of Web analytics - there are lots of online businesses out there that consider Web analytics to be a second priority.

Interestingly enough, I too had my “why do I need Web analytics now” a few weeks ago, for Perenety. Consider all the issues related to the formation of a startup - product, technology, funding, marketing, etc. It’s not too hard to understand why Web analytics is a second priority for some, at least for the first 2 or 3 years of operation. Being a pragmatic kind of guy, I wasn’t going to sink hours into Web analytics “just because” - and I needed a strong case for having Web analytics on my radar. And truth be told, being in the consumer software business, we don’t need sophisticated analytics because we only have one product we’re going to market with 5 or 6 pages on our site, max. On the other side, our marketing budget is essentially zip so we have to be very focused, and make sure these 5 or 6 pages are fully optimized.

Do we need or not need analytics. I do not have the final tactical answer yet. i.e., are we going to be looking at these reports and making decisions everyday. Not sure. But I have a strategic answer. We are building a product that will be used by millions of people, 98% of them living “East of the Silicon Valley hills”. It’s critically important for us to reach out to our users in Arkansas, New York or Italy, and find out what’s in their minds - because THEY are the customers. Not our employees, not our VCs, not our family and friends. And for that, we need need to test different marketing messages, measure their impact, and adapt - almost in real-time.

So, Web analytics? Absolutely. Integral part of our company culture, and the strongest of foundations.

Startup 2.0

Starting a new business is a lot easier now than back in 1998, when I started Fireclick. Set aside the fact that I have more experience, the cost of doing business is nowhere near what it used to be. A few examples:
- Phone and internet: today you can really good office connectivity for dollarsignr75/mo, with VoIP limiting your bills to dollarsignr50-70/mo for a 6-8 people office (we use Asterisk, the open source PBX for phone switching).
- Office rent: costs are about 40% of 1998-2000’s (Silicon Valley)
- Marketing costs: this won’t be of any surprise to anyone, but all the pay-for performance marketing programs, getting in front of your prospects is more a science than an art.
- Outsourcing: there are now lots of options for Web site development, specific engineering projects, QA, Operations. Non-mission critical tasks are easy to outsource for cheap.

Clearly there are exceptions (medical insurance costs, local Silicon-valley wages, etc), but overall, things have changed, big time. Entrepreneurs are the big winners here, since they need less capital to get off the ground.

Bye Fireclick, Hello Perenety

Some news - after more than 7 years at Fireclick, I am going to hit the entrepreneurs’ trail again with an exciting new startup called Perenety.

I want to thank every Fireclick employee, customer, partner, supporter - past and present - for helping create a great and healthy business with a bright future. I want to thank our investors for keeping their faith in us, and helping us weather the 2001 recession. I want to thank our competition for keeping us honest, forcing us to innovate, and by and large, for their fairplay with regards to Fireclick. My best Fireclick memories all revolve around extraordinary people that I’ve met, and certainly hope to work with them again on new and exciting technologies.

Talking about new and exciting technologies, I’m inviting you all to sign up for the Perenety alpha, and, as we soft-launch, give us as much feedback as possible along the way. I promise to be sharing my entrepreneurial experiences, including my analytical experiments, with the readers of this blog.

Are you ready? Let’s go!

Learning from the top bloggers

Bloglines users have access to a list of public subscribers for every blog they subscribe to. That’s what I’ve used to try to validate the theory I explained in my Bloggers’ Theory post. Just for fun.

If click on the “subscribers” link, you get a list of public subscribers for the blog and the date they first subscribed. That is a good sample of all feed subscribers - not perfect - but good enough to get broad trends on what’s going on with almost any blog. Let’s assume a strong correlation between total readers and public feed subscribers - and call this the “Reader Index”.

I took the five or six high-traffic, best blogs I read. TechCrunch (Mike Arrington), Let the good times roll (Guy Kawasaki), Ray Ozzie (Microsoft’s CTO) , John Battelle, Venture Blog (mostly David Hornik) and Seth Godin. Then I used Excel Pivoting capabilities to build a cumulative chart of public Bloglines readers, to see if I could find the pattern I earlier posted about:

The data is fascinating. Let’s start with TechCrunch first.

This blog is not even a year’s old and counts over 20,000 feed readers. Now look at how smooth the seeding phase looks like - this blog started slowly, then things started to accelerate around August ‘05 and now you can see very nice growth, very steady. By the way this is one of the best blogs on Web 2.0, highly recommended.

John Battelle’s has a similar pattern. Now Seth Godin. His blog started late 2003. Did you notice the slow start - the explonential growth phase, and what now seems to be slower growth? Very interesting, maybe we all want Seth to write another book.

In an earlier post I was talking about how strong communities provide almost instantaneous readers for a well known and popular character - take the VC community and compare Venture Blog:

With Guy Kawasaki, who started a new blog earlier this year. Very fast initial growth, quickly reaching a saturation point, within days.

This is even more clear looking at Microsoft’s new CTO, Ray Ozzie, who started blogging in November ‘05.

Now benchmarking these blogs once against another (as of 1/29/2005):

(1) Guy Kawasaki
About: Famous entrepreneur, VC
Total Bloglines Subscribers: 878
Public profiles: 275 (31%)
Weekly subscriber growth: 12.2%
Time to get the 1st hundred public bloglines subscribers: 3 days

(2) Techcrunch
About: Web 2.0 reference site
Total Bloglines Subscribers: 3992
Public profiles: 1465 (37%)
Weekly subscriber growth: 3.9%
Time to 100 pub subs: 62 days

(3) Ray Ozzie
About: Ray is Microsoft’s new CTO
Total Bloglines Subscribers: 1063
Public profiles: 399 (38%)
Weekly subscriber growth: 2.2%
Time to 100 pub subs: 1 day

(4) Seth Godin
About: Seth is a viral marketing guru
Total Bloglines Subscribers: 3408
Public profiles: 888 (26%)
Weekly subscriber growth: 0.9%
Time to 100 pub subs: 287 days

(5) John Battelle
About: John covers the Yahoo/Google wars
Total Bloglines Subscribers: 4331
Public profiles: 1300 (30%)
Weekly subscriber growth: 1.2%
Time to 100 pub subs: 165 days

(6) Venture Blog
About: David is an influencial Web 2.0 VC
Total Bloglines Subscribers: 7904
Public profiles: 1466 (19%)
Weekly subscriber growth: 1.7%
Time to 100 pub subs: 233 days

Granted - data is far from perfect and there is a lot more than just looking at these numbers. But there are a few lessons to be learned from the pros. What do you think?

[Read related other posts on blogging analytical experiments: “Using Web analytics to drive more traffic to my site” series - part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7 part 8 part 9 part 10 part 11 - and Blogging success: “what lessons have you learned”, A Blogger’s theory].

A Bloggers’ Theory

I’m committed to limiting my time investment in blogging (see rule #14), so let’s get to the point: looking at analytics data and correlating with market events, blog posts, other bloggers’ comments, etc - I’m seeing a pattern for readership growth.

The basic cycle goes like this:

(1) Seeding. You start a blog, write 8 or 10 interesting posts, and advertise your blog as much as possible (link on your email signature/forums/etc). Soon enough, another blogger will write about you or point to you (blogroll, etc).

(2) Exponential growth. After reaching some critical mass of readers, readership growth accelerates all of the sudden - typically because a popular blogger has written about you, or there is a press article pointing to your site.

(3) Organic growth. Your base keeps growing but it’s slooooowww. You’re incapable to sustaining the growth rates you had in phase 2.

The challenge then becomes to reach out to another community of readers, and starting this cycle again (or wave). For example, if the initial community was the “Web analytics gurus” - maybe your next community will be “Search Engine Marketing gurus”. In this case, you need to start the seeding cycle again.

In the context of this simple theory, it’s important to note that the characteristics of the communities you are targeting will determine how successful you’ll be. Community characteristics such as:
(a) Size: the “Search Engine Marketing” community is much larger than the “Web analytics” community
(b) Viral quality: the “Venture Capital” community is a lot more inter-connected than the “people with blue eyes” community
(c) Maturity: According to some studies, only 8-10% of Americans regularly read blogs. If there is no blogging culture in a given community, it’s going to be a lot harder to seed.

As far as this blog is concerned, I’ve seen 2 waves already: Web analytics gurus (started in ~Feb 2005), then the Google analytics followers (~November 2005). Now working on a new wave…

[Read related articles: “Using Web analytics to drive more traffic to my site” series - part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7 part 8 part 9 part 10 part 11 - and Blogging success: “what lessons have you learned“].