Hurricane Katrina helped to demonstrate to all of us the hard way that we need to take action ourselves to save our own skin sometimes.

We can not necessarily rely on the government planners or rescuers to protect us before its too late. This means that we need to be prepared for many different situations. Many things can go wrong even if you do not live by the coast.

In a tornado, the main thing we need is a place to go for emergency shelter.

FamilySafeShelterms.com recently provided a press release describing how they have been working for many years to provide some of the highest quality storm shelters made out of steal construction. Their goal is not to provide the lowest price at any cost but to provide the safest product and protection.

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No one likes their conversation taken out of context especially in court, so it has to be a little embarrassing for Windows Development Chief James Allchin to have been quoted from his email to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer as saying that he’d rather buy an Apple Mac if he didn’t work for Microsoft.

He states today that he sent the email in 2003 to make a point and push Microsoft to make dramatic changes in their development of their operating system that today is known as Vista.  He also says that those changes were made and the OS is better than it would have been.  His comments and others stating that Microsoft had “lost sight” of customers needs were revealed in some of the remaining anti-trust cases looming in state courts against Microsoft.  These statements may have been dramatic at the time and are probably no less dramatic now.

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Well the season is almost upon us, not Christmas or New Years but tech show season.  The Consumer Electronics Show and MacWorld are coming up right after the lesser holidays of Christmas and New Year’s and that means lots of gifts and toys for geeky visitors that haven’t been naughty.

Of course I’m talking about all those great promotion products that are given out at the trade shows.  Getting good foot traffic is sometimes as simple as giving away the good stuff.

Odds are most companies will get their existing client base or partners to visit them at the show, but to get exposure to new customers and partners a little branding bling sometimes can go a long ways.  For that you need some good stuff for a trade show giveaway. 

Now you want to make sure that its something that people will use and remember in a positve way.  It should have your logo or brand or theme involved and hopefully it will bring a smile to their face for years to come.

Popular favorites are typically  backpacks and bags with wheels to hold all the other stuff.  If you are looking for advertising at the show itself, nothing works better than giving out the best backpack wheeled or not so that everyone will carry the rest of their stuff in your bag throughout the show.

After that the gift that seems to keep on giving is memory cards.  Flash memory is always useful, and its a great way to convey your product details, trial software and much much more.  Everytime someone plugs a usb card into their computer they might then think about your company and products.  Those are excellent reminders that you can capitalize on at a tradeshow.

And don’t forget the toys!  There’s alwasys something that everyone wants to play with at the show, whether its a ball, or putty or lazer beem pointers or something!

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Siemens has big problems with slush and we’re not talking about the kind of slush that results from snow and ice turning mushy as it converts back into water. No we’re talking about the type of slush that results when a company pays cash to a intermediary, who then proceeds to pay that cash to a partner, customer or some other stakeholder of the company in the form of bribes, kickbacks, hush money or a number of other possibilities.

Siemens has been investigating a slush fund scandal within its company that dates back to the mid to late 1990’s and has grown from tens of millions of euros in pay offs to 200 and now 420 million euros.

The company is being investigated in multiple countries throughout Europe and over a half dozen former employees including the chief financial officer of the telecommunications unit, Michael Kutschenreuter, who was working as the head of Siemen’s real-estate division at the time of his arrest in mid-November.

The scandal is based on some simple and unfortunately classic uses of dummy corporations. Siemens paid money allegedly to dummy companies that held the funds in secret Swiss bank accounts and then funneled that money off to pay non-existent consulting contracts with funds going through the Caribbean just for good measure.

Siemens is cooperating with the investigation but the troubles threaten to unravel a deal with Nokia as the potential financial burdens from wrong doing threatened to torpedo the deal.

KPMG, Siemens’ auditor of record, has indicated that they did not notice any of the wrong doing. The tip off came to investigators when a whistleblower contacted the Swiss Money Laundering Authority. This prompted a Swiss, Austrian and German investigation and shortly there after it came to light that Italian were also investigating and thought that the corruption went back to the mid-90’s.

Siemens current CFO, Joe Kaeser, indicated that 420 million euros in illegal payments dating back to 1999 have been identified coupled with an additional 168 million euros in tax charges. This has resulted in a temporary restatement from 3.11 billion down to 3.03 billion euros, but if the recipients of the payments are not identified, then the payments can not be deducted from their tax liability and that liability will increase.

This investigation is not over and its like much more information will come out in the weeks to come.

Additional reading

• www.techworld.com/…/NewsID=7411
• www.techworld.com/…/newsid=7571

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Ever wonder how websites protect themselves from a denial of service attack?

Gigenet provides real time Denial of Service prevention and mitigation services for your website, your servers and your IP network. 

Their product ProxyShield DDoS Protection provides the benefit of not having to change hosts or servers.  A company simply reroutes their DNS to through Gigenet’s Proxyshield, which proceeds to screen out potential traffic resulting from a DoS and allowing normal traffic into your system so that your company and website can continue to function.

Preventing DoS downtime is a very important.  A company with $25 million in revenues stands to lose $68,493 a day in lost sales and productivity if a Denial of Service is not prevented.

They have stopped some famous attacks on Joker.com and MillionDollarHomepage.com and can provide you similar protection.  They guarantee it or provide the service free.

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The Forrester Group has brought out the Grinch for Apple this Christmas.  New studies by Forrester indicate that monthly iTunes purchases have declined by 58% and that the average checkout purchase size has dropped by 17%.

Forrester pondered with Reuters whether or not this was a seasonal decline or possibly the result of consumers who were starting to reach the saturation point.  No comparisons were made to the decline in overall record sales by the music industry throughout the year by Forrester who apparently missed that potential correllation.  Plus, the data may be hindered by historicals not reflecting future performance as the previous period measured had registered a sevenfold increase in sales.

• So Apple could be in decline as iTunes are concerned, or
• iTunes sales could be levelling out off their high as they define a new normal, or
• iTunes may be suffering from a poor year for Records and Record sales, or
• maybe Forrester is onto something and this decline may mark the beginning of a slow long-tail styled end reminiscent of the Sony Walkman.

With a half dozen major manufacturing players debuting products like the Microsoft Zune over the next 2 months, Apple may need to get on the iHorn and see if they can re-energize their sales efforts to maintain market dominance.

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EverythingFitness.com is offering a great deal on specialty exercise equipment.  They have a wide selection of Heart Rate Monitors that can come in the strapped or strapless variety.

Everything recently released the news that today (December 13th!) will be the last day to receive free holiday delivery on all orders of $19 or more.  They  even have a Reebok strapless heart monitor built into a watch that is ECG accurate for less than fifty dollars.

Heart rate monitors are excellent to insure that you are training your heart and burning calories.  The heart rate monitor can help you make sure that you are in the right heart rate zone. 

So check in with EverythingFitness.com and don’t delay to get a great deal.

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Skype has been hunting for the right application to run on Windows Mobile smart phones and has now developed it themselves in Skype 2.2.  The new client will enable Skype calls to be made over 120 different Smart Phones in existence already through Wi-Fi networks using Skype’s VoiP service.

Under a beta plan users will be able to make free calls to other Skype users.  Users can also utilize their Skype in and Skype out accounts to make and receive calls to landline phones as is available with normal skype products that are not resident on cellular devices.

Skype was previously available on Pocket PC devices.  Over 5 million Pocket PC device downloads have occurred under that service plan.

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For the last couple of months my inbox has been plagued with with these annoying faux stock alert image spam emails. They are these annoying emails that are text based on the surface but come with an image that shows up when the email is previewed and they are Spam!

In looking for a solution to the problem, I came across a service that specializes in fighting this specific type of spam. Borderware provides MXtreme anti image spam software to help combat this spam.

Spammers alter the images slightly so that the spam and the image will pass through normal filters more readily. Their solution reviews over 30 different attributes of the image and compares those attributes against similar attributes in multiple other messages that have been indexed to detect the spam and filter it out before it litters up your inbox.

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