Better Ideas™ Pavilion

Better ideas for the Traditional and Non-Traditional Workplace

Significantly unique or demonstrably practical products and services made available within Home Office Mall’s™ BETTER IDEAS PAVILION are tested and must exhibit tangible consumer benefit in order to qualify for inclusion. Only those truly exceptional products or services for the Home Office or Traditional Workplace which meet the above described qualifications will be showcased here.

You'll also occasionally find "Heads-UP!" notices about products or services which may directly effect the way you do business.

HEADS-UP! CELLULAR PHONE USERS :

06/97 - If we hadn't gotten this right from the horses' mouth (a very high level executive at a VERY big telecommunications company, both of which shall remain nameless for rather obvious reasons) .....well, suffice it to say that our collective jaws dropped when we heard it.

We're simply going to recommend that you request a clarification preferably in writing from your local cellular provider.

The information we were provided states that if you are using an ANALOG cellular phone and a pirate gets hold of your number, cheerfully racking up several thousand dollars worth of bogus phone bills, you're not held responsible. (Been there. About $2500. dollars worth. Say, where the heck IS Gabon, anyway?)

If, on the other hand, you happen to be using a DIGITAL cellular phone and the same thing happens, you are now held personally responsible for the entire sum.

"WHHAAATT?!" , we howled, "You've got to be kidding!?". "No", our informant replied. "I'm dead serious". Stunned silence on our part. "Is THAT why they're pushing Digital phones?" we inquired, aghast. "Well", the individual said. "that's certainly one of the reasons".

Yikes.

On to the Better Ideas Reviews
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The OFFICE™ This, as you'll see by its awards, is a true champion. Equally at ease in a home, a hotel room, a retail site, or in a traditional work environment, The OFFICE™, an Electro-entopic Satellite OffiCenter, (e-soc) provides practical, functional, technological and ergonomic support for the intelligent computer user, without the need to sacrifice existing room or site utility.

The OFFICE™ is considered the highest quality, best engineered, PC enclosure in the world. Grand Prize Winner at NeoCon, the World's Trade Fair for Interior Design, Facilities Management & Communications, a Fortune Magazine "Product-to-Watch", featured Live on the NBC TODAY Show. The Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinal wrote about The OFFICE™ "Every once in a while, somebody comes out with a product so good it deserves a standing ovation".
UPDATE: We've had the CEO model of The OFFICE™ in service for better than two years now, and we've had the CEO's predecessor-- the VP-- in use for 4 years. There's nothing on the market that even remotely compares to either one.
RECOMMENDED
http://www.the-office.com
info@the-office.com

Product: Online Backup Services

Online backup and data management services for business PC users and consumers. Now here's something you want to think seriously about. Today, and not tomorrow.

We had it brought into focus in a big way when our Atlanta based ISP was struck by a major power surge that literally fried every surge protector in their place along with blowing out almost all of their computer monitors. We happened to be on the phone with them when it happened. Smoke, glass, burning wires. Try to visualize this. Grim, isn't it? Yes, of course they do their own back-ups, as do we, but all of our back-up data was right here on site. Their misfortune got us to thinking. Suppose our offices suffered a fire, or a hurricane, or an earthquake. We'd have had all of our eggs in one basket. So much for disaster recovery. So we got smart. And so should you. Connected Corporation is but one of the firms offering the service. We're now using Connected ourselves. Software installation was a piece of cake and customer service was excellent. Connected has taken their own advice and has all of their storage data mirrored in two separate locations. (McAffee, MCI, Surefind and others offer similar services.) Connected charges $15/mo and gives you a 30 day free trial. Connected's Online/Off-site back-up definitely qualifies as a Better Idea.
RECOMMENDED.

Okidata OKIPAGE 4W - This is one sweetheart of a personal printer and a bargain (under $300.) for home office users. It's an absolute triumph when it comes to conserving valuable workspace. With a footprint only slightly larger than the size of a sheet of paper, and about 6" high, this 600 dpi printer cheerfully delivers top quality text, drawings and graphics at a rate of 4 ppm. It's also very quiet. We gave this little powerhouse a real workout, followed by our own brand of torture test. We started by feeding it a variety of paper to see how it performed under duress, (somebody around here even fed it paper from a ream that was easily 10 years old). It just kept on chugging away. Emboldened by our success, we then fed it something that looked like tracing paper. It didn't even blink,...it just kept delivering what it was supposed to, razor-sharp text and crisp graphics from a CAD program. Then we gave it the ultimate test. We set it up on one of the computers running Windows 95. Smooth as silk. Purred like a kitten. We think that the 1-year limited warranty with Overnight Exchange is simply the icing on the cake. Ink cartridges run about $25.
UPDATE: In continual use for nearly a year, this sturdy little printer has continued to function as well as the day it went into service. Top notch.
RECOMMENDED. http://www.okidata.com

Smart Money Tip for the Small Businessman - Know those stores touting "Any Kind of Checks Cashed!" signs? They conjure up all kinds of visions, none of them very pleasant, don't they?. Well, you might want to take another look. Your local banker, you see, is pleased to accept your deposit, but is equally pleased to slap a hold on it for anywhere from five to seven days. If, like most small businesses you have money going out as fast as it comes in, chances are you can't afford to have the bank just sitting on your money. And heaven help you if you issue a check which arrives before your customer's funds have cleared. You can get hit with as much as a $35. returned check charge. So what's the alternative? - Interestingly enough the answer lies in those little stores. As a business owner you can can set up accounts with these companies which will permit you to cash checks made payable to your business---something your bank simply won't do. With a commercial account, the typical charge to cash a check made payable to your company is 2%. Look at it this way. On a thousand dollars the check-cashing charge is $20. If on the other hand, you had deposited the thousand dollars to your bank account, and it didn't clear as fast as you thought it would....let's see, that's $35. for the returned check you sent to the phone company, $35. for the check to your credit card company...$35 for the......well, you get the picture. Look under check-cashing in your local phone book.
Thanks to Home Office Mall visitor TJM for giving us a heads-up on this handy resource
Digital Cameras and What You Can Do With Them: - Been wondering whether a Digital Camera would make sense for your business? The biggest question, of course is "How’s the quality?". We'll let you judge for yourself. The model reviewed here is a Casio, the QV-11 model. Towards the lower end of their price-spectrum, this one was priced at under $300 in early ’97. Operating simplicity? It’s the online counterpart to the point-and-shoot Instamatic, in our opinion. Plug it in to a serial port. There are two software programs, one is stand-alone, which allows you to import graphics into their own program, the other is a twain driver which makes the graphics compatible with just about any major graphics program. This one had a swivel view-finder in which you could look at the picture exactly as it will appear in a finished version. The swivel part is pretty handy, in case you want to take a picture of yourself (We got our resident guinea-pig Bill to do just that) He turned the swivel view-finder so that he could look at the picture, (it’s computer adjusted so that you see yourself right-side-up which is especially handy), and he simply pressed the button. Click! He imported the image to Corel PhotoPaint, saved it as a .jpg and e-mailed it to our machine. To show us how well it handled on close-up’s, he shot a picture of the ring he was wearing. He shot the digital photo from about 6" away, in harsh fluorescent office lighting. He was well pleased with the quality of this camera, but ended up exchanging it , because he found that he needed zoom, panoramic and flash capabilities. All-in-all, however, this is pretty impressive. Especially if you’ve got products you want online instantaneously. Want to see how the photos looked? OK, here’s BILL 18k (he had been fishing the weekend before and was still peeling from his sunburn here) And here’s the shot of his RING. 56k. Want to see an exterior shot? Here's BILL'S OFFICE . Not bad. Not bad at all. But this next section is even more interesting. Our appreciation to Brooks at CyberConch Zine in Key West for bringing this to our attention. He tells us that Chris Donald at Key West Paradise (chris@keywest.com) has found a way to display a 360degree panorama, using a small downloadable file and a free plug-in viewer for either Netscape Navigator or Microsoft's Explorer browsers. Chris photographed dozens of locations in Key West, Florida to create a virtual tour. He then virtually "pasted" together digital photos taken every 20 degrees in a circle. The 18 shots were stitched together with software purchased from RealVR http://www.realvr.com and saved as a single file. That file is downloaded to your browser from a web server. Photography tools are a professional tripod and a digital camera with a 35mm lens, camera hand-rotated every 20 degrees. Figure 5 to 10 minutes to film each panoramic sequence. The stitching together part is a bit complex but there are plenty of consultants around who can make life simpler for you. Take the tour. We think you'll be glad you did. 360degree Tour of Key West

Do you have a product or service you'd like reviewed for inclusion in Better Ideas? Submit requests to us at: t-office@home-office-mall.com

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