WARNING: This Might Make You Flip

Why are so many people “flipping out” over the Flip Slide HD™ camera? Because it’s small, super easy to use and lets you upload videos to your computer in seconds. What could be better? So glad you asked! The makers of the Flip Video have just introduced the Flip Slide HD.

This newest addition to the Cisco Flip family features a pop-up, three-inch screen and “touch screen” capability. With double the record time of the original Flip, it supports 4 hours of video footage. It holds up to 12 hours of compressed videos, snapshots, movies, and Flip Channels with its 16GB storage capacity. If you want to get really fancy, you can personalize your Flip Slide HD with your own images, patterns or designs.

But the biggest reason this device has taken off is because of its simplicity and ease of use. You won’t find complicated buttons and options – just a simple push button recording. Plus the images and audio recording are fantastic, making it practically fool-proof. More information about the Flip Slide at http://www.theflip.com.

How To Quickly Add Facebook And LinkedIn Contacts To Outlook

With social media becoming a widely spread way of finding and connecting with customers, prospects and business partners, it’s about time someone came up with a way to pull all these contacts together in one spot.

Xobni is an Outlook plug-in that pulls contact information from several sources, including LinkedIn profiles, Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce, Hoovers and Yahoo mail. It also organizes your e-mails into threaded conversations and makes searching for documents and e-mails much easier.

If there is a phone number, address or company name in an e-mail, that person’s information profile will be automatically populated. It’s the same thing if one of your contact’s e-mail addresses matches a profile on Facebook, Yahoo or LinkedIn. Company information is automatically pulled from Hoovers.

Another cool feature is the contact statistics, which gives you a graph showing what times people tend to send you e-mail so you can quickly identify the most likely times you’ll be able to reach that person. Additionally, it ranks that person with regards to the number of e-mails exchanged and displays the balance between sent and received e-mails. Xobni Actions supplies you with quick templates for asking a contact for their phone number or to schedule a meeting. Icons for LinkedIn, Facebook, and Hoovers allow you to quickly pull information from these sites including Facebook updates.

While there is a free version you can download, the paid version only costs $30 and gives you advanced search capabilities.

Writing For The Computer Screen

With so many people reading documents online, a new challenge has presented itself for anyone trying to use electronic communications: making your documents reader-friendly for SCREEN reading.

Reading material on a computer screen is much different than reading printed material. Instead of reading physical matter, we are reading light when looking at a computer screen. That means you blink less and are unable to easily adjust text size by moving a document closer to, or further away from, your eyes. These factors contribute to an online reader scanning a page, and searching for phrases and words to match what they are looking for. Because of this, writers need to capture a reader’s attention immediately, increasing the need for headlines on pages and subheads to break up longer paragraphs. Here are some other tips for making your web pages more reader-friendly.

* Use Arial or Verdana fonts because they are the easiest to read.
* Make sure you use 12 point text or larger; smaller text makes a page very unfriendly to a user.
* Use black text on a white background if you want people to read your document. Many designers like to use light gray fonts which prevent users from easily reading your document.
* Don’t put graphics behind text; again, this makes it difficult for users to read your information and will cause them to skip over your page.
* Don’t clutter up your page with lots of flash or graphics. These distract the reader from the text.