In addition to complimentary registration, we’re offering exclusive summer special pricing on Apple-related products for Macworld registrants only. We’ll offer one product special a day.

This event is the best way for a small business to research and evaluate new products, especially those that don’t have an ad budget or strong outreach to the business press. You can register at the website and learn a great deal just off the show floor, but adding sessions to your show package is well worth the extra $100 or so.

At the latest MacWorld Expo, the company was displaying a new inventory lot control solution for Mac-based businesses. A modest little kiosk, one developer/representative, and a lot of functionality in demonstrations on the floor. In a release for Accountek 6, company officials explained

Lot control is necessary in many industries and where detailed part identification information must be tracked in the event of a product recall.  Having a lot control system allows a company to completely track all parts received and shipped by their lot numbers.  The changes in Connected make it very easy to track and pick specific parts throughout purchasing and sales process.

Connected’s lot control allows a business to:

• Simplify the process of tracking parts throughout production.
• Meet the needs of your industry when lot tracking is a requirement for product recalls.
• Identify specific lots received by purchase order and pick and ship specific lots on customer orders.
• Build products and create your own lot number and expiration dates.

If you’ve got no idea what a lot is, as it relates to inventory, you can move on. But Accountek understands financials in a way that corporations use to communicate with each other. It’s assuring to know that even if the solution starts at around $5,000, there’s business-class accounting available that lets you soar above the muddied plains of QuickBooks.

The Mac enjoys an easier time in security because Apple’s product is a less juicy target. Malware and viruses are designed to make money for criminals, and the number of PCs out there running bareback is 10 times the number of Macs. Security by obscurity only works until it doesn’t. It’s just a matter of time, sad to say, before the criminals fan out and try to rob your system of power or privacy or both.

Anti-virus software (AV) is not just the paranoid geek’s tool anymore. The last virus we detected came off a Web page, and we last had data corrupted in 1997. But things have changed since Apple moved to Unix underneath it’s OS. Oh, and there’s that thing called the Internet, plus the Flash videos you may use to gather research (like from the Wall Street Journal’s site, now that they’re owned by Fox.) Flash, and Adobe’s Acrobat PDF files, are a big target for malware today.

You have more than one choice for a commercial AV tool for your systems (that wasn’t the case in ’97). What you buy probably should provide both firewall and virus protection. Two leading companies offer very different value propositions in their AV software. MacScan commits to a fixed price, while another supplier uses a subscription fee+purchase price model.

Today we look at MacScan, software built by a company that started tracking viruses in 2002 on the Mac. For five years MacScan didn’t even sell software; it simply created the definition files and patrolled the Web for criminal weapons. Since ’07 they’ve sold MacScan, which despite claims from its competitor Intego, still looks like a worthy value for AV.

Intego, whose products we’ve run at Bites HQ for more than three years, now sells a $49.95 X6 edition of VirusBarrier that protects two Macs. The MacScan 2.7 software protects three systems for the same price. (There’s also a 1-Mac license for MacScan for $29.95; Intego sells only its 2-Mac license.) Figuring the relative value requires you to consider the protection scope of such products. MacScan’s product manager told us at Macworld that the company ships along regular updates of the virus profiles, at no extra charge.

MacScan makes a significant point of examining Web cookies, a source of malware targets, in its regular process. A half-full iMac in our offices took more than an hour to probe with MacScan, but the AV software found nine tracking cookies in the first minute. And no viruses or other spyware. We got an option to disable these ad cookies after MacScan caught them.

A tracking cookie is not something you allow easily into your Mac. While you might not want to erase all of them, these are used by advertisers on Web sites to track your Internet use: where you browse, how you jump from links, even the information you enter into forms online. A fine article on the World Privacy Forum’s Web site explains that “allowing the tracking types of cookies to follow you around as you surf the Web is a lot like building a see-through house to live in, click by click.”

MacScan doesn’t reach any deeper into the malware world, though. It’s good at finding troublesome files on the system, but it won’t do a thing to block access to your computer. Apple’s firewall is the default for the MacScan user. While that’s better security than none, it might not be enough to keep prying spooks from hijacking your bandwidth.

Doing one thing well, and affordably, is noble and true to the Macintosh Way. We like to see more of what back doors might be open on our Macs, however. The extra features of firewall improvement are included with the new VirusBarrierX6. But they’re not easy to use, or so valuable that Intego could keep selling this super firewall that it once called NetBarrier as a standalone product. That’s for Monday, though.

The Web site is lightly protected, if you didn’t make it to the conference but had suspicions that the meeting would be as useful as ever. We wouldn’t want to encourage anybody to swipe anything, but the access is so simple that we think Macworld must be encouraging a little borrowing on the path to promoting 2011.

Some of these are basically billboards for the presenters, while others are standalone training. Rob Griffiths Best of OS X Hints has plenty of value by itself, but Griffiths has even posted a QuickTime file with his presentation (beware, it’s a 60MB download.)

But that it’s available at all proves that Macworld hasn’t lost too many steps from the glory days of Apple’s involvement. If you attended the show, have at the slide downloads for the next month. Grab ahold of a conference program to sort out who’s who from the bare bones download menus — and maybe queue up next year’s conference on your travel agenda.

The software, pen and paper integrate with JPEG and PowerPoint files, so that slick slide deck you created to dazzle in the boardroom or in a pitch to a client gets a fresh angle. Canson, a French company that started selling paper in the 16th Century, unveiled the product for the Mac at the show, after selling Papershow during 2009 for the PC. It’s a $200 solution that was competing, sort of, with the likes of the massive $4,000 electronic whiteboard in the booth right next door.

The full solution includes a pen with a micro camera, Bluetooth transcorder and a processor on-board; the magic paper both in printable sheets (to put your slides in front of you to annotate) and in a notepad format; and a USB key of 256MB to plug into your Mac and receive the pen’s transmissions. Your presentation’s audience doesn’t even have to be in the room — if you’re able to share your screen over the Web, your marks and notes become part of your show in remote offices.

In front of a crowd still buzzing after a day and a half of expo time, Chason’s rep showed the ability to underline, circle or make a note on top of a PowerPoint slide, in multiple colors. The product makes a presentation more alive than the stock animations from PowerPoint. Once it imports a PowerPoint file for annotation, it can save the resulting markup back to PPT or JPEG formats, or Papershow’s native format.

Excel poses for its close-up at Macworld

Microsoft has released the 11.5.7 update to its Office suite, aimed at the users of Office 2004. You should download this update to protect your Mac from being hacked by compromised Word, Excel or PowerPoint files. Even the Mac has security flaws, but more common are the hacker entry points through things like Office or Adobe’s Flash. (If you aren’t up to date on the Microsoft security releases, 11.5.7 won’t load up. You can check your status in the Updater Logs folder inside your Microsoft Office 2004 folder. Microsoft also has prior updates available for download, to catch you up.)

Microsoft was one of the few big-name vendors at this year’s Macworld Expo, but it didn’t have new software to roll out this month in conjunction with its show appearance. The Redmond Giant was talking up the forthcoming release of Microsoft Outlook for the Mac. (Talking only, since no demos were presented at the Microsoft booth.) Outlook will be a replacement for Entourage, which still has advocates within the Mac expert community. One advantage of Entourage, noted in a Macworld panel, is its smooth interface with Microsoft Exchange servers, operated at countless companies who handle their own e-mail. Outlook will be inside the Office 2011 suite, and it’s not yet clear if it will be sold standalone. Entourage never was.

Those differences between Entourage and Outlook might have protected the Mac from some Microsoft-based exploits, however. Outlook has such a weak security reputation that it’s called Lookout by the PC community — at least those who’ve been infected by a mail message that wormed its way into the Windows environment on office PCs. Microsoft has closed these holes repeatedly on the PCs, but the tight link between Explorer and Windows remains a point of attack. No such link exists on the Macs.

It appears that Apple isn’t the only vendor who’s chosen an ill-advised name for a recent product though. (iPad will need some extra oomph to sell.) Microsoft will call its new generation of mail program Outlook, “which you’d think was one of the more bankrupt names” in the computer world, according to one panelist on the e-mail client showdown session at Macworld 2010. It’s important to Mac-PC offices that the two products exchange messages easily, to enable switchers as well as interoffice mail using the .PST message format.

Attendees waiting for the keynote to start covered a wide age range

A trade show is an odd thing, an entity that exists only in a brief span of time like a polliwog, a text message or an NBC talk show host’s gig. Afterward, it’s remembered best by those who were actually attending the conference, like last week’s Macworld Expo. But the Web is full of ace prognoses today about the health of the Apple world’s biggest trade show, many served up by people who want to justify their absence.

I’ve sat in that kind of chair, far away and commenting on a show I didn’t attend, doubting its health and relevance and value. Take those comments for what they’re worth. There was a lot of value in being at this year’s Macworld. In the days and weeks to come, this blog will tell stories from being there, ones you couldn’t report any other way about what’s new or what works for Apple computer users who employ their gear as a work tool.

People at the uber-sharp Macintouch.com site are weighing in on the experience, although a serious share of them didn’t experience the conference. Some who were there are saying they noticed a genuine upward age creep in attendees. It didn’t seem any different to me than in years past, except maybe there were not scores of 25-year-olds in an Apple booth. Nothing wrong with the youth of America, but a robust trade show is built of equal parts managers and explorers. 2010′s show had both in my iPhone’s viewfinder.

Unless there was a fountain of youth bubbling in the basement of the Moscone Center, making us geezers somehow look callow, there were plenty of attendees well under 40. The show itself may be elderly in hitting age 25, but many there were not a lot older than the expo’s own tenure. The picture above is a little clue of who was on hand at the first day’s Feature keynote.

If you want to forecast the lifespan of a trade show, you need all your instruments working to make a prediction. When people talk about this year’s MacWorld as “half as many booths” or “no massive vendor exhibits with savvy people inside,” they’re correct, but not accurate. Those raw numbers don’t matter any more than just measuring the wind speed and then trying to predict weather. You want to work with business measurements, because a trade show is a business opportunity.

There’s no way you could have been in the aisle between the Dr. Bott’s booths anytime Thursday and believed this expo was less than any other. I haven’t been at every Macworld, but I’ve been at the last five in a row now. The previous four included Apple and this one didn’t. I didn’t miss the fruit company wizards. Last year Apple’s big news was what, iWork? We didn’t have people seven-deep, drooling over a phone which wouldn’t be on sale for nearly six months. That was a dramatic moment in 2007, like lining up at 4 AM to try to squeeze into the Reality Distortion speech. These things drive ardor, but I don’t find them to be a massive business lift.

I’m a technical journalist and editor since 1984, and a newsletter and blog publisher since 1995. I’ve used Macs in publishing and small business since 1987, and set up two little companies that rely on them, but I cut my teeth in the HP marketplace, in particular its HP 3000 business line. That vendor has killed off that product and turned its computing business on its ear. Innovation is just acquisitions for lots of HP’s inventing today. Apple couldn’t be more different.

For 25 years I’ve attended trade shows as big as 25,000 users, including close contact with the customers and show volunteers. Macworld 2010 didn’t exhibit a debacle, or slink away. I gotta disagree with the doom.

Yup, the show area was half as big. I didn’t care. I was drained after two days of interviews and demos and Q&A about features and business models and competitive stances. I said wow a lot, especially in the mobile apps floor space. I was impressed by products I didn’t know existed, because media notice is now fragmented and sliding so fast it’s harder to keep up than ever. What I didn’t miss at all was 75 booths’ worth of iPod accessory makers. Or the massive leather couches where you could watch media streamed onto TVs you could only buy at home if you hit the Lotto. Or the big honking booths from the likes of Adobe and Microsoft with lots to toy with, but experiences that would often not escape the labs as those products were released. At those booths you could talk to an engineer easy. But whatever they said to you then had to clear the business and marketing arms of the companies — and firms like Adobe and Microsoft have massive hurdles to clear in those areas.

Contrast that with the vendors who were on the floor at Macworld 2010. Smaller companies who often had innovation those larger beasts didn’t want to invest in. It was no problem in some cases to talk with the CEO of a little firm and believe they were really going to follow through with what they showed you. After 25 years of talking to software and hardware companies, you can tell sometimes what’s true faith and what is fantasy, or worse.

Yes, dead-on: There were less than 800 people in the room when Jon Gruber, Guy Kawasaki or David Pogue spoke, not the thousands at hand or watching remote screens to see Steve Jobs year after year. What did this matter? 700 media credentials were issued and the press room was busy, albeit not packed. People were watching and writing this week with a larger audience than the total attendance of 10 Macworlds. What’s more, their insight and summaries are going to be available to the Mac world on Web sites like this one for a lot longer than what you’ll remember from a suitcase full of data sheets and demo disks.

I’ll remember this: A David Pogue one-act as part of his keynote, a parody mashing up Steve Jobs’ life with It’s a Wonderful Life, played by the likes of The Gregory Brothers and LeVar Burton, that plucked the heartstrings of the Mac faithful — those of us who suffered through the 90s — just as ably as any tune that Jobs ever fiddled from a Macworld auditorium that only the lucky few could enter. (We saw last month how declined Steve’s demo skills have become, when he blew through his iPad demo points via Web access that looked slow and peppered with blue-box reminders of a Flash-less Internet experience. If you saw the show live, rather than the cleaned up Apple video, you can hear the chuckles from the audience while Steve-o showed the “best way to experience the Web.”) I love the iPad’s concept and believe in The Job’s ability to make it ready for work users. But I didn’t need Steve Jobs to distort the iPad reality on Jan. 27, or this week at Macworld.

It’s just as hard to predict the campaign of the iPad’s progress as it is to forecast the future of a trade show that’s already 25 years old and is working to change. But I saw changes in this year’s event that give me hope, the kind of faith I have in Apple’s pursuit of iPad business. I saw conference sessions, like a User Show with a half-dozen tracks, providing great training at several levels of expertise from seasoned consultants. I attended three sessions, and each gave me more value than the $27 I spent to attend them. The e-mail client showdown all by itself was worth the whole $79 one-day user conference pass. (You want to attend the conference sessions, really. Even for just one day. You could download every PowerPoint deck for every track, no matter what you’d paid for, once you entered the session hall in Moscone West. Talk about hidden value.) The show did heavy discounting this year, and you had to be pretty unplugged to need to pay for your Expo pass.

Macworld had gotten too big for all of it to be useful, bloated as bad as any Microsoft or Adobe product by the time Apple pulled away last year. The economics of this year’s experience are measured the most by how the exhibitors felt. I didn’t talk to a single one who was disappointed with floor traffic, and I didn’t even stay to see the Saturday floor, which had the potential for being unprecedented.

Who will be back in a booth in 2011? Well, there were 80 iPhone app companies squeezed into microscopic kiosks, with traffic so jammed I got lost and talked to a company that wasn’t even on my interview list. That kind of random messaging and learning is why we come to shows instead of sitting at our browsers to learn. The kiosk people will be back, and some will spring for more elbow-room to demo.

Go ahead and believe that the 2008 model of Macworld is the only one worth attending, if you want. I have a feeling that when you can get a sharp pencil like Jon Gruber to talk for an hour about Apple’s weak spots — the problems it needs to address — you have a more useful show than the one where everybody tiptoes around the El Jefe Vendor who is the patron of the Mac populace. I have January 25 circled for next year’s calendar, even while I admit there’s an outside chance that IDG collapses its business in the Mac expo market. But I bet not. It’s harder to build business than to rediscover it.

It’s tough times out there, which is a better explanation for a downsized show floor than “There’s No Apple” to bring its black-shirted staff up the road. I’ve talked to Apple Macworld staffers who were no more savvy than anything experienced talking about Entourage. (By the way, Microsoft seems to be moving away from Entourage to Outlook, so maybe nobody at MS cares about those template answers anymore.) I didn’t struggle to compare e-mail, or scanners, or backup products, or mass storage. I had an easier time for some of that because I didn’t have to hike more than a mile from hall to hall. People were getting by with less to exhibit, and you knew that those who were there were selling and building for the long run.

One 10×10 booth was staffed with eight people from a small but sharp company. They saved the square footage and cartage charges but sent their best. You need to have staffed an exhibit to know how this works, but as IDG you want that booth size to grow from kiosk to small to larger. Macworld got a reset of its economic model this year. You could forecast its demise. But that wouldn’t be a lot smarter than subscribing to Dell’s premature obituary for Apple.

You can let go of the old trade show model, if you try, and open your eyes to the potential for something better. I say let’s see, in person, what Macworld Expo can become. This looked to me like the first year that I attended Appleworld, not just Macworld. I didn’t observe a business event that was in trouble, just one in a state of change.

In the vacuum of the month before the doors opened, nobody could tell how spry the old guy’s step was going to be yesterday. The conference organizers invited the right people, to be sure. They got an Emmy winner in David Pogue to kick off the opening day with a show so complete it even included a play about Steve Jobs, written as a parody of It’s a Wonderful Life. They got Levar Burton to play Steve Jobs, so the actor who created Geordi La Forge on Star Trek could swap adulation with Pogue. “I can’t believe I get to meet you,” they each said.

But it’s one thing to put on a good one-act and another to fill the seats. A few hundred yards away from the play, the bodies were thick in the center of a bustling Macworld 2010 Expo floor. “Steve Jobs isn’t here,” Pogue said to start his keynote. But the Apple faithful were, and probably will be even more by tomorrow, the first weekend day in decades for this conference.

You had to be patient, in the face of the Cool New Stuff all around, to squeeze through some aisles and into some sessions. Like Burton, though, people seemed to know that this meeting about the Mac has roots, deep enough to weather the chill Apple showed to the show.

Burton came into the public’s eye the year before the Mac was born, the Reading Rainbow host who’s now in his 50s and producing. Pogue is 46, and neither fellow looked anything but genuine in his child-like ardor for Apple’s solutions. Out on the expo floor there were plenty more less famous acolytes and experts to testify to a shinier future, with evidence of their creations on display.

Macworld is so much bigger than just the Mac these days, and what’s been sloughed off of this event isn’t being missed. For every absent Adobe booth there was an expanded Crash Plan exhibit, where the back up company showed a product range wide enough to be free for The People or priced to help corporations protect untold acres of data. Crash Plan was giving out $60 licenses to everybody who visited its booth. Adobe might have been here before, but I never walked away from their booth holding a free tool that could keep my creations alive.

If I ran a company and wanted to save money on my utilities, I would look into the asset management software from Absolute Software. Tucked away into the Enterprise Desktop Alliance booth, the company showed the sort of product you would expect for corporate servers, tracking the use of Macs on a network to show when they could be put to sleep to reduce power consumption. The software scales from a handful of Macs to thousands, in one office or across an organization’s continental network.

The products sold through Dr. Bott include Blue Microphone’s Mikey, emerging in a new model tuned up to grab meeting notes as well as close-up note dictation. It swivels toward the subject of your video you’re taking with the iPhone. It’s got a line-in port to use for phone recording and three “volume” settings on the gadget that plugs into an iPhone or iPod Touch, new gain settings to help you get the sound onto a file headed for your Mac. Once it’s there, the new Scribe software from MacSpeech will help push those spoken words into text. The software was so new to production release that they were burning DVDs at the back of the booth to tuck into boxes. But it was also being sold at about a 40 percent discount.

That sums up the draw of Macworld, for the faithful who’ve come here for years. Something new, unveiled in the sparkle of a sea of the excited, sold at a steep deal and explained in a way the Web can never match. It was enough of a valentine to why we love Apple’s products to bring a tear to this old guy’s eye. Of course, it helped that the moment was echoing It’s a Wonderful Life‘s finale, when “Steve Jobs” learns that there wouldn’t have been the Web, or Wired Magazine, or popular computers, or Pixar, if he hadn’t invented the Mac.

And it helped if you were old enough to know and love the movie as well as the long haul away from that darkest year of 1998, as Pogue’s play pointed out, when Apple lost $1.7 billion and the last non-Jobs CEO was leading the Mac over a cliff. If a Mac’s life could imitate art, the ardor of the audience and attendees here showed a lively pulse for the products of tomorrow, showed today.

This is my fifth Macworld but the first without an Apple mothership hovering in the expo’s molten core. We’re all waiting to see what the impact of the missing lead vendor will be on this 25-year tradition. Registration lines seemed light this afternoon, although the media desk had a steady stream of reporters and bloggers. It might just be a feeling, but the attitude at the press registration desk smacked of genuine gratitude for our attentions.

One sign of scaling back is right here in the press room. It might be an artifact of a new decade of computer journalism, but gone are the 24-inch iMacs hooked to high speed boardband cables. No serious journalist would be without a laptop here. In shows past, even Microsoft organized a on-floor corral for the media’s blogging use.

But the show’s organizers seem undaunted, even if Steve Jobs did blast his salvo of new product two weeks ago today right next door at the Yerba Buena Arts Center. Few attendees of Macworlds ever got inside the hall where Jobs introduced things like the iPod, iPhone and more. I squeezed in for the Intel Mac announcement in ’06 by getting up at 4:30 and standing on line like a supplicant to a Bruce Springsteen concert.

This year’s event substitutes The New York Times tech columnist David Pogue for that leadoff keynote spot, to be held here in Moscone North in a room larger than the old site for Apple keynotes. Pogue has become a budding video and media star over the last few years, with regular spots on CBS news, plenty of video on the NYT site, and an entertaining manner to match Jobs’ enterprising swagger.

So “Late Night with David Pogue” kicks off at 9 AM tomorrow, followed by the first of the three Macworld Best of Show presentations at lunch. A group of solution providers who call themselves Indie will work for media attention here in about a half-hour or so, followed by a wider confab in the same room. About 20 of us are tapping away and talking here at 4PM. It may be hard to judge how well-subscribed this New Era is, lacking an Apple keynote or booth. That matters more to the organizers, who must impress the expo vendors, than attendees. There’s plenty to learn here, both at the booths as well as in conference sessions.

It helps if your blog already has an RSS/CSS feed, apparently, something that most blog services include as a tick-box. Yapper promises a means to create that brand-specific app for smartphones and perhaps the iPad too.

We’ll have a look at the tool when it makes its debut at Macworld next week. Early feature sets in the teaser information tout:

APPER (Your APP maker) is an online self-service for bloggers, newspapers, pod casters and others to make their own native mobile apps in WYSIWYG fashion. Key features:

• No coding required use existing RSS/ CMS feeds
• Multiple mobile OS support: iPhone, Android and Blackberry
• Optimized for mobile user experience: Mobile optimized UI (mobile friendly entire article content with images and videos), Content caching (users can read offline), Fast (no straight RSS feed parsing), Location enabled
• Customization options: colors and branding
• Push notifications for breaking stories and events
• Monetization and analytics support