Throughout March, the organizers of Macworld Expo 2010 are making the conference session presentations available to attendees. These are usually PowerPoint slide decks, and they are offered without audio commentary. But they are online this month at the Expo’s Web site, a real value for any attendee who couldn’t find enough time to sit in sessions and enjoy the riches of the show floor and keynotes.

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.

One of the busiest booths at last week’s Macworld 2010 Expo was one staffed by a 500-year-old company, showing a sparkling-new product. Papershow makes a presentation interactive over the Web or inside a meeting room. It relies on the magic of Papershow paper, a frame of microscopic points, almost invisible to the naked eye, which work as locators when a special pen moves across the sheet.

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.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

The 25 percent-off discount for Macworld Conference packages has been extended through midnight Pacific time Tuesday (Jan 5). The two-day extension includes the offer of a $10 Expo Pass, which can educate about business solutions as much as many training sessions.

But even one day of those sessions is only $79 through tomorrow night. Some reports show that more than 20,000 attendees are already registered for the first Macworld Expo that won’t have an Apple keynote or a booth. The conference begins in earnest Feb. 11 and features its first Saturday hours this year.

Register at the Expo Web site using the priority code MWHOLIDAY to get the discounts.

The Take Control Of e-book guides are on sale through the end of the year, Dec. 31, at the company’s Web site. These are well-written, easily-search guides to all level of Mac use, including some aspects of Apple computing that a business operator can benefit from.

We’ve reviewed the guide for securing WiFi, for example, and invested in our own copies of the Snow Leopard guides (Upgrading, Exploring and Customizing the newest OS version), the AirPort networking guide (essential if you set up an office net without yards and yards and cables) and even something as complicated and powerful as permissions.

From that last guide I got a tip on FileExaminer, a dandy $10 utility that sets permissions on files so you can transfer music and photos from one system to another without the vexing “permissions not sufficient” error box.

Take Control guides are written by the staff of TidBits, one of the very best Mac resources online. Tonya and Adam Engst have run the company for years as man and wife, a combination that delivers a broader range of strategies.

The guides, delivered as PDF files, cost as little as $5 in the current 50 percent off sale. It’s hard to find a better value for training.

It’s easy to forget how many strides Apple made since the Year 2000 to become a force in computing. This article from TechRadar.com sums up the magic, from the iPod to embracing Unix as the new Mac OS X to those stores jammed with customers for advice, repair and business counseling.

Here in Austin on Dec. 26, the busiest day of the retail year, the Apple store in The Domain retail village (shown at left) was buzzing with customers. I visited a handful of shops in this retail mecca and Apple’s was busiest. So busy, in fact, that the crowds were overwhelming the network that could connect them to schedules of free workshops and training. Of course, that mob at the end of the store might have been bringing in holiday gifts for the Geniuses to repair, or just getting on-the-spot training on a new tool. Or just asking why they couldn’t discover when the store’s network was going to be back up. In a legendary episode from the series Californication, our hero Hank writes his first paid blog entry from an Apple store and posts it.

The Apple Stores have their shortcomings — the red-shirted floor staff is wildly uneven in its expertise about the Mac line — but these places are a hub of face to face advice and counsel. One such overlooked resource is the One to One training, a year of lessons available for $99 that entitles you to a one-on-one session of an hour per week. It’s a great way to go deeper on an Apple solution, especially something like Numbers, Pages, or iPhoto, the software that Apple makes and nobody else seems to know how to teach.

One to One has its own limits, too, such as scheduling: the Apple Concierge Web site won’t let you book more than one session in advance. But even if you only used 10 visits out of 52 weeks, this would be a $9.90 consult. You can even bring your own laptop to train, and so take away more than just learning. You can finish a production.

The organizers of the biggest Apple show of the year are discounting registrations by 25 percent through midnight, Nov. 29. Use code CREATE25 as you check out of the registration site.

This year the conference includes a first ever Mac Work track in the User’s Conference. The eight sessions in the track are designed to ease a user into employing a Mac in a business environment. The session lineup:

Thursday, February 11
10:30 AM – 11:45 AM Branding Your Small Business Better
1:00 PM – 2:15 PM Mac at Work
3:00 PM – 4:15 PM The Paperless ‘Mac’ Office

Friday, February 12
10:30 AM – 11:45 AM SOHO Survival Guide
1:00 PM – 2:15 PM Connecting with Your Customers Using Snow Leopard

Saturday, February 13
10:30 AM – 11:45 AM Social Media Demystified

The User’s Conference also includes tracks on the new Snow Leopard environment, Music, Creative Tools, Video and a lot more. A discounted registration is less than $150 using the above code.

In these days before Palm’s Pre smartphone finally arrives, fans of that brand-new device are airing gripes about the iPhone. The iPhone isn’t perfect by a long shot. Especially to those who don’t own one and can’t become an ATT customer here in the US. But even if you do use Apple’s mobile device to help run your business, you might wish for iPhone features like multiple programs running all at once.

These self-professed “power users” of smartphones will enjoy iPhone Hacks, the latest O’Reilly Press book that shows every iPhone user how to add features like multitasking to the phone. Smartphones such as the iPhone are the ultimate portable computer, at their hearts. iPhone Hacks shows you how to take command of your mobile computer, to become king of all that rests in your palm.

The advice in this book runs from understanding what Apple permits its everyday users all the way to modifying hardware inside the iPhone. Along the way this book, with its copious photos, screen shots and step-by-step guidance, tells users about “jailbreaking,” another word for “opening the iPhone or iPod Touch to customization.” Read the rest of this entry »

David Pogue is amazing. The New York Times columnist (his Circuits writing is a fun must-read) has another life as an O’Reilly “Missing Manuals” author. His new Missing Manual on Digital Photography illuminates the sometimes-murky world of taking pictures with digital cameras. Even more important, Pogue sharpens the focus on what to do with the photos once you’re taken them.

Business users can overlook the power of pictures. The Web has become a high-value marketplace with social networks and blogs. Every one of these sites — Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, even free blogs on Blogger — is a marketing tool. And these messages from businesses stand out when they have a graphic element.

You could start with your own picture, and Pogue’s book begins with taking photos. He’s got a clear and illustrated 13-page Taking the Shot section right up front that answers questions of how to frame and shoot. This is all subjective, of course, but adding things like The Rule Guideline of Thirds shows flexibility. And Pogue has his own artistic sensibility, since he was a Broadway musical conductor in a prior career.

The book also covers 10 Decisions to make on camera options, like flash, manual mode, how much exposure. I’ve been taking photos for more than 25 years as a journalist, and Pogue’s advice refreshed me. Every enterprise has access to easier photography tools today. The basics are in this book, but it adds so much more in details, too. Read the rest of this entry »

Macworld Expo organizers have moved the 2010 conference and trade show back one month, into a more sensible February. It’s a welcome change for those of us who’ve been attending to learn, shop and network at the old early-January show dates.

The fate of the Feb. 9-13 conference, which Apple abandoned after this year, is not certain even though IDG World Expo has already said the event will happen no matter how much participation they get. The Expo organizers report that 90 exhibitors signed letters of intent to buy show floor space already. The cost per square foot has dropped, too. Best of all, free passes to explore the expo floor are available now.

As for attendees, the marketing has already begun many months earlier to get us to show up in those expo aisles. The word “conference” has been added to the event’s name, but every class and seminar is now packed into Moscone West; they once spread over two halls. But there’s decent learning on the expo floor, too. It’s worthwhile to make a trip to Macworld at least once if your business is built upon Macs and Apple products. It remains to be seen how much iPod commerce will fill the show aisles, rather than the higher-grade exhibition of business solutions in software and hardware. Read the rest of this entry »