Way back in the day my friend and co-worker had this idea for web site where a couple of different authors (myself being one) would put articles on various subjects – he was going to call it something like mrmojo.org. I know, doesn’t sound very revolutionary, but keep in mind this was back in at least 1999, before everyone and their sister had a blog.

Not sure what else to do with it, and it gave me a laugh re-reading it, so enjoy or don’t – your call…

To e or not to e…

eBusiness? must be cutting edge. eCommerce? Have it or die. Right? Fedex.com? What was wrong with Federal Express? Today’s business world seems stuck on catch words and phrases, with no real idea what they are saying – or maybe they don’t know what to say, so they use “cool” words to make them sound cutting edge. After all, if cutting edge is good, then bleeding edge is better, right?

Engineers and those in the computing world have always been in love with making new words. DOS (Disk Operation System), IBM (International Business Machines), ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) are just a few of the new words that have become standard – at least in the geek world that I live – but which we have either forgotten what they mean or don’t really care. There are some words, such as CMOS, whose source – I guess I should be ashamed to admit this – is completely lost to me. Feel free to correct this shortfall in my knowledge, or to submit obscure contractions of your own.

Thus eMail was a natural contraction of Electronic Mail, but how do you justify calling something eBusiness? As it is commonly used and understood today, eBusiness is generally used to mean the process of a company selling its products on the world wide web, but how is this any more electronic than the grocery store that allows you to pay for your groceries with an ATM or credit card? Where does it stop? eToys – buying a board game on the Internet makes it electronic? eBay – who would guess that they do online auctions? The marketing departments have run rampent naming their products using words whose meaning they have no idea. If it sounds so good, how can it be wrong?

And since when did adding a .com onto the name of your business make any sense? Besides Saks Fifth Avenue, when else has a business named itself after its address? Federal Express decided that they could not keep their name as it was, but instead they felt that they needed to rename themselves after their web address. 1800flowers.com? is that their web address? Their phone number? Their name? I guess in this case it is all three, but couldn’t they have put a little more effort into comming up with a real name? I guess it is just an attempt on the part of the marketing departments to make themselves sound like a company on the cutting edge of technology.

The current fad of adding a e to the front of what you do, or a .com to the end of your business name will sometime lose favor when too many businesses have done it and it is everywhere and no longer is it something that sets apart the company. Then it will (hopefully) lose favor and then all the companies will need to change their names or look like the are selling out of date products or that their business is behind the times.

Thanks for reading my eColumn.

I now have a serious case of “want it, Want It, WANT IT, WANT IT NOW!”

I knew someone would do this someday, I just did not know it would be so soon – this is cooler than cool!

Wi-Fi SD Card for Cameras

My only complaint – they should have made it Bluetooth so that it could go straight to your computer and not need the Wi-Fi network… Carry around your computer, and every picture you take, anywhere, would be more or less instantaneously on your computer.