In today’s world most of the companies are dispersed in different geographical location and information is exchanged through emails, it is very critical to have a secured way to communicate and exchange files. Most of the enterprises are looking ways to protect their data beyond anti-virus and firewalls.

Daily more identity thefts, security breaches are happening in different parts of country. It’s doubling day by day and companies are trying to develop new products to kill this problem. You can read latest news on security breaches below. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/02/data_breaches_skyrocket/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/30/ohio_hospital_hack/

Consumers have had hard time protecting their personal data, which is kept on their hard disks. Sometimes, these above news make them panic and persuade to look for more secured way of storing data. It is very difficult to protect the data loss and data theft.

But to some extent it can be prevented by incorporating latest encryption codes. Here is a solution that offer simple and easy to use for small businesses and consumers. Secure Zip by PKWARE combines file compression with encryption and an X.509 digital certification process to provide simple, effective email security without an expense security infrastructure…something small businesses can’t even entertain.

It is free for consumers / individual users for limited period. It can save and send secure documents directly from your Microsoft Office Suite. It is tightly integrated with other office email clients so that your email attachments are safe and secured. You can try the product by just providing your email id.

Securezip will protect all your stored data and transmitted data. SecureZIP is the industry-leading security and compression utility that zips and unzips files, greatly reducing transmission times and storage requirements, while securely protecting data in transit and at rest.

SecureZIP allows you to exchange data securely with a wide variety of systems including mainframe, midrange, server and desktop systems. It protects mail server gateways too. SecureZIP supports both passphrase and digital certificates, offering flexible security that meets varying requirements within business environments.

SecureZIP also improves processing efficiencies and security. Application Integration1 streams data directly in and out of the application. Other products require the zip file to be extracted into a data file before it can be read by an application. Application Integration eliminates this step, improving operational efficiency by reducing the number of steps needed to process data and security by not staging decrypted data to disk. Digital certificates also authenticate the file’s sender to assure recipients that the communication received can be trusted and has not been altered or tampered with in any way.

SecureZIP automatically installs an X.509 digital certificate and provides global directory services so files can be securely exchanged with others without requiring passwords. When a user sends an email and attachment, SecureZIP retrieves the public key of the recipient from the SecureZIP Global Directory and encrypts the information using that key. The recipient can then open the encrypted file using their private key.

More than 25,000 companies, including 60% of the Fortune 100, are using SecureZip. SecureZip recently launched its new and updated version SecureZip12.1. You can also have the review of this product at PC Magazine.

Jim Peterson
Chief Scientist
PKWARE

Jim Peterson – A biography

Jim Peterson is the Chief Scientist at PKWARE. Jim has been developing commercial software products for over 20 years. Since joining PKWARE in 1994, he has held various leadership roles in product development. He continues to drive the evolution of .ZIP technology, focusing on ensuring the ZIP format remains a secure and interoperable standard. Prior to joining PKWARE, Mr. Peterson held engineering roles at several companies where he was responsible for designing and developing healthcare management, warehouse automation, and financial accounting applications.

About PKWARE and SecureZIP

PKWARE, Inc., the largest global software company providing ZIP solutions, is the creator and continuing innovator of the ZIP standard for file compression. PKWARE products are used to ensure the security and portability of data across all major platforms. Hundreds of global organizations in financial services, banking, retail, healthcare, government, and manufacturing use PKWARE services daily.

It’s even pain if some clients insists a copy by snail mail. We have come up a simple solution to blending century old book keeping to new technology. Keeping financial record should be easy, fast, simple (and perhaps even fun), but still detailed enough to satisfy your accountant.

We have seen many people / companies are struggling with tools like Word and Excel for invoicing or with QuickBooks which is completely bloated for their needs.

Here an alternative and some relief to those who raises frequent invoices to clients. FreshBooks has made it very simple so that you create and send invoices in seconds. FreshBooks simplifies the billing process, transforms the way entrepreneurs and their customers look at invoicing.

FreshBooks is an easy to use online invoicing service that re-invents how professionals, freelancers and small businesses invoice their clients and helps them save time, get paid faster and look super professional. FreshBooks was built from the ground up to address the highest level invoicing needs/pains of our customers – saving time, getting paid faster and looking super professional. Your data deserves to be safe, secure, and accessible to you.

It also keeps track time and expenses. You can send your invoices by email and even by snail mail depending on your client’s requirement. You can automate the invoices and do a follow-up reminders for those who have not paid. All these are possible and automated too to make your life much easier. You can import and export your data and prepare a report too.

FreshBooks has tie ups with major online payment channels such as Paypal, Authorize.net and many more.

Save time:

If you only send 3 invoices a month, this new service will be a huge help because it will be so easy. No envelopes or stamps to buy. No trips to the mailbox. Sometimes it takes you weeks to get around to actually mailing your invoices. Now there will be no time wasted between when you want to invoice your client and when you do invoice them.

Time spent to do billing has been reduced. On average – 4.5 hours a week / billing cycle. Payment waiting time is cut by 14 days, on an average.

Save Money:

Take a moment and imagine you (or your client) have 5,000 clients that you manually send invoices to every month using the ground postal service. To mail all those invoices probably costs around $2,500/month in postage, plus materials, plus time and effort. The total expense is probably about $50,000/year plus a whole lot of wasted time. Ouch. How do you stop that kind of pain? By helping transition those 5,000 ground mail invoice clients to 5,000 online billing clients and by transitioning them smoothly.

Imagine saving about $50,000, just by sending your invoices by email instead of by post. It really could be that easy. The trick is to get your clients from “snail mail” to email to save that money, and that’s where FreshBooks comes in. That’s what we are going to help you, your clients and their clients do.

Most of the Freelancers, professionals and small businesses make up a massive market place. But they also make up one of the most under-serviced markets because individually they are small. People from 100+ countries are using FreshBooks and then nos are increasing.

You can test it before you become a FreshBooks user. To know about the different pricing options, click here.

Mike McDerment
CEO
FreshBooks

Mike McDerment – A biography

Mike McDerment is the CEO and co-founder of FreshBooks. An entrepreneur with two successful start-ups to his name, Mike talks faster than he writes and can deftly juggle and keep his eye on hundreds of balls at one time. Mike is a founder of the mesh conference, lecturer at Humber College and a frequent speaker at Internet conferences. See what Mike’s up to by reading his blog or catching his latest Twitter updates. Mike loves his work, and would rather be outdoors than inside.

We know billing is a pain. We know you have tried tools like QuickBooks, Excel and Word to create your invoices and manage your books. That’s why we built FreshBooks – because you need something that works well and gets the job of billing your clients done – without the pain. What pain you ask? The QuickBooks pain of having to do 100 steps to get one thing done. The Excel pain of poorly formatted invoices. The Word pain of keeping track of who has paid and how much remains outstanding.

We designed FreshBooks to attack those problems, and to create a solution that made it easy to handle billing and invoices.

You may not be familiar with CrowdSourcing, or the free, new software that’s designed to help remove unnecessary and damaging components from your Windows PC, but this looks very promising!

SlimWare Utilities officially launched SlimComputer this week which allows its users to collaborate together to determine which software on your computer is going help your performance, and which programs slow things down considerably.  CrowdSourcing is a new approach to building communities of people working together to solve problems, and is one of the biggest innovations in human interaction.

Check out this article about SlimComputer at USATODAY.com.

Currently more than 52% of Internet users are exposed to this problem due to ISPs who haven’t properly updated their DNS (Dynamic Name System) servers, but there’s a way you can tell if you’re at risk.

Visit www.doxpara.com and click on the “Check My DNS” button on the upper right side of the page.  It will run a series of tests for you, automatically, and tell you if your machine is at risk.  There’s another checker at DNS-OARC and one at the lower left corner of DNSstuff, but you don’t have to run all three.

Business personnel must check their DNS to ensure that there are not problems that could expose personal or proprietary data to criminal enterprises abroad.  Failure to do so could result in criminal prosecution for the company themselves  — it’s unlikely the true criminals will ever be caught.

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[Listen here to get the inside information from the people who make parallels about how it will help your Mac run Windows while it's still running the famous Mac Operating System!]

Parallels, an award-winning virtual machine packages, enables Mac users to run Windows, Linux or any other operating system and their critical applications at the same time as Mac OS X on any Intel-powered Apple computer. Since being made available in June 2006, the product is now in its 3rd generation.

Parallels is the company made famous for being the first to enable Macs with Intel processors to run Windows programs. In technologist terms, this was like solving the common cold – something people had wanted forever.

Since being launched, Parallels Desktop for Mac has been recognized with more than 30 major industry awards and was the first non-Apple product to ever win the MacWorld Magazine Reader’s Choice Award. Some other notable awards include the MacWorld Magazine’s “Editor’s Choice” Award (the “Eddy”) and PC World Magazine’s “Innovation of the Year” Award.

Now, about two years later, Parallels has sold more than 1 million copies of the Parallels Desktop for Mac software. It is the top-selling Mac utility program and sales have been made in 102 countries.

Is it coincidence in that time span the Apple Mac market share worldwide has climbed from approximately 3 percent to nearly 7 percent? Hardly … the Parallels software has eliminated the wall that previously existed between PCs and Macs and the virtualization technology has been a catalyst behind enterprise Mac adoption.

On 16th May, 2008, Ben received on behalf of Parallels the Red Herring 100 Award, a selection of the 100 most innovative private technology companies based in North America out of more than 800 closely-evaluated companies that are leading the next wave of innovation.

Ben Rudolph
Director of Communications
Parallels
Ben Rudolph – A biography

Ben has worked in both information technology and biotechnology and describes himself as a total tech nerd who loves tinkering with gadgets, hardware and software. In his role as the evangelist for Parallels that means he can either talk at the deep technical level with the “gearheads” or provide a “tech 101″ overview to someone who doesn’t know a USB port from a tawny port. Ben is a frequent and popular speaker at industry conferences and at Apple stores.

Parallels is a worldwide leader in virtualization and automation software that optimizes computing for consumers, businesses, and service providers across all major hardware, operating systems, and virtualization platforms. Founded in 1999, Parallels is a fast-growing company with 900 employees in North America, Europe, and Asia.

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You can run Windows on Mac. But it’s not possibile to run Mac on Windows. Apple is creating waves and business of Mac is growing at rapid pace. Apple’s retails stores have also been a factor in greater sales of Macs. Half of all sales at Apple Stores are to people who are new to Macs, according to Apple.

• Sales of Macs to Windows users have accelerated. This is partly (or primarily) because Macs can now run both its native operating system, Mac OS X, and Windows, making it the most versatile computer you can buy.
• Windows users are looking for an alternative to their current computer because they feel inundated with viruses, spyware, and hackers that take advantage of security flaws in Microsoft’s operating system.
• The use of Intel chips in Macs — the same as is used in Windows PCs — has changed the game, both for home and work use. The issue of Windows compatibility is largely erased as Apple hardware can now run Windows. Both home and business users can think of the ability to run Windows as a safety net – it’s there if they need it.
• Home use has started to affect the landscape in the office. As more home users buy and use Macs, they’re coming to their bosses and asking for Macs instead of Windows. As a result, Macs are now being considered by more workplaces than in the past. Even IBM is going to let its employees use Macs if they like.
• Apple’s marketing has been remarkably effective. The Mac vs. PC ads have become a cultural touchstone, and made more people interested in Macs who normally would not have been.

Although you can run Windows on a Mac, the reverse is not true – at least not legally. But hobbyists have figured out a way to run the Mac OS on some generic PC hardware, and one controversial company — Psystar - has actually started selling generic PCs with the Mac OS preinstalled.

Dwight Silverman
Author – Running Windows on your MAC
Houston Chronicle Columnist

Dwight Silverman – A biography

Dwight Silverman is the computing columnist and technology blogger at the Houston Chronicle and cohost of “Technology Bytes,” a weekly radio show on KPFT-FM. Dwight is also author of Running Windows on Your Mac, a new book published by Peachpit that reveals how to use Microsoft Windows on your Mac.

Berkeley-based Peachpit has been publishing the industry’s best-selling books on the latest in graphic design, desktop publishing, multimedia, Web design and development, digital video and general Macintosh computing since 1986. Its award-winning books feature step-by-step explanations, time-saving techniques, savvy insider tips, and expert advice for computer users of all sorts. It is the home of the internationally recognized Visual QuickStart Guide series, the design imprint New Riders and its highly popular Voices That Matter series, and is the publishing partner for Adobe Press, NAPP, Apple Certified, and others. Peachpit is part of Pearson, the international media company. Pearson’s primary operations also include the Financial Times Group and the Penguin Group. Learn more at www.peachpit.com and www.pearson.com

The Houston Chronicle is not only a newspaper, it’s a Web site that attracts about 2 million page views a day. Chron.com is the leading local Web site for reaching Houston’s online population. With more than 6 million unique visitors per month, chron.com is the city’s most visited local Web site, complete with up-to-the-minute breaking news and exclusive online content, including coverage in Spanish. The perfect complement to the printed Houston Chronicle, chron.com provides more expansive detail, story packages, links and the latest updates throughout the day.

Microsoft just this week announced a whole new user interface know as “The Surface”. This new 30 inch touch-sensitive table is topped by a computer screen whose surface is monitored by a series of cameras allowing it to see

everything that comes close to the screen. Check out the New York Times article to get more information.

This type of interface will change the face of computing, but it isn’t something new to Microsoft. As I already mentioned, Hollywood has been using this type of technology in the science fiction genre for years, and NYU researcher Jeff Han has been demonstrating this type of technology for more than eighteen months. Too bad Microsoft didn’t mention that in their press releases.

To see a good demo of the table and its use in business visit Popular Mechanics. The Microsoft Surface is truly cool! Too bad John Atherton will have to wait to wave his hands in the air to make things happen.

Palm has been falling behind cell phone manufacturers as they’ve been integrating new multi-media features into their hand-held devices. The Palm operating system hasn’t seen the types of upgrades it needed, and the company split into Palm and Treo — software and hardware companies. Treo phones, which I use, have been very popular and recently adopted both Palm and Microsoft Windows operating systems. Although the Windows versions has its problems (power being one of them), it has proven to be very popular, as it can handle newer multimedia applications.

Enter Palm’s secret project.

Palm just announced that it has been secretly developing a Linux operating system platform for the use of our ever-present hand-held devices, and will provide it with full multi-media capabilities. The units will be able to handle audio, video and a host of other functions.

What does it mean to consumers? Palm is saying that they will have three platforms that they official support – Palm OS, Windows CE and Linux – so your favorite version won’t go away. Moving to Linux, however, means that a substantial library of free software will become available and that many commercial applications will be able to move over to your cell phone due to ease of portability and features.

Your cell phone, though, will still be a cell phone, and it should work pretty much just like it does today. The future, however, is pretty promising.

Wrong.

Instead of fixing the root cause of their security problems, Microsoft decided that they would just release patches once a month — even when there were pressing security issues. This monthly patch cycle gives the impression to users that there are fewer problems. Hence, their regular monthly patches, and the reason why this patch is such a big deal.

If you are using Microsoft’s auto update feature, you’ll find that there’s a patch sitting there for you to fix a major problem with their handling of certain types of graphics. This particular bug is currently being exploited by organized crime and hackers world-wide.

Make sure you download this update and install it now. This is a very real problem, and a huge concern to business and home users alike. If you don’t use their auto update procedures, you can visit the Microsoft Security Advisory to grab a copy.