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LastPass is a free online password manager and Form Filler that makes your web browsing easier and more secure. LastPass supports IE and Firefox as Plugins (Opera, Safari, Chrome, iPhone, Opera Mini via Bookmarklets), allows you to import from every major password storage vendor and export too, captures passwords that other managers won’t including many AJAX forms, and allows you to make strong passwords easily. Your sensitive data is encrypted _locally_ before upload so even LastPass cannot get access to it. One Time Passwords & Screen Keyboard help protect your master password.

Wow – this has it all. It is cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux), and has browser plug-ins for IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. It does form filling, identities, and secure notes. It will import your passwords from IE and Firefox and then asks if it can erase the passwords from those browsers (previous articles have discussed how insecure those are, if anyone else has access to your computer). It will also import passwords from practically every other password manager available.

The security model is tight, and offers a couple of levels of security vs. convenience, depending upon how much access others may have to your computer. You can decide whether it logs out automatically when you close the browser.

Your passwords are strongly encrypted and stored online so you can access them from any computer and keep them synchronized. Of course, there is a strong password generator. You can also click to clear the local cache. You can install a pocket version on a usb key for when you need passwords but don’t have an internet connection.

Now for the really cool features:

1. It allows you to create one-time passwords in advance that you can use when in a public location. Even if someone looks over your shoulder or films your keystrokes surreptitiously, the password you use will never work again.

2. You can set it up for two-factor authentication. You can either use sesame with a usb key, or……….you can use your………..(drum roll)……YUBIKEY!.

3. There are mobile versions for the Blackberry, the iPhone, Windows Mobile, Android, and Symbian.

How much for all these features, along with phone support? $12 per year. If you want to pass on the mobile versions, Yubikey support, and the sesame support, the price is $0.

I think I have tried every password manager available and this one has all the features of Roboform and more. There are features I have not even mentioned.

LastPass is the last password you will ever need. It allows you to:

- Create strong passwords, knowing you only have to remember one.
- Automatically fill out forms to save you time
- Log into your favorite sites with a single click
- Access and manage your data from multiple computers seamlessly
- Share logins with friends and let others share logins with you
- Use One Time Passwords, and a Screen Keyboard to help keep you safe while on the road.
- Supports IE as well, so if you switch browsers you’re always in sync, as well as when you switch computers
- Supports Opera, Google Chrome, Safari, iPhone, Opera Mini, via Bookmarklets
- Supports importing passwords from other password managers such as Roboform, Keepass, PasswordSafe, MyPasswordSafe, Sxipper, TurboPasswords, PassPack, Firefox and IE’s built in password manager
- Exporting your data always available in plugin and the website, even back to Firefox.
- In windows, helps you recover lost passwords stored on your computer
- Capture passwords that other password managers will not capture like those done in AJAX logins, and multi-step logins like Bank Of America, and frustrating sites like ING bank using the ‘Save All Entered Data’ feature.
- Make moving to a new computer or using multiple computers much easier
- Mobile access at http://m.lastpass.com

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Earlier this week, Windows 7 became the highest grossing pre-order product in Amazon history. The much-anticipated OS has already been a huge success before its much-hyped Thursday launch.

“Microsoft has said it is expecting 300 million sales by 2012; IDC has projected by the end of 2010 there will be 177 million sales. If Microsoft misses either of these targets, it will definitely not be a successful launch,”

The new system — which is faster, less cluttered and has new touch-screen features — comes almost three years after the launch of Vista, whose complexity frustrated many home users and turned off business customers.

The success of Windows — which accounts for more than half of Microsoft’s profit — is crucial for Chief Executive Steve Ballmer to revive the company’s image as the world’s most important software company.

PCWorld
“…the final shipping version I test-drove appears to be the worthy successor to Windows XP that Vista never was.”

NYTimes
“[Microsoft's] three-year Windows Vista nightmare is over.”

IT Pro
“Windows 7…is competent and functional due to internal improvements and the user interface is attractive and good for productivity.”

bit-tech
“For want of a better way of describing it, Microsoft has essentially fixed Vista and the result is arguably Microsoft’s best operating system to date.”

Maximum PC
“…Windows 7 is unquestionably the best version of Windows that Microsoft has ever released, and is the true successor to Windows XP.”

Tech Radar
“No version of Windows is ever perfect, but Windows 7 really is the best release of Windows yet.”

PC Mag
“It’s far and away the best OS we’ve ever seen from Microsoft.”

Wall Street Journal
“I believe it is the best version of Windows Microsoft has produced.”

Telegraph
“Windows 7 is the operating system Vista should have been…”

Hexus
“This is the operating system that Windows Vista should have been.”

Laptop Mag
“If Vista left you somewhat disillusioned with Windows, we suggest you upgrade to Windows 7.”

Computer World
“…it’s finally time to upgrade.”

If you’ve been keeping up with Windows 7 news, you know one of the selling points is a less annoying UAC system.

The biggest change in Windows 7 is the new User Account Control “slider” setting, where you can choose your own balance between annoyance and security—but behind the scenes, Microsoft reduced the amount of actions that will prompt you. The 7 Tutorials blog ran down a list of common actions that triggered a UAC prompt in Windows Vista, but don’t in Windows 7, concluding that:

…in Windows 7 you will not encounter UAC prompts in at least 11 of the scenarios where Windows Vista triggered one.

System Requirements

According to Microsoft:

• 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
• 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
• 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

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The Fitbit is a small, wireless, rechargeable device that can be worn on your pants, shirt, wrist, or undergarments, and tracks how far you walked, how many calories were burned, and even your sleep patterns.

The Fitbit Tracker uses a three-dimensional accelerometer, similar to that in the Wii Remote, to sense user movement. Like many pedometers, the Tracker measures steps taken, distance walked, calories burned, and activity duration and intensity. It uses an OLED display to display this and other information such as the battery level. It also measures sleep quality: how long it takes the wearer to fall asleep, how often they wake up over the course of the night, and for how long they are actually asleep.

A wireless base station is included to receive data from the Tracker and also charge its battery. When connected to a computer the base station will upload data to the Fitbit website (which is required for use). From the website, a number of features are possible: seeing an overview of physical activity, setting and tracking goals, keeping food and activity logs, and interacting with friends. Use of the website will be free, though James Park has indicated there are plans to add premium subscriptions in the future.

The alternative: If you’re an iPod owner, and not all that interested in tracking your non-workout time, the Nike+iPod combo is a cheaper solution. The newest line of iPods actually have Nike+ receivers built in, so the chip alone only runs you $20.

There are thousands of items in the database to select for, and full nutritional information including protein, saturated fat, and fiber is stored for them. That’s great, but it’s impossible to get that data back out in a report. There is a selection of nice looking pie and bar charts showing caloric burn vs. intake, your weight, and a few others, but that’s it. If you want to see if you’d been downing enough protein to get ripped but not enough to send yourself into ketosis you won’t be able to do it here, nor can you track your water intake or any specific nutrient.

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Tungle is the industry’s first calendar accelerator. By syncing with your existing calendar, you get all the scheduling and calendar sharing benefits of Tungle without having to switch to a new system.

Tungle’s biggest asset is that it integrates seamlessly with Outlook, Google Calendar, iCal for Mac OS X and Entourage for Mac. Support for Lotus Notes is coming soon. Tungle basically hooks into your existing calendar and keeps track of when you are busy and when you are free.  That way, if someone wants to propose a meeting time to you, they can instantly select times that they know you aren’t busy. Keep using your Google, Outlook, iCal or Entourage calendar – Just sync it with Tungle and you’ll be able to:

• Easily schedule meetings with anyone
• Share calendars inside or outside your company, even with people on different calendar platforms
• Choose what you share and who with – choose between free/busy or full details
• Enable your personal link so people can see your availability and schedule meetings with you
• Tungle is free, easy, and works hand-in-hand with your existing e-calendar.

Tungle combines the best features of a variety of calendar syncing and meeting scheduling tools and rolls them all into one. With Tungle you can quickly jump from your existing calendar application to sending invites to your team members, checking their calendars even if you all use different applications, and optimizing everyone’s schedule for the best meeting times. Check out the demonstration video below to see Tungle in action:

Tungle is a free service and is accessible by the Tungle site, an iPhone app, a Firefox plugin for Google Calendar, and a variety of apps for various social calendars.

If you set-up the Tungle.me service, you can offer up your available/busy times to outsiders, so they can see what is going on and schedule a meeting with you. The best part is, the details of your meetings are never revealed, it just shows that you are busy if you choose to make your availability information public.

Tungle also has a Facebook () application and can integrate with Ning, Xing () and LinkedIn ().

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Google has previewed a new technology called Wave that combines collaboration with chat, e-mail, event planning, document sharing, and nearly anything else you can think of.

What is a wave? A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when. A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Some key technologies in Google Wave
Real-time collaboration	Natural language tools	Extending Google Wave
Concurrency control technology lets all people on a wave edit rich media at the same time. Watch the tech video	Server-based models provide contextual suggestions and spelling correction. Watch the tech video	Embed waves in other sites or add live social gadgets, thanks to Google Wave APIs.

When you log into Wave, the default view is a three-column, 4-module layout. From left to right, the first column includes Navigation on top (think of this as your Inbox, Sent, and labels in Gmail) and Contacts below (think of this as your GTalk buddy list). The second column is the list of active waves in your Inbox, and the third column is where you can start a new wave or open a wave.

When someone updates a wave in your inbox, it turns bold and moves to the top of your inbox—just like email. If a contact of yours is online, a little green dot appears on his or her icon.

All the modules are collapsible and dock themselves in the upper part of the screen. If you’ve collapsed your inbox and a new wave gets updated, it flashes green. Here I’ve clicked on new wave and minimized all the other modules to expand my workspace.

You can add all sorts of rich content to your wave, like a YouTube video, Google Map, image, links, or anything that a gadget enables. (More on gadgets below.) Here I’ve added some colored text and embedded a video clip in my wave.

When I finish typing and click the Done button on my wave, Wave pops up the “Add participants” module so I can share my wave with anyone on my contacts list. You can search for a contact by name, or just drag and drop anyone to the wave you choose.

Once you’ve shared a wave, the magic starts to happen. At first you’ll swoon over the ability to watch your co-waver type in real-time. It’s weird in a good, we’re-living-in-the-future way to see another person’s cursor hard at work outputting characters, key by key on your own screen. But you get over that novelty pretty quickly. (Most likely your IM client can do that; anyone who’s used collaborative editors like SubEthaEdit has seen this as well.)

You can reply to an entire wave like an IM or an email by clicking the reply button on a wave’s toolbar. But what’s most cool is the ability to reply to bits of a message inline. This lets you and your collaborators annotate the wave as you go.

For example, I gave a talk about Wave here in San Diego, and prepared my talk notes in a wave. At the beginning, I did an audience survey to gauge the level of experience with Wave-like technology. I was able to insert replies to the questions in Wave as I went. (Even better would have been to have a co-presenter or note-taker do that for me.)

You can collapse or expand inline comments easily. Here’s what the talk wave looks like with comments collapsed. Notice the small talk bubbles on the top Audience survey section.

Here’s what that same wave looks like with inline comments expanded.

Your replies inside or to a wave can also be marked as private; so if Jack and Jill and I are collaborating on a wave and Jill wants to tell me something about Jack in-wave that Jack shouldn’t see, she can click on the drop-down on the upper right of a wave and choose “Private Reply” as shown.

Once you’ve entered your private reply, Wave prompts you to add participants to just that reply. That’s because every reply is a wave in and of itself. You can create a new wave from any reply or copy a wave to a new wave, too.

Besides real-time updates, another “holy crap” feature of Google Wave is wave revision playback. If someone adds you to a wave late in the game, after lots of conversation and annotation has already happened, you can click on the playback button to see how it was constructed over time. Think of this like a slideshow through Wikipedia page revisions. Here’s a quick video clip of what playback looks like on a wave I was in on this morning.

Just like Gmail, Google Wave offers powerful advanced search operators, wave tagging, file uploads (though those are wonky for me in the dev preview), and saved searches. In addition to tags, Wave also offers folders. Folders! The interface is completely drag-and-drop: you can grab any wave and drag it to the trash or a folder.

Wave Extensions: Gadgets and Robots

Wave is a completely extensible platform, like Firefox. Wave extensions come in two flavors: gadgets and robots.

A gadget is a piece of rich content that you can add to a wave. A few example gadgets are available in the Gadget gallery.

Click on the puzzle piece on a wave’s toolbar to add a gadget to the wave. One useful gadget is the “Who is Coming?” gadget that lets you invite folks to an event and get RSVPs quickly and easily.

The most useful gadget I’ve seen so far is the Ribbit conference call gadget. Add it to a wave, and everyone adds their phone number to it. (You only see your own number, not everyone else’s.) Click the “Start Conference” button, and everyone’s phone rings—and you’re on the phone, while you collaborate on a wave.

For more on the Ribbit Wave gadget, check out Rafe Needleman’s review.

Robots are email addresses that you add to your contact list. Then, when you are in need of their services, you add a bot to a wave so they can perform some action on its contents. A robot can modify the contents of a wave, and several already exist that do silly to useful actions.

For example, Eliza the Robot Shrink (elizarobot@appspot.com) will chat with you about anything—useful when you’re the only one of your friends who has a Wave invite and you’ve no one to talk to.

More usefully, the Bloggy bot (blog-wave@appspot.com) will publish a wave onto a Blogger blog for you. For example, I have Bloggy in my contacts, and added it to my Wave talk wave as shown here. Notice the “Bloggy published this wave here” message in yellow at the top of the wave.

Other bots do things like automatically link Twitter usernames to their Twitter page, clean up empty replies (which proliferate quickly for some reason), and insert stock quotes. I expect we’ll see tons more gadgets and bots bloom over the next year. Here are some more featured Wave extensions, courtesy of Google.

But What Will We Use Google Wave For?

The most frequent question I get about Google Wave is: “But what would I use it for?” Personally I can’t wait to use it to take meeting minutes collaboratively and to co-write documents like blog posts and articles online with my editors and co-conspirators. Instead of using something like Campfire or IRC to chat, I could see using Wave as group chat—but with inline and private replies, which are key.