Walk around in your own wireless cloud

This about-to-be released MiFi card really looks cool.  You can carry your own wireless cloud with you and share it with up to four other users. There are lots of very interesting possibilities, including, as one poster noted, saving a lot of money if you exhibit at trade shows where they charge through the nose for Internet access.

Here's David Pogue's review.

Here's his CNBC interview.

Release date is May 17,  2009.

A Bounty of Law Practice Tips

I try to bring you lots of different tips to allow you to practice law better. But it is rare that I get to pass along so many tips at one time. That is because the March 2009 edition of Law Practice Magazine is once again a technology tips theme issue. 

The idea is to promote ABA TECHSHOW. The result is a great collection of tips on everything from e-discovery to paperless practice to expanding your web presence to easy online collaboration.

You really don't want to miss this issue of Law Practice Magazine. To make sure you don't miss future useful issues, you can either join the ABA Law Practice Management Section if you are an ABA member or subscribe to Law Practice magazine if you are not.

Meanwhile, enjoy the great content in the online version of  the magazine.

Site of the Week: Wired.com

For years, if you wanted to read cutting-edge, mind expanding, futuristic material, you just had to grab a copy of Wired magazine or go to its website. While many say staff changes and the passage of time has caused Wired to lose its edge, I submit the following collection from its most popular and "most commnented" articles to make the case that Wired has still got it.

12 Good Gadgets for Hard Times

6 New Web Technologies of 2008 You Need to Use Now

Diary of a Self-Help Dropout: Flirting With the 4-Hour Workweek

Top Technology Breakthroughs of 2008

The Top 10 Green-Tech Breakthroughs of 2008

Ok, you may think that last one has nothing to do with law office management or legal technology. Maybe. But you don't have to have a very good crystal ball to see lots of legal work in the "green law" field over the next several years.

Tech Toys for the Holidays 2008

The now-Annual Tech Toys for the Holidays edition of the Digital Edge podcast is now available. Sharon Nelson and I had a lot of fun with this one and there are a lot of very interesting products covered. Even if you don't have time to listen to the entire podcast, we have included a list of products with links to most of them in our "show notes" section of the podcast. But you should listen to get the full effect.

As many of you know, this podcast is now hosted at the Law Practice Today ezine. There is a new product review section in the ezine and two of the products I mentioned in the podcast are reviewed there. I have to confess to being infatuated with both of these products, even though I don't own either yet. Oklahoma City lawyer Mary Beth Guard reviews the Pulse Smartpen (and Dot Paper) by Livescribe and the Eye-Fi SD card. Mary Beth is a first time contributor to Law Practice Today. I'll bet you enjoy her reviews as much as I did. We hope to have her do this again in the future.

I also direct your attention to the GPSolo 2008 Shopping Guide to Holiday Techno-Gifts by Jeffrey Allen and Alan Pearlman. This is a long article covering many (and I do mean many) products from computers to smart phones to telephone accessories to MP3 players to hand held recorders.The print magazine version is prettier with pictures of the products, but the online version has live links.

Finally, from National Public Radio's Day to Day, Brian Westbrook has his Top Five Gadget Gifts. You can listen or read the brief summaries.

Reid Trautz's 2008 Holiday Gift Guide for Lawyers

My friend, Reid Trautz, has published his 2008 Holiday Gift Guide for Lawyers. Lots of fun and interesting items are included there. This is a good opportunity for the lawyer to drop electronic hints to family members. A November e-mail with "Oh, I was just surfing the Internet and found this cool gadget. Here's the link. Isn't that interesting?" doesn't even really sound like a hint, does it? In mid-December, Sharon Nelson and I will let you hear our "Tech Toys for the Holidays" Digital Edge podcast. There will not be much overlap with Reid's holiday list.

Time Magazine's "25 Gotta Have Travel Gadgets"

Well, in my ever-challenging quest to keep you, my readers, on the cutting edge of technology advances, I am compelled to pass along to you 25 Gotta Have Travel Gadgets from that old media giant, Time magazine.

This list really illustrates so many changes, both in society generally and specifically for the business traveler. A laptop and mobile phone are the minimum business requirements for the road warrior, with the iPod or MP3 player on the personal "must have" list. How many of these items were only sci fi entertainment just a decade ago? I noted interesting GPS devices, the Kindle, a drinking water sanitizer, the HP EliteBook 6930p Laptop that can fold down and scan business cards with the built in camera, all sorts of power accessories and Apple's Airport Express, which can serve as your light and inexpensive portable wireless hub for hotel room stays or meetings. Check them out. You may find something you can't live without.

Choosing Your Cordless Mouse

I was a bit late to change to change to using a cordless mouse. The cord didn't really bother me all that much. Of course, like so many things in life, once you try the upgrade, you're hooked. When I started using a laptop fulltime, I found that I would often leave the wired mouse at the office when I traveled. It was just too big a hassle to unplug the cord from the docking station, wind it up and put it in my laptop bag. When I got a cordless mouse, I still had to remember to get the mouse transmitter unplugged from the USB, but it was a much more easily used travel companion. Of course the main reason to use a cordless mouse is that it is much more comfortable to use in most daily working situations.

When my last cordless mouse gave up the the ghost, I shopped a bit and found reviews of a really nice wireless mouse, the Logitech VX Nano. It is great for the road warrior because the USB transmitter is so tiny you can just leave it in the computer all of the time. Mine even fits in a USB port on my laptop within a half an inch of the docking station that I couldn't use for anything anyway. It came with a nice traveling case.

Of course as soon as you buy something a newer or better product comes out. In my case it was Jeff Beard, who published "What's New in Cordless Mice?" on his Law Tech Guru blog in December. Well thankfully for my piece of mind, Jeff liked my new mouse well enough, although it was not his favorite. Read Jeff's blog post and you will be able to impress all of your friends with your knowledge of the cordless mouse landscape. Well, OK, you may not want to brag about it at cocktail parties, but at least you'll have a good idea of which cordless mouse you'd like to own. (And, who knows, if I read Jeff's review often enough I may decide to become a dual cordless mouse owner.)

Tech Toys for the Holidays

With so many holiday gift guides popping up online, Sharon Nelson and I decided to cover "Tech Toys for the Holidays" for the November edition of our podcast, The Digital Edge: Lawyers and Technology. On the same page as the podcast, you will see the links to and prices for the various tech toys, ummm, I mean important technology tools that we cover.

Reid Trautz's 2007 Holiday Gift Guide for Lawyers

Just in time for the kickoff of holiday shopping season is Reid Trautz's 2007 Holiday Gift Guide for Lawyers. It includes lots of interesting ideas for presents for lawyers and laypeople alike, delivered with Reid's typical understated humorous style. "OK, I want that and that and ...."

Courtney Kennaday, Practice Management Advisor for the South Carolina Bar sent me an e-mail today noting another nifty gadget, the Drive eRazer, a bit of hardware that permanently erases data from a hard drive, allowing the hard drive to be safely re-used or donated to a charity. Now if you think that might make a great holiday gift for a lawyer or law firm administrator, well, you really need a serious attitude adjustment.

Jott: Extremely Useful Utility

I've just been using Jott for two days, but I really like it. I've received a couple of good reviews from other users and so I'll encourage my readers to give it a test drive. How many times do you have a bright idea in an odd location or think of something you need to remember to do at work? In a perfect world, you'd be carrying a pad and jot a note to yourself. (And in a perfect world, you'd even remember to take the note to work.)

I know I'm not the only one who has called my own number to leave myself a voice mail reminder. With Jott, I can do that in a much more usable form. I have Jott's 800 number to call on my mobile phone. I can talk for up to 30 seconds. It will then send me an e-mail with the text of what I dictated by voice and a link to the audio file in case the voice recognition software didn't get it correctly. By receiving text instead of just voice mail, it is easy to copy and paste into a calendar or to do list or e-mail to another. Of course that's how a Jott to me works. But I can also add others to my contacts in Jott and identify them by voice command to send them voice-dictated e-mail as well. It will import contacts from many popular e-mail programs including GMail and Outlook. Visit Jott.com for more info or to set up your account.

There's not much risk in trying it. It is free and you do not have to load any software on your phone or PC. You do need to to have access to both your e-mail and your mobile phone for verification when you set it up. Jott obviously retains the text for at least a time, so it is not for confidential matters. It is in public beta. There may be ads later. Jott has been available for a few months. I'm really glad I tried it.