Have you been away from your home base and your gadget battery was dead, or close to it, and there was no electrical outlet anywhere? Or have you been at the airport, coffee house, or bookstore, and the few available outlets were taken? Me too. That’s why I’m so excited about the iGo. It’s a battery and charger in one. You can use it to charge various gadgets without an outlet, just by changing the tip.
I made this quick video to demo using my iGo to charge my iPhone (you can order various tips to fit whatever gadget you use, including a laptop).
You can purchase the iGo from Amazon (this is a link to the unit I purchased on Amazon for my iPhone) where it’ll probably be less expensive than buying from the manufacturer. Two tips came with this order: one for my iPhone and an extra tip for a BlackBerry. Other tips are available, if not on Amazon, check out iGo.com.
So don’t get caught with another dead battery and nowhere to plug it up. Impress your friends and colleagues with this simple but powerful technology and charge your battery anywhere with iGo. Let me know what you think.
Send Your Product for Reviews
If your company manufacturers a gadget or software that improves productivity or helps with small business marketing, send it my way to review. First, email me with a brief description of your product and include a link to your Website. I’ll respond if I’m interested. No returns. Thank you!
I just found this free tool on the blog, Super Easy Video, that I used to create a 3D wall of all my YouTube videos from my channel, Digitalbreakthroughs. The product, CoolIris Express is in beta, and it’s free and easy to use (you can also use it to create a 3D wall of photos). I’ve created a demo to show you how I did it.
Use the slider and click a video to play it.
Video – How to Use Cooliris Express
I recorded this quick video (no voice-over) to show you how easy it is to use CoolIris Express.
Last Friday, I produced another successful seminar as part of my lunch ‘n learn series, Digital Breakthroughs. The room was full of meeting planners, small business owners, and employees from local corporations and universities.
After the seminar, I created the video below using a combination of digital photos, videos, and text.
Downloaded all photos and video footage from my iPhone and Flip camcorder to my laptop.
Opened photos in Microsoft’s Windows Live Photo Gallery.
Cropped photos I wanted to use, and deleted the ones I didn’t need.
Uploaded the photos and a jpeg of the flyer I’d used to promote the training to Animoto.com into a new project.
Back on my computer, I had to edit some of the videos.
Converted videos from the seminar that were on my Flip camcorder to Windows format using Movavi Video Converter (the next camcorder I purchase will produce videos in a Windows format so I can skip this step).
Started a new project in Camtasia and edited some of the footage into two, 10 second clips so I could add them to the Animoto project. I rendered each of these videos to the Flash format.
Back on Animoto.com, I worked with the main video.
Added my edited video clips to the project.
Created a couple of text slides.
Created the video and exported it to YouTube.
Now on YouTube, I did the following.
Opened the main video in YouTube’s Video Editor.
Added all the video clips of testimonials from attendees and trimmed them in YouTube’s Video Editor to capture only a few seconds.
Added a slide transition between each clip.
Saved all this as a new project in YouTube, added the title, description, and keywords.
Added annotations to the video: one with the URL to my Website and another with a live link to my YouTube channel’s homepage.
Published the finished video.
Note: If this had been a video I’d use multiple places and various ways, I’d have done Steps 2 and 3 inside Camtasia.
I’ve made this list of what we can do the next time to shorten this process.
Get a camcorder that records in a Windows format. If I have anything that will need editing on my laptop software, I won’t have to convert first.
Record 7-10 second video clips of the speaker in action. This would eliminate the need to edit later.
Take tighter photos to eliminate the need to crop.
Take horizontal and vertical photos, mostly horizontal. This will add more variety to the video. All or most videos will be horizontal.
Walk into the audience and take photos instead of from the same angles. This way, different people will appear in the shots.
Capture the diversity of the audience. It was great and we need to showcase this. I’m going to set up my Flip video camcorder on another tripod and record the audience.
Pay more attention to the venue lighting.
If all this sounds like a lot of work, it’s not when you know what you’re doing. And it beats watching junk on TV any day!
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Click to Tweet is a free tool that makes it easy to create a customized message you want tweeted. I created one below and hyperlinked the URL to my Facebook Like button below.
Here’s how it works.
Write the message you want to share in the box (it’ll need to read as if it’s coming from the person who’s sharing the link so don’t use “we” or “I” or “our” for example). Be sure to include your hashtag if you have one and keep your message with at least 15 characters to spare (leaving enough characters for the tweeter’s handle and RT).
Click the Generate button to create a custom link.
I was fixing some broken links in various blog posts using the WordPress plugin, Broken Link Checker. As I was working my way down the list of broken links, I clicked the wrong command and deleted the whole post.
My blog is backed up so I didn’t panic, but I would have had to take several steps to retrieve an individual file from the backup or pay my hosting company $75.00 to restore my entire blog. Neither of those solutions appealed to me, especially since I would have lost all the work I’d done repairing all those broken links.
Then I remembered Google’s cached pages.
Google takes a snapshot of each page it examines and caches (stores) that version as a backup. Since practically every search result includes a Cached link, I knew I stood a good chance of recovering my file the free and easy way. Here’s what I did.
Put the title of the blog post I’d deleted into Google’s search box and found the link to it on the first page of results.
Held the mouse over the result, and a double chevron appeared >>. Held my mouse over that to see a preview of my site.
Click Cached (if you get an error message, try a different browser),
When I click Cached, up popped my blog post I’d deleted!
A quick copy and paste onto a blank post page had the article fully restored. And since my images were still stored, they appeared in all the right places. I wanted to make sure the link to my post wouldn’t be broken so I was careful to type the title exactly as the original.
Google saved the day! And sometimes, Yahoo will (when you can’t find what you’re looking for in Google, try Yahoo.com.
Last Friday, I produced another successful seminar as part of my 
