Webware

I'm at the Conversational Marketing Summit, listening to a chat between organizer John Battelle and Intuit founder Scott Cook. Batelle is asking about Intuit's online presence. Cook says he'd move all his business online in a heartbeat if he could, but that many QuickBooks business customers don't want to run their accounts online. And not for reliability or accessibility reasons.

Rather, Cook says, his customers want to know where their data is at all times, since in many cases, they're keeping somewhat fictional accounts for their tax reports. Should the IRS come knocking, Cook says, "Format C:..."

You can't do that on a Web drive. Something to keep in mind if you're building a Web service for business.

Printing at a FedEx Kinko's can be a real pain. You have to deal with a foreign computer and pray that its software is working, which can be tough if you've got a Word 2003 file that won't open in Word 2000. To improve this experience, FedEx Kinko's is rolling out Print Online, a Web-based application that lets you print out various documents from your own computer. You can also pay for things online, which means not having to deal with loading up a special card with the funds to get the job done.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Print Online lets you pick the location of the FedEx Kinko's where you want your documents printed, along with options to get them delivered using FedEx. If you are putting together a job that uses several files or needs inserts, you can just add, remove, or reorder the files on a master list. There's currently no image support though, so you're limited to whatever you can add inside of your usual Microsoft Office, PDF, and text files.

It took Kinko's a long time to get this service going. You normally can't get a service like this unless you're doing a large print job through a professional printing shop, or you're willing to pay a premium to work with a shop that handles the shipping too. I'd like to see some image support and maybe some document visualization beyond an ordered upload list, but it's nice to have the printing and shipping combined in a way that makes sense for people who can't always leave what they're doing to deal with brick-and-mortar print shops.

Enough already with the combo clock-weather stations. They've become as commonplace as the $6.99 digital alarm clocks behind the counter at Walgreens, next to the batteries and razor blades.

(Credit: Akihabara News)

This uber-clock, by contrast, gives you the stuff you really want to know when you wake up: stock news, traffic bulletins, the Monday Night Football score and the latest on Britney's divorce and sex tape scandal. And you can set your MP3 tunes or Internet radio for the alarm. As its name implies, the award-winning "WidgetStation" displays your custom widget feeds on one of its two screens, according to Akihabara News; the other shows the standard time, date, temperature and tomorrow's forecast.

But we could do without that last part. Given the track record of most meteorologists we know, we'll take a chance on our own.