I didn’t use teleflip very often, but on the occasions that I want to send an SMS to someone’s cell phone and didn’t have mine handy, it was extremely convenient.  Just send an email to <domest cell phone number>@teleflip.com, and teleflip would deliver it to the cell phone almost instantly. (Apparently there was also a reverse SMS to Email service called Flipout, but I never had the occasion to use that. )

I didn’t think much of it when a Teleflip I sent the other day returned a “delayed” message; email systems are sometimes just not working.  I didn’t need it much with my recent SmartPhone acquisition and “all you can eat” talk - data - text phone contract. When I got a follow delay message and couldn’t access the Teleflip web site, I took out the trusty Google, and learned that Teleflip had discontinued its (free) email to sms service mid August.  The company was working with other services, which apparently didn’t sell very well and the money ran out.  And, of course, I wasn’t the only one who didn’t need the service any more.

There’s a lot of that going around in the Tech sector these days.

I haven’t the foggiest idea of what US Customs Trademark Recordation is, but if I did, I’d probably use CompuLaw to make sure I didn’t miss any deadlines.

David Kalmick, President/CEO of CompuLaw LLC, publisher of calendar/docket matter management software with built-in court rules databases, announces the release of calendaring rules for attorneys that utilize the Rules of Practice and Procedure for U.S. Customs Trademark Recordation. CompuLaw?s database package now includes court rules for recording trademarks with the U.S. Customs & Border Protection Office, allowing attorneys to efficiently monitor their cases and keep track of all related deadlines.

The U.S. Customs Trademark Recordation rule sets also take advantage of CompuLaw Vision?s most advanced software features. Vision?s Case Summary feature allows for quick and easy calendaring and tracking of all relevant trademark data, including goods covered by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office registration and specific products entitled to U.S. Customs protection. In addition, the rule sets include Jurisdiction Summary Reports, which list U.S. Customs filing/renewal requirements and include convenient links to the U.S. Customs Web site.

?CompuLaw?s Intellectual Property calendaring databases already include rules for U.S. Patent and Trademarks, the Patent Cooperation Treaty, Madrid Protocol and state trademark rules for all 50 states,? said Kalmick. ?We are pleased to now offer law firms the U.S. Customs Trademark rules to help legal professionals monitor their filing and renewal deadlines. Our rules are written, edited, tested and maintained by a department of expert in-house attorneys ? so we set the standard for accuracy and reliability. CompuLaw offers the largest national court rules database available today, and our packages are designed to make tracking critical dates and deadlines simple.

. . . .

For more information about CompuLaw, CompuLaw Vision, CompuLaw Rules or other CompuLaw products, call (800) 444-0020 or visit www.compulaw.com.

When LexisOne was first announced, Lexis promised to offer free research in state and federal appellate cases within the last five years.  (Presumably, in the second year of the program the earliest year in the set would drop out.)  The theory is that except for seminal cases that you know anyhow, cases older than five years aren’t cited much.
It didn’t offer everything, and there was no fancy hyperlinking, but it was sure a lot better than anything else around for free. And if you needed more, you could always buy a week or a day of Lexis.

I am not sure when it happened, but when I looked at LexisOne this morning, it had expanded its database to TEN years. It still doesn’t have, notably the United States District Courts, and some specialized federal courts, and some other state courts — did you know that Arizona has a Tax Court? Well…those cases aren’t in LexisOne —  but if you need something fast and don’t have a paid CALR site at hand, LexisOne is obviously a good deal.

The URL, of course, is www.lexisone.com. Reigster once, and you’ll be able to access the site even years later.

Bob Ambrogi, writer, editor, lawyer and premier lawyer web crawler extroadinaire,  asks whether Expert Witnesses should Blog.  On the one hand, blogging may be a good way to attract clients; on the other hand, consider the first question out of opposing counsel’s mouth when you tender your expert witness:

Mr Witness….On January 3, 2007 did you write a post on your blog saying…..

Anyway, catch the whole article here. 
And read down to the very end where I get quoted.
And be careful what you write. Never know when you may want to be an expert witness.

Smart Pones are, I continue to tell myself, is really a computer.
So when the other computers in my life are giving ne problems, the
Motorola Q9c joins in.

I’ve left this message on the Google Maps forMobile HELP forum, and someone
thee ought to have more specialized knowledge than readers here, but then
lawyes are very resourceful.

Here’s the problem, as I presented it to the Google hangers on.  If you know the answer
or have had a similar problem with your Windows Miobiile 6.1 Smart Phone, please let me know.

After a month of working beautifully, I suddenly get the following
message when I try to launch Google Mpas on my Q9c with MW 6.1

ALERT
 ——————————————-
Access denied.  The program cannot start
because it is not digitally signed with a
trusted certificate. 

There is a watermark showing a large yellow circle and a “!” in the
side of the message.
The only change I made before this happening was to attempt to install
the latest Skyfie.
It seemed to install, but wouldn’t launch with the same error message.

Any idea of how to fix this> (short of a hard reset which both
Motorola and Sprint suggested.)

I really don’t want to do a master reset and re-install everything.

Aspen has lots of their books on sale through 11:59 pm, tonight. (August 22).

  Homepage  

  Special Offers  

Site-Wide Savings Event: LAST DAY! (Sale ends at midnight.)

Save 10% on purchases made online from now through Friday, August 22nd!
Don’t wait. This special savings event ends at 11:59pm on 8/22/2008.

This is the URL that the SAVE NOW button in my e-mail links.

If you need one of their excellent treatises, this may be a good time to buy.

I got an email from a well known computer industry publication to which I subscribe and is sometimes really useful.  They wanted recipients to spend just 15 minutes of their time to answer some questions about satisfaction with IT distribution companies.asd then they would use the responses in a story at the end of next month.  A good idea, that might turn out useful for someone looking for an IT distribution vendor. I probably wouldn’t have answered, anyhow, as I don’t purchase that much “IT” myself, and my  response wouldn’t be worth much.

But there was a “giveaway”.

The subject heading, as above was:

Evaluate IT Distributors — Get a Gas Card

And the publication agreed to give a genuine $10 gas card to 200, selected at random, of the people answering the e-mail.

 I haven’t looked up the circulation of the publication, but I assume at least 10s of thousands, probably more.  Assuming only 10 percent of the 10,000 mailing list respond, that would be 1000 responses to compete for the 200 gas cards. Let’s see….that’s a 20 percent chance on a $10 card — expected value $2 — for 15 minutes time, or $8 per hour.  (Didn’t the minimum wage just go up?)  IF they receive only 1000 responses.

Now the publication is a good one, the goal worthy, and had I something to say I would answer it they weren’t offering the gas card.  But how many people would do it because the company offered them a full 2-1/2 gallons of gas, if they gave a card for each answer?  Few, I’d guess. And fewer on a chance to win 2-1/2 gallons of gas.

Of course, times are tough, and every little bit helps. (I wonder if they’ll send the winners 1099s?  Nah!)
This is, I suppose, like the dollar bill that is sometimes inserted into requests to take a written survey.  The theory is that some have the dollar in hand and may feel obigated to take the survey, thereby increasing the “yield” of the mailing. If it works, I suppose it is worth it.

My wife, having retiredfrom her longtime employment in the local community college wanted a new computer. (We have several in the house, of course, but she reasonably wanted one devoted strictly to her use.)

After carefully reviewing options for a modern laptop — and after Fry’s unconscionably refused to deliver a Sony they had agreed to sell us — went to the local Office Depot where we selected a Compaq laptop with a slowish (1.73 GHz) dual core processor, 2 Gigabytes of RAM, a nice looking screen, Wifi, built in Web Cam and about everything else we wanted except for built in BlueTooth. (So we’ll buy a dongle and plug it in to one of the three USB ports.) The machine had only one basic flaw: it came with Vista Home Premium with Service Pack I  and the store wouldn’t arrange for a downgrade to XP.

The whole thing cost about $500 which seems to be a reasonable base price for a base laptop these days. You can pay lots more for faster and more powerful, but we thought the machine reasonable for e-mail, surfing, word processing, digital pictures, DVD burning and playing and so forth. In fact, we’ve been writing about a $500 price point for basic computing for many years. The only difference is that a modern $500 computer can do a lot more than a 90s $500 computer, and if you buy it in Euros, it costs even less.

We had the machine for less than a week when the WiFi just stopped working. No Internet. I could have plugged in a wired connection to the Internet, but that would have been too much effort. Not that it was fun to spend literally hours on the phone with HP technical support, but after a lot of testing and trying various approaches, the Tech Support person gave up and suggested the final remedy: re-install Vista.

Reinstalling the Operating System is a pain, not because the procedure is complex or time consuming, but because the process brings your computer back to the state in which you bought it. Gone are all the changes you’ve made. Gone is the customization of existing software. Gone is the new software you’ve installed. Gone are the documents you’ve saved to the hard drive, including your Outlook contacts, events and e-mail, the digital pictures of your grandchildren, the MP3s you downloaded from iTunes, the eBooks from Fictionwise and the audio books from audible.com.

You can back up your documents (including the Outlook PST file) to your backup hardrive, and a lot of the folks who sold you content will let you download it again, free of charge. (And digital rights management may prevent you from transferring some locked files back to your “new” drive.) So you prbably won’t lose much, but it is an aggravation.

But as this computer was almost brand new, there was little material to back up, and we could easily download Open Office and Firefox again, so we agreed. The huge hard drive — 250 Gigabyte — included a backup partition containing all that was necessary, so we just pressed (figuratively) the backup button, let the machine run, and went to dinner. When we came back, a new machine, and WiFi worked fine.

What was wrong? I can only assume there was a Vista problem.

And things were fine for a couple of weeks, until suddenly FireFox wouldn’t run because of a corrupted file.

> “What did you do dear?”

<”Nothing”

> “Well reboot and it will work.”

< “I did that. Still doesn’t work.”

> “OK! I’ll get to it”

Should be easy. Right? Should be, but this was Vista. Wherein hangs another tale.

Announcing the Launch of earlyCASE ~ A FREE Early Case

Assessment Software Now Available for Legal Professionals

earlyCASE software sets new standard for early analysis and culling of

documents, data and metadata for eDiscovery

Ah! Electronic Discovery Analysis: let’s read more:

ATLANTA, GA (August 11, 2008) – Atlanta-based earlyCASE, an innovator in advanced early case assessment for Electronically Stored Information (ESI) and eDiscovery, today announced the launch of its free software available for download from www.earlycase.com . earlyCASE is a web-based application which runs on your local PC and analyzes the ESI that your computer can access without the data ever leaving your computer or network.

Runs on your local computer, and it is FREE!  Sounds Interesting.

earlyCASE allows you to see and understand all of your data before it is processed for discovery. It supports multiple languages, extracts metadata, generates hash values, detects duplicates and creates a local inventory database of documents and emails. earlyCASE allows users to make informed discovery decisions and easily cut down the size of data sets through filter and culling rules before going into the discovery process and review.

Sounds like a preprocessor of some sort. Why review all of your data if you can only tag the relevant stuff?

Companies spend millions of dollars annually on the review and analysis eDiscovery phases. By assessing data early and reducing the sets of data going to review, the cost of processing and the time to review can be drastically reduced in the overall eDiscovery lifecycle.

“We are excited to introduce earlyCASE,” said Tom Strack, CEO of earlyCASE. “earlyCASE brings a real understanding to the eDiscovery process at the earliest moment, the lowest cost, and at an unprecedented speed, giving clients a more realistic view into what data they have at stake. With data storage continuing to increase in size, it is common to have terabytes of information to process and review. earlyCASE can analyze that data and decrease the data sets that need to be reviewed, reducing not only eDiscovery budgets, but managing their legal risk. earlyCASE can process the data without it ever leaving where it is stored, using your own people and equipment. “

And you — or at least the client, hopefully together with its lawyers — can do it. On Site. And there is a free version.

earlyCASE is offered in two versions, a Basic (FREE) version and a Professional version for a small flat rate charge, regardless of the amount of data you analyze. The Basic version offers 15 high quality eDiscovery reports, one which estimates your processing and review budget while providing an immediate understanding of your data. Through the Professional version, a 26(f) report for meet and confer is available to help clients reduce legal risk exposure by offering a necessary view of the legal case information—custodians, context, third parties, and more. earlyCASE provides you the tools and results to best understand, define and memorialize the ESI going into the meet and confer. Duplicate document detection and container processing (zip, rar, arc) are the primary reasons most people use the Professional version of earlyCASE.

ah! There is a free version with, but it won’t read files within standard archives, and it won’t provide attachment MetaData and other information you probably will want.  The Web site says the professional version costs $198 per run , with unlimited data, which doesn’t sounds terribly expensive.   The company representative tells me that all of the processing is done locally, and you end up with a local Microsoft Access database to use as much as you want.

For more info if you want to do some pre-analysis analysis, surf over to : www.earlycase.com

But before you use it, you’ll also want to check out this page on the earlyCASE Web site, which tells you one way the company can provide all that stuff free of charge — or how you can become an advertiser and obtain (presumably little more than contact) information about who’s using the program and how much data was processed.   Nice of them, actually, to place the stuff where potential users can see it.

There’s also a link to a page for Level 9 Corporation, which apparently is the real name of the company, and which has a set of Terms and Conditions of Use buried under a link for the L9 site’s "Privacy Policy ". Probably just misnamed, as the "agreement" is relatively innocuous, as long as you don’t mind litigating in Georgia. (To be clear, and to make sure we are not getting involved with the Russians, that is  "State of Georgia, United States of America". )

Level 9 is a great "gee, I’ve heard of that company before" name, that has been involved, over the years, with books, short stories, a tv show, computer games (all tending towards techy, hacking , science fiction sort of stuff) over the years.  This Level 9 isn’t connected with the other stuff, of course, but if you think you’ve heard of the company before, years ago, that’s why.

askSam has been around a long while, and is a useful way to store information. The company has been showing off, for years, by tossing all sorts of PD literature and other information into its own program, You can then search by using a purchased version of the product, or a free “viewer”. From Shakespeare to confirmation hearings to US Budgets to transcripts of Presidential Debates, check here. The askSam folks appear to have very eclectic tastes.

But we just loved the headline on the Press Release introducing the new version:

askSam Releases askSam 7 to Organize Information

Accurate, certainly, but doesn’t really tell us a lot. Well…when you read the entire thing it looks a little better.

Perry, FL — askSam Systems is now shipping version 7 of askSam, its popular free-form database software. askSam lets you organize, search, and analyze both structured and unstructured information. askSam can create searchable databases from different types of data, including email, word processing documents, Web pages, PDF files, spreadsheets, and other databases.

askSam 7 offers a completely new way for askSam users to organize and navigate their information. Dynamic Folder View lets you place your information in folders and sub-folders based on field content. So everything is organized, dynamically, as you enter it. Save Word Documents, PDF files and other documents directly into folders, even save Web Pages directly from Internet Explorer. askSam 7 also allows you to drag and drop attachments, such as images or other documents, directly into an askSam database.

In addition, the program  — and the Reader? —

[. . .]now connects with all major web search engines like Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Windows Live, and more. Highlight a word or phrase and right click to immediately perform a web search directly from askSam. With the askSam Home Page you can now open and search multiple files from one screen. The home page provides immediate access to create a new database, your most used askSam files, common features, and more.

And, as everything  else, these days, faster and better.

Also included are faster searching, improved user interface, a tabbed file interface, automatic updates and the ability to narrow your search results by searching only within the results of a search.

I hadn’t realized that askSam didn’t have the ability to search within the “hits”.  We use that sort of thing elsewhere, and it is useful.

Pricing begins at $150 and jumps to $400 if you want full text indexing.  For more information, to buy, or to download a 30 day free trial,  surf over to www.asksam.com

We’ll try to review the new version in the next few weeks.