It’s that time of year again – registration for the UK-based Lotusphere Comes To You events is now open. There are three events this year – London (13th April), Edinburgh (15th April) and Warrington (13th May), the latter being run by our excellent Business Partner Polymorph. One great attraction this year is the fact that I won’t be speaking (for the first time in many years) so you won’t have to listen to me… instead you will have the pleasure of hearing from Kevin Cavanaugh, Vice President of Messaging and Collaboration.

The usual fevered speculation about the guest speakers can now commence – we were going to book William Shatner, but he did the Orlando main event so we had to drop that idea. I can tell you that Harry Hill is too expensive (I didn’t bother suggesting him again this year after discovering the cost last year). I’m not going to drop any clues this year, basically because I have no idea myself.

Anything else? Oh yeah, you’ll want the links – click here for the London and Edinburgh events and here for Polymorph’s event.

A couple of weeks ago I tweeted about a story on the BBC News site which reported that:

Millions of European Internet Explorer (IE) users will have the option to choose an alternative browser from 1 March, Microsoft has announced.

Now, this came as a bit of a surprise because to my knowledge I already had an option, one which I exercised several years ago… and I chose Firefox. Safari is my second choice, followed by Google’s Chrome, and the only reason that Internet Explorer is my fourth choice is that there’s no other browser installed. I didn’t have to wait for Microsoft to tell me I had a choice.

However, I’m sure that the less computer-literate users stick with what’s installed with Windows (i.e. Internet Explorer), and this is what Europe’s Competition Commission are setting out to fix. In certain circumstances Windows will notify the user that they have a choice of browser and present the options to them.

I was amused by the last paragraph of the most recent article on this subject:

Some fear the browser choice system will confuse people. Already some who have been confronted with the choice screen have been worried that their machine has been taken over or fallen victim to a virus.

The irony is that if you switch away from Internet Explorer it’s less likely that your system will be taken over by a virus*.

* I have no proof that this statement is correct, so you may choose to disregard it.

Sarcasm aside, free time search works fine within organisations, although some people do their best to scupper your best attempts to find a convenient time. I have known people to be apparently busy every day, but the reality is that their days are marked with an all-day event reading ‘working in Staines’ or even ‘pancake day’ – neither of which really prevent a meeting or conference call. But what about scheduling time with people outside of your organisation? Unless there’s an organised and maintained link it’s difficult to achieve. Tungle offers a way to solve this.

What does Tungle do? It allows you to upload and sync the contents of your calendar from a number of sources, and then present the free and busy time to contacts on the web. Your contacts can see when you’re free (not necessarily the meeting details), suggest some appointment times, and then Tungle does the job of arranging the meeting between the two of you and provides the invites.

A partnership between Tungle and IBM Lotus was announced at Lotusphere – see here for details. The Tungle plug-in for Notes, now in beta, provides the synchronisation between your Notes calendar and the Tungle service. This means that you just have to update one calendar for your internal and external colleagues to see when you’re free.

Click on the purple button for a view of the Tungle calendar with my free time.

But my real problem with this list of nominees is the glaring omission, mainly those Welsh wonders the Manic Street Preachers – a band who in 2009 released not only the best album of the year, but also one of the best of the decade (Journal For Plague Lovers). The lack of recognition for such a powerful and emotional collection of songs is a farce. Who are the people deciding on the nominations?

Best British band is a category which fares better in my estimation (Doves, Muse and Kasabian), but again, where are the Manics? Instead nods are given to JLS and Friendly Fires… what the hell is going on? Let’s be honest, I like Doves but they hardly set the world alight and their latest album wasn’t that great.

To be honest, I couldn’t give a monkey’s about best single, best female artist and some of the other categories. However, there is one more lunatic category which celebrates The Brits thirtieth anniversary… ‘Brits Album of 30 Years’. Think about some of the great British albums released in the last thirty years… OK Computer (Radiohead), the eponymous Supergrass album, The Holy Bible (more love for the Manics), Power, Corruption And Lies (New Order)… I’m sure you could come up with your own list. Even albums by The Smiths, The Stone Roses, Blur and The Clash could be described as significant even if they’re not my cup of tea. Love them or hate them (probably the latter), the Spice Girls made a huge impact in the history of British pop music.

So who, from the alumni of British bands and artists from the last thirty years gets a nod in this category?

• Coldplay – like visiting Belgium, interesting in places but an overall disappointing experience
• Dido – dreary music for dumped females
• Duffy – one-album-wonder, and sings like me mucking around with a helium balloon
• Keane – wimp rock dominated by a chap who plays the piano out of key
• Sade – 80’s somnambulism
• Travis – more dreariness – “why does it always rain on me?”… because you’re so effin’ miserable

The rest of the nominees are Oasis, Phil Collins, The Verve and Dire Straits. Fair enough. But overall that list looks like a joke. If you were responsible for drawing up that list of nominations, please leave a comment to explain yourself.

Thanks to my brother Florida Steve who noted that I made a slight error in the original version of this post, and also Mrs A pointed out my error while we were driving to Windsor. 1970 was, of course, forty years ago. I’m just in denial about the fact that I was four years old when Abbey Road was released.

What can I say? How about “wow”? This is a major upgrade – it uses the OpenOffice 3 core stream – and the extra work that IBM Lotus have done improves the usability and functionality further. There’s important stuff like support for Visual Basic macros (there goes another deployment blocker), OLE objects and embedded audio and video. In the presentation editor I’m very pleased that resized images get proper anti-aliasing, and the charting for the spreadsheets is vastly improved. I’ve been using it for a week with no problems, and despite it’s beta status so far I’ve found it a better experience than Symphony 1.

The most important thing for any business considering the adoption of Symphony is the file fidelity, as interchange of Office documents will continue to happen for as long as Microsoft’s suite is around (I gave it three years). So there’s been lots of work there.

Symphony 3 beta 2 can be downloaded from the Symphony web site. It’s up to you – it’s your money you’re spending on Microsoft Office, not mine.

In a rather puny attempt to set myself up as an observer of future technology trends, I speculated that early adopters would probably wish they’d waited for the next iteration. Clearly others agreed… Wired published Ten Things Missing From the iPad while Gizmodo could appear to only manage eight things but carried on to eleven and positioned them as things that suck.

The business world was also unimpressed, as Apple’s share price fell by around $7. So, here’s my tip (now that we’ve established my credentials as a gadget futurist)… buy an iPad the moment it hits the stores. Queue for three days if you need to. Can you imagine how awesome that airplane landing game will be on a big screen? That’s gotta be worth the money. Also, Florida Steve has some Apple shares, and he’s banking on them reaching $270. So when the iPad 2 ships with some of the fix-list ticked off, throw away your iPad 1 and get the new one. I know this makes sense because I live in a house that contains three people and eight iPods.

With this in mind, today the world is waiting for the expected announcement of an Apple tablet. To my knowledge, no-one from Apple has said it will happen, but various bits of information and speculation have been pieced together to the point where we’re all expecting the iSlate / iSlab / iTablet / iWantOne to be announced. The combined world of technology media could end up looking pretty stupid if Apple’s announcements for today consist of a retractable tape measure being added to the iPhone and an LED torch being added to the iPod nano. But assuming the hype is correct, who’s going to buy a first-generation Apple tablet? History shows that early Apple adopters are often rendered green with envy or red with rage when an improved model is released six months later. Given that Apple products aren’t cheap (well, okay iPods are a pretty reasonable price) the initial market for the Apple tablet could be restricted to the stupidly wealthy or the hopelessly devoted.

Mrs A had some last minute wobbles as we drove to Essex, but the doubts melted away when she saw the tiny black fluffy bundle. ‘Missie’, as Lolli has named her, came from a litter of five. We saw the mother (a lovely tiny Yorkshire Terrier who wasn’t much bigger than her offspring), and observed that the family who owned both parents had given the puppies the best start in life – everything was in order, and it was a very good sign when the lady insisted that we rubbed antibacterial lotion on our hands before touching the pup. You hear so many bad stories about dog breeders and puppy farms, but there were no concerns here. The initial vaccinations had been done, the puppies were already ‘paper-trained’ and had a proper feeding regime.

Missie is now back at Adams Tower, and Lolli is on cloud nine. Mrs A said that she’ll be cooking sweet and sour chicken tonight, but I have a feeling it’ll be delayed.

Click on the photo to see a larger version, and I’m sure there’ll be more soon. Lots more.

A while ago I was offered a Storm 2 to try out, and I took possession of it a few days ago. Cosmetically it’s almost identical, the only difference I can see is that the control buttons are now part of the screen panel rather than being separate buttons. Some of the specifications are the same… for example, the screen and the overall dimensions. The key differences (I should say ‘improvements’) are under the hood. The whole touch-screen experience has been revamped – the one under-screen physical button of the first version has been replaced by four corner-located piezoelectric sensors. The result is an all-round better touch experience and more accurate typing. Okay, it does take a bit of getting used to but it doesn’t take long – at first I was hitting ‘r’ instead of ‘e’ every time, but that bad habit has already disappeared. I will admit that the physical keyboard of the other devices is easier to use, but it’s early days and I am speeding up.

Other aspects associated with navigation show huge improvements, namely scrolling (now very smooth) and more reliable screen orientation.

The Storm 2 supports Wi-Fi and 3G, so there’s no longer any major connectivity omissions. It has a 3.2 megapixel camera – not an astounding feature these days, but it has a flash (a win over the iPhone), the picture quality is very good and the fact that you can use a swipe of your finger to zoom in and out is really rather cool.

And there’s a number of other things which are well-implemented – the dialling screen allows you to quickly switch between the dial-pad, call log and contacts (maybe this was in the original Storm, but whatever, it’s a step above the previous BlackBerry devices I’ve used). The message-thread approach to SMS messages is also very good – this may be a feature of OS5 and therefore available on other devices, but I like it anyway.

In summary – the touch-screen experience is a vast improvement on the original, and any small disadvantages in not having a physical keyboard are compensated for by that gorgeous big screen which almost all applications benefit from. If you tried the original Storm and were put off, I’d recommend that you give the new model a chance to win your affections.

Firstly, Ben Langhinrichs has once again provided the Lotusphere agenda and session planning database. This is a Notes application which you can store locally, and then inspect the sessions and add them to your personal calendar.

The Turtle Partnership have taken Ben’s application and hosted in on their server, so you can get up-to-date information via replication. You can open the application from lotusphere.turtleweb.com and then grab a replica.

If you have an iPhone or a BlackBerry you can also access the session information from native mobile applications (created by The Turtle Partnership) on these two devices. Check the Turtle Partnership’s blog for instructions, but the easiest way to grab them is to go to the respective app stores for either device and search for ‘Lotusphere’.

Many thanks to Ben and the Turtle team for providing these resources to the Lotus community. I hope you’re kept in free drinks for the duration of Lotusphere.

Also, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this thing called Twitter, apparently it’s quite popular. The Lotusphere team will be updating the Lotus Knows Twitter stream with information about the event. So if you’re attending, or if you’re stuck somewhere less interesting and want to keep up with the latest news, you should follow LotusKnows.