All the inventions were great – the highlights included Heard Systems; a bovine pregnancy detector, We Are Hunted; a music charting system that tracks a work’s popularity across the Internet and Posse; a ticket seller that harnesses a band’s fan base to fill venues.

The intriguing thing about two of these companies is they rely on communities. The fact both these businesses come from the music industry isn’t surprising. This is a sector where social and peer power has been long understood through sales charts and fan clubs.

With all of us having grown up with Top 40s and music videos we have an intuitive understanding of how these communities work.

An advantage all three businesses had were passionate, informed presenters who believed in their product and who could explain the benefits in 240 seconds. Those 23 presentations showed was just how important a good pitch is to communicating how a great idea is going to change the world and make investors happy.

Another thing that stood out was how a well done Powerpoint enhances a speaker while a poorly done one distracts and irritates the audience. Interestingly only one of the three pitches mentioned had a memorable overhead shows how a passionate speaker who believes in their product trumps even the most elaborate presentation.

In some ways it’s another variation of the rule of threes in that you have a three second pitch, a 30 second pitch and the three minute extended version. Indeed the ReadWriteWeb site has an extended rule of threes, describing how an “insanely great” service is being spoken about after three days, three months and three years.

While you can’t control what people will say about your business three years after hearing about it, you should be able to get across what your business does in three seconds.

Funny enough, that’s pretty close to how long it takes to read a 140 character SMS or Twitter message. Can you describe your business in one tweet?

What stands out is how patent applications rise during economic downturns with an increase of 25% in the 1929-32 period. Steve goes on to point out;

The Depression years yielded fundamental advances in technologies of the future like television, nylon, neoprene, photocopying and electric razors, according to the Thomson Reuters analysis.

A similar trend is true around later, far shorter recessions, when basic work on personal computing and later Internet-related technologies were done.

In this respect, economic downturns are necessary as they clear out the old, inefficient industries and allow new ideas and businesses to take hold.

While governments had to do something to avoid a massive depression when the capital and trade market froze in late 2008, is the propping up of debt laden industries like banks, housing companies and auto manufacturers  going to act as roadblock to new ideas and businesses?

Just a thought.

We won’t miss Vista, it was slow, clunky and irritating to use. Like Microsoft’s previous OS disaster, Windows ME, it was a hybrid of new and old technologies that managed to satisfy few users.

Vista’s poor reputation effectively broke the upgrade cycle where businesses and consumers replace their computers roughly every five years. Rather than taking their chances with Vista, PC owners decided to stick with their ageing XP boxes.

So Windows 7 is being held out as the saviour of the computer industry as Microsoft’s customers are expected to rush into long overdue upgrades. Some commentators predict the new operating system will reinvigorate PC sales that have been battered worldwide by the Global Financial Crisis.

The reality is probably a bit more complex, there’s no doubt the combination of the global downturn and customers putting off computer purchases hurt the industry, but to expect a surge of sales may be optimistic.

Most computer users are a cynical bunch who have heard all the hype before and won’t be rushing out to buy anything just because some bloke on the web tells them it’s the greatest thing since Wordperfect 5.1. The days of crowds waiting to buy the latest operating system are long gone, at least in the PC world.

While it isn’t worthwhile queuing up on a cold morning for Windows 7, the new program is a vast improvement on Vista. In a hopelessly unscientific experiment, I installed a complimentary copy of Window 7 Ultimate supplied by Microsoft on my wife’s cranky, Vista supplied laptop.

The results were good. Boot up time was reduced by 34% to 55 seconds while Internet Explorer loaded twice as fast and Word 2003 documents opened a whopping 300% faster.

For the record, the machine isn’t exactly a powerhouse being an Acer Extensa 5220 Celeron 2GHz CPU with 512Mb of RAM ­– exactly the sort of machine that should never have been supplied with Windows Vista in the first place, which was part of Vista’s problems.

So my experience with Windows Seven has been so far favourable. If you have been through pain with Vista, it may be worth upgrading although you will probably find driver and software problems won’t be solved by the new program.

For XP systems it almost certainly isn’t worth the upgrade to Seven as the process requires a fresh install, substantially increasing the cost, time and risk involved in making the move.

Overall, XP machines are best replaced outright as many are well past their retirement date as owners have held off being forced into buying Vista machines.

If upgrading or buying Windows 7 systems is on the horizon then you should start preparing now. Get a few Windows Seven machines and test them in your office; monitor how they go with your critical line of business systems, check they connect properly to your network and start getting familiar with the quirks and differences in the new system.

While Windows 7 isn’t flawless, Microsoft have learned from the mistakes they made from Vista, it is faster and so far seems less irritating and more stable. If you are struggling with Vista, or your Windows XP systems are on their last legs, the upgrade will probably be worthwhile.

Tune in at 702 on your AM radio or stream us online from the ABC Website.

Your comments and questions are welcome so call in on 1300 222 702 or SMS on 19922702.

That’s been the fate of a million Sidekick mobile phone owners in the United States over the last two weeks when the servers storing the Sidekick data went down.

The Sidekick is an unusual mobile phone that saves all its data “on the cloud”, a big group of servers run by the device’s designer, Danger, who were bought out by Microsoft in early 2008. Unlike other phones and PDAs, the Sidekick doesn’t synch with your own computer and stored data may get wiped if it can’t find the cloud servers.

This is exactly what happened a few weeks ago when the Sidekick cloud stopped. Owners of the Sidekick, a phone that’s never been sold in Australia, have been through a harrowing fortnight hoping their data will be recovered which Microsoft now believe can be done.

Sidekick’s outage is a major embarrassment for Microsoft who are pitching their Azure cloud product as alternative to other cloud services provided by competitors like Amazon and Google and the failure certainly deserves to be one of the technology disasters of the decade.

The question now is how badly this outage will affect cloud and software as a service providers. These service rely on customers trusting data and critical business applications to a third party and the Sidekick saga doesn’t inspire confidence.

It would be a shame if this is the case, as cloud services offer a lot of advantages to smaller businesses. In many ways they offer the same advantages big business have had through outsourcing services at a fraction of the price and complexity.

We need to remember that all technology breaks. People press the wrong buttons, unexpected software bugs appear and sometimes things just break or go wrong. Every business needs a contingency plan if things stop working.

While a data backup regime is a critical part of a contingency plan, you still need to consider other aspects such what happens if the power grid fails and leaves your without electricity for three days, if bushfires and floods stop workers getting to the office, or what will happen if you forget to pay your phone bill and suddenly you have no Internet access for a week.

Technology is complex and we have trust a lot of things are reliable and sometimes some of our partners aren’t as trustworthy as we’d like.

So have fall back systems just in case your trust in technology, partners and vendors is misplaced and test them regularly.

Last week’s event featured Marketing Angels’ Michelle Gamble explaining how she uses the brand pyramid to help her clients and Kylie Little, founder of Essential Baby, describing the journey from a business idea to exiting from a big business buy out.

Kylie’s story of Essential Baby’s early days resonates with anyone who has started a business after the arrival of a baby. It’s always a relief to find you’re not the only one who thought it’s possible to run a business while your blissful cherub sleeps contently for most of the day.

In many ways, Essential Baby’s story describes the dream exit for many entrepreneurs, or at least most venture capital funders, with the website being bought out by Fairfax.

Interestingly, Kylie’s tale about what happened after a big organisation bought her business has some similarities to Lars Rassumussen’s experience of Where 2 Technologies’ absorption into Google.

The cultural shock of moving from an independent start-up to being part of a bigger organisation is huge and the problems can’t be underestimated. So there’s a lesson on being careful what you wish for.

One part that shone through both Kylie and Michelle’s presentations was how important communities are to a business. It’s often easy to think businesses are stand-alone entities, proudly independent of the world around them.

In reality every successful businesses relies on groups of supporters, be they customers, suppliers, financiers or just simply fans. Businesses need communities just as the community needs them.

Communities aren’t just generated by Twitter followers, witty blog entries or clever search engine optimisation, it takes credibility, honesty and doing the right thing by those around you.

So who are your communities and what are you putting into them? You may find those groups are your business’s most important assets.

Is the desktop computer dead? Will we all be using smartphones or laptops, and what happened to netbooks? Will Windows 7, OSX or Chrome dominate the computer world, and does it matter if all our data is saved on the cloud?

We’ll be answering these and many more questions on the show so tune in your local ABC station or listen online at Nightlife’s website. We love listeners comments, questions and opinions so please call in on 1300 800 222.

As usual, we had a wide range of callers ranging from recovering info from an iPod, strange desktop icons and excess Internet usage and how to avoid it.

Choosing an Internet plan

Alan is finding his Internet connection is always being shaped. That is, his speeds are dropping once his household exceeds their plan’s data allowance. James called with the same problem.

The simple solution to this is to choose an Internet plan with a higher download allowance. For instance, if you are being capped halfway into the month on a 12Gb limit, then you should look for a 24 Gb plan.

When choosing a plan be careful you aren’t locking yourself into a longer term plan as that 24Gb may be enough now, but you may have the same problem of exceeding your allowance in a year or so.

The good thing is both James and Alan are on capped plans as the alternative are excess use plans where you are charged for the usage that goes over the monthly allowance. This is like writing a blank cheque to your ISP and we strongly recommend people avoid them.

We have a rundown on what you should look for at the PC Rescue Choosing an Internet plan page. It’s a useful checklist for avoiding nasty and unexpected Internet surprises.

Unwanted downloads

Having unexpected icons appear on the desktop is a good reason to be concerned and Jan called about a link for McAfee antivirus appearing on her desktop.

The reason for this is probably from a software update. Many packages will now include downloads for other products as part of a marketing deal and that’s probably what happened in this case.

Although Jan’s computer is probably safe, it’s worthwhile downloading and running Malwarebytes just to make sure the system is clean.

Recovering an iPod’s music

After her dad cleaned up the family computer, Nicola found she’d lost her iTunes music. She wondered if it were possible to get it back.

Because the music is still on her iPod, she can copy the music off the device and into a folder on her computer. From there, it’s relatively simple to get the import the music files back into iTunes.

A good guide to doing this is on the makeuseof.com website’s How To: Move Music from iPod to PC in 5 Easy Steps where Mark O’Neill shows you how to go about getting the files off and organising them.

The next show is November 8 and we’ll be looking at what’s in the shops for Christmas. Hope you can tune in then.

That Tuesday morning Mark Fletcher’s Australian Newsagency Blog had a post about the Strange Light Magazine, a collection of photos around Sydney during the recent dust storm.

Some notable points about Strange Light – it was self-published in 31 hours using HP’s Magcloud, the photos were all sourced from Flickr and Derek Powazek, the publisher/author, did everything from San Francisco.

Publishing on demand using services like Magcloud and Amazon’s Createspace is worthy of many blog posts in themselves. Derek’s story of Strange Light on his own blog is a terrific step-by-step guide to creating a self-published magazine. Notable are his points about obtaining permissions and proof reading.

It isn’t one-way traffic between California and Sydney, Australians are also doing business in the US without leaving home. The same day I read the Strange Light story, I had a coffee with Andrew Rogers from Sydney’s Anchor Systems, who set up a new data centre for US-based developer management system, GitHub.

All of GitHub’s hardware is in the US and their new data centre equipment came completely bare, without operating systems or software. Andrew’s team was able to build, configure and test the systems from their Sydney office.

The fact GitHub were prepared to accept a quote from a business 11,000km away and have full confidence the job could be done from across the world shows just how distance no longer matters to forward-thinking enterprises.

Finally, that day I managed to catch up with an old contractor who now runs a remote support business for homes and small offices. You call him and he logs into your computer to fix the problems.

Nothing particularly special there except he operates out of Thailand. So he gets to run an Australian business from a Phuket beach hut. He has business he enjoys without sacrificing the lifestyle he wants.

These entrepreneurs are showing how the globalised economy is really working. Each are using freely available tools that allow individuals and small teams to offer their talents across the world.

You might want to have a look at the tools which are revolutionising your industry, you can be sure your competitors around the corner and around the world are already doing so and might soon be offering innovative new ideas to your customers.