Smart and Final

DiskCheckup a simple little tool which keeps an eye on the SMART status of your hard drives. In addition to displaying an exhaustive amount of information about your drives (everything from its model and serial number to standards compliance and feature support), DiskCheckup can also park itself in your system tray and keeps a watchful eye on HDD temperatures. Once your threshold has been crossed, DiskCheckup can either display a notification or send you an email notification.

Thumbs Up

Many of you use USB thumb drives to backup data when you travel or for other reasons. However, there's a lot more you can do with a USB drive. Here are the Top 10 USB Thumb Drive Tricks.

Face Time

As many of you know from my lectures, I'm a big fan of social media, especially sites like Facebook, to grow your practice. Just getting started? Here's How to Build Your Personal Brand on FaceBook.

Game Changer

As many practice management gurus (including me) will tell you, understanding and taking advantage of social media, like FaceBook and Twitter, is going to be critical for practice growth in the second decade of this century. Some trends are more important than others to be aware of. Here are 5 Social Media Trends to Watch Right Now.

Changing Faces

There's little doubt that the most popular phone I see in use by dentists is the iPhone. However, many are not fans as it's proprietary and tied to the generally-crappy AT&T network. From a featues standpoint, the Andriod phones are a better long-term bet in my opinion. What if you already are used to the iPhone? Here is Jumping Ship from iPhone to Android: A Switcher's Guide.

Bright as a Bulb

Many of you who have been to my lectures have heard me talk about an upcoming service that allows dentists and specialists and labs to share information online called Brightsquid. Well, they are no longer upcoming, they are now offering the service. Here's the press release:

Calgary, Alberta, Canada. July 26, 2010 – Brightsquid Dental Link (Brightsquid) announces the release of their collaborative work-flow management platform to dental practices and labs in North America. Taking their lead from the digital advances in medicine, the release of Brightsquid Dental Link creates a digital hub for all dental data in the practice, and enables the necessary data for communications
between Dentists, Dental Labs and Patients.

Brightsquid Dental Link integrates into Practice Management Systems, synchronizing patient information across multiple systems in the practice. The application is a powerful chairside consultation and communication tool that features dental prescriptions, digital x-rays, photos, patient details, digital impressions and CAD/CAM files to be transmitted quickly and easily between systems and to the lab.
Cases can be easily annotated by authorized users, reducing errors in communication, enhancing turnaround times, improving profits, and increasing the overall quality of patient care.

Dr. Deepak Kaura, CEO of Brightsquid, says “Although we’ve been established in the medical marketplace for a number of years, we are very excited to bring the technology to dentistry. After great feedback from the Dental community with our beta software program, we’re pleased to be releasing our software to the general public. Our digital prescription and web-based image viewer will enable unprecedented chairside consultation and communication, collaboration between the dentist and the lab, and between the dentist and other dentists. Over the next few months we’ll be announcing major partnerships with technical leaders, dental labs and distribution partners globally. This is an exciting time to be part of the digital revolution in dentistry.”

About Brightsquid:

A privately-held company, Brightsquid Dental Inc. is headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. More information may be found at www.brightsquid.com or 1-800-238-6503.

Lock and Load

If you've ever received an error message when trying to delete a file, then you know what Unlocker is for. It's a free utility for deleting or moving files that are locked by a Windows process.

If you've got a 64-bit Windows system, you might have tried an existing version only to find out that it can't work its magic. Fortunately, the developer purchased a Windows x64 machine a while back, and he figured he ought to be able to run his own app on his own machine.

Two quick things are worth noting. First, it is a beta build -- so expect to encounter some bugs if you decide to test it. Second, your antivirus app may throw a false positive when you extract or execute Unlocker...don't worry, it's clean.