HP Dreamscreen 400 All-in-One Desktop PC Unveiled

HP DreamScreen 400, unveiled on Friday, is not your regular run-of-the-mill all-in-one desktop PC. The HP DreamScreen 400 PC aims to bring together a host of services and online applications through its touchscreen display, accessible for the entire family, according to HP.

HP DreamScreen 400: Specs, Features
The HP DreamScreen 400 is different from the HP Pavilion MS214. The DreamScreen has a 18.5-inch touchscreen display (like the Dell Studio One 19), with a 1366x768 pixel resolution. The HP DreamScreen all-in-one PC also comes with a 250GB hard drive and a 1.3MP webcam.

The HP DreamScreen 400 bundles in four USB ports, optical DVD writer, SD Card slot, microphone and headphone jack. The HP DreamScreen all-in-one PC also has two 5W speakers built-in, better than the Dell Vostro 320. It can play all major audio file formats (MP3, AAC, WAV, etc) and view .JPG and .PNG images. The HP DreamScreen All-in-One PC can play 480p H.264 HD video.

An HP representative told us the DreamScreen All-in-One PC runs on a Linux-based operating system developed in-house by HP. Whether the DreamScreen dual-boots with Windows in its retail version isn't known, right now, and details on its Intel-based processor are also at large. We'll update this space the minute we hear more from HP.

HP DreamScreen 400: Other features, services
The HP DreamScreen 400 PC is aimed for Indian homes and for family use. HP says that the DreamScren 400 is especially aimed at first-time technology users.

HP has collaborated with Airtel and Tata Teleservices for providing an immersive online entertainment experience for the entire family. Other important collaborations include Bill Desk for paying bills online, Edurite for education, Hungama for music and movies, India Games for thrilling games, India Today for media content, Music Today for Music, NDTV for news and Daily Astrology, Tata Communications for Live Darshan and Yatra for booking Air and Train travel.

"To serve kids, their parents and their grandparents in a family – sharing one device – that was our goal. Today we have unveiled HP DreamScreen, which is just a version 1.0 of a long series of product experiences to follow. HP will subsequently take this experience to other countries," said Phil McKinney, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Personal Systems Group, HP, and head of HP’s IPO at the launch of HP DreamScreen 400 all-in-one desktop PC.

Best BitTorrent Clients 2011

We've reviewed four of the best BitTorrent clients that offer speedy downloads, app stores, and a myriad other features.

BitTorrent gets a bad rap--at least from the likes of the MPAA and RIAA. The peer-to-peer technology speeds the file transfer process by letting users with a downloaded torrent (a small file that contains BitTorrent metadata) draw data from multiple sources rather than a single user. This way, even if each individual seeder (uploading source) only offers a trickle of bandwidth, you can acquire large files in a remarkably short time.

BitTorrent Clients
Downloading and capitalizing on torrents requires the use of special applications such as the official BitTorrent client, Deluge, uTorrent, and Vuze. BitTorrent 7.2 (Free, 3.5 stars) and uTorrent 2.2 (Free, 3.5 stars) are both properties of the BitTorrent company, with the latter serving as the testing grounds for new features that may eventually make their way into the marquee product. Both include rather cool app stores that let you download games, antivirus software, and other software. Deluge 1.3.1 (Free, 3 stars) and the Editors' Choice award-winning Vuze 4.5 (Free, 4 stars) both offer remote torrent management, but we selected the latter as the superior client due to its ease of use, intuitive search engine, and transcoding abilities.

BitTorrent 7.2 Free The official BitTorrent client is the sister app of uTorrent and carries many of the same features: multi-OS support, an intuitive interface, swift downloads, and an Apps Studio. Like uTorrent, BitTorrent 7.2 could use better search results and a splash of visual polish, but as a strict download tool, it's worth consideration.

Deluge 1.3.1 Free BitTorrent clients are a dime a dozen, so one has to be truly special to stand out from the back. Sadly, Deluge doesn't fall into that grouping; it's your standard BitTorrent client that adds a complicated remote management feature (one far more complex than Vuze 4.5's offering) that few will bother to use. You can do better with the likes of BitTorrent 7.2, uTorrent 2.2, and Vuze 4.5.

uTorrent 2.2 Free If you want to quickly download large files, uTorrent (and its sibling BitTorrent) is a solid selection. It may suffer from an unattractive interface, and an unintuitive search engine, but its Labels and App Studio features may make it worth considering. If you want those missing features, however, then the Editors' Choice award-winning Vuze is the BitTorrent client that will appeal to your sensibilities.

Vuze 4.5 Free BitTorrent clients are designed to do one thing, and one thing well; download large files at lightning speed. If you need just that, any of the BitTorrent clients (BitTorrent, Deluge, uTorrent) will get the job done. However, if you want a more feature-rich client, one that lets you transcode files and control your torrents remotely, the Editors' Choice award winning Vuze is the one to choose.

Acquiring BitTorrent Content
Independent content creators have used BitTorrent to distribute their products. The BitTorrent-powered Vodo.net serves as a place for entertainment-seekers to legally download over 50 indie films. Likewise, Clearbits.net offers open-licensed media ranging from games to graphic novels.

That said, it would be silly to pretend that BitTorrent isn't used to illegally obtain content; blockbuster Hollywood movies, porn, computer software, and copyrighted music comprised the majority of BitTorrent downloads in 2010. Note: If you download copyrighted content, be prepared to pay the penalty. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has not only closed down torrent sites, but has sued peer-to-peer server operators and individuals, too. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has attempted to protect its properties by sending out nearly 2 million copyright infringement warnings.

BitTorrent Tips
BitTorrent can be tricky for novice users, so here are a few introductory tips to assist in making your experience a pleasurable one.

• Seed—Don't Just Leech
  Don't be selfish. Although it's very easy to simply be a leecher (one who downloads files), you should display common courtesy to the BitTorrent community by acting as a seeder (one who shares data), so don't block others from accessing your file data.
• Cover Your Tracks
  Second, download free software such as BTGuard and TorrentPrivacy that masks your router ID by bouncing it through several nodes should you wish to keep your seeding and downloading private. The tradeoff for this anonymity, however, is slower download speed. It should be noted that these programs don't guarantee 100% invisibility, but they add an extra layer of protection.
• Open The Flood Gates
  Third, you may need to enable port forwarding if you don't believe you're seeing optimal download speeds. By default, routers and PC security software may feature firewalls that slow or block data, so make that they allow incoming TCP and UDP connections.
• Clean Up Your Mess
  Finally, make sure to clean out your client's incomplete download folder should you lose a signal. Although the content may not have fully downloaded, the torrent itself remains—and is the size of what would've been the downloaded file. In other words, even if the 2GB video file didn't fully download, there will be 2GB of hard drive space allotted to it.

Mobile Payments for iPhone, iPad

Apple may launch a system for making retail purchases directly from iPhones and iPads later this year, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Such a system would be dependent on near-field communication (NFC) to make payments. A consultant told Bloomberg that Apple will introduce NFC radios in the next iPhone and iPad, and that it's developing an NFC payment terminal for retailers.

There have been many attempts in recent years to introduce a cellphone-based payment system based on NFC, but they've been hampered by a dearth of phones with the technology and a lack of support from service providers. However, those barriers are slowly being lifted—Google notably built NFC into the Nexus S phone, and new NFC systems have major backers—lending weight to the possibility of an NFC-equipped iPhone.

Apple has another incentive to put NFC in its mobile devices, as the company already runs an entire digital payment system in place via iTunes, and millions of people store their credit-card information there. When buying something at a story, instead of using a physical credit card users would simply hold up their phone to an NFC terminal, and it would tap into the phone owner's iTunes account.

Apple could also encourage users to use bank-account information, since recent legislation pushed forward by Senator Dick Durbin limits the fees that retailers pay on debit-card purchases. Apple, like all merchants, must pay credit-card companies fees for every transaction, and having customers use bank accounts instead would reduce its operating costs.

In addition to purchases, NFC tech on phones has the potential to let users easily access merchants' rewards programs and even enable targeted advertising. Advertisers would likely pay a premium for personalized ads that specifically promote services directly where customers are spending money. Apple launched an advertising platform specifically for its iOS devices,called iAd, last year.

The Future of the Internet: and How to Stop It

The book The Future of the Internet makes it sound like one of those upbeat future technology books that you see people in suits reading on planes, but the subtitle "and How to Stop It" shows that it's not so upbeat. The Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University and the co-founder of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, describes how so much use of the Internet is headed in directions that contradict the principles that made the Internet great in the first place. The most important of these principles is what he calls generativity—flexibility in the creation of hardware, operating systems, applications, or websites that allow people to make new contributions, often resulting in unexpected contributions that others can build on further. While Linux, Apache web servers, Firefox, wikis, the IBM PC's open architecture, and many other platforms have provided this so far, the increasing use of "tethered appliances" to perform Internet-related tasks threatens this pattern. Products such as the iPhone, TiVo, and the XBox are so tightly controlled by their makers that any innovations built on these platforms must come from within the companies that control them, much like any innovation in the U.S. telephone system had to come from the monopoly company that controlled it for so many decades. Sure, you can write a new application for the iPhone, but no one can load your app onto their iPhone until it goes into Apple, gets approved, and then distributed by them. If you want to add a new menu option to Firefox and recompile it, no such approval process is necessary for people to use it, and this kind of freedom is how the Internet grew to where it is today.

which includes a history of the Internet that was fascinating to someone who's read quite a few histories of the Internet, he reviews several of the things that have gone wrong (for example, spam and malware). This sets the stage for how tightly-controlled Internet walled gardens are becoming more appealing to people, and he describes some of the decentralized, grass-roots practices that have dealt with such issues surprisingly effectively—for example, robots.txt files and Wikipedia's practices for resolving disputes.

He does present a hopeful case for how the future can build on current work by technical people and legal scholars to prevent the looming corporate-controlled Internet. (One legal scholars he mentions is Pamela Samuelson.I strongly recommend the book to geeks interested in relevant legal issues and to lawyers interested in Internet technology, because lays out the explicit, implicit, and potential connections between these worlds so well.

3 Steps To Successful Customer Relationship Management

Company's size and the requirements for your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution, the goal remains the same: learn more about your customers and leverage that knowledge into increased customer loyalty and improved sales.

However, too often companies jump into their CRM initiatives without the proper thought and planning. The result? A CRM system that does not meet critical organizational needs and fails to provide the proper insights into their customer base. Or perhaps worse--a CRM system that is not used at all. The key to success for your CRM implementation is not just the technology driving your solution, but in the strategy itself.

To achieve CRM success, there are 3 steps every company must follow before starting to consider CRM technology:

1. Establish a commitment to organizational change. If your company already understands why it is essential to improve customer loyalty and agrees that a CRM initiative is a high priority, congratulations! If not, you'll need to do the legwork necessary to achieve consensus with all teams. Don't be overwhelmed. Use this as an opportunity to put the pieces of your CRM puzzle together--discovering where customer touch points interact, what information is important to whom and why, and to identify what current business processes seem inefficient to those tasked with executing them. Once each team feels heard, and their grievances documented, they will likely agree that change is a good thing. Then you not only have much of the critical information you need for your next step, you also have the capital to return to these folks for their buy-off when your CRM strategy is completed. Your next step?

2. Define specific adjustments to operations. This seems like a tall order, but it is the logical next step towards building a solid strategy that your entire organization can get behind and evangelize. We suggest creating a matrix of all the problems identified in the first step and the solutions that were discussed. Use this matrix to compare the challenges across departments and identify potential operational changes that would solve these issues. Do not think about how technology can support these solutions, just concentrate on the operational changes necessary--who needs to know what and when, what workflow will share critical information between departments, and what critical customer-facing actions should occur at the completion of each task. TIP: The biggest factor to building a solid CRM strategy is developing a standardized sales process that is based on best practices, can be implemented across your sales organization, and integrates tightly with marketing and operations. Armed with this information, you are ready to:

3. Document your CRM Strategy. Your strategy should identify the specific business problems that need to be addressed (based on your information gathering and prioritization exercises from the first 2 steps), define objectives whose results can be measured (to demonstrate the ROI of your implementation), and outline solid insight into how CRM will impact the company, current operations, and your customers. To ensure organizational buy-off, boil down your CRM strategy into these critical points: How will CRM improve the lives of its users? How will it increase productivity? How will it impact sales? It is this strategy you then take back to the key stakeholders for final buy-off. It is this strategy that you will arm yourself with when researching and evaluating all possible CRM solutions available to you.

Understanding what business problems you need to solve and how they impact your operations--while demonstrating company support for this initiative--will ensure a successful implementation of your CRM solution. Not only will you better understand the trade-offs that you will need to make with the technology you choose, you will be able to better evaluate customization requirements and recommendations made by your CRM partner. The time you spend planning and documenting your strategy will be well worth the results!

9 Strategies for Internal Marketing

Internal marketing is a powerful way to increase patient referrals. In fact, Levin Group has found that internal marketing has the potential to be more effective than any form of print advertising or business phone directory. There’s no mystery behind why internal marketing works. It leverages the fact that a practice’s current patients are often more than happy to refer their friends and family. Practices lose opportunities for referrals because dentists and team members don’t communicate that the practice is actively accepting more patients. Billionaire businessman and philanthropist Milton Petrie had a favorite saying that best captures the thought, “if you don’t ask, you don’t get.”

What’s the most effective kind of internal marketing for your practice? Different patients respond to different types of marketing. Unfortunately, many practices take a scattershot approach to marketing rather than implementing a well-designed series of strategies that drive new patients to the practice. To be successful in building your patient base, internal marketing should be repeat, consistent, and positive.

The following internal marketing strategies can help you maximize opportunities to grow your practice:

1. Train your staff to ask for referrals

Take advantage of one of your practice’s best resources — your dental team. They’re interacting with patients at every step of the treatment process. By training your staff to ask for referrals, you can dramatically increase production from new patients. Use scripting to train your team. For example, at the end of a treatment, the staff member can thank the person and say, “We love having patients like you. Please tell your friends about us.”

2. Place signs in the office that show referrals are appreciated

Place signs in the reception room, clinical areas and at the front desk. The signs can state something like, “Referrals are appreciated” or “Thanks for the confidence you show in our practice by referring your friends.” Be sure the signs are prominently displayed throughout the office and have a professional look. A well-designed “thank you” brochure also lets patients know their referrals are appreciated.

3. Start a practice building program

Thank your referring patients with a complimentary dental product or service. Patients who refer three or more people should go into your “VIP Club.” These patients are demonstrating that they really want to support your practice. Show them you appreciate their support with a gift certificate for dinner or a high-end dental product or service. A valuable gift recognizes their efforts and encourages them to continue to refer new patients. Develop a patient referral brochure that outlines all the benefits patients can enjoy when they refer friends and relatives to your practice.

4. Display testimonial letters

Testimonials are often powerful marketing tools because they are generated directly from patients and not from the practice. Letters from your patients can motivate new patients to stay with the practice long-term. Encourage patients to send letters and e-mails to your office. When you receive positive letters from patients, ask for permission to display those testimonials in your office.

Another strategy is asking for a testimonial from patients who felt treatment made a significant difference in their lives. Many practices like to display handwritten patient testimonials on a bulletin board near the reception desk.

5. Make your practice brochure an effective marketing tool

What makes your practice the best choice for new patients? Spell that out clearly in your practice brochure. It can educate patients about the advantages of your practice over others. Highlight the reasons to choose your practice over the competitor down the street. A good brochure will list all of your patient services, products and technologies, along with practice hours and other vital information. A brochure is an investment in practice growth, so it should reflect the quality of your practice.

6. Display posters of the dental services you perform

Place posters in the reception area, operatories and other office areas. Dental product sales representatives will be happy to provide you with posters and other promotional materials. As internal marketing vehicles, posters are effective in getting a patient’s attention and sparking questions about new services.

7. Create marketing events to showcase your practice and staff

Make the most of events like an anniversary, adding a new associate or partner, or moving to a new location. These occasions can become natural opportunities to gain some recognition and connection to your community. A good rule of thumb for an event is to develop between 5-10 marketing ideas to effectively promote it and make it successful. For example, an “Oral Health Week” could be promoted with press releases to local media, in-office drawings and giveaways, and partnerships with local merchants that sell dental products.

8. Start a practice newsletter

An effective newsletter updates patients about practice services, staff information, events and new technologies. Today’s easy-to-use software programs make it possible to publish a professional-looking newsletter. The publication can be as simple as a single sheet with 4-6 brief stories about the practice. Your newsletter can feature articles on new services, longest active patient, staff, recent courses taken by the doctor, oral hygiene, products and anything else you’d like to convey to your whole patient population. You can e-mail or print copies of your newsletter for distribution to patients. Also be sure to hang it on a bulletin board near your reception area.

9. Aim for the “WOW” response

The best form of internal marketing is often excellent customer service. Who wouldn’t love a practice that treats patients like VIPs? And wouldn’t everyone like to be seen promptly and have their questions answered courteously and with enthusiasm? It can be difficult to exceed patient expectations. But achieving the “WOW” response from patients is critical to ensuring sustainable long-term growth.

Next Generation Marketing Strategies

Marketing environment is turbulent and hence requires a relevant strategy that can effectively plug into the constantly changing trends. Successful businesses realise that gaining insight and applying next generation marketing strategies ensures a more flexible response to this volatile business situation. Investments in marketing programmes are expected to generate revenue and as such return on marketing investments is always an area that marketers have to optimise in their marketing activities.

The fast changing business environment requires that businesses readjust the way they do business. Businesses insisting on engaging in cyclical planning processes face the risk of making their business and their products obsolete in the current dispensation. Businesses must have to make strategic decisions outside the normal planning cycle if they are to efficiently deal with rapidly changing consumer preferences, media channels and competitor profiles. The environment that marketing professionals ply their trade is witnessing an unprecedented change of trends as the traditional means of marketing are being challenged on a daily basis by the emergent technologies and strategies.

This conference on Next Generation Marketing Strategies, boasting of top marketing professionals in East Africa, will bring together the best minds in marketing from the region to deliberate and network on the current trends and what they mean for the region. The increasing role of the consumer in the co-creation of values for the market will be explored while interactive discussions involving all delegates on new media channels. There will also be a mini workshop on marketing return on investments where delegates are guided through the best practices required in making your marketing activities translate to better balance sheet.

Some Ways to Find Brands & Companies on Twitter

A big question for marketers that want to connect with businesses on Twitter is that they often don’t know where to look. Part of the rub is that Twitter is predominantly a service used by individuals, not companies. While you can use search.twitter.com advanced features to find individuals using specific criteria, it can be more productive for finding companies or commercial users of Twitter via a managed list.

WeFollow – Kevin Rose from Digg started this user powered directory of Twitter users organized into categories with rankings based on the number of users. Inclusion is based purely on users submitting themselves by Tweeting an @wefollow and hashtags describing what 3 categories to associate that user with.

Twibs.com - Alphabetical Directory and search engine of 5,368 businesses on Twitter with a voting option to see which profiles are featured on the home page. Each business Twitter account has a profile showing latest Tweets and others’ Tweets about that user.

Twellow.com – Directory and search engine of Twitter users. Allows customization of profiles, categories and addition of links to other social services. Grabs publicly available messages from Twitter then analyzes and organizes them into the categories found at Twellow.com. Users can add themselves also. Features “Twellowhood” to find local Tweeple.

Tracking Twitter - The Electric Artists Twitter Tracker is a real-time listing of the top media, entertainment, and consumer product feeds EA is following on Twitter - Broken down into the following categories: Brands, Media, Television and Celebrities.

A Wiki of Social Media Marketing Examples - This list published by Peter Kim shows much more than Twitter, but you can sort the list of brands using social media by type, then scroll down to the “Microblogging” section.

Useful Twitter user discovery lists and directories include:

Social Brand Index - Jonathan Kash maintiains this index of Twitter accounts sorted by: Business, Education, Entertainment, Executives & Notable Individuals, For Consumers, Government & Politics, Housing Market, Media, Non-Profit, Organizations, Service Providers, Social Properties, Technology and Travel.

Analyst Twitter Directory - Listing of industry Analysts on Twitter by Carter Lusher of SageCircle.

Brands That Tweet – Collection of brand names Twitter accounts from Paul Dunay. Many of the accounts listed are squatters and not managed by the brands.

C-Level Tweeters – Another collection from Paul Dunay of CEOs, CTO’s and CMO’s. There are many more in the comments.

The Ultimate List of Moms on Twitter – Wendy Piersall has assembled this list of Tweeting moms plus many more additions in the comments.

Ultimate Small Business Twitter List – Anita Campbell and friends have compiled this list of people and organizations to consider following on Twitter if you want to keep your finger on the pulse of small businesses.

To improve your multi media product creation

Nice iMac 27 inch just for creating multi-media products. Here are the few targeted programs I downloaded to make it a really effective media business machine. This post has no affiliate links and most programs are one time fees (many with free trials).

Dropbox

I like to sync my media folders using dropbox between devices over the WiFi network. Just drag and drop files into it and access it from any computer (or device like iPad / iPhone). Dropbox makes managing content between devices simple.

Call Recorder (for recording skype)

I use Skype on this machine with a quality Rode Podcaster microphone and headphones. Call recorder by ecamm is a high quality voice or video + voice recorder I use to make high quality downloads. I convert .mov to MP3 files and podcast interviews. This has been extremely reliable and has many customizations. (If you use Windows try Pamela for skype Recorder).

1 Password

When you access a few different online programs like I do (Gmail, shopping cart, Basecamp etc…) it helps to have passwords stored. 1 Password is pretty cool because you can sync it with your Dropbox folder and access the same passwords as your other computers in a network capacity. (Windows users can use Roboform).

iWork

iWork for mac includes Pages (a really nice ‘Word’ replacement) that creates clickable links in the PDF export. Keynote it a lovely slideshow platform (like PowerPoint). The backgrounds are very nice, the transitions are clean and the effects like drop shadowing of images are unequaled. Line up some content and pictures and you can use this as an expert speaker from stage or as a shy IM’er creating amazing videos from home using Screenflow… (Windows users can use Word and Powerpoint).

Screenflow

Making video products is super easy with this screen capture software. Setup a keynote slideshow and hit record and you have an instant product. Webinars or just straight videos with or without face to camera are all possible. Being able to create high quality sales / education videos from home allows anyone with a mac to be a publisher. Start your empire. Create content, feed YouTube, sell high quality training products and away you go! Note: I also use Screenflow to edit my Flip created movies because it is so easy. (Windows users can use Camtasia).

iSkysoft Video Converter

Once you create your Keynote presentations and record them with Screenflow you can convert them into a bunch of different formats using iSkysoft video converter. This will let you create almost any size and format for optimized streaming across a huge range of devices. These videos can be loaded up to Amazon S3 using BucketExplorer…

Bucket Explorer

Managing my media files is essential especially when I run webinars, interviews and podcasts. I rely on Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for delivering the content to my clients. Bucket Explorer is a heavily featured FTP application for managing Amazon S3. You can set expiring URLs for the content and create buckets and cloud distributions easily. It is drag and drop easy.

Get Creating!

Using these tools I have been able to create and distribute incredible multi media content from my home lab. I this helps you improve your business profits.

Some best methods for building a big twitter following

What’s a Twitter Giveaway? Well, essentially, you give something away… whether it’s an eBook, software product etc. OR a physical product like an Ipod… in return for Twitter users

• re Tweeting a message that you ask them to re Tweet to their Twitter account
• Follow you on Twitter

This does a few things…

1. It builds your Twitter follower count when the initial registrant follows you on Twitter
2. It “goes viral” because when the initial registrant retweets your message, you’re now “advertising” on their Twitter profile page, to all of THEIR followers. Their followers then click on the reTweet message and sign up for your contest also… and the process just spirals

This is how many of the people with large Twitter followers are able to build a Twitter following so large. Many Twitter experts like Deborah Micek, iJustine, and Joel Comm use and/or teach about Twitter Giveaways.

The nice thing about Twiveaways is that you’re FIRST providing value in the form of an eBook or physical product… and THEN you get something in return, in the form of a larger follower count.

Rather than all of those black hat methods of building a Twitter following that we’re all so used to seeing online lately.

Because of the power of Twitter Giveaways, Actually created a tool to automatically run and track Twitter Giveaways, so that there is absolutely no manual tracking necessary on our part, and the site is 100% free.

Here’s the link to the site where you can run your own Twitter Giveaways: http://www.twiveaway.com

How to know if someone is invisible on Gmail

As you might be knowing from quite some time you can go invisible while chatting on Gmail. The invisible status is available in Gmail Chat, Google Talk.

What to do if you want to know if someone in really offline or is playing Mr. Hideous.

Follow these steps:

Step 1:

Open the chat window for the contact you want to confirm is offline of invisible

Step 2:

If you see a message "The chat is off record" then proceed to step 3, else click on options in the chat window (Gmail) or the down pointing arrow (Gtalk) and choose "Go Off Record" You will now surely see that "The chat is off record"

Step 3:

Now you need to interpret what you get.

• If you get a message in red like below, this indicates that the user is really offline.

shows the contact is offline

• If you get nothing then the user is invisible, or any status updates in gray it means the user is online but invisible.

shows the contact is invisible