Edward N. Albro, PC World, Robert Strohmeyer

Dedicated mobile hotspots have been around for a few years now, but they've gotten progressively easier to use. And with the advent of 4G service, they’ve become notably faster, capable of connecting to more devices, and just a lot more useful.

We decided to compare the latest and greatest mobile hotspots from the two national 4G LTE providers in the United States, AT&T and Verizon. We lined up Verizon’s new MiFi 4620L Jetpack LTE hotspot against AT&T’s Mobile Hotspot Elevate 4G (by Sierra Wireless) to see which one worked better.

Hotel rooms have a lot in common with pork bellies and Louisiana sweet crude: their prices bounce around from day to day, driven by the vagaries of the market. A room that costs $350 on Saturday might be available for $175 on Tuesday.

But is that $175 room really a good deal? New site DealAngel, launching tonight, aims to let you know. The site examines the pricing history of all the hotels in the area you're planning to visit and analyzes whether that $175 price tag is above or below the typical cost of that room for a Tuesday. When you search for a hotel on DealAngel, it doesn't arrange your choices by price, but by how good the deals are.

Finally! After years of confusing consumers with multiple, slightly different versions of the same operating system, Microsoft announced today that Windows 8 will come in only four versions: One for home use, one for business, one for devices running ARM chips, and one for large enterprises that buy in bulk.

For most people buying an operating system for a traditional desktop or laptop, the choice will be between just two versions. The version called simply "Windows 8" is designed for home users. "Windows 8 Pro" is for business users and includes features for encrypting a file system, virtualization, and domain management.

Salesforce ChatterWhether your company is a small shop of just a few intensely hard-working pros or a large venture with hundreds or thousands of workers, good communication is critical to your success. And by "good communication," I mean communication that works. With the right collaboration tools and a little operational discipline, you can overcome any communications challenge and get your teams in sync.

When I started my career back in the olden days of the 20th Century, the workplace was largely synchronous. For the most part, everyone showed up at more or less the same time, worked in the same office together, went to the same meetings, ate lunch at 12:30, and gathered around the same water cooler when they felt like taking a break. Communication wasn't always of the highest quality, but there was plenty of it and if you missed something, somebody was always right there to fill you in.

People who have installed the Windows 8 Consumer Preview praise its speed and the changes to Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer, but most readers who answered a PCWorld survey aren't satisfied with the new Metro interface--and half indicate that they would be unlikely to recommend the new operating system to a friend.

Microsoft made the Consumer Preview available for a free download last week, and more than 2900 people who had installed the OS answered our survey.

As everybody knows, the most striking thing about Windows 8 is its Metro interface--those brightly colored tiles that serve as both shortcuts to programs and live widgets reporting data from those programs.

The interface has been widely praised around the Web, and for good reason. It's a bold innovation (especially coming from a company that's normally so timid), it looks great, and it makes getting around Windows a lot more fun.

The top tech story of the last week has been Microsoft's release of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. The company radically redesigned the new operating system from Windows 7, with a controversial new Metro interface borrowed from Windows Phone 7 smartphones.

The changes have prompted generally positive reactions from tech journalists, including our own Jason Cross and Nate Ralph. But the broader public seems less convinced that Windows 8 is something to embrace. A highly unscientific survey of followers of the @PCWorld Twitter feed found few people who were eager to try the new OS.

Whenever a new version of Windows comes out, I’m always ambivalent. The idea of a new operating system with cool, new features sounds great. Going through the long, sometimes mystifying upgrade process doesn’t. But the Windows 8 Consumer Preview seemed so compelling that I threw caution to the wind and put it on an older Dell desktop I use at work.

The good news is that the process was a little shorter than I remember from previous versions of Windows--and much clearer. I was able to get the Windows 8 preview up and running on my system in less than 2 hours.

LG introduced today today the Optimus Vu, a combo tablet-smartphone LTE device with a 5-inch display to support easier multimedia viewing and ebook reading.  

The Optimus Vu will be on display at the Mobile World Congress next week and will be introduced in Korea in March, LG representatives say; no global availability or pricing was disclosed.

I've ranted before against the perils of delegated social strategies. You know: Management decides it's time to get into social media, and appoints some whippersnapper to the task. The potential perils with this approach are many and severe, but even under good circumstances, this approach comes with a steep lost-opportunity cost. And that -- even if we ignore all the ways a lone-gunman social strategy can backfire on a good company -- is a very compelling reason to spend less energy thinking about your business's social strategy and more energy thinking about your company's social culture.

In a delightfully insightful opinion post on Fast Company last week, Bulldog Drummond CEO Shawn Parr advanced the observation that "culture eats strategy for lunch." The point, in brief, is that no matter how much strategic thinking you do, the culture of your company will either bolster your success or unravel your elegantly wrought plans. And while Parr didn't talk about social specifically, it occurred to me that this is a great opportunity for some dialog about the overwhelming impact of company culture on the effectiveness of social campaigns.

There's no shortage of talk about engagement in marketing circles, but really honestly engaging with people (not just customers, but any target audience) is a lot harder than most of us are willing to admit. It takes real work. It takes creativity. It takes a sincere desire to understand the people whose influence can elevate your brand. And, critically, it takes a commitment to create social content that resonates with the personalities you're trying to reach.

At the start of the social gold rush, the prevailing attitude among businesses that "got it" was that we just needed to get in there and join the conversation. Social media strategies focused on figuring out ways to crank up follower counts. Quickly, though, savvy brands realized they needed to do something more, and there are now -- happily -- hundreds of companies out there creating genuine, mutually valuable relationships with their customers on the social web through thoughtfully executed strategies that reward customer interaction.

Does the world really need another blog about social media? We invested some serious effort into exploring this question before making the decision to launch "Go Social," the blog you're reading now. (As you might have surmised, the conclusion we came to was "yes.")

There's no shortage of chatter about social media on the web, but much of it -- in our opinion, anyway -- remains too tightly focused on a narrow set of use cases loosely described as "marketing." The lion's share appears dedicated to the dubious aim of getting more followers, getting more shares or retweets, or "going viral" (whatever that means). But it’s not clear to us what followers, as a numerical value, actually do for a business. Shares and retweets may be a vague indicator of engagement, but only if they come from (and go out to) genuinely engaged human audiences. And "going viral" is, more often than not, an objective doomed to failure.

So while there's a lot of noise on the web about using social media in business, relatively little of that chatter actually helps businesses to discover the potential value of social media across the whole spectrum of business use cases and guides companies in developing holistic strategies and practical tactics for putting social tools to work inside and outside their organizations. This blog aims to do exactly those things.

Who We Are

Over time, we'll work hard to make sure "Go Social" exemplifies the principles it espouses. That is to say, it'll be open, inquisitive, interactive, and engaged with its audience on the social web. While we'll always uphold PCWorld's high editorial standards in choosing which content to serve on this blog, we intend to open it up to outside contributors whose perspectives illuminate the broader landscape of social business.

Anchoring the blog on a week-to-week basis will be Robert Strohmeyer and Michael Ansaldo, two veteran technology journalists who've written for a wide selection of top tech sites over the past couple of decades, and who now put their collective energies to work creating impactful social media and content campaigns for top-tier technology partners through our company’s content marketing service, PCWorld Content Works.