insync: it is ok to break up with dropbox

I heard about insync on twitter not too long ago.

It caught my attention the fact they sell themselves as a Dropbox killer, I had to try.

Insync (http://insynchq.com) is, like Dropbox, a little program you can install in a mac or pc even if you are not an admin (which for my work laptop is a must) and that has for objective to sync a local folder among your computers, with a copy online… but with a huge difference from services such as Dropbox or SugarSync, or box.net…

First: it is free. But sure, Dropbox is free for a couple of Gigs too, and SugarSync free for 5Gb…

Second: it uses GDrive or Google Docs as storage and online sharing and versioning… so:

They don’t have to host anything, and you pay Google for storage.

The difference with Dropbox is that for instance a 50Gb with Dropbox costs $9.99 per month, and a 20Gb with Google costs $5…. a year!!! or 80Gb for $20 a year!!

• For $200 per year Dropbox gives you 100Gb
• For $100 per year Google gives you 200Gb

For me this is a no brainier. I was already using Google docs, so I switched to insync.

I can edit documents locally or online, I can set up sharing permissions on google docs… it works like charm.

Congratulation guys!! insync rocks.

Now, how is this Philippines based company going to survive?… we will see… maybe Google buys it…

Posted from .

GTD: Todos, Task managers… PART 2

I had promised for a while that I would write a second part to the GTD To Do review I did some time ago. Well, here it is.

It is not going to be so deep as the one I did back in September 2010, simply because I don’t have too much time to write on my blog.

Since Sept. 2010 the To Do solutions have increased exponentially. Now we can easily find solutions that are web based with apps for iOS and Android, and even more solutions that are focused for teams and they are web based.

I will focus on the way I do it while mentioning the ones I encounter in my way.

Objective:

• I want a way to manage my To Dos, from my iPhone, iPad, Mac and web. I would like it to be offline.
• I need to have access to shared To Dos with my wife.

List of To Dos and Project Management tools

For collaboration project managment and to dos, take a look to this sites.

Teamly

Teamly is a great tool for managing a team. It has private and group tasks.

• http://teamly.com

Huddle

Huddle is more than a to do solution. Pretends to be a substitute to SharePoint.

Here you have a list of all the features: http://www.huddle.com/this-is-huddle/features/

• http://www.huddle.com

Teambox

Teambox is more like teamly. Webbase app for teams. It integrates with Google docs and Dropbox, and they have iPhone app. 3 projects free.

• http://teambox.com

Vitalist

Also based on David Allen’s GTD. Free to try. Take a look:

• http://vitalist.com

My Favorites

Wunderlist

Wunderlist is awesomely designed. It has apps and web and for windows and mac. It is simple and nice. It is a todo program, and has collaboration features, which makes it a perfect candidate.

• http://wunderlist.com

What do I use?

Evernote

I am an Evernote lover. You can see it from my posts. I am a premium subscriber with 1000′s of notes, from all incoming mail, to my books, wine, receipts, to the todos.

Now the new iPhone an iPad app allow you to create checkboxes therefore in combinaison with Egretlist is an option to consider. The downside continues to be the due dates and repeting tasks….

2Do app + Toodledo

I reviewed the 2Do app in September. It is the one I use, with a Toodledo sync.

Why?

I love the app. It is one of the most complete, with location (on demand so no battery concern), tagging, etc.. it is fully syncronized with toodledo and:

I can feed it via emails. I can email a secret email address at toodledo and with some queries I can control where the to do goes, so a task could have in the subject of an email something like

Call Jim !! @phone #today
Finish the Report ! #next friday *ProjectA @work $Active ~1hour
Mow the lawn *Chores @home

Also I can syncronize my toodledo account with my iCal and see it in my mac.

Downside: No mac client (or PC…)

Reminders Mac.

With iOS5 Apple released Reminders. It is a very simple to do. I use it for shared lists with my wife. The shopping list and the shared list.

This is day to day list, perfectly integrated with mac (iCal) web (iCloud).

To share a list go to iCloud click on the icon.

Other

I bumped into a nice to do website… but not to manage your todos but to outsource them… take a look:

• http://www.taskrabbit.com/

More….

ther you might consider:

• Diddit – http://www.diddit.com
• Doomi – http://doominow.com
• niid.to – http://niid.to
• Toodledo – http://www.toodledo.com
• Remember the milk – http://www.rememberthemilk.com
• HiveMinder – http://hiveminder.com
• ToDoIst – http://todoist.com

 

Posted from .

Quick poll results: the most useful intranet content types (world Internet Challenge)

(this article is extracted from worldwide intranet challenge)

I ran a poll recently asking people to rate the usefulness of 9 intranet content types that add value to your organisation. 221 people (as at Sat Oct 15) responded to the poll and the results were surprising.

iPhone augmented reality translator

Word Lens — http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/word-lens/id383463868 download now on the App Store, and purchase language packs when you need them!

Languages currently available using in-app purchase:
- Spanish to English
- English to Spanish

Try the demo modes first to get a sense of the technology in action — reverse or erase Spanish and English words!

Check us out at: http://questvisual.com/
Now available for iPhone 4, iPhone 3gs, and iPod Touch 4.

Word Lens can instantly translates printed words from one language to another using the video camera on your iPhone. No network delay, no roaming fees, and no reception problems.

Word Lens is a dictionary — evolved. It looks up words for you, and shows them in context. You can use Word Lens on your vacations to translate restaurant menus, street signs, and other things that have clearly printed words.

Word Lens has its limits. Sometimes the translation will have mistakes, and may be hard to understand, but it usually gets the point across. If a translation fails, there is a way to manually look up words by typing them in. Word Lens does not read very stylized fonts, handwriting, or cursive. Try it, and tell us what you think!

Facial recognition… the future of Social Media?

Jailbreakme via web. Less than 30 sec.

This is my iPad 2 3G 64Gb.
See how easy and fast is to jailbreak it. It is running 4.3.3.

MeshPotato – A Communication Revolution for Africa

Mesh Potato could be a revolution in African communications.

The idea is just brilliant: The Mesh Potato is a new device for providing low-cost telephony and Internet in areas where alternative access either doesn’t exist or is too expensive.

Watch the video:

Blogging from an iPad

Do you use wordpress for your blog?
Do you have an iPad?

Then you have probably have tried the wordpress free app.
Well, there is another app (not free) which works even better. It allows you to connect to flickr, youtube, picasaweb, and create rich text posts with photos and a much more flexible editing environment.

You can find more information at blogsy’s website

How To Embed Practically Anything On Your Blog or Website

If you want the hands-down, easiest way to embed practically anything on your blog or website, have we got a tool for you!

The nature of the web is such that sharing and republishing content is common — and often even encouraged. The problem is, we increasingly store bits of our data on various services scattered across the web. Aggregating that content into one centralized personal hub can be time consuming — requiring user to manually copy text and links or upload files and photos — or fiddling with RSS feeds trying to make content automagically appear.

Twitter released a very cool tool to allow publishers to embed tweets in their blog posts, but the process is overly complex for most users, with plugins needed to streamline the process. Why can’t you just paste a link to a Twitter status in a blog post or webpage? It turns out, you can.

A Quick Introduction to oEmbed

A technology called oEmbed, in existence for a number of years, was built to solve the embeddable content problem. oEmbed is an open format, designed to let web publishers easily embed content such as photos, video, rich content — and automatically display other content by typing in a URL. Providers like YouTube, Hulu, Flickr and Vimeo all support oEmbed, meaning that pasting a URL for one of those services into a system with oEmbed support should allow users to quickly embed rich media.

WordPress, the world’s most popular CMS, has had basic oEmbed support since WordPress 2.9. Plugins for most other popular platforms exist, too. The problem is, keeping an updated list of the providers that support oEmbed and keeping libraries up to date isn’t a streamlined process.

Embedly: Secret Sauce to Web Embed Fun

In March, we wrote about the startup Embedly, which has developed a platform for converting URLs into embeddable content. Embedly is already in use by companies such as Storify, bit.ly and TweetDeck.

Embedly uses the oEmbed spec to add embed functionality to a growing list of services — 218 at the time of this writing — by interfacing just with the Embedly API.

When we first wrote about Embedly, our post focused on how third parties can use Embedly to provide rich-media previews in their own apps or to create their own embed targets. Embedly Pro also lets its users bring rich embeds to mobile users.

Still, the basic free Embedly service is extremely powerful. In fact, when paired with a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress, Drupal or Joomla, it makes embedding rich content a snap.

How to Use Embedly

Embedly has libraries available for a host of different client and server-side web languages, including jQuery, Python, Ruby and PHP. For users who don’t want to mess with writing their own tool, Embedly has built its own JavaScript tag and WordPress plugin. Community-developed plugins for Drupal and Joomla also exist.

Since the WordPress plugin was developed by Embedly itself (and we use WordPress at Mashable), here’s a brief overview of how easy it is to use Embedly to bring rich content to your website.

Install the Embedly Plugin

The first step is to download and install the Embedly plugin. Activate the plugin and you can select what services you want to enable from the Embedly menu in the WordPress dashboard.

Embedly frequently updates its service list, and you can run an “update services” command to get access to more libraries.

Paste URLs Into Your Posts

The next step is to simply enter a URL on its own line into your posts or web pages. Each service has slightly different parameters for how URLs should be entered, but in general, the base URL is all that is needed.

To embed a Twitter status update, for instance, you just need to enter in the URL to that update. The Embedly API page has the parameters for each service supported by Embedly.

Enjoy Rich Media Embeds

That’s it. You can now enjoy and share media from 200+ web services across your site.

The Tumblr support is one of my favorite features — simply entering the URL for a post will embed the content of that post. If it’s a photo, the photo is displayed; if it’s a video, you’ll see the video in its player, and so on.

On the Twitter end, Embedly’s Blackbird Pie implementation is a lot easier than any other method we have seen. The company even has basic support for Twitter Photos.

(from mashable)

5 Great Skype Alternatives

Microsoft’s whopping US$ 8.5 billion purchase of Skype is probably good news for a large pool of video chat users, but there’s undoubtedly those who are worried about the possible implications of the acquisition. While there’s no exact clone of Skype floating around out there, a number of tools would still make great alternatives for those that fall into the latter category:

Viber

Originally an iPhone-only service, Viber (news, site) claimed somewhere around 10 million downloads in early May, 2011 when it opened up a beta for Android. The Android app adds a couple of unique features over the iPhone version, including a full call screen when a Viber call is received, popup text notification that lets users reply without the need to fully open the app, as well as the ability to act as the phone’s default dialer — for both normal calls and VoIP calls.

The VoIP service is free, runs in the background, and doesn’t charge anything to make calls over 3G and WiFi:

 

Just weeks later, the service now claims 15 million downloads. We wonder how many of those are thanks to the Microsoft/Skype deal.

goober Messenger

goober (news, site) is a multi-messenger for both your desktop and mobile device. Free services include calls from goober user to goober user, video calls, call forwarding to a goober user, and receiving calls.

Further, the desktop application integrates popular networks like Facebook and Twitter so you can keep track of all your favorite actions at once:

 

VoxOx

VoxOx (news, site) is like a combination of Skype, Google Voice and TweetDeck with some file sharing capabilities thrown on top. A unified Google Voice-like number will ring all of a user’s connected phones, calls are 1 cent per minute in several countries, and the service also has a mobile app, which was most recently demonstrated here:

 

ooVoo

ooVoo (news, site) lets you video conference with up to six people at once, and is especially neat because it also allows users to send video messages rather than emails if typing just isn’t your thing.

Although currently only available for Windows users, there’s some Mac-friendly software in the works. Further, the company sells several compatible third-party cameras, headsets and speakerphones, and runs its own servers, making an outage less likely.

Google Voice

You had to know this one was coming. Google Voice (news, site) provides free PC-to-PC voice and video calls, free PC-to-phone calls within the U.S. and fairly cheap calls elsewhere. The service also provides a range of other useful features, such as voicemail, SMS, conference calling, call screening and voicemail transcription.

(from cmswire)

Panasonic Viera AR Setup Simulator app augments the reality of your TV dream (video)

A cardboard cut-out, really? You pasted a 50-inch rectangle of stiffened paper to the wall in order to preview the flatscreen of your dreams within your new Vitsoe shelving system? For shame. A true nerd, nay, a real man would have cast aside those arts and crafts for Panasonic’s new Viera AR Setup Simulator app. Just grab the wall or pedestal AR marker from the printer and place it wherever you hope to showcase that new Panny. Then watch the app augment your reality through the iPhone’s camera. Don’t cost nothin’ but your time, starting with the 60 second video embedded after the break.

(from engadget)

Watch This Now: Aerial Photography Turned Into 3D Mapping

The latest and greatest revision of Google Maps released at the end of 2010 brought an exclusive feature to the Android platform: 3D map imaging. Solid white 3D representations of buildings pop into focus when you zoom in and rotate the angle of the map with multi-touch, and the feature delivers some awesome depth to Google Maps. It looks even better on a tablet. Why is all this important? Picture those 3D buildings. Now make them a hundred times cooler, and you might be prepared for the 3D maps a Swedish company is creating with flyover aerial photography.

Technology once used in missile guidance systems has been adapted to convert flyover video into 3D city models. The company has already mapped over 100 cities, including New York. We want this in Google Maps yesterday.

(from tested)
 

Rome2Rio, a Vehicle-Agnostic Travel Site, Launches

A new travel site called Rome2Rio launches today, the brainchild of two ex-Microsoftemployees, Michael Cameron and Bernard Tschirren. The site’s main innovation? It’s vehicle agnostic, in a way–you tell it you want to go from A to B, and it’ll tell you what combination of car, plane, train, or ferry you need to take.

In that way, it’s more like the “how to get there” in a Lonely Planet guide, points out VentureBeat in its story on the site today. Rather than piece together information from here and there, Rome2Rio aims for the all-inclusive experience of simply reading a paragraph in a guidebook.

And it goes further than that, too–to be truly useful, any travel site needs to let you book flights. Rome2Rio does that, presenting Kayak airfares, which you can click through to purchase flights.

Cameron and Tschirren told VentureBeat that the site is probably most useful in Europe, where the train systems are complicated and have varied pricing. “Hours of travel time and hundred or even thousands of dollars” could be saved, goes the claim.

The site joins the trend of creating technology that would make classic movie plots based on missed connections and poor communication–such as Planes, Trains, and Automobiles–obsolete.

(from fast company)

Guardly for iPhone: Your Personal Mobile Emergency Response System

As mobile phones become more ubiquitous, they are undoubtedly changing how we respond to and record crises. We can report emergencies and call for help in real-time, rather than having to drive to the nearest phone. But we haven’t really built these networks out fully and taken advantage of all the power of the mobile phone to send text messages, phone calls, conference calls, photos, and instant messages – not just to the authorities but to friends and family.

Enter Guardly, a new app from a Toronto-based startup that arrives on iPhone today.

I don’t want to run a sampling of scenarios where you’d want to have to use a device like this. But consider this. Even if you walk around with your iPhone in hand (or in pocket), it still takes 8 taps to dial 911 (Home, Slide to unlock, Phone, Keypad, 9, 1, 1, Send). It takes 3 taps to launch Guardly.

When activated, Guardly is able to contact the user’s personal safety network (which can be a number of people via voice, SMS or email) and/or cal 911. It will keep you in contact with these groups so you can collaborate via conference call and instant-messaging. Yes, another group messaging app. But not really.

The app also includes mapping and photo-sharing and can issue a blaring warning sound too.

The app is free, but you’ll need to subscribe to the premium features – $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year – to unlock all the features.

(from readwriteweb)

OpenShot 1.3.0 released; cements place as the best video editor for Linux

The latest version of Linux video editor ‘OpenShot‘ has been released with a raft of new features and fixes.

New features present in version 1.3.0 of the non-linear editor include: -

• A new user interface and icons
• Timeline and interface animations
• Smooth scaling
• Easier filtering of files/effects/transitions
• Video upload support for YouTube and Vimeo
• New 3D animations* (Snow, Particles, world maps and Lens Flare)

A full change-log can be found @ launchpad.net/openshot/1.3/1.3.0

As is tradition with a new release of OpenShot the developer, Jonathan Thomas, has created a new video to promote the release. Whilst it doesn’t show off the latest release to its full extent many of the new 3D animations are demonstrated.

The animated 3D maps in particular are impressive…

OpenShot 1.3 Released! from Jonathan Thomas on Vimeo.

…and the addition of smooth scaling will appease many of those who like to work with images in videos:

OpenShot Gets Smooth Scaling! from Jonathan Thomas on Vimeo.

Download

To install OpenShot 1.3.0 in Ubuntu 9.10 or higher add the following PPA to your software sources: -

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonoomph/openshot-edge
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install openshot
*Requires Blender to be installed
(from OMG ubuntu)