Last week Google started rolling out the long awaited Google Drive, with Mac and PC installers to accomplish sort of what Dropbox does, with the difference that they increased the free storage to 10Gb while Dropbox gives 2Gb.

I installed Google Drive. It is basically Google Docs renamed. Honestly I am a bit disappointed. In my Mac GDrive creates a folder with only links to Google Docs and yes, with the files that are not Google docs specifics. Insynchq does it much better… with Insynchq you use Google Drive but instead of having links it converts them to word, excel and powerpoint documents that are downloaded into your computers. Neat.

Also with Insynchq you can have multiple Google drive mapped at the same time. I use two, my norai and torres domains, now both upgraded to 5Gb each. I ended up removing the Google Drive Mac client as I prefer the Insynhq one.

What is cool about GDrive?

Well I am a heavy user of Google Docs, so is nice to have extra storage, plus to buy extra storage is pretty affordable. What Google does well is to be able to open most of the file within the browser, from PDF to DOC to even Photoshop. Also they have included OCR making it by far the best search. If you upload a photo or a pdf, and you search for something in it, you will find it. Like with Evernote.

The collaboration rocks with Google and I believe is one of the best for online editing.

Then we have Microsoft Skydrive. It has been there for a while, but is not that known, and not that loved. You might change your mind after reading this.

They also released an installer for Mac, PC and even apps for iPhone and iPad (while Google has none). So, again, like Dropbox, you will have a local folder synchronized with your cloud service.

So what is good and different about SkyDrive?

For starters, if you had it before you can claim 25Gb for free (which I did) and if you are new then you get 7Gb (which is still the best out there).

Second, it works perfectly fine on my Mac, PC, iPad and iPhone. Also if you use the web, and you have an Office document such a word, excel, powerpoint or Onenote you have access to Office 365 or online editor for word documents fully compatible, of course, with your traditional Word, and others.

For sharing is also pretty easy now. You can get a link that can be emailed or shared in social networks easily.

For collaboration Google is still stronger thought. I guess SkyDrive still works with the concept of checking in and out documents.

What about Dropbox and SugarSync?

For me they are pretty much dead. SugarSync gives you 5Gb for free and is the most feature rich one, but too complex for many.

Dropbox is still the simplest and that is why they might still survive, but for me is over, together with SugarSync. Storage space has no competitive prices.

The best?

Well I have a NAS, as Synology DS 1511+ with 15Tb. In the latest update they rolled out (DSM 4) they included Cloud Station which is again based on the same principle. A local folder with local files synchronized with the NAS via an installer.

So far they did not release a Mac version yet but I have it on my Windows machines.

So which is the best… well with my Synology I have raid 5, I own the data, and I have 15Tb available… plus fibre optics at home with 100Mb up and down…. so for personal use my NAS, for collaboration, Google Drive, for the best storage option now SkyDrive.

But… what I use the most is Evernote… anything I print I don’t send to the printer anymore, I just print it to Evernote. All my docs are tagged, OCR, emailed and stored there…

Now someone should create a service that uses all the cloud storage and puts them into one single volume… so 5Gb from your GDrive plus 25Gb from SkyDrive plus your 5Gb from SugarSync, the 2Gb from Dropbox…

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 .

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 .

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.

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!

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:

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

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)

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)

(from engadget)

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)
 

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)

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)

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)

You can download a cloud player and start having fun, or just use the web.

Then you should try views.fm. It is a web layer on top of dropbox that displays nice galleries, file sharing… pretty easy and straight forward.

Posted from Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.

We have storify (beta) that turns what people post on social media into stories.  Collect the best photos, video, tweets and more to publish them as simple, beautiful stories that can be embedded anywhere.

There is paper.li that creates sort of newspaper with just twitter handles and lists and even Facebook.  A different and nice way to discover new content…  See mine for example: http://paper.li/tokao

Google has quietly launched its own full-length online magazine, a quarterly publication whose aim is to create a “breathing space in a busy world.”

The first edition of Think Quarterly, based out of the U.K., is a 68-page dive into the world of data and its impact on business. The first thing most people will notice is that it’s a visually stunning piece of work. It’s a rich Flash app with Google’s quirky sensibilities and the in-depth writing you might find in BusinessWeek or Salon. Google’s quarterly magazine is edited and designed by creative agency The Church of London.

The articles themselves are thought pieces about major business and technology topics from a variety of freelancers and contributors. Google was able to snag Simon Rogers (editor of The Guardian‘s Datablog), Ulrike Reinhard (editor of WE Magazine), and other journalists for the project. Many of Think Quarterly‘s articles feature interviews with Google executives and technology leaders. Some of the people featured include Vodafone U.K. CEO Guy Laurence, Google chief economist Hal Varian and famed psychologist Peter Kruse.

“At Google, we often think that speed is the forgotten ‘killer application’ – the ingredient that can differentiate winners from the rest,” Matt Brittin, Google’s managing director of U.K. and Ireland operations, said in Think Quarterly‘s introduction. “We know that the faster we deliver results, the more useful people find our service.

“But in a world of accelerating change, we all need time to reflect. Think Quarterly is a breathing space in a busy world. It’s a place to take time out and consider what’s happening and why it matters.”

It’s unclear whether the new online magazine is another sign that Google is entering the media business or whether it’s just a project to feed the company’s intellectual curiosity. Google doesn’t describe its newest project as a magazine or a publication. Instead, Google calls it a book on its website and a “unique communications tool” on its Twitter account.

Regardless of what you call it, Think Quarterly is an interesting and informative experiment by the search giant.

Update: Google says that Think Quarterly is designed as useful information for its business customers. Here’s the company’s statement:

“Like most companies we regularly communicate with our business customers via email newsletters, updates on our official blogs, and printed materials. This short book about data was sent to 1,500 of our UK partners and advertisers.

“There are only a limited number of copies, and they aren’t for sale or designed for anyone other than our partners – but anyone who’s interested can visit the companion website at www.thinkquarterly.co.uk.”

(from mashable)

At the end of the day if I choose to communicate my position I would do it in two ways:

1. Using Facebook places to let my friends (not my followers) where I am.
2. Using an app to coordinate with people I am meeting with on our locations. This could be via Google latitude (that I don’t use) or, sending an SMS with the location with apps such as i-Finder or Kayak, or even better using Whatsapp

But now there is a new way, Glympse.

This app sends an email or an SMS not just with your coordinates, but it logs in real time your trajectory. You choose the time you want to be broadcasting that to the person or group or people you send the message.

I find it very very cool, just to say: “I’m on my way” and they can check exactly my location and the progress towards destination.

As Egyptians took to the streets and overthrew former President Hosni Mubarak, millions of people throughout the world turned to Al Jazeera for coverage. The global interest in events in the Middle East drove record levels of visitors to the news agency’s Web servers. Traffic to Al Jazeera’s site increased by 1,000% and that to its Drupal-based live blog increased by 2,000% during the crisis in Egypt, according to a blog post by Dreis Buytaert, Drupal creator and the founder of Acquia, which is now providing its elastic service for the international news organization.

(from readwriteweb)

How could you put 280daily to use? Below are 7 possibilities.

1. Journal. Realistically keep a journal, 280 characters only takes 2 minutes!
2. Travelling. You’re too busy having fun to write down every detail!
3. Business. Keep track of your business life.
4. Sport. Running a marathon? Track your progress.
5. Food Diary. Losing weight or getting fit?
6. Target Progress. Record progress of a large task.
7. Backwards To-Do List. What did you get done today?

280daily: Sum up your day in 280 characters from 280daily on Vimeo.

Co-founded by Brooke and Lynn Dixon (Left to right, in image below), Hour.ly has been in pre-revenue, beta mode since September 2010. The bootstrapped company’s newest site features should have it generating and sharing revenue in the second quarter of 2011.

Through its partnership with Trufina, Hour.ly will allow temporary job seekers to pay for and run their own identity and criminal background checks, so that employers won’t have to, and so that hiring decisions won’t be delayed. Hour.ly will also enable employers to conduct an in-browser video chat interview with job seekers — through its partnership with Tinychat — rather than requiring them to download and use a service like Skype or Jabber.

Lynn Dixon, EVP of sales and business development at Hour.ly, explained that her company’s early market research found a large number of temporary job seekers online — for example substitue teachers, barristas and cooks who might not require use of this technology at work — do not have existing accounts with (or even familiarity with) standalone video chat services.

Hour.ly started with a focus on temp hiring needs within the hospitality industry, inspired by Ms. Dixon who holds a culinary degree, and worked for a celebrity chef of the NYC fine dining scene, Daniel Boulud, after spending years in media and technology business development.

Among Hour.ly’s 10,000 active users today, she said, 8 percent are employers. Users can create a profile to apply for and get automatically matched with jobs on other sites with listings like Craigslist, or Indeed. Ms. Dixon reported that the greatest demand for qualified workers via Hour.ly, however, is split between tech and web design, hospitality and retail.

Brooke Dixon, the company’s chief technology and executive officer (and Lynn Dixon’s husband) noted that recent economic trends have driven people to seek temporary employment, yet existing job sites [ranging from Monster and CareerBuilder, to Mediabistro and Simply Hired] have not adapted to the quick sales cycle and price sensitivity of this market.

Hour.ly lets job seekers and employers build “dynamic work profiles” and job listings for free. Through Hour.ly, workers and potential employers get matched automatically, based on their location, availability within a range of time, keywords, multiple job functions that a worker would be willing and able to do, rate of pay, and experience.

(from techcrunch)

Room 77 is a site (and iPhone app) that helps you choose the right room in a hotel.

Normally you go online and book a room, and in the same hotel you could have very different room, one facing the sea, one with a building on the site. The idea is to have a database of the best rooms for each hotel… cool isn’t it?

The Internet Archive, in conjunction with 150 libraries, has rolled out a new 80,000 e-book lending collection today on OpenLibrary.org. This means that library patrons with an OpenLibrary account can check out any of these e-books.

The hope is that this effort will help libraries make the move to digital book lending. “As readers go digital, so are our libraries,” says Brewster Kahle, founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive.

(from readwriteweb)

Some newlywed couples work to produce an offspring on their honeymoon. Most don’t labor towards birthing a startup. But that’s exactly what British entrepreneurs Natalie Downe and Simon Willison did on their post-nuptial adventure. After traveling in Europe and Africa, the couple caught ill in Casablanca and extended their stay and booked an apartment to recover.

The pair have a shared love for building projects in their spare time — which is why, with all that extra time in a bedroom, they managed to create and release an early build of Lanyrd. Within two hours of its launch, Downe and Willison saw the site generate more than 14,000 visits.

After finding immediate success with social media denizens, the couple applied to Y Combinator’s accelerator program. Lanyrd was accepted and has since relocated to Mountain View, California to complete it. The site remains a largely bootstrapped effort, though the couple did accept the $150,000 in convertible debt offered up by Start Fund.

Willison calls Lanyrd “the IMDb of conferences” — except that its content is crowdsourced. The site asks its users to do the heavy lifting for them by filling in the blanks on each conference: sessions, speakers and content. The incentive? The same as at any conference: self-aggrandizement. Organizers will go to any lengths to promote their events. Speakers want to flesh out their profiles by adding past, present and future engagements. And everyone wants to see useful conference content.

“Conferences are traditionally insufficient for transferring knowledge,” says Willinson. “Longer term, this is about capturing the value of what’s shared.”

Lanyrd’s tie-in with Twitter is ingenious — and almost spooky. Sign in with your Twitter handle, and you’ll automatically be greeted with a smorgasbord of contacts and upcoming conferences, drawn from your Twitter relationships. You may see that Lanyrd knows you spoke at a trade show last month, or that you’re on a panel this fall. The site already lists 6,000 crowdsourced conferences and 30,000 user profiles.

Downe and Willison opted to use Twitter’s social graph — rather than Facebook’s, say — because they believe the “follow” has more aspirational value than the “friend.” You likely already follow the people you’d like to know, the speakers you’d like to see talk. According to Lanyrd, you’ve already composed a list of the thought leaders you’d like to bump into at an upcoming conference. So Lanyard is well positioned to find the sessions of social relevance to you.

Since users are encouraged to add speakers and their Twitter names to sessions, the speaker need not be a Lanyrd user to have a Lanyrd presence. On signing up, you may notice your conference history has already been charted for you by your Twitter followers, organizers or fellow attendees.

Next up, Lanyrd has its sights set on South by Southwest, held in Austin next month. The startup launched its unofficial guide to the show Tuesday to help users find which sessions their Twitter friends are attending, and stay current on slides, videos and notes.

The SXSW tool marks Lanyrd’s first real test at a major conference. At worst, the event will provide a trove of data and real-world experiences that Downe and Willison can use to better determine how to serve users while they’re attending conferences.

Downe and Willison describe the chain of events following their June 2010 nuptials to their present day found status as an unexpected, whirlwind affair. Their story, and their startup, are still in their nascent stages. The couple will graduate from the Y Combinator program in March, and may be forced to return to the UK when their visas expire. But location may matter little to a startup that has successfully leveraged the power of an international hit like Twitter.

Image courtesy of SimonWillison.net

(from mashable)

A cool thing is that it is available for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Nokia.

In addition to basic messaging iPhone, Android and BlackBerry WhatsApp Messenger users can send each other unlimited images, video and audio media messages and even a map with your current location.

The nice thing they just add with 2.6.x version is Group Chats. It took me a while to find how they worked. Go to Chats and pull down. A menu appears on top with broadcast message and group chat. Groups could contain 5 people at this point, but it is great.

Check here:

For this you could also use Beluga which is basically for group texting plus a cool map to see where all your friends from a group are. The cool thing about Beluga is that you can create groups easily: a group for the ski outing, then see where everybody is and chat and send photos for free. WhatsApp groups has not the map with everybody but the rest you can do too, and more! share voice messages, videos, …

The third app I wanted to talk about is Viber. Viber is an iPhone application so far, but coming soon on Android and Blackberry. It lets you make free phone calls to other iPhone users that have Viber installed.

When you use Viber, your phone calls to any other Viber user are free, and the sound quality is much better than a regular call. You can call any Viber user, anywhere in the world, for free.

You could argue that for this you have skype or other messenger, but I was surprised to see how many people of my contact list (it scans it) had it. Also it just runs on the back, it uses push so you don’t drain battery.

Like a stripped-down Segway, Inventist‘s new Solowheel is geared for the mobile urbanite. The “self-balancing electric unicycle” operates through gyroscopic technology, which a 1000-watt rechargeable lithium-ion battery powers. On a full charge (which takes about 45 minutes), the Solowheel lasts two hours—but the battery actually recaptures energy when going downhill.

Weighing only 20 pounds and consisting of little more than a simple wheel with a fold-up foot platform on either side, you can easily throw it in your backpack or briefcase once you reach your destination, or carry it by its convenient handle.

Publishers have been struggling for years. Now local newspapers, magazines and even the New York Times, that Grey Lady, are being treated like old ladies by Apple, stealing their pocketbooks while they’re trying to stay on a fixed income.

This week, Apple announced what the publishing industry has been clamoring for,subscriptions, in exchange for a whopping 30% cut. Clearly, paid subscriptions are a part of the future of all online media, whether tied to a print version or not. That’s what The Daily is all about and even AOL might one day go down that path (Tim Armstrong admitted as much on CNN). It’s part of the shift to the Subscription Economy that’s happening across not just media, but software, cloud computing, communications, consumer services, entertainment, you name it. In just the past year, as one example, my company, Zuora, has signed over $1 billion in contracted subscription revenue.

But something very dangerous is happening. Apple is now calling the shots for the entire publishing industry’s digital strategy. Think about that for a minute. While Apple is prescient and makes great products, it’s hardly a publishing expert. Yet, Apple is setting up new rules that could bring the publishing industry to its knees. As if it weren’t already in that position.

It’s not that Apple can’t save publishers—which I don’t think it will with these financial terms. It’s that its model completely ignores the realities of the publishing business:

• The App Store and iTunes only offers one subscription pricing model. Will a single model work for the San Jose Mercury News, the Wichita Eagle and Runners World? The reality is that it’s likely going to be very different for different titles and subscribers.
• Apple has no way to bundle physical and digital goods. Do you want to give up home delivery forever? Or would you still like to get a Sunday paper every week or monthly glossy magazine along with your digital version? I bet most consumers would like some combination of both.
• With the Apple model, there’s not enough adequate ad revenue from tablet editions of magazines and newspapers. In particular, eliminating the Sunday delivery also means that local papers lose a huge advertising vehicle.
• Consumers won’t stand for one subscription through one device. People want to consume their news on whatever device they have at hand—whether it’s a Blackberry, an iPad or an Android phone. Amazon is showing us all the way with their “Kindle reader everywhere” strategy (with syncing bookmarks to boot), and Google has set a strong standard in its deal with Time Inc around Sports Illustrated subscriptions. Publishers also know that content ubiquity requires platform independence.
• As last week’s article from John Squires, former EVP for Time Inc, so rightly points out, access to customer data is truly the lifeblood of the publisher’s business model. In the Apple world, Apple is the one controlling this data.

To quote Steve Jobs himself, “A functioning media is vital to a functioning democracy.” I agree, and I think there’s a better way to use the genius of the iPad and other devices that enables publishers to control more of their destiny—and benefits everyone financially.

So what’s a publisher to do?

Take Matters Into Your Own Hands: Don’t be tempted by that juicy red apple called the iPad. You need to build your own online subscription commerce strategy, one that allows for lots of different ways to package up your content and sell it.

Not Your Father’s Subscriptions: The industry continues to see “subscriptions” in terms that are far too simplistic. Yes, consumers will never agree to switch to a full “subscription only” paywall, so you need to have flexible billing that can slice, dice and package content by the month, the article, by home delivery days, by online, and the list goes on.

Make It Easy: Provide customers single click convenience while providing a PCI-compliantpayment and billing process. You need to be able to bundle, cross-sell and rapidly deploy promotions to capture more readers than you ever could through a call center.

And as for Apple? Can you redeem yourself?

Customers with Benefits: If you want that 30% cut you have to let the publishers own the subscriber relationship. Share that data and you both win. Simply giving subscribers “the option” won’t cut it.

Freedom of Choice: You know consumers want both print and digital. This isn’t music. There’s no love lost for the CD. Most consumers want to keep home delivery, and publishers want to be free to work across platforms and devices. “Control” and “closed” are completely counter to the anti-Big Brother brand.

Help Them Help You: Selling publications is not the same as marketing the latest Black Eyed Peas song. Newspapers and magazine titles will get lost in the iTunes model. Just being part of the App Store isn’t enough. You need to deliver more merchandise value for a 30% cut.

The bottom line? The Subscription Economy is here, and Apple should be applauded for offering content via subscription. Unfortunately its model just scratches the surface. In the end, publishers should think twice before taking a bite of the Apple. This current plan will do more to hurt publishers then to help them make the shift to the online world.

(from techcrunch)

iPhone was the pioneer of a new generation of smart phones… and the iPad set a before and an after on the tablet world.

The iPad was launched a year ago and we are expecting a new version in the coming months. This new version will probably have a front camera, and they expect also a back camera, but who is going to use a 10 inch device to take photos? for me it makes little sense.  Probably it will be lighter (not aluminium, maybe fiber or a strong resine) and will have a better processor (maybe dual core). The screen will be improved but not as good as the retina in the iPhone 4 (it would be too expensive).

Since the iPad was launched we have seen many promises of Android tablets, which never materialized. Only one the Galaxy Tab, with a very interesting form factor (7 inches), two cameras… very nice… but the current android version is not meant for tablets but for phones, so I guess it has not been as popular as expected.

Now we are seing many other tablets coming up: HTC, Blackberry, … some with new OS (fighting against Apple and Google) but most of them adopting the new version of android for tablets (so dual core). Now the fight becomes interesting.

I foresee that android will skyrocket and overpass iPad soon, even iPad 2. Lets remember it is not married to the hardware so everybody can build a platform for an android tablet, therefore bringing a lot more competition.

Also specific in the near future we will start to see devices targeted to specific tasks, like the nook color, based on android but just for reading, or even more into the future  we will seeing the stylus coming back, specially for students, or just to take notes and draw diagrams more precisely than with the fingers.

I did not buy any tablet so far, not even an ebook reader. The iPad lacked the camera and for me it would be mainly a tool to do email, internet, video conference and reading.

Now I am waiting to see what Apple has to show for the iPad 2 and I reckon I will buy it.

I still think I will switch to Android in the future. Android honeycomb is in the right direction…

Did you close by mistake a tab?
Click Command+Shift +T and there you have it again. (Control+Shift+T for Windows)

Going to the search bar?
Click Command+L and the cursor moves to the search bar selecting everything so you can just start typing

Synchronising Extensions, bookmark on all your computers using Chrome?
Go to Preferences, Personal Stuff and log in with your Google apps or Gmail account. You can sync bookmarks, extensions, forms, etc… across all your computers using Chrome. Neat.

You normally search using Google, but if you often search in other search engines, such as wikipedia, amazon, bing, etc… you can create easy shortcuts without having to go to their websites.
If you right click on the search bar, you have the option of edit search engines. There you can say for instance that the shortcut for wikipedia is wiki, so whenever you start a natural search with wiki in the bar it will fix wikipedia and search the next words in wikipedia. See the screenshots:

In the past content was generated by a small elite of journalists, correspondents… big news agencies, or journalist with opinion and good writing.

This has been changing. They are struggling to find their place now. Traditional media is married to a physical support (paper) which is expensive to produce and distribute, it is not real time and the companies behind are not flexible and adaptable towards new models…. now we all have the tools to broadcast, write, publish our content.

Anyway, what I wanted to highlight in this blog post is that I have observed an evolution of the tools towards laziness and minimum effort.

We have the blogs, sure, and we will continue to have them, as we still have magazines and newspapers. We can build them around a topic we want or like, around our lives, our interests, our community… we can have it in isolation or being part of a blog community such as blogspot.

Then a new trend started. Not everybody has time or skills to write. In fact probably it is still a  minority. Other tools were more focused to the crowd: micro-blogs such as tumblr or posterous. Less writing. Just share something you see out there, a link a photo, …

Then twitter, with 140 characters, first in parallel with SMS, now twitter just twitter . Surprisingly it quickly became very very very popular.

Twitter is limited so a lot of complementary services were born around it: twitpic, yfrog… and even we have seen better twitter products that have ended up dieing. Products  like Buzz or Brightkite, not limited in space, handling location, photos, comments… for me far superior products… but I guess this is life. Beta was also superior to VHS and it was VHS who won.

So we have gone from Blogging to micro blogging to twittering, to twittering with location (foursquare, gowalla) to now a whole new wave of social media products:

Just take a photo with your phone, have your network, comment, like, push it to all the social media channels… no writing. Is this laziness?

Check out what is hot on this: Instagram and PicPlz

Of course they all coexist but I am curios to see how this evolves. I believe Brightkite was too early to be successful. Same with Buzz and even Wave.

In any case, everybody is in Facebook and facebook evolves and has everything: wall for short or long messages, link stories, videos, add comments, photos, checkins …  an ecosystem where everybody is and that offers everything.

Still the perception for the people is that is a closed ecosystem where all the friends are. Same for linkedin and your professional cloud.

Perception is key. Even if Facebook has attempted to change this, by trying to make things public and therefore creating a controversy on privacy issues, they are still perceived as a closed tool and the content you find there is thought as this: confidential for friends only.

There is also the fact that it is becoming too big, even at the point of threatening the Internet itself.

Are twitter and instagram and the others just for a minority of people who want to broadcast to everybody with the dream of being popular? marketing tools for individuals and companies?

A media for spreading news fast?

I’d like to read you in the comments.

If you click on Learn More, then you will see that they have competitive prices to call using VOIP.

I have to say that I have several google apps accounts with different domains, but I can only get this in one of them. I don’t know why.

The iPhone app [iTunes link] allows you to translate from and to 15 languages and to translate words and phrases into more than 50 languages.

You can also listen to your translations spoken aloud in 23 different languages. One can also zoom in on text to read it more easily, as well.

In an informal breakfast news test, this morning I sat in bed with my coffee and peanut butter toast and browsed both The Daily and Flipboard. OK, it was also an excuse to lounge about in bed for an extra hour! But to the point: in both content and user interface, Flipboard served up most of the articles that I ended up consuming this morning. If it had been a paper product, I’d have flicked through The Daily in about 5-10 minutes and discarded the scrunched up newspaper at the foot of my bed.

At first glance, The Daily has a few nice interactive touches – like 360° photos, a short 2-3 minute video review of the day’s big news, and other multimedia features. While it could be doing a lot more with the iPad’s interactive functionality, it’s a decent start and shows the promise of what’s to come with digital newspapers.

Where The Daily mostly fails to deliver is with the content. There are two big issues: firstly a lack of choice for the consumer, and secondly the blandness of the content that is on offer. As we’ll see, Flipboard is able to deliver much more than The Daily on both fronts.

Much of The Daily’s content this morning was of little interest to me. I hadn’t expected the sports or gossip sections to appeal to me, but I’m very interested in the arts and The Daily has an ‘Arts & Life’ section. Today, Sunday in the U.S., there was an article about an iPad version of the bible, a feature on halftime shows at the Superbowl, a review of a movie called ‘The Roommate’, and a review of a book about Michelle Obama. All pretty standard mainstream newspaper fare. The bible app article was a nice touch, although oddly there was no interactivity on that particular article.

The main issue on the content side is that there is no real choice of what content is served up. It’s middle-of-the-road fare, with a few seemingly token geek stories.

For example in today’s issue there was a video story about live World of Warcraft. I can imagine the editorial discussion that produced that story: “Hey we need a story about nerds, because those people have iPads, right? World of Warcraft, you say… is that something nerds do? Well then, that’s perfect!” (if that story didn’t satisfy The Daily’s geek demographic, there was also a story today about what apps Buzz Aldrin uses.)

I wasn’t even halfway through my coffee and toast when I got bored with The Daily and fired up Flipboard. If you’re unfamiliar with Flipboard, it’s a self-styled iPad “social magazine” that lets you select what content to follow. So if you want the latest news of the day, there are multiple ways you can get that. There’s a section called “FlipNews” that offers up the latest news headlines. CNN, Fox, USA Today and other news brands have their own sections. You can plug in a selection of your favorite news RSS feeds from Google Reader. You can add a Twitter list that gives you breaking news.

Let’s take the arts example. As I mentioned, I follow the latest arts news regularly and one way I do that is via Flipboard. I have 3 different art sections in Flipboard: FlipArt (sources selected by the Flipboard editors), the ‘Art’ folder in my Google Reader (filled with my favorite art blogs and websites, such as Juxtapoz and FecalFace), and my art Twitter list (a private list filled with a bunch of my favorite art tweeters).

This morning, I happened to be interested in reading up on the latest news and reviews in the art world (and by art, I include music and books). I spent a good 40 minutes browsing and reading stories via those 3 sections in my Flipboard. Reluctantly, I closed Flipboard after that time – as I had work to do! But my point is, that was essentially my morning newspaper.

For other people, it’d be about reading the latest politics or sports news. Whatever your interests, you can plug in sections on Flipboard that give you a much wider and more interesting selection of news than The Daily offers up.

The crux of The Daily’s problem is that it tries to deliver a general interest traditional newspaper, except in the iPad format. However, the future of the newspaper is about increased personalization, interactivity, social features, more choice of niche content. It’s no longer about serving up a selection of middle-of-the-road fare every day and hoping that satisfies a large chunk of the newspaper-reading population (which is of course in decline, too).

There are ways that a newspaper, paper or digital, can still command interest and readership. Providing local news – like my city’s newspaper, which I read from time to time. Or in-depth, professionally reported features – such as most of the articles in the New York Times, Washington Post or USA Today. However, The Daily isn’t local enough and its articles seem light fare when compared to the three U.S. dailies I just mentioned.

I’ll be sticking with Flipboard for my daily news, together with my favorite sources of local and in-depth news. The Daily just isn’t doing it for me. How about you?

(from readwriteweb)

PicPlz, which is lead by former Imeem music community head Dalton Caldwell and funded by leading VCs Andreessen Horowitz (who bailed from Instagram to invest in PicPlz instead), just announced the following: public availability of its Application Programming Interface for other apps to use its filters and widgets, support for users to publish photos under Creative Commons licenses and new analytics dashboards for brand advertisers using the service. The simplicity of Instagram just got challenged in a big way.

(from readwriteweb)

I don’t know if this is due to the fact that I have tons of photos in the iPhone and in the iPhoto, or that this is the 4th iPhone synchronizing with iPhoto or that we are synchronizing 2 iPhones…

What I know is that I have duplicates and I could not find an easy way to get rid of them…

I use iPhoto on my macbook to sync my iPhones photos. The iPhone camera has become my main camera.

My nikon d300 I sync with a PC (multimedia) running windows 7 and picasa (more than 250Gb of photos).

iPhoto duplicates: Solution

I found and bought this program: Duplicate Annihilator.

Basically what it does is to identify the duplicate photos and add a comment saying that it is a duplicate. They you can search them and bin them. Pretty straight forward. It has many options but the default worked fine for me.

The problem is that the thumbnails can be duplicated too, and even if they have another program for that, if you start iPhoto holding Command Key+Option, then you have the option of rebuilding thumbnails.

The features of the Duplicate Annihilator are:

• Easily find and annihilate duplicates created internally by iPhoto or during import.
• Compare images using different algorithms to detect and understand differences.
• Detect duplicates using effective algorithms using electronic checksums like MD5 and CRC32.
• Detect duplicates by using file specific meta data such as filename, dimensions, filesize, Exif creation date or date of creation.
• Delete duplicates upon detection or mark them with a keyword to make them easily found using iPhoto features like search or smart folders.
• Makes your iPhoto slimmer and faster.
• Only uses standard Apple features and API’s. No hacking nor tampering with iPhoto system files.
• Free updates.

Ask any media company about their mobile strategy, and one of the first things they’ll discuss is their fantastic content strategy centered around their app. Dig a little deeper, however, and the frustration starts to show. Do they develop just for iOS? Do they add Androidand Blackberry? Is Symbian dead? What about feature phones — should they just ignore these?

The answers are problematic for media, because if you peel back the excitement and dazzle of mobile tablet and phone device innovation, you find the kind of chaos that makes strategic planning nigh impossible.

The recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was a microcosm of this broader issue. Like many, I was dazzled by all the new products. But when you looked beyond the hype over the Xoom tablet, the Atrix cell phone or the Entune dashboard, the panels and hallway discussions suggested an underlying hardware ecosystem in significant flux.

Obstacles

I mentioned the difficulty in developing across multiple OSes in the cell phone and tablet space, but this is complicated now by multiple form factors, as well. From a cell phone screen to a 7 or 10” tablet, can you really make one size fit all? This problem of system complexity was addressed again and again at CES and continues to be an industry sore point.

The irony is that as systems have gotten more complex, content strategies have gotten simpler. The recent industry-wide media strategy of focusing on adapting content or cutting it into chunks and providing various pieces for various destinations is now practically dead. “Give consumers the content, and let them choose where to consume it,” is the mantra of the day. Of course, a strategic caveat is that consumers want content where and when they want it. But the “what” is now everything they could expect from other distribution sources, from DVDs to TV shows to radio stations.

This is what makes the underlying device and OS chaos all the more maddening for traditional media. They’ve finally figured out a content strategy, and their distribution strategy is up in the air.

This is true of phones and tablets, but to get a really good taste of these issues, just take a look at automobile dashboards as an illustrative example. There has been a tremendous amount of positive press about the potential for content creators in this realm, but even a quick survey of the digital dashboard ecosystem reveals it to be a total mess.

The lack of standards is an even bigger problem in dashboards, not to mention the very real concern over distracted drivers. Unlike a stand-alone device like a phone or a tablet, in-dash devices need to interact with other car systems, many of which are manufactured by third parties. Car dashboard system standards development has been painfully slow and is still nowhere close to a solution.

The Wild West

It is tempting to just say, “but that’s the dashboard, it’s different.” But UI and OS issues exist across all devices. QNX is a company with a long history in auto electronics infrastructure. At CES, Andrew Poliak, QNX director of automotive business development, basically threw up his hands in frustration over various OS differences. QNX’s solution is to develop an open web-based platform using their own codebase. Interestingly, this is the same OS that will be used by the Blackberry Playbook, one of the hyped new tablets expected out this year. In both cases, QNX parent company Research In Motion is making a large bet that openness and web-based standards will win out — in both tablets and in the dash. Their goal mirrors media content strategy perfectly: A consistent user experience across all devices.

In short, media faces a device and OS environment that is like the Wild West. While the expectations of the users are known, the OSes will change; the standards will change, and device innovation will continue. At this point, no one knows really what is worth fighting for or which UI will be the one that dominates. Will the chaos lead to a consolidation to three or even two dominant mobile OSes in the tablet and phone space? Will it all implode in a return to web standards and applications, powered by HTML5, as quite a few speakers at CES predicted?

Conclusion

For content companies, this chaos requires a deft strategic hand. If you listened to the conversations in the halls and paid attention to the panels, the momentum appears to be in favor of HTML5 and web-based solutions. Content-specific device apps are, at best, going to be disrupted and, at worst, going to be phased out entirely. Accepting this as the reality changes a lot of things for media companies, from the wisdom of large OEM app deals to creating a development team around iOS or Android development.

But this is still far from assured. In the short term, apps are still the key player in the device and content space. Dealing with the mess of cross-platform and cross-OS development is just something media has to do, although hedging their bets away from large-scale investment in one OS or OEM may be wise at this point.

The interesting thing is that it took years for media to realize that their mobile content strategy was ultimately quite simple. At the end of the day, perhaps their distribution strategy is just as simple: Hire a bunch of mobile web developers.

(from Mashable)

The first two words of WWW mean “world wide,” and this is one important aspect of the Web that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (news, site) is currently focusing on. With about 2 billion Internet users around the world across continents, not everyone is speaking the same language. Given the relative increase in use of non-English languages in Web content, the W3C recognizes the importance of standardizing access to multilingual content for best compatibility and usability.

Through the W3C Internationalization Activity, the organization aims to standardize use of the web so as to transcend language barriers. The W3C will be conducting a workshop entitled “Content on the Multilingual Web” on April 4 to 5, 2011 in Pisa, Italy. Organized through the EU-financed Multilingual Web Project, participation is free, although participants are expected to shoulder their own travel and lodging expenses.

2010 Madrid Workshop

The Pisa event acts as a follow-up to an earlier workshop conducted late 2010 in Madrid where the current state of localization and multilingual use was explored through the perspective of various stakeholders: developers, creators, localizers, users and even machines (with developers speaking for the infrastructure-related concerns).

2011 Pisa Workshop

The W3C has issued a call for participation for the upcoming workshop in Pisa, which aims to continue the discussions put forth in the Madrid workshop, which should ultimately be pieced together as a four-part series of workshops.

The Multilingual Web project is looking at best practices and standards related to all aspects of creating, localizing and deploying the Web multilingually. The project aims to raise the visibility of existing best practices and standards and identify gaps. The core vehicle for this is a series of four events which are planned for the coming two years.”

Again, while registration is free, the workshop logistics only permit a limited number of participants on a first-come, first-served basis. Presenter participation will usually entail 15 to 20 minute talks on best practices relating to multilingual access, new standards and ways to fill in the gaps that these best practices and standards are not currently able to address.

(from cmswire)

Posted from Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.

A great tool to add creativity to your domains is domai.nr

Domainr helps you explore the entire domain name space beyond the ubiquitous—and crowded—.com, .net and .org. Inspired by jish.nu, burri.toand del.icio.us, apologies to Flickr, and a high-five to Dopplr.

Read more about their features.

Posted from .

OpenStudy uses AI recommendation engines to match students, and really real-time technologies to facilitate online interaction. It’s like walking into a library or coffee shop and finding just the right group of students who can help you with what you’re studying right now or someone struggling with a problem who could really use your help…halfway across the globe.

Why use OpenStudy?

Learners

• Get help right now – your study emergency resource, just in time, when you need it.
• Why study alone? – your study network, always there, always on.
• Pay it forward – learn by helping; feel good about helping someone in need.

Educators

• Engage your students – connect with students on their terms using a social learning network.
• Facilitate peer learning – create study groups to help your students learn better.
• Know your students – see who needs help, recognize early signs of trouble.

Getting Started on OpenStudy! from Open Study on Vimeo.

“Neutrality”—if it’s good enough for the core of the Internet, isn’t it good enough for the edge? The biggest Internet providers say it is, and they would love to have the government slap a few neutrality rules on Google, just to see how the advertising giant likes the taste of the regulatory bridle.

In 2010, while the FCC was debating net neutrality rules, ISPs like Time Warner Cable settled on a “they’re gatekeepers, too!” strategy.

“Google has led the charge to adopt regulation to ensure Internet openness, yet it has the ability and incentive to engage in a range of decidedly non-neutral conduct due to its control over so many aspects of the Internet experience,” said one representative filing. “Google’s core search application relies on a pay-for-priority scheme that is squarely at odds with its proposed neutrality requirements for broadband Internet access service providers.”

Comcast agreed, telling the FCC, “If the Commission were to conclude that an interventionist regulatory regime is needed to preserve the ‘neutrality’ of the Internet, it could not defensibly apply that regime to broadband providers but not to Google.”

And AT&T blasted Saint Google for its sinful practices: “They ‘determine the information… that customers access online’ through algorithms that highlight some information, favor certain websites, and even omit some sites altogether.”

The answer: search neutrality. Somehow.

It’s hard to tell if this was ever a serious proposal, since it was most often deployed by ISPs as a sort ofreductio ad absurdum against network neutrality proposals. (“See, if you go down this path, you’ll have to regulate everything!“)

But outside the den of self-interest that is an FCC docket, academics were also pondering the question. In 2009, for instance, well-respected University of Minnesota scholar Andrew Odlyzko suggested that net neutrality (which he favored) might then “open the way for other players, such as Google, that emerge from that open and competitive arena as big winners, to become choke points. So it would be wise to prepare to monitor what happens, and be ready to intervene by imposing neutrality rules on them when necessary.”

But what does it even mean when we talk about applying “neutrality” to search—which is all about subjective rankings of relevance?

“Telling a search engine to be more relevant is like telling a boxer to punch harder”

James Grimmelmann, an associate professor at the New York Law School, ran through eight main principles that underlie various “search neutrality” arguments. He found every one of them “incoherent.”

Grimmelmann’s resulting paper, “Some Skepticism About Search Neutrality” (PDF), has just appeared as a book chapter in The Next Digital Decade, and it’s an intriguing look at the foundations of search neutrality. At bottom, the paper understands search as an inherently subjective enterprise that makes a mockery of attempts to regulate it into some sort of neutral form. Indeed, trying to do so is almost a categorical mistake.

Here are the eight possible bases for search neutrality regulation:

• Equality: Search engines shouldn’’t differentiate at all among websites
• Objectivity: There are correct search results and incorrect ones, so search engines should return only the correct ones.
• Bias: Search engines should not distort the information landscape
• Traffic: Websites that depend on a flow of visitors shouldn’’t be cut off by search engines.
• Relevance: Search engines should maximize users’’ satisfaction with search results.
• Self-interest: Search engines shouldn’’t trade on their own account.
• Transparency: Search engines should disclose the algorithms they use to rank webpages.
• Manipulation: Search engines should rank sites only according to general rules, rather than promoting and demoting sites on an individual basis.

Most of these are dealt with by the simple (and obvious) objection that “systematically favoring certain types of content over others isn’’t a defect for a search engine——it’’s the point. If I search for ““Machu Picchu pictures,”” I want to see llamas in a ruined city on a cloud-forest mountaintop, not horny housewives who whiten your teeth while you wait for them to refinance your mortgage. Search inevitably requires some form of editorial control.”

As for transparency, which usually involves revealing the algorithmic underpinnings of a search engine, Grimmelmann argues that it’s simply a recipe for competitors to copy and for website operators to game.

All eight principles are weighed in the balance and found wanting. (The piece is quite a good read; do check it out in full if the issue is of interest.)

All of this is fine as far as it goes, and the arguments make a great deal of good sense in general, but they open Grimmelmann up to some obvious charges of supporting a behemoth like Google—and if you can’t imagine any way in which the company could “be evil,” you’re severely lacking in imagination.

To deal with real problems that can be caused by search engines, Grimmelmann remains open to traditional methods of oversight. “It doesn’t follow that search engines deserve a free pass under antitrust, intellectual property, privacy, or other well-established bodies of law,” he notes. “Nor is search-specific legal oversight out of the question.” Should Google simply start extorting websites into a “pay for placement” scheme that is not disclosed to end users, then the government should step in.

But when it comes to the question of applying “neutrality” principles to an inherently subjective enterprise, Grimmelmann has nothing but skepticism.

(from arstechnica)

Usabilla – Hassle free usability testing from Paul Veugen on Vimeo.

The previously stealth startup hails from Caleb Elston and David Kasper, both formerly of Justin.tv. The two started working on the application in March of 2010 and left their Justin.tv jobs in October to pursue Yobongo full-time. Their mission is to help people better connect with others in the world around them.

Yobongo, as described by Elston, is a new way of communicating with real people. At launch, the application automatically drops the user in a chat room — based on location — where he or she can start chatting in a group environment with others in the room. Chat room members can also see each other’s avatars at the top of room, and start one-off private conversations with other room participants.

The key difference from applications such as MessageParty is that Yobongo controls who gets placed into what rooms and when. It’s a serendipitous experience engineered by a number of variables that the service uses to determine the makeup of each mobile chat room.

Location does factor into the experience, but the application is more people-centric, says Elston. So, rooms dynamically adjust based on where people are and the flux of a city, but the velocity of users coming in and out of the app and the nature of the individuals (i.e. if they’ve chatted before) also play a role in where users end up.

Prior to today’s private beta launch, Yobongo was being privately tested by a small group of individuals, which means many of Yobongo’s features are unproven.

In a short test, I experienced firsthand just how fast the messaging experience is — in terms of mobile messaging, it’s as real-time as it gets. But because of the restricted nature of the private alpha, I was messaging in the application’s only room. The experience was entertaining and fun, but none of the people or location factors mentioned above played any role in determining how I was placed in the chat room. The private beta will continue to be a controlled test, so the elasticity of the application will still be hard to see in action.

Yobongo is currently self-funded, but Elston and Kasper are said to be in talks with investors. The two believe that as the market for location-based advertising matures, Yobongo will find a way to monetize its service.

Yobongo has fielded interest from thousands of would-be users, but Mashable readers can cut the line. iPhone owners can sign up here to receive priority access to the private beta.

(from Mashable)

All content strategists dream about fully understanding what their audience wants in terms of content. Delivering content that is valuable, shareable and findable is the goal of every content strategy. Watching how your users interact with your content is now a dream that has come true with real-time analytics packages.

How Real Time Analytics Can Help
There are four stages to content strategy:

• Planning
• Creating
• Executing
• Governing

The challenge for content strategists is to understand their audiences, so they can know what they want — like a new mom and her newborn baby. Learning the baby’s cries, when they are hungry, wet or bored is an experienced that requires time together and careful attention and listening.

Typically, for content strategists, this “getting to know each other” is accomplished through surveys, analysis of analytics, company knowledge and development of personas. However, the analysis of analytics can be frustrating for many Web professionals.

First, the technology is not that superior. While many analytics packages are very powerful, there are limitations on how much you can see about what users are actually doing on the site. For example, is there a package out there that allows you to tag a user and then watch his or her behavior as they click through the site?

Enter Real Time Analytics

If you’re a content strategist, information architecture or UX professional you will love real-time analytics. You can now watch what your users are doing in real time with programs like Clicky, Chartbeat and Optify. Apparently, Omniture has this powerful option as well, although I can’t really figure it out because their home page is filled with marketing nonsense.

Comment from tokao: I use woopra for real time web analytics.

The program I am most familiar with is Chartbeat, and for a content strategy nerd like me, this has become my new, most fun toy, like ever. I’m seriously on this thing all day, just watching all the changes, trying to make sense of the patterns that are emerging over time.

The program I am most familiar with is Chartbeat, and for a content strategy nerd like me, this has become my new, most fun toy, like ever. I’m seriously on this thing all day, just watching all the changes, trying to make sense of the patterns that are emerging over time.

Chartbeat
Chartbeat looks like a dashboard when you open it up. It shows you, using a needle, how many active visitors are on the site right now, as well as how many are new and returning. It shows you which pieces of content your users are interacting with — both reading and writing (commenting). [Are you freaking out yet?]

It also shows you traffic sources, which is huge in terms of an integrated content marketing strategy. For example, if you see most of your referring traffic is hitting your site because of Facebook or Twitter, you know you need to target those sites.

Other features include:

• Page load times
• Worldwide locations of users
• Search
• Referring traffic sources

You can also do this really cool thing, where you can replay the history and see what happened when you were sleeping, or eating or having some other type of life. This is so helpful for Web teams that watch spikes in traffic, and aren’t sure why they are happening.

Content Strategy Comes from Knowledge
If you watch Chartbeat over the course of several days, patterns emerge about where your users are coming from, which pieces of content they respond to and content they interact with. When this happens, you can base decisions about what kinds of content to create and execute with a plan. I think they call that strategy.

Do you use real-time analytics packages in your analytics analysis? Tell me about them — I’m so curious to hear how others are using these tools.

(from cmswire)

OneNote is similar to note-sharing services like Evernote; the difference is OneNote is tied tightly to the Office ecosystem and its focus has largely been on the desktop rather than the cloud or on mobile devices.

We took some time to play with OneNote Mobile for iPhone [iTunes link] in conjunction with the OneNote Web App. This web app was introduced in June and is one way that Mac users (OneNote is not available on Mac OS X) and others can access OneNote 2010 notebooks or create and store their own cloud-based notes.

The app is attractive and usable. The user interface has taken some cues from some of our favorite organizational apps like Things and OmniFocus, and that’s a good thing.

As expected, note options are more limited than either OneNote 2010 or the OneNote Web App. Notes are entered in as plain text and because of the rich text limitations of iOS (for non-Apple developers anyway), some rich text formatted notes from the web or OneNote won’t show up correctly. Hyperlinks, for instance, are selectable as a URL but not highlighted.

You can embed photos from the camera roll or take a new photo from the camera itself, just like with Evernote. Unlike Evernote, OneNote Mobile doesn’t support audio notes at this time. We also couldn’t figure out how to rename tabs within the app.

For the most part, the app seems speedy with synching over the cloud. Our Internet connection was a tad slow so it was hard to judge, but it seemed to be in-line with the synching performance of Evernote or MobileMe.

The app by itself isn’t really enough to convert anyone over to using OneNote on the web or in Office 2010, so individuals already satisfied with services like Evernote aren’t going to be swayed away. However, this app has potential with existing OneNote users who were perhaps thinking about forgoing the desktop app in favor of something with a more robust mobile presence.

We also hope that OneNote Mobile is a sign that Microsoft will be bringing more readers and basic editors of its Office apps to the iPhone. The best way to keep individuals and businesses from jumping ship to a different product is to make accessing and editing documents as seamless as possible. It’s good to see Microsoft leveraging Sky Drive on the iPhone.

(from mashable)

But that doesn’t mean a year in front of your television. There are still plenty of ways to cut costs. Here are 11 strategies — and some useful Web sites — to help you save on travel this year.

1. SHOP “PRIVATE SALES” A growing number of Web sites, including SniqueAway.com, TabletHotels.comand Jetsetter.com have flash sales of 20 to 60 percent off hotel packages to travelers on an invitation-only basis. Jetsetter, for example, recently offered a Friday night in January at the Angler’s, a boutique hotel in Miami, for $255 a night, down from the $359 offered at the hotel’s site. Another site, TripAlertz.com, works like Groupon for travel, meaning that the more people who book a deal, the lower the rate. For example, a four-night, all-inclusive stay at the Hilton Papagayo Costa Rica Resort & Spa was initially offered to members for $1,496, or 15 percent off, last month. After 55 bookings, the price dropped to $1,220. At TripAlertz and LivingSocial.com, which offers last-minute getaways, all you have to do is create an account to access the deals. A Google search for “Snique Away invite” turned up a registration form for SniqueAway.com that got me in.

2. BUY ON TUESDAY Most airlines begin sales on Monday evenings, and by the following day other airlines have usually matched the lowered fares on the same routes, said Anne McDermott, editor at Farecompare.com, which tracks price trends. Last month, for example, Virgin America had a sale on Dec. 13, with one-way fares as low as $79 on some routes, according to Farecompare. The next day, there were sales from AirTran, Southwest and American, with one-way fares from $59. Because sales are hard to predict, travelers looking for the best deal should start their searches three to four months in advance, when airlines begin to look closely at which routes may need a sale to fill seats.

3. SEARCH FOR COUPON CODES Practically every travel site includes a box at checkout for a promotional discount code. Sites like PromotionalCodes.com orCouponWinner.com organize such codes into categories so that you can search specifically for airline, car rental or hotel deals. A recent search turned up codes for deals like $94 flights between New York and New Orleans, 15 percent discounts on Avis weekly car rentals and $75 off of three-night Westin Hotels packages.

4. ASK FOR A REFUND Many airlines will refund the difference in price if the fare drops after you purchase a ticket (minus a change fee). Yapta.com helps get you that refund by tracking the price of your ticket and sending you an e-mail or Tweet when the price drops so that you can call the airline to claim the credit. A new site, Autoslash.com, offers a similar service for car rentals.

5. AVOID ROAMING CHARGES Skype and Truphone offer free apps for making cheap international calls using Wi-Fi, with rates that start at pennies per minute. You can pay as you go or sign up for monthly plans to make unlimited calls in certain countries for a flat fee: $13.99 a month for Skype calls to land lines and mobile phones in more than 40 countries, or $12.95 a month for Tru calls in 38 countries with TruUnlimited. Another option: the Vonage Mobile app for Facebook allows travelers to make free international calls over Wi-Fi to Facebook friends who also download the app.

6. CHANGE YOUR CREDIT CARD Most American banks charge currency conversion fees, typically up to 3 percent when you use your credit or debit card outside the United States. But there are some exceptions. Capital One does not charge foreign transaction fees, and Chase recently began waiving the fees on its British Airways Visa Signature Card, its Hyatt Card and the Priority Club Select Visa.

7. SAVE ON PARKING YOUR CAR Bestparking.com steers drivers toward the cheapest parking at off-airport lots near 79 North American airports. Rates are updated frequently, and sold-out lots are highlighted. A recent search for parking near Newark Liberty International Airport offered a snapshot of rates and locations on a map. The Renaissance Hotel lot was among the cheapest at $12 for 24 hours. There is also a free app for iPhone, Android or BlackBerry users.

8. WAIT A WEEK Avoid the crowds and save by traveling the week after a major holiday. A five-night ski vacation in Breckenridge, Colo., during the last week of December was priced at $1,988 a person, including airfare from Chicago, at Orbitz.com. For the following week, the same trip was listed at $1,037 a person. Similarly, a vacation including airfare from New York and five nights at the Walt Disney World Dolphin Resort dropped from $821 to $580.

9. NEGOTIATE Though many hotels say that they offer their best rates online, it pays to ask the front desk for a lower rate. My colleague Seth Kugel regularly uses this tactic, as he pointed out in a column last summer: “I arrive with a solid reservation but then check out five or six other hotels and go back and forth between them in an attempt to set off a price war.” The strategy saved him $20 a night in León, Nicaragua. I have had similar successover the phone with reservation agents at New York hotels like the Ritz-Carlton New York and 60 Thompson.

10. TRAVEL LIKE A STUDENT Student travel agencies like STA Travel, StudentCity and StudentUniverse have begun to extend their low prices to nonstudents and older travelers. While some of the deepest discounts are offered only to travelers enrolled in an academic program, recent college graduates can often save 10 to 25 percent with “youth fares.” For example, a recent search for flights in March on STATravel.com, which limits certain deals to nonstudents under the age of 26, turned up seats for $926 round trip on V Australia Airlines. The best rates for the same dates on Kayak.com were $1,187. Though it is not common for older travelers to use student travel agencies, it is possible to do so. There were no age restrictions for a discounted four-day Inca Trail trek with STA Travel for $674 a person, down from $899.

11. DON’T PAY TO CHECK A BAG Checking bags can quickly add up, with airlines charging between $15 and $35 a bag. Delta’s SkyMiles-branded American Express card allows you and up to eight others on the same reservation to each check a bag at no cost. And American Express introduced a travel-rewards card — the Blue Sky Preferred Credit Card — that offers travelers an annual $100 allowance to cover checked baggage, in-flight meals, entertainment or Wi-Fi purchases, and other fees, on any airline.

(by MICHELLE HIGGINS from NYTimes)

Sennheiser has a thing for trotting out< titillatingnew wares at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, and this year is proving to be no different in that regard. The audio specialist has just introduced one of the most fully-featured headsets we’ve seen in quite awhile, with the CXC 700 boasting not one, not two, but three levels of noise cancellation. The newfangled NoiseGard] /digital technology gives owners a trifecta of noise-cancelling profiles, with each one optimized for something different. In fact, we’ll let Senn do the explaining here:

“Mode 1 absorbs low-frequency noise in particular (100 to 400 Hertz), such as engine noise from trains, buses or small passenger planes. Mode 2 focuses on cancelling noise in the medium frequency range (400 to 3,000 Hertz), which is caused above all by air-conditioning systems in large passenger aircraft or office buildings. Mode 3 has a particularly wide frequency range (100 to 3,000 Hertz), and combines the noise-cancelling effect in the medium and low-frequency ranges. As a result, background noise with different noise components, such as that which occurs at airports, railway stations or underground stations, can be effectively suppressed, although with a slightly lower noise-cancelling performance than in the first two modes.”

In case that’s not enough to convince ya, these offer a frequency response of 20Hz to 21,000Hz, and they’ll function just fine (albeit sans noise cancellation) even if your AAA battery keels over. Controls are embedded in the cabling, and users are able to activate the TalkThrough function if they’d prefer to conduct a conversation with someone without actually removing their earphones. Furthermore, changing between the NoiseGard profiles and activation of the TalkThrough function are indicated by both an acoustic and a visual signal. The company will be shipping these with a 4.5-foot long cable, an in-flight adapter, 6.35mm jack plug adapter, a small carrying case and a diaphragm protector, with sales to start later this month for around $320.(from engadget)

Well there is a free alternative to SkypeIn, that in fact has more destinations than skype itself: ring2skype

How is that it is free? Well you don’t actually get a number for yourself. You get a unique extension on a number, so people will call to a local number, and they will be asked for your extension, which will forward your call to your skype. Probably Asterisk…

Give it a try. Now I have a local Spanish number. I don’t know if you can get more than one though.

This season is very special as we are releasing a new version of Skype for iPhone and iPod Touch with video calling. Now you will be able to share all the special moments in video, as they happen, wherever you are.

Download the app straight from iTunes and let us know what you think about it on our forums.

Skype video calling is supported over WiFi and 3G* data connections. You can enjoy video calls with users on all Skype desktop versions and with other Skype for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad users.

You can make video calls in both portrait and landscape mode and use both front and back cameras.

Users on iPhone 4, 3GS and iPod Touch (4th Generation) can enjoy full 2-way video calling. Users with iPod Touch (3rd Generation) and iPads can receive video.

Video calling with Skype requires iOS 4.0 or above to be installed on your device. Skype 3.0 for iPhone will also work on iOs 3.x, but without video support.

Full release notes for Skype 3.0.0 for iPhone:

New Features:
* Video calling

Known issues:

* – Additional Data charges may apply.

New Google Phone Service Whispers Targeted Ads Directly Into Users’ Ears

Foursquare has added two heavily requested features to its popular iPhone app that should make the service significantly more social: photos and comments.

The new features let you attach photos to checkins, tips and venues, and add comments to the checkins of your friends. These social updates, released just in time for the holidays, will also get enmeshed within the rest of your Foursquare activity and included on your history page.

With photos, you’ll be prompted to add one as you check in, in much the same manner that you’re already prompted to add a “shout” with each checkin. You can then continue to add photos after you check in that will be added to the checkin detail page — this page is also where comment activity happens.

Photos and comments will stay mostly contained to your immediate circle of friends. Photos associated with checkins will only be visible to your Foursquare friends and the other social networks you share them with. Comments, however, are only viewable by your Foursquare friends. So, should you share a photo checkin with Facebook and Twitter, the photo and the checkin will be visible but the comments can only be seen by a logged in user who you’re friends with.

As for photos associated with tips and venues, those will be public to all users with the intention of adding richer context to your picks and pans.

“The community of users that we have are already super comfortable with checkins, so adding something like this to that mix should be pretty powerful,” says Foursquare’s head of product Alex Rainert. Rainert believes photos and comments will stimulate activity in and outside the application and better support the fluid exchange of information.

Foursquare also hopes these new features will help transform the way you think about the service and your location-based activity. Eventually, the startup would like to present your personal archive — photos, checkins and comments — in a more visually arresting manner, according to Rainert. “There are interesting things you can do when people create media at places,” he says. “We hope to build creative ways to let people browse and share that history in the future.”

Rainert stressed the fact that photos and comments have been in the works for months, but were pushed out in an accelerated fashion to get them to users before the holidays. Several enhancements are already in the works, he says. Users should soon have the ability to export photos to Facebook and Flickr, better track comments and more easily access old photos, for example.

Today, however, mobile photo sharing fans already using Foodspotting, Instagram and Picplz, will be gifted with the ability to share their photos — not just their checkins — with Foursquare.

Android users can expect photos and comments sometime this week; BlackBerry owners should expect a photo and comment compatible version of their own in January.

(via mashable)

When you use Viber, your phone calls to any other Viber user are free, and the sound quality is much better than a regular call. You can call any Viber user, anywhere in the world, for free. All Viber features are 100% FREE and do not require any additional “in application” purchase.

How does it work and why is better than skype (in the case that you are doing iPhone to iPhone calls)?

You don’t need to have a login name. Just your telephone numbers. It scans your address book and find those with viber installed, then you can call them free, well, using part of your data.

Works via wifi or 3g or even gprs. Give it a try!

* WebGL is available, but not enabled by default in Chrome 8 (the latest stable version). Type about:flags in the address bar, click “Enable” next to “WebGL” and then click on “Restart now”. Please note that this is an experimental feature in Chrome 8.
* WebGL is enabled by default in Chrome 9 Dev Channel, Chrome Canary Build and Firefox 4 beta.

Damon Hernandez was surprised to notice that the application doesn’t require a plugin. “Unlike other web based medical applications I have seen, no Flash, Java, or other plugins are needed. This application will run on any WebGL supported browser. (…) Last year I got the opportunity to work on an open standards based web3D medical app for learning the bones of the body. After witnessing how that app really helped students learn the bones, I am sold on using web3D for medical education.”

Posted from St Louis, Saint-Louis, Senegal.

Originally, e-mail delegation was useful for granting others access to your primary Gmail account — personal assistants, for example.

With today’s changes, this basic feature is going to be more useful for any Gmail user with multiple accounts of his or her own.

When you sign into your primary Gmail account, you can choose to grant access to another account. Just navigate to your Gmail settings by clicking the link in the top right corner of Gmail’s web interface.

Under the Accounts tab, there’s now a new section entitled, “Grant access to your account.” Here, you can add any other Gmail accounts you control to your primary Gmail account.

When you add an account, you’ll have to accept access from a verification e-mail sent to the to-be-added account. Once the account is successfully added, you can simply toggle between your Gmail accounts without logging in and out.

Also, when you send a new e-mail message while signed into a secondary account, your primary address will also appear in the e-mail details.

The Mashable staff will find this particularly useful — will you? Let us know in the comments.

(from mashable)

Sparrow is in beta (v6) and it is free. It works with Google and Google apps, and the advantages that has over Mac Mail is that you can archive and see labels, pretty much like you see it in the web, with conversations, etc….

It is beautiful, nicely design and it works fine. Every day there are more Google mail users using mac, and this is the perfect client for them.

I am one of those. I use mail from mac with 3 accounts (all google apps: norai.net, tokao.com and torres.cc).

I also have Outlook 2011 for work (ifrc.org) which is great for exchange and having corporate LDAP and Pushed calendar and email.

I

Mark Suster who joined GRP Partners in 2007 after having worked with GRP for nearly 8 years as a two-time entrepreneur. Most recently Mark was Vice President, Product Management at Salesforce.comI wrote in his last post where he discussed the origins of social networking online, beginning with CompuServe, Prodigy, the Well, then the rise of AOL, Geocities and Yahoo Groups. Next began the era of “spam-based” networks of which Plaxo (founded in 2002) was the king.  Co-founded by Sean Parker (yes, the same one who worked with Mark Zuckerberg in the early days of Facebook), it encouraged groups of people to email everybody in their email address books and “connect” on Plaxo so that when any of their contact information was changed online it could by synchronized with everybody’s local computer version and thus we could all stay in touch.

There was a backlash against the Plaxo spamming yet it paved the way for everybody who came after them to get users to drive viral adoption and we’d throw up our arms and say, “oh boy, here goes another social network that my friends are going to spam me about” mentality that made it acceptable for everybody who came afterward.

And come after they did.  While Plaxo never figured out what to do with us once we were all connected online, LinkedIn did.  They formed us into networks of networkers.  It was suddenly now not only about whom I was connected to, but who they knew and how I could get access to them.  We suddenly all wanted intros.  It added a new dimension to online social networks … business networking.  And they encouraged us to part with a lot more data about ourselves making LinkedIn our virtual resume.

And importantly Web 2.0 ushered in the era of “participation” – we all know that.  But less considered is the fact that the success of the Web 2.0 companies versus the Web 1.0 ones were enhanced because they coincided with hardware that allowed us to capture more content instantly – namely images and video – otherwide Web 2.0 might have been a lot less differentiated.  Suddenly we were all creating blogs on Blogger.com, Typepad & WordPress.  We started uploading images of ourselves to our blogs.

But the masses didn’t want to blog.  They wanted to publish pictures of themselves & their friends, share them, communicate with others, stay connected, have common experiences, find people to date, etc.  As I’ve said, it’s the same shit as the 1980′s – I swear.

Modern Social Networking: Friendster, MySpace & Facebook

We all know Friendster was the trailblazer in this category allowing people to create personal pages and connect to other people in a LinkedIn style but without the “business” and with a little more interactivity (let’s face it, for the longest time most users “friended” people on LinkedIn but then never really did much else).  But Friendster’s computer systems couldn’t keep up with the explosive growth (reportedly due to the complexity of the security model set up to control connections, privacy and authenticity of users) so MySpace was hot on the heels and swept up the market in a very rapid ascent.  Friendster was DOA.

And there it was – MySpace was growing at the exact time we all had cheap digital cameras, smartphones with cameras and new, cheap video cameras like the Flip that allowed us to create video.

Except that MySpace didn’t handle images or video well.  Luckily Photobucket & ImageShack did.  So users put all their photos on Photobucket & their videos on YouTube and shared them with their friends through MySpace.

Fox bought MySpace for $580 million and then did a deal with Google worth more than the purchase price to serve up ads.  For a nanosecond Rupert Murdoch seemed like the smartest guy on the Internet.  Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion, which at the time seemed laughably high and now seems prescient.  Google turned YouTube into one of the most valuable future Internet properties.  MySpace would have liked to own YouTube but didn’t have the public stock valuation to purchase them at the price that Google did.

MySpace later bought Photobucket for $250 million + $50 million earn out.  It did not have the same success as Google’s acquisition and MySpace sold Photobucket 2 years later to a relatively unknown Seattle-based startup called Ontela for a reportedly $60 million.

Murdoch seethed at these “startups” getting rich off the back of MySpace.  The conventional wisdom at Fox’s headquarters is that MySpace had “made” both YouTube & Photobucket by allowing them distribution.  MySpace vowed not to create anymore million dollar successes off of their backs that Google could then acquire.

So Fox ludicrously set up a quasi internal innovation center called Slingshot Labs.  The goal was to create innovations outside of MySpace and then MySpace would acquire them at pre-agreed prices based on how well they performed.  This was Politburo-style innovation and was laughable. I literally snortled when I heard that they were going to do this.  It was obviously a scheme set up by young entrepreneurs to line their pockets and some big-company executives who didn’t understand innovation.

Enter Facebook.  It had grown stratospherically from 2004-2007 to 100 million users, which actually was slightly smaller in December 2007 then MySpace was.  Facebook was everything that MySpace wasn’t.  It was: up-market, exclusive, urban, elite, aesthetically pleasing, ad-free and users were verified.  MySpace was: scantily dressed, teenaged, middle-America, design chaos and on ad steroids.

But the critical distinction in the direction of both companies was that while MySpace was putting up moats to keep outside companies from innovating and making money off their backs, Facebook took the opposite approach.  It launched open API’s and created a platform whereby third-party developers could come build any app they wanted and Facebook didn’t even want (yet) to take any money from them to do so.  So along come companies like Slide, RockYou & Zynga who wanted to build apps across all the social networks but were green-lighted the hardest by Mark Zuckerberg.

It was at that moment that a 22-year-old Mark Zuckerberg completely schooled the 75-year-old Rupert Murdoch.  Within the next 12 months Facebook users doubled to 200 million while MySpace stayed flat at 100 million.  The lesson was learned over 30 years in Silicon Valley: you create ecosystems where third-parties can innovate and thrive and you become the legitimate center of it all and can tax the system later.  Ask Microsoft, Autodesk or Salesforce.com – the evidence was there from Seattle to Sand Hill Road.

Facebook went on become larger than even Google and Yahoo! in terms of time spent on the sites.  Slingshot Labs was unsurprisingly closed within a short period of time and its properties sold-off or dismantled.  Duh.

Social Networking goes Real Time: Twitter

While Facebook was built on the idea that all our information was private and shared only between friend (before they changed this after the fact), Twitter was born under the idea that most of the information shared there was open and viewable by anybody.  This was revolutionary in thinking and worked because as a user you understood this bargain when you started.  Twitter is not the place to share pictures of your kids with your family.

Another Twitter innovation was “asymmetry” because you didn’t have to have a two-way following relationship to be connected.  You could follow people who didn’t necessarily follow you back.  This allowed followers to be able to “curate” their newsfeed with people that they found interesting.  Twitter restricts each post to 140 characters so users often share links with other people – one of the most important features of Twitter.  So this combination of following people you found interesting who share links drove a sort of “news exchange” that mimicked many of the features of RSS readers except that it was curated by other people!

Twitter is much more.  I’ve written extensively on the topic, but in a nutshell it is: an RSS reader, a chat room, instant messaging, a marketing channel, a customer service department and increasingly a data mine.

But what is magic about Twitter is that it is real time.  In most instances news is now breaking on Twitter and then being picked up by news organizations.

The one major thing that Twitter doesn’t have figured out quite yet is that platform thing or at least how to encourage a bunch of 3rd-party developers to build meaningful add-on products.  Twitter seems to have become a bit allergic to third-party developers (or maybe vice-versa).  18 months ago 25% of all pitches to me were ideas for how to build products around Twitter’s API.  Now I don’t get any.  Not one.  Yet the number of businesses looking to build on the Facebook platform seems to have increased.

Given I’m a passionate user of Twitter, I sure hope somebody there will re-read the MySpace vs. Facebook section above.  Lesson learned (to me at least) – let people get stinking rich off your platform and tax ‘em later.  That way other companies innovate on their own shekels (or at least a VCs) and let the best man win.  Close shop to try and control monetization and you can only rely on your own internal innovation machine & capital.  Seems kinda obvious or am I missing somethign?  Rupert?

Social Networking is Becoming Mobile: Foursquare and Skout

The trend that is unfolding before our eyes is that Social Networking is now becoming mobile and that adds new dimensions to how we use social networks.  The most obvious change is that now social networks become “location aware.”  The highest profile brand in this space is Foursquare.  Pundits are mixed on whether Foursquare represents a major technology trend or a fad but undoubtedly it has captured the zeitgeist of the technology elite at this moment in time.  At a minimum it has been a trailblazer of innovation that a generation of companies are trying to copy.

As our social actions become both public and location specific it opens up all types of future potential use cases.  One obvious one is dating where players like Skout are trying to cash in on.  When you think about it, young & single people go out to bars & clubs in hopes of meeting people to “hook up” with.  In a perfect world you’d like that person to be compatible with you in additional to being attracted to them, yet as a society we go into bars and have no idea what it behind any of the people we see other than the immediacy of their looks and whether we can get enough liquid courage into ourselves to talk with them and learn more.

It’s obvious to me that the future of dating will involve mobile, social networks that tell us more about the compatibility of the people around us.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how big people like Match.com and eHarmony became on the trend of helping us find our dating partners and why this would be improved my mobile, social networks.  How long this trend takes is unclear – but in 10 years I feel confident we’ll look back and say, “duh.”

FourSquare obviously brings up a lot of interesting commercial opportunities.  For years I saw companies pitching themselves as “mobile coupon companies” and I never believed this would be a big idea.  I’m not a big believer that people walk around with their mobile devices and say, “let me now pull out my device and see wether there are any coupons around me.”  I always said that if an application could engage the user in some other way – like a game – it would earn the right to serve up coupons as a by-product.  I think that is what Foursquare has done well.

In the future I don’t believe that Foursquare’s “check-in” game with badges will be enough to hold users interests but for now it’s working well.  I’ve always said that if Foursquare has a “second act” coming it could be a really big company.  In the long-run I believe that check-ins will be more seamless – something handled by infrastructure in the background.  So I expect more and new games from Foursquare in the future.  One awesome features of today’s Foursquare that often isn’t talked about is the ability to graph your friends on a real-time map and see where everybody is.  This is a killer feature for the 20 and 30 something crowds for sure.  Me? When I go out I mostly prefer to eat in peace with my wife and friends without people knowing where we are – I guess we all get old ;-)

In the next post I will make some predictions about where social networking is going next.  And only one hint —it isn’t all dominated by Facebook.  Stay tuned.  If you can’t wait you can get a sneak peak in the PowerPoint presentation below.

(from techcrunch)

Social Networks: Past, Present & Future –

You’re still alive, she said
Oh, and do I deserve to be
Is that the question
And if so…if so…who answers…who answers…
I, oh, I’m still alive!

from Alive by Pearl Jam

I’m pleased to announce that we’re in the final stages of completing a sale of Xmarks to a new owner who is 100% committed to keep our great browser sync service running smoothly.

The Xmarks service will evolve to have both a free component and a premium component – we’ll share all the details once the deal is done. For all of you that signed our pledge, or are asking us to reopen the pledge, please hold that thought. When we update the service we’ll have a premium option for you to spend some of your hard earned money on, and we will be very thankful when you do!

I can’t provide more details just yet, but I wanted to publish this update to let you all know that we’re alive and kicking and things are on track for a “new and improved” Xmarks.

Regards,
James

xmarks

1. Double-check time zones. Heck, triple check them — there are all sorts of strange situations you can encounter. Different countries start daylight savings time on different dates, certain areas don’t participate in daylight savings time (and there are inconsistencies on the country, state and county levels), and the international dateline can be tricky. The best bet is to confirm the time of the meeting with each attendee.
2. Don’t start with a brand new tool. If you haven’t used the software you’re planning to run your next meeting with, do a dry run with it before the day of the meeting. Every tool has its own quirks and the middle of a meeting isn’t the best time to figure them out. If you can run a test with a few of the people who will be attending your meeting, so much the better.
3. Plan for a back channel. In every meeting, there are people who are trading knowing looks, passing notes or planning to track someone down right after the meeting. If you build in a back channel where your meeting attendees can pass information privately, you can make sure that any problems or questions can be handled in the moment.
4. Offer a transcript or minutes. With many online meetings, there is a certain sense that taking notes isn’t quite as necessary, especially if there is a recording of the meeting available. But no-one ever sits through the recording of the meeting after the fact, so having written notes or  a summary is important to ensure that people act on any decision or plans made at the meeting.
5. Have a follow-up plan in place. With a virtual meeting, you can’t exactly count on bumping into someone in the hallway the next day. Making concrete plans for follow-up is necessary to making sure that any plans or decisions actually get carried out without having to schedule yet another meeting.

(from gigaom)

DoubleTwits offers a desktop media player that looks a lot like iTunes (which is no accident given the ‘iTunes for Android’ theme), and it’s added support for the Android App Store, a music store through Amazon MP3′s API, and a directory of Podcasts. Today it’s launching what’s probably its coolest feature yet: wireless sync, which they’re appropriately dubbing ‘AirSync’. And it’s not just for music — DoubleTwist will let you wirelessly sync your movies, music, and photos.

Given how powerful the feature is, setup is relatively painless. Install the latest DoubleTwist client for your Mac or PC, then download the new version of the Android app. Set your phone to connect to the same Wifi network as your computer, fire up the Android app, and hit the new ‘AirSync’ button. The desktop app will detect your phone, ask you to key in a passcode (this is similar to the Bluetooth pairing process), and from there you can configure the application to sync music, photos and video (photo sync is only available on Windows for now, but is coming soon for the Mac version).

All in all, the process takes around three minutes, though the sync itself will take significantly longer — possibly hours —depending on your Wifi speed. There is one caveat though: DoubleTwist’s Android application has historically been free; that’s still true for the basic functionality, but you’ll have to upgrade to a paid version if you want AirSync — it’s a 99 cent upgrade for the first 10,000 users, and then will jump to $4.99 for everyone else.

The coolest part about AirSync is that after the initial setup, everything should work automatically. Whenever you walk within range of your wireless network, DoubleTwist (the desktop client) will detect any new content on your phone and sync it back to the computer; you can also sync new content from your computer back to your device. This means that you can go out and shoot some videos on your phone, and, provided you don’t walk immediately to your computer after getting home, they should already be waiting for you when you sit down at your desk (Ok, this also assumes you leave your computer on).

It’s quite impressive. Unfortunately there appear to be some issues.

In a word, this is the future. Whether DoubleTwist or Winamp or an official solution from Google becomes the standard, a world without annoying tethering is clearly the way things are headed. DoubleTwist is the first that offers such deep integration, and it’s definitely worth checking out.

Given the timing of the launch (which was originally slated for yesterday but was pushed til today to QA test a new version), I reached out to DoubleTwist to see what they thought of Winamp’s release. Aside from pointing out some feature differences (Winamp doesn’t support Macs and is for music only at this point), they also had this to say — they’re not exactly mincing words:

In general, we do not consider Winamp a competitor as they are geared towards a specific subcategory of users who don’t mind endless menus, preferences and options. We are more focused on the mass market, average user who just wants to make the most out of their device without being overwhelmed by technology.

(from techcrunch)

Here is my list:

Apple

• iPad (Great to consume content)
• MacBook air 11″ (sexiest laptop to take with you everywhere)
• iPhone 4 (the best phone ever, with the best camera)
• Time Capsule or Airport Extreme (the first if you have a mac to forget about local backups, the second if you just want a great wifi network at home)

Android:

• Samsung Galaxy Pad (7″ android tablet. Great size, with cameras, more features than the current iPad)
• Samsung Galaxy S (iPhone 4 equivalent in Android)

Other:

• Kindle 3 (best ebook reader)
• Pogoplug (plug an external HD and build you own cloud)
• Synology DS1010+ (best NAS)
• Bose QuietConfort 15 (best active noise cancelling headphones if you travel)
• myfox (wifi home alarm)
• GPS logger (great for tagging your DSLR photos)
• Vue Zone (simple IP cameras)

Internet services:

• Evernote (my second brain)
• Google storage (if you use picasa, google docs, etc… cheap storage)
• Flickr pro or smugmug (for your photos online if you have a lot of photos and look for unlimited storage)
• crashplan (best backup in the cloud solution)
• sugarsync (best sync solution, better than dropbox)
• toodledo (great todo management tool)

To help smooth the transition from Office to the cloud, my teammates and I founded a company called DocVerse, which was acquired by Google earlier this year. Over the last 9 months, we’ve been hard at work moving the DocVerse product to Google’s infrastructure. We’ve also renamed it Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office. Today, we’re pleased to take the next step towards a public launch and make it available to early testers.

For those of you who have not made the full move to Google Docs and are still using Microsoft Office, Google has something great to offer. With Cloud Connect, people can continue to use the familiar Office interface, while reaping many of the benefits of web-based collaboration that Google Docs users already enjoy.

Users of Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 can sync their Office documents to the Google cloud, without ever leaving Office. Once synced, documents are backed-up, given a unique URL, and can be accessed from anywhere (including mobile devices) at any time through Google Docs. And because the files are stored in the cloud, people always have access to the current version.

Once in the Google cloud, documents can be easily shared and even simultaneously edited by multiple people, from right within Office. A full revision history is kept as the files are edited, and users can revert to earlier versions in one click. These are all features that Google Docs users already enjoy today, and now we’re bringing them to Microsoft Office.
All you need is a Google account, and you’re ready to go. That’s it!

If you’re a Google Apps for Business customer interested in joining our preview program, please sign up here. If you’re not, don’t worry- at launch, Google Cloud Connect will be available free to everyone, including consumers.

(from google)

Currently limited to the U.S. and women’s fashion only (with plans to expand in the future), Boutiques assists you in refreshing your wardrobe with a combination of curated fashion choices from fashion taste-makers and machine learning algorithms. Start with a style, and you’ll see 50 hand-curated items on top, with the rest of the inventory in that style chosen by Google’s algorithms.

Features include the ability to filter searches by genre, silhouette, pattern, color families and sizes, as well as visual search, which analyzes the photograph of a clothing item for its color, shape, and pattern and then returns visually similar items. Boutiques also gives you matching outfit ideas to the right of the search results, and you can complete looks using style rules, which suggest items that match.

Boutiques is also available as an iPad application, available for free in the iTunes store.

With Google Docs, we’re always trying to make you more productive—and part of that means making it possible for you to get things done from anywhere, at anytime. That’s why we’re excited that the new documents editor now supports editing on your mobile browser. We’re rolling this out over the next few days.

That means that…

• You can work on that important memo…while on the bus or train to work.
• If you’re behind on a group proposal, but really want to make it to the ball game tonight, your whole team can work on it from the bleacher seats.
• You can take minute-by-minute notes at a concert so you’ll always remember the setlist. And your friends can jealously follow in real-time at home.
• …and the list goes on!

Take a look at this video to see mobile editing in action:

In the next few days, we’re rolling this out to English-language users around the world on Android with Froyo (version 2.2) and on iOS devices (version 3.0+) including the iPad. We’ll be adding support for other languages soon. And as before, we also support editing of spreadsheets from your mobile device’s browser.

We hope you enjoy editing your documents on the go—especially when you’re at the game with ahot dog in your other hand.

Mark Zuckerberg said “This is not an email killer. This is a messaging experience that includes email as one part of it,”. It’s all about making communication simpler. “This is the way that the future should work,”.

Here are the keys to what a modern messaging system needs according to Zuckerberg:

• seamless
• informal
• immediate
• personal
• simple
• minimal
• short

To do that, Facebook has created three key things: Seamless messaging, conversation history, and a social inbox. Essentially, they’ve created a way to communicate no matter what format you want to use: email, chat, SMS — they’re all included. “People should share however they want to share,” engineer Andrew Bosworth said.

All of this messaging is kept in a single social inbox. And all of your conversation history with people is kept.

The Google message asks users: Are you super sure you want to import your contact information for your friends into a service that won’t let you get it out?’ and notes that the site the user was redirected from (Facebook’s name is never mentioned) ‘doesn’t allow you to re-export your data to other services, essentially locking up your contact data about your friends.’ Google says it ‘strongly disagrees’ with this kind of data protectionism, but is willing to let users export their information because it believes they should control what happens to it. The notice also contains a checkbox that allows a user to ‘register a complaint over data protectionism,’ although it’s not clear what exactly that does.

Just to recap what has been going on for the past few days, Google changed the terms of its contacts API, which third-party developers use to automatically import email address books from Gmail, so that users can find their friends on a network or service. The change required that anyone making use of this feature also allow users to export their data, including email addresses ‘ and this was a clear shot at Facebook, which doesn’t allow this (although you can download names, wall posts, photos, etc.) Facebook responded by linking directly to Google’s download feature, which is why the new warning appears.

In the only official comment that has emerged from Facebook, platform engineer Mike Vernal suggested that Google is being hypocritical about data portability, and is only concerned about it because Facebook is more popular and is a competitive threat. According to Vernal, allowing users to export email addresses is something Google should be required to do, but not something Facebook should have to do ‘ because users on Facebook control their own contact info, but not their friends.

As several sites have noted, however, Facebook happily allows users to bulk export the contact information for all their friends from the social network to partners such as Microsoft and Yahoo, but not to Google. So it appears that there is plenty of hypocrisy to go around ‘ and even more tangible signs that Google and Facebook are in the middle of a social war, and your contact information is one of the main weapons.

(via Gigaom)

Using�Eats, application users can essentially explore the interior of local restaurants in a virtual walk-a-round fashion, similar in style to Google Streetview for mobile, but infinitely more practical for would-be restaurant diners.

Eats also includes visual search options, social sharing features and filters for users to find restaurants by location, price or rating.

The EveryScape custom-built technology powering Eats is capable of transforming photo stills into three dimensional, user-controlled internal store tours. The application is designed to further the connection between patron and business owner, and business owners can use the service to customize their venue information.

EveryScape is also announcing today the private beta release of its mobile SDK, making available its collection of visual restaurant guides to select iPhone and iPad developers.

The Eats mobile application will be rolled out to New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C. in the months ahead. In many ways, Eats is like a next generation version of�Yelp for mobile. Interestingly enough, Google may also be�experimenting with a similar idea to enhance its Streetview product.

You can watch a demo of the Boston edition of the iPhone application below.

(via Mashable)

Very very cool.

If you are a mac user you had glims doing something similar. Now (I just tested it with chrome) is a standard feature of Google. Great improvement I have to say.

MobileMe

TekTrak

TekTrak offers its location-tracking app for $4.99, in the Apple App Store. The App�s functionality is fairly simple: it allows an iPhone�s owner to access their device�s location information in realtime from a browser. You can access all the location history of your phone (i.e. where it was and when); and the app runs in the background. You can also remotely ring or send push notifications to your phone.

TekTrak tries to tackle the pain of battery drain by running in the background and allowing users to check location at predetermined time intervals. TekTrak�s main competitor is Apple, which can be a challenge, but its app is fairly affordable compared to a MobileMe subscription which hovers around $99 per year.

Like any good burgeoning artistic movement there are already a bunch of brilliant online resources aimed at iPhone photographers offering great galleries, talent showcases, app reviews, exhibition news and more.

Read on for 10 great sites from around the web that we�ve bookmarked for iPhone Photographers and photo-lovers alike. Your favorite not on this list? Please share any other great iPhotography sites you like in the comments below.

1. Pixels at an Exhibition

This site describes itself as a �gallery of the most beautiful and ground-breaking iPhone art on the web and home to an ever-increasing number of visionary pioneers in the exploration and development of this nascent and vibrant new medium.� With a daily pic to inspire you, easy browsing by category or a tag word cloud, featured artists and exhibition news, iPhotographers will find lots to like on this site.

2. iPhoneogenic

Run by Edgar Cuevas, an iPhotographer in his own right, iPhoneogenic is a lovely site to visit. Described as �a place for highlighting the iPhoneographer,� it offers enlightening interviews with iPhotographers from all over the world that sometimes include interesting how-tos on certain techniques. It�s always a fascinating read.

3. EYE�EM

EYE�EM is about more than just iPhotography � it�s a hub dedicated to mobile photography as a whole, where �creative minds from all over the world unite to share their images and create a unique stream of mutual inspiration and creative expression.� You can browse through pics, follow photographers you like, search by location and tag words, comment on photos, and share images. You can also jump into the fray by creating your own stream.

4. iPhoneography

Glyn Evans� great iPhoneography blog covers iPhone photography and videography with app news and reviews (including great info on app updates), photographer showcases, news from the iPhotography community around the world and more. There�s also a user forum for discussions on the topic where you can post questions and help others with answers.

5. The Best Camera

Chase �the-best-camera-is-the-one-that�s-with-you� Jarvis� worldwide hub for mobile photography is the sister site to the app of the same name, with photos from iPhotographers globally uploaded via the app. Viewing a real-time stream of these images is great fun but you�ll get the most out of this site if you post your own content thanks to the great management and sharing options that are available.

6. Life in LoFi

Life in Lo-Fi is the iPhoneography blog of Marty Yawnick, a freelance graphic designer and iPhotographer. Yawnick offers his readers app news and reviews, links to relevant articles of interest he spots around the web, curated Flickr showcases, some of his personal photography and regular promo code giveaways.

7. iPhoneArt

A relative newcomer, iPhoneArt�s aim is �to build a grassroots mobile art community where professionals, beginners, and developers alike can share and discuss all forms of mobile art.� Despite being in its early days, user-generated content has helped create a huge gallery of more than 6,000 photos. The site includes a �Studio Talk� forum, a robust app review section and the option to sign up to create you own online gallery with a unique username-based URL.

8. The Big Hipstamatic Show

Fans of the titular app should definitely look up its sister-site: The Big Hipstamatic Show. The guys behind Hipstamatic run regular contests for best photos under certain titles. The current contest, for example, is �Fields.� You can view the leaderboard to see the hot contenders or view past entries for a wonderful showcase of iPhotography.

9. iPhone Photo

�Gently� curated by Caleb Kimbrough, iPhone Photo is a very simple site offering an online showcase of what Caleb considers �the best user submitted iPhone photography.� Dating back to July 2009, it�s an eclectic collection with some strong photography.

10. Flickr

No, we haven�t gone mad. We know everyone (and their dog) is well aware of the world�s largest photography site, but besides being a place to upload your own pics, it�s a really good resource for iPhotography inspiration, artist discovery and app research.

Many iPhotographers will name the apps they�ve used for specific photos, giving you an idea of what the different photographic options can produce. Did you know there are more than 30 million iPhone photographs on Flickr? You can browse pics by camera model or head for one of the iPhoto groups � there are tons of them and some amazing photography to enjoy.

(from mashable)

Without this, hacking your account over an unsecured wireless network may not be rocket science, but it surely isn’t the one-click magic made possible by Firesheep.

Firesheep takes advantage of unsecured wireless networks and unencrypted cookies to “sidejack”, or gain access to sites by way of accessing these cookies. Developed by Eric Butler, a freelance web application and software developer in Seattle, Washington, Firesheep was created and released at�Toorcon 12 to demonstrate the security risk inherent in storing unencrypted login data in cookies. As Butler writes on his blog, “On an open wireless network, cookies are basically shouted through the air, making these attacks extremely easy.”

Firesheep opens a sidebar in Firefox that shows everyone who is connected to a certain unsecured WiFi network. With a single click, you can connect to most any social network using that person’s user name and password.

By making it this easy to hack other users accounts, Butler says that he is hoping the extension will force major sites like Twitter or Facebook to act responsibly and protect their users.

“Websites have a responsibility to protect the people who depend on their services,” writes Butler. “They’ve been ignoring this responsibility for too long, and it’s time for everyone to demand a more secure web. My hope is that Firesheep will help the users win.”

(from readwriteweb)

It is damn sexy. I am a one laptop man, but I would even consider the new 11 inches as my next only laptop… wow

After rebooting the server after a year or so, I noticed weird things, like “who” �and “top” were not working, some directories were not there (like the log one), cpu was 100% all times… yeap, tokao server was compromised on the 26th of October, so yesterday after taking a careful look at what have been done, I closed all ports to the manchine and tonight I have migrated tokao to another more secure server.

Tokao was running on centOS and the rootkit was done via a hole in my old apache. The server was at home with a big UPS and 1Mb DSL upstream, enough for tokao. I had secured ssh with webknock.

Well after 8 years, this is the perfect excuse to upgrade my old CentOS to the newest Ubuntu.

Now tokao is in a VPS Ubuntu machine with the latest updates… while I decide where to host it. I have not tested all. I see that some stuff still does not work (like url rewrite). Working on it ;-)

.

The other one that I chose was Backblaze. For $5 a month you can backup one computer to the cloud.

I emphasized that it is very important to keep backups in a different location, and that is why I took a look to backblaze, carbonite, mozy, etc…

Now, there is another player that I either forgot or that it is new. I don’t know.

Also there are some remarks I want to make.

First remark is that if you have lot of storage in use, these online backup solutions might not be good. It takes ages to upload everything and I don’t want to imagine what happens if you happen to need the whole thing, not just a file you deleted.

Some, for a fee, can send you a HD. This is good. Some also, for the first backup they send you an HD you copy it locally and you send it to them. This could be a good option.

Crashplan

The newcomer is crashplan. It is by far my first choice. Let me tell you why.

Crashplan does this: they can send you a hard disc, you copy whatever you want, you send it and voila. Same for restoring.

Of course you have a software in your Mac, Pc or even Linux to sync with crashplan servers.

The great thing is that for as little as $3.5 a month you can back up everything you have. And for $5 you can backup everything you have in your house!! including all computers, external disks and NAS. Everything for as little as $5 a month.

Now, the software you use, which is great has something that nobody else has. You can back up for FREE from one computer to another. So you install crashplan in your laptop for free and you back up to your desktop computer. All this peer to peer backup is free and hassle free. Of course both computers should run the software. Ah, and this include your computeres or your friend’s. You can back up your laptop to your mum’s computer in the other side of the world if you wish.

For me this is the winner by far.

I tested it. You have 30 days trial to upload to crashplan unlimited data. I selected my two photo folders and starting backup from my mediacenter. Both folders have around 250Gb. Well the estimated time was something like 4 months. Not a solution for me then.

Also I cannot backup this to any other computer. I would eat my mum’s hard disk if I do so.

I do have backups at home but offsite backups is something I still don’t have (except for the 45.000 photos in flickr). At home though every computer has raid 0 (except the mac, but it has timemachine on a computer with raid mirror)

For me the solution is a NAS that rsyncs with another NAS in a different location. The first backup can be done at the same place then you just sync changes. If your house is lost in an earthquake then you can always mail the other copy.

This is a far more expensive solution, but it is the one I am choosing. The winner for that is Synology DS-1010+, but this is another post….

Well, before you go for an Organizing tool such as evernote, you should take a look at the alternative products. This are the more notable I found. I stay with evernote though, as I can use it in the web, on my mac, on my iPhone and on the PCs. It has the best tagging out there and the fact that everything is indexed and searchable (even hand-written photographed notes) makes it the winner.

The best way is to see their videos showing up their products:

Yojimbo

Yojimbo is simple and very nice. Now it has an iPad app and is great for taking stuff to read later, bookmars and puting your pdf’s together.

Here you have an introductory video.

Together

Together also lets you keep everything in one place. Text, documents, images, movies, sounds, web pages and bookmarks can all be dragged to Together for safe keeping, tagged, previewed, collected together in different ways and found again instantly.

Springpad

Springpad is the closest to Evernote.

Evernote

Sure, how to forget evernote…

Here their intro video.

The new feature works with the latest versions of Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari, and Google says it plans to add support for other browsers soon. The feature works exactly as you would expect. Rather than importing an image using the web uploader, entering in a URL or doing a Google Image Search, you just drag the item from your desktop into your Google Docs document.

Drag-and-drop uploading is actually a pretty big win for a web app like Google Docs. Competitor Zoho supports drag-and-drop for some of its apps, but dragging an image into a Zoho Writer file just ends up inserting a local file address into the document.

The process works pretty well and we had no problem taking images from our Mac desktop and putting them in a Google Doc using both Safari 5.0.2 and the latest release of Google Chrome.

In fact, if we had any complaint at all, it wasn’t with the feature itself, but with the fact that images still cannot be inserted with a float alignment, so that text fills the column to the left or right of an image, rather than starting a new line where the image ends. Again, this isn’t a criticism of the drag-and-drop feature, but a feature that’s lacking in Google Docs itself.

Thanks to HTML5, it’s getting easier and easier for developers to add features to web apps to make them behave more like desktop applications. We hope other online office suites take Google’s hint.

(from mashable)

I would like to share with you some tips in order to have a great trip diary, using the latest techonologies.

Checklist

Option A

When I travel I pack my nikon d300 with a 10-20mm and a 18-200 lenses. My nikon has a 16Gb memory card. Unfortunately most DSLR do not have GPS unlike the iPhone or other smart phones, but there is a work around. Keep reading.

I also pack my GPS (Garmin Oregon 300), rechargeable batteries and the charger sure. If you don’t have a GPS you should consider getting one, and they are now very cheap. You don’t need a fancy GPS, you just need a GPS logger. No bluetooth even. No screen, just a GPS logger, that when you switch it on it starts recording your trail, and once back home or with your laptop, you just plug it in and extract the .gpx file. I will explain what to do with it. You can but very cheap GPS at Dealextreme a Hong Kong based online shop full of gadgets at ridiculous prices… and shipping anywhere int the world is free. You can have a GPS for $35.

Now if you travel to remote places you can consider a good GPS with SOS function such as the SPOT.

Also if you don’t want to take the gpx file from the gps and use one of the ways I described further down there is a GPS logger (ATP Photo finder) that you sync the time with your camera, insert the SD card, and it tags them automatically. Not for Compact Flash and not for RAW images though…

If it is going to be a long trip, and I plan to blog properly, then I take my old sony vaio t series (10 inch screen) and an external 2.5inches Hard Disk.

Option B

Just your iPhone 3gs or 4. (Has a decent camera and GPS).

Option C

Both. Option A for more elaborated blogging, Option B for quick on the spot.

Which option?

Nowadays with an iPhone 4 you have more than enough to take good quality videos and photos. Take a look at this blog entry for tips on how to take the best photos with the iphone.

In addition to have a 5Mpx camera and shoot HD videos, the new smart phones have GPS so videos and photos are geotagged, and programs such as picasa (for Mac, PC and Linux) or iPhoto (for Mac) plot all your photos in a map which is great.

If you really like photography then you choose to take your DSLR with you, so then you have to take a laptop (and an external HD if it is an old laptop like mine) so you can take the photos out of the camera and put the in your blog, site or community. Or just to empty your camera.

I take both.

iPhone apps and Everytrail

When I first bought my first GPS (Garmin Vista) it was quite a job to be able to do something with the tracks you save. You needed a windows computer, nothing for mac, and the software that came with it was pretty bad.

Then Google Earth would allow you to import the tracks (.gpx files). It was great. It is still great!

Everytrail

Now there is a website that I love and I use as a main stop for GPS logging: Everytrail.

Everytrail is free. You can upload your .gpx file even directly from your gps, and there you can have all your tracks store, that you can tag, put some text, add waypoints with explanations, and edit them!! yes. You can make them public or private. Very very powerful tool.

Everytrail also gives you an embed code that you can put in your blog, where you see the trail you have uploaded, the waypoints you have inserted, stats of time, altitude, speed… and more.

Geotag your photos with Everytrail

Once I have written about my photography workflow. Now when I upload them to flickr, make sure you create a set for those photos in the same GPS track. So if you go out switch on your GPS logger, then all the fotos you take until you switch it off should be in the same set.

With Everytrail, you can select the flickr (or picasa, or uploading manually) set and it will import it. As the camera has a clock it will know when they were take it, and plotted into your trail map. Great.

Now you have to fine tune that. There might be a bit of missmatch between the time in the GPS, the timezone and the camera clock. You take one photo you know exactly where it was taken, drag it to the right place and , then click on “update offset based on this picture” and the rest will follow. Magical!!

Now you have your trail uploaded into Everytrail, you have corrected it, you have added notes as waypoints, and you have uploaded the fotos from flicker that have been geo tagged in Everytrail.

With Everytrail alone you have already a good blog for your trip, because you have a space to write, to give tips and to have the track an dall the photos along it.

In addition to this you can have the embed code and put it into you blog.

Everytrail in your iPhone

Everytrail is available for the iPhone. They have two apps, a free one and a paid one. They are not very good. There is a free app, though, that uses Everytrail as a back end which is absolutly great!

Trailhead iPhone app (from the north face)

Last August the north face released an iphone app (free) that uses everytrail track. This app is just awesome. When you start it you have two main options, start tracking (and it is reasonable on what you use of battery) or see nearby trails. You can track even if you don’t have GPRS or 3G. In this case you don’t see the maps (in the pro app for everytrail you can download offline maps).

Then when tracking, at any given point you can add a photo or a note (not a video yet).

So in summary, with the iphone alone you do what I explained before without the need of a camara, a gps, a computer and a website.

Blogging tools

When traveling often you don’t have internet. Blogging everyday is therefore difficult.

For that reason you should use an offline blogging tool. The best one out there is Windows Live Writer. For the mac you have Ecto or MarsEdit, but Live Writer is much better.

The advantage of using one of this offline tools is that you can write every day, add your photos and so, and when you have internet, then you upload everything.

If you are planning to use GPS info with everytrail, you should do it online though.

This offline tools are good for blogs such as wordpress, blogger etc…

I use wordpress and there is a great plugin called mappress for having a google map where you can easily add a waypoint with html code in it if you wish. It is handy if you want to show your readers where you are sleeping, or what to visit for instance.

Alternatively you can simply go to google maps, log in and under my maps, create a map. It is very easy. Then you can copy the embed code and past it into your blog.

Blogging sites

If you don’t have a blog, and you don’t blog regularly, they you can use one of the dedicated free blogs for travelers. My favorites are:

• Travelpod
• Mapvivo

Travelpod is a great place full of good tips and travelers. You have maps, you can upload photos, … it is a tailored blog for travelers.

Mapvivo is more of a travel diary. It is based on having a map and putting what you do in it.

Geotagging your photos at home

To geo tag the photos using everytrail is OK, but you will probably would love to have your photos in your PC/Mac geotagged as well.

Well there is a way to do it too, even if you camera has no GPS.  As I mentioned with a GPS logger, and a normal camera you can.

Select the photos you took within the period of geotagging. Then use one of these programs:

The best one is GeoSetter (just for PC unfortunately)

GeoSetter (free) allows you to take your photos, the log file of the GPS and geo tag the photos automatically. You can easily take one that you know exactly where it was taken, position it and the rest will follow. GeoSetter will write in the EXIF header of the file, so if you now import them to Picasa, iPhoto, Flickr, etc… they will have GPS information.

For Mac there is a paid program which does pretty much the same: Geophoto. It is even nicer, but not as complete as the Geosetter.

Also GPS photo linker. (tags Raw and it is free). Take a look at the demo, for me is the winner.

With this I modify my photography workflow. The first thing to do is to geotagg the raw photos, then apply DxO for corrections and to create JPEGs.

Here an example of the embed code from a trip with photos in everytrail in Puerto Rico. If you mouse over the bottom you can see a link to the stats and to the slideshow. Also mousing over the spots of the photos.
San Juan de Puerto Rico

The cool thing is that they have a Gmail extension ;-)

The service is free but if you track it inserts a banner. If you pay, it is clean. If you don’t register it is impossible to see how much you should pay for a full service, which is very nasty. Just for this I will not even sign in to try.

A work around could be to insert a signature (jpg), hosted in your google docs or dropbox or anywhere, and track it with google analytics. For free, forever. Not as cool but it works.

So, what’s the big deal?

Well, when apple annouced the new FaceTime everybody was excited! wow! video chat with your iPhone and they will open the standards…

Sure but they have been sleeping… FaceTime works only over wifi… only between iPhone 4 users…

Then it came Fring. Free, phone to phone video calls. No matter which phone. Even better than FaceTime!! Now I can use my nokia to call an iPhone 4 or even a 3GS with the back camera.

Well the last is Yahoo! mesenger. It allows you to have video calls for free… but this time no just to other phones but to someone with the desktop version of Yahoo! messenger. This is big. Over wifi, 3G… and videocalling to my mum’s computer.

Apple? Don’t sleep.

What I do have with me is my iPhone 3GS (waiting for the iPhone 4).

I am pretty happy with the quality of photos and videos the iPhone 3gs does, and I am looking forward to the iPhone 4 which is much better.

For the photos I would like to recommend 3 apps that will make you a better iPhone photographer:

Autostich

Autostich is an app that will allow you to make panoramas, so you don’t need wide angle lens ;-)
The beauty of this app is that you take photos that overlap a 20 to 30% side by side and they the app puts them together on a single panoramic photo.

In addition to this you can even take a second row of photos and add it too!

Here you have a couple of photos using this app:

Hipstamatic

Hipstamatic transforms your iphone into an old camera. You can change the lense from the typical John S, to a Jimmy, Kaimal Mark II, Helga Viking, Lucifer VI, etc…

Also you choose the film: Blanko, Ina’s 1969, Ina’s 1935, Kodot Verichrome, Blackeys B+W, etc…

And the flash (simulated), from a dreampop to redeye gel or berry pop…

The results are amazing. Take a look at the photos I just took:

Pro HDR

Pro HDR is a great app for when you are facing a contrast, like a photo at home with the window. Either the inside is OK and the outside is burned, or the outside is OK but the inside is black.

HDR has been introduced to the iPhone 4. The technique is simple, you take an overexposed photo and an underexposed and you mix them. The result is not natural but it is great. I use this technique with my nikon too. I read that this app is far better than the one coming with the iPhone 4.

Take a look at the photos:

I have not played with it but I watch some of the videos they have on their website and looks amazing.

Basically it comes with a special paper notbook, where you write with this special pen. You can draw, write… everything is memorized. Then you have also a play, stop, pause at the bottom of the page to record the sound, so if the algebra teacher is doing something damn complicated and you are coping, it when you click in the physical netbook, you can listen what he said at that particular moment.

This is magic…

Also you connect it to a computer and you have all your notes… wow…

It is thought for being productive while driving.

Dial2Do Voice2Note is a special service for Evernote users that converts all of your voice/audio notes to searchable, taggable text.

Take a look at the video, looks pretty impressive:

While mobile phones have become a lot more capable in the past few years, the connection between the printer and your phone is still very weak.

For instance, if you are using a BlackBerry or an iPhone, how do you print any of the presentations or spreadsheets that you have as email attachments? Or if you are viewing driving directions on Google Maps using an iPad, how do you send that map to the printer?

Your phone’s app store will have a few printing apps to let you wirelessly print files but if you want to save a few bucks, you can simply use Dropbox to print documents from your phone to any printer without requiring any additional software.

Some upcoming printers will have built-in support for mobile printing via email but with Dropbox, you get the same feature without requiring any new hardware.

Before we get into the details, watch the video above as it shows how printing from a mobile phone actually works through Dropbox (apologies for the bad audio quality).

Print Files from any Mobile Phone through Dropbox

The workflow is like this. You download a small utility on your computer that runs in the background and constantly monitors one of your Dropbox folders for any new printing jobs.

You can send files for printing from your mobile phone through email or using any of the Dropbox mobile apps. As soon as Dropbox downloads the file locally, the utility will send it to the default printer. Once the file is printed, it gets archived to the logs folder.

To get this thing running on your computer, please follow these easy steps:

Step 1: Make sure that you have Dropbox on the computer that is connected to the printer.

Step 2: To send print jobs from your mobile device to the printer, you have two options.

• You can download a Dropbox app on your mobile phone — they have apps for BlackBerry,iPhone, iPad, Nokia, webOS (Palm), and Android based phones.
• Alternatively, you can send files from your mobile phone to Dropbox using email. Just connect your Dropbox account with Habilis and they’ll give you a unique email address – any files or attachments sent to this address will automatically appear in your Dropbox folder.

Step 3: Download this zip file* and double-click the eprint.vbs file (see the source code). The script will create a sub-folder inside your main Dropbox folder called PrintQueue where all the mobile print jobs will queue up and another sub-folder called logs where all the completed jobs will be archived.

[*] VBS scripts are Windows-only but there are workarounds for Mac OS X and Linux as well.

Step 4: You are now all set to print files from our mobile phone. Just send a test file from your mobile phone to that secret email address, or upload it through the Dropbox mobile app, and your printer will turn it into a hard copy almost instantly.

The utility can also handle multiple files in one go and it should print almost all file formats for which you have an associated application on the computer. If you would like to shut down the eprint utility, launch Windows task manager and end the “wscript.exe” process from the list.

If you have trouble running the above script on your computer, there’s a chance that you may have associated the file with Notepad or some other text editor. Press shift and right click the file in Windows Explore and choose “Windows Based Script Host” under Open With. Alternatively, open the command prompt, type “cscript eprint.vbs” and hit enter.

(extracted from Digital Inspiration)

This is a tip by Aaron Ladage on how to do it in a Mac:

There’s a simple method for Mac that doesn’t require the VBS script:

1. Create a folder in Dropbox (mine’s called “Printing”), and within that folder make two more folders: “todo” and “completed.”

2. Fire up Automator. In 10.6, a box pops up asking you what type of template you want to use for your workflow. Choose “Folder Actions.”

3. At the top, where it says “Folder Action receives files and folders added to…” choose the “todo” folder from Step 1.

4. In Automator’s search box, type “print” and you’ll see an item called “Print Finder Items.” Drag that into your workflow and select your printer (I left mine default).

5. In Automator’s search box, type “move” and you’ll see an item called “Move Finder items.” Add it to your workflow and choose the “completed” folder you created in step 1.

6. Choose “Save as…” and give your workflow a name.

That’s it! Anything you drop in the “todo” folder will now automatically open its respective app, print it and file it for you.

Well, Google is rolling out this week the possibility to switch this off. Go to settings, and in General you will find the option to switch of conversation threads. I would love to see a switch in each email though, if in case I want to bring the whole conversation…

How to be fast in windows 7 by using the keyboard shortcuts. Keep reading…

You can also create new keyboard shortcuts to open programs. For more information, see Create keyboard shortcuts to open programs.

• Most of the inputs will be on my mobile device: now an iPhone, but in the future probably android.
• That it can be done offline on my phone when I am roaming, it is synchronized.
• Synchronization is done to:
  • Desktop client (Mac mainly, but PC too): so not a stand alone phone program
  • Cloud (using specific service or using Google docs or Evernote) – ideally a free cloud service that would sync mobile with desktop clients
  • Syncs due date tasks with my google calendar and iCal (using busyCal in mac it does not matter as I use google calendar). Most of the solutions offer due dates for the todos but in their own calendars… but I already have a calendar, I don’t want to use theirs.
• It is simple: todos, with a note, due dates, recurring todos and tagging. I don’t need fancy priorities, focus areas and so.
• That can manage projects which are basically an indented todo.

I have tested a wide variaty of iPhone apps, web apps and desktop apps, and believe it or not, I did not find the perfect solution…

Scenario: I use now Google apps: my domain with google. Email, Calendars, Docs and tasks. I have an iPhone connecting with Google apps using Exchange.

I have a Macbook pro (main computer) a windows XP laptop for travel, and a windows 7 computer. At work I have a PC (so I live in a browser, chrome synchronizing bookmarks with xmarks).

In the past when I started (just after reading Getting Things Done from David Allen) I decided to use an custom approach for managing my todos.

Reviews:

Things

From Cultured Code, it was the first GTD program I used. It is available for the Mac (not PC) the iPhone and now the iPad. You can sync all of them with the Mac using bonjour (wifi) which might not be available in your office.

I love the look and the way it works. It has a very clever way of tagging stuff and and filter stuff by tags. You can add due dates, recurring stuff and so. It was perfect except for one key thing… I could not access to my todo’s in my work place. No cloud, no PC no nothing.

This was the reason to leave it, but if they would have a free cloud way to access my tasks, even if they would not have a PC version, I would probably have stayed with them. In principle they are working on it, but I am not willing to pay for a service like this.

Pros: It is beautiful and both the desktop client and iPhone clients are great.

Simple and yet powerful thanks to the tagging, that if done intelligently removes the need of location based todos, and so. I click on shift command and T and I create a todo wherever I am. I am on an email a link is added to the notes part to that email, which is great (see right screenshot).

Also the todos can be synchronized to your iCal/mac tasks.

Cons: Just Mac and iOS. Sync over wifi (not all). No cloud, no PC, no web.

GeeTasks pro

When I moved my domains to Google Apps I though that I would stick to Google Tasks. Well I still do. They are very simple which is good. May be too simple. You can create lists and inside this lists add your tasks. You can indent them, add a due date (but not recurrent) and a note to them.

You can’t add tags and this would be good, so you can be disciplined and create tags for location, responsibility, etc… like I do for Things or Evernote. I will write a post on how I organize my tags sometime this week.

You can create todos from email using the web client and it creates a stupid Tasks calendar that cannot be syncronized with anything and that only shows the due dates task of the list you have opened, so pretty useless.

Pros: As most of the input I do it using my iPhone I found that GeeTasks pro, and after testing the rest of what you have below, I am still using this… I have it offline in my iPhone, and syncs when online, it is simple and very well integrated with my mail client. I can create todos from my mail (see right screenshot) and in a way there is a calendar with my tasks (not ideal though because I cannot see it from my iCal).

Cons: No tags, no recurrent tasks, no desktop client and no good integration with my iCal or even google cal. No API basically. Now I use fluid which is sort of dedicated browser to my tasks, but if I am offline on my mac, that’s it…

I Kept looking for other solutions….

Well I wanted to test the rest of Todo’s to see if there was something better. First I though thought there was different ways to have the sync and web access:

• A product with their own site
• Linking to existing cloud services, in particular Evernote (which I am a heavy user) and Google Docs
• Linking to ToDos services with open APIs such as Toodledo and Remember the Milk.

Remember the Milk

Remember the milk might be one of the most well know online todo managers. It is very good and powerful and free. You can pay $25 a year if you wish to have an add free version.

The iPhone app is also free. It is full of features: priorities, due dates, repeat, estimate times, tags, location, URL… You can sort by Today, Tomorrow, This week, or lists (Inbox, personal, work1, etc…)

It is a very good product. In the web you can share, have your list of contacts and subscribe to iCal, which is great.

Pros: free, great web interface, rich of features, iPhone app. I love the fact that I can subscribe in my calendar, that they have add ons for firefox and chrome and google to see the task within your gmail.

Cons: design is not like Things, not simple and very ugly. Again, there is no desktop (sure you can do it with fluid). Too complete for me. I don’t need location, sharing, and so many things. I want something simple.

Toodledo

Toodledo is similar to Remeber the milk, but other apps use it as a back end thanks to their API.

They have a free version (that does not allow you to have subtasks…) and two paid ones for $15 ad $30 which allow you to add subtasks, have collaboration, stats, location (more than 5), history (you loose if you are on the free one)… they compare themselves with other products here.

Other apps use it in a very smart (but dirty way) so you can have (in the App) projects, and subtasks, by inserting a header in the notes, that surely you cannot do if you go the other way around (using the web as input).

The web interface is crowded with tons of features with an ugly UI. It is very powerful, even more than Remember the Milk, but I don’t need HOT lists Location and so many other things… It is not GTD friendly.

The iPhone app is free and it is also complicated, full of features. Take a look:

Pros: Rich on features. There are other iPhone apps using it as a backend, like Todo iPhone app. It is the best and most powerful backbone for managing apps with more elaborated iphone and ipad apps (theirs are very ugly). A great feature is that you can create a webcal feed that you can import in your ical or google calendar and another one the fact that you can have a secret email address so you send emails directly to feed toodledo, or to have a gmail gadget to see your toodledo in your gmail, something you can only do with an online service like this…

Cons: The free version has a lot of limitations. Again no desktop client. I did not see a link to subscribe in my calendar. The web design is really ugly and cluttered.

TouchTodo

Well, while looking for the perfect todo, I found ToucTodo, and I tested it too. Why? They have the best sync with google calendar out there.

This one could have been a winner for me. I had 2 parts: todos and projects. You can sync with google calendars (you select with which calendar) you can back it up to google apps as an excel sheet, and restore from an excel sheet, so I could have used Google apps to enter data at work.

Then I realized that the projects are not backed up and that the todos that have not a due date are not in the calendar (sure!) so they are not online, unless you export it to this xls in google docs, and that it is not a project…

So it looked great, but…

Pros: Great synchronization with google calendar and google docs. Great back up and restore option to your Google account. Simple: todos, and projects. Today, tomorrow, next and someday. You can add a note, reminders, due dates, repeat and level of importance (focus they call it).

Cons: If I want to input stuff from my PC, there is no desktop app, and via web I could do it in the excel thing in google docs, but it is not great. For the events that have no due date, they are not in the calendar or todos, which is understandable but not acceptable to me.

Awesome Note

The idea of using Evernote as the back end for my todos and notes was very appealing. I am a heavy user of Evernote, and I love it.

Then I found out that Evernote it is not ready for that. I had to test two products to get to this conclusion.

The first one was awesome note or aNote as they call themselves.

I have to say that is one of the most awesome todos I have tested, and I loved it. Again there are reasons why I chose not to go on with them. Let’s see:

It can back up your notes to Evernote and or Google Docs, and it does it great. You have to select a default to do so and not do it by default to both which is a petty. The iPhone GUI is awesome. Really.

aNote has both, notes and Todos. By default you create notes, then you can click on the todo button and you create this note as a todo. So far so good. You can add a due date, but you can not add a recurrent one. This is not good for a task manager… You can select different backgrounds, and ways to filter your views. All nice. Also sort by dates, etc… I really like it. I would say that visually is the one I like the most. You can add photos and even maps (maps are not sync to evernote or google docs).

Now, how it syncs with Evernote? It creates a set of notebooks like [aNote] name of your list, like [aNote] Inobox or [aNote].No Folder for those that are Notes not linked to any folder.

The folders you can create: inbox, next, someday… and they will all be folders in your Evernote.

Each note/todo will be an entry in your evernote. You will not distinguish what is what, and here the problem with evernote, you will see if it has a due date, priority (that the program can manage) or whatever. Here was when I realized that both Evernote and Google Docs are not good enough for backing up your todos. They simply cannot back up your due dates, recurrent appointments priorities and so.

How does it sync with Google Docs? It creates a folder called Awesome Notes, and inside this folder subfolders with the different folders (inbox,etc…) and inside each of these folder a document for every single todo/note. Again, nothing for dates, priorities and so. Not the fault of aNotes, but the backend.

Pros: Beautiful design. Easy and very very flexible. Notes can be converted into todos, add due time, add photos, maps, create a journal if you wish. It has quick note entry. It syncs with evernote and google docs.

Cons: Not a problem of aNotes but a problem of the support for backing up. If I want to add stuff from my office laptop, I can use google docs or evernote, but I will not be able to add a due date. You cannot, in any case, add recurrent appointments. No desktop client, sure, apart from Evernote with the limitations I mentioned. Personally I don’t like that I have to have specific notebooks in Evernote (that I can’t rename).

Egretlist

Continuing with Evernote sync, the one to try was Egretlist. Like Awesome note, a beautifully designed app.

Egretlist is more elegant in the way it syncs with Evernote. It does not create a set of new notebooks, it is more clever and if you get use to it, because it is not an easy app, it can work like charm. The learning curve is steep though.

The way it works is that is it scans all your entries in Evernote and those which have a checkbox in it, it is added to the iPhone app. Smart eh?

So if in your already existing notebook inbox you create a new note with a checkbox it will be a todo in egretlist. In addition to this it will use all your tags seamlessly.

So here in the screenshots you can the categories are just tags. Whenever I tag something with next (I define which ones are the relevant for egretlist), it appears under categories. If a list has a star it will also appear under lists (not seen here). Then a list of the notebooks with checklists in the notes. In this cases I moved the notes to the [aNotes] notebooks (previous app) but it looks like in the third screenshot.

Pros: I really wanted this to be the one. It has a great way of using evernote, great with tags, taking the notes with checkboxes… really smart. Great looking app. You can add images, voice notes, videos, and decide which note to send to a specific task the calendar (ical).

Cons: very hard to understand at the beginning. It does not support recurrent appointments or even sorting the tasks in any way, what make it unusable for some of us… but again, this is Evernote’s fault, due dates and so cannot be seen in Evernote, and therefore not entered if you don’t have the iPhone with you. Petty because this could have been the winner for me as I said.

After testing this I realized that Evernote, as it is now, will not work for me for todos. I need to feed my task from the phone and from the web and if evernote cannot create due dates, etc.. then that’s it.

Todo

This is probably one of the most known and popular iPhone todo apps. I guess the reason why is because the got the TODO name for the app… and this is exacly what you search in the iTunes store.

Don’t get me wrong, it is a very good app from appigo.

It can syncronize with Toodledo but if you are using the free account (from Toodledo) no subtasks…

As a todo app is great, it syncs also with iCal (when I say iCal I also mean Outlook). You can tag stuff and search by tags. In the home screen you clearly see those task due by today, tomorrow, Next week and at the end those with no due date. You can star and prioritize tasks. You can create lists, like shopping list and then subtasks, and add contexts (@home, work, etc…).

Pros: It does the job. You have lists (inbox, work, home), focus, priority, due date, repetition, … everything. It syncs with Toodledo so good if you need a web interface for easy entry. Again toodledo web is not very nice but it is functional. It can sync with your local calendars.

Cons: No desktop. I don’t quite like Toodledo and the free version is very limited compared to Remember the Milk. For me this is just one more ToDo app.

edit 29/9/2010: They have released a web version 15 days trial otherwise $19.99 (i don’t know if for a year). Is pretty beta, but a good step on the right direction.

Producteev

When I discovered Producteev I thought it was Things on the web and I was very excited. So beautiful and simple web client… I loved it and I decided to download the iPhone app (free).

Producteev is a collaborative tool. For free you get two users, but I guess the beauty of this product is for a team to work together in a sort of ticketing system more like a todo way.

I loved the interface and the fact that it is socially integrated. You can add/receive todos via google talk, email, etc… neat.

The problem for me was that it is thought for a group, and not for an individual. In the iPhone app you see who entered the task (me) and who has to do it (me again) which makes no sense when screen space is the iPhone is critical.

As you can see from the iPhone screenshots it is pretty much the same than any other todo, but with this team focus. You have stars, hot (I see this over and over… and I don’t quite understand, I rather order stuff myself and the ones on top of the list are more “hot” than the others…).

Pros: It has one of the best web interfaces out there. Beautiful and useful. A trillion way to input data (email, IM, etc…). Is team oriented.

Cons: the iPhone app is not that good looking. No desktop (offline) client. I did not like the fact of having creator and responsible if I am using this on my own. No recurrent appointments. You use workspaces for projects and labels are not transferred from one to another.

2Do

I tested a few more apps. One of them is 2Do. This one is also fancy and good looking. I has locations, syncs with toodledo, and can export to iCal (it uses its own calendar but using toodledo you can have an ical live). I did not mention but some of this apps, including this, you can back up the tasks, but being in the same wifi network, you go to the ip of your iPhone and download the file with the backup… not something you do everyday. I would rather have this transparent on the back towards and online service, like touchtodo.

Well, here you have locations, like this is where you are and this are the things to do here. Fancy but I am would be happy just by tagging that says home, work, supermarket and when I am in one of these places voila.

You can add audio, attachments, photos, location… very easily and intuitively. Those you can’t sync with Toodledo though.

Pros: Good looking app. Can sync with Toodledo, ical (outlook), has push, and a lot of features (location, attachments, voice…). Toodledo back end is powrful: you can feed it via email, create subtasks (pro account), have calendar sync. It is by far the best app for sync with Toodledo. I will play more with it.

Cons: No desktop but Toodledo has a lot of widgets. What I did not like is that you cannot sync with both, Toodledo and local sync using the program they have for PC and Mac. One or the other, so I choose Toodledo.

eTodo

eTodo is from BitAlpha and the design is awesome and beautiful. Simple. If you don’t need sync then consider this one.

It is very basic, yet it has most for the stuff.

When you add something it goes to your inbox. You collect everything there. Then you go to something in the Inbox and decide if you have to take action or put it into next or someday. Big icons. Nice way to see tasks details. You can back up in the web server way (accessing your iPhone ip). I has due dates, repeat, priorities, you can add notes and tags.

Pros: simple yet it does a lot. Nice icons and clear workflow.

Cons: no sync, no desktop, no projects, no ical.

Put things off

Put things off is again a very very simple app. Even simplier than the previous.

In this app you just add a thing to your inbox and  decide if you do it today or you put it off. Once it is done, it is on done. That’s it.

For some people it would be enough. Not for me.

EasyTask

I found this one by chance. It looks promising:Orion Belt has a nice desktop app for Mac and PC, and iPhone and iPad app… it syncs with ical and… a web based app! So in principle it has most of what I need.

The desktop version is $20 so pretty affordable. You have a trial period.

Here you have projects (home, work 1, etc…) context (@home, @office, @computer, @telephone…) and finally the categories: inbox, today, next, someday… so far so good.

So, you can sync like things using wifi with your iPhone and desktop app. In addition you have a Windows version and … and that is the best, an online version too: http://www.easytaskmanager.net/

Now, it is not perfect… the web version basically sucks. Very simple. With Safari and Chrome I was just able to view not to add new tasks. Not even edit. See the revision log.

Also EasyTask does not support tags which is pretty important for me.

Pros: GTD stile, with desktop apps for Windows, Mac, iPhone and iPad. The iPhone app is good, syncs with wifi to your computers and to the cloud. You can access your tasks via web but the web interface is in a very infant state. You cannot add or edit tasks. I guess you have to wait but others will catch up. The local app syncs with ical and it is pretty good.

Cons: No tagging. The web interface is only to view, not to edit or add tasks. You cannot create lists with sub tasks. For that you have to create a project and then add the tasks there.

Simple note

This is the last app I tested. It is not really good for todos, but it is very good for notes. For me there is no use, because now I can sync notes with iPhone and IMAP via google. I also use 1Password with secure notes, and Evernote mainly for everything, but this little app has a web version (very nice and easy to use) and desktop versions for Mac and Windows.

Pros: simple, nice.

Cons: too simple.

Conclusion

Well after an extensive testing no app or service is fulfilling my needs, so for me there is no clear winner.

All have their own strengths and weaknesses, but no clear winner.

I learnt that Evernote and Google apps are not good enough as a back end. That only a couple have desktop versions (Things, EasyTask), that few have a cloud sync (Toodledo, Remember the Milk, EasyTask, Google Task)…

I think EasyTask is promising but I miss tagging and sub tasks and the web interface is not good.

I love Things but there is no Windows version, but if the cloud version is as good as producteev it can be the winner for me.

If you want good integration with iCal (Outlook) it is better to have a desktop app.

If you don’t want to spend money and the iPhone+ web is good enough, the Remember the Milk is very good.

If you need a tool for your team to manage things, then Producteev is good.

In my case, I continue with GeeTask Pro and google Task, until something better comes, or Google decides to do something good about the Tasks… ideally Things if they don’t make me pay for the cloud thing…

In paralel I will play more with Toodledo as it looks like it is the winner and most apps connect to it. Maybe is just a question to get used to it…

I will write another post soon with further testing and to explain which is my solution and how I use it.

Edit 9 Jan 2012:

Finally part 2 of this post: http://tokao.com/2012/01/09/gtd-todos-task-managers-part-2/

Ever wanted to tell the driver in front of you that their lights are off? Or maybe you’ve wanted to be the good Samaritan and warn someone that his meter has expired. Perhaps you just find the driver in the adjacent vehicle visually stimulating and are hoping they think the same about you.

These street scenarios face us drivers on a daily basis, but there’s never been an easy or safe way to message another driver or car owner. Enter Bump, a recently launched, private-beta startup (we’ve got invites) that has created a way to message other drivers by using the one unique identifier all drivers have in common: our license plates.
Bump users can message other drivers through voice-automated commands, photo snapshots of license plates and SMS. Bump also includes e-mail support, which you can use by directing your message to State.Plate@bump.com, where state is the two-digit state name abbreviation and plate is the individual’s license plate number.

Bump stores all messages sent to a particular license plate in the system until the plate in question is claimed by the plate owner. If you claim your plate, you can then start to receive messages as voice messages, e-mails or text messages. Of course, this also means that those messages you attempt to send to the hottie in the Audi TT won’t get delivered unless he or she has also claimed their plate on Bump — a clear limitation of the service at launch.

Bump members can also connect their Twitter, Facebook, and eventually Match.com profiles, e-mail accounts and cell phone numbers with their license plate to further complete the loop between the physical world and the digital world.
Eventually Bump will enter AAA’s realm and offer premium services to drives through a member program. Upgrades will include discount offers, special privileges and roadside assistance. The company is also working with rental car companies, sports leagues and fast-food outlets on marketing initiatives to target special offers to members on the road by tapping into existing video cameras. In this capacity, Bump aims to bring Groupon-like discounts to the real world through license plates, which may be a bit too ambitious for privacy-conscious drivers.

The service’s immediate and long-term success will rely on drivers claiming their plates. The challenge, however, is that even without offers directed at individual license plates, Bump’s technology will likely be a bit too intrusive for those who would prefer not to incorporate their license plate as part of their virtual and physical identities.

The license plate may seem like an obvious public identifier, but to those with higher profiles, their license plate number is not exactly information they want to be part of the public domain. For others, their license plate will be a welcome natural identifier to help bridge the gap between their online persona and offline life.

Right now Bump is available as a website and mobile web app, but the company has plans to release an app for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry in the near future. Bump is still in private beta, but 250 Mashable readers can start using the service today. Simply enter the invite code “mashable” during the registration process.

Bump has raised $1 million in Series A funding and recently appeared at DEMO in Silicon Valley. The startup is in the process of raising a Series B round that will likely reach $8 million. The startup also recently acquired Platester, a license plate messaging platform, for an undisclosed sum.

(via mashable)

So what exactly is two-factor authentication? Most of the login systems you’ve probably used are only ‘one-factor’ — you enter one password and you’re in, but if that password gets compromised, you’re toast. More secure systems are common in large businesses, and often require both a password and a physical card or dongle to login — these are called ‘two-factor’ systems, because they require both your password and another key, and are far more secure because a hacker probably isn’t going to have that physical token. Unfortunately these security systems are generally quite expensive. But Google is bringing one to the masses.

Google’s system doesn’t require a physical keycard. Instead, it relies on your mobile phone. First, you need to activate the optional feature from your settings page (again, this is only available to certain Google Apps customers at first). Then, when you go to sign in to your Google account, you’ll first be asked to enter your password as usual. Next, you’ll be brought to a screen asking for a verification code (see the screenshot above).

The verification code comes from your mobile phone, which you’ve previously linked up to your Google Account. Google has built a ‘Google Authenticator’ application for Android, the iPhone, and Blackberry — fire up the application, and it will give you the six digit verification code that you enter back into your browser (the system can also send you a SMS message or give you the code via voice call).

That’s it. The entire process only takes a minute or so, but it’s much more secure because anyone wanting to access your account will also need access to your mobile phone. You can opt to require this two-factor authentication all the time, or you can elect to only require it one time per computer (in other words, you’ll only need to enter it once on your home PC and/or work computer).

Like I said, this may not sound sexy, but it’s a big deal. Given how much data users are storing on Google, and the fact that plenty of people still fall prey to phishing scams on a regular basis, this is a major step in helping keep users secure. This is all optional (unless your Apps administrator sets a policy requiring it), but I suspect Google will be making a push to urge users to take advantage of the new system as it begins rolling out more broadly.

The news will also make Google Apps an even more tempting proposition for security-conscious businesses (Google notes that prior to this release, it was also the first company to receive FISMA certification in the collaboration/document sharing space). To make this more appealing to businesses, Google is also open-sourcing its authentication apps, so businesses can create their own custom-branded versions.

(via techcrunch)

Dynamics Inc., a startup which recently raised $5.7M in series A funding (second in size in the financial sector only to Jack Dorsey’s mobile payment startup Square), announced its high-tech solution to credit card theft this week at DEMO in Santa Clara, California (see video embedded below). The company has developed electronic credit cards that provide users with both added functionality and security.

By creating thin and flexible electronics components, Dynamics’ credit cards can feature buttons, displays and – the killer app – automatically reprogrammable magnetic strips. One demo card features multiple accounts which the user can toggle with buttons on the card, and another has a display which hides and shows the card’s number behind a secure passcode.

The magnetic strip on the back of the card can be dynamically changed or erased, creating an amazing layer of security at the card level. The buttons, while credit card-thin, actually have tactile feedback and can feature small colored lights. The cards have a lithium polymer battery that can last a hefty 3 years, and have passed industry stress tests for durability, heat and water resistance.

Dynamics has been running stealth pilot test programs with many notable banks, and these cards should start appearing in the hands of customers in the near future.

Well, take a look at this one, pretty clever and cool.

You can buy it here for $13.

If you are looking for a netbook that it is more a laptop, this could be the one… and only for $349.

The only think I don’t like is the 0.3Mpx camera… why not a better one?

Also windows 7 starter… but I don’t actually know the differences among different windows versions. Do you?

Anyway, I am going to seriously consider this to update my sony VAIO t series, now obsolete.

For project managers looking for a Web-based alternative to the industry standard Microsoft Project for creating Gantt charts, one option might be Gantto, a Y Combinator-funded startup that recently went into private beta.

Gantto offers an intuitive UI for building out and editing Gantt charts, from the most basic to the rather complex. To make things easy for those who have historically used Microsoft Project, Gantto allows you to import project files in XML format.

For those who aren’t familiar with them, Gannt charts are bar-based charts that break down a project’s timeline. They’ve been around for about a century, but it was only with the invention of the personal computer that it became easy to rapidly produce complex Gantt charts. Today, they’re an indispensable part of any project.

Project managers looking to take Gantto for a spin can sign up here.