Wiki with all pay as you Go plans around the world

Going out on a trip? Would you like to have a web with all the prepaid phone plans around the word, which, by the way, you can contribute to?

It is there, in a wikimedia way: Pay as you Go

Jailbreak your iPhone just visiting a website

Do you have an iPhone? even an iPhone 4?

Just go to http://jailbreakme.com with safari in your iPhone and slide the bar. Jailbreaking your iPhone now just as easy as this…

Why should you do that?

Well, first now it is legal, you can always restore your iPhone if you prefer, and you get cydia, like an appstore with software you will never find in the apple app store, such as my-wi which converts your iPhone into a wifi hotspot using your 3G, or have voip calls via 3G, or have sms delivery reports, or shortcuts for bluetooth, or you name it.

I’ve seen some people reporting that when they did the JB the had issues with mms and facetime. The same people by restoring and applying the jailbreakme again, fixed the problems.

Did it work for you?

Soho OS Lands $1M, Opens Business Management Suite To All Small Businesses

A couple of months ago techcrunch covered Soho OS,describing its offering as a soup-to-nuts “hybrid of Quicken + Zoho + SalesForce”. Today, the company is announcing that it has secured $1 million in funding from The Time. This is on top of the $250K the company had raised in its pre-seed round.

The company has already begun putting the money to good use. As noted in the initial post, “the interface could certainly use a UX overhaul,” and it got one, and a new logo to boot. With a new color scheme, layout and consolidation, the new interface’s look & feel is softer, more pleasant on the eye, and more convenient to use. A definite improvement on the interface we previously reviewed.

Soho OS also beefed up communications features with video chat, SMS, VOIP, voice messaging, as well as improved conference calling and broadcast emails.

I really like where Soho OS is going but would like to see them charging a tiered service fee rather than rely exclusively on cutting commissions off their 3rd party integrated services. There’s no shame in charging your customers kids, especially if you provide them with clear value. Tattoo that please.

(from techcrunch)

Traveling? Create your own travel guide

Stay.com turns travel planning into a fun and social activity. Have fun discovering some of the best attractions, restaurants and hotels around the world, collect places you find interesting in your own guide and share it with family and friends.

Forget about your already outdated travel books. Stay.com has updated information on thousands of places to visit for your next vacation or business trip.

Simply collect everything you find interesting in your own personal guide. This way you can bring along all the details you need. You can print your guide in a nice compact format which is easy to fold and put in your pocket.

A very cool idea!

TIME best blogs for 2010

• Zenhabits
• PostSecret
• Climate Progress
• HiLobrow
• Hipster Runoff
• Kottke.org
• Cake Wrecks
• The Oatmeal
• S___ My Kids Ruined
• Deadline Hollywood
• Everything Everywhere
• The Sartorialist
• Information Is Beautiful
• The Daily Kitten
• Shorpy
• Apartment Therapy
• Double X
• Strobist
• Roger Ebert’s Journal
• The Awl
• GeekDad
• Engadget
• The Washington Note
• The Consumerist
• Pitchfork

Essential Blogs

• The Daily Wh.at
• TechCrunch
• Gawker
• Politico’s Ben Smith
• Boing Boing

Overrated Blogs

• FAIL Blog
• The Big Lead
• Perez Hilton
• Mashable
• Daily Kos

Read more here.

Stick with me, baby!: Cool Mac stickers

A group of designers living and working in Barcelona for Herraiz Soto & Co created a family of stickers to personalize the Apple logo on the MacBook with some hair. Clearly, these designers are not business types. If you’re a Mac user (like me) you may relate. The collection is called Stick With Me Baby. I don’t care if you think mustaches are out, these decals are in.

Flowdock: keep your team organised

Flowdock is a web based project management tool that helps you keep your team organized and up-to-date with no effort. Similiar tools include yammer, Google wave or SociaWwork.

Flowdock is similar to google wave, with strong focus on tagging. The best way for you to understand how it works it to watch their video:

Annotate web sites and pdf. Keep organized.

Nowadays we spend more time surfing the Internet than sleeping. Some of us work hooked in a browser, searching for information and managing it, and believe me, to keep track of relevant information is not an easy task.

Before we use to have cabinets where we stored our papers, now we have bookmarks, and other internet services. We have moved to have an Internet Explorer browser with favorites that are duplicated and useless as we used to just click favorite and forget about it, then 5 years later realize that we have hundreds of bookmarks in the office computer, different bookmarks at home, in our laptop… basically a useless mess.

The idea of this blog entry is to show a set of tools that can help you be organized in this chaotic Internet so you can be more productive.

If you are a bookmark type of guy, then what you need is synchronization. Be aware that syncronization of bookmarks is different depending on the browser you use.

Google Chrome

In the cases of Google Chrome browser if you have a google account, then all your google chrome browsers bookmarks can be synchronized.

So if you have Google Chome in the office and at home, if you add a new bookmark both will be synchronized. The way it is done is via Google Docs. There is a document there with all your bookmarks.

Firefox

If you are a firefox type of guy then you have several plugins that will allow you to sync your bookmarks between firefoxes and the web. The most notable I would say is xmarks (previously known as foxmarks).

Safari

If you use safari then the best way to sync not just between safaris but also with your iPhone, iPad and so, it is using mobileme.

Browser Independent

Delicious in Safari

Now, if you are not married to a specific browser, then I would recommend Delicious. Delicious is a socialbookmarking but you have plugins for all browsers, so if you see a site you like or want to remember you just click on a button and the beauty is that you can access via web o via another button in your browser (no matter which one), plus it is very powerfull because it let you apply tags to your bookmarks (much better than folders) and decide if you want them public or private.

Delicious in Chrome

Delicious in Firefox

Other tools

Bookmarking is OK but not enough. We have been bookmarking for 20 years now. True that now we have synchronization and tagging, which makes life easier, but there are other tools that allow you to:

1. Highlight parts of text of a website or PDF, add notes and share them. You can comment on a specific website or add some notes.
2. Get a copy of the website offline and make it searchable
3. If you don’t have the time to read something, with the click of a button you can add it to a cue of thing you have to read in your computer, iPhone or wherever when you have time.

This things have different tools.

1.- To annotate on websites and PDFs (which is very usefull) you can use:

a.nnotate, just for PDF. It is the pionner (I think). It is free if you don’t use it a look but it looks great. You upload a pdf and you can highlight stuff and add notes. Share, and so.

Lets annotate I discovered lately. It is also for PDF only and it is not as nice as a.nnote but it is free. In a.nnotate you can select text to be highlighted. In letsannotate you create a box with the mouse. It is good to provide comments on PDFs

Webnotes is by far my favorite, and the one I use. When you see a website click on the bookmark you have to add it to your webnotes and voila, you have the website with a top bar that allows you to highlight text, add post it’s, share it… and then you have an organizer where you can organise your websites and PDFs on folders and see the annotations.

2.- If you would like to have a copy offline of your website, Evernote does a great job. Its competitor Springpad might also do it (I have never tested as I am a devoted Evernote user).

With Evernote, if you see a site you want to remember then you click on the Evernote button in your browers (no matter which one you are using) and then you can access your evernote online or in your desktop sofware. If you want the site as you see it click on SHIFT+ the Evernote button (tip). It will be indexed and you can change the name and tag it as you wish.

3.- If you use twitter in your phone or you see a long article you can not read now, then there are a couple of tools that are great for this:

Instapaper (the one I use) has a bookmark you can have in your browser so you basically add the website you are reading or want to read to the cue of sites to read. The nice thing is that it has an iPhone (I don’t know about Android) app where the sites are transformed in text if you wish.

Readitlater is similiar.

Most of all services I mentioned here are free, and if you want more features, space, etc… then you have a pro payed plan.

Which ones I use?

1. Webnotes. Specially to highlight parts of a website I find interesting.
2. Evernote: not a lot for websites but I take photos of all the incoming mail, books, wine, receipts, etc… so they are indexed.
3. Instapaper: if there is something I want to blog about, or I’m in the iPhone and theres is a link in a tweet that I would like to read later. Very handy.

CloudApp: sharing files in the cloud elegantly

CloudApp allows you to share images, links, music, videos and files. Here is how it works: choose a file, drag it to the menubar and they take care of the rest. Thy provide you with a short link automatically copied to your clipboard that you can use to share your upload with co-workers and friends.

Additionally you can view, track and delete files right from your menubar.

So, any file, you just click on your define shortcut or drag it to the icon and it is uploaded to the cloud. Another shortcut and you have the link to the file that you can send to your friend/family.

Easy, elegant. Give it a try. It is free.

You can have an online dashboard where you see everything you have uploaded.

Forget emailing big files again. Just send the unique URL ;-)

Here a video I found in youtube showing how it works.

iWebcamera: Turn your iPhone into a real webcam

Turn your iPhone into a real webcamera and use it to video chat with your family and friends.
With iWebcamera you can use your iPhone as webcamera in applications like Skype, Windows Live Messenger, Youtube and every other webcamera enabled application.

Features

• Turn your iPhone into a real wireless webcamera.
• Two quality options.
• Instant-Pause mode, stop streaming instantly and resume whenever you want without exiting your host application.
• Plug and Play ready, install the drivers and you are ready to go!
• Built-in manual.
• Beautiful Userinterface fully translated in English and German.
• Compatible with Windows 7, Vista and XP and Apple’s Leopard and Snow Leopard.

iWebcamera requires an iPhone with at least iPhone OS 3.1, a computer connected to the same network and the installation of the iWebcamera drivers.

Google alerts

Google has a service you might never have heard of: Google Alerts.

Google Alerts are emails sent to you when Google finds new results — such as web pages, newspaper articles, or blogs — that match your search term. You can use Google Alerts to monitor anything on the Web. For example, people use Google Alerts to:

• find out what is being said about their company or product.
• monitor a developing news story.
• keep up to date on a competitor or industry.
• get the latest news on a celebrity or sports team.
• find out what’s being said about themselves.

Here’s how it works:

1. You enter a query that you’re interested in.
2. Google Alerts checks regularly to see if there are new results for your query.
3. If there are new results, Google Alerts sends them to you in an email.

For general queries like [ football ], you can get a summary of the new results every day. For specific topics, like [ cardiovascular atherosclerosis ], you might not get an email every day, but you’ll find out when something new and relevant is published. See more examples of how Google Alerts are used

snapfinger: order your next meal online

Snapfinger is the largest online restaurant ordering site with more than 28,000 locations in over 1,600 cities..

Don’t wait in line… Snapfinger is the largest online Restaurant Ordering Site

Snapfinger is the US’s largest most complete restaurant search and remote ordering site for take-out, delivery and catering from your favorite restaurants. More than four years in the making, Snapfinger allows you direct access to the nation’s top restaurant brands through each location’s interactive menu. You can access your favorite restaurants from the web, from your cell phone or from a toll free number.

withings wifi body scale

Five months ago I wrote a post about tools to control your diet. Now I would like to extend on a 125euro gadget that I might buy in the future: withings.

Withings is a body scale that it is connected via wifi to internet. It is a smart body scale, you just step on it and recognizes you, weights you, finds you body fat mass and sends it to your private account at withings. So every morning when you go to the toilet you just weight yourself, and you don’t even have to look… ;-) then your wife and kids. The scale will know who is who.

When you log in you can see all sorts of graphs with you weight through time. They even have an iPhone app.

Take a look to the videos:
Web based control panel:

iPhone app:

MAXroam cheap international roaming

Living in the US you can travel around using your own data plan, with you iPhone, iPad, Android or whaterver. In Europe it sucks as everytime you change country you roam.

I was looking for prepaid plans in Spain, Switzerland and France for iPads or just as a USB modem (3G) when I found this:

MAXroam. You can travel with cheap international roaming. It will always be cheaper if you buy a prepaid bundle in the country where you go, but it looks fine.

To consider ;-)

Get next beta from Skype (windows) with group video calling

Click here to download the latest Skype beta for windows that comes with a free trial of group video calling. Video call up to four of your friends – all at the same time. Everyone on the callwill be able to see and hear each other.

Note: group video calling currently works with Skype 5.0 Beta for Windows only. Everyone on the call needs this version of Skype, otherwise the group video call won’t work.

The question is, who is going to pay for the service once the trial is over? How is it going to be? Everybody in a conference video call should subscribe? If so…

I see the interest for companies, not individuals. People is used to get skype for free, even with video.