Showdocument is free online service that will allow you to upload a document and in real time chat and highlight stuff together, like browsing the pages together. You can also open a plain one and write, and even link it with google docs.
Very easy to use and very handy when wanting to go over a document on the phone remotely.
Notable is an online tool that will allow you to easily provide feedback on websites.
Quickly and easily give feedback on design, content, and code on any page of a website or application without leaving your browser. Works on iPhone, too!
Notable helps your team collaborate through visual feedback on screenshots, via a chaos-free process so that everyone can express their opinion.
I have blogged about Evernote in the past. Is one of my top ten apps for the web, mac, windows and iPhone. I use it extensively everyday. I take photos with my iPhone 3GS which has autofocus and in the past with my iPhone 3G with a berklin case with a magnifying glass.
The fact is that I aim to have a digital indexed life. I take photos of all visiting cards, job and private, wines, books I have, and lately all the mail (bank, cell, etc..). What I like about Evernote is that you take a photo, it is uploaded to their servers and they extract the text, even if handwritten so the images are indexed and if you search for a work appearing in a bottle of wine, author of a book you have taken a photo, there you have it, in your phone, in the web or in the desktop app.
What I like the most is that you take the photo and you forget about it. You can later add it to a specific notebook and tag it for easier access and organization.
What I also liked is that in the windows app, the OCR was done locally so you could have local notebook not synchronized, which for mail was fine. In the mac it has to be sent to their servers for OCR recognition. I hate it because I soon finish my free quota which is 40Mb per month. You can go pro for $45 a year increasing it to 500Mb per month.
I have always been interested in OCR. Ideally I would love to have it in the mac by default so I could use spotlight and it would search in the photos, pdf, and why not, mp3s. I hope that is what will happen next, but for the time being the indexing does not go that far.
Windows is more advance. Onenote does precisely all this.
With this I would like to point out that in my view scanners are dead. We all have mobile phones and we take photos of documents, visiting cards or whatever, and ideally OCR should be part of the jpg so everything could be indexed. We are not there yet.
I found a program for mac: Prizmo
Prizmo will allow you to take a photo which has text and put it into the right perspective and then do OCR. Then you can save the new modified image or a PDF with the embedded text. It is a cools software, but at the end of the day, what you want is more intelligence, like Evernote. You want to take a photo and forget about it. Here you have to make a rectangle, select the text, apply OCR save file…. don’t get me wrong, it is a great software.
If you use windows you can use Onenote, SimpleOCR, topOCR (which is equivalent to Prizmo for windows) or freeOCR.
Google has also an open source OCR treatment, but I don’t know a lot about it.
There are also other ways to organize your bills and mail: snapscan scanners and neatreceipts which are expensive and for neatreceipts I’ve read mixed reviews.
Conclusion: I like simplicity. Take a photo and ideally when in iPhoto be able to index it and be able to find it using spotlight. Not possible yet.
The solution that is the easiest, more effective and efficient is still Evernote. Pity that OCR is not done in my mac.
For me (us) it has been a great year.
It all started in December 2008. Nuria got a new job at The Global Fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. A considerable jump in her career in a place where most of us would love to work for what they do, which is to save lives. 4.9 million to be precise.
Once we learnt that, I was working at Shelter Centre where I was the Web Communications Chief, I asked for leave without pay, so we could have a dream trip around the world February and March. They accepted. The new Drupal website was up and running now it was just a question of fine tuning it.
We bought a round the world ticket with roundtheworldflights.com very nice people (thanks Jarvis) and very good price.
We did Geneva, London, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tahiti, Auckland, Christchurch, Hong Kong, London, Geneva. All flexible. In Tahiti we bought internal flights to Moorea, Bora Bora and Huahine (see photos at http://norai.net)
Well we blogged every day in our TDM (tour du monde), so you can see our adventures, skydiving, and 9000 km driving in New Zealand. 
There we conceived Kai. Our Christmas present for 2009.
Once back in Geneva Nuria started her job, and I was called by my former employer (the ITC) where I worked nearly for 5 years as a consultant and they asked me to join them, so I finished the site at Shelter Centre and joined ITC in July, where I have been an Advisor in Export Strategy and Competitiveness up to present, traveling extensively to Africa (Liberia, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Rwanda…).
When kai was born, 23 days ago, we also got our new car. We said bye to the 1989 red Golf GTI and said Hi to the new Fiat 500.
Now I can go to work in the car rather than in my Ducati. It is pretty cold and rains often. I’m very happy with my new little car too. Pack of technology by default (bluetooth for mobile, reads mp3 from USB key, vocal commands, … etc…)
So as you see, even if for most of the world it has been a bad year, not for us.
My brother lost his job. Nuria’s brother’s too. The economy is in pretty bad shape, but 2009 has been a very good year for us.
Now it is coming to an end. In less than 6 hours in fact. It is also the end of a decennium.
What happened this decennium technologically speaking?
This decennium has been a huge change in technology. Internet has changed the world. We carry our computers in our phones, specially since the iPhone came out. Internet is fast web2.0 has brought us video and ajax. The web experience has reached unthinkable limits. Google has become bigger than General Motors and one of the most profitable companies in the world… and it is in internet… who could have imagine something like that 10 years ago! They are even on the phone industry!
Information is now at the tip of the hands. Mobile phones have spread like mushrooms and have given Africa a huge step towards development and poverty reduction.
Now the big media companies (CBS, CNN and so) are not that big. Internet has provided real time news and information has been democratized with tools such as twitter or Facebook. We know what it is going on firt by social media tools than from BBC or CNN. We are the writers and we control the content with tools such as digg or delicious. Now we have millions of people feeding the news. It is a user generated era, even companies have started to learn that they should have API’s or be open source (google). Look at the contribution in kind done to the iphone platform! nearly 100.000 apps!
The hardware has progressed a lot too. My iPhone 3GS has 32Mb. Solid state memory has increased at huge steps too. Who could think 10 years ago that a mobile phone could have 32Gb or/and a 8Mp camera? 10 years ago we had 3Mp with a terrible screen. Now cameras like canon 5d mark II provide video at a HD quality with the plus of professional lenses.
What else have we seen… the web… the web has gone from a showroom to a two-way collaborative tool making our live more efficient. We buy all via internet now. I bought not only my car via internet but most of the stuff I own. And I have been doing that for a while already. My 42 LCD TV I bought in ebay in 2003. In my house, the shower with sauna, the massage chair, all the kitchen appliances and most of the stuff I bought via internet.
Last that I can think of for this last decade, having kai and Nuria sleeping on my right, is that finally the LHC (at CERN) is working! I am proud as I worked for 3 years in the conception phase of the LHC 10 years ago. To see it now running is great, specially when I contributed to it.
What can we expect in the next 10 years?
Obviously the hardware will continue to explode. Hard disk, processors, screen technology (LED or something new, ebook readers, tablets), internet speed and connectivity (wimax, 4g)… that will make information easier to access and to share. Now a smartphone has GPS, accelerometers and a lot of sensors. I foresee a step towards this sort of uses: location, using the camera of the phone to take a photo from anything and have image recognition, reviews, who is there, where is cheaper, banking, payments… all!!. Search engines will go one step further and they will have other ways to search than text, photos videos, voice… everything indexable. With my phone I will be able to see where my friends are, what they are drinking, etc… reviews are important. I use internet to review and read reviews of what I buy, the hotels I go (tripadvisor), google, tell me where, etc… so location, location, location.
But not everything are flowers… I think that because Internet is going to be so big, Internet Governance is going to be a big issue. Now the US controls ICANN and a lot of other stuff. Internet Governance is going to be a difficult topic. Also Internet as a human right. ISP (internet providers) will try to get the maximum out of it, by capping, limiting connectivity, filtering content (like in China) and so. If this is the case, Internet could be in danger. It should be a 100% open platform. No restrictions. I hope governments intervene to avoid this sort of issues that we are already starting to see in the US with ISPs. Access to Internet should be unlimited and unrestricted. Government should be careful also not doing like in Finland where they are going to filter content at ISP level… a biiiiig mistake.
Privacy is also going to be an issue, but I guess we will be living in public. There is no problem for me, but privacy should be seriously managed. Specially when companies are outsourcing for instance email to google apps, or google docs and calendars…
Cloud computing will be big, and I don’t know if computers will trend to be more like terminals and run all the programs in the cloud. I do use google docs a lot I must say. Online photo services, backups, etc… I can’t wait to see how it progresses. The combination of cloud computing and terminals with strong browsers with offline technology could be a way. If you think about it, why not log in at any computer/terminal and have your files programs and so? Well this could be achieved with good connectivity and good cloud computing. But again, if this is where we go, we will start to see issues of compatibility and standards. Exporting things from a cloud to a computer or to another cloud… it should be standardized.
But the I wonder… when I bought my fiat 500, I printed out the price I was getting in internet and went to my local Fiat dealer. The salesman was furious. He said he could not compete with that. They have cost of personnel, stocks, training, etc… while the guy in internet buys bulk and gets incredible prices… so it made me think. There is no point in having shops or car dealers. They are simply not competitive with internet. So where is the business? Well, services I guess. Garage to repair. Warehouse to collect parts. Advise… but not in selling goods. I told the guy in Fiat that his business model was condemned to die.
There is another ethical question you could ask yourself. If you could buy cheaper 98% of people would buy cheaper. What about paying extra if it manufactured at home, or uses organic stuff, or is environmentally better? It is a difficult question. Specially for our generation. I hope next generation will think differently. Developed countries can not live from services alone, and the rest is more expensive than to do it abroad. So what to do? Free trade has given a lot of opportunities to developing countries, but we have seen with Doha failure that one size does not fit all. What about free movement of people? Goods and people are not strangers. If I am a farmer in France and all farming goes to … China (just a stupid example), then what happens to the french farmer? Should he go to China? Move to something else? Should we cluster activities wherever they are more productive? I don’t know. That would not be sustainable for the environment. Look at Indonesia, they have destroyed the forest to put palm oil plantations. It is so sad. Al fauna is dead and most of the country is monocorp…. but this is where we are going! Look at the farmers in the US. Maybe it should be studied where the environmental impact is lower and do it there.
If you go to Africa you will see how developed countries have destroyed. We imposed the capitalism there. The richer continent in earth is the poorest. Before people there did not have to work. If they were hungry they would take it from the trees. No effort. Simple and happy life….
The end of it is that we can not avoid to spread wealth with this model, meaning that developed countries will have to lower their living standards, otherwise I don’t see how this is sustainable. Closing borders? Big mistake… Anyway that is whole new story.
Happy new year!!!
Spotify is a new way to enjoy music. Simply download and install, before you know it you’ll be singing along to the genre, artist or song of your choice. With Spotify you are never far away from the song you want.
There are no restrictions in terms of what you can listen to or when. Forget about the hassle of waiting for files to download and fill up your hard drive before you get round to organising them. Spotify is instant, fun and simple.
Because music is social, Spotify allows you to share songs and playlists with friends, and even work together on collaborative playlists, Friday afternoon in the office might never be the same again! We’re music lovers like everyone else.
We want to connect millions of people with their favorite songs by creating a product that people love to use. We respect creativity and believe in fairly compensating artists for their work. We’ve cleared the rights to use the music you’ll listen to in Spotify.
You will need to have an invitation (token) to get access as it is still in beta. There 3 plans, free (supported by ads) and two premiums.
There is also a nice iPhone app. This link is for the features and this for the price plans.
The iPhone app is superior to the Pandora or last.fm ones.
The interface is like iTunes (which is a negative point if you want it web based like pandora).
Unlike either Last.fm or Pandora, Spotify actually lets you pick the exact music you listen to, which is a plus.
Of course, there is a catch. In return for being able to access any music you want, you have to listen to occasional adverts, like radio ads with web links to the products. This for the free version. The ‘Premium’ account (a tenner a month, or 99p for a day pass) removes the ads entirely.
Money management is now easy with moneystrands.
If you do not want to monitor multiple bank sites and maintain painful spreadsheets anymore, then moneyStrands automatically pulls together data from your bank, credit card and investment accounts to provide an accurate, up-to-date picture of your financial life broken down by meaningful automatically identified categories along with flexible user defined transaction types. Best of all, moneyStrands is 100% FREE.
Where does your money go?
Get a clear view of how much you spend eating out, gassing up the car and those guilty pleasures. Then look at your spending trends or drill down into individual categories to see just where all the money you earn goes. Easily define budgets, see projectionsalerts to help you follow your plan.
Your data wherever you go
Thanks to our easy to use mobile widget you’ll have immediate access to all your financial data anytime, anywhere on your smart phone. Check balances and receive text alerts on-the-go. moneyStrands keeps working for you where ever life happens to take you. All you need is a web browser to enjoy moneyStrands on the go.
How do you mesure up?
Find and connect with like-minded members who share your goals and your traits. See how you compare, share your thoughts on best bargains or just exchange financial tips and money missteps. Your experience is as valuable as any others and there is no better insider track than following to the word of mouth.
Savings and recommendations
moneyStrands intelligent recommendation engine constantly searches through numerous offers from a multitude of service providers to find the best deals on everything from credit cards to complementary products that fit your financial condition. We know recommendations are only as good as the value they add to your bottom line. moneyStrands recommendations are bias free and are uniquely tailored to your needs based on your spending, saving and investing patterns.
Outright is out of beta.
Outright is a very simple-to-use web service that helps you track income and expenses, pay estimated taxes on time, and see how your business is doing. It’s perfect for self employed people. Unfortunately only for the US, but a great product.
We are all day listening to the tech news and they talk about the future, Google making this new Google OS that will be open source and will be basically in the cloud.
Amazon offering cloud space and processing power.
Are we going to live in the cloud in the near future?
Some people have gone one step further, and have developed sort of operating systems (pretty basic) in the cloud. When I say the cloud I mean that they are not hosted in your PC but they are in the “Internet”, so wherever you go, supposely that you have an internet connection, you might be able to access your email (that would be imap protocol) via a webmail client (such as gmail) or your files iDisk, or whatever.
This operating systems (OS) in the cloud (webos) try to be like a computer on your browser. In the same way you have your Windows, with your start button, your applications, photos, files, etc… These services provide you with cloud space and a set of applications to install in your virtual pc.
You can have to kind of OS: hosted by them or that you can host yourself.
I will highlight a couple on the first category:
Ghost is one of the best. They offer for free 15Gb of storage using Amazon s3 services. You can share your desktop for collaboration purposes and you can use zoho or google docs office suits.
Cloudo is pretty cool. It is build on a LAMP server (linux with Apache, MySQL and PHP) but they also host it. Looks like it is not open source though. They have an API for developers to develop their stuff in cloudo. I could not see how much space they give you for free. What I saw it that you can make it look as a windows vista, a macos or whatever you want. Pretty cool.
On the second category:
Eyos is open source and you can host it in your own servers, so no limits. It is pretty good too. I would probably choose this one for precisely this reason.
All can provide schools and universities a full web platform where students, teachers and parents will have a personal yet collaborative desktop to work, communicate between them and get organized inside and outside the school. The Students and teachers will have an intuitive and easy-to-learn Desktop System, to work with school resources and communicate with other students and teachers. Also for personal use, for your photos documents, and even to share part of them.
They have interal communcation tools, so they are great for collaboaration, but again…
Are you ready to live in the cloud?
In my case not at any price. Google OS will be good because they have the Google Gears that would allow you to keep it all offline and continue working in the train.
In fact, I wonder who would be using this sort of solutions. Some will rather have a place with shared files and continue having all distributed: photos in flickr, email with gmail, contacts with mobile me, etc…
Honestly I don’t see the point on browsing inside one of these or using zoho or google docs. Why not use them in the regular way?
I have to test it more… but for the time being I am a bit esceptical.
Here you have a more extended list:
These are self hosted:
There are 3 major players of turn by turn navitiaon for the iPhone now:
Tomtom costs 99.99 euros for the European version. It has 21 countries.
Everybody was expecting this app. There were rumors about the price. We saw photos of the little gadget to put it in the car… Well now we know, 100 euros just for the software. For this price you can get a stand alone version of tomtom and leave it in the car, honestly.
I have been playing with it for the past couple of days. It is like the one I had on my htc artemis but worse. It has all the good things that tomtom has, but now connectivity. No traffic, no weather, no radars. If they call you it goes back to tomtom, and you can switch the screen off and just listen to the driving directions if you wish. In my case this is handy when I ride my motorbike.
The list of POI is extensive and the graphics are the same as all tomtom versions.
A nice thing it has is that it does not talk too much and you can configure complex routes. This I like.
Navigon Europe costs 79.99 euros. That is 20 euros less than Tomtom. It has 39 countries (including Romania, Hungry, etc…).
Navigon has the nicest graphics of the three. It is an app that would be like done by apple. Beautiful in terms of graphics. When on a motorway you have a real graphic of the panels and indications you find which is handy.
The downside is that it is as it is. Little to configure. You can also access the contact database, but no data, radars, traffic, etc. No alternative routes or complex itineraries.
The plus (aside from the graphics) is the POI. Very complete, with nice graphics.
The voice commands are OK.
iGo my way costs 89.99 euros and it has 40 countries. There is a Western Europe version for 10 euros less, but the 89.99 has even Turckey.
iGo is by far the best. Don’t stop reading here though. It is also veeery buggy. I would say that you should not buy it at this stage! The voice stops working and you have to reset to factory defaults. It gives far too many vocal instructions (when it works). In the negative part also you cannot plan itineraries and the POI db is the poorest. You cannot access the contacts and has bugs such as you cannot control de volumen unless you edit the language and when you play then you modify it.
Positively I would say that it is great that you click on the screen and navigate in 3d. Like in google earth!. That it has 3d topography. Yes… you can see the mountains. Also it has rendered buildings (depending on the city). Also that you can actually see in 3d, so if you are in a complex motorway you can see if it the road where you are goes under or above the one you are crossing, or if you are entering a tunnel it gets darker. That is smart. In Navigon you know you are in a tunnel because it complains that there is not satelite coverage.
Positevly also that you can choose the arrow you normaly have as vehicle: a car, truck, bicicle etc… You can choose from alternative routes and the interface is very good. You have also the motorway panels like in navigon. Both are better in that respect compared to tomtom.
What you don’t have is the speed at what you are going. For this TomTom is the best. You can tell it to alert you if you are over the speed limit though, but tomtom is smarter and displays currentspeed/maxspeed and if you are over it turns red.
The down side for all of them is battery consumption. I have a car charger but even with the car charger connected it drains the battery. I will have to buy a 1000 mah minimum if I want to keep using this apps.
Conclusions:
Tomtom is too expensive but it is the benchmark. It does well what it has been doing for the past years. No improvements though.
Navigon is beautiful, but you should like it as it comes. Little configuration is possible but may be this if fine for 90% of the people.
iGo is premature and buggy but the one with more potential.
Not an easy choice.
As a negative point for all of them is that with a regular car charger they will not survive for more than 4 hours….
Also that none connects to the internet to get traffic or whatever. Also that none allow you to add POIs such as speed cameras and so.
May be is too soon.
Yesterday I posted a link to yuuguu, a sort of adium or multimessenger that would allow you to share your desktop.
Well, in the comments I got Andrew from mikogo who was recommending me to try his product.
I did and I love it.
I got a couple of friends to install it. I tested it on my work PC and my mac at home.
The problem I had with yuuguu was that I did not want to give up on adium. I do like adium, and even if yuuguu was providing me extra features I prefere adium. What I was missing was a sharing desktop feature.
I have to say that iChat does that in a very nice way. The bad news is that it works only with Mac.
Mikogo, on the contrary does the job very very well. It works with mac, with pc.
Unfortunatelly the Mac version is not as complete as the PC one. If you are driving a session with the PC you have a whiteboard and some other goodies that are not availbalbe with the mac. I’m sure they will come in the future.
Give it a try! I got my mum to install it too. Now I can take over her PC from my mac and show her how to upload photos to picasa for instance. Easy.
The other day we went out for dinner with some friends. Seb finally fell for an iPhone and he showed me a pretty nice app:
Actually the English site is empty so you have to go to the French one if you want more details:
It is a little app, connected to Google Maps where you have all the services: restaurants, shops, you name it, and you can review them and read the reviews. You can see what is around you and then decide weather or not the reviews are good. It is also useful for you to remember if you did not like a certain restaurant.
I know there are tons of apps like this, the problem is that here in Geneva all the american ones are pretty usless because there are not many reviews.
I would mention yelp and trip advisor.
This is a sample:
Shoot it! is a very cool app for the iPhone that will enable you to send a real, photo postcard from anywhere to anyone in the world directly from your iPhone. Your personalized postcard will be delivered in just days…not weeks. Easy. Just take a photo (or choose one from yor library) write the text, putt the address and they will print it and send it as a real post card.
It will cost you 99 cents for the US, $1.25 for the UK and $1.50 for Western Europe. This is what you would pay to buy and send it, but it is much cooler ;)
This is a pretty nice review of free remote desktop sharing screen solutions. I would add the new Skype version. Now you can share your desktop or a window. Pretty cool.
These are the vibram shoes:
http://www.vibramfivefingers.com/
and a review: Vibram Five Fingers Classic .
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