Mobile

Many of you already know that twitter’s an interesting site. Me, I’m still learning. Sure, there are lots of interesting folks out there but there are some also interesting and useful bots. One I just discovered, well a pair actually, are qr and rq. Together they manage a list of personal variables for you. Follow them, send a direct message to qr with the name of your variable and its value and you can get it back by sending a direct message to rq.

There’s also timer which will send you a message after the specified interval has expired, and rtm which is the Twitter persona/interface to Remember The Milk.

If you know of any other interesting or useful bots, let me know.

I’m a subscriber to Comcast’s High Speed Internet service and I just got an email telling me that Comcast and Plaxo have joined forces to provide the Comcast Universal Address Book. I don’t have much more information other than it’s free to HSI customers and it’s Plaxo’s Premium service that goes for $49.95/year.

I’ve looked into Plaxo’s services before and their premium service provides synchronization services across multiple computers, multiple email clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.), LinkedIn, mobile phone and more. All in all, it looks like it’s a win although I’ll be tieing myself to Comcast. When I have a chance to look into it a bit more, I’ll post more.

So, no sooner do I write the piece on sync and the piece on FolderShare than I find out about Dropbox.com. They’re in private beta right now so you have to sign up to request an account and who knows how long it’ll take to get one. Basic idea is similar to FolderShare. Drop by and play the flash demo that’s on their front page.

Microsoft has made an updated beta available of their Windows Live FolderShare. It was announced in this entry of their FolderShare Live Spaces Blog (the whole FolderShare Live Spaces is here.

So, what it is? It’s a service (free, right now, while it’s in beta) that allows you to upload files to a central server and synch them between multiple computers. Right now, it’s Mac and Windows only — no mobile and no Linux, but I imagine at least the mobile part will be available sometime soon. You can also supposedly share public folders with friends or colleagues and there’s even a web interface for it, although they say the web interface isn’t as secure as the client you download — communications with the client is encrypted with AES and uses SSL for communications.

I haven’t been able to find much more information or reviews of it yet but I’m sure someone with more time available to them than me will be digging into it. Just quickly browsing their help I see that you can have up to 10 private libraries, each with up to 10,000 files, each file no larger than 2GB. Sounds like a LOT of storage to me and, since it’s free right now, I imagine there’s some other limit that I couldn’t find.

This article from Microsoft Watch discusses the importance of Sync. I’m a geat believer in the power and utility of synchronization. Keeping information current across all of your information sources is crucial to being able to RELY on your data. And I believed in it even before I ran Internet Operations for Pumatech/Intellisync. When I had my first Palm Pilot I was at a loss to explain why more people didn’t use these devices to keep their contacts and calendars with them. I was happy that I could synchronize my device with my desktop but, at the same time, I was quite unhappy with the fact that I had to cradle the device to do it.

Enough preaching, the REAL reason I’m writing this is to say that I think Nokia does, at some level, understand the importance of sync because they BOUGHT Intellisync who were the leaders in the entire synchronization market, owning something like 85% of it (I say “were” because I have no idea what their market share is nowadays).

One of our noble but failed efforts at Intellisync was Intellisync.com — the great synchronization server in the sky (or the ether or whatever we called it back then). In 2001, we could synchronize your calendar, contacts, notes, tasks and email to your desktop(s), laptop(s), mobile phone(s), PDA(s), all via the Internet, wired or wireless. It was true multi-client, multi-platform synchronization and it was great because the “sync point in the sky” was the place to which everything synchronized. It was automatically maintained — whenever anything that had or could make a connection to the Internet was connected to the Internet, it would sync. There was no question of which source contained the current “master”. The effort failed back then, perhaps because the Internet bubble burst, perhaps because it wasn’t marketed correctly, perhaps because it was a bit buggy (it never got out of beta), perhaps because the world wasn’t ready for the service, but probably for a combination of the reasons listed as well as a few others that I haven’t listed.

Now, 7 years later, we’re finally getting back to realizing the need for sync. Let’s hope we get it right this time.

What’s Twitter? Why would you use it? Check out this blog entry and their associated Youtube video.

Yes, I Twitter but I’m not going public with it yet. Email me if you want to twit up 🙂

The Age has this article about a new 5mm chip that can transmit at up to 5 gigabits/second over distances of up to 10 meters and it only will cost less than $10 to produce (I assume that’s in Aussie dollars).

The Mobile Gadeteer has made this post about the aforementioned service. For $12/month it’s a GREAT deal and should put some pressure on the home VoIP providers like Vonage to lower their prices. In fact, when T-Mobile roles out their 3G service, I may be tempted to ditch my AT&T service and return to the T-Mobile fold — I’ve never been impressed by AT&T’s service whereas I’ve always had good experiences with T-Mobile.

$12/month is really a pretty good rate although I’ve only spent a little over $4.00 for two months of service with VoicePulse Connect. That was for 380 minutes of outbound calling (a little over 6 hours of talking). If you consider that I’m spending about $2.00/month for my setup then I’d be paying an additional $10.00/month for the simplicity of installation and maintenance. That seems like a reasonable trade to me. Fortunately, I don’t have to make a decision yet … it’s not available here in Silly-con Valley yet.

Still no reply from eMoze. I applied to become a member of their forum so I could post my question about how it integrates with Pocket Outlook and I also sent an email to their support via their online form and haven’t received an answer from either of them. Hello? Is there anybody in there?

VoIPPlanet published this article last month but I missed it somehow. Anyway, they discuss Vumber which, as near as I can tell, is GrandCentral with fewer features for $4.99/month.

Both GC and Vumber let you customize the handling of individual numbers — including always sending a call from a particular number straight to voicemail or even playing a “Not in service” message. GrandCentral lets you ring multiple phones and, to a certain extent, even customize which inbound calls ring which numbers; Vumber only rings one number. When a call comes in, you can request that GC show you DID (so you know it’s coming from GC) or the caller’s ID; Vumber always shows the original caller’s ID. When you answer your phone, GC lets you select to take the call, send the call to voicemail, send the call to voicemail and listen in or send the call to SPAM; Vumber lets you take the call or send it to voicemail. They share other features and differ on yet others but I’ll stop there. Email me if you want more details.

Why would you choose Vumber over GrandCentral? GC is owned by Google so it’s probably fairly safe to believe it’ll be around for a while. Call quality is good to excellent and outbound calls through GC are free so the only reason I can think of for going with Vumber is that you’d want to go with a commercial provider. Think about it.

FYI, I’ve been with GrandCentral for almost a year, now, and, while I have a few complaints, I’m incredibly well satisfied with their service. Yes, I’d pay $5/month for it.

Update, Feb. 19, 2008: Got an email from the folks at Vumber with the explanation that their service is really about privacy and the speed of setup — from your control panel you can change, add and delete vumbers; with GC, you’ve got one number and you’re stuck with it. Vumber says number set up is “immediate”. Of course, I didn’t give the whole story on Vumber.com. For that, you should really go to their site and check them out.