MSNBC.com has a new “visual news reader” called Spectra. You pick buckets like politics, sports, etc and it starts displaying news items as 2.5D visual blocks.
I spent some time with it — and I like it. It’s not going to change or replace any of my RSS reading, but it’s a nice change of pace — also reminds me a bit of the Digg Labs work being done.
My buddy Dave Pell, of Rollyo and Davenetics fame, launched Addict-o-matic yesterday. Addict-o-matic is an innovative yet simple to use news aggregator meant to give you a very quick snapshot of what’s going on based on a search term / topic. Dave describes it as a service that:
… searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and feed your addiction for what’s up and what’s now.
I’ve been beta testing it for a bit, and I really like how it doesn’t require login credentials even when customizing. Rather, it creates a unique URL you can share with friends. You can also choose which sources you want displayed including WordPress.com search results.
Techcrunch reviewed it and said:
Addictomatic sports a very clean and manageable layout – a necessity given the amount of information it throws at you. Users can add, remove, and rearrange the location of each headline feed, and layouts can be saved by simply creating a bookmark. The site is also offering plugins to integrate Addictomatic into browser search fields.
The very smart Seth Godin agrees:
It’s pretty simple. It gives you a popurls type view of the web for any search term you can imagine. Nicely done.
Definitely worth checking out @ addictomatic.com
Just want to give props to iConcertCal:
iConcertCal is a free iTunes plug-in that monitors your music library and generates a personalized calendar of upcoming concerts in your city. It is available for both Windows and Mac OS X and supports worldwide searches.
It simply runs inside iTunes and notifies you of all the concerts of your favorite artists when they are performing in your town.
I listen to some obsecure music and lots of non-US stuff, and so far so good. Not exactly clear if it’s handling languages other than english though.
It really does feel that most applications are moving to the “cloud” especially in publishing and email.
The other category of applications that is undergoing this transformation, in my opinion, appears to be photo editing.
Picnik
I’ve been using the web-based Picnik for a few months now to do what I had previously done with Photoshop and iPhoto — essentially light editing, cropping, resizing, and image size optimization. Picnik also includes some nice touches for framing photos and inserting text and other objects as well as mimicking some of the popular Photoshop filters/plugins. Like Flickr, Picnik had a limited free version and a full featured paid version. Only two weeks after I paid for the full version, Picnik switched to a nearly all free ad-supported model 🙂 But it was worth the $20 at the time.
conclusion: The best online photo editor I’ve used, and it’s allowed me to nearly stop using Photoshop. The integration with Flickr also makes it easy to save directly back to Flickr and not need to re-upload. It’s basically free, so check it out. The Picnik blog is here, powered by WordPress 🙂
Animoto
Animoto is also an interesting web service. It creates music video style montages from your collections of photos. You can upload your own images or hook into flickr and other photo services to pull out the images. You add your own MP3 or one of their supplied tracks, and within a few minutes it created a pretty cool video. The free version is limited to 30 seconds, and the paid upgrade allows for videos of any length. Apparently their paid upgrade conversion has been very good — I haven’t made the move yet.
conclusion: Pretty cool overall, and worth trying out the 30 second free version. I personally like the slideshows that iPhoto creates, and find the Flickr slideshows to be too basic and not inclusive of music. My ideal setup would be to have something like this built into Flickr. The Animoto blog is here, hosted on WordPress.com 🙂
Below is an animoto video I just did with a few photos I took in Hong Kong:
Vodpod videos no longer available.
The bottom line — this is a real trend. It definitely also points out the need for real broadband connectivity, especially on the upload side to make these services compelling and “snappy”. Luckily I just got a small speed boost, but could definitely use a bit more.
I guess I got spoiled when I lived in Brooklyn and had a fairly fast internet connection using Cablevision’s Optimium Online Boost service. It delivered 30 megs down and 5 megs up (link).
When I moved to San Francisco I expected something even better, but instead was only able to signup with Comcast’s 6 megs down / 768K up service.
So when Comcast upped the offering ( for an additional $10/month ) to 15 Mbps / 2 Mbps I signed up. And according to this speedtest I’m getting pretty close to what I should be seeing:
Hopefully we’ll catch up soon with countries like South Korea that offer 100Mbps connections at half the cost – we rank #14th currently. I also hear Verizon Fios will be available in my area soon — and offers 25Mbps up/down. AT&T is also expected to up their DSL offering. And lastly I could choose my next apartment based on where web-pass is setup – they offer 45 megabit synchronous connections at select apartment complexes in SF 🙂
Been using Dopplr lately. Dopplr is “an online tool for frequent business travellers.”. They’ve been around a few months and have great buzz like this:
“You put in your travel schedule and link to your friends. It allows you to see where everyone is. I love it.” – Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia in The New York Times.
The idea is that it helps show you who will be in town, and who might also be traveling to the events you are attending. I think all of us use a combination of blogging, email, IM status updates, twitter, and facebook to broadcast our various trips. Dopplr looks to make this all simpler and more efficient.
OK, so this all sounds great 🙂 Except what I’ve found is that the people I know who have dopplr accounts, are “following” my trips but not actually sharing their own trip info. Could be a privacy setting issue, or a general lack of usage since they signed-on since you need to login and actively share stuff back, whereas sharing your trip with others requires no action on their part.
For this service to have any real value you really need lots of your friends and colleagues to use it. It’s a classic network effect – the more nodes – the more people use it – the better the service will become. Time will tell how this works out. Looking at my latest stats in Dopplr, about 10% of the people I know who have accounts are actually active.
Over the holidays I was testing Google Apps and except for a small false positive spam issue with google alerts — I was really impressed.
The reason I was testing it was to see if I could replace my gmail account with one of my own email accounts, using my own domain — but running on google apps. Google Apps essentially allows you to use all the Google services like email, docs, calendar, etc — but using your own domain (i.e. myname.com).
The main motivator for me was to have a permanent email address that had great web interface, and also pop/imap support for a desktop client.
My old personal email setup:
* hosting: running on my own server
* Spam: using SpamAssasin to filter out spam. It worked fairly well but required some maintenance overhead of keeping up with new versions and tweaking the spam’s whitelist was a chore
* Webmail: the default Squirrel webmail was good, but not amazing
* Search: using Thunderbird for search when you had gigs of email was tough, and webmail search was OK
My move to gmail:
Then in July 2004 I signed up to test gmail and was amazed. I was tired of endless mailboxes/archive rules/folders of the Outlook/Eudora/Thunderbird world. Gmail had:
* awesome search
* no folders ( but simple & powerful labels )
* virtually unlimited storage
* killer feature — the threaded view which I’m amazed hasn’t been copied by every mail provider (and conversely i’m amazed gmail doesn’t offer a non-threaded view for people who just hate the threaded model)
* really solid spam protection
In addition to gmail’s great features I found that I needed a google account to use i-google, google reader, google webmaster tools,etc and I quickly found myself just using the gmail address as my person email address, and forwarding all my old accounts to the gmail address. ( since then google has changed the google account setup so you can use a non-gmail address for google services )
I can still easily call up the Gmail welcome email:
You’re one of the very first people to use Gmail. Your input will help determine how it evolves, so we encourage you to send your feedback, suggestions and questions to us.
I recall emailing in and saying that they should support domain mapping so you could have email@yourdomain.com. Fast forward a few years, and google now has that option. I quickly set it up on google apps, made some DNS changes and was up and running in no time.
Google Apps
I’ve been using google apps for about a month now, and here are a few observations:
* the free version I’m using is perfect for my use. They do offer premium options of larger organizations.
* everything you would expect with gmail you have with google apps – including docs, calendar, etc
* the mobile blackberry app for google apps works great
* with the calendar there are some extra features for people “on your domain” to always have access to your calendar
* outside services that provide a way to grab your gmail address book ( such as facebook ) do not work with google apps – this could be considered a good thing for some people 🙂
* moving my gmail emails to google apps was relatively painless. Details & lots of discussion at Scott Hanselman’s blog.
WordPress.com Support:
If you have a blog at WordPress.com and are using a mapped domain as I now do with this blog, you can enable Google Apps for that same domain. Details are here in our faq.
Wish List:
* Fix the “on behalf of” issue. If you use multiple email addresses, gmail and google apps are easy to setup to receive those emails. But when you send out using those non gmail/google apps addresses, certain recipients – especially those using Outlook – will see a “on behalf of email@gmail.com” in the “From” field.UPDATE: Now fixed.
Conclusion:
Pretty much a no brainer. If you love gmail, want your own domain, and like having the safety to know that you can pop/imap your email, and move it at any time — google apps is a great choice.
I generally don’t comment on food 🙂 But when something stands out I feel compelled to share ! I just wrapped up dinner up on 131st at Dinosaur BBQ. (yelp review here) The food was fantastic, the portion just-right, and the service was impeccable. I ordered the “traditional sampler” that included a little bit of everything.
Now some of you who know a little bit about Automattic know that we all take BBQ very seriously. My title even includes “QA for the secret company BBQ sauce”. It will be interesting to see what my other colleagues who have a long history with BBQ think of this place.
Gotta love GPS !
After using various GPS units in car rentals, and thinking about next generation p2p GPS devices like the Dash, I finally decided to go out and buy a GPS device for myself. The market for these devices is in a phase where innovation is accelerating, adoption rates are picking up pace, and expectations for the “next thing” dominates product coverage.
My research for this purchase included googling around and finding a good review of the Nuvi 350 on the Signal vs Noise blog (Dec ’05 review) . And also consulting with my buddy, and GPS expert, Wilson Rothman.
It’s been about two months since I chose the Garmin Nuvi 350 after looking at various models. Overall it’s very solid and gets the job done, and for around $350 ( bought in Aug 2007 ) it’s hard to beat.
The good:
– A crisp display that does well in all light conditions
– The maps are easy to read
– Directions are accurate 🙂
– The voice prompts are helpful and well timed
– If you miss a turn or want to hunt for an alternative route the device “recalculates” very quickly
– The price point was spot on for me
The bad:
– Bootup time could be better — takes about 10 seconds
– Locating the satelite on bootup can take 20-30 seconds – would be nice if it just remembered the last place you were at and asked if that’s where you were.
– Looking up a business name seems too slow to be useful
– In theory it’s portable enough to take on a hike or any other use outside the car. In reality the battery drains so quickly after a charge, that when I go and check the device after being in the car overnight, the battery is almost always completely empty.
The ugly :
– No complaints of anything terrible
Wish list:
– No easy way to transfer address info from my desktop machine to the device. Many times I’m on my macbook pro usually using google maps or yelp to find something, and I would love to be able to email-in or via SMS send the address to the GPS unit. Instead I email myself, and then punch it in when I get to the car
– Certain highways always get selected even though you know better roads are available. Not a big deal, but would be nice if it “learned” my preferences.
– Having to punch in the city name just seems weird. It knows what city I’m in, and should simply show the 5 nearest cities by default.
– Needs to be two way. The other day I had it find the nearest gas station and it found a 7-11 store that had no gas station ! Not a huge deal, and an easy mistake, but I should be able to flag that, and inform all other users of this mistake.
– More two-way options. Would be nice to have the ability to sync all the data back to the web, so I could review past trips, and mark places of interest for future trips.
– More sharing. Would be cool to see (anonymously) what were the most effective routes to take at certain hours based on what other people did, the most scenic, the one with the least amount of traffic, etc. Lots can be done in this area.
So overall The Nuvi 350 is a solid mid tier GPS unit, and I’m personally looking forward to the next generation GPS devices.
I have one of the very first Blackberry 8700C models, and I’ve been itching to upgrade for a while. At first I was convinced I’d pickup an iPhone, but managed to hold out. Next I was going to wait for a Blackberry with 3G, WiFi, GPS, and a camera. Once it became clear that this combo was still a couple of revisions away from launching, I settled in on looking for a good deal on the Curve. I called AT&T and got a really good deal, ordered it, and then saw that the new Curve was just announced in Europe with GPS 🙂
Unphased I eagerly unpacked my new phone a couple days later, and have been happily using it for the past couple of weeks. Here is my take on it, with a very strong emphasis on how it compares to the 8700.
The good:
– Form factor is much better ! The slightly smaller keyboard really makes a difference — the phone is also much slimmer and not as bulky. It actually feels like you are carrying a phone again.
– Keyboard is actually better too. The feedback/response from the keys is stronger, and within a day I was used to the somewhat more narrow, but still full QWERTY, keyboard.
– The scroll wheel replacement with the joystick is a good thing. I thought I’d miss the scroll wheel, but the way the joystick is implemented actually opens up many new uses, and makes navigating much easier.
– Having a camera again is great. I missed having a camera ever since I switched from Nokia phones to the Blackberry. The 2 megapixel camera on the Curve takes surprisingly good photos, and combine it with email->Flickr and it’s really useful.
The not so good:
– AT&T loads up the phone with all kinds of extra icons for the “ATT Mall” to shop for themes, ringtones, etc. Not a big deal to hide them, but depending on which theme you run, it can add all kinds of extra icons that simply get in the way. Not quite as bad as PC “craplets“, but for a high end phone, I would have much preferred some kind of gift certificate in the box that would let me try out some premium “shopping” items — not a bunch of icons that really shouldn’t be there.
– Battery life. Definitely not as good as the 8700. I somewhat expected it with the camera usage, and I do use lots of data applications (see “going 100% mobile” post) — but I find that by the end of the day I can be down to just 1 bar. My solution – I carry the charger with me in my bag, and charge up at various times during the day.
– OS stability. I probably had my 8700 freeze-up maybe 4 or 5 times over the course of a year with heavy usage. So far, the Curve has frozen up on me twice in 2 weeks. Both times it happened while using the camera application — so I need to see if it’s a storage issue perhaps.
– Lack of bundled apps. Would have been nice to see a solid IM app like JiveTalk bundled in. I am now running the google mobile pack — Google Maps, gmail, Google News, Google Search, and mobile gTalk. I then added in Yahoo!Go, and also an RSS reader Viigo (my Viigo review here)
The bad:
– Really nothing to complain about. I wish it was 3G, Wifi, and had GPS support 🙂 But otherwise this is a great upgrade to the 8700, and should hold me over for a few more months.
Raanan Bar-Cohen 
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