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The
wordle to the right reflects an RSS feed of this blog in June. Much of the recent content is centered around Internet Week, New York.
Image via CrunchBase
Siri is an iPhone app that is as close to being a “virtual assistant” as anything I’ve seen out there. It won’t put together spreadsheets, edit documents, or cook for you but it looks like Siri could definitely make one’s life easier in numerous ways. Right now it’s only available for iPhone, not Android or Blackberry but I’m sure that’s in the works. It works with voice recognition and supposedly remembers things you’ve said to it on previous occasions.
Here are are just a few of the things Siri can do:
- Make restaurant reservations for you
- Buy movie tickets for you
- Do research about happenings in your city
- Help call you a cab (in cities other than NY)
read more…
Today is the the day that Apple is making their big 2010 announcement about upcoming product releases. It’s certainly received more attention than the president’s State of the Union address, which takes place tonight, and may in fact have more viewers – online of course. What’s different this year? Well every year Apple’s announcements are a big deal and looked forward to but as most everyone knows by now, this is rumored to be the announcement of the much-hyped, yet-to-be-named Apple Tablet.
I had to dig a little to find out exactly where Apple’s announcement could be viewed live. Here’s what I found thanks to Tech65.org, which is based in Singapore. Tech 65’s will be streaming it live and they also claim other sites that are supposed to do the same thing. The only ones that specifically mentioned the event on their sites’ home pages (at the time this post was written) are Tech65.org and Live.GdGT.com. The event will begin at 1pm E.S.T.
Watch the 2010 Apple Announcement Live Here:
read more…
The media world probably changed more in 2009 than any other year in my lifetime. And I think that was just the beginning. History is continuing to rewrite itself and the “new normal” is being conceived as I write this. As we consume more and more media, filtering it and tailoring it to our needs will become more common and desirable. The lines between where television and the Internet cross will continue to blur and we may, just may see more pay models for the fittest of online media outlets. Here is Part 2 of My Predictions for 2010 in Tech, Web, and Social Media.
Filtering Internet Noise Will Become a Priority
Humans today have more information coming at them than any other time in history. Take a look at this report by Nielsen that provides some statistics on media consumption by Americans. Our ability to multitask has improved but some studies show that multitasking does not necessarily lead to productivity.
read more…
So much happened in 2009. Facebook became a household name as well as a tool for business. became a major player in the sphere of social media, marketing, and customer service. Print media continued to take a nosedive and television became less important as a source of news and entertainment. So what’s in store for us in 2010? Here’s Part 1 of my list of predictions – just some of what could be in store for the world in terms of of technology, the Internet and Social Media. Let’s revisit next December and see how close I got!
Geo-aware Services Become Mainstream
2009 was the year that microblogging became mainstream and 2010 will add geographic awareness to the mix. Fun services like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Brightkite lead the pack of mobile social media apps that work on multiple phones and let you announce where you are and find out where your friends are. Foursquare and Gowalla add a gaming element, the former providing badges for accomplishing certain activities and deeming users “the mayor” of places they frequent the most.
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Nutshellmail just made a major improvement in their message aggregating service, which I mentioned in a previous post. They’re now calling it The DVR for Your Social Networks.
It’s now much easier to quickly respond to any messages on Facebook or Linkedin, comment on posts or photos, and reply to tweets or retweet them. The key difference to the new Nutshellmail is that rather than commenting or messaging happening via your mail service, when you click on a comment or reply button, it opens up a new tab where you can easily perform the desired action and then quickly close it.
Even if you tend to retrieve your Facebook messages regularly via Facebook itself and are often on , Nutshellmail is a great recap of the day (or since the last time you checked). It’s a really quick way of getting a recap when you’re busy and want to quickly respond or update your various social networking accounts.
The service also let’s you switch back to the classic version at any point, which they claim is easier if the majority of your e-mail is checked from your mobile device.
read more…
Wordpress 2.9 is a major upgrade and makes blogging even easier than before. URL video embedding, global undo and the new image editor are just a few of the features that distinguish this version and make this blogging platform the best available. I wonder what’s in store for us for Wordpress 3.0 next spring?
They’ve nicknamed Wordpress 2.9 as Carmen after jazz singer Carmen Mcrae. As fabulous as it is, I’m surprised they didn’t choose Carmen Miranda as the Carmen of choice. Here are some details on my favorite improvements in order of how important they are to me:
- Video Embed by Url – the Oembed format allows the Wordpress User to simply paste the url to automatically embed a video and/or other multimedia content to a Wordpress post. Not all urls are supported but so far YouTube, Flickr, Hulu, Blip.tv, Polldaddy, and Wordpress.tv (among others) are supported with many others to come. This will be very handy for me. For specifics on how this works, check this post out.
- Batch plugin update – With 2.9, you can click on the Upgrade button under tools in the left nav and then you can update all of your plugins at once to make sure they are compatible with the latest version of Wordpress version (as compatible as possible). One aspect of this that could be improved is to name the plugin rather than just show 1 of 20 or 2 of 20 (see image)
- Built-in Image Editor. Wordpress 2.9 allows you to crop, flip, rotate and scale your images right in the editor and the Wordpress folks promise there’s more on the way (in terms of image editing)
- Global Undo/Trash Feature. This feature allows Wordpress 2.9 users to throw something away to a trash bin that is sort of like a 30-day holding cell. You can bring it back any time before that 30 days is up.
read more…
A new iPhone app – Gate Guru – helps frequent fliers locate the best restaurants, shops, and services at more than 85 airports worldwide. It’s sort of like Yelp but within the confines of airport terminals. Gate Guru provides user reviews for the various airport businesses. I think this will be useful for business travelers who fly a lot and to a lot of new airports often. Yet, in many cases, airport food options are often limited to the chains we all know, which are bad.
Gate Guru Close Up
What’s Interesting:
What’s interesting is the Foursquare element of the app that gives points and titles to those who visit the airports most frequently. It’s a game but for the “road warrior”, this could be kind of fun. It would be great if there were a mechanism for people to actually meet if they know their fellow frequent-flying friend were laying over in the same place.
read more…
Image via CrunchBase
Google announced in their blog that they will soon begin incorporating real-time results into searches. The new features are due to roll out in English this week. You can see how it works now by going to Google Trends and clicking on any of the hot topics.
According to Google’s blog post Relevance Meet the Real-Time Web:
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Thanks to reading the post NutshellMail Brings Twitter and Facebook Right to Your Email Box on Steven Rubel’s Lifestream Blog on Posterous, I discovered NutshellMail, a great tool for coping with information and inbox overload. [See this from CNN on just how overloaded we are these days] Despite how flawed e-mail can be as a means of communication, it’s certainly one that’s been adopted heavily and will probably not be replaced anytime soon. And as social media continues to become a bigger part of our daily lives and businesses, it’s difficult to know what to check first and when. And because social networking sites like Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter send us message updates via e-mail, this just adds to the clutter in your inbox. Are you tempted just to change those e-mail notification settings sometimes and turning everything off? Well maybe you can do just that and just get a synopsis of all your at exactly the times of day that you’d like.
NutshellMail does just that. It’s a simple e-mail and social networking aggregation tool that will send you an e-mail (yes, just one more) that contains a recap of all of your activity on other e-mail accounts and any of the social networking sites you select. You can adjust the settings to only get specific types of updates and a specific number of that type. And from this compendium e-mail of social activity, you can choose to click right to what you’d like to respond to or comment on. You can choose the exact times during the day and night for the recap e-mails to come in and change the number of e-mails you get at any point.
What are the benefits of NutshellMail?
read more…
Image courtesy of www.topnews.in
Imagine a world where you have to go to certain search engines to find content from a particular publisher. To put it in other words, imagine having to go to alternative search engines to Google in order to find content from a particular publisher. Until a few months ago, there were no real alternatives to Google. And when Bing came along and surprised everyone with an attractive alternative, I for one, was happy. Competition is always a good thing, keeping people on their toes and making the service better and better. And I think this is already happening between the Coke and Pepsi okay maybe RC of search engines.
And then I read this on Mashable: Murdoch: Take Your Google Ball and Go Home
Rupert Murdoch is thinking about taking all of News Corp’s content and de-indexing it from Google. It would be available on Bing but there would be some sort of pay model or at least financial reward. You might think that this is a farce but it was reported by the Financial Times as pointed out in the FT article Microsoft and Newscorp eye Web pact read more…
