800notes.com falls into the category of sites I wish I'd thought of. Like most people who live in the United States, I get a fair number of telemarketing calls. There's a particularly persistent time share company that calls because I made the mistake of talking to them once. While the do-not-call list is great in theory, it doesn't account for every annoying call you get because doing business with a company means they can call you unless you specifically take action to get them to stop. I prefer to simply investigate who called by way of a simple search. Input a telephone number on 800notes.com, see who called and all the feedback people have left regarding a specific number. If it looks like I'd want to take the call, I'll pick up when they call again, otherwise I can opt to take action or simply ignore the call and hope they eventually go away. Think of 800notes.com as a review service for phone numbers you can't easily find any other way.
Recently in Web Services Category
Thanks to a tip from Brandon, I just noticed that GrandCentral.com becomes Google.com/Voice very soon. I'm hoping this means it becomes open to the general public soon, because I'd love to have a unified phone solution in my life again. I waited too long to sign up for GrandCentral before Google closed it to new accounts, although I did put myself in the queue to get a number should they ever get around to reopening. Looks like they are reopening, under the new Google Voice brand.
Why do I want Google Voice? Several reasons:
I'm lousy at gift shopping. Give me a holiday like Valentine's day, or a significant milestone like an anniversary and I agonize over what to get. StyleFeeder Gift Finder is a cool solution to my problem. Feed it some simple data about the person you are shopping for, like gender, age, and some general topics of interest like cooking and clothing, and you get product recommendations. While it hasn't totally solved my dilemma over what to buy, StyleFeeder Gift Finder does do an excellent job of narrowing my focus allowing me to hone in on items from the greater universe of overwhelming choices. Another way you can use StyleFeeder is to find one of the StyleFeeder tastemakers who consistently recommends things you like and follow their suggestions for things like clothes, furniture, electronics, and other gift ideas.
Whether you're one of those people who stash your receipts in a shoebox and wait until April 14 to sort out your taxes, or you simply get inundated with business cards when you go to a tradeshow, Shoeboxed can help convert the paper in your life into searchable online data. I wrote about a similar company called Pixily back in November, but Shoeboxed has much better pricing for a very similar result. Shoeboxed is like having your own personal assistant for as little as $10/month. They won't get you coffee and answer your phone, but Shoeboxed also won't be surfing YouTube on your dime either. You mail them your receipts and business cards, they do all the tedious work of scanning papers in and making them useful.
Key features I like about Shoeboxed:
- Free catchup service to help you get all the old stuff scanned
- Convert reciepts to data ready for import into Quicken or MS Money
- Business card scanning with conversion into files you can add to your Outlook contacts, Gmail contacts or other PIM software.
- Shoeboxed offers to either send back the paper versions or shred them for you
- Upload or email an unlimited number of reciepts to add to your data
- Backup CD containing all digital files is an option
If you made a new year's resolution to get smarter about managing your money, or if you just need a simple online checkbook solution, Quicken Online has a ton of great features in a free package. I watched a demo at CES 2009 and was impressed with how they are making it easier to understand the impact of your spending on available cash flow. Quicken Online works just like any other checkbook application. You enter income from your paycheck and other sources. You enter expenses from your debit card or checkbook. If you use Quicken Online consistently, you get a highly accurate picture of how much money you have available to spend between the time you deposit your current paycheck and the time the next paycheck rolls around, which helps prevent overspending or making an impulse purchase that puts you dangerously close to overdrawing.
If you have an iPhone, Quicken will be releasing an iPhone version of the online service that makes it simple to add the purchase you just made right at the point of sale, instantly updating your financial picture. Another handy feature is the ability to get a text message to your cell phone with your balance information, instantly answering the "can I afford it?" question without needing to make a phone call or go to the nearest ATM for a balance lookup. If you're looking for a way to get smarter about finances this year, use free Quicken Online to manage your finances, the price certainly won't hurt your wallet and the access to better data will help prevent financial mistakes.
YouTube seems to be the unstoppable force of online video. Everyone I know who makes online video realizes they have to post a version of their videos to YouTube if they expect to get a meaningful number of viewers. One thing YouTube hasn't got is a convenient mechanism for editing your uploads. This is where services like Yahoo's Jumpcut show some potential. Jumpcut supports editing photos and video together. You can add titles and audio. A limited set of effects and transitions are available. For most basic edits, you can get a pretty decent looking video with Jumpcut. Would I trade my desktop video editor for Jumpcut? No. But if I had a video I wanted to post online Jumpcut could definitely get the job done. Now if only Yahoo would implement a publish to YouTube button from Jumpcut...
At the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Start-up Challenge finale tonight YieldEx was the big winner, providing a service that claims to help online publishers make more money. The service I thought looked most interesting is more mundane, a way to get rid of all the paper clutter in your office forever. Pixily is the new paperless service, which provides you envelopes to send them papers, scans the papers, and makes them searchable on a data infrastructure powered by AWS. I like the idea of the service. I know I have stacks of paper, organized into folders with some semblance of order, that still require time to sift through. I could scan them all in to my computer myself, but then I'd also have to make sure they are backed up somewhere. Pixily handles the backup, they handle the scanning, the only thing you have to do is send them a stack in one of their brightly colored envelopes. If some of your documents are already digital, you can upload them to your Pixily account as part of the overall pool of files you might need to search.
The only downside to the service is that it seems expensive. You can store up to 200 pages for free, with the first pay account starting at $4.95/month for up to 1000 pages. I say this is expensive because my average bank statement is 6 pages long, so a year's worth of bank records is at least 72 pages. My cell phone bill is typically another 8 pages on average, putting me at another 96 pages per year. Anything else and I'm into the money category. Thankfully those don't need to be scanned because they are available for electronic download, but they count against the cumulative total. At the high end, you could be spending $720 per year to store up to 20,000 documents. Pricey for the average consumer, but potentially a convenient alternative to someone wasting time digging through a file drawer if you have a business that relies on referring to old files frequently. Regardless of the cost, the service has merit, it remains to be seen whether someone can offer a more DIY version of Pixily where most of the scanning is done by the customer and the service is really about providing access to the data.
Awhile ago I received a question about the best way to share large files remotely. In that case, the file size was more than 4GB, which takes a long time to upload from cable and DSL connections. At slower connection speeds, overnight mail is faster. For files less than 1GB in size, I'm currently enamored with Box.net as a file sharing solution. Box.net keeps things simple, by offering access from your browser, which should avoid many of the firewall issues people encounter with FTP. Box.net offers very simple permission based sharing, so you can determine who gets to share which files. I'm also finding Box.net to be far more reliable than popular competitor, YouSendIt. The times I've used YouSendIt recently, I've ended up restarting an upload more than once. Box.net hasn't failed me yet.
I mentioned trying out Callwave's visual voicemail service during CES 2008. I also mentioned being disappointed with the quality of the speech to text conversion. Callwave's service was free and in that case, I got exactly what I paid for. On January 15, I started testing SimulScribe. SimulScribe is free for 30 days and then will likely cost me $9.95 per month at the rate I get messages on my cell phone. The voicemail to text conversion done by SimulScribe isn't perfect, but it's pretty awesome.
Dictionary words are converted from speech to text with no problem. Most European names come through nicely as well. Names originating from Asia haven't fared so well and neither do all the wacky Web company names, but I didn't necessarily expect them to. The important thing is I'm not guessing at what the message is trying to tell me the way I was with the Callwave service. Instead of wasting time listening to messages, I now get them in my inbox, where I can easily act on whatever it is someone needs me to do - that's a huge time savings for me and a surefire guarantee that SimulScribe gets my business as soon as the trial period is over.
Try reading your voicemail - it will save you time and keep you from ever having to listen twice to decipher a phone number again.
If you live in the US, UK, or Germany, Last.fm launched a service that will likely interest you (the rest of the world will need to wait about 90 days). Starting today you can listen to music from Universal Music Group, Sony/BMG, Warner, EMI, and more than 150,000 indie labels and distributors including CD Baby, IODA, the Orchard, and Naxos. This is a huge win for those of us who love our music, because it means that just about anything you might want to listen to is available from Last.fm, whether you forgot your iPod at home or not. The catch is you can only listen to any one track 3 times before you'll be prompted to purchase the track, but for samplers like me, who simply want to hear a few new tracks to see if we like them or not, it's a great alternative to buying an album we hate. Registration is required to start listening.
The name Callwave brings me fond memories of desktop software for managing phone calls through a voice modem. As the POTS voice business gradually erodes to cell phone and voice over IP, the company is re-inventing itself with a service to replace your existing cell phone voicemail service with something more useful. If you switch to the Callwave mobile visual voicemail, instead of having to listen to voice messages on your phone you get them delivered to your inbox, which is similar to the GotVoice service I wrote about in 2005. By getting the voicemails in your inbox, Callwave also makes it possible to either automatically dial your phone to connect with the caller or respond to the voicemail via email, which might save you additional time over playing phone tag. Another cool feature of the Callwave service is call screening, so you can accept a call, send it to voice mail, or listen in on the voicemail to see if you really want to take the call. I recently switched my own voicemail to Callwave to try it out and everythings working so far. The service is currently in a free beta period - rumor has it if you sign up before the end of the beta, you'll never have to pay a subscription fee.
UPDATE from 8 January 2008: After living with Callwave Visual Voicemail for a couple of days I'm not impressed. I've received several complaints about the message quality from people attempting to call me, so I'm switching back to my core service. The voice to text feature that sends me SMS messages is also less than impressive - it does a lousy job of recognizing words and converting them to meaningful text. I'm still on a quest to find something more interesting to make it easier to work with my voicemail.
Google still hasn't convinced me to switch away from Outlook as my dedicated mail, calendar, contact and task manager, but the new features of the Google Apps suite are certainly alluring. Top of the list this time around is an import tool to migrate your email from another IMAP enabled mail solution to Gmail, so that all that junk you've been storing is merged with your new Gmail addy. A new shared address book feature makes adding contacts to your account a little easier. Attachment sizes for Gmail are now 20MB, which is big enough for almost anything but video.
Other Google Apps enhancements are obvious features they should have included ages ago - like mutli-user chats in Google Talk. Google Docs and Spreadsheets now include a feature to create charts, which will be necessary to convert any diehard Excel user. Zoho Office Suite is still kicking Google's butt in online features for word processing and spreadsheet applications, but Google is finally taking the necessary steps to make their apps a more viable alternative to other office solutions.
You can try Google Apps here:
A couple of weeks ago, I made a list of six ways to improve information gathering with Technorati. The service has since undergone an overhaul, greatly improving search results (at least from my own subject tests), while further improving ways to collect and filter information.
One of the features I like is the list of popular YouTube videos. YouTube has its own popular list, but I find the Technorati list to be a more meaningful test of what's popular. YouTube bases popularity on sheer number of views. Technorati bases popularity on how many people are linking to a particular video, which doesn't weed out all the garbage, but does provide a much needed filter.
Search integration is finally a reality. Results on Technorati now combine text, photos, audio and video so that all relevant results are returned, instead of needing to search in the photo search to get photo results or the blog search to get text results.
While all the search engines are in a constant battle with spam, Technorati seems to be doing a good job keeping out the junk. It's getting harder to game the Technorati search results. Ask.com still gets a slight edge with their blog and feed search results, which are based in part on subscriptions via Bloglines. One place there's still room for improvement is speed of updates. There are a number of items in my RSS subscriptions that do not show up in Technorati search results, even though they will eventually be there. I'm not going to claim Technorati is beating Google, but they've come a long way.
For more details on new features, check out Dave Sifry's comments at Technorati.
Download CompanionLink for Google Calendar
UPDATE: Be sure to order CompanionLink for Google Calendar, with LU3300 in the Affinity Code box.
Syncing Google Calendar automatically with whatever your desktop PIM might be is something of a holy grail in productivity. It gives you calendar access anywhere you get Internet access, with or without your phone being recently updated. CompanionLink makes a great software application that is painless to install and configure for syncing a Google Calendar with calendars from applications like Outlook, Blackberry, Groupwise, Lotus Notes, Palm Desktop, Treo 700 via Hotsync. This is the solution I'm currently using to sync my Google Calendar and Outlook, making it a snap to make my schedule available even when I've forgotten to sync my phone. After trying other solutions, I found CompanionLink for Google Calendar to be a more consistent completely automated method for keeping my calendars synchronized.
Many companies have tried with limited success to take on Microsoft Office. I still refuse to use either OpenOffice or the Software 602 office suites because both are too clunky for daily use. Recently a number of Web apps have been appointed the "MS Office killers" for various reasons. I think the demise of Microsoft's cash cow is greatly over exaggerated , but the online versions succeed in usability where their downloadable counterparts have failed at providing a highly usable experience . My favorite of this category is Zoho Office Suite, which includes a spreadsheet, word processor and basic presentation maker. There's also a downloadable collaboration tool for things like calendar sharing, group email, and meeting planning, free for up to 10 users, which I'm not covering here. One recently added feature is the ability to open any Word document or Excel file online through a browser plugin without needing to download the file first - this is a huge leap in creating a fully usable online office experience.
Zoho Writer
If you need most of the features of Microsoft Word, but it isn't on your computer or simply isn't in your budget, you could download one of those bulky free Office Suites, like OpenOffice or Software 602, but there's an easier solution. Zoho Writer is a browser-based word processing application with every feature I typically use in Microsoft Word. It formats text with fonts, styles, highlighting and all the standard text layout features. Zoho Writer has a spell checker that seems better than any of the spelling functions of the free office suites. It outputs files as DOC, SXW, PDF, ODT, RTF, TXT and HTML. A function for posting to blogs at Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad and WordPress, as well as any installation with support for the metaWeblog API makes it an ideal solution for writing online posts that make you look and sound smart. All the features I mentioned here work without ever creating an account with Zoho. By signing up for a free account you get additional features like emailing from within the application. Emailing your desktop documents into Zoho for online backup or to edit them on other machines. Versioning makes it easy to see the document at earlier points in the writing process. You can create templates. By assigning permissions to other people you can add read and edit functionality for multiple reviewers. If you store many documents in Zoho Writer, a tagging system helps make it easy to find specific information.
Zoho Sheet
I rarely use spreadsheet applications. Most of my data analysis consists of reviewing financial information in my accounting program or studying Web statistics in something like Google Analytics. Zoho Sheet is perfect for light duty spreadsheet usage. It does all the basic spreadsheet calculations. Zoho Sheet imports data from existing Excel and OpenOffice Calc files as well as CSV files. Like Zoho Writer you can either work in a mode that requires no login or create an account to maintain a set of online spreadsheet files. Since I'm not a heavy spreadsheet user, I can't speak to the full abilities of spreadsheet calculation with Zoho Sheet. For the most part the basic functions have been perfect for my needs. One thing I didn't like was the lack of a unified account creation when creating an account for both Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet. Presumably this is something the company will eventually fix.
Zoho Show
More recently Zoho added this PowerPoint competitor to their stable of free Web apps. Like PowerPoint, Zoho Show creates slide decks for presentations. From adding graphics and text, to adding timed transitions, Zoho Show will do basic presentation tasks. Unlike Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet which compete readily with all the common functions of comparable offerings in the MS Office suite, Zoho Show comes up a little short. There's no support for audio or video, two components I'm regularly asked about for PowerPoint. They do get bonus points for supporting image importing from Flickr, but I'm sensitive to the many situations when audio or video come in handy to make a key presentation point. For the basic text and images presentation, Zoho Show is quick and easy to use - and if you've got an Internet connection, you never need to worry about not being able to access your presentation from any machine with Firefox or Internet Explorer.
The thing I like about this entire suite of apps is how quickly the pages load and how well the features respond. Based on my experiences with the downloadable Microsoft Office alternatives, Zoho is faster to respond and feels like the interface is designed by someone who cares about usability. The features are easy to find and readily exposed. Even familar keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+B for bold, Ctrl+C for copy, Ctrl+V for paste and Ctrl+A for Select All work as if you were in an offline application. I'm not quite ready to abandon the old faithful feel of Microsoft Office, but when I'm working on a project on multiple machines, this suite of Zoho apps is perfect for making sure I always have the latest version of an article on the machine I need it.
BTW, this entire article was written in the no login version of Zoho Writer.
While I currently upload most of my photos to Flickr, BubbleShare is one of the best looking alternatives. The site offers a ton of fun features for categorizing and labeling photos that none of its competitors are currently implementing. You can add audio captions to photos on-the-fly, include cartoon word balloons on images and share photo albums without ever creating an account. By creating an account BubbleShare includes a number of additional options for organization and managing images, as well as the ability to keep your albums private.
BubbleShare offers a few neat tricks other photo sharing sites should be drooling over. You can send out puzzle games of your photos for friends to try and reassemble. BubbleZoom is a clever favorite among the bunch - providing a 3x enhanced view of a section of any photo.
Album display options for BubbleShare are outstanding. For example, there's the slider display and photo story mode with the slideshow fading between images. All of this is done automatically. You can share albums with other users of BubbleShare or pass them along to friends who have never even heard of the service. A BubbleBar option displays images on the desktop for both Mac and Windows users.
Bubble Slider
Fader
Admittedly, the service isn't without flaws. It's optimized for creating these albums, whether you want to upload one picture or one thousand pictures. There are many cases where I upload a one-off image and the "album" concept doesn't make much sense. The only way to add multiword tags is to either add each word separately (like 'summer' 'palace') or run the words into one long run in (like 'summerpalace'). These are minor shortcomings for a site that makes sharing photos both easy and fun.
Someday they plan to announce a live sharing service with collaboration between multiple users. Similar to something like a shared desktop service from GoToMeeting or WebEx, you'll be able to browse and edit slides with other BubbleShare users. You can see a demo online, but they haven't made the service completely live just yet.
At the moment, all these services are both free and advertising free, so I'm not entirely sure how they will sustain the service over time, although they indicate there will be a premium version someday. In the meantime, BubbleShare is a fun way to compile and share images with friends, family and complete strangers (if you choose to share).
Several months ago Australian photo sharing site Faces.com beta tested a new service called TuneFeed, making it easy for anyone to upload a few tracks from their personal collection of MP3s and share them via an online player. The beauty of this process is the sheer simplicity in uploading and sharing files. You can upload a handful of tracks or your entire music library. Sort tracks into playlists based on whatever your mood happens to be and post the playlists to MySpace, a blog, or any personal Web page. Ideally the company would love you to send people to your Faces account, but there's nothing forcing you to stay in their universe. All file hosting is handled by TuneFeed meaning you never need to worry about running out of bandwidth. A future method for purchasing tracks you find in other people's playlists is promised and a revenue split for making the introduction to other listeners might be in the works as well. The only catch here is a monthly upload limit for free accounts - a healthy 500MB of storage and 10GB of data transfer is available for free. Pro accounts are just under $25 per year, which is ridiculously cheap if you find the service useful. The company claims this is 100% legal, presumably because they are paying royalties to the record companies who own rights to the music, although I couldn't find the fine print that spells out how they are doing this.
