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Avego.com is where travelers cooperate to make the whole transport system more efficient, saving us all money, wasted time and reducing pollution.
A 5-seat car traveling with only a driver is inherently inefficient, and yet 85% of the time, that’s how cars travel in much of the world. With our iPhone GPS technology, web services and your participation, we can fill up those empty seats.
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Did I get enough exercise today? How many calories did I burn? Am I getting good quality sleep? How many steps and miles did I walk today? The Fitbit Tracker helps you answer these questions.
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Swype was developed by founders Cliff Kushler and Randy Marsden, along with a very talented team of software programmers and linguists.
Cliff is the co-inventor of T9, the standard predictive text-entry solution used on over 2.4 billion mobile phones worldwide. He is the named inventor on multiple patents related to alternative text entry.
Randy is the developer of the onscreen keyboard included in Windows, with an installed base of over a half a billion units. He is a recognized leader in the field of assistive technology and alternative computer input.
Together, their experience is unmatched in developing onscreen keyboard-based text input solutions for mobile touch-screen devices.
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ShiftSpace (pronounced: §) is an open source browser plugin for collaboratively annotating, editing and shifting the web.
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# Create and track invoices you issue to clients.
# Determine what you’re owed, by whom, and when it’s due.
# Keep track of timesheets for yourself and your employees.
# Notify your clients of new invoices.
# Create interesting reports and analyze payment history
# Save time & collect your money.
Google Maps and Rising Sea Levels
Is Google Maps getting radical? Switch into terrain mode and you can see what the future is going to be like. The screenshot above shows the northeast tip of Singapore, much of it underwater.
This is what it looks like in Map mode:
No doubt a glitch that is soon to be fixed, but
a) I’m not quite clear what the glitch is. Old elevation data? and
b) you can’t help feeling it would be a great feature to have a “10 years’ time” button to see whether you should be thinking about selling up and moving to higher ground. Especially if you live in Changi Village.
links for 2008-09-10
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Footnote.com is a place where original historical documents are combined with social networking in order to create a truly unique experience involving the stories of our past.
Scaling Business Card Mountain
By Jeremy Wagstaff
One day everyone will be beaming/Bluetoothing their business cards to people, or sending them via email as soon as they get home from the Taiwanese Horticulture Convention. But for now we’re stuck with mountains of them on our desk, waiting for that moment that never comes when we might actually do something about them.
I’ve seen a lot of solutions to this problem, and none of them work particularly well. The most common seems to be the ‘Farm It Out to Your Assistant’ routine, which works well if you’ve got an assistant, but doesn’t really help him very much, since he’s going to have to type all those details in somewhere.
I’ve recommended before investing in a scanner, and that’s still a good option. Fujitsu’s ScanSnap lets you scan bundles of about 10 cards in one go, and does a pretty fair job of converting the images to text—what’s called optical character recognition, or OCR.
From there it’s a small step to moving the resulting files into Outlook, or whatever program you use to store these things.
But this still means you’re stuck with waiting until you get back from the convention or kayaking expedition, or wherever it was you gathered the small pile of business cards. By then you’ve forgotten who these people are, or you’re too tired to do anything about filing them away. Soon another convention comes along and the pile builds up.
Your network is rotting before your eyes.
This is made even more absurd by the fact that actually online networks, both for business and pleasure, are blooming. Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster, Plaxo, all operate for the sole purpose of making your network of friends and business contacts more efficient.
But name cards seem to still operate in a analog world of their own.
Here’s how I get around this problem. It’s not perfect, but it saves time and means that the leads and contacts you make are strengthened and you can find all the details you need when you need them.
First off, make sure you get a card or a name from the person. If they don’t have one, which often happens, see whether they’re up to sending you their business card digitally. Most phones nowadays make this relatively easy.
Nokia, for example, let you send a ‘business card’ to other users via either SMS text message, multimedia (MMS, a kind of email), Bluetooth or infrared. Be prepared by making sure that you have your own contacts in the phone, along with (preferably) a photo, your business title and address—all the things you’d hope would be on a business card.
(The photo is a good way of reminding other people who you are. I’m sure you’re a very memorable person and the life and soul of every party, but it’s worth hammering home the point. This photo will eventually sit on their phone and in their contacts program, so make sure it’s a good one.)
Be ready to beam these details to someone else—find the contact, select options and then send business card—and help the other person find theirs if they don’t already know how.
Chances are, however, the other person won’t be up to doing this, so just make sure you’ve got their name right, give them your card and ask them to email their details to you.
Chances are they’ll forget, so when you get back to your computer Google them (or look them up on sites like LinkedIn, or Zoominfo, or Wink.) Grab that data and make your own Outlook entry (a great tool to make this easier is Anagram—getanagram.com—which is smart enough to fill out the fields in a contact file automatically.)
If this person is on LinkedIn etc, connect to them that way to reinforce the link and to make sure that their contact details are automatically updated to your database. (More on this in a future column.)
If they do have a name card, as soon as you get back to your room, into a cab, or somewhere you can sit down, get out your cellphone and take a photo of it. Change the camera settings to close up and make sure it’s in focus (the camera usually beeps when it’s in focus.)
It’s possible, you see, to send that photo to a service which will automatically scan the name card, convert it to text (and to a standard business card format called VCF) and email it back to you all ready to go into your Outlook or other contact database. It’s also free. (The scans will also be saved online, should you ever need them.)
The service is called scanR (scanr.com) and works with most types of phone. And it works well. This means you’re scanning the name card almost as soon as you’ve received it, meaning there’s a much higher chance you’ll remember the guy—especially if you add a few notes to the contact details (“Met at party where he was wearing hostess on his head” or somesuch.)
There’s an even faster way of doing this. If you have an account at Plaxo, a networking and contacts backup service, you can tell scanR to automatically send business cards to your Plaxo account. If your Plaxo account is synchronizing with your Outlook address book then that’s all you need to do. Once scanned with the phone, that contact wends its way back to your address book without you having to do anything.
It may seem a long way around but until we’ve ditched this charmingly antiquated little custom from our business world, I’d suggest that it’s the easiest way to avoid Business Card Mountain.
Jeremy Wagstaff is a commentator on technology and appears regularly on the BBC World Service. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com or via email at jeremy@loose-wire.com.
How to Send Big Files to Other People
Here’s probably the simplest and most effective way to share files from your computer with others—without clogging up other people’s email inboxes or having them ask you to resend it because they deleted the email by mistake.
And without having to sign up for an account or anything fiddly. Promise.
First off, go to drop.io (pronounced dropeeoh, apparently).
You have the option of customizing the link your file(s) will be stored at: Type in your preferred name until drop.io finds one that hasn’t been taken already. Your URL will then be something like drop.io/loosewire.
Click on the green button below it to add files.
Select the file from the list (to select more than one file hold down the Control/Command key as you select the files).
Click OK and you’ll see the fuel-gauge-type bar to the right of the green button partly fill. You’re allowed up to 100 megabytes of space.
The next window lets you set a password for other people to enter if they want to view the files. (You don’t have to include a password if you don’t want to.)
You can also choose how long the files will be available for (from one day to one year.) And you can choose whether others just view the files, can add to them, and whether they can delete them.
Once you’re done with these settings (or have skipped over them) click on the red Drop it button.
The button will change briefly to grey and then to a message indicating your files are uploading.
You’ll see the fuel-gauge bar above change to indicate how far your files have to go before they’re done uploading.
Once the files are ready, you’ll be asked if you want to add another password—this one’s for you, so you can change settings later or delete the files. It’s also optional.
You’re done uploading. The only thing left to do is to let your colleagues/friends/family know the link you’ve sent these files to. (Select the link, right click the mouse and copy it to the clipboard. Paste the link into an email or your chat program, or however you intend to alert others to the files’ existence.)
Free tip(s)
You can easily leave notes for others on the page of files you’ve uploaded—a neat feature that could be helpful. Just click on the Notes link at the top of the page and type your note:
If you use the latest version of the Firefox browser (and if not, why not?) there’s an even easier way to do this (for both Mac and Windows users.) (You can see a screencast of this here.)
Install the drop.io Firefox extension (a small piece of code that plugs in to Firefox) and you’ll see a little red dot at the right hand corner of your screen. Drag and drop a file from your desktop or a Windows Explorer/Finder window. You won’t get any pop-up messages, only a moving graphic to indicate the file is being uploaded:
