I’ve been a pretty die hard Gmail guy for the last year.  Yes I know I’m late to the game but prior to that I was using a Treo and utilizing Exchange for my eMail duties.  Unfortunately is just seemed like the whole Outlook on the Desktop and Exchange in the cloud solution caused many crashes.  Let alone trying to access two different Exchange servers.  So I consolidated everything over to Gmail.  It did a great job of combining all the multiple sources of email and allowing me to reply to everything from one interface.  The solution came together for me further when I moved to a Blackberry Pearl (I like small phones) and started utilizing the gMail application on my Blackberry.  (more…)

Over at Tech Crunch Michael Arrington has decided to call it for Voicemail. That’s right time of death is July 5th. As much as I’d like to believe it is and hope that everyone would stop using it the simple matter of the fact is that it’s far from dead. Maybe in Silicon Valley, but out in the real world a surprising number of people are still not connected to all of the latest and greatest technology has to offer. What about all of those people that don’t have a service such as Grand Central or YouMail that takes care of their voice messages? Or the latest and greatest iPhone? People are still cheap, economical, whatever you call it and voicemail is a lot cheaper than a service such as Spin Vox. While voice mail may not be preferred to the adopters of the latest and greatest technologies, there is still a large section of the population that will contain to use it and resist getting rid of it.

Web Worker Daily has an article about a FireFox plug in called DejaClick, Automate Routine Friefox Tasks With DejaClick. I downloaded the plugin and used it and must say that I might impressed. While the author doesn’t find much use for it working in a world that I do there are many tasks that I must perform repetitively in the browser. Most involve downloading files and clicking on buttons to make things process (Credit Card Processing, Order Batches, etc.). These new plugin will not only make it more efficient (this thing is faster than you are), but will also ensure accuracy by not pressing the wrong button. Some other things that look like it may be able to do is creating a bookmark that runs the script. I still have to verify that it would work, but I believe you should then be able to trigger these bookmarks by using the Windows Scheduler. So you could perform “manual” web tasks automatically…… So far I’m liking it.

ScribeFire is a nice plug in for FireFox (you are using FireFox right?) that allows you to post to your blog(s) without leaving the site you’d like to write about. I’ve just installed it and this is the first post using it but it seems like it’s very efficient and will allow me to up the number of posts and ideas I can produce. Instead of the normal bookmark the site and go back to it later ScribeFire makes it easy to just push a button and get it done. You can drag and drop links as well How It Works.

Miro is a nice video platform I’ve been using the last couple of days. It’s addressed many of the issues that I’ve had with other players such as Windows Media Player, iTunes and just basic players within Firefox. I run a triple monitor setup and anytime I’d move the window from my main window to any of the other monitors it would slow down and skip. iTunes alone seems to cause problems with any system I’ve ever used it on. Especially playing video. I’m pretty sure it’s not a hardware problem, I run a Dell Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz with 4 GB or RAM. Both of my video cards are middle of the line with 256MB.

Back to Miro. It does a great job of downloading the shows that I want. Playback is awesome with no slowdowns or resource hogging. While playing videos (and downloading) it is only using 5% of CPU resources and approximately 180MB of RAM. Plus it’s easy to jump between videos, check out the newest offerings and plenty more. I’m paritcularly fond of the Revision3 line of shows. You can also play your existing media with the player. Take a look I’m sure you’ll like it.

So here’s some information on some of Bungee Connects newest service offerings. I’ve been toying with it for a while but haven’t come to a conclusion on it yet. Once I finish a nice thorough review of the product I’ll get some more information out on it. But as of right now I’m not swayed one way or the other. Although they did have a nice display at the Web 2.0 Expo.

From their e-mail…

Yesterday Bungee Labs made three announcements, each of which is the direct result of the feedback provided by Bungee’s developer community.

We want to thank you for your feedback provided so far as part of our Beta and hope you enjoy the additional flexibility we’re providing to developers and businesses, and encourage you to keep the feedback coming so we can continue to improve the Bungee Connect platform. (more…)

Well it’s time to use up the GI Bill benefits I have before time expires. So in looking for an online school the University of Phoenix contacted me to tell me how great their technology and technology degrees are. So when I replied to tell them I’ve decided on the University Of Maryland (I went there previously when I was in the Air Force), imagine my surprise when my e-mail rejected….. (more…)

   GigaOM is reporting that Microsoft is Predicted to back away from Vista. I can only hope that much is true. While many people have jumped on the Vista bandwagon, I tend to find that they are mostly home users looking for bragging rights. Yes if you buy a new machine and it comes with Vista your life will be OK. But there are plenty of us out there with a plethora of devices that won’t work with Vista. And that’s not to mention the number of corporations that have software that simply won’t run on Vista (I personally deal with a couple that had to return Vista because of applications that aren’t compatible). Even Dell (who recommend Vista) gave me a Downgrade to XP option when I purchased my new machine. I’ll probably be using it in the future if service packs don’t get the OS back in line.

  TechCrunch reports that GrandCentral was down this morning.  While I didn’t notice any loss of calls (it’s Sunday morning here in the PST for me), it’s surprising that the outage lasted for a couple of hours.  This service was acquired by Google at the end of last year.  And while it’s still marked as Beta I’ve been hoping to see some improvements but the service has mostly been stagnant since the purchase.  I was at least hoping for integration into GMail contacts by now, but no luck.  I keep waiting and hoping they do something with it, ultimately I’d like to see an integration with a service such as Jott so I can get my voice messages sent to my e-mail or text.  I really hate having to dial a number and sit and listen to voice messages.  Especially if it’s just someone rambling.  It would be much more efficient if it were text….. Are you listening Google?  The only promise of hope that has come from the service so far is issuing permanent numbers to the homeless thereby allowing them to put a contact number down on job applications.  (more…)

TechCrunch is reporting that Fon has just raised another $9.5 million in funding. This will allow them to develop a new router and push into the Russian market. I personally have a Fon router (the older version 1 LinkSys) sitting in my closet. I haven’t seen a single person connect to or use it. Although I’m in the desert, not in a city such as San Francisco where I’m sure this would be welcomed.  I’m all for anything that allows for the gaining spread of WiFi.