Getting your voice mail as text is awesome. I started using a service that did this when I worked for Spinvox, in London, many years ago. But the service was sort of expensive, a Mechanical Turk, since there were a few offices spread about where transcribers would listen to your messages and type them out. Google Voice (aka Grand Central) did it better, and I’ve been using it for a while now. Today, they moved it into public availability, free for all, do go give it a whirl. Note: Lifehacker has a great write-up on making the service play nice with sipgate, so you can call out to regular old telephones.
Google Voice Goes Public
June 22nd, 2010Lady Gaga vs. Journey
June 4th, 2010A couple of years ago I attended Lawrence Lessig’s “farewell tour”, before he was to get into California politics. Still a participative representative of the Creative Commons, the subject of the talk was “copy left”, or pushing distribution rights to the public rather than keeping them private. Mash-ups were the example he used, to demonstrate how content in all forms can be used as an instrument, much like a good dj uses turntables to create something new and unique. I really enjoyed this one, by dj Tripp, featuring Lady Gaga and Journey. How else are you going to get them on stage together?
How to innovate
June 1st, 2010Dan Pink, author of business books, gave a great talk at The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, the subject of which was motivation (beyond the almighty pound). Very interesting stuff, particularly the (implicit) bit about our new, purpose-driven economy.
Google buys the future
May 5th, 2010Recorded Future, it seems, has succeeded in making the difficult seem easy… generalizable predictive algorithms that can be used for forecasting purposes. The vid demonstrates how cool it *could* be, assuming it is somewhat accurate. This kind of information *could* be so valuable for traders, or any business that’s engaged in commodities. Caveat: I didn’t sign up for the $149 subscription, but am very much looking forward to seeing it in my Google results page.
Google Docs Upgrade
April 12th, 2010Google Docs added some cool new features today, including some general interface tweaks and a nifty new collaborative image editor. Looks pretty basic, if you’re comparing to CS5 (which is completely unfair!), but it has some definite utility… consider those times when you could just get the message across more clearly in visual form.
25 million Google Apps users
March 17th, 2010This is just a little marketing bit on how Google Apps is getting used in a lot of large companies, these days. Konica Minolta, National Geographic, Jaguar Land Rover and plenty of others. “Enjoy”…
Yahoo! Placemaker API
March 15th, 2010Yesterday, I attended a cool presentation (below), by Pamela Fox (Google), the purpose of which was to demonstrate the power of robot scripts in Wave. The one she walked through essentially intercepted your (Wave) string, semantically parsed it for geo locations and fired off the text with embedded map links. Ironically, Yahoo’s Placemaker API was under the hood, catching locations and feeding back the structured data. Way cool service, can’t wait to play more with it.
Gestural Overlays
March 14th, 2010Chen, from Google, just finished up a cool presentation about some new hacks he’s been working on, that provide a gestural interface overlay to Android. This is a very cool step toward natural human interaction with the wealth of data we’ve got access to, now. Check out the stroke gestures library.
Joi Ito and the New World Order
March 14th, 2010I’m paraphrasing, here. Nonetheless, I felt marvel, listening to Joi Ito’s presentation on how to save the world, this afternoon. His thesis was, roughly, that it will take a decentralized approach to justice in order to counteract the essentially corrupt mega governments and the essentially corrupt minor/failed governments alike. Furthermore, the Internets fit well with the need for a decentralized platform from which to launch the (r)evolution. See the “prezi” for an idea…
Google Apps Marketplace
March 10th, 2010Yesterday, Google announced the Google Apps Marketplace, which is a storefront for web applications that integrate with Google Apps, combined with some new integration tools. Think iTunes, but for Google. This is great for developers, it would seem, as a means to give potential customers visibility into new products. More broadly, though, it will be interesting to see how this impacts Google’s presence in the enterprise application space. See the video for details: