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Docs by Microsoft and Facebook

Quang Ly — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:28:01 +0000

Docs by Microsoft and Facebook

Look out Google because Microsoft and Facebook are teaming up to challenge Google Docs online document sharing.

Microsoft Docs looks like a real threat to Google Docs because simply Microsoft still makes a better word processor than Google. Facebook’s crowd sourcing and social networking platform creates a true online desktop and utility for productivity. Docs also have a simple domain name that people can remember http://www.docs.com.

Google needs to respond with a true social networking strategy by merging their Gmail, YouTube, and Picassa audience to a single destination to share and communicate more seamlessly. They have made a pathway so far with integrating Buzz into Gmail. It was disappointing, however, that Google Wave was still a separate destination that needed another active conversion for adoption. Furthermore, their UI across different sites like Gmail, YouTube, and Picassa do not have similar look and feel.

Via http://docs.com

Transfer Your Mobile Number to Google Voice

Quang Ly — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:02:18 +0000

Transfer Your Mobile Number to Google Voice

I’ve been using Google Voice since it was owned by Grand Central. It is a great platform for managing free calls, SMS, and contacts with intelligence. Now Google Voice lets you port your mobile number from your carrier to Google as well. This way, your voicemail is accessible from the cloud. By allowing Google Voice to manage my voicemail, it solves my issue with AT&T which prevents me from receiving voicemail notifications. Once you receive a voicemail, you can be alerted a number of ways by transcribed email or SMS text messages.

Google Voice can let you have a single phone number that automatically rings to your mobile, work, home and other phones based on rules and settings. For example, calls from your kids will ring all numbers while office related contacts only ring your work number.

The process to move your carrier number to Google Voice requires a few steps. However, it is very worth it in the end.

Via TechCrunch

Dropbox Online Storage and iPhone App

Quang Ly — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:06:06 +0000

Dropbox Online Storage and iPhone App

Dropbox is an easy to use online file storage that syncs your files across all your computers. I installed it recently and must say it is very intuitive, easy, and fast! You simply go to their website, create and account, and then install on your computer (both Windows and Mac compatible). You can then select your drop box folder to by synced. Files or folders that are in your Dropbox folder are then synchronized online. The performance is great. When you make a change, Dropbox sends the “delta” only to the server thus making the change very quickly. You can also access your files through the website.

The free version begins with 2 Gig of storage space with an additional 1 Gig by referring friends. There is also premium paid version which offers much more.

Dropbox recently released an iPhone application to make it even easier to access your files anywhere in the world. This new iPhone app will let you get access to all your Dropbox documents, PDF’s, pictures, videos and much more. Dropbox also introduced offline viewing in the iPhone app, with “Favorites.” If you add a file to your ‘Favorites’, they’ll be accessible at any time. To do so, just hit the star at the bottom of any file, and it’ll be added. Otherwise, your files stay in the cloud. This is great for people who complain that the iPhone does not offer local file storage. Dropbox offers this and more with automatic sync with their cloud!

Dropbox can also let you share files and folders to anyone in the cloud. The iPhone app also lets you upload pictures and video (with iPhone 3GS).

In just a few days, Dropbox reached over 2 million users. Impressive.

When is Google’s rumored GDrive coming? Google???

Google Docs Now Convert Images to Text

Quang Ly — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:29:01 +0000

You can now use Google Docs to perform OCR image-to-text conversions when you upload high-resolution files. It is a nice newly added feature from Google (and of course it is free)

For 3rd party webapps or services that uses Google Docs, they can use this URL parameter to accept JPG, PNG, and GIF files for conversions. Keep in mind this is still in beta.

Tell us what you think of Google Docs OCR performance. Was it good for you?

Google Docs OCR Convert Images To Text

Via Life hacker

Google Push Email for iPhone Now Available

Jay — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:50:41 +0000

Google Push Email and Calender Sync

Dammit. I just spent $2.99 on an app to give me push Gmail on my iPhone and then Google goes and adds that capability through Google Sync. Damn you Google, for making what used to cost money free. Details at the Google Mobile blog. Thanks to TechCrunch for alerting me.

If you have GSync already set up on your iPhone, all you have to do is go to the Exchange entry and activate the Mail option. Simple!

Warning – the Google mobile blog servers are apparently mobbed right now, cause performance is slow slow slow.

UPDATE: In the 20 minutes since I activated this service, I’ve noticed three things.

You don’t get a popup alert on your screen when new emails come in. This could be a good or bad thing, depending on your point of view. You will get a buzz indicating new mail (if your iPhone is set up for that).
There is a definite lag between receipt of email and Google pushing it to your iPhone. It’s not huge but it can be a couple minutes. I’m curious as to if this is due to the newness of the service or if it’s normal lag due to using Exchange. It’s no different than what sometimes happens with the Blackberry, so unless you’re OCD about your email you probably won’t notice it.
My Yahoo push email has apparently never worked properly and for whatever reason I do not get my Yahoo mails pushed to my iPhone. I only noticed this because of how Google’s push works. Luckily I don’t care about my Yahoo accounts, since they serve as repositories of spam and junk emails for various signup lists. Plus all my porn user names and passwords.

How To Fix AT&T iPhone Visual Voicemail Notification Alerts

Quang Ly — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:39:38 +0000

iPhone Visual Voicemail Notification Fix

One of the most frustrating and surprisingly under reported issues is with AT&T and iPhone Visual Voicemail notifications. When you receive a voicemail on your iPhone, an alert appears and you can play your voicemail as if its a song. There is now a solution!

Since the iPhone 3GS was released, some customers experienced lack of alerts for voicemail (me being one of them). I recently found a fix for it while I was researching tethering for 3GS. Apparently, tethering your iPhone may cause this issue.

So here’s the fix. Navigate to Settings → General → Network → Cellular Data Network and within the Visual Voicemail section add “acds.voicemail” into the APN field. Your visual voicemail will now work once again.

CAUTION: This fix does break the tethering. You can’t have voicemail notifications and Internet tethering work at the same time.

Via Apple Blog

Google Liberates Your Data

Quang Ly — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 23:06:12 +0000

Google Liberates Your Data

Google officially launches DataLiberation.org to inform users their expectations on how their private data is exported. Actually, Google has already provided some of this to a certain extent. A few weeks ago, I helped my brother and his wifey export the content from their Blogger site to a self hosted WordPress installation. It was very easy to do. The only things that weren’t transferred were the images which I haven’t figured out how to do yet.

Imagine you want to move out of your apartment. When you ask your landlord about the terms of your previous lease, he says that you are free to leave at any time; however, you cannot take all of your things with you – not your photos, your keepsakes, or your clothing. If you’re like most people, a restriction like this may cause you to rethink moving altogether. Not only is this a bad situation for you as the tenant, but it’s also detrimental to the housing industry as a whole, which no longer has incentive to build better apartments at all.

Google’s Data Liberation movement plans to give users greater control over their data and easier facilities to export and import with Google apps.

Via The Data Liberation Front

Review – AutoStitch Panorama Generator

Jay — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 14:00:39 +0000

I recently returned from a family vacation in Puerto Rico. Aside from having a great time and seeing some great sights, I was able to play around with an iPhone app I’d installed some time ago. I say “play around” but really the app became a core part of my vacation photography. AutoStitch is one of the most impressive photography apps I’ve seen on any platform, iPhone or otherwise.

You may remember my review of an app called Pano. AutoStitch one-ups Pano by removing the need to manually align subsequent photos to create the panorama. Before I go into detail, let me show you a couple of the pics it created. (All panoramas have been reduced to 60% of their original size to help them fit better on most screens. Click on the images to see them in their full glory.)

The image quality is not bad at all, considering I took these using the iPhone 3G’s junky camera. This app actually made me want to upgrade to the higher resolution/quality of the iPhone3GS, because I think the same pictures would have turned out even better.

If you recall, Pano used its own interface to the iPhone’s camera to do its thing. You took a series of pictures that overlapped guidelines that Pano provided. While I originally really liked Pano, I found it really difficult to use in real life because it’s tough to get the overlap Pano needs to make its panorama. I also found that Pano was slow to snap and save successive images, making picture taking a pain. AutoStitch solves both those problems.

When you launch AutoStitch, you are greeted with a very simple screen.

You have your list of photo folders plus the iPhone default Camera Roll. I wound up using mostly my Camera Roll as my source (I’ll explain why later). When you select a folder, you get a thumbnail view of all the pictures in the folder.

You just tap on two or more pictures to begin the process. Each picture you tap on gets added to the “Photos to Stitch” area.

You can remove pictures from the stitching area by just tapping it. Once you’ve selected your set of pictures, you tap the Stitch button to start the process. To show you the output, here’s the three pictures I’m stitching together:

You can get a sense of how those three pictures might overlap to create a single image, no? Well so can AutoStitch, because here’s the output of its manipulation of the above three images.

(Click on the image to see it in full size). Pretty impressive, no?

AutoStitch doesn’t use the iPhone’s camera directly. Instead, you snap pictures using the Camera app and then just select them in AutoStitch to generate the panorama. This makes picturetaking blazingly fast. The iPhone’s camera app is pretty quick to take and save pictures, so you can snap off a series of images to stitch together in no time. (This is why I say you’ll probably use the Camera Roll most of the time – you just snap pictures into the Roll and then select them for stitching. I recommend you do this quickly after taking the sequence – it becomes difficult to remember which images went with what panorama if you let too much time pass.)

Another benefit of AutoStitch is that you’re not limited to just six images like Pano. Instead, you can use as few as two or as many as 20 to create the final frame. AutoStitch recommends that you let each picture overlap by at least 30% to ensure the best results, but I didn’t really pay much attention to that after my first few stitches. I just kind of did a fast pan-and-snap and trusted in the app to do its thing.

Once AutoStitch creates the panorama, you can crop the image to remove top/bottom fragments that result from AutoStitch doing the overlapping necessary to generate the image. The crop area suggested by AutoStitch can be overridden by you but I found that I didn’t really need to do that – the app did a great job of finding the maximum size photo that could be extracted from the stitched images.

As my final showoff of the app, take a look at this gallery of thumbnails:

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

And here’s the final output:

I’m totally impressed by AutoStitch and highly recommend it to anyone who wants to create panoramic images from iPhone snapshots.

Seth Godin On Social Networking

Quang Ly — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 23:19:03 +0000

Accordin to Seth Godin, networking is always important when it’s real and a useless distraction when it’s fake. We all know the Facebook or MySpace guy or girl with over a thousand friends. A “friend” on social networks like Facebook or MySpace requires commitment by the recipient to accept. This has been played out so much that it really doesn’t mean anything if there is no continuing engagement between the two parties. Twitter is slightly different in that it has “followers”. You can follow a person’s update status without commitment from the other to follow you. Facebook, similarly, now has Pages with fans which work the same. You can become a fan of a Facebook celebrity, artist, or business page without the page having to follow you.

Via Brand Infection

Urban farming movement is a revolution

Quang Ly — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:36:33 +0000

Urban Farming

This is a very exciting and much needed change in our food culture especially in the urban areas where access to fresh produce is limited or expensive for minorities. What you tend to find is more fast food is located in the poor urban areas which are one of the causes of obesity and diabetes. Urban farming promotes a self sustaining food supply system in a community garden.

Benefits

Use of Solar Energy and reduction of carbon foot print for trips to grocery store
Quality fresh vegetables and fruits
Less reliance on fast food and thus reduction in obesity and diabetes
Less waste
Implicit excercise through gardening

I think this is SOOO important for us to really take back our food communities from fast food nation like McDonald’s (McDeath), Burger King (Murder King), Taco Bell (Taco Hell). It benefits us in so many ways.

Via CNN

Google Wave

Quang Ly — Sun, 31 May 2009 21:29:06 +0000

There are a lot of different communication platforms to choose from: email, facebook, twitter. Google Wave is a very promising new unified communication tool that combines all these and more.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ

What Is Wave?

Google Wave allows people to communicate and collaborate using objects like rich text, photos, videos, maps, and twitter. But also share these conversations with other participants at any point. The new participant can then watch a playback of the history of the communication.

Wave is also live so a person on the receiving end can see letter for letter what is being typed for real-time communication.

How To Have A Web 3.0 Website

Quang Ly — Fri, 01 May 2009 13:34:18 +0000

Just when you think you are up to date with the latest technology platform running Web 2.0 principles. Web 3.0 is now upon us. In fact, this entire post is written with Web 3.0 technology while I was in bed.

Just what is Web 3.0? Well beyond the usual content management, social networking and widgets that weere introduced in Web 2.0, this is really about mobility and integration of devices.

GadgetMETER.com is built on the WordPress blogging platform and uses a plugin that renders the pages to various mobile devices. If you view www.gadgetmeter.com on your iPhone, this website will be rendered very appropriately. I highly recommend having your own hosted WordPress installation rather than using wordpress.com or blogger.com because essentially, you own your own site and can install additional plugins without restrictions relatively easy.

Web 3.0 Example - Our own GadgetMETER.com site

Web 3.0 Example - iPhone 4G Post

Web 3.0 Example - Website Pages

Web 3.0 Example - Website Categories

Mobile Plugins
There are various free WordPress plugins to convert your site for mobile devices. Feel free to experiment and install it. There is usually a few configuration you can do (but not required). These plugins detect the devices and renders the proper theme with managed content. GadgetMETER uses a combination of WPtouch: Mobile Plugin + Theme for WordPress, WPhone Admin Plugin, and WordPress iPhone App by Automattic, Inc.

Once you have the plugins installed and activated, just visit your site on a mobile device like the iPhone.

Web 3.0 Example - WPhone Admin

Web 3.0 Example - WPhone Admin Menus

Web 3.0 Example - Write Your Post

To capture photos and upload to WordPress, we use the WordPress iPhone App since the web based mobile WPTouch doesn’t allow file uploads (yet).

Web 3.0 Example - Upload Your Pictures

Now, save your draft and go back to WPTouch and set the version type (draft, scheduled, published) or assign an author

Web 3.0 Example - Assign Author

Using Web 3.0 is an absolutely wonderful experience. We will be live blogging at CES 2010 using the iPhone capturing photos at booths and uploading it here. We also have a Twitter Plugin that updates our twitter tweets automatically whenever a new blog post is updated. Another feature of Web 3.0 is write once, publish everywhere.

WEB 3.0 FEATURES

Integration between mobile devices, Web, and Internet
Even easier to use
Write once, publish everywhere
Portability
Usability

Another example of a Web 3.0 website is my personal site www.quangly.com. (yeah, yeah, it’s a shameless a-hem, plug). It uses the almost exact principles and plugins of GadgetMETER.

Google Custom Search

Quang Ly — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:55:36 +0000

We are excited to let you know that we have finally implemented Google Custom Search to provide you with a better user experience. It took us a few tries but we happily made it!

You won’t see much difference in the user interface but our search results are now indexed by Google rather than WordPress (the wonderful blog platform we use).

Give it a shot and let us know what you think!

To see how to you can incorporate Google Custom Search on your site, visit http://www.zparacha.com/how-to-incorporate-google-custom-search-engine-with-adsense-into-your-wordpress-blog. They did a great job explaining it.

Cheers!
Your folks at GadgetMETER

Gmail Labs Lets you Undo Sent Email

Quang Ly — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 12:03:31 +0000

Gmail Labs Lets you Undo Sent Email

Have ever accidentaly sent a message that was incomplete or something you immediately regret? Have you ever sent a message that you forgot an attachment. Now, Gmail let’s you undo the sent email within 5 seconds after pressing send.

Visit this link below to find out how. It’s a great feature.

Via Official Gmail Blog