April 20, 2008
SOMEWHAT FRANK Weekly Tidbits from around the Web gathered by Frank Gruber for the week ending April 20, 2008.
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April 16, 2008
With the popularity of text messaging and the rise of Twitter via mobile there is a growing trend for find me/follow me mobile applications. FindWhere, a Sterling, Virginia based company, has just launched an application called Livecontacts to help you find and keep track of your buddies. Users can now share their location and track their friends’ locations for free. Livecontacts is taking the same approach that craigslist took to democratize the online classified advertising space by offering users what is traditionally a paid geographic data service for free.
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April 7, 2008
As a member of the frequent flyer club, I have used TripIt and previously reviewed when it first launched. Now TripIt has made traveling easier by adding some additional mobile support for users on the go with the TripIt Mobile release. With TripIt Mobile users can access what they need to know from their mobile phones including flight changes, and in my case cancellations, hotel addresses and phone numbers, and auto rental info. By adding additional integration components for your TripIt account, even restaurant reservations can be accessed.
Making TripIts applications available on mobile devices makes a lot sense since when you are traveling you are most likely cannot as easily get on your computer. TripIt offers applications to enable staying in touch with others in your social network, allowing you to schedule appointments if in the same area or at the same event. In checking out the mobile experience I snapped the photo shown here can be visited on your mobile device at: m.tripit.com.
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March 29, 2008
The adoption of Twitter, which I covered previously a number of times , appears to be acceleratingly since March 6th, as I have seen my followers double in that three week period. My friend Gary Vaynerchuk recently started to do a daily "thoughts on life" video podcast and gave his thoughts on Twitter vs. Facebook...kinda. So in response to his video I wanted to make a quick SOMEWHAT FRANK TV episode 18 with my thoughts on Twitter (mainly) as well as a few comments about Facebook.
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March 20, 2008
I have been to a number of industry events and I don't know how many times I either run out of cards are find myself cardless but technology has made it a lot easier to connect. LinkedIn recently joined Facebook and a number of other sites that have created iPhone experiences which makes it pretty easy to contact people and connect immediately thus online identity has replaced one of the features of offline identity - the business card.
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February 24, 2008
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits from around the Web gathered by Frank Gruber for the week ending February 24, 2008.
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February 23, 2008
Twitter is a great communication tool. I use it all the time. I initially enabled mobile notifications but found I was getting a constant stream of Twitter text messages which can be somewhat distracting. So I turned off mobile notifications except for direct messages. But I still find that I miss "@ replies" since they cannot currently be sent to my mobile device.
I just put in a feature request to Twitter. I would love to be able to get "@ replies" sent directly to my mobile device just the same as direct messages are. Anyone else want to see this feature added?
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February 16, 2008
Have you ever taken a photo or seen a video and wanted to immediately share it with your friends while on the go? Obviously you could upload it to Flickr or Facebook or a number of other sites but more than likely times you probably would fire off an email to your friends to share it with them. Your friends would then get your message at various times depending upon when they actually go to check their email which means you are not instantly communicating with your friends.
Movial is looking to help make sharing easier with the recent launch of Movial Social Communicator. Social Communicator offers a desktop client and mobile application that syncs all your mobile phone contacts and empowers users to send videos, photos and news directly to their friends at their current location.
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January 23, 2008
Playyoo, a social networking platform for creating and sharing mobile casual games, officially opens its beta doors to the public today. Described by TechCrunch as the "YouTube For Mobile Games," Playyoo (www.playyoo.com or m.playyoo.com on mobile phones) allows anyone to create and submit mobile games to its network. Users can create, share and discover new mobile experiences all via Playyoo.
Playyoo, a privately held company based in London, England, offers game developers a place to create and distribute Adobe Flash Lite mobile games. But you don't have to be a seasoned game developer to create a Playyoo game as it offers integrated game creator tools to enable anyone to develop and publish a mobile game creation.
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January 9, 2008
Music makes the world go round. OUTSHOUTS, a Palo Alto, California based three employee startup, takes music going 'round seriously as it enables anyone to create and send their own mixes of music over email and text message directly to your mobile phone. OUTSHOUTS lets anyone become DJ to mix music tracks with your recorded voice and pre-recorded music or other content.
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January 7, 2008
Lifestreaming has made great strides in the past year as Justin.TV strapped a camera on his head. Robert Scoble, Sarah Meyers and a number of others including myself have participated in one way or another in the lifestreaming video movement leveraging tools like UStream.TV, Mogulus and Blog.TV.
With CES taking place in Las Vegas this week and the unfortunate fact that I was unable to attend (due to my day job) I am going to take full advantage of my friends lifestreaming videos to get the feel of the conference. There is a new tool called Qik that might make lifestreaming even easier than before. Qik is an alpha product that has sprung onto the scene to enable users to stream live video directly from their mobile phone.
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December 4, 2007
Ever been in public when nature calls and you have no idea where to go? We all have been there at some point and have scrambled to find a restroom. MizPee, a creation of Yojo Mobile, launched this past summer to try to alleviate the issue by empowering people to contribute and find toilets nearby. MizPee has been busy the past six months and will soon be launching some upgrades with MizPee 2.0.
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September 11, 2007
Looking for a reaction from a tee shirt? Reactee offers the ability to create customized tee shirts that might just get the reaction you are looking for via SMS text message. Reactee, a project of TextMarks, allows a user to setup a keyword to text to 41411. By simply sending a specified keyword to 41411 you will receive a response text message created by the tee shirt creator.
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September 4, 2007
Geezeo, a Framingham, Massachusetts based startup, offers a free online social personal finance application that makes it easy to keep track of your money from anywhere. With Geezeo you can simply aggregate all your accounts into one place and check account balances online or with your mobile phone.
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September 3, 2007
If you are looking for a way to cut corners when it comes to updating your online status you might want to give twitterfeed.com a try. Twitterfeed.com turns twitter into a status feed aggregator as you can pull all your status updates into one place and then publish them all to twitter.
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July 11, 2007
If you have an iPhone you may be trying to figure out a way to optimize your widget experience. Mojits offers a potential solution as it provides a place to find web widgets optimized for the iPhone. Currently, Mojits offers a couple dozen web widget options which include AIM iPhone...
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March 23, 2007
Twitter has been the talk of the blogosphere and tech community for the last few weeks. Twitter has taken a simple idea and technology to create an easy to use and somewhat addictive product thus turning it into a growing phenomenon. I finally gave in and reviewed Twitter two weeks...
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January 10, 2007
Groovr recently launched a social network built around the connectivity of a mobile phone, mainly text and photo messaging. Groovr aims to act as a communication mechanism for people interested in constantly updating their friends or contacts with their whereabouts. Groovr also offers other social networking hooks which include the...
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