SOMEWHAT FRANK

AskMeNow: Text Message Answers On The Go

Are you ever on the go and in need of answer? I often find myself in need of an answer the minute I step away from the computer and therefore cannot look it up. While having an iPhone has often remedied the problem, AskMeNow may be another possible solution. AskMeNow, an Irvine, California-based startup, is a mobile service for anyone with questions and looking for answers while on the go.

OUTSHOUTS Makes The Music Go Round

OUTSHOUTS, a Palo Alto, California based three employee startup, takes 'making music going round' seriously. OUTSHOUTS enables anyone to act as a DJ to create and send their own mixes of your recorded voice and pre-recorded music or other content over email and text message directly to your mobile phone.

Remember Your Travel Expenses With Xpenser

If you are a business traveler you know what it is like to have to come back and remember every expense you made on your trip. Credit card bills offer a good record and are a good place to start in trying to recall all your expenses but they do not always tell you the entire story as most companies require you to submit details about each expense. For example, remember who was at a company dinner, where you took a taxi to and from and why are all things that often elude us after the fact. Xpenser is here to help make remembering expenses easier.

Reactee T-Shirts That Text Message

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.

Reactee tee shirts designs can include custom slogans, keywords and even images. Creating interactive human billboards, Reactee creators must have a US phone number to create account. Users can update their tee shirts as well as manage the message that a tee shirt sends.

Geezeo: Social Personal Finance Startup

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.

Use twitterfeed.com To Aggregate Your Facebook Status Updates On Twitter

Though an early Twitter adopter, I found that when Facebook came out with its open application platform which included mobile and web status updates I stopped updating my twitter page as frequently. I just couldn't keep up with updating two places with my status updates. When you also factor in Flickr photo uploads, myAOL 'Mix & Share' Favorites and regular blog posts (on Somewhat Frank, TECH cocktail and myAOL Blog) I had to start to looking for a way to cut corners. I recently found twitterfeed.com, thanks to my good friend Eric Olson. Twitterfeed.com turns twitter into a status feed aggregator as you can pull all your status updates together to be published on twitter.

Do You Need A Hug (Shirt)?

CuteCircuit thinks you need a hug as the company has created an innovative shirt called the Hug Shirt. Leveraging Bluetooth technology and SMS text messaging, the Hug Shirt lets you send a hug to your fellow hug shirt wearing friends via your mobile phone. Each hug you send is played back like a message. So if you tap on your left shoulder the receiver of the message will feel that tap wherever they receive the message.

Simply Manage Email Like SMS Messages

I have written about email management a couple of times (here & here) and yet I still struggle to keep both my professional and personal emails uncluttered. So I am always looking for suggestions as to how to handle such a large bulk of email. Nonetheless, I just noticed an article by Mike Davidson which references to sentenc.es, a low-fi solution to email overload.

What is sentenc.es? Sentenc.es puts some rules around replying to your emails. Instead of replying to every email you receive with long-winded replies why not just pretend you are sending an SMS message and put some length parameters around your replies. Though it probably sounds like a joke, I think it actually is a good idea. You can choose from any of the sister sites at two.sentenc.es, three.sentenc.es, four.sentenc.es or five.sentenc.es depending on how brief you want your replies to be. It's so simple yet it might actually work - if you stay discipline that is.

FixYa A Free Gadget & Consumer Electronic Product Support Community

Do you have questions about your latest gadget purchase? If so you can always take a look the instruction manual that came with that particular product. However, you still might have questions which is where FixYa comes in. FixYa offers free tech support and technical help for gadgets, electronic equipment and consumer products. 

FixYa aggregates support information from its community of users who share their experiences of technical problems and solutions. FixYa offers a rating system for support content which allows its users to find the best solution for every problem and even solve new problems. FixYa's knowledgebase is based on real users' experience rather than on information by the manufacturer.

FixYa could come in handy for iPhone related questions. For example, find out  the best way to send an SMS message to multiple recipients via the iPhone. Or better yet, I'd love to figure out how to get my enterprise email flowing into my iPhone.

Interestingly, community members can also earn money for answering other users technical questions. If a user solves a premium problem they can get up to $5.00 for the solution. Additionally, users can provide live chat assistance and receive up to $15.00 for a solution.

Bottom-line: FixYa provides free community supported tech support and technical help for gadgets and consumer electronic equipment and products. 

Email Woes Getting You Down? Perhaps the Post Office Can Help

Email used to be so hip. Now it is such a pain in the ass. I have written about email management and liberating my email inbox before, but being on the road the last 19 days has turned my inbox upside down. Om Malik wrote a great piece today about email bankruptcy which starts by saying:

"Email sucks."

I agree. I have thousands of messages and I cannot get through them all. I am hoping to get to them soon, but even on a U.S. holiday (July 4th) emails continued to flow in like a river of hell. These days I am finding myself looking for more interesting ways to communicate, whether it be via the notes or comments on Flickr photos, Facebook status, wall or other messages, SMS or Twitter.

All this pondering reminded me of the good old days when getting mail from the post office, that’s right, “snail mail" was the way to communicate. So I did a little poking around and found that there are a couple of products offering users the ability to easily send “snail mail” from the Web.  If you think your email inbox is cluttered, now your kitchen counter and office desk can be cluttered too!

Postful offers users the ability to have any email sent via the post office for the charge of $0.99 for the first page and $0.25 for each additional page. Postful's mission is to be the bridge between the digital and physical worlds – thus making easy to send emails as letters to grandparents and other non-email users.

Easy Post, a Canada startup, offers users the ability have mail sent directly from the Web to Canada addresses. Easy Post is free anywhere in Canada.

eSnailer offers users the ability to send any letter over “snail mail” via the Web. eSnailer is free because it is supported by ads and free offers that are shown after you write your letter. Users must accept a free offer in return for the service.

If you want to go the other way and turn all your "snail mail" into email you should check out Remote Control Mail which was highlighted previously on TechCrunch.

Bottom-line: Information overload is a problem regardless of the medium, we can take ongoing measures to defense the problem.

Feed Alerts Over Instant Messenger & SMS

Do you want to stay connected with latest news updates from your favorite sources? Would you like to receive feed alerts and updates via instant messenger or over SMS? If the answer is yes to either of those questions you might want to read further as a few new services have popped up recently that might make it possible to get feed alerts anywhere.

FeedCrier is a new service created by Adam Kalsey, founder and former CTO of Pheedo. FeedCrier offers the ability to deliver feed alerts or updates via AOL Instant Messenger. Rick Klau of FeedBurner was the first to draw my attention to FeedCrier. Interestingly, Rick created a piece of FeedFlare to be added to the bottom of a feed. In case you do not recall what FeedFlare is, check here for refresher. The FeedFlare places a link at the bottom of your feed which offers you the ability to opt-in to FeedCrier instant messenger alerts. Rick has placed the FeedCrier FeedFlare here if you are interested in giving it a try.

TechCrunch also recently published a piece on FeedCrier which highlighted a few other similar services which included ZapTXT and Rasasa. TechCrunch had this to say about them:

"These other services are not limited to AIM, they offer autodiscovery bookmarklets and both ZapTXT and Rasasa incorporate SMS and email alerts as well. Rasasa’s push technology is the smartest, but isn’t supported by all US mobile vendors."

Read/Write Web wrote a piece on ZapTXT, sizing it up as a possible replacement for the keyword search product PubSub which recently folded.

While all products mentioned are innovative and pushing RSS feeds and syndication to new limits, the ability to not only instant messaging updates but also SMS alerts for on the go updates positions ZapTXT and Rasasa as slightly more appealing options.