Ideas from Mark Stout

The past few months have been quite satisfying from a geeky standpoint. I've integrated a number of new capabilities into my life that are changing the way I work and do personal business. I'm never really been an early adopter--for financial reasons--so my new capabilities are mostly new to me. There is nothing wrong though in moving cautiously and acquiring technology when its usefulness is established. First, I was a late comer into smart phones. I chose the Instinct because Sprint made it affordable for three people. I read the posts of people on the Sprint Forum who were early Instinct buyers and profoundly disappointed (and mad) that it hadn't become the iPhone killer they'd hoped. By the time I chose it, I knew it wasn't going to be an iPhone, but it would be a good value and useful. It has turned out to be just that. And I've gone on way to much about the other game changer, Google Voice. Suffice to say, I like making free calls and having some con...

If you take the time to read this blog last dozen posts, you'll see my struggles to understand and implement Google Voice . It occcured to me I haven't really defined what GV is. It is a telephone application from Google. It is not yet out to the public. I got lucky a year or so ago and got a invite to the Beta for GrandCentral that Google bought and transformed into GV. It will be made available to the general public "soon" in Google parlance, which has already been almost two months. When it actually goes public is anyone's guess. Lifehacker.com did a great profile of GV back in March. It is as good an introduction to GV as I can find.

The toughest part of having a service like Google Voice is figuring out the best way to use it. I've finally settled on a plan and after a few weeks it appears to be working for me. Instead of having it ring a variety of phones, I send all incoming calls to my cell phone. My cell is always with me, and besides I share my home phone and don't want to have it answered professionally. I can hand out my number freely. If ever there should be someone I regret giving my number to, it is a simple matter to flag them in GV's settings so they always are sent to voice mail. I see that as a great boon for many professionals. When our dog had a minor procedure recently, he was in great pain his first night home. Our vet gave me her cell phone number and we did call her a time or two that night. Now, I'll never again use her number without permission, but what if we were the kind of people who would call her at two AM because our dog sneezed? If she handed out a GV number,...

I have a whole Saturday to geek out. Have a bit of real work to do, some personal finance, some filing, and some fun projects to work on. So a little rambling here as I go. Gave some thought to how a 10 digit phone number can support just shy of a billion people. There are are 303,824,640 in the US now. We each may have 3.29 phone numbers. Let's see, I have a landline, a cell phone, a Google Voice number, and a personal efax number. I've exceeded my share. Interesting article from PCWorld (via Digg ) about how the cell phone is changing the life of children on the planet. Did you know there are onl y 1.27 billion landlines, but over 4.1 billion cell phone subscriptions? Better connectivity is thought to improve education, healthcare, political organization, and can reduce fraud. When I was in Journalism School in the late 70's theory then was that the then looming satellite TV technology would bring news across borders and help eliminate totalitarian regimes . I ...