Ideas from Mark Stout

Techcrunch today went with a post " Skydeck Mashed Up With Google Voice Could Be The Perfect Combination ". I'd not heard of Skydeck , so I checked this out with interest tonight. They are similar to GV but instead of managing all your phones, they manage only your cell phone. They do transcribed voice mails like GV, you can send SMS text from your PC that looks like it came from your cell, you can backup your addresses etc. all like GV. Their main talking point is that you don't have to hand out a new phone number, but that it works with your existing cell phone number. As I mentioned in a post in April, how you implement GV can take some thought. I finally decided to use it as a manager for my cell phone calls, not unlike Skydeck. With GV, I have to hand out a new phone number, but that is advantageous. The phone number I give to customers is independent of my the phone. If my cell phone is lost or stolen or breaks, incoming calls can be routed to another phon...

There are a million task manager programs out there. Everyone manages tasks differently so each seem to have their followers. Google recently came out with a basic task capability added to Gmail through Google Labs. Today they announced tasks can be shown in Google Calendar too. Looks pretty nifty. If you give a task a due date, it appears in the entry for that date. If no due date, then it is in a list that can be re-arranged. They just might have me. One piece I thought was missing at first was a mobile element. But a little research tonight discovered http://mail.google.com/tasks . Android and Iphone users have some things they can do over what is able to be done with the regular web page. For example I cannot edit tasks, or set (or even view) due dates in the mobile version. Language in the help page makes me hopeful that will soon change for the better. I'll play with it and also Remember the Milk in the near future. Task managemnt is a topic near and dear to my he...

For the past week, I've used Tweetdeck to catch up on Twitter feeds at the end of the day. I follow only a handful of people so I get more quality then quantity out of Twitter, which is okay by me. Tweetdeck lets me quickly scan my Friends twits, but also quickly see if I have replies or Direct Messages. More useful is the panels I can have for search. I can easily see new Twits from everyone, not just friends on topics of interest. Yesterday, Google Voice stopped working with Gizmo5. Since I use Chad Smith's Google Voice Firefox Add to easily dial numbers from my work's CRM, that was a hassle. I spent the days channeling outgoing work calls to another phone, but I missed being able to use my headphones with Gizmo. There was an active thread on the Google Voice Help Forum , but as the day wore on, no responses suggested Google Employees may not have seen the post and knew of the problem. Finally, I had the bright idea of twitting @googlevoice and also the Twitter addr...

In a BBC Blog today, Rory Cellan-Jones questions applications on the cloud's reliability while writing mostly good things about Evernote : "But will Evernote - and the memories it stores in the cloud - still be around in five years' time?" "We are putting more and more of our lives into the internet "cloud" - and that raises all sorts of issues about security and trust. Companies offering these cloud services will need to provide plenty of reassurance to their users over the coming years." His concerns dovetails nicely with concerns I have about data on the web. I learned in the last great Internet Boom that when the bubble bursts, data can be lost. I am very careful now to choose online providers that allow me to back up my online data. You may assume they backup their data--and they might--but the free services do not offer any real Quality of Service guarantees, so I assume the data is vulnerable. When I recently began using Evernote, I was ...

Not everything in my life is high tech. My family includes a furry member. We have a six year old Great Dane. He is our second Great Dane. While they don't live long, they give a lot of love in their shortened lives. As such, we especially appreciate Marmaduke , the comic strip by Brad Anderson. I heard somewhere that while Mr. Anderson once owned Dane's now he gets his inspiration from his daughter's two Danes that visit him often. About one in six comics hits Dane ownership squarely on the head. Today's is one. Click Here to see the Comic. I had the image embedded here, but unfortunately it did not size well. They are sweet dogs, but a bit messy. I introduced ours to a family of all girls on our street. Afterward, one of the toddlers told her mother, "I don't like him. He drools." I know how she feels.

Evernote is so much about search of your own information, and Google is so much about search, period, it is a wonder Google hasn't acquired Evernote.

I have figured out a way to call from my cell phone, and have a transcription of my verbal message centrally stored with my entire collection of documents and easily searchable by me. And it is all free using Evernote and Google Voice . I initially setup my Evernote account in July of 2008, but didn't spend enough time with it to understand its value. I revisited it lately and learned the enormous power it has. I've integrated it into my life in a big way. Evernote describes their service: Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere. Last night I finally figured out to force Google voice to send me to voice mail when I call my own GV number from my cell phone. I documented the process on the Google Voice Help Forum . Remember, Google voice transcribes voice mails and sends the transcription to me. I can s...