Nick Projects

I understand that this is a fairly broad statement.  There is a lot of room to make outlook better.  I mean if outlook was half as efficient as Gmail people wouldn’t be flooding to the service.  Xobni allows more efficient processing of contacts and attachments.  It also provides some interesting statistics about your email use.  Finally it helps integrate your email data into a few social networking tools.

When you open xobni you will notice how the side bar fits nicely into outlook,  it’s more stylish than the typical outlook interface and it crams a ton of information into it’s small amount of screen space.  When you click on an email xobni gets to work.  It checks a few social networks to find information about the person and company that sent you a message.  Xobni then lets you know all of the file attachments and groups that the contact is associated with.

Groups is a fairly intelligent and unique feature that looks at all of the people who have ever been cc’d on an email chain that a contact was included on.  I correspond with a variety of IT groups so it is interesting to see who tends to get CC’d on a client’s issue or who may need to know about a specific problm impacting a client.  Also in a large organization it may keep you from having to dig up information about the chain of command for a contact.  Also,  it’s just cool data mining, although scary.

If that isn’t enough xobni will provide you trivia about your email usage, for example who emails you most often and who do you most often email you.  I think it’s amazing how many CRM features xobni is able to provide from a simple look at one’s email rather than using a overblown bloated system like Exchange Server.

Good Job Xobni.

http://www.xobni.com

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This is a cool trick I came up with a while ago and it works quite well and doesn’t really cost anything. First,  buy really really cool olive spears and put them in your olives like you would in the martini.  Then just put them in a bag and freeze them.  When you put them in the martini they will be frozen and keep the drink extra cold.  They won’t dilute your drink because they don’t have any extra water in them and by the time you finish the olives will be thawed so you can eat them.

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The video shows how the case works.  There is a printable template in the linked website so you don’t have to be good at orgami.  Just a cool way to move CD’s around when a binder won’t do.

Printable Template

Via Lifehacker

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I have been following a story about the author’s guild trying to force the kindle to remove text to speech capabilities from the kindle E-reader.  Saying that the audio license is different than the written license.  The problem is that Amazon isn’t distributing an audio version of the book.  It is distributing the book and the user’s are making an audio version once they receive it,  in real time.  This is like saying that a mother who reads to her children at night should have to pay for the audio version of Harry Potter in addition to the written copy of the book because she is distributing an audio version. I hope the courts tell the Guild where to stick it.

In fact I think Amazon should argue that all digital material should be required to distribute audio licenses with the material as a concession to vision impaired individuals who would otherwise not be able to read books.  Amazon would need to add some screen reader capacity to the kindle to really sell this but then the courts would be forced to side with the blind or the rich.  Tough choice there!!

- See the original story in Tech Crunch.

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While my PRS-505 handles some of what I and most people need,  the next generation of devices will be completely amazing.  Two promising new devices should be announced sometime next year.  The first is from a company called Plastic Logic.  This device appears to be using similar E-ink technology to the PRS-505 and Kindle,  but boasts a full 8.5 x 11 display.  The device also has a touch interface so there isn’t a clunky keypad messing up the interface.

Check out this You Tube video clip displaying how the device will function.

The second device is also cool, but looks like it is targeted for corporate use rather than personal use.  Fujitsu is marketing a color e-reader that appears to be using OLEDs rather than E-Ink.  The device is being test marketed in Japan at restaurants ( who will benefit minimally from their presence).  The device is large and actually has color which is a true step forward for digital paper.  I keep thinking of the pictures on Hairy Potter when I look at these devices.

One thing is clear no matter what format wins the day.  My daughter will probably stop using paper by the time she is in high school.

Via Slash Gear

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If you have read many of my posts you may note a certain theme,  I like to digitize things that exist in non-digital forms.  The idea of using my phone to convert websites into audio or speek into a website and having it do my bidding, capturing perfectly good paper notes on a computer even storing reciepts as digital images are all examples of taking the “real world” and interacting with it in a different medium.  Since the real world already exists and more or less does it’s job fairly well,  this post will be to describe the advantages of digitizing things for people (like my wife) who don’t see the point.

For me being digital means one large thing,  escaping the confines of physical and geographical location.  Being digital allows you to easily store data and more importantly easily move data.  By keeping data in a sharable digital format it can be accessed and reproduced from pretty much anywhere.  This portability of information allows me to perform a variety of tasks from anywhere.  In my current career I am tethered to the office only by a phone and the other people that I work with.  I can easily move the phone home when I need to work in my home office and I am able to access my co-workers via email, instant message and chat rooms throughout the day.  The fact that I can keep most information in some digital format allows me to pick up work from home without missing any functionality.  The last corporation I worked for required dozens of pieces of paper.  The result was chaining people into traditional office working environments because there was no way to effectively move resources from work to home or back.

Digital media is also far more simple to organize.  While it is just as simple to have files buried in directories or drives that make them inaccessible,  there are tools that enable far more efficient searching.  Digital stickey notes can be searched for with a few mouse clicks while real sticky notes require tearing desks apart to find missing phone numbers.  Digital notes taken with a live scribe pen can be searched even when they are hand written,  while hunting through old notebooks on paper is a tedious task.  This ability to quickly access required data makes digital information far more efficient to use than “real world” data. For example I can rummage through a badly organized evernote database far more quickly than a filing cabinet to find a document I may have lost.  This quasi-organization is a huge benefit of digital information.

For all of these resons and…. because you can.  I will continue to follow this pursuit.

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Key lemon is a cool free program that allows you to login to your computer using only a webcam.  The system is not the smartest facial recognition that I’ve ever seen,  you need to be in approximately the same position and angle when looking at your computer and also not drastically change your appearance with things like glasses being on or off.  However,  the system is free and is still quite good,  and darn impressive to see work.

Using a free system like keylemon with a cheap webcam proves one thing to me.  Facial recognition is amazing. People worry about rfid tags and implanted computer chips to confirm your identity.  Those thing will probably become irrelivant in the wake of a really powerful facial recognition systems.  Imagine if bestbuy could link your face to your credit card information and identify you from their security cameras everytime you entered the store.  They could record everything from the frequency of your visits and purchases to the types of things you like to look at when you are in the store.  The power of this technology for mareting entities everywhere could be truly amazing.  Unfortunately the annoyance to consumers could be equaly as intense.

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Desktop Stickeys

Sometimes you just need to jot something down.  Unfortunately, cluttering your desk with little notes and pieces of paper is hardly a user friendly organization.  Also, it’s pretty wasteful both monetarily and environmentally.  Fortunately, there is a free solution that allows most of the benefits of little sticky pieces of paper everywhere.

Desktop Stickeys by Zhorn Software is by far the coolest application I’ve found for managing this task.  They system is light weight and allows plenty of customization options for the look and feel of sticky notes.  You can change the color the title bar and minimize sticky notes easily.  Also you are able to assign quick keys to sticky notes to show and hide and create new notes.  This prevents you from stumbling around your desktop when you need to write down a phone number.  Another really cool feature is the ability to make sticky notes disappear and pop up at different times.  You can set mini-reminders to do different things right from your sticky note.

While this application won’t work for non-computer related tasks,  I constantly find myself in front of a computer screen,  so having notes on my desktop is the most obvious place for me to keep them.  This application works great and has been making my life easier for several years now!

Desktop Stickies by Zhorn Software

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Dial2do is an amazing free service that allows you to interact with digital services through your cell phone using your voice.  While this type of service has been available through other platforms dial2do is truly powerful because of the services it can work with.  For example you can post to twitter by simply dialing your assigned number and saying twitter and what you would like to post.  People viewing the post will see a transcribed version of what you said and a link to the actual audio recording.  I have used Dial2Do in a variety of settings and found that their speech recognition is pretty amazing.  It very rarely mistakes commands or spoken words for messages.

Another good feature of Dial2Do is the ability to listen to information from web based sources.  For example if you avidly follow lifehacker (www.lifehacker.com) you can simply subscribe to the feed on dial2do and listen to their RSS feed on your way to work.  This is like podcasting on steroids because you are actually getting the information delivered real time to your phone.  It’s also good if you need to pretend to be bussy to get out of a situation.

I use this feature in conjunction with my T-Mobile fav five plan so that I don’t get charged for calls to the service as listening to a few news sources on the way to work can rack up some charges.

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I’ve been reading freakanomics.  One of the stories is about a gentleman who decided to sell bagels by dropping them off and asking people to put the appropriate dollar amount into a box.  This simple business yielded volumes of information about people’s trustworthiness, ethics, and job satisfaction.  I believe the bagel barometer should be used by any company that is concerned about its employees morale or job satisfaction.  Here’s how the experiment should go down:

Management sends out a memo saying that to improve the workplace environment they will have bagles delivered to the office every morning.  The cost for bagles is $1 leave a collection tin next to the bagles.

Each day tally up how many bagles were taken vs how many bagles were paid for.

At the end of each week or every other week send out a scathing email chastizing people for not paying for their bagles.  The email needs to be firm but not overly harsh.  You don’t want to scare people simply make it kown that the bagles are not free and that people are expected to pay for them.  This is to prevent the rule from becoming a guidline and eventually a joke.

What to watch for:  Obviously management should be watching for any dips in the payment rate for bagles.  This change should be tracked and refferenced to any business activities that would disgruntle employees.  If there are layoffs or if hours suddenly change the bagle theft rate should be an indicator of how employees actually feel about whats going on.  If there are no changes in the work environment that would cause employee dissatisfaction this is an indicator of a problem cropping up in employee moralle.  A disgruntled employee is more likely to steal from their employer in small ways before quitting or doing more damage.

In addition to being a relatively low cost experiment the bagle consultant has the positive advantage of making an office a better place.  Who wouldn’t be more happy working in an office where fresh bagles were brought in each morning.   This is a win win.

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