Friends, as a part of my job I research and explore new technologies and seek ways to put them to good use. Some fall into my "why in the world" category, some into my "that's cool" genre, and a select few I choose as "must have". Today, I share a few of the best finds with you and you may have heard of these before, but never reviewed with my intense wit and charm (see what I mean?).
Google Labs' GOOG411 and Reader
Call me biased but there's one company that doesn't often make a mistake with their product. If it needs "fixing" they do it and quickly. I wasn't impressed by the first version of Google Reader but in it's latest iteration I have found it incredible. I can subscribe to as many RSS feeds as I want and Google Reader will feed them to me however I want -- chronologically, random, alphabetical -- and know what I've read and what I haven't. I can see, at a glance, all the feed topics and after viewing those that catch my eye I can click "Mark All Read" and move on. Why use this over Outlook or IE's built in reader -- simple. I can use Google Reader on my laptop at home, desktop at work, my Motorola Q and the content is the same and always up-to-date.
Labs recently debuted GOOG-411, a voice-response system that is free to use to find business listings. You simply dial 1-800-GOOG-411 from any phone, tell it the city and state, and what you are looking for. GOOG411 presents you with the top listings and you can simply pick by number or ask for "more". Want GOOG411 to connet you, just stay on the line of say "Connect". You can also ask for "directions" or have it sent to you phone with "text message". An incredible alternative to cell providers charging you $1.49 per call to their own 411 service.
GrandCentral.com
Originally a start-up GrandCentral is now owned by Google. GrandCentral provides you with a single phone number that you provide to everyone instead of giving them your home, cell, and office numbers. They call one number and all of your phones ring, or only certain phones -- it's all up to you. Every call is logged and can be screened, sent to voicemail, recorded (which notifies the caller of the recording) and you can see it all online, mobile, anytime. You classify your frequent callers into Family, Friends, Work or Other and can choose which of those groups call which phones. And possibly my favorite part is that you only have one voicemail to check. GrandCentral is currently by invitation only and if you ask nicely I may help you out (cash bribes accepted).
OhDontForget.com
Simple service but very handy. You "add" your number to the service and then you can schedule text messages to your or your spouses phone at any time using a very simple interface. Very handy for quick reminders.
Mozy.com
Love this one. Most people have data they want to backup, but to where and how? You could have an external hard drive with one of those free softwares that copies data to that drive on a schedule. Great. Now you have it in two places hooked to the same computer that can be struck by the same lightning. We need to one-up this. Network Attached Storage (NAS) technology is essentially a hard drive on a stick. You hook the drive to your home network and your computer can backup data to this drive and you may not lose them both at the same time -- or will you? What if you were one of those affected by the April 7th tornado or Katrina and lost your house and along with it all of your precious digital data? Tax records, family photos, important documents all good in an instant.
For a while there have been services available such as Carbonite and XDrive that will backup your data over the Internet to a private storage facility. Enter Mozy. Carbonite has issues -- you need a client program to access/restore your data, you must transfer the entire file when changes are made, and multiple versions are not kept. XDrive, from AOL, also has the lack of delta transfer technology, but also cannot backup open/locked files. Mozy is incredibly easy to setup and 2GB of space is yours free. Have a lot of photos and other data? Need 50GB? No problem. XDrive will give you that for $120 a year. Mozy will do it for half that. Need 100, 200, or 500GB? XDrive will laugh at you. Mozy will answer the call and for not a penny more.
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