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Voice-Activated Internet: Text-Free Tweeting, Blogging & More

cgseo — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 05:12:19 +0000

As some of our readers know, I was clumsy enough to hack off a chunk of my finger while making dinner a couple nights ago. This incident has severely curtailed my blogging activity, but it's led to a fortunate inspiration, as well! For those of you who are differently-abled - temporarily or otherwise - or for those of you who are simply too lazy to type, here are a handful of resources for hands-free Internet use, from blog posting to Twitter updates to straight-up voice-to-text transcription services. I hope you find these apps as useful as I have. Sponsor Jott Jott is a transcription service that takes your speech and converts it to text. With tiered subscription plans that run a modest gamut of around $4 per month to $13 per month and a pay-as-you-go option that seems perfectly geared toward casual users, Jott is competitively priced for both a satisfied userbase and profitability. The site allows users to set in 15- or 30-second snippets of audio to be converted into text. Jott also offers services for consumers (voicemail transcription) and the enterprise (a Salesforce integration ), as well. The company started in Seattle in 2006. Since then, they've integrated Twitter functions and a suite of mobile apps for various devices. QuickTate A similar service we found is QuickTate. This service allows users to leave audio messages for themselves via phone; the messages are then transcribed to text and delivered to the user via SMS or email, depending on one's account settings. Text messages are also available on the web. QuickTate also allows provides a voicemail transcription service and has a handy iPhone-optimized widget. It too offers tiered subscription plans, with a convenient free option for occasional users and monthly plans ranging from $3.50 to $30 a month for up to 200 transcribed messages. We actually tested this one firsthand and found the vocie-to-text process both quick and extremely accurate - Google Voice transcription this was not. Each word was correctly spelled, and sentences were adequately punctuated. TweetCall TweetCall was another simple, free and accurate service we tested for posting updates to Twitter. There are many similar apps on the market, including TwitterFone (still in private beta after more than a year and a half since inception), but we appreciated the quick and easy nature of TweetCall. Signing up for the service took no more than a minute, after which we were able to dial 1-877-TweetCall, enter an optional PIN and leave a message to be transcribed to a 140-character tweet. The service worked just fine, and the text of the message was transcribed beautifully: We were not too surprised to learn that TweetCall is, in fact, powered by QuickTate. We were curious enough to dig around to find out why each product had such quick and accurate transcriptions; we found both are affiliated with iDictate , a long-standing figure in the space that employs actual human beings to get voice messages into text formats. It might not be the most technologically innovative or scalable solution, but these two apps certainly did everything we needed them to, and with a higher degree of accuracy than similar applications that rely on machine transcription of messages. Audio Blogging on Tumblr Lots of blogging software applications have tools for audio posts, but few are as simple as Tumblr's. Tumblr has the distinct advantage of giving users a completely free offering, as well. Early last year, Tumblr gave users the ability to post audio entries to their blogs. While this function doesn't provide any text transcription, it does do the trick for most casual bloggers who might need to call one in on occasion. We tested it out , and weren't too disappointed. The sound was a little muffled, though, and it's definitely not a feature that would be of any use to professional or enterprise bloggers. Visual Voicemail For an extensive and thorough look at voice-to-text voicemail transcription services, check out this post from Baratunde Thurston . I did not test voicemail transcription services because I, dear reader, make a point of not checking my voicemail, ever. Although Google Voice and similar services' audio message (mis)translations can be humorously wrong, they're often helpful for getting the gist of a communiqué without having to reroute through the labyrinthine depths of one's voicemail inbox. Let me know your favorite voice-to-text apps in the comments - I'll need them while I'm resting up and trying to regenerate my finger down in the basement of the ReadWriteLabs. Discuss

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Voice-Activated Internet: Text-Free Tweeting, Blogging & More

MoveIdiot: Use the Web to Manage Your Move, Track Your Stuff

cgseo — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 06:15:43 +0000

The Internet is becoming more and more a part of the world around us: our homes, our neighborhoods, our communities. Services such as BuildingBulletin and Neighborgoods allow us to be efficient and productive neighbors and homeowners. A new service we just found takes that one step further, allowing users to put their entire moving process online. Using online tools to streamline real-world processes is nothing new, but we think MoveIdiot is a particularly useful application. Sponsor The app is a free web-based service set to launch this month. It allows users to manage their moving experience from a central location online. Users can track boxes, manage budgets, keep track of their belongings and manage to-do lists. With its pre-made moving checklists, MoveIdiot reminds users of every imaginable circumstance, need or errand, such as notifying one's doctor or bank of a move, changing one's address with the DMV or even planning a farewell party. MoveIdiot further allows users to track their moving budget, with fields for each expenditure and category, such as travel, hotels and rentals. Finally, one of the most interesting aspects of MoveIdiot (and one that, if enhanced, we'd actually pay for) is the ability to track one's belongings. The site lets users upload and organize data on all their possessions, so users know exactly where each item is packed. MoveIdiot has pre-fabricated lists of common household goods, and users can also input items themselves. The app allows users to print the packing details as well as box labels. Then, MoveIdiot's box tracking feature lets users upload or e-mail tracking information from multiple shipping companies and then view real-time updates on an interactive map. If this feature also included RFID tags from MoveIdiot itself, that would provide an interesting value add for users making cross-town moves, as well, or using moving companies that don't have thorough tracking systems. According to MoveIdiot, tens of millions of people move each year. The MoveIdiot application provides these folks with a central and intuitive application for managing this process. It speaks to the growing trend of using online and mobile tools to manage, simplify and expedite one's day-to-day life. And with the right mix of features, such as the aforementioned RFID tags and a good mobile suite, we can see a freemium model going over very well. We also wonder if MoveIdiot has considered enterprise applications for corporate moves or the same kind of labeling and tracking for items in storage. What do you think, friends? Would you use a free web app to help manage your next move? And what features do you think would be worth paying for for such an application? Let us know what you think in the comments. Discuss

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MoveIdiot: Use the Web to Manage Your Move, Track Your Stuff

Hearst Believes There’s Money to Be Made from Website Printouts

admin — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 19:07:55 +0000

Hearst is showing the Skiff e-reader at CES this week, but the company also just announced a deal with Format Dynamics that focuses on a very different aspect of the online content business: printing hard copies of websites. Printing from most websites tends to result in wasting lots of paper on printing empty pages. Often, the layout of the site also doesn't look quite right on the printed page. Format Dynamics' works with publishers to create printed pages that are professionally formatted - and in the process, the company also adds advertising to those pages. Sponsor Hearst is rolling out Format Dynamics CleanPrint technology on GoodHousekeeping.com now and plans a larger roll-out on its other sites like Cosmopolitan, Harper's Bazaar, Redbook, Popular Mechanics and Seventeen later this year. Some of the larger websites that already use Format Dynamic's technology include the Denver Post, Politico , CNN Money , Slate and the Wall Street Journal . Format Dynamics takes a publisher's HTML code and reformats it into a multi-column layout. The service then adds advertising to these printouts based on criteria set by both the advertiser and the publisher. Advertisers are charged per printed ad. Catering to Big Publishers for Now - Self-Serve Services Coming in the Future For the time being, Format Dynamics is only working with larger publishers, but the company's CEO Ethan Holien told us that a self-serve product for small publishers is also on the company's roadmap. Question: Do People Still Print? We couldn't help but wonder how many people actually still print anything from a website. According to Holien, this number is higher than most people expect. He couldn't disclose the exact data - though the company does offer detailed statistics to its customers. The only statistic we were able to get was that for a typical news site, about 0.5% of all visitors print out news reports. According to Holien, for other types of content, this number can often be much higher and given the content on GoodHousekeeping.com, Hearst will likely see higher printout rates than 0.5%. Discuss

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Hearst Believes There's Money to Be Made from Website Printouts

How The Web is Transforming Personal Finance

admin — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 20:12:27 +0000

Not too long ago, personal finance tools like Quicken and Microsoft Money used to be bound to the desktop. Exchanging information with your banks used to be a hassle. Keeping track of credit card purchases was often a question of waiting for statements to arrive by mail and then entering data by hand. Today, free tools like Mint , moneyStrands and Wesabe make it easy to track all of this information. Thanks to this, you can now get a better overview of your personal finances than ever before. Sponsor Editor's note : This story is part of ReadWriteWeb's Personal Finance series, a weekly, three-month-long look at how the Internet has transformed personal finance. Up until April 15, which is the deadline for U.S. readers to file their taxes, we'll be looking at how personal finance has evolved, analyzing top web tools and posting video of our conversations with the people who are shaping the online world of personal finance. If you are interested in sponsoring the rest of this Content Series on Personal Finance, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati . Mint: Leading the Charge Currently, the two most well-known online tools for personal finance management are arguably Mint and Intuit's Quicken Online . Mint stood out from the pack early on because the company made it extremely easy to keep track of all your expenses. After giving Mint access to your bank and credit card account, the service simply downloads your financial information at regular intervals and organizes it. Mint can even track your 401(k) for you. Mint launched in September 2007 and quickly became the darling of the Web 2.0 world. Unlike most of its desktop-bound competitors, Mint managed to talk to virtually every bank and credit card issuer from day one. In October 2008, Mint came out of beta . Today, the company has more than 1.7 million registered users and sees roughly 700,000 active users every month. In October 2009, the company was signing up 30,000 new users per week. Mint's success didn't go unnoticed by the incumbent market leaders and Intuit acquired Mint in October 2009. In November 2009, Intuit announced that it would begin to phase out Quicken Online in favor of Mint. Microsoft suspended sales of Microsoft Money on June 30, 2009 and doesn't plan to compete in the market anymore . Correction : In December, Microsoft actually announced a plan to enter the personal finance market again with a Mint-like tool it is developing in collaboration with Citi. Beyond Mint While Mint gets most of the mindshare on the web these days, it's by no means the only player in this market. Indeed, the success of Mint has given rise to a plethora of similar tools and legitimizes the efforts of companies that tried to enter this market before Mint. ClearCheckbook.com , for example, launched in May 2006. The company focuses on bringing checkbook management online. A number of other tools are competing more directly with Mint. Wesabe , for example, also focuses on giving users an overview of how they spend their money. Sadly, Wesabe makes downloading your information from your checking and credit card accounts a bit more difficult than Mint. Since acquiring Exepnsr , Strands now also offers its own personal finance tool for setting up and tracking personal budgets and staying on top of your finances. Geezeo - which was founded in 2006, and also looks a lot like Mint, has a very strong focus on budgeting. Most of these tools focus on the U.S. market, but more and more of them are also now available outside of the United States. Kublax , for example, offers a Mint-like service in the U.K. Going Mobile Just like almost every other category of online tools, personal finance tools are also making the move to mobile. Mint and Wesabe , for example, offer both an iPhone app and mobile-optimized websites. Most importantly, all of these services are also able to send out alerts to your phone - either through push alerts on the iPhone or as text messages. Whenever you run the risk of exceeding your credit card limit, for example, these services will send you an alert. Of course, a number of banks have also gotten into this game and now offer their own mobile apps. The Bank of America , Chase Mobile and Wells Fargo apps are currently among the top 10 most downloaded free finance iPhone apps, for example. When it comes to paying your bills, apps like BillMinder and BillTracker make it easy to never forget when a bill is due. What's Next? Over the last few years, the web has clearly transformed the way we use personal finance software. Over the next few months, we will have a closer look at the current generation of personal budgeting and finance tools on the web. We will also analyze the current trends around online finance software. This is the first post in our upcoming series about personal finance. If you are interested in sponsoring the rest of this Content Series on Personal Finance, please contact our COO Sean Ammirati . Discuss

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How The Web is Transforming Personal Finance

TXT.IO Takes Minimalist Microblogging to the Extreme

admin — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 18:35:14 +0000

Once upon a time, microblogging was all about simplicity. Today, even services like Posterous that started out as very simple and easy-to-use tools have begun to add more and more features . Microblogging, however, can't get much simpler than TXT.io . The service offers nothing more than a simple text interface. No more, no less. You log in with a Google account, type your message and hit "post." Sponsor For users who want to do a bit more with their text (link, underline, italicize, HTML headers, etc.), TXT.io offers support for the Textile markup language . Features? What Features? Besides this, though, TXT.io offers almost no other features. The service, for example, doesn't allow you to add images to a post and developers won't find an API to add to their tools. What TXT.io does offer, however, are RSS feeds and a mobile version of the site . TXT.io is an experiment in minimalism and won't appeal to everybody. Indeed, "elitist microblogging" is the service's tagline. Sometimes, though, simple tools like this are exactly what it takes to bring us back to the basics. Minimalist text editors like Ommwriter or WriteRoom , for example, are popular because they only focus on one thing and do it extremely well. Discuss

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TXT.IO Takes Minimalist Microblogging to the Extreme

Get an RSS Feed or iCal of Your Favorite Bands’ New Releases With Roadie

cgseo — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 03:25:48 +0000

Every now and then, we come across cool apps that allow geeks to conveniently manage their musical tastes in a way that encourages more real-world fun. Last year, we met up with Livekick's founders in New York to talk about their very thorough site for helping web geeks get out to more shows and concerts. Today, we've discovered Roadie , a much simpler app that focuses on album releases. Roadie creates an RSS feed or iCal based on a user's Last.fm favorite acts or a custom list of manually entered bands. Essentially, it allows users to keep up with album releases quickly and painlessly. Sponsor The Last.fm import is a super simple way to get users quickly into using the site's features, but we also wish they'd allow for an iTunes artist scan: The RSS feed, which we quickly popped into Google Reader, shows recent and upcoming releases: And the iCal was just as easily added to Google Calendar, for those who prefer those kinds of notifications: Users can upload other folks' Last.fm faves, as well, if gift-giving ideas are in needed. Other features that would make this app even more useful would be a Twitter OAuth to receive DMs the day before and/or the day of an album's release. And of course, we'd love to see a location-based feature that added tour dates to the mix. Roadie comes from Portuguese web and mobile dev shop Think Orange , which was founded by a couple Ruby on Rails geeks. Roadie is an experimental side project for them, and they're looking forward to creating many more projects in 2010. We're looking forward to seeing what they cook up, as well! Give Roadie a spin, and let us know what you think in the comments. Is this app useful for you? Discuss

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Get an RSS Feed or iCal of Your Favorite Bands' New Releases With Roadie

Keep All Those Resolutions You Just Made: Try mySomeday

admin — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 05:23:57 +0000

So, this year, you've resolved to lose weight, take a class, learn a new language and buy a better mobile device. Good for you - but we all know how well most new year's resolutions go. If you want to strike while the iron is hot, we've found mySomeday , a new tool for solidifying, planning and executing your dreams into realities. The site's a little bit like Dorthy.com and a little like LetSimonDecide , but it's also got simple project management tools and interesting social features. Could mySomeday actually help us stick to our resolutions? Sponsor A while ago, we tested Dorthy.com, a semantic search engine for aspirations that asked users to list goals, share progress and encourage one another. This is quite close to what mySomeday purports to do, as well, albeit through very different mechanisms. Calling itself a "goal achievement platform," mySomeday combines planning tools, social networking features and a support community. It makes sense that publicly sharing goals with one's network has a positive impact on one's chances of reaching those goals. Also, hacking a dream into a plan with a series of steps and measurable outcomes can help transform a cloud-castle into a reality. The site also reminded us of LetSimonDecide, a decision-making platform that helps users analyze their dreams or wishes to determine if they're optimal, practical and advisable. Once the decision-making process is complete, users can share their conclusions with other site members and make an action plan to implement the decision. On mySomeday, users are prompted to set deadlines and receive email reminders, but one of the most interesting features is the option to add multimedia inspirational content, including pictures and videos. Visual reminders have powerful effects - much more than mere words on a glowing screen would, we suspect. As part of their business model, mySomeday is offering branded "Expert Plans" for common or niche goals. Currently, Expert Plans are being offered by Seeds of Peace, Flirtexting, BK Farmyards and Nuru International. What methods or tools are you using now to keep your resolutions - whether they were made for 2010 or whether they're just longstanding but dormant goals? Do you think mySomeday is a site you could use? Would the imagery, reminders and community help you achieve your goals? And what do you think of the company's rather unique Expert Plans model? Let us know your opinions in the comments. Discuss

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Keep All Those Resolutions You Just Made: Try mySomeday

Anonymity, Self-Reference & Q&A: Formspring.me’s Winning Combination for the Social Web

cgseo — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 07:28:03 +0000

FormSpring.com is a data collection and management system with a particular emphasis in online forms, registrations and surveys. And enterprise-level system, FormSpring.com might seem rather dry to anyone but an online retailer or event coordinator. FormSpring.me , on the other hand, has tapped the very essence of what makes the social web so addictive. This new application, a free and social side project, nearly has all the requisite puzzle pieces to go completely viral. It's fun, engaging, and slightly game-like, and it encourages the behaviors users love to indulge. It's only missing one critical element. Sponsor A stable back end. But more about that in a moment. First, let me tell you what makes FormSpring.me so infinitely entertaining. First, the site is user-to-user Q&A . This is the kind of formula that has populated the Web with masses of UGC on sites such as Yahoo! Answers and Wiki Answers . It's also the basic formula behind such highly praised startups as Aardvark , which allows users to ping one another across networks to get answers about specific topics. Q&A between end users is a growing trend on the web, without a doubt. Second, the site allows one user to anonymously ask questions of another user. Anonymity has bred some of the most interesting and varied experiments of the social web. Very often, a lack of links to users' true identities leads to bathroom-wall-of-the-Internet content such as 4chan or YouTube comments. But while anonymity breeds trollism and is actually a dying phenomenon online, having a thin veil between the asker and the answerer of a question can act as a confessional booth in a way, allowing for more frank communication or the posing of some very interesting, controversial questions that might otherwise be considered impolite or risky. Finally, one of the most enduring trends of the social web, from its inception to the present day, is our deep and insatiable love of self-reference . The provocative beginning question for the site is, "Ask me anything," which users then tweet or post to Facebook. Answering questions all about you, your preferences, your past, your thoughts, your wishes and hopes, your regrets, what you eat and where you live - nothing is more intoxicating to the average social media user. From our first LiveJournal entries to mid-2000s MySpace chain surveys to our latest tweets, we clearly love talking about ourselves. The way that FormSpring.me caters to this inherently human attribute is by giving us the impression or illusion that someone, somewhere actually cares about what we think and do enough to ask us and expect an answer. So, when you combine the power of a Q&A site with the magic of an anonymous commenting system and the addictive qualities of navel-gazing with the expectation of being noticed, you basically have on your hands the social web app of the year just waiting to happen. And if it weren't for back end - which is likely built on Ruby on Rails, according to a few sources we've consulted today - FormSpring would have not only a money-making enterprise app but also a blockbuster social app. Although the concept is fascinating, the implementation is transparently shoddy. It seems like a hastily put-together weekend project along the lines of a Startup Weekend or Rails Rumble one-off. In fact, several developers we consulted said the site bears all the marks of a Ruby on Rails product, including rampant database scalability errors . ActiveRecord is a Rails class for accessing databases, and it's been shown in past applications to be unscalable. Concurrency issues mean that a small group of geeks or judges can have a grand time with your app, but the second it catches on with the social media crowd and then - god help you - general Internet users, the app's database is unable to handle that volume of traffic over a period of seconds, and end users start seeing error messages and abandoning ship like so many faithless rats. And since FormSpring.me is in all likelihood a side project from a single staffer or a couple employees (the company blog doesn't even mention the offshoot), it might not get the executive attention for further development or resource allocation. After all, without a revenue model, why would an enterprise-focused company waste time and energy on a social application? Speculation aside, FormSpring.com support tech Ryan Dillman writes, "Eventually, we plan to rewrite the FormSpring.me code from the ground up using the same type of database as sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc., so that we can handle the load. In the meantime, the millions of calls to the database cause frequent issues during peak times." Many parts of Twitter are built on Scala , and Facebook's database abstraction layer was developed in-house. If that kind of userbase - millions upon millions of users accessing the site around the clock - is what FormSpring is preparing for, they're going to need a much more robust solution that's much closer to bare metal than whatever they're currently running. And we do suggest they find one. FormSpring should consider monetizing and quickly scaling such an addictive little application before someone else does it next and better. So, to take the site's "Ask me anything" query and pose it to the site's creators, do you plan to seriously devote resources to create a stunning and addictive social app, or is this experiment destined for the digital dustbin? Ask us anything - or give us your frank opinions - in the comments. Discuss

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Anonymity, Self-Reference & Q&A: Formspring.me's Winning Combination for the Social Web

Synchtube: Watch Synchronized YouTube Videos With Your Friends

admin — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 17:25:34 +0000

Chances are that you are getting at least a few emails and IMs with links to YouTube videos every day. While watching these alone can be fun, Synchtube turns this into a far more social experience. Synchtube allows you to share and discuss a video in real time with up to four of your friends. The first person to enter the room controls the playback and also has the ability to change videos. Sponsor Features To get started, just head over to Synchtube.com and copy and paste a link to a YouTube video into the box in the lower right corner. Then send out the link to the room to your friends and start the video once they have arrived. In our tests, the service worked just as advertised. The chat room itself is basic, but it fulfills its purpose without getting in the way. The video sync sometimes lagged behind a bit by up to 4 seconds. This is definitely within an acceptable range, however. Just like these commenters on Reddit , we would love to see a few additional features in the app, including the ability to create playlists, search for videos within the app or give control over the room to another user. The developers have promised to continue to work on this app and plan to add more advanced features in the near future. Verdict For now, if you are looking for an easy way to watch YouTube videos with your friends without having to install a desktop app like DeskTube , Synchtube is one of the easiest apps to use. The app has some limitations, but for the vast majority of users, the current version should work just fine and most of the current issues will surely be fixed in the near future. Discuss

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Synchtube: Watch Synchronized YouTube Videos With Your Friends

Fun: FirstFollower Identifies Any Twitter User’s First Follower

cgseo — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 20:06:24 +0000

Who was the first person to follow you on Twitter? According to the app FirstFollower.com , mine was someone I never followed back until today! Chances are you're already following your first follower, but you probably don't remember who they are and it's interesting to find out. Built by Russian developer Victor Babichev , FirstFollower appears to perform a function that's relatively simple but in a much faster way than you can do manually. You could scroll back page by oddly numbered page through a person's Followers list, but now this handy little app will do it for you. It's also a very interesting way to find people who are close friends in real-life of Twitter users you admire. Sponsor It's hard to know for sure how accurate the service is, particularly since Twitter changed the way it displays followers earlier this year, but Twitter founder @ev is said to have been followed first by @dom, one of the handful of people credited with creating Twitter in the first place. The first person to follow @barackobama? Cori Schlegel , a contract web developer who's worked on several projects for tech journalist Steve Gillmor and probably a good guy to know. See also: The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Heroes on Twitter Did you know that Mary Hodder was the first follower of both chronic innovator Chris Messina's new Twitter account and our own Alex Williams ? That's enough to make you think that anyone Mary follows in the future deserves a close look. Fun and useful! What more could you ask for from a lightweight little Twitter app? This is just a small example of the kind of social graph analysis that's made possible by Twitter's relatively open user data. Discuss

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Fun: FirstFollower Identifies Any Twitter User's First Follower