Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on November 22, 2006 by CyberNet.

This is a unique service that I stumbled upon earlier today. It is called ReminderFeed and it will create a reminder for in the format of an RSS feed. I thought it was very interesting because you just put in the information about the event and it will generate the subscription links for you. Then when that day comes around it will automatically appear in your feed reader.

The only bad part is that it doesn’t offer customizability for repeating events. You can choose to have the event for a single day or for it to appear every day. Maybe options as simple as weekly, monthly, and yearly would greatly enhance the usability of the service (especially for birthdays and anniversaries).

I originally thought this was something that Google Calendar provided since you can create a feed for a specific calendar. Then I remembered that with Google Calendar the feed shows all of the events, so once you subscribe to the feed it will download everything that is currently in that calendar. That means when the day of the event comes around it will not show up again, but with ReminderFeed the event is not made available until that specific day.

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This article was written on October 02, 2009 by CyberNet.

I’m not sure how many of you have decided to take part in the Monopoly City Streets game, but one of my friends pointed out something interesting. The game was promoted as being powered by Google Maps, but looking into the FAQ’s reveals that the data is not solely coming from Google. Instead the maps that you see are coming from Google, but the data that is actually being used in the backend is from a site called OpenStreetMap. Google Maps is pretty much used just for the “eye candy” and nothing else. This makes things a bit interesting:

Monopoly City Streets launched in September 2009 using map images from Google Maps and map data from OpenStreetMap for the streets that you can buy. You may have noticed that the streets on the map do not exactly fit the (blue/purple/red) street overlays, or that the spelling of the name of a street is different, or that you cannot buy a street at all. All that is because the street data comes from OpenStreetMap, but the map images do not.

I hadn’t heard of OpenStreetMap before, but after looking into it I have to say that it’s a rather cool idea. It’s basically a Wikipedia for maps. Anyone is free to update the content, which means if your street isn’t on the map you are free to add it. It does require that you collect and upload some data though.

What’s the purpose of OpenStreetMap with services like Google Maps? This isn’t designed to be a site that you can get directions from. Instead it’s geared towards developers. It’s a free source for developers to get map data from without having to worry about any kind of licensing:

The goal of the project is to have free-as-in-free-speech geographical data for everyone to use, for any purpose. Anybody can download a copy of all of OpenStreetMap’s database and do anything they like with it.

Kinda neat. There’s a good chance that from a user’s perspective you’ll never hear of this service again, but don’t be surprised to find out that some of the apps you use are getting their data from this site. One good example that I found is CloudMade, who lets you apply or create your own visual styles and color schemes for the maps. There’s other OpenStreetMap-powered solutions as well, such as MapMe or the iPhone app called OffMaps that is designed to take your maps offline. Developers are definitely using it, and it will be interesting to see if the “open” nature of the site will contribute or hinder its success. After all, one day you might wake up and your street will cease to exist (on the map that is). 🙂

OpenStreetMap Homepage
Thanks Pete!

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This article was written on June 08, 2007 by CyberNet.

The new fad these days is collaboration via video conferencing, instant messengers, or just by sharing files over the Internet. Google Docs has been known to embrace that by offering a collaboration feature on both their document or spreadsheet service, where sharing the information is as simple as entering in the user’s email address.

When sharing a document with people, you can choose whether they are a collaborator who can make changes to the document, or they can be just a viewer that can not edit anything. Up until now the people being invited would need to have a Google account just to view the document, but Google is doing away with that.

Now when sharing a document you’ll see a new option allowing invitations to be used by anyone (pictured above). A URL is then sent to the individual that you’re inviting via an email, and even if they don’t have a Google account they will still be able to view the document that you’re sharing:

As you can see you’ll still need to login if you want to edit the document, which might be wise for security purposes. Otherwise anyone could share the necessary URL with someone else who could make changes that you’re not aware of. Well, it might not be that bad since you could just go back to a previous revision since Google keeps track of them all.

I’m finally starting to see myself warming up to the Google Docs service, although I would like to see synchronization capabilities between Microsoft Office and Google Docs.

Source: Webware

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This article was written on July 03, 2007 by CyberNet.

FeedBurner just announced that because they were acquired by Google they are now able to offer their PRO package at no cost to all users. What kind of goodness does such a package get you? For starters you can get advanced stat tracking that lets you see who has viewed or clicked items in your feed. It also lets you see the "Reach" which is an estimate of how many subscribers interact with your feed on a daily basis.

That’s not all though, you can also get "MyBrand" without paying a dime! As long as you don’t mind playing around with the DNS entries for your site you’ll be able to create your own feed URL. Instead of having an URL that looks like http://feeds.feedburner.com/CyberNet you could have one that looks like http://feeds.cybernetnews.com/CyberNet. This has several benefits to it, with the most significant being a professional-looking feed URL.

So how do you setup the two services? Here’s what you have to do:

• You can turn on advanced stats by signing in to your account, navigating to the Analyze tab and heading to the FeedBurner Stats PRO section. Click the "Item Views" checkbox to activate these PRO features. When you’re viewing a listing of your feeds you should then see a "PRO" label next to the feeds you have upgraded.
  
• To get started with MyBrand, sign into FeedBurner, click the "My Account" link in the upper left-hand corner, and then click "MyBrand". I had to email them to setup the MyBrand, and haven’t heard back from them yet. I’m not sure why an email is required, but I’ll play along.

I have a feeling that this will just be the beginning. It is only natural that Google will begin working to combine the FeedBurner statistics with Google Analytics. This would give a central location to monitor both your site and feed stats, and I don’t think there is any denying that this will happen.

FeedBurner Homepage

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This article was written on November 25, 2006 by CyberNet.

I’m not sure if you have ever heard of Pinger before but it is an amazing new service that was just started a short while ago. It definitely reminds me of the voicemail feature that most cellphones come with but it goes way beyond that by making it feel more like an email system. You can send, reply, and forward (even to more than one person) a message in a matter of seconds.

You can be notified via text message or email when there is a new “Pinger” that you can listen to it. The service ties everything together very well and instead of trying to describe how things work just checkout this video that the founders made:

I created an account for the service, which is currently in Beta, and you don’t have to be invited or anything. It just asks you a couple quick questions like what’s your phone number, email address, phone carrier, etc. and then your account will be opened. They do initially send you a text message to show you how the service works but after that you can disable the text message notifications via the Options (I get charged per text message so I disable this option).

MySpace users will undoubtedly love Pinger because you can post audio comments on your friend’s MySpace page by using your cellphone. I don’t have a MySpace account to try this out with but it does seem really cool.

I wonder how long it will be before cellphone companies ditch the regular voicemail and go to something a little more extravagant like Pinger. Maybe one of the companies will even buy the service. 😉

Note: At this time Pinger is only available for U.S. residents.

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