Ever needed an alarm? Wanted a reminder? Hoped to send a message wishing someone well on their big presentation? Here’s a spin on an old idea that involves using SMS and delayed email sending.

There are a number of reasons for time-sensitive reminders/messages, but they’ve always been plagued by two things:

1. The recipient needs a reliable way to receive the reminder
2. The sender of the reminder (even if it’s yourself) needs a way to ensure that they remind the recipient at the appropriate time

I suggest time-delayed SMS. SMS, or text messaging, is built into most cellphones as a quick way to send or receive short messages. One way to send an SMS message is from one cellphone to another. Another method is to send the message through email.

While I don’t know of cellphones that allow you to delay the sending of SMS messages to a specific time, a number of email tools do allow you to schedule messages to send at specific dates and times. Thus if you want to get a reminder to someone (or yourself), you need merely schedule an email that will send a message to their phone at a specific time. Continue reading…

The Washington Post website has been completely down for at least ten minutes of my lunch break:

I guess it happens to the best of us…

Woohoo! Now del.icio.us has private bookmarking available–the one critical feature I pointed out as missing in del.icio.us. Perhaps it’s because ma.gnolia had it all along… (from Lifehacker)

Mark Hurst just wrote an excellent post about people missing the point of software and technology. He brought up an ironic story about the author of a software productivity tool who couldn’t touch-type. In the comments to his post there was mostly agreement, but there was one dissenter (at least so far) who claimed that there were so many other places where he could better use his time to improve his efficiency.

Anyone who is familiar with my business knows its message–that people don’t use the most basic software very well and that they’d gain time more by better using those tools than by investing in upgrades or “productivity” tools. Shortcuts and backroads will get you to work sooner than even the fastest ‘Vette in rush hour…

That being said, I encounter friction every day when I try to change habits. People are comfortable with the way things have always been. Accepting your way to be the wrong way is tough. Changing is no easy task.

The dissenter who couldn’t type is a part of all of us. Continue reading…

I just came across this excellent tutorial about which image format to use under which circumstances (via Lifehacker). I agree with the tutorial’s analysis, but will offer one thing to look out for (discussed further down). I mention this whole topic as it seems to come up on a regular basis with developers, designers, and clients. If I’m lucky they ask in what format I’d like an image. More often they just send me the file either in an obscenely large email attachment or in a format that looks poor even for the web.

The gist of the article is that one should use the JPEG file format for photography (or images where there are LOTS of colors, such as the detail found in video games), and one should use 8-bit PNG for “text, line art, comic-style drawings, [and] general web graphic[s].” Outside of animation, GIFs are less appropriate and use a bigger file size.

The key point of the article, in addition to providing a tutorial, was to debunk the myth that GIFs are the only web friendly format outside of JPEG. Continue reading…

I live off my Outlook reminders. But one of the things that’s always annoyed me is that, when dealing with task reminders, you can dismiss them or open the item to which they refer…but you can’t simply mark a task as completed with the click of a button. Up until now I’ve always opened the item and then changed its status to completed.

Today I just realized that you can right-click on a task reminder and choose to mark it complete without opening the item. It’s really that easy:

1. Right click on a task in your “Reminders” window
2. Select Mark Complete

Enjoy!

In this entry I discuss the fine line between convenience and sharing too much online. In particular, I’m following up to my entry on social bookmarking…something handy but potentially revealing. In the very end, I also point out how the same can apply to posting reviews on Amazon, using online support forums, and other seemingly innocuous online activities.

I began using del.icio.us and ma.gnolia to keep track of articles I’ve enjoyed. While in the past I had used browser bookmarks for pages to which I knew I’d return, these sites offered convenient ways to maintain a richly searchable history of what’s interested me over time. However, I immediately found myself debating how to describe my entries and which entries I tagged…

Let me first explain why I began using both del.icio.us and ma.gnolia. For a long time now I’ve consciously separated my business and personal activities online. I have different email addresses, websites, screennames, and now bookmark lists. Don’t get me wrong, someone can easily find the other me online, but I’d rather them search for it than dangle it under their nose.

Today I was reading a great article in the Washington Post on a religiously-charged topic. I was about to tag the article to my personal bookmark list, but realized Continue reading…

The Washington Post published an article today that reaffirms an idea I’ve been spreading for a while to my peers: blogs serve as an efficient and powerful tool for businesses to stay informed within their industry. The article primarily discussed the use of Nielsen BuzzMetrics to track trends, but it lent more credibility to the blogosphere as a whole.

One of the article’s interesting points was that blogs may offer the best gauge of customer sentiment given that they’re often “gut-level and spontaneous.” Why it is that HP needed blog-metrics to recognize this particular opinion is beyond me, but I’m glad something clued them in:

Hewlett-Packard, the computer and technology company, lately has picked up from cyberspace that customers really hate leaving their computers at shops for repairs; far better, the company learned, is having technicians repair the machines in homes. “What that makes us do is that when we think about investing more in that area, we say, yes, it’s positive to do that,” said Rickey Ono, business strategy manager for HP. “We drill into the individual comments and it helps to justify our expenditure on in-home repair.”

The article also served as fodder for a program I’m presenting at the Maryland State Bar Association’s Annual Meeting in June 2006, “Relax: It’s time to Outsmart your Peers with RSS.” I hope to offer some ideas to business professionals on how they can stay informed by better utilizing RSS and other technologies related to blogs. Continue reading…

I’d been slow to adopt del.icio.us, a free social bookmarking site that’s been popular for a couple years now. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, here’s more information on what del.icio.us is. Here’s why I told myself I didn’t need del.icio.us (I disagree now):

1. I have no needs for bookmarking beyond what’s provided by the web browser (addressed in recommendation 3 below)
2. Why would I want to share my links with others? (addressed in recommendations 5 & 6)
3. I have too much stuff to keep track of already, especially online (addressed in recommendation 7)

What I didn’t realize is that del.icio.us makes browsing more efficient and research more productive. Can it be distracting to find more things to click on? Sure, but the results are often better than just searching google.

Here’s why I recommend del.icio.us: Continue reading…

Today Apple announced one more product in a long line of tools built to capitalize upon and further the success of their iPods. The iPod Hi-Fi was announced as a high quality compact speaker system that serves as a docking station for their iPods. It’s portable, it works with the Apple Remote, and it serves some value for people who want everything to look Mac-minimalist… But even the least technically-inclined have found easy ways to play their music at home, especially since they have a synchronized copy of their music in iTunes or other music software. This is nothing revolutionary.

What I’d like to see is a synchronized iPod car stereo. I’ll explain to you first what I see out there now and then offer what I believe would make the most sense…

Apple has done an excellent job of partnering with car manufacturers and car stereo companies to sell their proprietary iPod integration technology for cars. It allows for some decent controls, and the better models even provide artist information on the stereo screen. But it’s a far way off from the interface of iTunes or the iPod itself. They also require that you have your iPod with you.

A better idea would be to have a car stereo that synchronizes with your iPod, much like iTunes, and then offers a iPod or iTunes-like interface. Let’s just call it iCarTunes for the sake of the argument. People would still need to connect their iPod with their car stereo from time to time to update the car, but they’d have most of their music available when they haven’t synchronized. This would accomplish a number of objectives: Continue reading…