5 posts tagged “productivity and business”

DailyMe delivers news that prints itself

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DailyMe is a customizable news aggregator with a neat twist--it can be set up to automatically print up the day's news at a selected time each morning, emulating some of the experience of having a newspaper delivered to your door.

The service lets you pick all the topics you're interested in and will group them together on a single page that's updated throughout the day. There are broad topics to choose from, and each one has its own menu of subtopics in case you want to hone your feed. There's also an option to call out keywords you want to track, which can help narrow a wide topic such as technology or sports.

Users can pick what kind of topics they're interested in to shape the news that comes in. Even terrorism.

Besides keywords, advanced users can fine tune the topics by the source. Sources are listed in a directory and with a specific grouping of feeds. In that sense DailyMe becomes more of an intelligent RSS reader, as you can pick the news sites or blogs where you want your stream of information coming from.

DailyMe provides several ways to ingest your news. As mentioned above, using a small desktop application DailyMe will phone home at whatever time you select and automatically print out the latest news from those topics. You can also set up multiple alerts per day if you feel like filling up your e-mail in-box with news feeds.

I found the actual reading experience to be somewhat bland. The news is spread out over several pages instead of being in one place like other news aggregation services. It's not a deal killer, but I found it to be too much work to browse through each category. I think a lot of people who are used to getting a ton of stories on a single page on major newspaper sites or news portals will feel a little out of their element.

The one nice thing is that the stories are all hosted on the DailyMe site, meaning you're not just on a portal page that's going to jump you off. There's also an integrated commenting system that's separate from the original site, as well as a one- to five-star rating system that helps track what's hot on the site. At the moment DailyMe doesn't seem to be taking advantage of these ratings or comments, as they're disjointed from the rest of the content.

Earlier today the company announced that Neil Budde, former vice president and editor-in-chief of Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, and Yahoo Sports is its new president (see News.com story). Budde is also the same guy who helped create The Wall Street Journal Online--so I see big things from DailyMe in the coming months.

Other services that aggregate news based on your tastes include: Tiinker, FaveBot, Spotback, and LeapTag.

DailyMe grabs news from topics you're interested in. If you're feeling old school you can even download a desktop plug-in that prints out the news for you.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Coordinatr is a new events communication service that's been designed for creating spontaneous get-togethers amongst tight knit groups of friends. The setup is similar to MyPunchbowl and Crusher, with just a few form fields that need to be filled out in order to create an event. What makes the service particularly useful is its integration with high profile media sharing sites and a great mobile service that lets you send quick distributed messages to the rest of your party friends.

While MyPunchBowl was one of the first of these services to really embrace that people using these services share their party media elsewhere, Coordinatr takes the process a step further by simply giving everyone with access to the event page a special tag to use. Adding that tag to photos (on Flickr) and videos (on YouTube) will automatically add them to the community page without requiring anyone with administrative access to the event to have to link up content manually.

There are all sorts of notifications options for Coordinatr. All of them can be toggled through various e-mail addresses and even SMS text messages to various phones. (click to enlarge)

Coordinatr

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Besides media sharing (usually an afterthought when the hangover wears off), the core part of the service--inviting and adding friends, is all handled through Plaxo, which lets you plug in your e-mail credentials and nab contacts without having to create an invite in each e-mail service. Pretty standard stuff really, but Coordinatr is smart enough to let you create custom groups of friends from those contacts that you can send out quick invites en masse the next time around.

Those same people on your quick lists can also elect to sign up to a mobile notification service that lets you send out SMS notifications, be it a quick location change or other important information. If I were to go back in time to my high school days, I could see this being a helpful way alert the rest of my fellow party goers if the cops had just shown up.

At first glance I was quick to dismiss Coordinatr as a late entrant to the events planning game, but it brings to the table a few handy features that innovate the space. Whether or not that's enough to push it into people's minds when they're planning events might be a stretch. I often run into a lot of resistance urging some of my friends to try out some of the newer events services we write about. Many are simply engrained in old systems like Evite, with too much fear to try some of the next generation planning services like Socializr, MyPunchbowl, and Crushr in order to avoid confusing their guests.

The best way going forward may simply be a convergence app for all of these events services, similar to what we've seen with tools like FriendFeed, Profileactic, et al. People want one place to view all this information, and there's still not a service that does it.

Your party start page has your events, plus events your friends are taking part in. (note: we'd never have a Webware party on a Monday)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

First Look: Avvenu Access 'n Share

This article was updated 6:00 pm on 3/16/08.

Let's get right to the point: Avvenu Access 'n Share is phone-to-PC remote access service with a strong base and a lot of good potential. With it, you can view and edit files stored on your PC from any smartphone. Provided your computer is running when you log in to your Avvenu account, you'll see your file system reproduced on the phone's screen. As long as your phone is outfitted with a third-party document viewer, you'll be able to remotely read and edit documents. Photos also render well.

Upgrading from the basic free service lets subscribers hand-pick which documents, photos, and videos they want stored on Avvenu's servers, for access whenever the computer is logged off or powered down. A few quibbles mar the overall experience: The beta version of Avvenu's music player has ceased being supported, Avvenu's founder Keith Barraclough told me, and the number of clicks it takes to get from the file tree to the meat of your content is wearisome. Also, the search function only works if you've got Google Desktop installed on your PC.

However, Nokia's December 2007 acquisition of Avvenu spells out change. Barraclough hinted that, supported by Nokia's greater resources, users can expect to see a faster, more streamlined remote access product that fully supports multimedia playback and lives up to its potential usefulness.

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Twiddla takes home SXSW award despite sluggish performance

Collaborative whiteboarding applications can be handy tools for small groups looking to do some brainstorming despite geographical displacement. Meet Twiddla, a free tool that lets you mark up media and live Web sites, or simply organize ideas together on a virtual whiteboard. It also tacks on live communication with text chat and free VoIP conference calling that doesn't require additional plug-ins or software.

The application won an award for technical achievement at last night's SXSW Interactive Web Awards. While technologically fantastic, in my testing I ran up against some noticeable speed and local resource problems. At times I found the application to be nearly unusable despite its simple interface and snappy menus. At other times it was incredibly responsive.

In any case, Twiddla's packing a lot of features that might attract users of premium paid collaborative services such as ConceptShare and Octopz who are seeking a very simple way to get feedback on Web design or photography. It could also easily replace WebEx for a large number of people who use the tool simply for its text chat and shared work space.

One of Twiddla's killer applications is the built-in screenshot tool. It will snap the current iteration of the whiteboard and save it into both your saved media folder and the meeting's history archive. For photo or Web design consulting, this gives you the option of coming back to a work space and editing content asynchronously.

I'm holding off on giving Twiddla a thumbs up for the time being. It simply didn't perform as well as I think it should to make me ditch some of the alternatives. However, I'm happy to see some little guys come up and show WebEx and others like the recently Google-acquired Marratech what can be done on the user interface side to make these tools simple and attractive.

Read Web pages at the same time with others, and make live markups to a site on the fly. You can also chat live with others either via text or VoIP conference calling.

(Credit: CNET Networks)