Quick Look: TripChill Automated Travel Assistant, A Mobile Friend in the Unfriendly Skies

Posted by: weiganla on Aug 26 2008 - 105 views

Traveling is a pain in the neck. Which completely explains why I just took a new job that will have me on the road 70% of the time. Seriously, I like going places, but with all the security measures turning airports into a much less fun version of a three-ring circus, I’ll take all the help I can get organizing and  keeping track of my travel arrangements. 

A new free service, TripChill, thinks it can help me out. TripChill is based around an online portal that stores your itinerary, and on the go it works with any phone with SMS or a mobile browser. From there, it offers a myriad of services to help you deal with everything that has to fall into place to make a trip successful and that tends to jerk you around unpredictably at the absolute worst times.

I took TripChill for a test drive last week during a business trip. Read on for a quick look!

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Jott Comes Out Of Beta

Posted by: danc on Aug 25 2008 - 20 views

Jott is great. Jott is convenient. Jott is key to a whole lot of people’s productivity these days. Jott is out of Beta.

The ability to make a call to Jott, speak for 15 seconds and receive a transcription back (or even send it to someone else) is amazing and since it was first launched, Jott was entirely free. Well, the party is over. Mostly.

Jott emerged from Beta last week and is now a fee service. Like Evernote, Jott will continue to offer a free, but limited, service. With it you will be able to record a 15 second message and have a transcription returned to you. Jott for iPhone, as well s Jott Express, will also remain free for 15 second messages.

If you want your Jott’s returned to you via email or sms, use a Blackberry, want access to all Jott feeds rather than just the free limited ones, however, you are now going to have to cough up some cash. Fortunately, the pricing plans seem rather reasonable, especially when you take into account that availability of a free option.

The $3.95 Monthly plan gives you
-15 seconds of recording time
-allows you to manage Jotts via email
-returns your jotts to you via email or sms
-adds Jott for Outlook (but not for Blackberry)
-adds Premium Jott links (key if you use RTM, Toodledo, Mentat or other web services)

The $12.95 Jott Pro subscription includes all that plus…
-increases recording time to 30 seconds
-adds Jott for Blackberry

Jott will also offer Pay-As-You-Go options that provides 60 seconds of recording time and access to all of Jott’s feature without being locked into a contract.

Every company needs a business model that either looks toward acquisition or brings in regular revenue and I figured Jott would obviously have to come out with a pricing structure. I’m glad to see that they have made it one that is accessible to all and includes reasonably priced premium services for those who need more and are able and willing to pay it.

For details check Jott’s website here.

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Untethered: Do you Remember the Milk?

Posted by: Ragart on Aug 13 2008 - 424 views

I’ve been trying to move away from Outlook and move my stuff into the cloud, but there aren’t really any obvious solutions out there. I’ve had to use multiple programs to move my calendar, tasks, and contacts into the cloud. One of the programs I tried out along the way was Remember the Milk. It’s got a unique name, a moo moo cow for a logo, and is accessible in a lot of different ways on a number of different devices (one of which is in your Gmail applet on your computer!). RTM looks like it’s making a lot of the right moves, but is it really powerful enough or do I just have my head in the clouds?

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Congrats to Evernote! Lifehacker Top Five Tools For Notes

Posted by: Brandon Steili on Jul 31 2008 - 51 views

HEY! HEY YOU!

I’m not totally sure if you’ve been under a rock lately, so just in case you haven’t noticed, one of the tools I’ve been preaching about for a while now is really starting to hit the big time - including having made it to onto what (if I was a developer) would consider to be a very coveted list … the Lifehacker readers list of the top 5 note-taking tools. With other things in the list like good old pen and paper (moleskine, hipster PDA) as well as things like One Note from Microsoft, this is a big event for the folks at Evernote I’m sure. I’m know I’m thrilled for them!

Anyway, here’s a bit more info from the Lifehacker post - including some links for how to get on the Evernote train. For me its still a daily use application - one I use seamlessly on my work PC, my Macbook and my iPhone. Also, if you have time click on through to Lifehacker to put your opinion in … they’re now voting to see which one is the best!

Evernote (Windows/Mac, Free)Evernote is a free, cross-platform universal capture application. With support for text, images, audio, tagging, and syncing between its web interface and all of your desktop installations, Evernote offers seamless capturing of information no matter where you are. Images you add to Evernote are searchable by text, and Evernote even supports several mobile devices—including the iPhone and Windows Mobile phones. If you can’t install Evernote on a computer, you can also use Evernote’s web interface and clipping bookmarklet to pull anything into your notebook. Evernote is free to use, provides 40MB per month of upload space; for $5 per month or $45 per year, you get 500MB.

(Via Lifehacker)

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Quick Look, NFB Widgets!

Posted by: Peter Murphy on Jul 16 2008 - 116 views

  What’s a Widget? Is it like a thing-a-me-bob?

widg·et (wjt)

n.

1. A small mechanical device or control; a gadget.

2. An unnamed or hypothetical manufactured article.

---

[Perhaps alteration of gadget.]

When I posted about Access’s new addition to the Netfront family I didn’t think I’d be brought to my knees by a widget. We are all familiar with widgets with our desktop browsers, but the addition of dedicated widgets to a Windows Mobile browser seemed like a novelty. Well it’s not a novelty, and it’s not even funny. The base application installs on it’s own then you add widgets, like modules, to the base application. You can add weather, news, world time, whatever widgets are available now.

 

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