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Note-taking, cataloging, and bookmarking service Evernote divides people. Either people love it or meh...not so much. Many of us fell into the latter category and never really used it until we learned the popular service became available for Blackberry users. Currently the Evernote for BlackBerry requires BlackBerry OS 4.6, but the company promises more devices will be added later. We've had a couple of weeks to put it through its paces and if you combine it with its desktop application and Web app, it's actually fairly useful.
FileTwt is a new service that enables file transfers using Twitter, from presentations and rich text documents to ebooks and music files.
At the moment, the UI is a bit clunky and the file sizes are capped at 20MB, but the service presents an exciting opportunity nevertheless. Once mobile capabilities are introduced, FileTwt would allow more freedom for the 9-to-5ers among us. And it already allows for mass sharing (either via public streams or multiple-recipient DMs) of files, which is awesome news for self-marketing musicians, who desperately need better online promotional tools.
Air pollution is one of the number one factors that affect our quality of life and health. Currently, pollutants are measured at different stations in a city and that data is aggregated to a single number (the air quality index) and published once a day on a website. There is not enough data that gets gathered to evaluate air quality in a given neighborhood and that data is hard to find. Now a European company called Sensaris is using Bluetooth wireless sensors, used in combination with mobile phones, that allow citizens to monitor and report air and sound quality data. Its first large scale deployment is in Paris.
Oh, how I'd like to be Merlin Mann... master of the email demons, wizard of the inbox. (Also, brilliant and funny as hell.) He has a methodology for taming the beasts that lurk inside Gmail, Outlook, Entourage, Thunderbird and Eudora, and his gleaming, empty inbox serves as a beacon of hope to all that it might be possible for you, too.
Of course, knowing something's possible is a double-edged sword... at least, for those of us procrastinators who have yet to find the time to become inbox black-belts. (Yes, yes... the investment of time now will more than pay for itself in future productivity. Thanks for the tip. Now please look up the word "procrastinator.")
Agency recruiters, employers and prospects now have a free online professional reference automation and collaboration tool to help them do their jobs better. ReferenceBot was launched recently and adds a "social 2.0" element to the headhunting market.
Time again to see what excellent events are happening around the world that you can participate in and network at. In this feature on ReadWriteWeb, we provide a weekly roundup of upcoming social Web events. We'll publish it every weekend, as good a time as any to review your conference plans.
Know of an event taking place that should appear here? Let us know in the comments below or contact us.
There are reports today that Iran has blocked Facebook, apparently to "prevent supporters of the leading opposition candidate from using the site for his campaign". Opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi has more than 5200 supporters on the popular social networking site and is said to be gaining momentum against current Islamic Republic of Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The United States Army has more than 700,000 desktops that currently run on Windows XP operating systems and use Office 2003 software. Despite a Windows 7 release just around the corner and rumblings about Office 2010, the Army announced that it will upgrade to Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 by the end of this year. Large corporations and government agencies are typically slow to adopt new technologies and software, mostly because of security, hardware and training issues.
A few days ago, the social web browser Flock released version 2.5 of their software, integrating Facebook Chat, improving Twitter functionality, and adding a new broadcasting feature called "Flockcast." As we evaluated the upgrade, a thought occurred to us: this browser should be the epitome of everything we love about the social web and yet the company has seen only moderate success. Flock has been downloaded 7.5 million times but has just 1.1 million active users. (Compare that to Firefox's 270 million). Is Flock doing something wrong here? Or is the product just too niche to ever see mainstream success?
