If you've ever taken a bunch of pictures on your phone and not immediately uploaded them then you're well aware of the problem - now they're essentially stuck on your phone. If you want to upload them to Facebook, you'll have to send them one at a time. Or you'll have to take the time to get all those photos off of your phone and onto your home computer.
Chute handles this by letting you quickly choose a number of photos and either share them with your friends or archive them online, making sure you never lose your photos again.
Recently, I've answered the question "What do you write about?" with "Not coupons." It's not that I don't like a deal (who doesn't?), but that coupons are coupons and aren't technologically interesting. Backyard, a self-described "scrappy young startup" showed today at the Launch conference and gives their users "relevant & valuable information about deals in their area."
Normally, this is the sort of thing that would fall into the realm of what I don't write about, but CEO Steve Espinosa showed me that Backyard has something different to offer. By working with Facebook Connect, the site immediately works to use demographic data to cater not only the look of the site, but also determine what sort of results you see. Consider it a personalized sort of Yelp search engine.
You and your friends want to go on a trip, you know that you each have $1,000 to spend, eight glorious days of freedom, and a serious case of wanderlust. How do you figure out what to do where in the budget you have?
You might do a ton of research and come up with something or you might go look at some package travel deals at your local travel agent. Now, you can plug all of these variables into Wanderfly and see what comes out on the other end.
With the South By Southwest Interactive festival just a couple weeks out, everyone is asking "What will be the big app this year at 'South By?'" One genre we've all been looking at this year is group communication. Apps like Beluga, GroupMe and Fast Society are getting a good bit of pre-conference clamor for their utility when trying to coordinate with multiple people.
Another app, called Yobongo, is getting some attention too, but not because it will make communication with folks you know easier, but because it will help you with communicating with folks you don't know who are nearby. All of it, however, hinges on one key, yet-to-be introduced ingredient - Yobongo's special sauce of location and "ambient real-time communication."
SlideShare, the popular presentation hosting, sharing and perusal website, launched a new feature today that allows users to host a live one-way video presentation right next to the deck they are discussing. The feature, called Zipcast, allows users to do video beside any presentation - their own or someone else's.
The feature is free and ad supported for basic users - SlideShare says it now sees an amazing 45 million unique visitors each month. Premium users who pay $19 per month have ads removed and can password protect the presentations. I just tested it for 30 minutes with between 30 and 40 people, viewing from all around the world. The verdict? Video quality could be a little higher (that might be my connection) but overall an excellent experience.
The free iPhone app for TechDygest has hit the iTunes app store and could be a good way for you to quickly catch up on technology news on the go. The app is similar to web aggregator Techmeme but with some additional features that really add to the user experience.
For each news story, TechDygest aggregates coverage from multiple news sources, then offers up a paragraph from each source and links out to the originals. You can generally get a good high-level overview of the news items by looking at the headlines and reading the excerpted paragraphs. You can also get a feel for the tone of the various articles covering the story and pick which one to read based on that.
With last week's acquisition of techie-adopted Twitter client TweetDeck, UberMedia stepped up as a force in the Twitter ecosystem. Combined with other recent acquisitions of Echofon, Twidroid and UberTwitter, the company now controls 20% of Tweets sent daily. This week, the company is releasing another client of its own - UberCurrent.
So why does one company need yet another Twitter app when it has four already? This one, unlike the others, intends to bring Twitter to everyone.
Sometimes, we here at ReadWriteWeb like to write about technologies that we think are going to change the world. Other times, we like to take a look at the most simple, minimalist tools that can make your life easy. This time is one of the latter.
Strike is a collaborative to-do list that makes it quick, easy and effortless (at least in terms of list-keeping) to work together with others and get things done.
The BBC has clarified its plans for the release of its Android and iPad-compatible versions of its popular iPlayer application - the British TV and radio service that delivers streaming content to the desktop and mobile devices - in light of a flurry of recent speculation. According to a post on the BBC.co.uk's Internet blog, the media company plans to have its new Android and iPad applications in their respective app stores by the end of this week.
There were a few caveats to the use of these new apps, however. And oddly enough, there was no mention of an iPhone application.
Many weeks have passed since my iPhone met its unfortunate end thanks to a dive into a pond that left it, even after i-Hospitalization, without Wi-Fi, a functional USB port (it charges, but does not sync) and with a flaky Bluetooth connection. Now, the Mute switch has stopped working, too. Who knows what will fail next?
In the meantime, I've made the switch to the Nexus S, and have been documenting that process here, in a series of posts, with the hopes that other iPhone users curious about the world of Android may learn something through my trials and tribulations. This week, I'm starting to delve into the power of Android automation, and I've found that this may be the key selling point for Android. Or alternately, the the one area that has you running back to the iPhone for good.
