ReadWriteWeb

Paul and Sara are getting married. On Twitter. Sort of. They're technical sorts with a long-standing relationship with social media, so when they decided to legitimize their personal relationship, they figured they wouldn't divorce their daily life from their personal lives while they did it.

"A purple dress. A kilt. A best man who is *all* woman. Live-streaming and live-tweeting. A Twitter-themed-pot-luck-pool-party-reception. Rock Band. A pinata. A sex toy toss in place of the bouquet."

Yarp?

At ETech today members of the InSTEDD team spoke about how they have been building SMS and mapping applications, in the Mekong Delta in the jungles of South East Asia. InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters) was organized in 2006-2007 and aims to harness technology to help with early warning, prevention and response to disasters and public health threats. Some of the issues InSTEDD came across in the Mekong Delta were figuring out multilingual issues, human interaction design for 140 characters, ad-hoc team creation, and data integration of disconnected systems. After the jump is a summary of their presentation at ETech.

"From paper cards to email contacts." This is Part Two of a two-part post. The first part is here.

As noted earlier, I had the opportunity to put e-business cards to a real-world test this past week at the DEMO conference. While I found a somewhat workable solution for sending out my contact info to others, I still collected a large stack of paper business cards from the people I met. These cards had to be digitized in order for them to be of any use to me. While people with administrative assistants are fortunate to have this tiresome data entry process handled for them, those of us without are stuck doing it ourselves. We can either sit at the keyboard for hours or use a scanner. Shouldn't there be a better way?

Part One: "Here's My Card"

This past week, I had the opportunity to put e-business cards to a real-world test thanks to a recent trip to the DEMO 09 conference in Palm Desert, California. You would think that if any group of people would have adopted the electronic business card model for exchanging their contact data, it would be the technology community. Yet at conferences like DEMO and all the others, printed paper cards are still exchanged. Why is that?

ReadyPing is a new mobile solution for restaurant owners which lets a host or hostess alert customers when their table is ready via a mobile notification. The system, a vast improvement over the restaurant pagers currently in use today, lets diners wander beyond the restaurant's immediate vicinity - something that would be especially handy for those one hour waits. The only question we have about ReadyPing is this: why didn't someone think of this sooner?

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we love to talk about the latest and greatest Web 2.0 applications. However, while a lot of these services make our life on the Internet a lot easier, another group of services on the web helps to keep our offline life organized. Here is our list of the top 'real world' apps that have made our offline lives easier in 2008. We will look at the following five six categories: finance, travel, education, health, politics, and non-profits.