ReadWriteWeb

Springpad, a rival to Evernote's popular cross-platform note-taking service, has just bumped the competition up a notch with a new release that integrates semantic technology to automatically enhance the notes you save with relevant info. What this means is that if you save a movie, Springpad is smart enough to know it's a movie and it will offer you showtimes. If you save a product, Springpad displays price comparisons and links to shopping sites. Save a recipe and you get menu suggestions. And the list goes on. In other words, Springpad doesn't want to just be a note-taking app, it wants to be a fully realized digital assistant.

Today, Research in Motion (RIM) announced that they've licensed HP's CloudPrint technology for use with BlackBerry devices. If you're unfamiliar with CloudPrint, it's a web service that allows you to use your mobile device to print documents to any available printer, and all you need is an internet connection to do so. The service was developed by HP's IdeaLab, a part of the company's central R&D arm, which features emerging technology made available for public use.

"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?

FriendlyFavor, which was released today, does one thing, and it does it well: manage favors. The service lets you request favors from your friends, and offer favors to your friends. With FriendlyFavor, you can ask your friends for help with your move, or easily offer tickets to a basketball game to all your friends. FriendlyFavor then provides you with a dashboard that lets you manage the responses from your friends, which is a lot easier than trying to keep track of individual emails.