Qumana Desktop Blog Editor

If you’re a blogger using either Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, Blogware or WordPress, then you can use the Qumana desktop blog editor to improve your blogging experience. The Qumana editor’s simple interface offers features such as easy image insertion, simple, one-click Technorati tagging, cross-posting, offline editing, and advertising insertion. The innovative DropPad feature lets you drag and drop content like text, photos, and graphics into your post. Quama has a stable 2.0 version and a beta 3.0 version available to download and it works on both macs and PCs. I think I have to try this thing out!

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You will DROOL when you see this! Unbelievable geeked-out office!

Google Calendar is finally here! It’s really easy to use, especially with the "natural language processing" technology of the "quick add" feature that allows you to enter events like "dinner Saturday with Joel at 8 pm." Each event can be edited with details about when, where, time, etc., but you can also make the event public or private and invite guests (bye-bye, Evite?) You can let the guests view the guest list or view the guest list and invite others to attend. Of course you can also configure reminders, which can come via email, SMS, and/or pop-ups. Outlook (.csv) and iCal calendars can be imported into Google Calendar and you can share your calendar with others. I signed up right away, now I just need events to enter!

Project Gutenberg is a website that houses a catalog of thousands of free e-books. The project was started in 197,1 and for the past 3 decades, the catalog has grown to the size it is now. Their current goal is adding 500 books per month. Project Gutenberg does not digitize any books subject to copyright, so this means that the collection is mostly consistent of books printed prior to 1923 (at least for the U.S.). However, this means that the collection contains "classic books from the start of this century and previous centuries, from authors like Shakespeare, Poe, Dante, as well as well-loved favorites like the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Tarzan and Mars books of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Alice’s adventures in Wonderland as told by Lewis Carroll, and thousands of others."

FoxIt Reader is a lightweight PDF reader that allows you to view and print Adobe PDF documents. It’s small, clean, and fast — so no more waiting for that "Adobe Acrobat" flash screen to load. However, the killer feature is the "typewriter" feature that allows you to edit any text in a PDF file - not just the text in form fields. Excellent!

Feedo Style is a new service that lets you convert any valid RSS, RDF or ATOM feed into news tickers that you can personalize and add to your web site. No XML or programming expierence is necessary — you just copy and paste the code. Using Feedo Style, you can have RSS feeds from your friend’s website appear on your blog, and you can personalize the colors, size, and shape of the feed to match your site. You can even make the feed scroll, if you desire. Feedo Style can also be used to customize content for a personalized homepage like the Google Personalized Home Page or Pageflakes, and it takes up less on-screen real estate when you do so. Want to see it in action? Then check out the right-hand column of my blogrolls page where I’ve added the feed to a very good tech weblog.

Spongecell is an innovative online calenar with lots of features. You can enter new appointments into the Spongebar as if you were naturally speaking. For example, "Soccer practice every other Wednesday at 6," and the appointments are created. You can click and drag to create an appointment, drag and drop to move it, and drag its borders to resize it. You can receive reminders on your cell phone, invite them to new events, and publish public and private calendars via RSS and iCalendar.

The Spongecell developer API is built with Ruby on Rails, and the javascript libraries Prototype and script.aculo.us. The patent-pending natural language processing (NLP) engine that powers the Spongebar and email/TXT entry is written in Java. As they progress, additional inputs to the NLP engine will be exposed.

The mobile features are what make Spongecell really stand out. You can use Spongecell with any mobile phone via text messaging. Some examples of the mobile features (from the Spongecell website):

1 - Send a txt message with a new appointment to sponge@spongecell.com - for example, “Dinner with bob next thursday”. Time isn’t mandatory, the sponge will do it’s best to figure out what you mean.
2 - Subscribe to your calendar via RSS feed. There are many different time frames to choose from. Hint - feeds in “weeks” are Sunday through Saturday, and feeds in “days” are Today + X days.
3 - To find out the details of your next appointment, send a txt message that says “next” to sponge@spongecell.com. This also works for “today”, “tomorrow”, “next thursday” and a date such as “june 23″ to get a list of appointments.
4 - Set a reminder to be sent to your mobile phone. Just click the “Text Message” box in the event details.

Are T-Mobile customers (like me) missing out? More and more cell providers are offering services, or are compatible with services that offer streaming videos, including tv shows via their mobile phones and other devices. Verizon’s proprietary Vcast service offers breaking news, weather, sports highlights, music videos, and more. Other cell providers, like Sprint, Cingular, and Alltel are compatible with the newer MobiTV service, which offers TV channels such as MSNBC, ABC News Now, CNN, Fox News, Fox Sports, ESPN 3GTV, MLB, NBC Mobile, CNBC, CSPAN, The Discovery Channel, TLC, The Weather Channel and others that deliver cartoons, music videos and comedy. (They also offer a service called MobiRadio which offers 38+ radio channels to listen to on your mobile phone.)

But what does T-Mobile offer? Well, I have a link to Videos that has been saying "Coming Soon!" for more than a year now. How soon is soon? T-Mobile is more than late to the game at this point, and it’s starting to get old. However, their service is good and I’ve been with them since the Voicestream days. I keep upgrading my phone, so I probably have extended my contract into eternity. So, what can I do? I want more, but I’m stuck.

GoogleNet, the free wi-fi service that is serving the cities of San Francisco and Mountain View, Caifornia, is the topic of many conversations in the blogosphere these days. With the recent announcement of Google’s wi-fi patents, there is a definite curiousity over the future of this wi-fi venture. Patent #1 is a patent on a "method and system for dynamically modifying the appearance of browser screens on a client device." Reading deeper into the details of this patent, this seems to mean that a user would receive free wi-fi in exchange for having ads dynamically inserted into the browser they are using — just by logging onto the free wi-fi service. In addition, the browser may be modified to display some sort of logo or wording that would read something like "Wi-Fi Provided By" and the name of the sponsoring business. Imagine sitting in a park and seeing ads that read "Wi-Fi sponsored by Quizno’s", when there’s a Quiznos’s right around the corner. It’s a win-win-win: Google makes money from ads, the business gets more people in the doors from the sponsored by ad, and the users/potential customers get free wi-fi.

The second patent is a "method and system to provide wireless access at a reduced rate. In one embodiment, access to a WAP is provided to an end-user at a rate subsidized by a first entity. The first entity includes advertisements in an end-user view." This patent proceeds to detail how the high cost of a wi-fi deployment (for example, T-Mobile Hotspots), necessitate high rates recouped from the users. These rates defer the casual user from using the service. This patent explains how the cost of the wi-fi can be subsidized by advertising. 

Patent #3 is for a "method and system to provide advertisements based on wireless access points." This method describes how the ads displayed to the end user would be selected by the entity providing the wi-fi service.

Google has denied plans to take GoogleNet nationwide, but these have been hedged statements, with qualifiers like "at this time", or "right now."

The question that comes to my mind, is whether this GoogleNet is going to be a separate internet or not. Since Google has bought up quite a bit of dark fiber, and they have some ISPs threatening to charge them for using their pipes, they may have decided to say "forget you, we’ll build our own internet!" However, based on their San Francisco venture, they teamed up with Earthlink to provide tiered access. For speedier access, you can pay for the wi-fi provided by Earthlink. I imagine GoogleNet would operate the same way: for ad-free, fast access, you can upgrade to [insert name of ISP here]. Brilliant!

Version 1.0.0.92 of Google Talk now supports buddy icons and nine different themes for chat windows. There is also a Google Talk download available for BlackBerry devices. However, the new features aren’t integrated into the Gmail version of Google Talk — at least, not yet. It would be nice if when you clicked "pop-out" in the Gmail GTalk, you would have access to these new features.