Jay Eye Sea

When mobile gmail (m.gmail.com) first came out, I used iton a Nokia 6680. A brilliant service: it was optimized for a small screen, supported mobile browser numeric shortcuts, and used very little bandwidth. This was a step-change for mobile apps - and finally a real use for my much hyped 3G Smartphone. But for a variety of reasons, mainly to do with data plans and international travel, I didn’t actually use it that much.

Fast-forward to Feb 2008 and I got a Nokia E61 from SwissCom - a great phone, and good data package, so I was in mobile gmail all the time. That’s when I noticed that hyperlinks in emails don’t appear most of the time.

Continue reading ‘no-mobile-links.gmail.com’

Recently DropBox introduced an innovative storage solution which makes data backup and collaboration very simple. One of the differentiating features is a client which syncs between the online cloud storage and local (offline) storage. My initial impression is very favourable, but I’m still trying to understand what I might be charged for the service.

Continue reading ‘DropBox - Charging for shared storage? Heaven or Hell’

Today is definitely a good day, as Xobni came out of private beta (which I wasn’t able to get on). What’s Xobni? In simple terms it’s a free Outlook plugin that makes managing your emails much, much easier.

Continue reading ‘Shock! Horror! Xobni makes Outlook useful!’

I wrote this blog post in Google Docs and used the ‘publish to blog’ functionality to post it. The functionality to post to a variety of blogging services and software has been around for a while (since at least the start of this year) but hasn’t attracted that much attention. So does it matter? Is it useful (i.e. is it much better than using the built-in editor in your blog)? I think there are four reasons why this is the case:

Continue reading ‘I blogged this from Google Docs. So what?’

e-learning on Learning Management Systems is ‘locked away’ from the rest of the data on the corporate Intranet. Social Bookmarking should be able to liberate it - but the interoperability standards, especially SCORM need to improve first.

I wrote this article for LINE Communication’s February newsletter. You can read the article here.

I wrote the following in reply to a question on Training Tech News, a VNU newsletter focused on technology and tools related to corporate training. The question regarded how to share files that are too large for email during e-learning development projects. Most answers focused on the usual corporate suspects: Microsoft SharePoint, Documentum eRooms, and Lotus Sametime, with little mention of free services such as Box.net. I decided to take a different angle, and look at how Gmail could solve this problem, even if you don’t want to use it as your primary email:

Continue reading ‘Using Gmail / Google Docs as a collaborative file sharing environment’

This article was originally published on Google Blogoscoped as Google For iPhone Update.

In an interesting article on CNET, Vic Gundotra – a vice president of engineering at Google, responsible for developer evangelism and open source programs – revealed that a new user interface for Google services on the iPhone would be announced at MacWorld only 6 weeks after the previous revision. (Do these people ever have holidays?)

Continue reading ‘Google For iPhone Update’

Last month we suggested that T-Mobile (or indeed any of the mobile telcos) should give a way a free Asus EEE on a beefy data tariff contract. Earlier this week Mobile Today reported that UK operator 3 have gone further (or not as far?) by giving away a Dell Inspiron 1520 with a 3GB /month data tariff.

We’d still rather have the EEE, though!

Ian Leader & Jon Bradford

This article was originally published on Google Blogoscoped as Google for iPhone: Android’s beta-test platform?

I’ve been surprised by how rapidly Google has been redesigning its mobile services to support the iPhone: In less than 6 months, Google has created custom iPhone interfaces for all its key services. But it may have an ulterior motive.The services which have been customised for iPhone include:

Continue reading ‘Google for iPhone: Android’s beta-test platform?’

Ian and I have been in an ongoing debate about laptops - I have been trying to persuade him about the validity of the Asus Eee.To make a ‘fair’ comparison between the Eee and a normal business laptop I have considered the five Eees (5 x £220 = £1,100) against Ian’s Thinkpad T61 (£1,100).

Continue reading ‘Eee versus Thinkpad’