Kendall's Online blog

Saturday, April 15, 2006

Frappr - Map the location of your friend, classmates, alumni

Frappr (Friend Mapper) from Rising Concepts is a social networking site that allows you to map the current location of groups of people.
The Frappr site states that ……….. “lets you see the zip code where your friends live or work, letting you find out who works in the office building next door and who lives in the apartment complex across the street.”
And the Wikipedia stub says…………“is a Web 2.0 website, currently in beta, which makes use of the Google Maps API. The site allows users of online communities to pin themselves on a map, and see other members location”

Like any other social networking site. You can send messages to one another and the email address of the users are not revealed. The sign up process is fast, you need is the current location and an email address and after registering you can join other Frappr groups or set up your own group.
One other cool feature that makes the sign up process painless is the predictive location feature that provides a variety of locations for you based on the first few characters of the city you are located in, and just in case your city isn’t in the drop down list, as id elink allows you to inform the site’s administrator. You can also apply tags to the group formed, so members can search and find the group easily.
The site is perfect for alumni groups and the maps can be easily integrated into your website as a button or thumbnail of the actual map.

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Skype acquires Global IP Sound Competitor

Skype acquired Global IP Sound (GIPS) competitor Sonorit AB which GIPS has sued for allegedly violating GIPS’ trade secrets and engaged in acts of unfair competition.Most of Sonorit's staff them are former GIPS employees. GIPS Voice engine is in use by Skype, Yahoo Voice and Google talk

read more | digg story

Monday, April 10, 2006

The looming format war

Not so long ago we were all excited about the prospect of the Visual compact disc format.It came it saw and certainly did not conquer .What happened was not just a case of a sub-standard technology but it was overtaken by the essence of time and invention.Roll back the years and we remember efforts like the Sony betacam VCR, or the more succesful VHS format adopted by some other firms.
Last week,i went window shopping in town and stumbled into Dixons the high tech shop.I have heard about high definition TV but i had not set my eyes on it before .There i was ,mouth almost open and in awe of HD-TV.The picture quality is refreshingly brilliant and dare i say close to perfection.Everything about the graphics i can say is picture perfect and i could boldly say that i could see the beads of sweat on the musicians face and even the tiniest of spots i did notice.What am i driving at ?
I cant believe that after this brilliant piece of innovation from these manufacturers,the only snag is the format of the discs to run with these equipments of wonder .A fraction of a millimetre is what seperates Sony and Toshiba .In Sony`s blue ray format,it is 0.1mm thick while Toshiba`s format is 0.6mm.I gather that both firms cant come up with a compromise that would alienate not just the major hollywood studios as to what format it is to shoot its productions but it will also put us consumers in a quandary.
Sony along with Philips and Pioneer have persuaded Dell,the worlds largest pc maker and most of hollywood`s major studios to back its blue ray format which will go on sale in a few months and cost twice as much as Toshiba`s HD-DVD format which is being backed by software giants Microsoft.Toshiba is expected to steal the lead though with it s lauch due before Sony`s blue ray .
The blue ray though is expected to come on strong with the release of the their playstation 3 console in November even thogh Toshiba have announced thatthey will make portable drives for the microsoft X box.
I understand that the blue ray discs would have a 25gigabyte storage while the more conservative HD-DVD would have 15 giabytes of storage.
To cap things,if the situation continues,we the consumers might be the ones to pay the price as the shops will stock up on both formats and we will be the ones to make the choices that decide the future and destiny of these brilliant works of innovation.
And lets hope that before we do that,they are not phased out of the market by a newer and more interesting product.

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Emoze - Free email push software and blackberry killer

Emoze from Isreali company emblaze is a FREE global Push E-mail service for mobile devices which will push send your E-mails and calendar and task data to you anywhere your mobile device is connected.
The personal edition connects to Outlook and pushes any new (POP) email or changes to your PIM data directly to the mobile device without storing the information on any server provided the client and desktop side software are connected to the emoze server.
The server only authenticates the desktop and mobile device and communication then takes off directly.
The server side software uses only 9M of system resources and its download size is slightly less than a Megabyte.

There is also a corporate edition but I haven’t tested it that works with Exchange.

Devices currently supported are:
AnexTEK - SP230
Asus - P505
Audiovox - PPC4100, PPC6600, XV6600
BenQ - P50
Cyberbank - POZ CB-0870, POZ CP-X301
Dell Axim X3, X50, X51
Daxian Telecom - CU928
Dopod - 696, 699, 700, 818
E-TEN - M500, P300, P300B, P700
HP - iPAQ h6315, h6320/6325, h6340, hw6500 Mobile Messenger, hw6510c, hw6515
i-Mate - JAM, PDA2, PDA2K, Pocket PC
Lenovo - ET960
Nokia - 6630, 6680
O2 - Xda II, Xda II mini, Xda Iii, Xda IIs
Orange - SPV M1000, SPV M2000, SPV M3000
Qtek - 1010, 2020, 9090
Samsung - M400/M4000, SCH-i730, SGH-i700
Siemens - SX66
Sprint - PPC 6600/6601
Telefonica movistar - TSM500
T-Mobile - MDA Compact, MDA III
Unitech Elictronics - PA950

Currently only Outlook is supported but from their email they promise to support outlook express and Lotus Notes.
The client software connects quickly and doesn’t take up a lot of memory which is rarely sufficient for a mobile device and it can be set up to load on startup. Posted by Picasa