Cool e-Book Reader

Kindle is Amazon's new wireless reading device. I watched the following video about it and I was impressed about its ease of use. As it works over GSM just like a common mobile phone it can be used almost everywhere! But you will only pay for the content you subscribe, not for the communications! The display also looks sharp and Amazon states that Kindle's battery will last for days which is also good! Kindle is sold out but there will be more available before Christmas! The current selling price is $399 and it is only available at the US. Boring! Sometimes globalization seems to be a slow process when it comes to new product availability... I will not discuss why because this is due to a big list of reasons like carriers, local authorities...

Cool Online Storage

I recently subscribed to JungleDisk, a "reliable online storage powered by Amazon S3". I chose Jungledisk among other online storage providers because "Unlike other services, with Amazon S3 ™ there is no mimimum and no maximum amount of data you can store. You pay only for the actual amount of storage you are using.". I found JungleDisk's value proposition more interesting than competitors like Box.net or BingoDisk. I'm waiting for gDrive (not confirmed as we speak) and Microsoft's Live Drive or Skydrive to become public (still in beta).

"Jungle Disk makes it easy to store any data securely online, and access it from any computer just like a local disk drive. ". They really mean that because they developed client applications for Windows, Max OS X, Linux and USB (works with all from an USB pen). I use it like a regular drive on my home and office computers and I feel safe about my data because "When you copy a file to your Jungle Disk it is encrypted and uploaded in the background to Amazon.com's servers. ". If you want to know more about how it works just check it out here.

Cool Maps and Driving Directions

I often use Mappy whenever I need to go somewhere and I don't have my GPS with me. Mappy is a french alternative to Google Maps or Via Michelin. It has some nice features like expenses calculation and a clean interface and I guess that's why I usually go there first when I need a driving direction.

Cool free video calling from any website

While I was taking a look at GigaOM I found this post about Tokbox.

You can read at Tokbox's website that "Tokbox is a free service that lets you talk with your friends over live video. Here's how it works: you sign up and we give you a link. When you want to talk with anyone, just give them the link - they click and you chat. We make it easy for you to put your TokBox on your social network profile, blog, or personal webpage. Anyone can come to your page and see a "Push to Talk" button. The click it and connect to you in real time using live video and audio.".

Sounds great doesn't it? I haven't tested it yet but I will try it for sure one of these days. Meantime I found this video at Youtube where you can watch it working.

Cool Open Identity Protocol II

It seems that there is a great debate surrounding OpenID usefulness. I wrote a small post about OpenID recently and since then I became more interested about it. As I mentioned it seems that OpenID usefulness is beig debated and of course that as any technology it has pros and cons. If you want to check out what is being said take a look at JanRain's blog or NY Times Freaknomics blog.

No matter what is being said I think that OpenID is usefull and I will use it whenever I can and I encourage all webapp developers to support it! Why? Simple! If you are developing a new webapp and you support OpenID you lower the entry barriers for your users! If a prospective user wants to try your app he will only need to make login using his OpenID and he's ready to go! As a user if my registration process is simplified I will give any webapp a try! OpenID is usefull for webapps users and developers and I hope it succeeds in the competitive technology market.

Cool Mobile Speech to Text and More II

I forgot to mention email2phone when I published my last post.

"email2phone is a service that converts ordinary text email into phone voice messages. Like ordinary email, the eMail2Phone.net phone voice messages are highly interactive and you can hear, reply-to, save, delete, skip, and send these messages. eMail2Phone.net manages these email-to-phone voice messages in two ways:
Outbound – Email messages that are sent to your phone as high-quality, phone voice messages. Inbound – Email messages that are retrieved as phone voice messages when you dial into the eMail2Phone.net system." as you can read at their website.

email2phone is available in the US, UK and Canada which makes me believe that supports only english speaking voice messages.

Cool Mobile Speech To Text and More

Stuck in traffic? Get things done anyway! How? Try Jott! As I didn't find one sentence that explains what Jott is/does I'll quote this Wikipedia article: "Jott is a voicemail service which allows its users to call a toll-free telephone number and say a small phrase, which is then transcribed to text and sent to themselves or other people through email or SMS.". At their website you can learn what else you can do with Jott: reminders, to do lists and so on! Mobile phone carriers should offer this kind of services to their customers!

Non-Us resident? Perhaps you should ask your carrier for Spinvox apps. They offer speech to text and text to speech apps such as:

• "SpinvoxmyVmail: Get voicemails as text or email: Never miss a message again;
• "SpinmyBlog - Blog from anywhere: When it suits you.";
• "SpinmyMemo: Speak reminders, memos and notes: Straight to your inbox.";
• "SpinmyBroadCast: Send text messages to groups: Simply by speaking.".

Cool Open Identity Protocol

At JanRain one can read that: "OpenID is a new way to identify yourself all over the web. With your own personal OpenID you can login to any OpenID-enabled site (there are over 1,000 of them and that number is growing everyday) and identify yourself as you.
It’s one username and one password for all of the sites that you go to. It means no more registration screens on the sites you go to. Most importantly, OpenID is open; its a protocol that has been developed by a diverse community interested in solving the identity problem once-and-for-all. You can use it at any website that is OpenID enabled as if I already had an account. It blurs the lines of where you you have an account, and the question you ask changes from “Do I have an account?” to “Is the site OpenID enabled?”".

I already created my OpenID account at myopenid.com and I am using it with two webapps that support it right now: Basecamp and Gastus. I really hope that this OpenID gets to be popular so we can drop the old password manager apps. One ID to rule them all! :)