Technology in Mind

My wife is from Germany, and I’m always seeking ways to try and find unique ways to keep the communication lines flowing between her and her family.  I’ve established a German VOIP number so that her family can call us in North Carolina, but by dialing a local Bremen telephone number. And of course we’ve been using video conference tools since 1999, originally using netmeeting over dialup.

One communication channel that has surprisingly been a challenge is sending International SMS’s.  Our carrier, Suncom, doesn’t even support it.  And the carriers in the U.S. that do support International SMS charge around 40 to 50 cents for each incoming/outgoing message, and it isn’t considered part of any unlimited SMS package that you might have added to your plan.

I know there are lots of websites that allow you to send free text messages to nearly any carrier in the world. That’s nice and all, but pointless if the person can’t respond to it.

I’ve tried Ipipi (I know wierd name). I’ve also tried Peekamoo, and Jaxtr.  Peekamoo requires the recipient of the SMS to be registered in order to respond to an SMS.  And I noticed that in Germany, their closest gateway number was the UK.  Since that would mean the recipient would have to send an Intercontinental SMS message to another country I believe that might be more costly than a traditional SMS message. (I could be wrong.)  Jaxtr recipients of SMS can receive a SMS, but they have to click on a link to respond via the web. So these two basically pale in comparison to Ipipi.

Ipipi seems to be the only site I’ve found that permits me to send SMS’s via mobile.  It’s pretty straightforward and it works.  It’s a pay as you go service and there’s no free options.  But I’ve sent many SMS’s this way and it works. I can send via the web or through my mobile phone to the gateway numbers, and it just works.  They also have gateway numbers in Germany so that when a recipient responds, they respond back to a German SMS gateway number rather than sending an SMS to the UK or over to the U.S.

I’m not going to go into detail of how it operates as their website is pretty comprehensive in explaining the details how it works.  But if you are looking for a solution for sending native SMS’s (not IM messages over GPRS, etc.) then this solution seems to offer the most straightforward approach.

I’m always looking for new offerings and methods, so let me know if you come across something better.

What are you doing?

That’s what Twitter asks, and provides you 140 characters to state your response.  Therefore when most people encounter Twitter and it’s prospects of usefulness, it’s potential isn’t realized.

And I’ll admit that was also my first reaction when I signed up with Twitter over a year ago. Why do people feel compelled to share their little nuances and activities throughout the day?  Can you really connect with other people through these little written statements? What is it’s attraction?

And ultimately it’s power really can’t be realized without joining and seeing for yourself.  Twitter isn’t explained very well, as it is experienced.  Therefore the many attempts to do so, (including my own) probably fail to adequately get the point across.

I did chance once across an explanation I liked on someone’s blog.

 http://www.parmet.net/pr/2008/05/12/is-there-a-doctor-in-the-house-2/  “It’s like entering a noisy, crowded stadium and saying, ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’… The entire stadium quiets to silence and everyone sits down except for four people that raise their hand and say ‘I can help!’…It’s that powerful and can provide a whole new lifeline of resources to draw from.”

There’s been a number of times I’ve helped people with questions they had, even helping one contact in Hawaii get a number for a locksmith after he locked himself out of his house.

Another time, I sent a message about needing a professional translator for documents and a lawyer sent me the contact name of a friend of theirs. And recently this lady in Canada helped link us up with her knowledgeable friend concerning our international adoption questions.

Of course there are other places we could have sought, but the speed at which received assistance was incredulously fast.

Before you can get this kind of social network support  and experience this yourself, you do need to build out your network. You can’t expect to just join and begin asking questions and have people chime in with informative responses.  You have to find people with similar interests as yours, follow them, and many will follow you in kind.  It’s okay for starters to just inform people of what you’re doing, but do take a bit of effort to try and be interesting.  You can share interesting news links you’ve found, and respond to others on topics they’ve started.  And you do need to be discerning with your tweets.  Some people tend to be a bit too verbose with one twitter message after another in a very short amount of time. 

Another thing is to try and keep your following/follower ratio balanced.  If someone follows me and they’re following over 10,000 users and only a 100 or so have reciprocated then that doesn’t bode well for that twitterer. I will not only ignore their follow, I’ll block them from following me.

It’s also okay to use the Twitter service as a means to market your business, but be careful with that too. Just using this as an advertisement medium won’t work well either.  Relationships should be fostered and nurtured.  The people need to be interested in the information you’re sharing, gain your trust, and only then is their a potential benefit to your business.

You can get started by visiting http://twitter.com for a free account.  And don’t forget to follow me at http://twitter.com/timmcdoniel .  In most instances, I’ll be happy to reciprocate.

ChaCha’s free service is something I’ve been using for a while that I think is really useful for mobile users. 

Although many phones these days are equipped with access to the Internet, it is still not common to the majority of the population.  Most people use phones with standard keypads where queries using any sort of browser on their phone would be tedious.  Therefore, if you are pondering a question for anything that you might normally seek an answer via the Internet on, you wait until you are back at your computer.

But really you don’t have to.  With ChaCha you can have an answer to nearly any question answered in minutes using any common cellphone.  This service is currently limited to the U.S. in it’s traditional sense, but once their Twitter IM service is restored, there’s a work around that limitation is well.  I’ll share that mashup in a seperate blog entry later.

There are two ways to ask a question on ChaCha with your mobile phone.  One way is call 1-800-2CHACHA (1-800-224-2242) and ask your question or send a text message to 242 242.  If you use the voice option your message is transcribed into text and then sent on to a guide who researches your question and answers promptly. If you ask a question via text, then it is sent directly to a guide for the question to be answered.  Therefore calling in your question rather than texting might add a small amount of time to receiving a response, but not by any significant amount since the transcribers are rather quick in handling the transcription and passing it on to a guide.

It is important to note that the quality of your answer and the feasibility of answering is reliant upon receiving adequate information.  If you ask, “What is the current temperature?”, the guide might not know where you are geographically and would have to request more information.  So it’s best to be somewhat precise with your question (i.e. “What is the temperature for tomorrow in Denver, CO.

The research guide will quickly research your question and send you a response back via an SMS text message to your phone with a link that advises where he got the information.  If your pone is Internet capable then you can click on the link and it will connect you to a page that will advise you to the source on the Internet where the answer was found.  You can also type in the website address on computer at home or in the office to determine the source that the guide used.

So what can you ask?  You can ask pretty much anything.  There are Terms of Service in using the service that do not permit questions that are considered pornographic, illegal, abusive, etc.  Any questions that are considered abusive would be reported, and your question would not be answered.  Be sure and read their terms of service for more details. You can ask science questions, gas prices for a certain area, directory information, store hours, sports scores, flight schedule, metric conversions, and nearly anything else.

The service is free but as with any services involving text messages, you will incur charges from your phone company for any incoming or outgoing text messages.  As for myself, I currently have an unlimited text messaging plan so I don’t have to worry about how many I send or receive, but if you don’t have any sort of plan then you might need to consider what those costs would be.

This is a service that really expands the power of any mobile phone, giving you the the wealth of information on the Internet during those times you’re not near a computer.

Alot of blogs have been written concerning Google’s Lively, so I thought I’d throw my few cents in.  When I read about Google’s new beta offering, I quickly installed the plugin and played around with it for a bit.  I chose an avatar, created a few rooms, added a few pieces of furniture, and even attempted to join a busy room (talk about lag). I don’t believe there were that many people but it did sort of remind me of visiting a very populated place in Second Life.

Some might say that any free advertising that Second Life receives when compared to Google’s Lively would be good, as it is free publicity for them.  I’m not so sure.  Google Lively (even in beta, which many projects from Google remain in for a long, long, long time) is not a virtual world. It doesn’t even closely compare to Second Life. Although I don’t think that Second Life is the best thing since sliced bread, I still was baffled anytime some news article would compare Google Lively to Second Life.  One might perhaps compare Google’s Lively to IMVU or Kavena, but the experience isn’t nearly as immersive or impressive as a 3D world like Second Life.

My fear is that people who are not familiar with the richness of 3D worlds like Second Life, will try out Google Lively, be turned off, and think that this is the gist of all 3D virtual worlds.  Understandably though, Google Lively is in early beta and there is lots of room for it to expand.  Honestly, I figured that any virtual world that Google created would be built around Google Earth and Sketchup for building.  This early revealing of their product is, well … just lame!  Hopefully Google (which has the talent and capital) will prove me wrong in the long run and develop this platform from it’s current 3D teenager-like chatroom.  I’d like to see real immersioin into a 3D system, real collaboration means, and rich integration with the Internet.

In it’s present state, I won’t even give you a link to the room I created, as I don’t think that Google Lively is presentable enough at this  time.

If you found this website while googling on the subject, then you’ve been along the paths I’ve been.

Here was an idea that crept into my mind. Although I’ve established the ‘purchased’ Chatbridge, I’ve continued to explore other means for conversation between SL and RL.  The Chatbridge is nice, except that the visiting avatar has to initiate the conversation.  After learning that I could establish a channel through irc.quickfox.net and establish the settings in a free SL object, then I went for it.

Since I’m not a regular on IRC, there was a bit of a learning curve, but nothing that reading documentation through Google searches couldn’t resolve.

So now I’ve sucessfully created a SL bridge to an IRC channel.  With my mobile device I can even use wmIRC to access the channel as well, but unfortunately on my phone I can only establish the link successfully over a WIFI connection, EDGE/GPRS doesn’t work   My next idea is to figure out how I can either find a GPRS means to communicate with the IRC channel, or interface it with an IM or Twittter application. i did google on some information in regards to Linux .pl scripts that could create a bridge between an IM application and an IRC channle, namely. Bitlbee.  But I’m not sure that it can interface with a specific irc server and particular channel.

Anyways, I now have a constant open channel that lets me know the actions of any avatar that enters the SL virtual office. I can then either teleport in, or initiate a conversation externally, whether or not they initiate a conversation via the Chatbridge.  It still would be nicer to ensure that I can interface with them over IRC using mobile applications, but the feasibility of that with my current hardware/carrier still has to be explored.

I mentioned that I decided to post a QR Code on the back of my business card.  The QR Code permits someone with a QR Reader to decipher the image.  QR codes are apparently very popular in Japan where it was created.  QR Codes can provide links to websites, contain contact information, or even simple messages.  The particular one I added to my card simply links to http://technologyinmind.com .  

Supposedly many phones in Asia already have a QR Reader, but for U.S. phones you normally have to download and install optional software. A major player in this area is http://reader.kaywa.com/ .  They work with many java enabled phones.

However I have a Windows Mobile Smartphone, and finding a reader that functioned correctly was not as simple. I did first try the Kaywa reader (though my phone wasn’t listed) using the Jbed java program on my phone. It functioned, but would not connect to the camera, so I could only use it if a numeric alternative code number was available that I could type in. Then I tried the Quickmark reader. It installed and worked quickly at reading most QR codes, but it never seemed to be able to successfully connect, and would often exit for no reason on my HTC S-621.

I also tried the I-nigma Reader. It installed correctly, but reversed the camera capture image, and could not read any of the codes on my smartphone. The final one I found was BeeTagg. It would launch the normal HTC S621 camera to capture the QR Code, but didn’t have any ‘lock on’ utility, so you had to guess if you had locked on it enough yourself before taking a snapshot.  This one at least worked some of the time.

Unfortunately as it stands right now, there doesn’t appear to be a decent Windows Mobile Smartphone QR Reader.  The phones that are supported do seem to primarily be those without the QWERTY keyboards though, so they would stand to benefit the most from this technology since typing URL’s via T9 or abc Text could be complicated.