PaulSpoerry.com
You found me…
Gmail Unleashes Google Voice – Make Free Calls from Your Inbox
Aug 25th
Gmail is integrating Google Voice and providing free calls to the U.S. and Canada, as well as cheap international calls, directly into Gmail.
Here’s the word from Google:
Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap (see comparison table) with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan-and many more countries-for as little as $0.02 per minute.
As soon as it’s available in your account, you’ll see a Call phone link in the Chat sidebar of Gmail. Click it, search for a contact or dial their number, and booya—phone call. If you’ve already got a Google Voice number, calls you make from Gmail will show your Voice number in that person’s caller ID. You can also receive calls (if you want) made to your Voice number directly in Gmail—making it a fully functional VoIP solution.
You’ll need to have installed the Voice and Video plug-in to use it. No support for Google Apps accounts yet but Google says they’re working on it.
Awesome Drop – Transfers Files to Your Android Phone with Drag-and-Drop
Aug 25th
Windows/Mac/Linux and Android: I’ve heard mounting your Android phone to your computer to transfer files can be kind of a pain (I get mine next week!). Free Android app Awesome Drop lets you drag files from your computer onto your device over the web, no mounting necessary. Awesome Drop is quick, painless, and works from any computer.
Just open up the Awesome Drop app on your phone and enter the PIN it gives you in Awesome Drop’s web interface, accessible from any browser. The HTML5-powered webapp will then give you a window to which you can drag and drop any files you want, and they’ll automatically appear on your phone, ready for use. Check out the video for a demonstration.
Awesome Drop is a free download for Android devices, and works on nearly every browser.
Google CEO Believes No Anonymity Is The Future Of Web
Aug 15th
No anonymity is the future of web in the opinion of Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt. He said many creepy things about privacy at the Techonomy Conference. His message was that anonymity is a dangerous thing and governments will demand an end to it.
Schmidt begins by saying “There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003,” Schmidt said, “but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing… People aren’t ready for the technology revolution that’s going to happen to them.”
“Privacy is incredibly important,” Schmidt stated. “Privacy is not the same thing as anonymity. It’s very important that Google and everyone else respect people’s privacy. People have a right to privacy; it’s natural; it’s normal. It’s the right way to do things. But if you are trying to commit a terrible, evil crime, it’s not obvious that you should be able to do so with complete anonymity. There are no systems in our society which allow you to do that. Judges insist on unmasking who the perpetrator was. So absolute anonymity could lead to some very difficult decisions for our governments and our society as a whole. In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. We need a [verified] name service for people. Governments will demand it.”
I can certainly see his point of view, however, there’s already a surprising lack of anonymity on the Internet already. Schmidt himself has admitted that if Google looks at enough of your online messaging, combined with some AI and your location that they can predict where you are going to go. He’s also quoted as saying “Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don’t have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You’ve got Facebook photos! People will find it’s very useful to have devices that remember what you want to do, because you forgot…But society isn’t ready for questions that will be raised as result of user-generated content.” That certainly doesn’t paint the picture of an anonymous Internet in need of government controlled online identities. In fact, take a look at how much Google knows about you now.
While Google’s mantra is “Don’t Be Evil”, you have to question the company’s motives. Google is NOT a search engine company, they are an advertising company. It doesn’t matter if they are generating revenue through targeted advertising, cross-selling or simply convincing their users to spend more time on their site and sign up their friends… they are an ad company. The more information shared publicly means more profits for Google. In short, Google would see a direct benefit in the form of higher revenue if there were less privacy on the Internet.
Bruce Schneier put it best, “If we believe privacy is a social good, something necessary for democracy, liberty and human dignity, then we can’t rely on market forces to maintain it.”
Net neutrality is foremost free speech issue of our time
Aug 5th
PLEASE read this… the issue of net neutrality could have widespread implications on our use of the Internet, and ultimately our First Amendment rights.
If we learned that the government was planning to limit our First Amendment rights, we’d be outraged. After all, our right to be heard is fundamental to our democracy.
Well, our free speech rights are under assault — not from the government but from corporations seeking to control the flow of information in America.
If that scares you as much as it scares me, then you need to care about net neutrality.
“Net neutrality” sounds arcane, but it’s fundamental to free speech. The internet today is an open marketplace. If you have a product, you can sell it. If you have an opinion, you can blog about it. If you have an idea, you can share it with the world.
And no matter who you are — a corporation selling a new widget, a senator making a political argument or just a Minnesotan sharing a funny cat video — you have equal access to that marketplace.
An e-mail from your mom comes in just as fast as a bill notification from your bank. You’re reading this op-ed online; it’ll load just as fast as a blog post criticizing it. That’s what we mean by net neutrality.
But telecommunications companies want to be able to set up a special high-speed lane just for the corporations that can pay for it. You won’t know why the internet retail behemoth loads faster than the mom-and-pop shop, but after a while you may get frustrated and do all of your shopping at the faster site. Maybe the gatekeepers will discriminate based on who pays them more. Maybe they will discriminate based on whose political point of view conforms to their bottom line.
How to Turn Your Android Phone into a Fully-Automated Superphone
Jul 30th
What if your phone automatically went silent when you step into the movie theater? Texted your significant other when you finished your long commute? Or automatically turned down the volume when a particularly loud friend called? It can; here’s how.
Android application Tasker gives you total rules-based automation for your Android phone. It’s not free, but it offers a free 14-day trial download. In the Android Market, it’s £3.99 in UK money—a little over $6 U.S. If you grab the trial, or shell out the cost of a Double-Double meal at In-N-Out Burger to buy it in the Market (scan the QR code at left), you’ll discover it’s worth the cost, even if you only have one super-specific use for it.
Since Tasker can do nearly anything on your phone (it’s mostly limited by your imagination), here’s some up-front ideas about what kinds of uses seem particularly attractive:
• Set preferences for each application: Give the Kindle app a longer screen time-out. Make Maps or Foursquare automatically turn on GPS, and have a file browser launch when you trade out SD cards. Have your music and other audio apps lower the volume to 50 percent when you plug in headphones, so you never get a way-too-loud moment.
• Time of day automation: Make your phone go into airplane mode overnight, but re-connect for a few minutes every 30 minutes to grab messages. Set up your phone to play specific or random songs from your collection as an alarm, back up files from your SD card every day, load up an application at a certain time.
• Set up contact rules: If you’ve got a friend who talks too loud, make your call volume go down when they ring. Create a home screen widget that sends an automatic SMS (“In the car,” maybe). Set your phone to pop up a more iPhone-style message box, rather than background notifications, when you miss calls or get SMS from certain people. Have your phone always record messages from a certain caller.
•: More fun, crazy-advanced stuff: Encrypt and decrypt data on the SD card based on your rules. Have speaker phone turn on when you lay your phone flat on a table. Change the home screen icons for apps, have your phone get drastically efficient when battery’s below 10 percent, and change your wallpapers to reflect the time of day or the number of messages.
Those use cases barely scratch the surface, really. Take the developer’s tour, and you’ll see there are variables, hundreds of events and triggers, and nearly infinite setups. Want to have Reddit.com launch on your browser if your alarm clock goes off on a Tuesday while Wi-Fi is on? You got it.
We’d need to write a research-paper-length treatise to cover everything Tasker can do for you, so we’ll instead offer up a few examples of app models we’ve found handy.