PaulSpoerry.com

Another cloud service is coming, this time on your phone. Dashwire is intended to mirror your phones content onto a web based interface. I’m sure the power users are thinking “I can already do that with other 3rd party apps. Yes, you can… but Dashwire is probably not intended for the ultimate power user and it does do a good job of providing a clean, easy to use web based interface for accessing for phones information. Some of the things they list that Dashwire can do today via their Web-based interface:

• Send and receive text messages (SMS)

•  Add and edit phone contacts

•  Easily organize your photos and videos

•  Listen to voicemails

•  Set Internet favorites, ringtones, speed dials, and wallpapers for your phone

•  Transfer contacts and settings to your new phone

•  Automatically upload photos and videos

•  Find friends and people you want to follow

•  Create a personalized web page to share your media

• Add comments and star ratings

• Single click photo upload to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and Bebo

The interface is smooth, grey, and very attractive looking. The fonts are large and everything is easy to read.

On your Dashwire dashboard are your photos and videos, contacts, bookmarks, and SMS and call history laid out in movable AJAX tiles. You can click to play on your ringtones (I found this a very easy way to manage ringtones. There are tiles for phone, and text messages and you can reply to them with your keyboard. Even with a Treo or Blackjack you can’t bang out an SMS as fast as you can on a traditional keyboard. You can e-mail photo links from Dashwire, too, without your friends having to sign up to the service to view them online. Contacts you add online materialize in your mobile address book. Essentially, Dashwire is allowing you a web interface for interacting with your phone, while at the same time making an online backup of some of the most important “data”. It’s not backing up your programs, registry settings or anything like that, but all your critical stuff like contact, messages, etc.

Now it’s time for the secret sauce: how your content gets there. Dashwire begins as a mobile app that most users will probably download over the air. It installs, and then syncs to your personal page on Dashwire.com, which you’ve configured by registering your screen name and number on sign-up. The synching takes FOREVER, and might take more if your mobile network is lagging. Photos and videos take the longest to upload, and even longer the more you’ve got. I only have the “stock photos” that came with my phone and I’m sure that’s the part taking the longest. I wonder about the value of that (personally) though for people unfamiliar with other backup solutions this might be a great alternative.

The video they put together gives a great overview of what Dashwire can do, so check it out and see if this is a solution you could use. The accounts are free (not sure yet how’ll they monetize this service yet) and it’s in open beta. Some improvements they could make are faster backups. Even once my phone was sync’d it still take a LONG time during the sync process… and I wonder… why? For the moment, it only supports Windows Mobile 5 and 6, and subscribers have to specify their carrier and device model when they register. Dashwire doesn’t manage files or programs, or perform certain small tasks like deleting photos from the phone or reading and initiating e-mail. Those would be welcome additions. Dashwire also has a setting to update your status on Facebook and Twitter… though I haven’t seen HOW this works or any instructions on their site for making this interaction occur. Still… for a beta it’s not bad and definetly worth checking out.

There’s been a lot of buzz going around about the latest XBox 360 Dashboard update that will be hitting the streets soon. Most noteable was the expanded Friends List, which will allow you to see more info about the person as well as THEIR friends. Basically, social networking is coming to XBox live. Sounds like a neat idea to me.

The feature I’m most looking forward to is the ability to change the Windows LIVE ID associated with and Xbox LIVE account. The description pretty much says it all, but choosing this option changes the Windows Live ID associated with your Xbox LIVE account. It will also transfer all your Microsoft points to the new Windows Live ID as well. Here are some screen shots that show what this looks like in the dash. I won’t go into detail, but I had an ooooold Xbox.com account from back in the day. I also had a local profile with a GameScore on it. Thing is… these two profiles were named the same. You wouldn’t believe how hard it was to create a new XBox Live profile on my XBox 360 and then associate those points with the new local profile. It was like pulling teeth. What I have now is a GamerTag with my nick, but it’s associated with an Windows Live ID other than the one I normally use (for MSIM, etc). So this will be uber handy for me. I can take my current profile and associate it with my current email address and finally everything will be unified! woot!

Wordpress.com hosted sites have a stats plugin that most people find instantly useful. One of the biggest complaints heard is that once you take Wordpress to your own host… you lose the stats system. There is of course Google Analytics, and Shortstats… each are good in their own right. One of the problems with these systems is that they can slow down your site because they’re writing to a database.

Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.

Installing this stats plugin is much like installing Akismet, all you need is to put in your API Key and the rest is automatic. You can find your API key on your Wordpress.com’s profile page.

Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more.

Finally, because all of the processing and collection runs on our servers and not yours, it doesn’t cause any additional load on your hosting account. In fact, it’s one of the fastest stats system, hosted or not hosted, that you can use.

Download the Stats Plugin here.