Pat Phelan, Telcom Rockstar - Serial Entrepreneur, just launched a new service called TwitterFone where you can make your Twitter posts via voice. Simply brilliant! I really think that this will get a lot more people hooked on Twitter (about time!). Make sure to head over to TwitterFone!
If you like TwitterFone, you’ll also love MaxRoam. MaxRoam will let you travel around the world with your cell phone without incurring roaming charges!
Kwout.com is an amazing tool for blogging. Everytime I want to create a screenshot and use it to paste into my blog, I head over to kwout.com. Its really simple to use… This is one of those must use services!
I met Simon Chen at the last DemoCamp in Ottawa and he mentioned his new project called Sixent.com. I just tried out the service and created my own personal profile here: http://sixent.com/aydin/Public
Here is a screenshot:
I like Sixent since it gives me LOTS of privacy options… I get to determine who sees what and what is publicly displayed… I’d love for this profile to appear when people are searching for me… I definitely recommend everyone create one of these profiles for themselves!
The Web Weekend is the first weekend being organized (May 9-11). Motivated professionals and amateurs work together in order to create a company and launch a web product in a weekend. Make sure to sign up here: http://www.ottawaw.com/
* Date: Monday, May 26, 2008 from 7pm to 9pm
* Location: The Velvet Room, 62 1/2 York Street, in the market
* Format for 6 demos: 2 minute introduction, 8 minute demo, 5 minutes for Q&A and discussion
Remember the Milk is one heck of a ToDoList application. It will plug into your Blackberry, your Gmail Account, and your Google Calendar Account. I absolutely love it! The integration is amazing! I highly recommend everyone start using this website to manage their lives…
A bunch of people have been asking me why my facebook status always says “Aydin is twittering:…”
Well, the reason is quite simple. I use a great tool called Twitter. I also installed the Twitter Facebook Application. With the facebook application, everytime I update my twitter status, my facebook status gets updated to and is prefixed with “Aydin is Twittering…”
Twitter is simply amazing… Rather than explain to you myself what it is exactly, I’ll embed this video that will tell you exactly what twitter is in plain english:
Scott Simpson from BitHeads really stood out as the person everyone remembered at the OCRI Awards. He gave the most entertaining and funny acceptance speech that I have ever seen when his company, BitHeads, won the award. He had the whole audience captivated and as a result, I think everyone knows about him and knows about BitHeads… Congratulations to Scott!
On another note, I happened to bump into John Roese who is CTO at Nortel (I used to work @ Nortel). He also won an award tonight (Next Generation Executive of the Year). Nortel is the 4th major company for which John has served as CTO (and he’s still under 40 - pretty impressive). You can check out his biography here. Amongst other things he has written two books and he’s also named on 16 different patents… and of course he’s an amazing public speaker… good to see him win.
Other than that, BridgeWater Systems won the Technology Company of the year award [I think that's what it was called] (Doug Somers was sitting at my table).
Well, I had a great time at the awards and can’t wait until next year
Here is the info from the TorrentSpy Team: (pay attention to the bolded text)
Friends of TorrentSpy,
We have decided on our own, not due to any court order or agreement, to bring the Torrentspy.com search engine to an end and thus we permanently closed down worldwide on March 24, 2008.
The legal climate in the USA for copyright, privacy of search requests, and links to torrent files in search results is simply too hostile. We spent the last two years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, defending the rights of our users and ourselves.
Ultimately the Court demanded actions that in our view were inconsistent with our privacy policy, traditional court rules, and International law; therefore, we now feel compelled to provide the ultimate method of privacy protection for our users - permanent shutdown.
It was a wild ride,
The TorrentSpy Team
“Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order [...] and the like.” - Justice William O. Douglas
I’m a big Facebook fan but in the last little while I have been wondering about what Facebook will look like in the future… Just thinking about the advantages of having Facebook (especially with all the new privacy features) for government agencies seems like a godsend. I mean, if you think about it, people “without any coercion” are documenting their every move online… If anyone wanted to track you, wouldn’t the best place be Facebook /Twitter ?
Ok, so, how unreasonable is it to assume that some of the following are possible in the future?
-no passport: why would you use a passport when you can add a “Passport Facebook Application” that will do the same thing? All you’d have to do when you get to the airport is show them your “virtual passport” on your Phone/PDA or perhaps give a secret access code to anyone who wants to check it out (possibly via bluetooth)?
-Facebook pages mandatory: Already, if you don’t want to fall behind in life, you need a facebook profile…. is it unreasonable to assume that one day everyone will be required to have a facebook page? Remember, as we go forward, privacy features will only get better (or so we hope)… so, its not all that unreasonable…
-verify with birth certificate: what if you had to verify your facebook page with your original birth certificate in order to prove your identity? Could your facebook page also act as your birth certificate? what if you were given login access credentials in the hospital when you were born?
-driver’s license: why show your driver’s license when you are standing in line for a 19+ bar/club when you can show your facebook page? yeah, yeah, you can show it when you get pulled over by a cop too…
big brother: Is it also unreasonable to assume that government agencies will be freely able to browse through all of this material online? I for one think that one is not so unreasonable at all…
Anywho… a lot of this stuff sounds ridiculous, I know. But, the world changes fast… I remember when I was first telling people about Facebook in Ottawa, Canada they would say: “why would I join? so people could stalk me?” and now look at where we are… people’s ideas and beliefs are changing.