I recently ended up purchasing a TomTom GO 2535M Live portable 5” widescreen GPS unit at a Best Buy store. With tax, the total price ended up being just under $300 dollars.

For the past 6 years or so, I’ve had a Garmin C550 with a 3.5” touch screen that is hard drive based. Since I drive a truck over-the-road, the Garmin has been running almost 24/7 for those six years, taking very high amounts of what can often be severe jolts and vibration along with occasional extreme heat and cold. I’ve paid to update the maps in the C550 about three times, but I’m reluctant to pay to update the maps again since I really don’t know how much useful life the hardware, particularly the unit’s hard drive, has left in it. For the time being, the aging Garmin is still working so I’m using it side-by-side with the new TomTom unit.

In my experience the perfect GPS unit has yet to be sold. Each brand has it’s strength and weaknesses. I’m including in this software-based solutions such as Google Navigation, Telenav, etc. that frequently comes bundled with Android or other smartphones. Maps used in GPS devices have improved dramatically, but they are accurate only about 90% of the time, and this includes Google itself. As a truck driver I’m looking for new addresses on average about two to three times a day, sometimes more and sometimes less. About 10% of the time I run into errors, sometimes with the potential to cause catastrophe – think narrow streets, weight-restricted bridges, etc.

Right after I bought the TomTom I had to go to a cold storage in Chicago, Illinois that the TomTom could not find, but the Garmin could. It turns out the street had been given two names with dual street signs, one below the other. The TomTom could find what was probably the original numbered street name, but not the other, which was a woman’s name the city was obviously trying to honor. At that point I was unhappy with the TomTom’s performance, but decided to continue to give it a longer chance before rushing into a knee-jerk judgment of the device or its software. The TomTom redeemed itself later that day by warning me around a 15-mile-long traffic backup in northern Indiana on I-65 which ended up saving me hours of sitting waiting for a major accident to be cleared and the road opened back up.

The TomTom is different than the Garmin. TomTom has a different way of doing things. The GO 2535M Live is a fairly sophisticated device. It even has a full-time GSM data connection to the TomTom server with the ability to do real-time Google searches, either locally or in other locations, get live traffic and weather updates, and do real-time rerouting to avoid traffic problems. Though the unit has free lifetime map updates from TomTom and a year’s worth of live “HD” traffic and weather updates, the live “HD” traffic and weather update service is just under $60 per year. Once you create an account at TomTom.Com you can sign in to your account with the unit itself. Incidentally, I’m willing to pay $60 dollars per year for accurate, up-to-the-minute traffic and weather information. That type of information can end up saving a lot of time and trouble as long as it’s presented as soon as it becomes available. The unit can even accurately display areas of traffic backups and slowdowns.

After I’d had the unit for about a week and a half, it was sitting on my dash and suddenly started going into a rebooting loop. Regardless of what I did, the unit would just keep rebooting. After a quick call to TomTom’s support number (I got right through to a live support person), they advised me to return the unit to Best Buy for an exchange since I was well within the 30-day exchange window. I’m pretty sure it must have been some sort of software/operating system error, since a few minutes before I had entered a new favorite location.

The replacement unit is working great. The TomTom rep gave me a reference number to call back with when I had the replacement unit so they could make the necessary changes to associate it with my existing account in their system, which I did.

There are much more expensive GPS units on the market (sold at truck stops) aimed specifically at truck drivers which look enticing, some of them priced up to 200% more than the units sold at a place like Best Buy or other big-box retailer. I talked to a driver that bought one of these very expensive trucker-specific GPS units. He said it was nice, but he didn’t feel the extra trucker-specific features were worth the substantially higher price he had to pay for the specialized unit.

It turns out feature I like the most so far is the ability to do Google searches in order to input destinations rather than go through the standard process. Other features I like are that that unit has enough room on its bright, high-resolution 5” widescreen to display my current speed, the current time with the time zone automatically updated, and speed limits with audible alerts if I’m going over the speed limit. It also has a lane assist feature which primarily warns if an upcoming exit is on the left or the right. Another useful, though not always consistent feature is that it can be set to announce upcoming points of interest such as rest areas and truck stops, along with virtually any other type of other business one can think of, including user-defined points of interest.

I am enjoying the TomTom GO 2535M Live. It’s not yet perfect, but with continued updates from the folks at TomTom I’m certain it can continue to improve.

One of the biggest problems today is the use of cellphones by people driving. Todd Cochrane spoke to Chuck Cox CEO of Cellcontrol about their solution to this problem at CES 2011. It is a three part solution. The first part of the solution is to integrate the program directly into the vehicle. When the vehicle moves the program is activated. It then sends a message through bluetooth to the cellphones in the car.

The program is supported by a most major cellphones and other devices. The program and policies are easy to setup and manage. The policies are also very customizable depending on what is the safety policy of the company or individual is. Cellcontrol is targeting companies with large fleets first, before moving into the direct consumer market. Businesses not only have to worry about accidents causing higher insurance and law suits, but also about the company reputation.

According to Mr. Cox twenty eight percent of all accidents involve someone using a cellphone, Driving and texting is 4x more likely to cause a accident then driving while drunk. People are going to use cellphones in their car, the question is how do we make it safer.

Interview by Todd Cochrane of Geek News Central.

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Save 25% on 4GH Hosting 1yr Subscriptions Save 25% Promo Code CES2.

It seems in the world of computers and the Internet there is always a steady stream of new things on the horizon, as well as a steady stream of new products and services. It’s been this way for many years at this point.

There are always winners and losers. Winners can win big, and losers at worst fail to make any marketplace splash or even a ripple and end up in the tech dustbin of obscurity with few people ever knowing that the product or service ever existed.

What is it that makes for a successful product? Why is it that some products and services that seem very similar to other products and services end up becoming household names, while others end up being cancelled domain name landing pages?

It’s obvious there are a variety of factors that come into play. If it were easy to predict these things, we would have a lot fewer losers. Why did Twitter become a household name, whereas similar services such as Plurk and Jaiku languish in the shadows? What enabled Facebook to steal most of the MySpace thunder?

New products and services that end up being successful frequently incorporate elements and principles of previously-existing successes, but package them in more compact and useful forms.

Initially when Twitter came along a couple of years ago, I heard people talking about it, but I was a bit resistant to sign up. I felt like I had plenty of ways to communicate with people, so why did I need to add yet another account to a service that would steal away time I already had filled, only to ultimately let yet another account go dormant? I finally signed up for Twitter, and after I began using it I began to understand the value of it. With a service like Twitter, the more people that are using it, the more valuable it becomes.

About the same time I signed up for a Twitter account, I also signed up for a Plurk account. After a few visits to the Plurk website over a period of a month or two, I haven’t been back to the site since.

I believe what is valuable about Twitter is that 140 character limit per Tweet, forcing people to be succinct with their wording. Twitter and Tweet are cute names. The site design is simple, the blue bird logo pleasing to the eye, and the developers kept the API and name open to other developers, allowing an entire ecosystem of ancillary products and services to develop around it at the same time it was rapidly increasing in popularity. Twitter is very much like chat, which was already well established, but it had the added value that it either could be in real time, or not, able to be accessed from a vast array of devices beyond the Twitter website. Twitter also allows you to subscribe to just the people you want, and ignore or even completely block the rest. Twitter also allows you to reach out and touch people, and it allows you to monitor what others are up to whose lives are at once very similar to your own, yet often radically different. You can spend as much or as little time as you wish interacting with the service. Another thing that turned out to be incredibly useful with twitter is the vast 24/7 real-time data stream that it generates. Real-time Twitter data mining has proved to be quite valuable to many people.

To be honest I have always thought that many MySpace pages were often monstrous, unbelievably cluttered messes that often took a long time to load. Nonetheless, MySpace became popular because it obviously served a need with a younger demographic.

I’ve always thought Facebook’s interface is somewhat confusing, though allowing for far less cluttered and confusing-looking profile pages. I still don’t quite understand what got Facebook to the level of critical popularity – perhaps the less-cluttered, faster-loading profile pages gave it the critical edge over MySpace.

It should also be noted that Facebook allowed for an open API, allowing a myriad of interesting and often useful applications to be plugged in to its interface.

However it did it, Facebook managed to get to a critical mass of users where it became THE thing to sign up for and THE place to be to stay connected with family, friends and business associates. Something interesting has happened with Facebook that has never happened before – everyday, non-geek people who had never built website profiles in all the years they had been doing email and web browsing were suddenly signing up for Facebook in unbelievable numbers. Mothers, dads, aunts, uncles, grandmothers, etc. were suddenly showing up on the same service with their kids, nieces, nephews and grandkids. Once the ball rolled, Facebook became an incredible success.

I started noticing a while back that many people were starting to use Twitter and Facebook to communicate with each other in lieu of email. At this point I find myself getting pulled into that trend myself. These services don’t offer the relative privacy of direct email, but they allow for easy, frequent public conversations and easy sharing of personal media such as photos between friends and family on a global scale.

What I take away from the success stories versus the less-successful competitors is that oftentimes the differences in design and implementation can be slight, but those slight differences can offer real, tangible advantages to the end user. If those often-slight advantages can somehow help get the product or service to a critical mass threshold, they can find themselves catapulted to the point of planetary awareness.

CFI Group has released its most recent figures for smart-phone providers.  The list includes AT&T, Sprint/Nextel, and Verizon, among others.  According to the survey, Verizon smart-phone users ranked the carrier positively 79% of the time; Sprint/Nextel smart-phone users liked their service 74% of the time.  ATT iPhone users, on the other hand, scored only 69%.  The biggest complaints are dropped calls, slow 3G service, and other network problems.  This is the first time AT&T has been at the bottom of the list.

But I have to wonder, are these figures misleading?  After all, AT&T has the lion’s share of the market with the millions of iPhone users out there, while Verizon and Sprint/Nextel have a much smaller customer base.  One of the reasons Verizon and Sprint/Nextel’s network has such good uptime for smart phones could very well be that the load on their network is much reduced from the monster load that is trying to make its way through the AT&T network.  It is likely, and probably inevitable, that should the same high traffic hit the Verizon and Sprint/Nextel networks, there would be as many, if not more, complaints. The fact is, none of the wireless networks are truly able to handle the load that iPhone users require.

Is it possible the world wasn’t ready for the iPhone?  Or at least, the providers’ networks weren’t ready for the iPhone?  Even with massive, billion-dollar spending to upgrade existing networks, it may be some time before wireless networks are truly ready for smart phones in everyone’s hands.  I don’t suppose that’s much of a consolation for those with iPhones in their hands but no decent network to run them on.

With the release of the Kindle 2 from Amazon this week, we techies are faced with another financial pitfall. Do we buy or do we not? How many of our gadgets end up being pricey, not just for the initial purchase, but for the continued upkeep or subscriptions for the device in the long run? What is the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) on the product?

One of the biggest complaints about the Kindle is the cost, around $360. And while you are presumably getting unlimited wireless download service for years to come, the books themselves aren’t free. Okay, some books are free, but those are public domain. Books range in price from $4.36 (Feng Shui A to Z) to $6,431.20 (Selected Nuclear Engineering Systems, Part 4). The Kindle holds 1500 books, so even if you look at the low end of about $5 per book, your Kindle could cost you $7860.00. Or more, if you are into Nuclear Engineering Systems. So total TCO for device could really get up there at some point.

The iPhone presents the same sort of issues, in a different way, than the Kindle. The higher-end iPhone will cost you about $400 plus an ATT wireless contract locking you in to two years of service with a base price of $70 per month. Then there are the applications you are expected to buy to make your iPhone be all that and the kitchen sink, and you’re talking a pretty good chunk of change in the TCO department.

And I’m not going to let the iPod slide either…Mine was $350 for a 60 gb video model, plus another chunk for the extended warranty, and I purchase all of the music I am storing on my iPod, whether electronically (eMusic, iTunes, Rhapsody), or by CD. I’ve had my iPod for 3 years and have about 6000 songs on it; I estimate I’ve spent another $400 buying music that I didn’t already own. That’s a chunk of change too, although it’s a bit more spread out and may not be so obvious.

There are times when I want a device to do just one thing and do it well (like the iPod). But then there are times when devices that serve multiple purposes can have lower TCO. For example, if I want to read eText, my laptop can already do that, and I can even have it read it to me with text-to-speech. My laptop is reasonably portable, as well, and would hold a lot of eBooks, too. And it holds my entire iTunes/iPod library as well. It’s just a little hard to carry around in my pocket, and it isn’t very good at making phone calls on the run.

But when it comes to TCO, it is something we have to consider, especially in these scary economic times. It’s not just the initial cost of the gadget. It is the long-term costs of service and support for that gadget as well. How many of us have made this decision when it came to home printers, and went from ink jet to laser jet, because of the TCO when it came to ink and toner?

For me, the Kindle and the iPhone have not hit my “must have” list because of TCO. How about your must-haves? Is TCO not a consideration, or are they a good return on your investment?

Over the past two months we have had a Indian development firm under contract to develop for us a shopping cart that we were going to roll out over a month ago.

The experience with this firm has been less than positive. We charted out how long the job would take and expected it to be a 2 to 3 week job tops and what we have after two months is a shopping cart that needs a lot of clean up work.

Issues we faced with this Indian firm included promising we would have senior developer from the start but our guess is that the developer they assigned to us had a year of experience if we were lucky. At week 4 I put the hammer on them and they assigned some more knowledgeable but he spent the next 2 weeks cleaning up the code the first developer had mangled.

It was a truly terrible experience and while we got the product we largely wanted it was not at the speed we would have expected. We probably saved a couple of thousand dollars at the expense of the shopping cart taking 2 months when it should have taken 3 weeks.

My recommendation to anyone looking to hire Hidden Brains is to have very low expectations. They talk a big talk but fail to be able to operate at a competency level that I would expect.

Deficiencies

• Code is not up to par with Current Standards
• Several Security issues were discovered in the code
• The programmer did not understand functionality of many libraries
• English comprehension was really sub-par
• Basic things like working with Subversion was unknown

While the company may be able to do basic web designs they in my opinion can not be relied up to work with companies that are looking to integrate features into existing code design.

That being said I am again on the hunt for another PHP Developer that can web integration and design. If you have a strong working knowledge of PHP and can speak English we want to hire you. Examples of previous work will be required and interview with my lead developer will be required. Send email to ceo@rawvoice.com

When a business and all the companies associates are all located under one roof it is very easy to install and maintain a sophisticated CRM system. With todays mobile workforce along with startups who’s workforce is often spread across multiple states and countries it can be a challenge to keep track of who everyone is talking to and what the status of a follow up may be.

Fear no more because Highrise is a new web based CRM platform that allows all of the information that is often shared in a stand alone system to be shared across an entire company via the Internet.

On a quick look at the service I was pretty impressed and will be migrating some of my team onto it. The service is worthy a look, I still have to analyse features to see if the per person cost is at the right price break. www.highrisehq.com from 37Signals.

At the bottom of this post I am going to link you over to a post that has a list of tools that teams like RawVoice that are spread out all over the country can use to to work interactively online.

While the list is pretty good one thing that they missed is Virtual Phone Systems like GotVMail which allows a company to have a sophisticated PBX/Voicemail system.

I would love to hear from others on what kind of virtual collaboration tools they are using as well. www.readwriteweb.com

Google has announced that users of Gmail, will soon be able to retrieve mail from  up to five other accounts. Those that are totally in love with web based mail may like this, but I still download all of my Gmail into Outlook and very rarely login to Gmail itself.

This feature has been requested for a long time and I know that Hotmail allowed you to do this as well. I already use rules within outlook to manage my multiple e-mail accounts so until Gmail brings more outlook like features to the service, I cannot see using them to manage all my mail.

What do you think? Would you prefer to have Gmail pull up to 5 other accounts email into your Gmail account? [TechCrunch]

I have been expermenting today with various Blog writting applications. I think I am the most pleased with BlogJet which I have used for a number of years. It has been the easiest to manipulate the graphics within post. The only thing though that I do like about Windows Live Writter is that I am able to to put tags in the post. This is something that BlogJet is missing.

Jeremey Zawodny gives some pretty compelling reasons why it may be more beneficial to use Amazon’s S3 storage service. In fact I wonder if this service may be a good place to backup archived media on a server some place. [jeremy.zawodny.com]

The word out is that it is possible that Apple will offer movies that can be downloaded and burned onto a DVD. This could be part of a reason for the delay in the iTunes movie store debut. The DVD Copy Control Association is the one hurdle that Apple has faced in their pursuit of the copying of movies to disc. The DVD Copy Control Association has the Content Scrambling System(CSS) which is placed on DVDs to prevent illegal copying. There is also a rumor that blank DVDs might be made with the CSS system in place.

It sounds like you’ll need this special kind of blank disc for this to happen. But it also is pretty clear that this is not near the end and there will be some more discussion on the legal side of such a task as this. Appleinsider.com has the story on their homepage.

-mn
My Website

Well I have been fielding e-mails from people voting at the 2006 People’s Choice Podcast Awards, seems Hotmail thinks the verification e-mail we are sending is spam and has blocked all e-mail coming from the podcastawards.com domain.

This happened last year as well, I understand companies trying to protect their customers from spamming but we are 100% in compliance in all e-mail we have sent, yet they are blocking every last single piece of mail. Now imagine if Hotmail decided to start blocking e-mail from your customers how mad would you be.

This is one service I will never ever use again. Good luck getting removed from their block list it is nearly impossible unless you want to pay some company a $100,000 a year to make sure all of your e-mail is delivered, this is beyond criminal.

I knew it was only a matter of time before a social networking site would receive a patent. It was to be expected I guess. The surprising part of the whole situation is that Friendster is in on it! MySpace could be expecting some backlash in the future. There has been no talk about what this patent news will mean in the means of law suits or fines for social networking sites. Friendster has not revealed any plans as to what they plan on doing with these shiny new patents.

What is going on here!?! Internet sites are getting patents? This is exactly what was mentioned yesterday in the General Public License article. Patents are being giving under the wrong circumstances. Now what will happen to somebody who wants to do social networking but can’t because of patents. Will this happen? Is the scare to possibly get Friendster back in the limelight? It is very hard to see exactly what will happen with such an issue, but it has me on the edge of my seat.

I would like to take some time to mention that my company’s website has officially launched as of 1pm PST. The link is XiTechnology (www.xitechnology.com). We specialize in software development at no charge! Check it out!

Thanks,
-michael novak

Friendster Article Link (www.news.com.com)

Imagine your paying $14.95 per month for your AOL account that you are using largely for e-mail to only start getting advertisements jammed into e-mail. This has to be the most stupid move I have heard about. AOL is nothing more than a over priced ISP, for them to do this is beyond comprehension.

When you have a free account place somewhere you expect ads, this will add another nail in AOL’s coffin. [InfoWorld]

I am sitting here shaking my head, sorry you knew I was gonna say it. For those that have been reading this site long enough you know what I am thinking about the announcement of being able to have your Typepad RSS feed re-directed to FeedBurner automatically. At least the folks at SixApart were smart enough to make it optional. What I don’t understand is why companies like SixApart have given up on RSS stats.

In my humble opinion they should have there own reporting system. There is nothing magical about a RSS feed it is a file that sits on your website, and when an application needs to be updated it reaches across the web pulls a copy from your webserver and your webserver logs the encounter in a log file.

Then it is just a simple mater of processing that log file and providing very detailed infomation about your RSS feed.
You can bake that data any way you want and your good to go plus you don’t have to pay someone for advanced stats that in my opinon are pretty piss poor. The folks at SixApart had a chance to make their service better, but instead went the easy route and gave a large percentage of their unsuspecting customers a easy way to offload the single most important link on their blog.

First some will say well they can’t read my rss feed on my site, guess what I don’t want people reading my RSS feed I want them on my website. Second many will say using FeedBurner is easy, my response do you realize every blog application in existence today has RSS baked in already.

For those using FeedBurner pray they have a endless supply of money, and that they become very profitable on the backs of your feed because heaven forbid their site goes dark, thousands of you could be singing a different tune. I just hope people make educated decisions on using there service just before opting in. Many really like the service and I am cool with that but having used the service before I am not drinking the koolaid.

Here is my final thought on this, of the two URL’s below which makes the most sense to you.

www.yourdomain.com/index.xml or feeds.feedburner.com/yourwebsitename

[FeedBurner & Typepad]

I must be slipping because I definitely missed this. Doing some searches on the net indicates that the data they are gleaning on your browser history and misc settings may be making them a little more aware of what your up to than what your comfortable with sharing. [Google Browser Sync for Firefox]

Anytime I see a service that has the potential to cause ones feed to be Hijacked it gets my attention. Looking at the FeedPass interface I became instantly aware that anyone could take our feed and sign up for an account, have Google Ads inserted and start making revenue by placing that same content on a service that could feed up my RSS feed and someone else’s advertisements.

I am putting FeedPass on notice that if I find any feeds from any of our companies being hijacked and ran thru their service that we are going to hold them liable.

I don’t need stats or help from any third party in figuring out what my stats are and I don’t want anyone coming across our content subjected to advertisements in our RSS feed. [Scripting News]

I am looking for a reliable Shoutcast Host if you have experience with that let me know. [geeknews@gmail.com]

Well I am logged into calendar.google.com pretty basic but free. You will be able to create multiple calendars of which you can make them private or share it. The one thing is obvious Google wants you to stay logged in. If you do then when appointments are near it will put up a pop up on your screen. Nice start. [calendar.google.com]

RSS feeds available I found the RSS feed, you have to dig around to find it, go to the left hand side click the down arrow by your name, and you will see calendar settings click that and you will be presented with a private feed URL if your application supports ical you can link in with that as well.

This weekend I had a conversation with someone that is in really bad bandwidth trouble. He is eating up about 3 TB a month, and has very little money. He said he was going to go to with dreamhost because they have some pretty awesome bandwidth deals. I always get leary when I hear of any service provider offering bandwidth at the levels they are, at the price they are. Anyone have any feedback on them, so I can give advise to this person in need.

Since we have been adding servers here at Geek News Central, I have been wanting to make sure that we have some things in place in case we blow a hard-drive or have a hacker incident etc. First thing was to move DNS services off all of our servers and onto a professional DNS Service.

I was introduced to Nettica by Tim who has done, server and design work for me. What impressed me was the price, 100 domains, $50.00 a year and a smoking web based interface. They are not a fly bu night company they have their servers in multi-tiered hosting facilities and spread out as near as I can tell in 5 different places in the country.

They also have a service call FailSafe which will watch our groups of servers and if one of them goes down will route the traffic to a backup. Thus we are now in the process of mirroring all of the critical domains so that if we do go down for a hardware failure we will be able to come back online within a 15 minute window.

It will be a couple of weeks before we are done doing all of the migrating and have the mirrors in place and it is a significant investment but at this point we cannot afford to go down. We have even went so far as to have a server pre-configured to step in and become a new mirror if needed.

We will be testing the failure and recovery pieces here in the coming weeks but will let you know in advance when it is going to happen. Check out Nettica yourself.

I am not sure how long this site is going to last but it is a pretty good hack. [www.houserdesign.com/flickr]

I received a e-mail tonight about a new site launch and although it is not uncommon for this to happen, the post I had read minutes before on Robert Scobles site made me scratch my head. Looks like two sites do the same thing here is the info I received.

“FeedYes.com gives rss feeds to websites which do not supply regular feeds. Just type in the URL of any page on the web, and FeedYes.com generates a valid feed in less than a minute. All generated feeds can be read in your rss reader. One click adding to most readers.”

Looks tried a couple of sites that did not have a RSS feed and the results were actually pretty good. Now go look at their site [www.feedyes.com] and then go look at the site [Robert] is posting about, very weird indeed.

There are more details about Live.com, it’s 1am here in Hawaii and my wife is wondering why I am saying wow so much. [Read/Write Web]

A re-worked Microsoft Search engine is being preliminarily released as I type this. This is the start of Microsoft attempting to make the long climb to compete with Google.

First look and this is indeed a impressive upgrade, and I have been playing with it for about 20 minutes and man it’s fast, and although the search results are quite different than what I see at Google you can see Microsoft has rolled the dice and put some serious Web 2.0 components on this page. The Site works out of the chute with Firefox as well [www.live.com]

More news Sources [Seattlepi.com]

First of all I have not sent a e-mail to anyone on Hotmail in a very long time. I am sure there are a lot of people that use it, but e-mail was always going missing and I personally find the interface horrible. Seems the Inventor of Hotmail did not like his interface very much either, as he has invested 5 million of his own dollars to build a toolbar that simply downloads the e-mail from Hotmail when the machine is idle.

I am not sure about you, but I receive and respond to e-mail today almost as fast as come in, sometime e-mail can be like a instant message conversations. From the point of view functionality I think the tool bar is pretty stupid. The second function piece adds some blogging tools, or actually it’s more a site annotation tool. What looks like has happened here is that the developer figured out part way into development is that he had a looser and had to add some functions to it in order for people to get excited about it.

What blows me away is he has had 50 programmers working on this thing. I tell you what give me 50 programmers 90 days and 5 million dollars and I will create a family of services that will cause people to sit up and notice.

Very good evidence that Gmail will be adding e-mail and integrating with a service called Evite this was from examination of the source code of Gmail. The Voicemail feature is a interesting one and if implemented correctly could really change the landscape of some of the existing services out there.

I spent about a hour exploring edgeio last night in the very late evening hours, and must say that I am impressed. The concept is beyond simple, the next time you have something to sell don’t go to ebay and sell it and pay all kinds of ridiculous fees, use your pre-established website to sell or offer services via edgeio for free. Here is how it works the next time you have a service to offer or something to sell, post a weblog entry with the details, then tag the article with the word “listing”. The edgeio site will be on the lookout on various weblog search services for the tag “listing” and as soon as it sees it edgeio will automatically aggregate the post and classify the listing in a category.

You can also force the service to index your website, you can claim your websites and add info to your profile including your flickr, linkedin accounts and others to establish who you are etc..

Personally I have a pile of stuff I would like to sell, but don’t have time for ebay or craigslist, but I do have time to go and post something on my own website helps build my brand, and keeps me from paying all of these little fees associated with some of the auction services out there.

Very powerful and I look forward to the edgeio official launch. [edgeio]

edgeio-key: 774fd2412efffe8b84da06c4d7be290248f9c948

If you consume DVD’s like crazy with either of these services be prepared to suffer the wrath of delayed mailing and not getting what you want on time. Seems both of these companies don’t care for consumers that are exchanging more than what they consider to be a fair share. My wife and I consume 10-12 movies a month and because we are in Hawaii, I don’t think we are seeing slow downs yet. But those of you that live in the Continental United States have seen throttling applied to your accounts.

Personally It still cheaper than Pay for View and going out to the movies. [Motley Fool]