technologies that I'm inappropriately excited about
None of them are released yet, but the odds of me buying or downloading each is high:
- The Coop for Firefox
- At the moment it's little more than an idea stolen from Flock and a wiki page, but if it ever launches this will be a social networking tool I could see myself using. I could be getting this wrong, but I think that instead of creating a new network it'd adapt your browser to integrate existing ones, and organize updates by person. So you'd have a list of friends, with Flickr photos, del.icio.us links, blog posts, twitter messages and who knows what else all organized by person instead of by service. I've been ready to have my news RSS and social RSS separated for a while now; this looks like a pretty slick method for doing so. Of course, the real question will be how easy it is for the app to track down all of your friends' various accounts on the different sites it can talk to.
- Chumby
- It's like an expensive alarm clock, except also magic. I'm pretty sure there was a Saturday morning cartoon with the same premise during my early childhood, but now it's all coming true. Also, one of the major players at the company is the guy who cracked the original Xbox, who's an incredible hardware-hacking badass. Naturally, Chumby will be open source. You could stream WOXY as your alarm, benchmark how long it takes you to get up in the morning, or have it wake you up in the night if someone sends you an urgent email. Neat!
- The Helio Ocean
- It's becoming increasingly clear that my Sidekick 2 is not only irritatingly behind the times but also very likely to break before the end of the summer. Its screen gets jumbled from time to time, requiring a swift smack. And one time the microphone stopped working (also requiring a swift smack). I was going to wait and see how the iPhone works out, but Nicco told me to take a look at the new Helio phone. After reading about it, I think I'm convinced. It'd be nice to know how expensive the associated plan will be and whether the device can work as a bluetooth modem. But even if the answers are "expensive" and "of course not", I'm still pretty likely to get one.
Comments
The Ocean looks pretty cool. Any idea whether it can read MS Office files (snicker if you must)? I haven't been able to find anything saying it can.
It's like an expensive alarm clock, except also magic.
It fits in your pocket and is different every time you use it.
No idea on the attachments, and my googling has been similarly fruitless. But I believe that outlook synching is a new feature that the Ocean will bring to the Helio platform -- I can easily believe that they might build that functionality in. Sidekicks have been able to open MS Word documents since the original SK's release.
Of course, if you wanted to be a real badass, you could always set up this word ocnversion stuff on a server and have it process your emails before the Helio pulls them down. But that may not be what you had in mind.
Incidentally, doing more googling has shown that the knock on Helio is that the company has burned through its money faster than anticipated and is currently going around its investors asking for a new round of funding. Things look like they'll be okay, but there's a chance that the whole operation could shut down by the end of the year.
Thanks, Tom. The prospect of the company going out of business is a bit concerning.