Author Archives: Dae Punt

It takes only $5 to get rid of the ads in #ÜberTwitter for your #BlackBerry!

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I’ve been using ÜberTwitter for some time now and in fact it’s the only serious BlackBerry application for Twitter.

Unfortunately the started using ads a little while ago, which really bugged me, although I understand the wish of the developers to make a living out of it.

I happened to see the possibility to pay $5 and get rid of the ads (the ad supported version remains free of charge), which makes it the perfect app for me. It’s well worth the money! Do you have a BlackBerry? Take yours to the address below and pay those lousy $5. Happy tweeting! 🙂

Get ÜberTwitter – The only Twitter Client for your BlackBerry!

1 + 1 = 3… Google acquires Aardvark!

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Did you see it coming? I wrote on Aardvark earlier and now the time has come. Google acquires Aardvark. In fact this did not come as a surprise to me, but the timing is special. Just now, after Google announced their realtime telephone translation service earlier this week (I’m speaking Dutch in my phone and it comes out in Japanese on the other end of the phone, thanks to realtime voice translation by Google), as well as the launch of Buzz…

We’re facing exciting times and I’m really curious as to how the other parties will respond to these strategic moves… Stay tuned!

Confirmed: Google has Acquired Aardvark

What is Foursquare? #4SQ

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Foursquare (4SQ) is een location based social network. That means you can tell your friends where you are. Or your colleagues. Or your customers. Or your boss. Or the rest of the world.

4SQ contains a game element. You get points every time you tell your network where you are. Every sunday night the leaderboard resets itself, allowing newbies to make it to the top (at least for a short while).

Telling your network where you are is called “checking in”. The best way to do so is by using your cell phone. 4SQ offers applications for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Palm and for the remaining phones there is a web version. If you want to check in, your phone checks your location and 4SQ tells you where you might want to check in. These are the places that were defined by people who checked in earlier. If your place is not listed, you can add it. Mind correct spelling, addresses, upper/lower case voor cities etc. Your place will be used by future 4SQ users. If you name your place correctly, it will be easier for others to find it.

Anybody can check into public places. The person with the most checkins in a particular place automatically becomes the mayor of that place. There are places in the US that serve free coffee to the local mayor. Think what this may mean for your business in terms of customer experience or marketing!

Hot: It has become possible to mark a place as private. Only your friends can see where you are and the rest of the world can’t. This may be useful if you want to record a phone number with a place. You might even add a Twitter account to a place.

4SQ made me rethink my privacy strategy and my conclusion is that Twitter is for my contact with strangers (and friends of course), where Facebook is strictly for my friends. This means I won’t be publishing location checkins on Twitter, but only on Facebook.

I used to have a Facebook application that automatically updated my Facebook status upon every new tweet on Twitter, but I removed it. Facebook supports a number of native applications. Native applications can update Facebook status in native Facebook format, so Facebook recognizes what they are. This means you’ll find less frequent, but nicer looking status updates no Facebook from now on.

Some applications that offer native Facebookness are (but not limited to): Foursquare, Flickr, Shazam and Youtube.

Click here to get your free Foursquare account

Keep your files safe online with @Wuala

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Technical evolution makes hard drives bigger and cheaper. Today, we have bigger files and more pictures and video’s on our computers than ever before.

Are these files safe? Do you have a backup of there beautiful memories? Even today, in 2010 a lot of computer still don’t have a proper backup.

Imaging the following scenario: What happens if your hard drive crashes today? What is safe and what isn’t? After reading this post you have no more excuse for not having a backup of your home computer (corporate servers are a different league).

Today, we have Wuala! Wuala is a free noline service that allows you to store your files. When you open your free account, you get 1 or 2 GB free of charge. You can use Wuala as a web drive, allowing manual storage of your files, but you can also use Wuala as a backup solution. In that case just point to a folder (directory) and tell Wuala to keep a synchronized copy in the cloud.

Wuala keeps all your stored files encrypted. Your files can only be retrieved with your password. Remember: If you lose your Wuala password, there’s no way to recover your files!

Every file Wuala stores is chopped to pieces and kept in (a minimum of 5) different places on the internet. Nerd note: This is done using P2P (Torrent) technology.

Wuala allows you to buy storage, but you can also trade local disk space for online disk space. If your PC has been online for a while Wuala will inform you that you can trade storage. The more you trade, the more you gain.

All files are private files by default. If you have friends or colleagues using Wuala you can share folders with them. If they wish to download a file from one of your shared folders, they don’t only download from your PC (it may not even be switched on), but the file comes from the collective, making downloads a lot faster!

You can use Wuala on more than one computer and it runs on Java, so it works on Windows, Mac and Linux! I keep a Windows Media Center PC at home (powered by Windows 7). It is always on and online. I traded 30 local GB’s for (almost) the same amount of online storage. I’m using this space to keep a backup of my laptop files, while I have easy access to these files from my home computer!

Please note: If you want to use Wuala as a backup solution, you need a Wuala Pro account, which you will get automatically when you buy or trade storage. If you join through a friend you get 1 GB free storage extra (as does your friend). It pays to makes friends on the Wuala network.

If you use the link below, you can become a 2 GB Wuala member as my friend 🙂

Wuala – Secure Online Storage – Backup. Store. Share. Access Everywhere.