Did you know you can use your Mac to connect to any Windows PC? Microsoft has a client, which even allows you to relay audio. It’s pretty cool!
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It takes only $5 to get rid of the ads in #ÜberTwitter for your #BlackBerry!
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!
Keep your files safe online with @Wuala
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.
Happy New Year, Google Wave!
Last year we saw the announcement and release of Google Wave.
For those who didn’t get it: Google Wave is a Hosted Conversation Service. Google thought: “If email were invented today instead of 40 years ago, what would it look like?”.
Rather than sending endless emails to each other, Wave allows you to start a conversation at one central place and involve other people, yes even entire websites!
If all of this doesn’t ring a bell, have a look at: http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html
There is short video (2 minutes) that explains in plain english what Wave is all about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8wXnVRnYdc
You can get a Wave account through an Invite, just like Gmail at its time. I still have tons of invites left, so if you’re not on Wave yet and I made you curious, let me know and I’ll send you your invite. Invites can be received at any random email address, but I discovered that invites to Gmail addresses actually take longer to arrive! Once you have your invite, you can subscribe to Wave using a Google Account (can be a different address than the one your invite was sent to). If you don’t have Google Account yet, you can create one on-the-fly and you’re ready to go. In the end you get a new address within Google Wave, which, funny enough, doesn’t allow you to receive email… Your Wave address ends in @googlewave.com and it allows others to add you to their Wave. I use daepunt everywhere, but unfortunately daepunt@googlewave.com wasn’t available, so if you want to share your Wave with me, add puntdae@googlewave.com instead.
The first thing I came across once I got started with Wave, was the interface. The screen looks like an interesting mix between Gmail and Google Docs (a chaos I never got used to). Wave is still in beta, so try not to use it for life/death stuff. On the other hand: If you’re not using it for serious purposes, how will you ever find out what it can/can’t do?
We’re using Wave in a production environment, which makes us discover interesting stuff on a daily basis. I’d like to share a few of those things.
The first thing I immediately missed was mobile support. I have a BlackBerry and an iPhone and a I perform a significant part of my job on the road. Google Wave runs within a browser and there’s no mobile support yet. There are numerous non-official Wave applications for the iPhone, but I’m always very careful with that. Those Apps require you to save your name and password and after that, you have no idea what happens to them. No, thanks! I’ll wait for the official Google App, although you might wonder if your name, password and data are safer with Google…
Google intends to turn Wave into an open platform, allowing the whole world to develop my mobile BlackBerry/iPhone App. But until that day comes, you’re stuck to a browser on a PC. The smartest thing I found was a FireFox Add-On, allowing you to see your unread Waves at the bottom of your FireFox screen: https://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/14973
Wave is still work in progress. My browser hangs a lot and today I discovered that it’s impossible to “unshare” someone, after you accidentally added the wrong person to your Wave. This means you have to be very careful when sharing Waves. Fortunately there is a way to copy existing Wave content to a new Wave (so your data doesn’t get lost), allowing you to share your stuff with the right people. You will then discover that there’s no way to permanently delete your old Wave! Emptying it or stuffing it with bogus is the only way to get rid of a Wave you accidentally shared with a wrong contact. Be careful with sharing (especially with the wrong people) because this is also a way to connect people to each other, which may not always be your intention…
Despite these quirks I see huge potential for Wave. There are people who worry about Google’s influence on our daily lives and I think it’s important to worry about privacy. Yet, I think Google is no bigger threat than Microsoft and we need to consider the options here. We should choose between existing possibilities instead of theoretical, non-existing products/services.
All progress is achieved step by step and taking active part in new developments enables you to stay involved and up-to-date. I don’t know if Google Wave will remain to exist in five years, but I see potential for a service like Wave. And Wave being Open Source creates spinoff projects, allowing you to run your own corporate in-house Wave server. That solves the privacy argument against Google and I reckon we might very well be installing local Wave servers in SMB companies, which are currently dominated by Microsoft Exchange only, anywhere between now and five years…
I wish you all a happy 2010 and I hope we will continue to see beautiful developments!