Buy wine by SMS!

So we all know that South Africa produces great wines, but how many times have you been at a restaurant and someone ordered a really great bottle of wine. You promise yourself to buy one, but the next day, you cant remember what it was called. You do a google search, but to no avail. Well, that seems to be changing. An SMS service in the US offers wine by SMS. All you do is simply SMS the name of the wine, its vintage and they will tell you how much it will cost and how you buy it from a near retailer. Maybe one step more might be to offer special offers on a case if you order it right there and then. Wonderful stuff!!

Moleskine, an icon!

About a year ago, I bought my first Moleskine diary. It is a great tool, I use it to jot down all sorts of musings and ideas that pop into my head. The diary itself is a high quality, well bound leather diary. I have a smallish version but they come in various sizes and shapes. It would seem that in the past year, they have become somewhat of an icon, so much so that a guy who put up a blog about his moleskine has just sold his blog to the producers of the diary. Pretty weird, but hey, well done to him. Take a look at the site here, for EVERYTHING moleskine: www.moleskinerie.com

New book size PC

Microsoft has been tight lipped for some time about its latest offering in the PC realm. They finally took the wraps off this week and presented the latest PC offering at CeBIT. The computer is calld the ultra mobile PC, why you may ask. Well it is about the size of a paperback novel but runs full version windows XP. Weighing about 1 -1.5 kg, the 1-inch thick device sports a 7-inch touch-sensitive screen that responds to a stylus or the tap of a finger.

Device looks great, and it is expected to retail in the US for between 600 and 1000 US$, so it could feasibly be under R 8000.00 locally. What about the specs you ask, well it will have up to a 60 gig hard drive and battery power of up to 2.5 hours…it is being pushed as a replacement for lugging a laptop around. Note to self, must get one of these soonest, for more info, take a look at some of these websites and be careful not to drool on your keyboard!!

http://www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS3801638897.html

RSS feeders

So, you cant spend the day surfing all the blogs you want to, but you dont want to miss out right. There are a few tools out there that can help you get your favourite blogs delivered to your desktop, they are called RSS feeders. I have tried a few, but my favourite is RSS bandit. It is a simple interface, easy to use and easy to set up subscriptions, try it, check out their website here…

What is Squidoo

Seth Godin is undoubtedly the guru of online marketing. His ideas never seem to age and he seems to often be one step ahead of the rest. In his latest move, he has set up a service called squidoo. In his words, this is what it is about:

“For a long time, the web has been about more. More links, more traffic, more hits, more choices. In the face of all that more, many sites (and most surfers) are not getting what they want. This free ebook, from bestselling author and Squidoo.com founder Seth Godin, proposes a different way of achieving your goals: less.”
The ebook outlines a technique that will increase PageRank, user satisfaction, clickthrough and the spread of your ideas, whatever those ideas are. It doesn’t matter if you use Squidoo or not… the idea of a lens makes sense whether you post it yourself or let us host it for you. And hey, it’s free.”

Once again, a great free offer from Godin, download his book here:
http://www.squidoo.com/stuff/books/EveryoneIsAnExpert.pdf

Visit the Squidoo site here:
http://www.squidoo.com/blog/

Amazing how the web changes, you gotta love it!

Writeboard..collaborative documents

In a similar vein to Jotspot, another collaborative tool is writeboard. The difference is that it seems that writeboard has quite a bit more functionality and it is completely free, no matter how many “boards” you put up. Also, it has some pretty good organising functions, so take a look around. The company that has developed this is called 37 signals and they have developed a few other collboration tools such as:

• Basecamp – web based project management tool
• Backpack – personal and small business information organiser
• TaDa list – web based to do list

Looks pretty good, take a look at :

http://www.writeboard.com/ and

http://www.37signals.com/

The web…the way you want it

Wired – A new mod that can be added to the Firefox browser, allows you to have a lot of control about how you see the web, enter the Greasemonkey! The site downloads the data, but you get to say what you want and dont want. Yet again, the need for change spurs innovation. Fore more insights take a look at the following websites:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.09/start.html?pg=7#

Download the firefox browser at :
www.firefox.com

Enjoy!

Free book from Seth Godin..download it!

Some of you may know of Seth Godin, the online marketing guru. If you do know him, you will know his views are radical and different. He is certainly one of the great marketing gurus of this day and certainly is ahead of his time.

What is exciting is that he has a new book out called knock knock. Here is a short excerpt from Seths Blog…enjoy

Knock Knock is now available for you to read for free. It’s a short take on how to use the new online marketing tools to make any website work more effectively.
You’ll notice on the second page of the PDF that there’s a link that makes it easy to contribute to the Red Cross. I hope you’ll take advantage of that.
Here’s the file. It’s sort of large, so if you want to post it on your own site, or email it to your friends, please go right ahead. I’ll post a list of other sites that are hosting it as soon as you send me the URL where you’ve posted. The only rules are no changes, no commerce.

Download the book free here: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/files/knockknock.pdf

Enjoy it

More power..to the mobile tribe

Wired News.com – Matsushita will develop battery technology in conjunction with Intel that will enable the battery to last all day.

Now, for those of us who know what it is like to be frantically searching for a plug to ensure “life” for our notebooks, this will be an awesome development. It also means that those overseas flights will be more productive and generally the life of a mobile person will become that much more independent. So, whilst the technology makers are focusing on making things smaller, faster able to store more and more colourful, sometimes the most obvious things are the most innovative. Battery power in my opinion is one!!

Google talks

Google will be launching an instant messaging product shortly. This takes Google well beyond the realm of simple search and changes its offering to the market yet again. It seems that Google is fast becoming the de facto innovator in the Internet space. Apparently Google wants to tackle the IM(Instant Messaging) market as well as the VOIP markets with their offering. Look out Microsoft and Yahoo, Google is getting there