“The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.” C.S. Lewis
If time were something I had more of, I’d gladly spend it with Paul Unger, Sharon Nelson, Jim Calloway and Erik Mazzone; but only if they’d promise to keep doing “60 Sites,” but for longer than a mere 60 minutes an hour.
This ultimate Techshow event not only garners as much ‘splash’ as the Keynote (no small feat, given Professor Lessig’s performance), but also never fails to thrill. While not all of the sites were new this year, they were all ‘relevant,’ if not outrageously affable. There was certain notoriety and unabashed contrarian tint, as these brilliant speakers (all individually and collectively), predicated self-deprecation against a sprinkling of mockery.
Sharon’s listings highlighted the theme of denial, not forgetting to mention that she failed to succeed at www.donothingfor2minutes.com by hitting print screen for this presentation. She added to our experience with–
Anti-Social http://anti-social.cc, “…a productivity application for Macs that turns off the social parts of the internet.”
Freedom http://macfreedom.com, “…a simple productivity application that locks you away from the entire Internet on Mac or Windows computers for up to eight hours at a time;” and
Fmylife www.fmylife.com “…a collection of everyday anecdotes and stories likely to happen to anyone and everyone, sent to the site by users,” designed (well, by design) to make us feel better about ourselves.
Erik Mazzone wins the “Simon Cowell Most Relevant” Award this year, nailing the intuitively needed and relatively obscure sites we tend to crave. He played us from the beginning, citing, among others –
Hipmunk www.hipmunk.com, “…the next generation of travel aggregator tools available on the web,…[which] helps zero in on the best flights faster,..by checking out the “agony index.” This travel landing page shows you a graph of how long you’ll be traveling, laying over, pulling your hair out, etc… It is, without question (and with a nod towards [my opinion] graphic display trending) the best I’ve seen so far. This keeps the nod to Kayak.com as I think the leader, with a bit of a nod to hotwire.com, and raises the question of whether the recent litigation in this area will truly affect those of us trying to get the best deal on the best flight.
He quickly digressed into the mania of the day, however with –
SorryGottaGo (www.sorrygottago.com), a site which makes it possible to get off the phone with that one person in life who calls all the time and is impossible to get off the phone with. During the call to ‘this’ person, it lets you play any one of dozens of audio files that provide plausible excuses for you to say “sorry, gotta go.”
Now in my mind this site works opposite with the App “Fake Calls,” which will ring you with any number of celebs that you choose to have them fake call you…I chose Lindsay Lohan, but apparently that may not be abelievable option for 100 days, at some point in the near future.
This theme was perpetuated by the venerable Jim Calloway, who ponied up –
Texts from Last Night (www.textsfromlastnight.com), which ‘…reminds us that some of the best stories from today’s world are now contained in text messages. These stories are gone and lost forever, unless your buddy/gal-pal decides to send them to this site.’
However, my antidote to this puppy is the App “Last Night Never Happened,” a sly little minx that will (the next morning) go into your Facebook and/or Twitter and remove all posts by you, based on the time you tell it to go back to and remove; pretty ingenious really and what I think ought to be part of the breakup kit I created with an ‘Ex’ of mine. In my perfect world this is bundled with an App I would call the “CelToxilyzer 5000” (non-existent at this point, though I believe someone in Korea or Japan launched something similar a couple of years ago), but which at midnight requires you to blow into this ‘apparatus-connectus’ affixed to your cell phone. If you blow over .12, .10, or .08, (depending on how long you’ve been broken up/get back together, broken up/get back together,…etc…), it will prevent you from actually making the call to your ex-girlfriend/ex-boyfriend/ex-huband/ex-wife. Notice the penalty by BAC measurement is enhanced by repeated violations. But until this time, the “Last Night” app will have to suffice.
It wasn’t all fun and games, however and Paul Unger and Jim Calloway joined the rest of the panel to remind us to pay attention to some serious sites that will help make us seriously productive.
Such sites (and they were dead on) were—
WhenIsGood (www.whenisgood.com) and Tungle (www.Tungle.me). Both are very good scheduling site additions to the already known TimeBridge and Wiggio staples.
SimpleCertifiedMail http://www.simplecertifiedmail.com is a slick and fast solution for those who have to send certified mail to people. And let’s face it – to those of us who hate having to deal with mail, dealing with certified is like nails on the chalkboard in the unending classroom of life.
Squarespace.com http://www.squarespace.com, in the last year or two, being touted as a really serious (and seriously simple to use) alternative to WordPress for free blog creation (Note: yes, the same WordPress who had an alleged and ‘slight’ hacking attack issue on their hosted sites recently).
With Apple under attack in just recently for allegedly tracking user locations from within iOS4 iPads and iPhones (and rumors of similar android based antics), simple seems really nice right about now.
Other extreme notables were –
Chrome Webstore (chrome.google.com/webstore) for Chrome browser web apps to make surfing like super-surfing.
Lynda (www.lynda.com), Not new, “…but online tutorials for all of your favorite software suites.”
Prezi (www.prezi.com) “…online and offline presentation software is turning heads with its non-linear method of presenting information.” This one is slick and easy with it’s own App reader for iPad. This is likely going to become one of my favorites as my right brain leaps into Spring like a borderline collie chasing enigmatic sheep.
Zamzar (www.zamzar.com) or KeepVid (www.keepvid.com) in order to “Download and convert YouTube or other online videos to MPEG, AVI, etc…”
In addition, you could go to www.vdownloader.com, which will perform a similar function.
With the rumors of Apple’s new iPhone possibly boasting an 8 megapixel back-facing camera (though not till September, unfortunately), along with Cisco’s pulling the plug on flip-cams, one might rest assured by the number of video conversion sites, that while video may be shifting in the way it’s taken, it’s also shifting toward being able to pull it from the net just as easily.
The full list of sites will be out soon and we’ll let you know when it hits the ‘www,’ but I hope this teaser lets you know just how great this panel was.
miu
