Appdate

I recently had some business travel after a a few month travel hiatus.

While I was attending a business technology conference, I was blown away by the number of iPads. In a 500 person presentation room, there would easily be 300 iPads, a handful of laptops, and maybe one or two other tablets (I saw exactly one Blackberry PlayBook, two Lenovo Android tablets, and one (I think) Samsung Android something-or-other)

There were a few great apps that came in handy worth highlighting:

• TripIt - if you ever travel and you haven't used TripIt, you are missing out. Simply forward all those airline, hotel, rental car, and restaurant reservation emails to plans@tripit.com. It automatically creates an iterinary, which can easily be modified on their website or a mobile app, and the pro version also checks for airline fare reductions and flight changes. Really handy.


• Flight Status is a great companion app as it syncs with TripIt, and gives you real-time flight information. It also has push notifications and often knows about gate changes, delays, etc before they are announced at the airport.


• Instapaper is a great app and service that works with your web browser. When you come across a lengthy article you want to read later, clip it to Instapaper. Using the iPhone or iPad app, the text of the article is downloaded and stored on your device for convienent reading, even without an Internet connection


• Tweetbot - the best iPhone Twitter client, period. Great interface and I've yet to find a feature I needed that it didn't have - only wish they made an iPad-optimized version


• Spotify is a phenominal music service. For $10/month, any song in their catalog can be streamed or downloaded to your PC, Mac, or mobile device. The iTunes music store still has a slightly bigger selection, but Spotify's catalog is impressive.

What we forgot

Ten years ago today was the first day of my last semester at college. I somehow ended up with a class schedule starting at 8:30AM, and after leaving that classroom for the first time that day, I learned how the world had changed.

I vividly remember some of the immediate effects of our collective shock. It took a week or so for television to return to anything but news, and I still recall Jon Stewart returning to the Daily Show with tears in his eyes.

As a nation, we reacted by starting a few wars, and made it impossible to board an aircraft with items as threating as a tube of toothpaste.

But one thing that I remember in the weeks following is that everyone, I mean everyone, was nice to one another. Doors were held, people made eye contact with complete strangers, and drivers even waved people into the line of traffic on the highway. We had all just been attacked and the common sense of shock reminded us of what was important.

That didn't last as long as it should, as we slowly returned to the new normal in the following months. A lot of brave, innocent people were lost that day. Perhaps the best way to honor their memory is to return to that common sense of kindness towards one another.

Happy Independence Day

Can you text me now?

With Apple's announcement of the new iMessage, mobile instant messaging appears to be a new battleground for differentiation between smart phone platforms.

Blackberry was the first to do this with Blackberry Messenger. BBM is a great tool in that it is fast, works really well, and is free. But of course, both parties must have Blackberries. iMessage is seemingly similar from a functionality perspective but adds the usual Apple flair with a nice UI. Apple has also integrated SMS into iMessage, so at least if you need to contact someone who isn't using it, you don't need a separate app to fall back on SMS like you do on Blackberry.

Rumor has it Google also has something in the works; whether this is an enhanced version of Google Talk or something else remains to be seen. However, since every smartphone platform has a more or less similar mobile instant messaging service, how does this differentiate or give one platform the edge over another? It will never happen - but if BBM could talk to iMessage could talk to Google - that would be the true killer of SMS and really drive up adoption and usage.

SMS works across any phone - even non-smartphones of course - but carriers use it as a cash cow. AT&T even dropped their cheapest SMS plan recently, making the monthly cost $10 at a minimum. It reminds me of how PRODIGY used to charge per email message in the 1990's. You got 30 for free, and then had to pay per message after that. We haven't come far in 15 years in terms of billing or service models apparently.

I have used things like Kik messenger, which running on iOS and Android, is fairly close to a true cross-platform solution. But even Kik should be integrated with the others. Imagine if you could only email other users of the same email platform as you. "Oh, you use Outlook? I'm on Gmail. Sorry!" It would never fly. Why do we have to put up with it in text messaging?