40Tech

Music is dead. That’s how I feel when I listen to the radio these days, or when I flip to a music video channel and find myself assaulted by the latest, greatest “reality” television series. Do people actually like Jersey Shore — or is it just some kind of morbid fascination? In any case, when it comes to music, I find myself searching for… something more. That’s how I came across ExtensionFM.

If you have read 40Tech over the past year, you may have discovered my minor obsession with productivity apps and methods. It’s a journey that began with my first post here: GTD in Evernote with Only One Notebook (posted a year and a week ago ), and continued through reviews of Action Method Online and on into my latest experiment, Producteev 2. I have really been enjoying Producteev, and have been using it exclusively for some time now — so I decided it was time to attempt a full GTD implementation, and see how it would work. After some trial and error, I’m satisfied. Check out a walkthrough of my method for GTD in Producteev, below.

As some of you have no doubt heard, Apple has recently applied for a patent entitled: Systems and Methods for Identifying Unauthorized Users of an Electronic Device. This technology is, ostensibly, supposed to give Apple the power to help you protect yourself in the event someone else has gotten a hold of your iPhone. It also gives Apple the power to remotely wipe your iPhone if you have Jailbroken your device — the legality of Jailbreaking notwithstanding.

Just that last detail is enough to get many people up in arms, but it is the method in which Apple wants to implement its new Big Brother feature that has people truly freaked out. After taking a bit of time to think about it and consider the implications, I have decided that I am one of those people.

As a marketing professional, I understand the importance of protecting brand identity. I get that it means dollars, and that any infringement upon or blanding of a company’s identity can, in the long run, have a negative effect on that company’s bottom line. I understand that a company as culturally dominating as Facebook has to worry about their brand becoming so “household” that their trademark can become non-enforceable (“google” anything lately?) — but does that give them the right to demand that an upcoming social network for teachers remove the word “book” from its name? You tell us.

If you are even halfway interested in some of the “neat-o” tech available in futuristic sci-fi films, you are going to want to learn all you can about Skin. Skin is a hot new bit of tech that’s been brought to market by Displax, purveyors of several intriguing touch screen devices such as Crayon, an interactive table for kids, and the Oqtopus multitouch table. Skin takes all previous future-tech from Displax to a whole new level , though. We’re talking touchscreen-on-any-surface kind of cool.

In an effort to discover a reasonable replacement for the collaborative powers of Google Wave, 40Tech has gone forth and tested several free or mostly free services and methods. So far, we’ve reviewed Zenbe’s Shareflow, as well as a conglomeration of other Google services (which, reportedly, will be absorbing some of Wave’s features). As our next candidate, we tested Socialwok, a free, very Facebook-like service that allows you to not only create your own focused social network(s), but was designed to integrate tightly into Google Apps.

Web based office suites are great – and getting better all the time – but none of them can really top the formatting capabilities and ability to work without an internet connection that comes from Microsoft Office. Still, we are a world heading for the proverbial Cloud, and we often find ourselves with the need to easily share and collaborate on documents over great distances. The Make Tech Easier blog took the time to lay out three ways to get that done, using Google Docs, Zoho, and, of course, the relatively new Office Live.

If you are overwhelmed by the multitude of services you are a part of and need to maintain, Cliqset may be the definitive service for you. Originally thought to be a slightly prettier FriendFeed clone, the service has taken big strides in the past eight months. With over 80 connected services, including deep integrations with Evernote, Twitter, Foursquare, and yes, even Google Buzz, Cliqset is well on its way to becoming your social media command centre.

Just last week, Producteev announced on their Posterous blog that their software now has the power to act as a virtual assistant, of sorts. Producteev has embraced the power of “natural language”, allowing users to actually tell the system (via email, IM, browser extension, and more) to do things like create or update a task and assign it to a specific person with a level 5 priority and a Friday due date. Producteev now also allows you to reply to reminder messages to change the status of a task, and to retrieve tasks by query. Read on for more.

If you’re a Safari user, you probably like the built in ad-stripping, easy-reading feature, Safari Reader. If you’re not, and you’re using Firefox or Chrome (I’ll happily side-step IE on this one), then you may be either jealous of the Safari functionality, or using an extension or bookmarklet like Readability (check out our post on the Readability+Evernote combo-bookmarklet). While Readability is great, Safari Reader is a step up — and the iReader extension for Google Chrome and Firefox is even better.