Bobby isn't 40-something, but is a strong supporter of the Grown-up Geek kind. He's a loving husband and father first, but is also a freelance writer, productivity nut, operatically trained singer, and (not-so) closet geek.
Check out his random thoughts, wackiness, and Instagram pics on Tumblr, Twitter, or Google+-- or just head over to bobby-travis.com.
If you want an easy way to stream media from your home computer to your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, and want it to be free, you’re going to want to check out ZumoCast. It appeared in the app store on September 8th, and it has been awesome ever since! Read more
After a (very) long wait, Netflix has finally opened up in Canada. Well, mostly, anyway. For starters, the Canadian arm of the service is streaming only, no delivery, so that that immediately cuts down the amount of possible content available to Canadians. That was just the first content cut, however… Canadian usage rights for entertainment content have always been an added difficulty with any mainstream media service, and Netflix proves to be no different. Even though the service has finally found its way to Canada, when Hulu, Pandora, and even YouTube content is still restricted, the selection of movies and television episodes have been met with groans of disappointment by many.
We’re all relatively grown here, and chances are that most of us have dabbled in a business venture or two. We’ve spent time reading blogs and listening to podcasts that tell us about this new toy or online start up that may change the way we work (for the better, of course). Chances are we even went and signed up for an account or free beta or three, and spent a little more time mucking about to see if that new online tool would work for us. I have a long (looong) list of things I’ve tried and put aside, still use, or have flagged for later, when it suits whatever project I’m working on.
I’ve culled through that list and pulled out some of the online business services that stuck out to me, avoiding the more obvious ones like Google Apps, Producteev, Evernote, and the like. I’m pretty… thrifty… when it comes to online ventures, so all of these services will be affordable, and many of them will be at least partly free. Check out the list, below, and share some of your own highlights and discoveries in the comments.
It’s an established fact that we’re Evernote freaks here at 40Tech. Kosmo even joked that Evernote-love is a requirement to be a writer here. Well, be that as it may, the fact remains that we love the service — and that their latest offering loves blogs and Evernote users, both. In fact, the new Evernote Site Memory service is exactly what another one of our Tech Grown-Ups, Ellen, was searching for in a comment on this post.
Evernote Site Memory basically “embeds a mini-version of Evernote” right into a page or a post, making it extremely simple for readers to clip and save your content, directly from the post itself. This makes it really easy for readers to save a blog’s content to their Evernote, complete with tagging and notebook choice. It even allows sites to suggest tags, and to designate which areas of the page can be clipped, cutting out any ads, comments, or other things that you may not want in your notebooks. Clips render in Evernote much better this way and I think that this feature, alone, makes Evernote Site Memory far superior to the web clipper and browser plugins.
Some additional niceness for readers is the ability to use the Site Memory button to see what other posts you’ve clipped from the site you are on, essentially giving you a “site favourites” list for any site you’re on that uses the button. For sites, Evernote will be doing monthly features of sites that get a lot of use out of the Site Memory button, and is now offering a piece of the proverbial pie to websites via an affiliate program. If a user signs up to Evernote through your Site Memory button, and later adopts a paid subscription, Evernote will give your site the first $10 bucks that they make off of that new user. Not a bad gig, considering that Evernote has surpassed 4 million users — and received more than a million of those in the past month.
The announcement for Evernote Site Memory appeared yesterday on the Evernote Blog, so we haven’t adopted it yet. There are some nice instruction sets for integration into WordPress and other platforms on Evernote’s site, so you can bet we will be playing with an implementation on our test site soon.
What do you think of Evernote Site Memory? Is it a feature you would like to see on 40Tech?
The Evernote Site Memory Button [Evernote Blog]
Update: Evernote Site Memory is now live on 40Tech! Save all the 40Tech posts you love to Evernote with a click!
Social Media’s Darker Side Has Reared its Head Outside My Door
Normally, I like to stick to light and fluffy things like how-to’s and reviews. I don’t get up on my soapbox often and I don’t like to mess up people’s days by spreading things that I wasn’t happy to learn. Today is a bit different. The fundamental shift in the way we gather, process, and spread information, while having a hugely positive affect on social efforts like fund and awareness raising, has an equally destructive affect when in the hands of those whose moral centre lays somewhere a billion or so feet below ground. What happened on Facebook over the past week — and is still happening now — is every bit as horrible and disgusting to me as the act that preceded it. I am, quite frankly, unable to fully process it, which is why I am writing about it, trying to put it into some sort of sense. Read more