2018 Shell Jewelry weblogs

My top 3

Google Calendar Invoice Creator If you’re looking for an easy way to transfer all your meetings from your Google Calendar to a program that will bill those with whom you met, Google Calendar Invoice Creator is for you.

File Furnace is unique–and quite useful.

Like the site, Remember the Task makes it quick and easy to add tasks to your to-do list. With a simple click of the mouse, you can jot down exactly what needs to be done. That said, it’s not quite as simple to use as Doomi. Its design doesn’t quite match Doomi’s, either. But if you’re looking for an alternative to Doomi that you can use anywhere, you should be happy with Remember the Task.

Klok Klok is a simple time sheet app that lets you quickly add projects and how long it took you to complete them. The app even records how long you’ve been working on something for a client. When you stop the timer, you can modify its description and add it to your time sheet. When you’re ready, you can create reports to see how much work you’ve performed. Unlike many time sheet apps, getting used to Klok takes no time. It’s a well-designed, easy-to-use program.

TweetDeck shows your Twitter stream

Agile Agenda makes it much easier to manage projects.

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Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

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Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Agile Agenda Agile Agenda is a project management tool that helps project managers keep their team on track.

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Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

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Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Think Think is yet another simple but highly useful app. Instead of jotting ideas down in your head or trying to remember things after a meeting, Think provides a simple, Twitter-like input box, allowing you to jot some mental notes down. Once you complete your thought, it’s added to your Think timeline for future viewing. It works well, but I had one issue: you can’t press the “Enter” key to post an update. Instead, Think requires you to enter the thought with your mouse. It’s annoying, but it didn’t detract too much from the app.

Ora Time and Expense As a former company auditor that spent far too much time inputting data into a time-and-expense tool, I was suspect of Ora Time and Expense. I thought it would be too simple. Oh, how wrong I was.

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Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Ora Time and Expense is, quite simply, the best time and expense app I’ve ever used. As soon as you download it, you’ll be treated to a fantastic design that makes it extremely easy to find anything you need. From there, you can add tasks, input expenses, and track your time. You can also run reports to see how much work you’ve performed and how much money you’ve made. The app’s timer will help you determine how long you’ve spent working. Ora Time and Expense is a must-try.

After you download TweetDeck, you can input your Twitter username and start checking out follower updates, replies, and direct messages. You can update your stream from the app. You can also shorten URLs automatically. If you want to manage your Facebook profile, TweetDeck allows you to update your status. You can also see what your friends are up to. Why waste your time on multiple sites? TweetDeck will help you stay in one spot.

Remember the Task Remember the Task is the AIR version of Remember the Milk, the popular online to-do list service.

MiniTask is small, but capable.

Agile Agenda is quite impressive. You can add your team and input information about the tasks you need to perform. You can set priority, dependencies, when a task should be completed, and more. You can also edit milestones so you can track how the project is coming along. Most importantly, the app’s fantastic design makes it easy to use.

1. Ora Time and Expense: Combining power and style, Ora Time and Expense is an extremely appealing app for those looking to be more productive.

Once you download the app, you’ll need to input your Google Calendar RSS feed into the app. From there, it will download all your events. When you finish a meeting, you can click on the event and start billing those you met with. The invoice can be sent in an HTML or text format.

File Furnace File Furnace is a unique app. Instead of impressing you with a nice design and several menus, the app displays a simple image of a fire. Over that, the app displays a message that reads, “Drop unwanted files here.” It also features the sound of a crackling fire. As long as you follow the directions of File Furnace, and drag and drop unwanted files or directories into the fire, it permanently removes them from your computer. It’s a slightly unusual app, but it’s much easier to delete files with File Furnace than waste time with the Recycle Bin.

Klok makes it easy to add projects to your time sheets.

Be more productive

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Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Doomi keeps you on track with a to-do list.

Adobe AIR apps are some of the best designed, most useful applications you can have on your desktop. Last month, I highlighted 10 applications to try out, if you’re thinking about using AIR apps. This time around, I want to take a look at 10 apps that will make you more productive. Trust me, they will help you save some time.

3. Google Calendar Invoice Creator: By integrating Google Calendar, this app is a great way to be more productive.

Ora Time and Expense will help you track all your cash.

Think helps you remember important thoughts.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

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Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

MiniTask MiniTask won’t blow you away with its design, and you probably won’t be incredibly impressed by its lack of features. But MiniTask is designed to be a lightweight app on your desktop that gets you back to work sooner. It wants to make tracking your day’s requirements quick and easy. And with a simple input field, it succeeds. MiniTask isn’t the best task-tracking tool in this roundup, but if you’re looking to be more productive, it should help.

Google Calendar Invoice Creator should maximize your time meeting with clients.

TweetDeck TweetDeck is not only one of the best apps you’ll use with Adobe AIR, it will easily make you more productive when you start interacting with social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Doomi Doomi is an extremely simple to-do-list app that lets you quickly add items you need to complete. That list is displayed under the input box. You can set how long it should take to complete the task and mark the box next to it when it’s complete. It’s a simple app, but it’s far more effective than writing your to-do list down.

Agile Agenda gives you the option of trying it for 3 days or 30 days, or buying a license. If you’re buying one license, the software will set you back $70. More licenses reduce the price.

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Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Remember the Task has a slightly older-looking design, but it's still a nice app.

2. Doomi: If you want to see what’s left of your day, Doomi is for you.

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Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

So good luck.

But this is the penultimate daily challenge, so I figured, why not dip into the well once more and task you with identifying one last wondrous piece of nature?

Do you know what this is? If so, you could win a prize in the Road Trip picture of the day challenge.

To that end, if you are the first to tell me (by e-mail to daniel–dot–terdiman–at–cnet–dot–com) what this is called, and where it is, you’ll win a prize.

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Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

If you’ve followed the Road Trip picture of the day challenges, you may have noticed that a number of them have featured big rock formations. And why not? When you drive more than 5,000 miles through states like Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, as I did during Road Trip 2009, you see some of the most beautiful things nature can throw at you.

Click here for the entire Road Trip 2009 package.

After tomorrow, however, there won’t be any more daily challenges. Until Road Trip 2010, that is.

(Well, it’s the company’s early days as depicted in Ben Mezrich’s juicy and most-definitely-not-authorized “The Accidental Billionaires,” which some have criticized for being factually liberal.)

The news was first reported by Variety, which added that actor Andrew Garfield will be playing Zuckerberg’s Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. Garfield is perhaps best known for his role in the 2007 Robert Redford film “Lions for Lambs.”

UPDATE at 11:11 a.m. PT: It looks like the casting rumors were first reported earlier this month by the blog Scriptshadow, albeit in a far less concrete context than Variety–and the report’s coincidence with the Labor Day holiday weekend likely kept it under the radar.

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Miramax Films)

Jesse Eisenberg, pictured here with 'Adventureland' co-star Kristen Stewart, will be playing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in 'The Social Network.'

We heard a few months back that the producers were looking at some bigger names to play Zuckerberg: perpetually typecast nerd Michael Cera and “Transformers” star Shia LaBeouf. But it looks like they’re putting the real star power instead into the casting of Timberlake as Sean Parker.

Eisenberg, who turns 26 in a few weeks, is a decently big name himself: he’s also been seen in “The Squid and the Whale” and “The Village.” Timberlake’s musical reputation needs no introduction (he got his start, after all, in boy band ‘N Sync), but his best-known acting role might be the “Saturday Night Live” short “D*** in a Box.”

Production for Columbia Pictures’ “The Social Network,” which was written by “The West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin, is reportedly going to begin in October in Boston.

“Adventureland” star Jesse Eisenberg will be playing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and singer Justin Timberlake will be playing Silicon Valley mainstay Sean Parker in “The Social Network,” director David Fincher’s cinematic adaptation of the company’s early days.

Should the sale go through, copyright owners say they will try to seize any of the proceeds from the sale.

In June, Global Gaming Factory said it intended to acquire The Pirate Bay. Last week, the company’s CEO said the Swedish company has managed to find the funding needed to complete the sale. The transaction is supposed to go through sometime after August 27.

“Today marks the end of a small era for me, but I am simply leaving a role in order to be a person instead.”

Sunde Kolmisoppi suggested that he may return to the copyright/file-sharing debate one day. “It’s an important cause and I will not give the fight up.”

Peter Sunde

Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, one of the three founders of The Pirate Bay, has stepped down as the site’s spokesman and has said he is moving on to new projects.

Napster sowed the seeds of sharing unauthorized music files on the Web and The Pirate Bay harvested the hunger for free content by building a file-sharing community that extended across the globe, according to the founders. Among many young techies and hardcore Internet users, Sunde Kolmisoppi, Neij, and Warg are revered.

Last week, the Netherlands banned The Pirate Bay in that country and issued a threat that unless the site discontinues operation there, the operators will be fined $42,227. Also, a group representing copyright owners in Italy filed a $1 million copyright lawsuit.

Last spring, a Swedish court found the Web site’s founders: Sunde Kolmisoppi, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, guilty of copyright violations. The three men were sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay $3.6 million in damages.

“I have decided to not be the spokesperson for The Pirate Bay anymore,” Sunde Kolmisoppi wrote in a blog post Monday. “The reasons are many, but most importantly it takes too much of my time. I want to build something new and I want to focus my energy in a different direction. I have projects waiting to be finished, a book is waiting to be finalized and many more books are waiting to be read.”

Sunde Kolmisoppi has maintained the three founders haven’t owned the site since 2006. They transferred ownership to Reservella. The Motion Picture Industry Association of America claimed recently that the founders control Reservella. Sunde Kolmisoppi denied the allegations.

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Mats Lewan/CNET News)

Peter Sunde holds up a pretend IOU after The Pirate Bay founders were sentenced to a year in jail and fined more than $3 million.

For the past several years, Sunde Kolmisoppi has become the voice of the controversial BitTorrent tracking service that enabled millions to find and eventually download unauthorized copies of movies and other content. His departure follows a series of crushing legal setbacks for The Pirate Bay.

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The Pirate Bay)

Our issues have “been raised to another level and it’s time for biological dispersal,” Sunde Kolmisoppi wrote. “At the same time, I have a feeling of being sessile when I need to be the most motile creature ever. The regeneration will continue with me in another place.

The music and film industries have alleged that The Pirate Bay was nothing more than a group of men who used technology to steal from artists and pocket the illegal proceeds for themselves.

For anybody looking for more information, they should visit Consumerist.com, which has done an excellent job of covering WebLoyalty and Vertrue for several months. To see a long list of consumers complaints about these companies, try here.

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Vertrue.com)

Vertrue, which operates a so-called Web loyalty program, apparently isn’t as forthcoming with information as some U.S. Senators would like.

“We requested in writing that the subpoena be issued and that’s because one of the items requested was consumer information,” Thomas said, “including consumer complaints and inquiries over the course of a decade, which would include personally identifiable information about the consumer.”

In a CNET News story published last week, WebLoyalty said that its service is popular with the vast majority of users. Typically, Web loyalty programs–which offer discounts or cash back if the customer just enters an e-mail–present offers as a consumer is about to finish a purchase. Many who complain about the programs say that the terms are tucked into a dense field of fine print and graphics.

George Thomas, a Vertrue spokesman, said that it was Vertrue execs who requested the subpoena as they would refuse to give up consumers’ privacy unless ordered to by authorities.

Companies like Norwalk, Conn.-based Vertue, along with WebLoyalty and Affinion, are marketers that make “cash-back” and coupon offers to consumers and charge those who enroll in their loyalty programs. The three are under investigation after scores of consumers complained that they were duped into paying monthly fees.

Update 1:15 p.m. PDT: Added quotes from Vertrue.

It’s worth noting that while Thomas and Vertrue say they wouldn’t give up consumers’ private information unless ordered to, Buy.com, Fandango and Orbitz appear to have a much lower threshold for sharing that information.

Also, many consumers who allegedly “opt in” to the program don’t know that by just keying in their e-mail address, companies like Vertrue and WebLoyalty can acquire access to their credit cards. WebLoyalty’s CEO, Rick Fernandes, said last week that his company pays retailers such as Buy.com, Fandango, and Orbitz for access to their customers’ cards.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate’s Commerce Committee issued a subpoena to Vertrue requiring that the privately held company turn over documents that committee investigators requested in May, including communications with business partners and credit card companies.

Apple blocks Google Voice app for iPhone

Report finds fake antivirus on the rise

Listen now:

After more than a year of back and forth, Microsoft and Yahoo have finalized a deal to share search and advertising resources. Reporter Tom Krazit talks about what it will mean for the two companies, Google, and everyday users.

Yahoo, Microsoft reach search, ad deal

Psystar hires Jammie’s lawyers in fight with Apple

Also in today’s podcast: fake antivirus software has infiltrated millions of PCs; Psystar hires Jammie Thomas-Rasset’s lawyers to fight Apple; an Internet scuffle over Rorschach inkblots; and more of today’s top headlines.

Verizon challenges Apple with Vcast app store

AMD spinoff lands top chip company as customer

McKinsey: Efficiency could save $700 billion

A Rorschach cheat sheet on Wikipedia?

Download today’s podcast

Today’s stories:

Typing on the iPhone/iPod Touch’s keyboard can be arduous. This is never more evident than when trying to bang out messages in several instant-messaging conversations at once. Shape Services, the makers of the popular IM+ instant-messaging app ($9.99 App Store link), have realized this, and are soon rolling out a new version of the app that includes speech-to-text, albeit at a price.

The updated version of the app is in Apple’s review queue, meaning it could be out later this week, month, or be rejected outright (although not likely since it’s using standard APIs). Besides speech-to-text, the update also adds animated emoticons for whatever service you’re using. It’s a small touch, but sure to make IM enthusiasts happy. We take a quick look at that and the speech-to-text feature in the video below. Worth noting is that processing times have been sped up for the sake of time, although we make note of that when it occurs:

The app managed to get a few sentences without flaws, but I regularly found myself going into make a quick edit to one or two words each time. That wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t take so long to do all the processing. Over 3G, small quips like a four- or five-word reply took around 15 seconds to process and get sent back, whereas full messages took up to 24 seconds. These times were cut a few seconds shorter when on a solid Wi-Fi connection, but still on the long side.

In short, it does a decent job, but it still experiences some of the typical pitfalls found in other speech-to-text tools. If you’ve used Google’s search app on the iPhone you know all too well that it can handle some words better than others, and that it works slightly faster when you’re on Wi-Fi. The same can be said of IM+.

Taking advantage of Apple’s recently released in-app payment system, 99 cents a month gets you the feature, meaning that the annual cost of continuing to use it is about $12 a year. Not bad if you’re a heavy user. But how well does it work?

It’s also got a major advantage over HP’s Skyroom, which is limited to being used behind a single corporate firewall. I liked Skyroom’s technology–though it seemed to have many similarities to Apple’s long-available iChat AV software–in particular because it offered the ability to share rich media, including real-time video.

What’s nice about Fuze Meeting is that it seems to provide a simple way to get multiple people together, regardless of where they are, and have a quick meeting where they can all share many different kinds of content. To be sure, this is not likely to be a company’s only way to have online meetings for remote employees, but given its ease of use and the fact that it allows the sharing of rich media across popular mobile devices, it seems like something that a lot of people may use.

First, Hewlett-Packard introduced its Skyroom videoconferencing application for PCs. But in my opinion, the better answer is Fuze Box’s Fuze Meeting. This is a nice application for the iPhone or BlackBerry that allows multiple users to conduct multimedia meetings via their mobile devices.

Once a meeting is initiated, users can share a wide range of media with each other, including PowerPoint presentations, business documents, 3D geospatial maps, photos, video, and more. In addition, any URLs used in a meeting can be posted, with one click, onto Facebook or Twitter for wide dissemination.

Fuze Meeting allows rich-media videoconferencing on iPhones and BlackBerrys.

This post was updated with correct information about requirements for Fuze Meeting on the iPhone.

It’s designed to make it possible to add participants easily and quickly from various social-networking services’ friends lists–like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter–to a real-time meeting session.

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Fuze Box)

But Skyroom’s behind-the-firewall limitations seem unnecessary, and Fuze Meeting proves it.

SAN DIEGO–At DemoFall 09 here Tuesday morning, one theme quickly emerged: new applications for collaborative video meetings.

Like Skyroom, Fuze Meeting allows users to have high-definition meetings–on the iPhone, that requires having OS 3.0.

More importantly, as Augustin calls out, open source puts CIOs, not vendors, in control of their destiny:

The one hitch to this enterprise open-source love-in is that the more open-source vendors enable enterprise IT, the less enterprise IT may need vendors.

Still, open-source vendors like Red Hat will win often enough to ensure that open source remains big business, and big for business, for many years to come. The risk is that while open source has transformed enterprise IT, enterprise IT is in turn putting its stamp on open source, making it more attractive to adopt and far less compelling as a competitive differentiator.

Ultimately, it could be the studiously “un-cool” companies like IBM that make the most money from open source, principally because they are best positioned to monetize it with additional layers of proprietary hardware, software, and services. This breaks the open-source oath of absolute transparency, but it’s a price many CIOs seem willing to pay.

Given its subscription model, open source forces vendors to innovate in order to earn renewals. And because open source comes with a built-in “recipe” (read: source code), it provides the “ultimate insurance policy,” as Glyn Moody writes, for enterprises that want to rely on a vendor but not become dependent upon it.

Perhaps it has already happened.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in enterprise IT, a market famously expensive to target due to the inflated cost of acquiring customers. Open source turns this cost equation on its head by making the acquisition of new customers relatively cheap, as SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin tells NetworkWorld.

Now people understand software and they understand that many applications have matured. I think we’ll see over time the software industry reach a point where it is not proprietary vs. open source, but the shade of how much control you want, how much do you want to do yourself, and how much do you want the vendor to do.

You can see this in the most recent IDC numbers on Linux deployments. While Red Hat, Novell, and other Linux vendors are growing comfortably, nonpaid Linux adoption is outpacing paid deployments. A sign that enterprise IT is going it alone?

In fact, open source has become such an essential ingredient to software success that Gartner’s Brian Prentice is now predicting that “we are rapidly moving to the point where all software companies will, to some extent, be an open source company.”

It’s this lack of religious devotion to open source, with an emphasis on its tangible cost benefits over its freedom benefits, that continues to make open source palatable to the enterprise but also less distinctive. The reason that enterprises buy from Red Hat in droves has precious little to do with source code access and everything to do with the superior value (read: cost and performance) Red Hat offers, as Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst recently noted.

Open source is becoming more like the market that gave it birth.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Even so, just a few years ago, if you were a start-up focused on enterprise IT, VCs treated you like a leper, preferring to invest in something with a name like Bungabooboo.com over something that could shave 10 percent from a CIO’s operating costs. The one way to get funding for enterprise software was to approach the market in a decidedly Web 2.0 way: open source. With the recession still in full bloom, open-source companies like Red Hat are cleaning up.

Today these are almost entirely those enterprises with savvy development teams, but it could prove to be an unhealthy trend for commercial open source. It’s one reason that Red Hat’s foray into cloud computing may prove a tough slog: the kinds of companies running clouds are precisely the sort that don’t need much vendor hand-holding. The Googles of the world don’t buy much software: they build it, and they use a lot of open source in the process.

That’s because however much we may enjoy Facebooking, Twittering, etc., ultimately we pay for what helps us get our jobs done.

It’s not a race that open source always wins. Notice, for example, that in Linux’s easiest market–the market for Unix-to-Linux replacements–it’s proprietary Unix vendor IBM that arguably is cleaning up the most.

Despite all the nifty, gee-whiz technology that the Web 2.0 craze brought the software industry, it’s still stodgy enterprise software that continues to command a significant price tag.

There are a gazillion rumors swirling out there about a forthcoming Apple tablet of some sort. And while we certainly don’t feel the need to point you to each and every supposed leaked photo or tip from a super-secret inside source, this potential clue is too interesting to pass on.

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Borders/Screenshot by Michelle Meyers/CNET)

Only time (and Apple’s anticipated September event) will tell.

Updated at 3:15 p.m. PDT on Tuesday: A Borders representative said book audience research firm Codex Group conducted the poll on behalf of Borders and “included the term iPad in the survey.” However, Codex Group founder and CEO Peter Hildick-Smith declined to explain the origin of the term, deferring to his client, Borders.

In other words, we still don’t know if someone was trying to predict the future, has inside knowledge, or is simply having fun with Apple watchers.

It’s hard to know what to make of this reference. Perhaps Borders has some sort of inside knowledge, or perhaps the third-party producer of this survey reads Apple fan blogs. Or maybe Borders is just listening to CNET readers, who seemed to like the name iPad in our “Name that Netbook” poll.

This story was updated Tuesday with some clarification about the origin of the iPad reference. See details below.

More specifically, after getting a sense of my taste in books and buying habits, Borders asked about my familiarity with digital-reading devices and whether “I plan to buy an Apple iPad (large-screen reading device) this year.” Hmmm, that was a toughie.

A Borders customer survey asks about a mystery Apple iPad large-screen reading device.

MacLife appears to be the first to have noticed that a survey Borders e-mailed to customers, for which those willing to participate earn a coupon for 20 percent off, referenced a device called the Apple iPad.