I do not own an iPod. I’ve been very tempted to get one, but I really don’t need another gadget to carry around. I do have a mobile phone that has a microSD slot so I can bring 2gb of music with me, however my phone has a USB 1.1 connection which makes data transfers painfully slow. And besides, 2gb is just a tease, I want to have my whole damn music collection with me, all the time!
I was hopeful Orb would do the trick but it didn’t work for streaming music to my mobile. Today I discovered Phling!, a mobile music social network. First and foremost, Phling! claims to allow access to all your music and photos stored on your PC from your phone. In addition, it is supposed to allow you to snap pictures with your mobile phone and have one touch uploading to your PC or your MBlog (mobile blog?). This all requires your PC to be running the “Phling! My PC” client application on your PC, just like Orb and for it to be running all the time.
So I gave Phling! a shot. After signing up for an account, I filled out a short profile (like any social network) and installed the desktop background client (which requires WMP 10 or newer). Just like any social network, you can have “friends”, six of whom you can share all you music with (a limitation Orb does not have, but then Orb doesn’t seem to work!) When I went to select my phone to which I found there to be a VERY limited selection of Symbian based handsets. The java app only works on a handful of Nokia and Sony Ericsson models. Disappointed that the E61 was not a choice, I selected the Nokia 5500. I lucked out and was able to install the app on the phone.
I started up the program, logged in and I was greeted with a shrunken home screen, I assume due to the fact that I was running software designed for a phone with a smaller screen (I wish java apps could figure the screen size out without requiring a version for each type of phone!). I was able to navigate my way through all my music and select “U2 - Elevation” then select play…then buffering…then MUSIC! Phling ! took about 5 seconds to buffer each song when running on EDGE, so I imagine it performs very well on a 3G network (I couldn’t get Phling! to run on my LG CU500).
I was also able to browse the photos on my PC. The software automatically resizes pictures to the size of the phone’s screen. If my phone had a camera, I would have also been able to take photos with the phone and upload them to your PC or my Phling! Mblog page. So far, there isn’t much “mobile social community” here. But this is where it is…Phling! allows you to see what music is most popular amongst other Phling! users, as well as rate and comment on songs. Those songs you can select to buy, which I didn’t try this time.
Overall I am very impressed with Phling!. I am now able to listen to my entire music collection from my phone. Where I think Phling! can use some work is with their support for additional models and by making their software a little more “music playery” and less “phoney”. Prefetching would greatly improve the mobile application’s performance, just like it does with Google’s mobile Gmail application. Phling! is really cool and I bet Phlinging music is going to become very common in the not too distant future (Sling for your video, Phling for your music and photos…Merger!). If you have a Symbian based Nokia or Sony Ericsson, you have to check Phling! out!
and use Kiva.org, a site that facilitates P2P microfinancing AKA adopting a developing world business . It works like the sponsor a child programs that we see infomercials for, however by giving to these loans you are practicing my friend Jammy’s motto: “You buy a man a burger he eats for a day; you find that man a job he eats for a while.”
When you have selected the business to donate to, you can even subscribe to the RSS feed to get updates on the business! Also, after a little bit of poking on Kiva’s site, I found that the repayment rate on these loans are upwards of 95%. And if you’re just not quite VC material, and the business you chose fails, just think of it as a donation to a good cause.
Here is the link to the business I chose to give to, please contribute too! However if you are a grinch this holiday season and want to make money off your loans, give Prosper.com a try. It’s a site where you can bid on loans, like on eBay. Here’s the NY Times article covering the launch earlier this year.
Happy Holidays!
Which do you consider more personal: What you did last weekend or what your money did last weekend? There are no shortage of places to find out what happened in my social life last weekend. Hit up the social networks and you can see my dirt.
Now there’s a financial planning social network called Wesabe which makes some of your spending habits more public. When I first discovered this site last Friday I was intrigued by the idea. As a somewhat financially responsible young professional, I look for financial advice from equally/more financially responsible close friends, family and some internet peers. The idea of social financial help brought Socialpicks to mind but instead of the investing angle, Wesabe goes after controlling spending habits. Think Web 2.0 meets Quicken.
After a painless sign up process it was time to configure my account. Wesabe offers a client that will pull data from your bank, credit card and savings account. I am a little weary of giving out my passwords to 3rd party websites, so I used Wesabe’s manual upload tool. I was able to download 3 months worth of data from my various accounts into Quicken files and then upload to Wesabe. This seems like a smart move by Wesabe to all new users to experiment with the service without requiring access to their financial account (Wesabe has the standard privacy statement saying you can trust them, they will never share it, yada yada yada).
Once uploaded, I was able to go through each of my statements line by line and tag items. Once an item is tagged as a certain type (Say Gordo’s burrito tagged as food), all other instances will be auto-tagged as that too. Pretty handy. Over time as the Wesabe community cleans up the imported credit card data, items will have more meaningful names. (”Pir sho Val” becomes “Pirate Shop on Valencia Street“). So far, so good.
Based on your tagging, Wesabe reports back how much you’ve been spending and how much you’ve been making. This is where I discovered some issues. For instance, I made a transfer from my check account to my savings account and tagged it as “Savings”. The way Wesabe counts it, that is spending. I would think the service would have some logic to figure that money going from a checking account to a savings account is not “spending”. There seem to be kinks to work out and this feature isn’t worth much until the software gets smarter.
There are two other areas of Wesabe. The first is “Tips”. Basically they look at your tags and match you with other users who have written tips on those items (You can write tips too!). Think of a message boards built around tag names. This is an interesting idea to provide relevant advice about my spending and savings but when I tested it there wasn’t much advice for me and it wasn’t very relevant to me.
The last tab on Wesabe is “Goals”. Users can create goals or subscribe to other users’ goals. Again these are like message boards based around specific goals. Again this is an interesting idea but my goals of “lower spending” and “buy a house” (rated as some of the most popular goals on Wesabe) didn’t have a lot posted.
In time as the community grows, Wesabe could become more helpful but I see a chicken and egg issue here. I am not likely to come back to Wesabe until it provides more value and it won’t provide more value until there is more content or more features. I felt the same way when I used Socialpicks. I would like these two to merger to build a really solid community of knowledgeable people who want control of their money.
As an unstaffed consultant, there are certain freedoms such as late morning Friday jogs around the Marina. After oogling at pictures and tech specs of the Samsung Blackjack for the past week, I was ready to get my hands on it! I planned my jog to pass the Cingular store. I really didn’t expect to get my hands on the thing but they had just put the Blackjack on display. Lucky me.
I’ve been in the market for a new phone since I am about to get parole from T-Paperweight and have been seriously considering getting a “smartphone“. With the arrival on the Motorola Q, there has been a rush by to get $200 smartphones to market (T-Mobile Dash, Palm Treo 680, etc). One thing that is holding me back is that I have not found a phone that meets MY REQUIREMENTS (besides being a good phone):
- qwerty keyboard
- fast internet
- multimedia capabilities (mp3, video, decent camera, storage)
- small
- easy software navigation
Qwerty keyboard: Check. Considering how a very challenging it is to find my jeans size at the GAP, I will assume I am of average male GAP shopper size and my hards are proportional. The keyboard was as easy as I can image a 2.3 inch wide keyboard can be to type on.
Fast Internet: Check. This sucka is equipped with the fastest 3G internet you can get on a mobile. The browser supports full html pages so you can waste your life on myspace, while at work.
Multimedia: Half Check. Speakers are fine for a phone but this thing has a proprietary headphone jack. My current Samsung phone also has this and it is EXTREMELY annoying because you are stuck using Samsung headphones (there are no adaptors to a normal 3.5mm headphone jack). These headphones don’t stay in my ears too well, so they are relegated to the original box in my closet.Cingular video worked well, the video recording and photo capabilities are par for the course (1.3mp camera and 320×240 video recording). Lastly there is a microSD slot to tote 2gb of junk with you.
Small: Check. This is one of the most compact smart phones with a full keyboard. The Blackjack feels good to hold and well made. It is not much larger than a closed RAZR and it is light too!
Easy Software: NO! This is a nightmare. I really think Microsoft should have done a better job of hiding the Windows Mobile files from the user. Just be navigating to get to the My Documents folder I found my way into a Windows directory full of mysterious configuration files. I have enough of that crap on my PC and I don’t want to take it with me everywhere. Compared to the ease of the Nokia S60 Symbian software, this is hell in your palm. I had to click too many times to get anything done. Windows does allow you to run many applications at once, but it is not clear how to exit applications so you end up with so many running that the phone becomes SLOW.
Finally, there is some software on the phone that prompts the user if they want to allow internet connection with every data request. When using Google Maps Mobile or Gmail Mobile, I was seriously interrupted every 2 seconds to with a prompt to allow the data connection. I experience this the LG CU500 so it may be a Cingular issue, but regardless it sucks. I dug through all sorts of internet settings looking for a way to always allow internet connections to no avail.
If there is a way to un-castrate the data software, I’d consider it but as a data phone that does not like data, I cannot.This phone’s software lacks the “smart” in the “smartphone” name. Where is a 3G Nokia smartphone?
I do not own an iPod. I’ve been very tempted to get one, but I really don’t need another gadget to carry around. I do have a mobile phone that has a microSD slot so I can bring 2gb of music with me, however my phone has a USB 1.1 connection which makes data transfers painfully slow. And besides, 2gb is just a tease, I want to have my whole damn music collection with me, all the time! 
