Author Archives: Michelle Lentz

by Michelle Lentz

I fully admit that Google pretty much owns me. They have my calendars, my email, my apps, my phone, and even my phone number. I rely completely on Google Voice. My biggest issue with Google Voice (aside from when they take my invites away) is the voice mail transcription. It’s laughable. In fact, it makes no sense. At one point, I had a voice mail from a business contact transcribed with words like “beloved,” which really made my husband raise his eyebrows and was completely wrong.

Google knows this. Previously, you could mark whether or not the transcription was useful. However, the Google Voice Blog is now asking for your help.

And this is where you can help by “donating” some of your voicemail messages. Until now, the only feedback you could give was to let us know if the quality of the transcript was good enough to be useful or not, by checking the corresponding box next to the message. You can now go one step further by letting us figure out why it was good or bad. When you rate a transcript, you will be asked whether you would like to donate the message. You have three options:

So this is where you are really putting some trust in Google. You’re giving them your voice mail for manual transcription and comparison. Google swears that these voice mails will “never be made public or used for any other purpose than improving the transcription quality.” All the same, you might want to keep those voice mails from your secret affair to yourself.

The first thing I did was go in and send them the wacky aforementioned business voice mail though. Anything I can do to help Google – after all, you own my life.

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Cheers!
Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.

I just answered my door to a FedEx guy holding a Swype-enabled Samsung Omnia II. I’ve had it in my hands for 10 minutes. The Omnia II (and I didn’t like the Omnia I) is a Windows-mobile device. The interesting thing about this new phone from Verizon is that it is the first phone released using Swype.

What is Swype? Well, I’m hoping it is technology that lets bumbling people such as myself successfully use a touchscreen mobile device. I’ve talked, multiple times, about my inability to use virtual keyboards that lack haptic feedback (ahem, iPhone). In theory, Swype changes that. According to their web site,

“Swype provides a faster and easier way to input text on any screen. With one continuous finger or stylus motion across the screen keyboard, the patented technology enables users to input words faster and easier than other data input methods—at over 50 words per minute. The application is designed to work across a variety of devices such as phones, tablets, game consoles, kiosks, televisions, virtual screens and more.”

I should never actually pick up my finger and instead, I’ll be dragging it across the screen from letter to letter. For me to accurately test this, I need to set up a few of my email accounts on the Omnia II and actually use the touchscreen keyboard.

While I admit to be mostly testing out the Swype technology, I’ll also, by default, be trying out the phone. It has a 3.7-inch WVGA (800×480 pixels) AMOLED touch screen and is running Windows Mobile 6.5, which includes IE Mobile. Let me know what you want to know about this phone so I can customize next week’s review.

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Cheers!
Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.

The Big in Japan folks, who make the popular ShopSavvy app, sent me some stats I found entertaining, so I thought I’d share with you.

The popular app, available for iPhone and Android, scans bar codes and lets you know where in your regional area the item can be found at different prices. It also prices the item online. I was standing at Macy’s at 5 am on Black Friday, debating on purchasing luggage. I tried the ShopSavvy app myself. Unfortunately, I could not get it to scan the UPC code on the luggage. I’m apparently the only one who had trouble.

More than 612,000 bargain hunters used Big in Japan’s barcode-scanning app on Black Friday alone, which is 7 times more than on an average Friday.

Data from the 18+ million scans by ShopSavvy users from Nov. 27-29 reveal that the most scanned product during Black Friday weekend was Sarah Palin’s new book, Going Rogue. Really? Other top products included:

Top Toy: Zhu Zhu Pets Hamster Mr. Squiggles
Top Video Game: Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock
Top Camera: Nikon Coolpix
Top Laptop: Sony 15″ Laptop w/Intel Dual Core Processor
Top Netbook: Compaq Netbook w/Intel Atom Processor
Top Desktop: eMachines Desktop w/AMD Athlon Processor
Top HDTV: Emerson 32″ LCD 720p HDTV

The five most popular retailers for ShopSavvy scanning were:

1.      Walmart
2.      Best Buy
3.      Target
4.      GameStop
5.      Macy’s

The five most popular metropolitan areas for ShopSavvy scanning were:

1.      New York
2.      Houston
3.      Los Angeles
4.      Dallas
5.      Chicago

Did you use ShopSavvy on Black Friday? Did it help or hinder?

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Cheers!
Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.

Google is talking about offering first-run TV shows on YouTube for a fee, similar to the Amazon or iTunes model.  For $1.99, you could view the latest episode of your favorite show, the day after it aired on network television.

The catch? It’s a streaming video. Unlike iTunes or Amazon, you have to watch it as a streaming video. The video won’t reside on your hard drive.

Sources say the site’s negotiations with the networks and studios that own the shows are preliminary. But both sides seem optimistic, since models for such deals already exist. No comment from YouTube.

The biggest stumbling block may be consumers. That’s because Google (GOOG) is talking about streaming the shows instead of letting consumers download them to their computers, as both Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN) do. But the networks and studios, which control pricing, will want to sell the streamed shows at the same price as downloads; they fear that offering them at a different price will force them to go back and rework their existing deals.

Executives at YouTube and TV insist that the disparity is simply a perception problem and cite studies showing that most people who download TV episodes only watch them once, anyway. But that’s a tough sell.

Now, the reason I will occasionally buy shows from iTunes is that I then have the freedom to watch them on my phone, my iPod, my TV, or my laptop. I can watch the show on an airplane because it’s local to my device. Personally, I hate the idea of paying $1.99 for streaming content. So until they figure things out, I’ll definitely stick to free Hulu for the television that I miss and downloading episodes from iTunes for television on the go.

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Cheers!
Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.

Today, the Global Language Monitor in Austin announced that Twitter is the Top Word of 2009. What? Well, the GLM monitors these things. It used a Predictive Quantities Indicator (PQI), which is a “proprietary algorithm that tracks words and phrases in the media and on the Internet, now including blogs and social media. The words are tracked in relation to frequency, contextual usage and appearance in global media outlets, factoring in long-term trends, short-term changes, momentum and velocity.” Right. Well, it turns out we’re all saying Twitter a lot. (I wonder how “tweet” fared in all this.)

The Top 10 words were Twitter, Obama, H1N1, Stimulus, Vampire, 2.0, Deficit, Hadron, Healthcare, and Transparency. I’m sitting here counting how many times each of those has passed through my lips and I can’t really argue with the findings.

But Twitter. Twitter is becoming ubiquitous, I think. Back in September, a street in a Palestinian refugee camp was named after a Twitter handle: @arjanelfassed tweetstreet. Yep, the first street in the world to be named after a Twitter ID, showing that it’s not just here in the US: Twitter is a global phenomenon.

According to Brian Solis,  co-author of Putting the Public Back in Public Relations (http://bit.ly/prbook), blogger at PR 2.0 and publisher of bub.blicio.us, “Naming a street for a Twitter ID has revealed signs that Twitter has had a cultural effect within global society. This is something that many digital anthropologists will tie to the “me” aspects in Social Media aroused through Twitter and the relationships and conversations it fosters. It’s creating a network of digital extroverts who bridge online and offline interaction.”

The Global Language Monitor defined Twitter as “The ability to encapsulate human thought in 140 characters,” which is a rather wonderful definition, although I think it applies more to “to tweet.”

What do you think of Twitter’s effect on our society as a whole, permeating our language and even our street signs?

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Cheers!
Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.