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Posts Tagged ‘Distraction’

feature: Collaboration 2.0? Twitter team-ups for fun and profit

Even if you’re a compulsive tweeter, you probably didn’t know what Twitter was a year ago. The 140-character broadcast machine has gone far beyond updating your friends about dinner plans, and, for those who use it, Twitter is slowly melding with the fabric of life and work. Turning the simple Twitter mechanism to creative uses has created a whole new toolkit, and I’m routintely surprised at some of the Twitter-based collaboration methods that users have come up with.

Of course, for many tweeters and former tweeters, Twitter is primarily yet another form of Internet-based distraction. “Twitter” and “productivity” are antonyms for a significant chunk of the service’s users. That’s why I set out to catalogue some of the productivity-enhancing, collaborative uses of Twitter. The survey below isn’t anywhere near exhaustive, which is why I hope you’ll drop into the comments section at the end of this article and fill in the gaps by sharing non-distracting Twitter uses with the Ars community. After all, if we’re going to keep a Twitter client open, we might as well get some work done with it.

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Ommwriter: Be Alone with Your Thoughts

Between Skype, chat, texts, push news notifications and three screens of scrolling feeds, it’s easy to get distracted while writing an email or post. If you’ve misspelled names, forgotten words or hit send prematurely on numerous occasions, then you probably just need to slow down. Rather than resorting to a life in the woods of hermit-like solitude, you could just take a few moments to think with Ommwriter.

Sponsor

Built by Barcelona-based design agency Herraiz Soto & Co., Ommwriter is a gorgeous Mac download that allows users to block out other applications and focus on their writing. The company originally created Ommwriter for their own internal use but quickly realized the service’s consumer appeal.

Ommwriter from Herraiz Soto on Vimeo.

Similar to WriteRoom, users download the writing tool and install it on their desktop. Upon opening it, you receive a distraction-free environment with just a few spartan font choices and an export feature. While WriteRoom offers a CRT monitor-style interface, Ommwriter offers a white Zen-like experience. Keystroke sounds can be replaced by plinking water or what sound like soft footsteps in snow and users can choose to play ambient music or keep their writing space dead silent. If you’re the type of person who is married to iPhone editing and a large feature set for word processors, then this is not your tool. But if you just want a few moments to collect your thoughts, then this is a great way to do it. To register for this free service visit ommwriter.com.

Discuss

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You Can Go Home Again, Even If It Means Back To Yahoo While Rejecting Google (And Maybe Facebook And Twitter)

This past summer, Daniel Raffel was desired. Google was pushing hard to hire the product manager, we hear from a source. And there are whispers that Twitter and Facebook were also in pursuit of his services. Basically, it seems like he had his choice of the companies in Silicon Valley that everyone wants to work for. So where did he end up? Yahoo.

Yahoo hasn’t exactly seemed like the ideal place to work over the past couple of years. Besides just the Microsoft acquisition offer distraction (and subsequent search deal), and the CEO shuffle, the company has lost much of its sterling polish that it once had during the dot-com era. But what’s even more odd is that Raffel has worked at Yahoo before. It’s where he made a name for himself by helping to create Yahoo Pipes, the popular content mashup tool. But a few years ago, Raffel took off to work at Pioneers of the Inevitable, where he helped make Songbird, the open source desktop music player.

So why’d he come back to Yahoo at a time when others were pursuing him? It’s hard to say for sure, but one source believes Yahoo paid a significant amount of money to lure him back. Another source believes he was promised more resources and an easier time rising up the ladder than if he went to Google. Still, Yahoo over Google is not a choice that a lot of people seem to make these days. And one source is sure that Bradley Horowitz, a former Yahoo exec that is now at Google, would have obviously wanted to bring Raffel on board, and was likely pushing for it.

There’s another reason he may have went with Yahoo. Since returning in late August, Raffel has been serving as a senior product manager under Cody Simms, the senior director of product management for Yahoo Open Source (Y!OS), we hear. He’s apparently working on mainly off-network projects such as making the Yahoo authentication platform more seamless. That might not sound sexy, but the bigger picture may be involve Yahoo building out its own platform product to better connect Yahoo with the rest of the web. Yes, think Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, and the like. The chance to get into this hot space and play a critical role in building a “Yahoo Connect,” may have also enticed Raffel to come back, but that’s pure speculation at this point.

“He’s one of those rare product guys who is technical and can actually build stuff,” says one our sources. We’ll be watching what he’s building for Yahoo the second time around.

We’ve reached out to Raffel for comment, but have yet to hear back. We’ll update if we do.

[photo: flickr/sektordua]

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Trapster Speed Trap App Dowloads Hit 50,000/Day

A must-have iPhone application for people who drive a lot is Trapster – the app for avoiding speed traps. Or a better description by Paul Carr before he was fired from The Guardian: “Yes, that’s Trapster: the mobile distraction for when driving at high speed isn’t fucking dangerous enough.”

But anyway, Trapster is available on the iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Mobile and Nokia/Symbian (I wouldn’t be surprised to see it for Palm in the near future, either). It’s had more than 1 million downloads, and is “getting about 50,000 downloads a day right now” to add to that.

Which just makes it all the more valuable. Trapster relies on users to report speed traps when they see them, making the road safe for other Trapster users who come later. The more users, the more data, and the safer the roads are for speeders.

It’s one of my personal favorites. And before anyone freaks out about how this encourages speeding, don’t. The site has endorsements from various police officers and organizations, such as “If someone slows down because of (Trapster), it’s accomplishing the same goal of trying to get people to obey the speed limit.” But Carr, in the link above, has a good point – the real danger is all the people grabbing their phone to add in a new speed trap. Jon Stewart says it best in the video below:

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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GetJar launches easy-branding mobile app installer

For a brand manager, fussing over the features of a bunch of mobile apps is a distraction from the much larger mission of getting consumers to install the brand on their phones.

Building a custom app to stand out in Apple’s 85,000-app store, or the growing app collections for every other phone, is too hard. GetJar, the cross-platform mobile app library that’s been around since 2005, has a solution. They’ve developed an App Download Page that the company describes as “a new service for mobile developers and content owners seeking to provide a simple experience for their users to download the right mobile app for their phone, independent of device platform, model or carrier.”

Let me simplify that: GetJar can park a logo on the home screen of just about any phone made.

The trick is that GetJar’s apps, like Yahoo’s OneSearch tool for my BlackBerry, pops open the customer’s browser. Installing a working web link with a logo is easy. As a brand manager, you throw it back on the tech guys to figure out how to make the Web destination for your brand logo something interesting that leads the user to bond with the brand.

Facebook has a GetJar-powered App Download Page that puts Facebook on phones that aren’t the high-powered smartphones Americans love. It works on the Nokia 5300, as shown at right.

Photobucket has announced in that they’re going to use GetJar this fall, too. Two down,

This is boring stuff for techies — oooh, a link to HTML, zzzz — but I’m pretty stoked about the idea that VentureBeat fans can just put a VentureBeat logo on their non-Apple phone screen and not need to know how it works, not need to install complicated software with bugs, and would probably be delighted that, duh, it’s just a link to our website. We haven’t built this yet, but it seems like the business development meetings would be longer than the testing cycle.

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Yeah, But Did You Steal The Zynga Playbook, Playdom?

It’s a day late, but social game site (and Zynga-antagonizer) Playdom has finally responded to our request for comment on the lawsuit and temporary restraining order they got hit with earlier this week (all the legal documents are here).

The statement, emailed to us earlier today, is short and sweet and contains very little information at all:

This lawsuit comes as no surprise given Zynga’s penchant for litigation. We do not believe in using unnecessary litigation as a business strategy, and we are troubled to see an industry as bright and promising as ours weighed down by such tactics.

We have no interest in Zynga’s “Playbook” or “secret sauce.” Our strength comes from our 111 talented people, and we will defend ourselves vigorously against this distraction.

The lawsuit stems from seven former-Zynga, now-Playdom employees who may or may not have taken a few proprietary documents with them to their new jobs. Among the documents Playdom is accused of stealing is the fast-becoming-legendary/mythical “Zynga Playbook”: “The Zynga Playbook is literally the recipe book that contains Zynga’s “secret sauce,” and its contents would be invaluable to a competitor like Playdom,” says Zynga in the lawsuit.

Did Playdom steal it? All they say is they have “no interest” in the document. It seems to me that the only way they could know that for sure is if they’ve read it. I mean, if the New York Times had a playbook, I sure would be interested in it. Unless I’d read it and found it uninteresting, that is. So I’ll ask again, Playdom. Did you steal the Zynga Playbook?

And if you did, can I have a copy?

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Faulty GPUs reportedly cost NVIDIA another $119 million
We already knew that NVIDIA had to shell out anywhere from $150 to $250 million last year to resolve issues related to its defective GPUs, but it looks like that may have only been the beginning, with The Inquirer now reporting that the company has also been forced to pay an additional $119.1 million over the past four months to fix a faulty die and weak packaging material used in the affected graphics chips. What’s more, NVIDIA apparently won’t say whether it expects to incur any further charges related to the defective chips or not, although it simply describes the whole situation as “small distraction,” and says it hasn’t affected its ability to launch new products.

Filed under: Laptops

Faulty GPUs reportedly cost NVIDIA another $119 million originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 07 Aug 2009 13:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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