Kiran’s Weblog

Boxee remote iPhone App shows the future of universal remotes

Recently NY times featured an article which points out that the universal remote days are numbered because your smartphone can control the home theater components. This is exactly what I have been thinking for while and been frustrated that there are not enough solutions out there that already do that. VentureBeat then wrote an article last december about SquareConnect which does exactly that, turns you iphone into a remote control. I have been excited and signed up to be a beta tester, still waiting for their invitation. There are already solutions for Blackberry like Unify4Life which turn it into an universal remote. However, as I started using the Boxee remote iPhone App it struck me I might not mind an extra device if they are usable and simple. The gesture based Boxee iPhone remote app shows exactly how a universal should be, absolutely no buttons. This is where I see universal remotes and universal remote apps heading to. This is where I disagree with the NYTimes article. I don't think the universal remotes will be dead, I predict that the universal remotes will adapt to this simplicity. Smart phone based remote apps work when your a single or have a small family where everyone has a smart phones, it will not work with old school or big families. Universal remote manufacturers like Logitech have enough cash, R&D that they will adapt to the market and develop simple gesture based universal remotes and may be even provide an alternative control via smarphones. I am sure their market share will reduce but I doubt they will be extinct that easily.

ThatsNeat iPhone app (concept)

I was thinking about this iPhone app concept over the weekend and just found time to blog about it. Let me try to first put down the use cases that led me to this concept and then I will give a quick summary of the concept. Story building: Case 1: Couple of weeks back we went to a donut shop for breakfast. Nothing special a small place by homestead and keily in Santa Clara. The interesting thing about this donut shop is, they still make donuts the old fashioned way, right in front of you and you get to eat them fresh! Of course they have set timings that you have to be there and reserve upfront before they make, otherwise you get to eat the stale ones like other shops! Anyways their fresh donuts are awesome and more over the overall atmosphere is great (not aesthetically). This is my 6th year in the area and I never heard about it until our friends took us there recently. You can find reviews from few other folks here. Case 2: When our son Abhi was born in 2006 we, like many first time parents, bought a lot of toys all new. Never wanted to look at any used stuff, couple of years later we slowly started to venture into buying toys from craigslist. However, we never really had the heart to go to a used store and buy toys. The thought of going into kids toy store would give us an image of getting into goodwill store (nothing wrong with them, we are not in a bad shape, we just wanted to buy more and more toys instead of few expensive ones). Then we heard about this little toy store called the "The Kidz Shoppe" in san jose, it does sell used toys but its a sweet little shop that is so cool, not only you find lot of toys for almost 30-40% off, some of the stuff you just cannot get at any major retailer. Of course its a consignment store where you can put the toys your kid has outgrown for sale. We would definitely appreciated if we knew about this 3 years ago. Now, the iPhone app concept Many of us write reviews for local stuff that we like, example restaurants, places, things etc. There are many options for writing such reviews including Yelp, Goodrec etc. However, these apps focus on capturing every place, good or bad and getting user reviews. What I want is an iPhone app which is dedicated only to great finds, places that have something unique about them like's Stan's donut shop and The Kidz Shoppe. Granted there is going to be a debate on what is "great", so there should probably some rating or liking system to bury stuff. The app's theme, focus and seeded content should reflect what the app is about. App Summary:

1. App about neat places, places that have something unique about them
2. App allows users to post a quick feedback on what the place is and why they think its neat, an option to post a pic
3. App obviously will use geo location to tag the place
4. App allows users to browse "neat" places around their current location or any location.
5. Of course this does not have to be just an iPhone app, this can be a mobile app across platforms.

So what do you think? Is this Neat :)?

Postbox a cool new email client

Postbox at the core of it is a simple email client but its packed with awesome, useful features. I procrastinated testing the beta version for a bit now. Today I took the plunge and switched my work email from thunderbird to Postbox. I already love it! It took a little bit for it to complete the indexing, but after the initial indexing, things were blazing fast. Sorting, searching, you name it.

• It brings the email search closer to gmail on the web and iMail on mac.
• Ability to set topics on emails is great, which go orthogonal to folders and labels.
• Ability to set an email as a Todo, which you can later sort on or write new to-dos
• Handles the threading of messages much better than any email I have seen. You can see the complete thread, hide one or more replies. Works smoothly. Though I can use a hide-all along with show-all
• Ability to see links, attachments, images and contacts which are parsed from the email content. In fact, when composing a new mail, it makes it super easy to grab any of these from another email and attach. Thats simplicity, no more downloading to the file system, attaching to the email.
• Integrated ability to attach flickr photos. I might not jump on this quite yet but I can see how it can be useful to folks.
• One thing I do hate is the the google web search in the email content pane. Clicking it launches a web page, I dont get that

"Keep In Touch" Simple iPhone App Concept

When it comes to keeping in touch with friends and family, I am the worst. Now a days I know more about folks I follow on twitter than I know about my friends. Nothing is stopping me from emailing them etc but I was thinking about a simple iPhone App that can help me personally to keep in touch with folks. ******************** Keep In Touch: Tabs: Contacts Tab Reminders Tab Most Called Contacts Tab: a) By Default a search text field (do not list contacts). b) Here either the user types in the contact search string at which point i) we search for both contact name and phone number. ii) Search should not return any contact which does not have a phone number. iii) If the typed in string is numbers, show a call icon at the end of the text field, next to the delete button c) or the user shakes the iphone and we list the contacts sorted alphabetically. Additional sort options should be their with the list. These options include sort by phone number and sort by recent calls Reminders Tab: a) Show a sorted list of contacts whom you wanted to keep in touch (factors to include are the reminder set date and time and the frequency) b) Have an option of remove reminder for this time, remove all reminders for this contact c) The tab should show the number of reminders that are past now (missed reminders) d) On the top there should be a + button to add a new reminder to a new contact i) search and chose the contact the reminder for ii) Select frequency of reminders(daily, weekly, twice a month, monthly, quarterly and yearly) or a specific date Most Called: a) Unlike the favorites tab in the default contacts application, the most called will show a list of contacts that are most called. ******************** I got some estimates for off shoring, ran the idea with few of my friends etc but never followed through. Yesterday I saw on my twitter stream that an app called cermster for social crm http://www.cermster.com/Main_Page.html which is in similar lines but more tuned for businesses and enterprises, its 4.99 and I haven't tested it out. I think I will just use my head to remind myself and be little less lazy to keep in touch for now :)

I do want to use laconi.ca. But whats with the license?

All my laconi.ca content in the enterprise would be available via CC license? I hope I am reading this wrong, if not I am not sure how this can be used in an enterprise environment.

At work one guy proposes Global Shopping Day and another responds with a Global Bonus Day :)

Friends,

Everyone is aware of the big slump in the current economy and are experiencing the pinch. US economy is heavily dependent on consumer spending and this has been never so evident before than it is now. This has rippled into a never-before-seen recession world over.

Last Friday evening, I was at Sears and I could hardly spot a shopper even when majority of the apparels & jewelry were on clearance with around 50% discounted prices. It was equally difficult to spot a Sears staff who could help me checkout my shopping cart items.

After walking around I found a staff member organizing the shirts on the clearance rack. She was happy to see me ask for help. However, the smile and the spark was gone (with all other shoppers and staff colleagues). Finally, I left the store with a bag full of gifts for my family and costing less than $50 (including taxes).

Having said that, I've no special interest in Sears and do not own any shares of this company. I'm not advocating any ongoing sale at Sears. But I'm as concerned about this economy as each one of you are and would like to do my part to help stimulate the economy and recover from looming depression.

I therefore suggest each and every one of you to do the following:

• Declare April 10th as the official Global Shopping Day!
  
• Spend a minimum of $50 at your favorite store (other than food)
  
• Create Awareness: Forward this email to as everyone in your address book across the world
• Drop a message on Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, YahooGroups, etc.

Potential affects of Global Shopping Day! on US economy alone:

• 100 Million people spending $50 would raise the America's GDP by $5,000,000,000 ($5 Billion) in one day
• Generate 1000s of jobs
• And much much more ...
  

April 10th 2009 - Global Shopping Day!

Shop Till You Drop on April 10th, 2009,

-Global Citizen.
****************************

Get free stuff for tech help :)

SuperAisle: An iPhone App (Concept)

I went down to Lucky supermarket today to get half a dozen items that my wife need for dinner today. Half the items I am pretty familiar with and I went right to them and picked up. The problems started for some 'new' items that I never bought on my own. Roam around couple aisles and found one item, fried onions! Then I was looking for puff sheets, looked around all the refrigerated aisles, no luck. Waited, waited, waited for may be about 5 minutes, felt like an hour, to see if anyone can help me. Anyways finally found a rep and found what I was looking for. So that got me thinking, wont it be great, if there was an app (of course location based) which could tell me what aisle a particular item is in, in that store. Coming up with such an app would of course require massive amounts of data collection or service integration into local stores. Hey but that sounds like a good challenge to me.

A setting to hide hash tag tweets in all twitter clients

Well, the ones I really care are twhirl for desktops and TwitterFon for iPhone. Hiding hash tweets Whenever a event happens either social, tragic or political, twitter has proved to be a great resource in getting 360 view of news, perspectives. All this breaking all geographic and social boundaries. Everyone is connected with a hashtag. First time I appreciated it is when the Mumbai terrorist attacks happened in 2008. However as you can see here, it has been in use for a long time, peaked during Katrina, Mumbai attacks etc. There is a negative effect from this, for example see these twitter posts from MG Siegler and Tim O'Reilly that highlight the core of the problem: http://twitter.com/parislemon/status/1208404929 http://twitter.com/timoreilly/statuses/1179952272 When events like TED, Davos etc happen, the redundancy and volume starts to get on your nerves. For example see the number of messages from one user in one event: http://tinyurl.com/cgpsz9 I absolutely do not want users to change their patterns in tweeting. However, I believe the twitter clients should add a feature to hide hash based messages. Twhirl added a great feature to group hash tag based events. What I want now is a setting to hide all hash based messages and may be even provide a separate tab for all my hash messages. ****** Update: Hiding should be at a hash tag level. Many folks including me try to use hashtags for no reason, not associated with any event. Don't want to hide all those messages. ******

iWant an iMonitor with push notifications

First of all push notifications have to come out for iPhone, the wait has been little too much. Usually Apple does not announce stuff thats its working on or stuff thats not ready but push is different. In anycase when they come out, I sure hope that there will be a dashboard of all the latest notifications that can be accessed from any app (by providing a button on the top toolbar for example).