Three months in, the iPhone is great, but I don't deny that there isn't appeal in an Android phone. Though young and unpolished, Google's mobile OS has, unsurprisingly, tight integration with Google services. Much like my own brain, tightly integrated with Google's mail, calendar, reader, maps, photos, and, oh yeah, search. Synchronization between Google services and Blackberries or iPhones had been weak in the past, but some official and unofficial solutions have emerged.
Gmail access on any smartphone has been easy and supported ever since they implemented IMAP. Their help provides setup information for major devices.
Today Google announced that Google Sync for Blackberry can now synchronize your Gmail contacts, in addition to Google Calendar events and alerts. Any changes made on the Blackberry will sync back to Gmail/Calendar. This also makes moving to a new device easy.
For iPhone users, its slightly harder because Google can't have it's own app running in the background synchronizing changes. NuevaSync is a solution that I've been running without issue for a couple months now. The iPhone supports Microsoft Exchange for mail, calendar, and contacts. NuevaSync acts like a Microsoft Exchange server and serves as a middleman between your phone and Google for bidirectional syncing of calendar and contacts. The service is currently in beta, and also supports syncing contacts from Plaxo.
Heard the bad news over your VoIP communications? Ottawa-based VoIPshield Systems is warning that media stream attacks could hit Microsoft Office Communications Server, Office Communicator and Windows Live Messenger. Microsoft estimates over 250 million computers worldwide run those applications, so this represents a potentially gaping security hole.
Why does it matter? Hackers can disrupt phone service, eavesdrop on private calls and of course steal private customer information.
VoIPshield has some pretty decent videos demonstrating how a hacker might be able to cause a breach. Will organizations be any more proactive about this threat than the hazards to networks and web applications? I'd like to be optimistic...
In related news, there's an excellent roundup of top 10 mistakes IT people in SMBs make. Read this BEFORE you set up your network.
I recently came across a cool iPhone app from Urbanspoon - it's the magic 8-ball for meals. Whether you have a group that can't make a decision or your stomach is growling louder than you can think, the app spits out a restaurant suggestion when you give it a shake. Are you one of those people who can never accept the first suggestion? Shake it again, and then suck it up because your friends are hungry.
The iPhone's accelerometers pick up when you're giving your phone a hopeful shake, it figures out where you're located via GPS, and then it picks its suggestions based on the top-rated restaurants in your location on Urbanspoon (because their site also features restaurant reviews in cities across the US and Canada, and is breaking into the UK and Australia as well).
Urbanspoon is the world's leading provider of time-critical dining data, a major division of a very important multi-national corporation, and an... [more]
With CanUX over, I found myself looking for all the links to templates and other information that were mentioned during the sessions. I thought I might as well share my list with others! Here it is (if you have something to add please let me know in the comments):
Web Form Design – Luke Wroblewski
UX Swimlanes – Yvonne Shek
A Better Method for Designing with Developers – Jerome Ryckborst
Sketchboards: Good Design Faster – Brandon Schauer
Visual Thinking in Practice – Dave Gray
Microsoft Surface – Dennis Wixon
Books
The next event from nForm will be the Web Strategy Summit, taking place in Calgary on May 4th & 5th, 2009.
If you’d like to read more about CanUX 2008, see my posts on Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3. I also posted some sketches here, and a list of attendees on Twitter here. My photos are here, and you can find other related photos on Flickr here.
Even though I only have enough air miles to buy a blender, I still dream of the day when I finally have enough points to book a flight, only to be thwarted by airlines not having any award seats left. Yapta is taking care of that problem - their new service provides award seat alerts on flights on Alaska Airlines, Continental, Delta, United, and U.S. Airways, so that you can know exactly where and when you can 
redeem your award miles.
Yapta (which stands for Your Personal Travel Assistant...cute) also offers price change alerts that have saved travelers over $90 million since the company was founded in 2006. If the price of your flight drops after you've booked on an airline's website, you're eligible to a refund or travel credit. The free service also tracks price and availability of flights of any flight that you choose, every day.
"One of the biggest frustrations for frequent travelers is not knowing when they can actually redeem their miles to book an award seat," said Tom Romary, president & CEO of Yapta. Romary is also looking at it as a service to airlines: "Airlines want their frequent fliers to use miles because it strengthens their loyalty program,"he says. "Our award seat alerts stimulate the usage of frequent flier programs and therefore will have a positive impact on the airline's balance sheet and income statement."
Our purpose is to make it easy for you to secure the best airfare deals available on the Web. We do this by giving you a tool to "tag" the trips... [more]
The 2009 Northern Voice website went live today and they're looking for speakers. As Canada’s largest Blogging and Social Media conference, this is THE event to present at if you're experienced and passionate about social media and blogging.
While Nothern Voice is celebrating its 5th year, some of you may not be familiar with the conference. In that case, check out last year's speakers schedule to get a feel for what they're looking for. The call for speaker’s deadline is December 19, 2008.
Logo and artwork by basco5.
This announcement is long overdue but at least two of you will be happy.
Brother Canada was kind enough to sponsor our Small Business Week contest and have provided Techvibes with two Brother Colour Multi-Function Centers (valued at $350 each) to give away. In order to enter the contest, all you had to do was comment on one of the following Small Biz profile blog posts:
And the winners are... Jess Sloss and Rory Hansen. I'll be in touch to coordinate delivery and/or pickup.
Thanks to everyone who entered.
Brother International Corporation (Canada) Ltd. markets a range of business machine products known for their originality and creativity. A Japanese... [more]
Via Jevon MacDonald of StartupNorth, Toronto startup Clutterme.com has put themselves on the auction block at eBay.
Clutterme.com a do-it-yourself website builder and domain purchasing site is for sale, on ebay. This isn’t the first startup to put themselves up on Ebay, Toronto based Tucows bought kiko.com in an ebay auction for almost $260,000 a few years ago.
Will Clutterme get bids well past $200,000? Probably not, but I think the service is worth something, and a registrar such as Tucows, GoDaddy or another could really make good use of it. Clutterme is what they say it is: A really, really, easy way to make a website. It is the kind of really simple website builder that your mom would be happy to use. They also have a really slick domain purchasing system set up that lets people get their own domain and website builder all wrapped in to one.
Most established domain name registrars already have a free or cheap website building tool in their product mix but the Canadian domain space has a large number of registrars that don't do retail. Why is that? For a domainer, getting accredited with CIRA as a registrar is the easiet way to guarantee wholesale renewal rates for your own portfolio and get unencumbered access to expiring domain names.
Acquiring an established site like Clutterme.com could turn a domainer with accreditation into an instant competitor in the website builder space. Current bidding is at US $51.00.
The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) is a not for profit Canadian corporation that is responsible for operating the dot-ca Internet... [more]
Clutterme Inc is website creation for dummies. Make a free website in seconds or upgrade your simple website to a .com, .org, or .net domain for... [more]
The date for the next Ideas On Tap has been announced and it's on January 22nd from 5:00 - 8:00pm at the Yaletown Brewing Company.
Ideas on Tap is a light business networking event for hi-tech professionals in Vancouver plus internet advertisers, social media marketers, bloggers, video game developers and other fans of the tech community.
This free event will feature a competition where 5 contestants deliver a 60 second pitch, idea, recruiting message, or elevator pitch from a milk crate. This could be talking about their company, a start-up idea, new technology, hiring, or raising capital.
The audience will vote for their 2 favourite pitches and prizes will be awarded. The event is being held in the Yaletown Brewing Company, Vancouver's favourite brewpub. In sticking with the theme of the venue, voting will be done by tapping beer glasses on tables or bars.
The re-launch event in October drew over 250 people from the Vancouver Tech community and was a huge success. Wondering what you missed? Check out the Flickr stream from the last event and be sure to register for January's event now.
Do you love intuitive and simplistic designs? Do you love playing or watching sports? Do you love short contract projects? And do you love working with fun people? Then we have the project for you…
We are currently looking for a talented designer to give us a much needed overhaul/re-skin of the site template we’re using for our website TeamPages.com. The task at hand, if you wish to take it, is to tweak our current design and turn it into a very polished, sporty, and energetic, parent friendly (looks REALLY easy to use), web 2.0 template for TeamPages that gives us a beautiful site that people will love to use and want to come back to. Pretty much we want our users to “Oooohhh…awww…wow, that’s cool!” and at the same time “I can’t believe how easy this is.”
This project will include:
Project start date: ASAP
Project deadline: December 30, 2008
If you’re up for the challenge, or just want to chat to guy who write this, send over your portfolio and resume to mike.tan@teampages.com.
TeamPages is an online social network and utility for amateur sports that makes it easier for coaches, team managers and players to: manage their... [more]
