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.
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.
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]
Google has released a major update to their Google Mobile App for iPhone with a nifty new feature that you'll see geeks demoing at parties for weeks to come. That feature is voice recognition. Launch the app, hold the phone up to your head, speak your search query, and in about six seconds you'll have a list of results. If your query is location-relevant, like, per se, "sushi", you'll be given a list of results that are closest to you. Beyond the voice features, the location-awareness is also unique to the app, as a Google search in Safari has no way of knowing your location. Also, the results page that it returns is better formatted for the mobile screen than searching in the browser.
Is it gimmicky? Somewhat. Is it faster than typing? Generally yes. How well does it work? Acceptably well. Andy Baio of Waxy.org attempts to deconstruct how the voice recognition works. The recognition happens server-side, with the app seemingly sending only 100-300 _bytes_ of pre-processed data.
In my testing, the app worked well with common terms, place names, and names of notable people. Being Google, you can also use it for unit conversions like "100 Canadian dollars in US dollars" or "50 miles in kilometres". Fans of the Simpsons will be amused that it took two tries to get "beat up Martin".
Today was the third and final day for CanUX 2008 (you can read about day 1 here and day 2 here). I had a great time at the conference, and I’d highly recommend attending if you’re considering it for 2009.
We started off with a session on Sketchboards from Adaptive Path’s Brandon Schauer. He took us through his process of sketching and idea generation. It starts with a six simple sketches. From there you pick one to focus on and flesh out a bit. Finally, you take your finished sketch and add it to the sketchboard, which will contain all your sketches and inputs. It was pretty interesting! You can find slides, templates and more at Brandon’s blog.
Our next session was presented by Dave Gray before and after lunch, called Visual Thinking in Practice. He shared with us some simple techniques for drawing, and expressed his frustration at the common response, “I can’t draw!” Dave has made it his mission to change that outlook, and was quite passionate when talking about how visuals are important for effective communication.
Our final session of the day was from Dennis Wixon, a researcher at Microsoft working on Surface. Despite being right at the end of the day, everyone was captivated by the presentation. Dennis did a nice job of explaining how Surface, as a Natural User Interface (NUI), fits into computing history. He was hesitant to talk roadmaps or product features, but offered a number of insights into the design and importance of Surface. He confessed that the technology existed long before anyone at Microsoft knew how it would be useful!
I’d like to thank the nForm crew for putting together an excellent event! It was great to meet some of Canada’s User Experience community, and I learned a lot.
Next year's Canadian Financing Forum takes place on January 29, 2009 at the Hyatt Hotel in Vancouver and with the first Selection Committee meeting scheduled for December 2nd, now is the time to apply. Presenting companies are split into two streams - Cleantech & Advanced Technology and Information Technology - and will have an opportunity to get to know the Venture Capital Community and promote their company at this premiere event.
The Canadian Financing Forum is one of the most respected resources for North American investors who seek to recognize, gain exposure to, and facilitate partnerships with the best and most promising Technology entrepreneurs and companies that are based in Canada.
Past presenters have raised over $1,080 Million and 47% of the presenting companies attending the Canadian Financing Forum have successfully raised funds over the last 7 years (2001-2008).
Visit the Canadian Financing Forum website for more information.
According to Telus' research, 55 per cent of Canadians track their medical history on paper, one third electronically and one in four by memory.
This survey findings explain why Telus Corp. announced today that it will invest $100 million over three years to develop a new health technology division to build and service networks to share medical records and other information.
The move by Telus's business solutions unit comes in the wake of the telecom company's purchase of Montreal-based electronic commerce firm Emergis Inc. early this year. Emergis is a major provider of software used to manage health care records, drug bills and other information in the pharmacy and broader health care industry. It's also a big player in financial services technology.
With its $763 million purchase of Emergis, Telus is moving aggressively to become a bigger player in health care technology and sees this as a major growth area for the company as provincial governments try to get health care costs under control and look for new ways to handle health services.
Like other phone companies, Telus faces stiffer competition from new wireless rivals in Canada and continued decline of traditional businesses. As part of its new investment in healthcare technology, Telus launched a new brand, Telus Health Solutions, a unit with about 1,500 employees.
Technology is a key enabler for TELUS and our customers, providing advantage and differentiation in the marketplace. By managing the life cycle of... [more]
