The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘desktop’

It took almost a year, but Xobni finally released its email app for the Blackberry. It works as a standalone app integrated with the email on your Blackberry, but similar to Xobni’s Outlook plugin, it ranks your contacts by importance and pulls in social data from Facebook, LinkedIn and other places.

Along with the Blackberry app, Xobni is introducing another product which may turn out to be more important in the long run. It is called Xobni One, and it syncs your Xobni contacts in Outlook with your contacts on your Blackberry, all in the cloud. As Xobni rolls out more apps in the future, Xobni One should be able to sync contacts across those as well (very Mesh-like).

Xobni One is a way to sync your desktop and mobile contacts. If you use Outlook on your desktop at work, but Gmail on your Blackberry, Xobni One reconciles the two. And when you leave your job, your contacts stay with you. Xobni One isn’t free. It costs $4 a month or $40 a year, bundled with the Blackberry app. Keeping your contacts in sync is expensive. Doesn’t it seem that Google or Microsoft will eventually just do this for free?

I’m here in Austin, Texas, where MOG CEO David Hyman is introducing the service’s new mobile functionality. This is a major step for MOG, and may be an inflection point in the success of the service. Up until now, users have been restricted to using MOG’s streaming music service on their computers. That’s fine for casual listening at work, but as we’ve seen with the success of the mobile versions of Pandora, users want mobile. And that’s what MOG is unveiling today. Read below for my notes.

Hyman kicked off the talk with some background information. MOG Music Network, the editorial-based site hosted at MOG.com, reaches 16 million unique visitors a month. In December, the company launched MOG ALL ACCESS, its streaming music service that costs $5/month for all-you-can-eat streaming music. The company is getting 17% conversion from its 3 day free trial (which is high). MOG, Hyman says, is a music service people will actually pay for. But the key will be portability.

MOG’s mobile applications for Android and iPhone will launch in Q2, featuring on-demand streams, downloads, MOG Radio, your library and playlists, High Quality audio, and a $10/month price tag.

First, MOG showcased its Android application. As with the desktop version of MOG, users can stream any song on demand (they can also edit their playlists and upcoming song queue). Along with playlists and individual songs, users can also tap into MOG Radio, which generates a playlist of songs based on one of your favorite artists, albums, or songs (it’s a bit like Pandora, but you can dynamically adjust the content of your station using a slider and can jump to new songs as many times as you’d like). One other very slick feature: on Android, the service will feature voice commands, so you can simply say the name of the artist you’re looking for.

Next, MOG showed off the company’s iPhone application. In general, MOG is looking to keep the interfaces of the iPhone and Android applications consistent.  From a feature perspective, the iPhone and Android applications are identical (save for the Android voice search), and the applications are being developed side by side.

Offline Playback

All of MOG’s on-demand streaming functionality looks great, but the killer feature is offline downloading. Using this, users can tap on a song or album they like and choose to download it to their iPhone or Android device, allowing you to seamlessly use the application when your phone doesn’t have connectivity. Hyman says that other offline services that have caching just cache your playlists — MOG lets you select any playlist or album on the site and immediately begin downloading it. Mobile web streaming and downloads will default t0 64kb AAC+ but users have the option to download 320kb/s files (which would obviously take much longer.  Streaming and downloading works over Wi-Fi, 3G, and EDGE.

Regarding whether or not MOG was worried Apple would turn down the application, Hyman said that historically Apple has allowed other subscription applications that feature local caching (he alluded to Spotify). But as always, nothing is certain with the App Store.

HP keeps the fun rolling with its MediaSmart Windows Home Servers. It’s called the HP MediaSmart Expander for TiVo, but don’t let the name fool you, it doesn’t directly increase your TiVo’s storage. The app, however, still has some nice features and might be a worthy replacement for the TiVo Desktop program.

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HP MediaSmart Windows Home Servers gets a TiVo companion app

MSI has added another skinny notebook to its X-Slim series with the announcement of the 13-inch X360 model. This one makes use of an Intel Core i5 ultra low voltage CPU clocked at 1.06GHz alongside Intel’s HM55 graphics chipset

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MSI X360: Intel Core i5, three pounds, less than an inch thick

Google’s recently announced $25 million acquisition of DocVerse represented one saga of an ongoing war between Google and Microsoft over dominance in the productivity suite place. Today, Israeli enterprise software company Mainsoft is launching a Docverse-like plug-in that may up the ante in the battle. Harmony is launching free plug-ins that bring Google Docs documents and Microsoft SharePoint document libraries directly to Microsoft Outlook.

Once downloaded, Harmony for Google Docs will open in a sidebar pane within Outlook. The new Harmony sidebar enables people to share a single, centralized copy of the document, eliminating the many intermediary steps associated with sending e-mail attachments back and forth. The plug-in allows users to locate, share, and work on Google documents directly from their email client.

Once logged in to your Google account, you’ll be able to drag any files (ie Microsoft Word files, PDFs) directly from an email to the Harmony sidebar to upload and convert them to Google documents. You can drag a Google document from the sidebar to create links in your e-mail messages and meeting requests to other users and viewers. Harmony automatically shares the document with the recipients. You can decide to give recipients read or write access. Recipients simply click the link in the message to open the document in their browser and don’t need to have Harmony installed to view the document.

Harmony also allows you to search document contents on Google Docs from the Harmony search box and locate documents using the View Bar, which allows you to switch between common views, such as spreadsheets, starred items, items owned by or shared with you, and more. One of the major features of Harmony is the ability to actually open and edit Google documents from directly in Outlook. All your changes are saved online and are available to your colleagues. You can organize and create folders to store Google Docs and also save Google documents in Office format. Harmony can export Google documents to Office, Open Office, PDF, RTF, HTML, TXT, and image formats.

The SharePoint plug-in isn’t nearly as sexy as as the Google Docs app but still offers a useful set of tools for enterprise users. The plug-in aims to transform Microsoft Outlook into a collaboration console, with access to documents stored on SharePoint. Similar to the Google Docs plug-in, you can drag e-mail attachments or entire e-mail messages to publish them on SharePoint. You can search the contents of documents in your current SharePoint site or library and share documents via e-mail message, calendar appointment, or task. You can edit a document from within Outlook, view document history and more.

Harmony was built using SharePoint Web Services interfaces and Google Docs open APIs and in the process has transformed Microsoft Outlook into a more collaborative application. Most importantly, the Google Docs plug-in makes the transition between web-based documents and the desktop email client seamless. It gives Microsoft users the best of both worlds, much like Docverse did with Microsoft Word documents and web-based files. If you use Microsoft Outlook and Google Docs, the plug-in seems like a no brainer to download. Plus its conveniently free. Considering the fate of Docverse, it may only be a matter of time before Microsoft and Google come sniffing around Harmony.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am not a loquacious orator.

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A call to arms: Reboot the public bathroom

A charming young buck by the name of John Herlihy of Google Europe believes, like most people in the Western World that desktop PCs will be dead in the next few years. However, he believes they’ll become irrelevant by the year 2013, which may put a damper on some PC makers’ sales forecasts

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Google dude: “Desktops dead in three years”

Don’t forget:  We’re going to be trying something brand new on Friday – a 30 minute show called the HourTime Help Desk. But we need your help. On Friday at 6:30 PM Eastern/3:30 PM Pacific we’re going to run a call-in talk show we’re calling Help Desk.

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New HourTime Podcast for you and yours

Looking for a decent web-browsing machine? Sellout.Woot! is selling the 18.4-inch Averatec all-in-one with Atom CPU and Windows XP for $300 today.

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CrunchDeals: Refurbished Averatec 18.4-inch all-in-one for $300

For those of you who have sworn off energy drinks because of their syrupy, cough-medicine-y, sugary taste, these new “Fein Energy Crystals” might be more up your alley.

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Fein Energy Crystals turn any drink into an energy drink without altering the taste