Techcraver.com | Craving tech, craving life!

Hey Everyone.

Just wanted to check in…it’s been way too long since I’ve blogged but its because I’ve had some major events happening in my life.  Namely my wife gave birth to our first child, a happy little girl.  So I’ve been offline enjoying our new bundle of joy.

Stay tuned to techcraver.com in the next few days I have some exciting product reviews coming up.

-Jason

Last weekend I enjoyed my first Gnomedex, a tech conference hosted by Chris and Ponzi Pirillo. Seattle was the backdrop for this fantastic conference. Chris asked for feedback via our blogs, so that’s the intent of this post along with generating some discussion.

Gnomedex is an interesting conference because it’s single track, meaning there’s one session per time period and everyone sees the same speaker at the same time. The audience is varied. There are bloggers, videocasters, podcasters, general tech enthusiasts and marketers.

With all that said, the sessions as a whole were very useful. I didn’t enjoy the first session hosted by Robert Steele. As I said on Twitter, I think mixing politics and tech is great, as long as the tech is tied to somehow. Mr. Steele had no focus in his talk and this became very apparent during the question/answer period. He dodged a few questions, in my opinion, because he didn’t have a decent answer.

The Calacanis talk at the end of Friday generated a lot of buzz on the internet and became a meme in the coverage on Gnomedex. It was so entertaining for me to be in the same room while Calacanis is speak, Winer is heckling him, and Scoble’s using twitter to comment on Calacanis subject matter. It was like being in the middle of a tomato fight. Fun stuff.

The following day, Cali Lewis and her husband Neal spoke about the rise of their video podcast. Even though it wasn’t popular, I enjoyed it. I am a fledgling pod/videocaster so it was fascinating for me to hear their story. Thank you to Cali/Neal and Chris for bringing them on stage.

I had some amazing hallway conversations. I met some great people including Andru Edwards and Britt Raybould. Also it was a joy to meet Scoble and Chris.

Also take a look at my flickr photoset.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

For those of you who didn’t see the coverage a while back, a company called Ooma announced a product that would do away with your long distance costs “for life”. The product was not very warmly received by the blogosphere.

The basic idea behind ooma is that you connect it 1) to your broadband internet connection, 2) to your local landline, and 3) to your cordless phone system. If you make a call that is out of your local area, ooma will route the call to someone else’s ooma device and place the call locally. And on the flipside, someone who is making a call remotely to your local area will use your local landline to place his/her call. So basically you’re sharing your landline to anyone on the internet with an Ooma device.

I (along with others) have two main concerns. Theoretically, someone on the other ooma can easily eavesdrop onto my conversation (by splitting the outgoing signal and listening in), and 2) if someone were to call in a bomb threat remotely from the internet; and the call is placed ‘from’ my landline - isn’t that a BAD thing?!

I’m hoping someone with knowledge about this will either comment on this or call me (my phone number is on the upper right of this blog). Either way, I’ll update this post for the benefit of my readers.

So Google is making waves today in the tech press because they’re offering increased online storage space. Read their blog for more details

While I’m a huge Google advocate and use their services for many online activities, I’d like to challenge them to do better than this. The options they have given us are merely more storage in their walled garden.

If I was going to pay for online storage, I’d look to Amazon Web Services’ Simple Storage Service (S3). With S3, you can use their storage however you’d like because they’ve released an API. For those with a mac, you can use JungleDisk as an offsite storage solution!

I’m currently in Seattle for Gnomedex 7.0. For those of you unfamiliar with gnomedex, it’s a blogger/podcaster/rss/social media conference in Seattle hosted by Chris and Ponzi Pirillo (yes that Chris from the old TechTV).

I’m very excited to be here and I can’t wait for my first Gnomedex. It’ll be so much fun.

To follow what I’m doing, keep an eye on this site and my flickr feed.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

My buddy Michael and I rode in the Summit to Surf bike ride on Saturday. The ride was absolutely remarkable. The American Diabetes Association did an amazing job organizing the ride, especially when it came time to supporting the riders.

There are several distances you can choose from when you do Summit to Surf. When Michael and I signed up for the ride, we were only planning to do the 56 mile leg from Welches to Hood River. However I was feeling adventerous on Saturday morning so I suggested to Michael that we do the Timberline climb, adding 12 additional miles and 1700 feet of additional vertical climb. We did the crazy climb and the views were simply amazing.

When we finished the ride in Hood River, we feasted on Burgerville cheeseburgers and some fantastic Widmer beer. It was the perfect end to a perfect day.

A while back I rode in Reach the Beach that took me up and over the Coastal Range. The ride on Saturday was roughly twice as far with almost twice the vertical climb as Reach the Beach. I’m stoked I was able to do *both* rides without ever walking my bike.

Another cool thing: as a team, Michael and I raised $270 for Diabetes research to find a cure for this terrible disease!

For more photos, see the slideshow below:

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

If you want to know more about what KTHXBAI means, it’s “Okay thanks bye”. You should really check out lolcats more

Anyways here’s the letter I got from SR,

Dear Customers,

After significant effort by the Company to avoid this result, SunRocket is in the process of closing its operations and therefore will no longer be able to provide you with the phone service that you have been accustomed to. However, this email provides you with an opportunity to sign up with select service providers who we believe will offer outstanding replacement service.

In order to assist you, we have entered into negotiations with a number of service providers. As a result of those negotiations, we have entered into agreements with 8×8, Inc., provider of the Packet8 service, and Unified Communications Corp., provider of Teleblend service to offer you the best options and we are proud to recommend the following alternatives to you. Please make your decision to move to a new service provides immediately as future service is uncertain.

8×8/Packet8

The Packet8 Internet phone service incorporates patent protected technology from 8×8. Inc., a publicly traded company in business for more than 20 years. The service works in the same way as SunRocket’s and offers a virtually identical feature set.

• No Startup Costs
• FREE activation
• FREE equipment
• FREE shipping
• FREE first month of service
• Quickly port your number at no charge

A Savings of over $100!

Click here to order (or copy and paste the following link into your Internet browser: http://getpacket8.packet8.net/sunrocket/) or call 1-800-868-0068 and mention special offer code SUNROCKET

Unified Communications Corp. / TeleBlend

The TeleBlend Internet phone service incorporates patent-protected technology from Unified Communications Corp., a privately held company in business to provide outstanding customer service and telephony products. Teleblend has been working behind the scenes already to restore and continue service for all Sun Rocket customers. The service works in the same way as SunRocket’s and offers an identical feature set with our Unlimited Transfer Plan.

• No Startup Costs
• FREE activation
• Use your existing Hardware
• FREE shipping
• FREE and Quick transfer of your current number
• UNLIMITED calling to the US, Canada and Puerto Rico
  

Click here to order (or copy and paste the following link into your Internet browser: http://www.myteleblend.net).

It has been our pleasure to service you at SunRocket!

I’m all registered for Summit to Surf, a ride that starts on Mount Hood in Oregon and finishes in Hood River, OR. I’m SO excited to do another ride. As you may know, I rode in Reach the Beach and the Gorge Ride in the last two months.

Summit to Surf is a fundraiser for the National Diabetes Association to raise funds to fight Diabetes. A person in my family was just diagnosed with Type II diabetes so it’s a personal ride for me.

If you’d like to make a donation, please visit my ride page. Your donation is tax-deductible and every dollar goes to fighting diabetes.

A while back I got an email from a representative from Callwave, inviting me to use their new service. The basic idea behind their voicemail service, called vtxt, involves using voice recognition on your voicemail in order to send you a text message with a summary of the audio message.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work. Say for example you get a message from your Mom that’s very wordy, but she’s just really trying to get you to call her back:

Actual example message:

“Hi, This is Mom, I really want to talk to you so please call me back at 503 555 1212″

vtxt example translation:

“Hi, This is Mom, call me at 5035551212″

BUT, the vtxt speech recognition has a long way to go. Here are two actual messages and translations that vtxt has done for me recently:

Actual message from Josh:

“Hi this is Josh, call me”

vtxt translation:

“Hi, this is Josh, don’t call me”

What?! The Callwave service totally screwed that one up. Talk about technology having the power to fracture personal relationships

Here’s another message, this time from my buddy Michael:

“Hey this is Mike, just calling to see if you want to go on a bike ride”

vtxt translation:

“…call us if you wanna go to my grad later.”

Heh - Michael graduated college about two years ago

So as you can see, Callwave’s speech recognition has a long way to come before it’s personally useful. I know it’s a hard thing to do with less than acceptable audio from cell phones and what not. It’s pretty fun to see what funky text messages come across. Thank goodness I can call in and get the actual message.

This afternoon it’s hitting the web that Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, held a meeting this morning and announced to all Apple employees that everyone who has been working there for at least a year would receive a free 8GB iPhone. Other internet rumors are suggesting even Apple store employees are getting in on the action.

This move, in my eyes, is a unbelievably smart in many ways. Not only does he reward everyone at Apple for their hard work, he instantly made thousands of people into instant iPhone evangelists. How can you talk about (and sell) a product if you don’t have first-hand knowledge of what it is like to live with it day-to-day? Stevie J just recruited lots of little salespeople with his grandiose move.  Also, it builds in employee loyalty, something that cannot be measured!

I have worked at tech companies before and suggest that they give employees a reward similar to this. I think the benefits outweigh the Bill of Materials cost that would be assumed.

Now I wish I worked at Apple even more!