GotVoice is a new service that will check your voicemail for you, convert it to MP3 files, and email it to you. This is great, because I’d been looking for a way to archive important phone messages. Say someone calls you up and says they got married. Wouldn’t want to have that archived, to play it back to them years later at their wedding anniversary? Or your brother calls you up to tell you his wife just gave birth to a baby girl? Wouldn’t it be cool if that message could be kept forever? Well, with GotVoice, you don’t have to hold your cellphone next to your computer’s microphone. You can just let it do the work for you! 🙂
Tag Archives: communications
The NSA wire-tapping scandal
I wrote about the wire tapping issue back on the 8th of April, and it looks like the it’s resurfaced big time. Just today, I read this USA Today article. Senators Leahy and Specter picked up the stoy, then CNN picked it up as well. Now the Washington Post published the results of a telephone survey that says most americans (60% or so) support the NSA’s collection of information on telephone calls.
It seems like all that’s happening is that massive amounts of data are getting crunched at the NSA, for statistical purposes, in an effort to try and determine patterns in terrorist communications, but the NSA (including Gen. Hayden) and the Bush administration have been going about it all wrong. As the USA Today article details, they used strong-arm tactics on the phone companies in order to get them to cooperate. When Qwest wouldn’t, they accused them of compromising national security and told them they wouldn’t get any more classified contracts… Is that the way to treat someone who has legal and understandable doubts about its customers’ privacy? I think it’s shameful.
So let me see if I get it straight. The government gives you classified contracts if you jump through their hoops, and once you get used to the taste of steady government money, threatens to yank them from your plate if you won’t compromise on your ethics. It looks to be a pretty good tactic, which works great on most executives. After all, every one of the phone companies but Qwest capitulated and handed over their data.
It’s all very sad. The NSA’s methods are classified, but I for one have a hard time seeing how one can gather real data about terrorists (people who are, for the most part, already flagged and monitored) by crunching through the phone calls of the average law-abiding citizen, unless you’re trying to make sure this same average citizen isn’t a terrorist.
Maybe it’s about establishing a “noise floor”, and that’s why they need a statistically-relevant mass of data? Once they’ve compiled a database of the common conversations of regular folks, anything out of the ordinary will spike above the “noise floor”, raising a flag for further examination. Just my uneducated guess. The method sounds good, but the manner in which they’re going about securing the data is, as I’ve said above, wrong.
Confess your secrets: i4giveu
From TechCrunch:
“i4giveu is an Israeli site that allows people to post confessions and ask for the community’s judgement. Confessions can be posted anonymously and are tagged for easy browsing. It just launched, and some of the ‘confessions’ seem a little canned or just plain dumb. And while this isn’t any kind of substitution for real therapy, the popularity of sites like PostSecret suggest that people really do like to tell their secrets on the Internet. Bonus feature: track comments to a confession via RSS.”
This is plain silly. Why would you confess your sins publicly, albeit somewhat anonymously, when you can confess to God in private? It just doesn’t make sense. Here is the link.
Mozes: secure your keyword
From TechCrunch:
“Mozes is a Palo Alto based startup founded by Dorrian Porter that is tapping into the U.S. SMS (phone text) market.
It allows you to do all sorts of things via sms. Hear a song on the radio that you like and want to bookmark? Text the radio station (ie, KROQ) to 66937 (which translates to “Mozes”). Mozes will note the time and station name and bookmark the song title in your Mozes page (and sms you the song information). Meet someone who has a Mozes keyword? SMS their Mozes keyword to 66937 and store whatever personal information they’ve elected to share. And online advertisers can use a Mozes keyword to give you more information on the product…”
This promises to be pretty cool! Here is the link.
Minuscule headset powered by novel battery
I was in my car, driving back from lunch, when I got a call on my cellphone. I’m holding out on buying a Bluetooth headset, because they look ridiculous. So I still have to answer the phone the “old fashioned” way, by flipping it open and pressing Speakerphone. I know, what tough luck… But I realized that these wireless/Bluetooth headsets could be made really tiny, and could fit in the ear, if the battery could be made really small. Sure, it’d be a hassle to change the battery, but what if you didn’t have to? What if the battery charged itself? How could that happen? Well, let’s look at three existing technologies on the market today:
- “Perpetual motion” watches: you know, the kind that charge themselves from the movement/agitation of your hand. They’ve been around for a while.
- Microphones: both dynamic and condenser types… They use a vibrating wand or membrane to generate an electrical signal. They’ve also been around for a while.
- The balance pebbles inside your inner ear: okay, this is more like biological technology, but I do find it interesting that they can move and touch nerve sensors, generating electrical impulses that tell your body how to balance itself.
Given these three very interesting methods of generating energy or electrical impulses, why can’t we make a really tiny battery that can charge itself from the movement of our body, our body heat, or the vibrations caused by our voice? We could be charging the battery as we speak, as we move, etc.
This sort of battery could be used in a tiny headset that could be placed in the ear, or in some other fashion, but the point is, it would be really small, almost unnoticeable. I wouldn’t look like a geek, with a big Bluetooth headset strapped to my ear, a menacing blue light flashing on it, as if I were an android. I’m sure many of you share my feelings here. Instead, I would use a small device, no bigger than the tip of my small finger, or even smaller, that could go inside the ear, or hook right outside the ear canal with a thin wire that goes behind my ear. It would let ambient noise pass through unchanged, but would block it when I’d be using my cellphone.
Wouldn’t this be cool?
Are you interested in using this idea? Then please see my rules about using it.
Raoul Pop 