Posted on | June 19, 2009 | No Comments
no secret, I have a soft spot for websites advancing music-charts on the web. being based on sources like Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and even P2P-Networks current traffic, We are hunted gives charts a social twist. great site, but I keep forgetting its URL, hence this blog-post 
ps: of course there’s also still charts.fm, where we’ve added Facebook Connect and a handy Facebook-sharing tool recently…
Posted on | June 2, 2009 | 2 Comments
you love podcasts, especially on the go, but feel limited by the need to download those audio-files to your computer just to sync them to your mobile device? or, if you’ve got an iPhone, have you ever tried to download a podcast which is >10mbytes over the air (don’t bother, Apple won’t let you)?
enter Yasssu, an Austrian-based startup offering an alternative way to listen to podcasts. once signed up, it’s pretty easy to use Yasssu’s podcast directory to build your own personal subscription-list by browsing by category, industry or media (which makes it easy to find all podcasts by one certain media-outlet) or using the search-bar. there’s also a section ’special interest’, containing editorial bundles of podcast-episodes on certain topics (i.e. “Fincial Crisis”, “Middle East Conflict” etc.). another way to find interesting stuff is to filter by language or ranking. If you’re missing one of your favorite shows (like I wasn’t able to find the TWIT-network’s shows or Gillmor Gang), you can request them for future inclusion. nice, but what I really would like to see is the ability to add any arbitrary podcast-feed to my Yasssu-portfolio (update: according to Yasssu, this feature is already in the works! ).
once you’ve set-up your subscription-list, there are several ways to consume your media-selection: YasssuMobile is the way to go if you’ve got an internet-enabled smartphone with a reasonable data-plan. just point your browser to m.yasssu.com, login, and find your subscribed podcasts waiting for you. while Yasssu is optimized for smartphones like iPhone or Blackberry, this should also work fairly well on most older devices. haven’t got an internet-connected phone or want to avoid expensive data-rates ( f.e. when being abroad)? no worries, YasssuCall provides an easy way to call-in utilizing a normal voice-line. using the keypad of your phone allows navigation, skipping etc. of podcast-episodes. while audio-quality naturally suffers a bit, it’s still good enough for most spoken-word content.
Yasssu is currently available as a free service with a premium option at the cost of EUR 3,90 a month. the free version restricts your portfolio to 5 podcasts and limits call-in time via YasssuCall to 30minutes/month, if you want more (and you probably will), you’ll have to go premium.
Posted on | April 16, 2009 | No Comments
after handing back my evaluation SIM-card to T-Mobile earlier today, I’ve finally found G1’s real purpose: as a glorified alarm clock on my nightstand (Nightwatch is the name of the app and it even uses text2speech to tell the time).
11 more incredible useful Android-apps can be found at Lifehacker.
PS: got a better idea? comment below or come to Austria’s Android Developers Day (A2D2), on May 7th in Vienna.
Posted on | March 7, 2009 | No Comments
It’s been a while since Twitter discontinued SMS-notification for most users outside the US. there have been plenty of replacements, all of which shared the downside of coming at an additional cost per SMS/Tweet. enter Twe2, which was launched a few weeks ago and is the first 100% free, ad-supported SMS-notification-service I’ve come around. Twe2 cuts off the last 25 characters of your tweet and replaces it with an ad (currently the only ad they’re running is for Wadja, some strange mobile community-thing sporting a blue kangaroo as their logo). fair enough, esp. since there’s an option to split the whole tweet into 2 SMS.
besides the ad, Twe2 is even better than the original SMS-notification, as it not only allows you to get your direct-messages and replies, but also gives you the ability to monitor any term on the public timeline (think search.twitter.com -> SMS). this great feature compensates for some bugs, like encoding-problems with special characters (like the @-sign 
) and delay of SMS-forwarding which can be up to 15min.
Posted on | February 24, 2009 | 2 Comments
Austria’s original, privately held TV-station ATV launched their new video-portal into private beta just yesterday. the ambitious goal: to mesh their very own on-air content with user-generated video, therefor building ‘Austria’s answer to YouTube’ (my interpretation) while bridging the gap between on-air & on-line. the strong emphasize on geo-location of users & videos might add an additional edge over established video-communites.
if you want to be among the first to try out beta.atv.at, just drop me a comment, I’ve some invites left!
Bonus: If you look really hard, you might find a totally embarrasing clip of yours truly impersonating german Schlager-star Heino (and no, the video is not linked to my account)
Posted on | February 19, 2009 | No Comments
while most austrian G1-users are still waiting to get Android’s latest release RC33 pushed to their handsets by T-Mobile, fellow mobileblogger electrobabe found a deep link to a firmware-binary allowing to upgrade straight from RC29 (the file is about twice the size of the usual RC30->RC33 upgrade, probably because it contains both diffs). keep in mind that this installs the US-version of RC33, so you are gonna loose the ability to set german (or any other) locale (don’t worry, the keyboard-layout is fine though). since it’s not sure if you’ll still get the official RC33 pushed to your phone after the manual upgrade, or if a manual switch to german RC33 will work at all, I’ld recommend to wait another few days for the official upgrade, esp. if you prefer the german user-interface
me, of course, I couldn’t wait, so here’s what’s new in RC33… Read more
Posted on | February 13, 2009 | 1 Comment
just in time for the weekend, here’s yet another mashup I’ve been working on lately. I guess the claim says it all: Tweetshirt - Your Tweet on a T-Shirt! (http://tweetshirt.me)
it’s pretty self-explanatory, just enter your Twitter-username, and choose the tweet you want printed on a shirt from your recent & favorite tweets. you may also enter the URL of an arbitrary tweet (i.e. http://twitter.com/darthvader/status/12… - you have to copy&paste the URL by clicking on the timestamp displayed in the Twitter-web-interface). the tweet including your avatar-image is pre-rendered and sent to TShirt.AG and/or Zazzle via their respective APIs. I recommend trying both services, as they differ in offered shirts, colours, shipping-cost etc.
btw, working with those APIs is pretty easy, so if you’ve got other ideas for automated mass-customization of T-Shirts, I’ld suggest to check those out!
big thanks go to Tina Fleck for the lovely screendesign, which she provided within amazingly short time! also, thanks all for retweeting this, I hope you’re having fun with Tweetshirt!
Posted on | February 7, 2009 | 1 Comment
Google Latitude, which was introduced earlier this week and is expected to be rolled out (at least in the US) on Android via the RC33 upgrade (this is not cupcake!) from February 5th to 15th, might be a game changer in mobile, geo-aware social networking. Google describes Latitude as…
…a new feature of Google Maps for mobile, as well as an iGoogle gadget, that allows you to share your location with your friends and to see their approximate locations, if they choose to share them with you. You can use your Google account to sign in and easily invite friends to Latitude from your existing list of contacts or by entering their email addresses. Google Talk is integrated with Latitude, so you and your friends can update your status messages and profile photos on the go and see what everyone is up to. You can also call, SMS, IM, or email each other within the app.
granted, there are plenty of geo-aware social networks, mostly on the iPhone-platform (loopt, Moximity etc. - TechCrunch has excellent coverage of this space), but most of them are either restricted to a single hardware-platform, don’t work outside the US, or force users to rebuild their contacts/friends within yet another online service. Altitude on the other hand, will soon be available on every major platform (iPhone, Android, S60, Windows Mobile, J2ME, BlackBerry) and can leverage the social graph associated with your Google account.
if you’re on RC30 and don’t want to wait until RC33 is pushed to your phone, there are plenty of tutorials on the upgrade-process (check MobileCrunch for english, Mobinauten.de for german instructions). unfortunately, us Mobilebloggers will have to wait with the upgrade, since the austrian G1’s run under a different build… 
Posted on | February 3, 2009 | No Comments
Niko wrote in:
somehow I can’t seem to find a good Android-app to upload photos to the web, preferably to Flickr. any hints?
after toying around with several other apps, I found Pixelpipe to be the perfect solution for this task. similar to Shozu (which I’ve been using back in the day on Nokia’s S60 phones), Pixelpipe acts as a hub to numerous online photo services, blog- & microblogging-services and social networks. currently Pixelpipe supports more than 60 (!) services, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter etc. included. use the web-interface to define which destination should receive your photos per default (say you want all photos go to Flickr, but only selected ones to Facebook) or use routing-tags to manually send images to certain destinations. even better: Pixelpipe is also natively available for iPhone, S60 and offfers several clients/plugins for Windows, Mac OS X & Linux. it’s really the swiss army knife of mobile image uploads!
Posted on | January 31, 2009 | 2 Comments
this post is part of Ritchie’s blog carneval ‘Best & Worst Gadget 2008′ (or ‘Bestes / übelstes Hardware Gadget 2008′, if you prefer german), which is about to end today - so if you want to join, better hurry up!
in 2008 I finally settled to buy a new TV-set for my living room. not being the decisive kind of guy (+a serious lack of knowledge), it took me weeks over weeks to decide on brand & model. most people I’ve talked to recommended Samsung & Phillips for their superior image-optimization features, but even within these two brands there’s plenty of options. at the end I got a Phillips 42PFL9732D set, 42″, 100Hz (which should really improve quality), Full HD (which makes not too much sense, living in Austria where PAL still rules the cable). but what really makes it stand out is ‘Ambilight’, a gimmick found in many of Phillip’s top-of-the-line models. Ambilight projects a colorful & dynamically responsive halo on the wall behind the TV-set. while definitely enhancing the viewing-experience (esp. in darkened rooms) , this also lends your TV a shrine-like appearance Read more
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