I tell my readers that my favorite ubiquous note taking application is Evernote.
Here is why I like about it
It is ubiquitous. Its found on the desktop, Chrome browswer, firefox, safari and IE. Its found on iPhone, IPad, Blackberry, WP7, Android. I don’t have to worry which device I own because I know I can have access to my notes.
Taking notes is easy. I can clip notes on my desktop. I can take voice and picture notes from my smartphone. I can now sketch on my picture notes.
Its got rich text input on desktop client. Its got rich text input on its iPhone and Android app! how cool is that. The key to being able to take notes effectively is to be able to come up with bullet points and I Can do that with Evernote.
The guys at Evernote are trying to build Evernote into a platform. They are opening up the API so that third party apps can interface to Evernote.
The network is getting bigger and bigger. The more people in the network the greater the value.
How did Evernote come about? Read their story here
We talk about in the past the swyping virtual keyboard for multiple platforms SWYPE. It speeds up text input on your device but recently I have fallen out of love with it.
SWYPE comes as a default on my Samsung Galaxy S2 but no matter how I tried to use, I still go back to the standard keyboard application such as Ice Cream Sandwich or SwiftKey.
SWYPing is just not very normal. I still prefer good ol typing input. I am not sure about you guys.
Today’s update since SWYPE was acquired by Naunce comes the integration of Dragon Dictate technology into SWYPE. So now not only can you enjoy Swyping goodness but also quality voice to text input.
You can also download other language packs as well.
The update can be installed from the Swype preferences pane now, and you can join the beta from Swype’s website
Here is the use case:What if you want to keep track of how many times you fart? Or how many times you clear your bowels (for health reasons)? How long you sleep yesterday? Did you eat anything that you are not suppose to?
Those are varied use cases. What if there is a web application that can help you do that.
Enter Routine Tap. Routine Tap basically creates a questionnaire that you can customize to ask the questions listed above. Everyday you can just answer them.
Routine Tap then is able to generate reports so that you can review them to help you make sense of your life.
The great thing is that they provide you 6 kind of question inputs since the things that you keep track of is very very different.
The downside: Still no smartphone application yet. Does not look like it has strong backers. There is already one competitor call Joes Goals.
I know a lot of people procrastinate and come up with excuses why they can’t start a new company. In this article at Fast Company it gives you reasons why it is a good idea to start during this period:
If you don’t believe me, take it from Fred Smith, who founded FedEx in 1973, at the start of a two-year recession. Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft in 1975, when the country was still suffering from stagflation and flat GDP. Ted Turner started CNN in 1980, during the first slide in what was to become known as a ‘double dip’ recession; Steve Jobs rejuvenated Apple in the midst of the dot-com bust.
Entrepreneurs like these, who launch when no one else seems to have the guts, do reap advantages. In a recession, you can hire better people, and pay them less, than you could during a boom. Even if you’re not yet in a position to hire full-time staff, you probably have a lot more negotiating power with freelancers and vendors now than you’ve had in a long time. Rent is cheaper too, whether you’re working out of your apartment, buying time in a commercial kitchen, or renting office space.
The Amazon Kindle Fire. A $199 Android device that Amazon wants you to only use to assess their Amazon music, applications, movie and buy things from them. I am sure not many of you want to use it ONLY for that.
So how can you have more fun with it? We saw what happen to a cheap Android device with a relatively good hardware in Nook Color which got hacked pretty thoroughly such that so many people are buying it off Barnes and Noble.
It’s a matter of time before it happens to the Kindle Fire.
Root the Kindle Fire through SuperOneClick
To enable your device from being able to have that much freedom, you need to give it root access, which in layman terms is to give it the super user access so that they can do everything.
Note: Rooting your device can be risky, and may end up rendering the device in an unrecoverable state or void your device warranty
3. Go to your %USERPROFILE%\.android on your system and local the file adb_usb.ini. Edit the file and append the following at the end of file: 0×1949 and save the file.
4. Go to the folder where you have the Android SDK installed and open the google-usb_driver folder and then edit the file android_winusb.inf. just add the following to the [Google.NTx86] section and [Google.NTamd64] section:
5. If Kindle Fire is already plugged into the USB you may have to open device manager and find “Kindle” under other devices and choose the android_winusb.inf file.
6. On Kindle Fire make sure to turn on installation of apps from unknown sources.
7. Now launch a command prompt windows (cmd) and run the following commands:
adb kill-server
adb devices
8. You should be able to see you device listed there. If it is then you are good to go.
9. Finally just launch the SuperOneClick tool. Hit the root button to get the SU binaries, BusyBox, SuperUser etc. pushed to your device automatically.
10. Kindle Fire is rooted.
Sideload other android apps
Sideloading android apps not on the Amazon App Store is just doing 3 things
Get the app APK
Ensure that quick settings > More > Device > “Allow installation of applications from unknown sources” is turn on.
You would need to root your device first. XDA developers then have the GoogleServicesFramework.apk and vending.apk for you to install and configured to work.
Once you get Android Market working, the rest of the apps should be a smaller problem for you.
Follow the instructions here to get them downloaded and installed. [Instructions here >>]
Conclusion
I hope you have fun with this device. Its price point is lower than that of the iPad but looks like a good hardware to do a lot of the productivity stuff.
Amazon App Store for Android phones gives a different free app everyday. Some of them are crappy but some of them are down right gems!
Today they are giving away office productivity suite QuickOffice Pro which usually costs US$14.99 for FREE.
From current time there is 8h 30 mins left.
I written extensively about QuickOffice for both iPhone and Android and it is one of the companies that are dedicated to making sure wordprocessing and spreadsheet work well on smartphones.
So go grab it today at the Amazon App Store on your phone today!
I have the opinion that there is a lot of focus on fats being bad for you, carbohydrates being bad for you, meat is bad for you.
But really the biggest evil for me is not knowing what other chemicals they put into those processed foods.
Your body requires fats and carbohydrates and proteins. That is a given. Your body needs sugar, salts as well.
The problem is always the quality of them.
I try to eat home cooked food and realise they taste very different from food that we bought off Kraft, Pepsico and Nestle. In the past when I take them, I always want to go back to have them. If I am working till 3pm, I will start to feel strange if I don’t consume them.
Looks like there may be a reason to it. Bloomberg today have an article that says there is growing body of medical research at leading universities suggesting that processed foods and sugary drinks made by the likes of PepsiCo and Kraft hijack the brain in ways that resemble additctions to cocaine, nicotine and other drugs.
A quick note is that these companies have also started coming up with healthy foods, or so they claim. Lower fat to no fat, contains healthy minerals. The problem is that how much of them is actually in the product, whether they are significant enough to make an impact.
I have colleagues who wants to be healthy and so he takes these healthy granola bars. But what if to make these products last longer, they throw in some chemicals to do that. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose?
The danger here is that you think you are eating something that is healthy and nutritious so you consume more, but in actual fact it is doing you harm instead of good.
I will be extra skeptical about healthy processed food. It is probably easier for me to know if its good for me since a little consumption of problematic food will trigger a response from my body.
Prolong poor diet will eventually lead to feeling low in energy at different times of the day, and that will eventually impede your productivity.
To ensure that you remain high on energy, pay attention to your diet and ensure that you feed yourself right.
The more I read about Apple’s business strategies, the more I had the idea that Apple is more than just a marketing genius. There is a group of engineering genius, ux genius and brightest business minds supporting him.
In this weeks Bloomberg BusinessWeek, there is a great story illustrating how Apple achieves great pricing, manufacturing and shipping advantages to make them the most successful supply chain in the world.
It is not too long ago where business school was studying Dell’s great inventory supply chain system. Soon we will be learning about this as well.
Apple have been so far ahead in their product design, conceptualization, integration and delivery. This caught all their competitors unawares and everyone is trying to brush up on their innovation and systems integration.
How then did Apple reinvest their huge huge cash war-chest? By growing their network effect and competing in different ways that the competition do note have the bandwidth to bother about.
At the end of the day, Apple is still a hardware manufacturer and the way to stay up and make others stay down is to keep cost low and increase others’ cost.
Most of Apple’s customers have probably never given that green light a second thought, but its creation speaks to a massive competitive advantage for Apple: Operations. This is the world of manufacturing, procurement, and logistics in which the new chief executive officer, Tim Cook, excelled, earning him the trust of Steve Jobs. According to more than a dozen interviews with former employees, executives at suppliers, and management experts familiar with the company’s operations, Apple has built a closed ecosystem where it exerts control over nearly every piece of the supply chain, from design to retail store. Because of its volume—and its occasional ruthlessness—Apple gets big discounts on parts, manufacturing capacity, and air freight. “Operations expertise is as big an asset for Apple as product innovation or marketing,” says Mike Fawkes, the former supply-chain chief at Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and now a venture capitalist with VantagePoint Capital Partners. “They’ve taken operational excellence to a level never seen before.”
To ensure that the company’s new, translucent blue iMacs would be widely available at Christmas the following year, Jobs paid $50 million to buy up all the available holiday air freight space, says John Martin, a logistics executive who worked with Jobs to arrange the flights. The move handicapped rivals such as Compaq that later wanted to book air transport
I have a feeling Tim Cook brings a different ball game to the table. But there is a risk there, should they focus too much on making this their competitive advantage and go laxed on product design, they could falter.
Apple perhaps are teaching everyone not just a lesson in product design but on business strategies.
Better society is a segment on Productive Organizer where we focus on business or people taking alternative efforts to improve the way we live through innovative means as well as opinions on our current society.
The market place is an important concept. Without its existence, people’s lives are worse because there do not exist a place that people that demands something can get their needs address by people that can supply it.
Unemployment and living the employment scene
The situation now in many places around the world have been a breakdown in business structure creating big unemployment.
Many people have lost the means to make a living if their skills that they learn in schools are in low demand or do not have demand in their countries. They would have to be retrained in other fields.
Imagine sending resumes to many firms but no one wants you because you are either too obsolete, too old or basically there is no demand for you locally.
There are many people falling out of the employment scene which actually makes unemployment numbers look better
There are always wants and needs
No matter how bad the situation, people have services that they require. The thing is that we glorify it as something that you have to professionally train in school for a few years, learn at a job to refine it and sell it at a high price to an establishment.
But what if the need is something more simple. What if as a professional you just enjoy helping people and getting to know people and don’t care about making money so much
I need someone to buy some furniture from IKEA and deliver to my house today
My nanny fell sick and I need someone to help me fetch my kids from school nearby so that I can pick them up after work
I want to learn how to create those nice pottery but I don’t want to go for a full class
We have a home gathering and need someone to cook or bake some unique eats for us
There are people with secondary skills
You don’t have to be professionally train to
Bake a cake that you like
Plan a great trip to Taiwan or Vietnam!
Take some nice photographs for the family
Assemble a computer for you family
Create a facebook fan page for yourself
Create a wordpress blog for yourself
If you are professionally train, you may want to help people with your skills
A Marketplace to match those that wants with those will provide
I think what government can encourage a marketplace to match these needs and wants.
We are seeing great entrepreneurs in the US trying to create a better society by addressing this space.
Phillip Rosedale, the founder of The Second Life, figured out how to get people to buy and sell goods and services in a virtual marketplace and he is now trying to do the same in the real world by launching Coffee & Power:
The site launched earlier this year, but re-launched on a broader scale today with services offered ranging from Arabic lessons to Android development to octopus crocheting. It uses a virtual currency, but exists very much in physical space — there’s even a Coffee & Power-funded coffee shop in San Francisco where people can meet up to exchange things. It’s a nice concept, but we can’t help but notice that Rosedale’s first project had one big advantage: you didn’t have to leave your house to buy stuff on Second Life.
How does it work?
You tell others what you are willing to do or need done, right now, for how much. The map shows your listings (we call them “missions”) along with those of other people. You use SMS and your mobile phone to quickly make/receive offers and get paid. Buyers and sellers use a virtual currency system (C$) for payments. You can earn C$ by selling missions, or buy themusing your credit card or Paypal. You can also turn the virtual currency back into US$ via Paypal.
Why do it?
As a seller: To help and meet people, make some extra money doing what you’re great at, or practice a new skill. As a buyer: To find new things or get something done faster and easier than you expected.
What kind of jobs happen on Coffee & Power?
All kinds! Do you need or have a recommendation on a new laptop, or travel advice on what to see on your upcoming trip to Buenos Aires? Check out the “Expertise on Tap” category. Need a desk assembled or a router reconfigured? See “Setup, Maint. & Repair”. Or maybe you just want some homemade cookies delivered to you by a local baking enthusiast? See “Little Luxuries”. But…we’re all still learning what people will use C&P for, which is a big part of the opportunity here!
Another very great idea is Task Rabbit created by Leah. It works on the same concept as Coffee and Power but it has been around for longer.
TaskRabbit is an online and mobile marketplace that allows folks to live a smarter and more fulfilling life by once again relying on their neighbors. TaskRabbit is about solving an age-old problem: there is never enough time in the day to do everything you need to do. At TaskRabbit, we harness the power of the community to get things done – forming a virtual neighborhood. We call it “Service Networking” – leveraging the latest social, mobile and location-based technologies to bring neighbors together to get things done.
There is a varied of task to be done and people with the right time and skills can bid for it.
The rabbits develop a reputation if they want to stay in this “business” for long. The higher your “level” the higher you can possibly charge and more likely to get the job.
Now we know that to build software, you need to integrate many modules and many lines of code and many user interface.
We typically hire a group of developers to make it. You have to content with the person’s skillset, competency not to mention his development as an employee and all the benefits they should have.
But we know that software projects are make up of smaller pieces and what if people that have the time and skills can bid for that small feature and get paid doing it?
What if you have a project but not sure how far it develops to hire a full time freelance developer?
That’s the beauty of Worklist, the brain child of Philip Rosedale as well.
Worklist is a marketplace to rapidly build software and websites using a global network of developers, designers and testers. If you do the job well, it also act as an interview to get more permanently hired in that project, start-up or people can refer you because you are good.
We all complain that in Singapore, if you like technical things, after a certain age, no one hires you. What if you can get paid doing what you like? And explore new stuff meet new people?
There are numerous projects whether on iPhone, web, Coffee and Power which was mentioned above is also listed here!
The requirements are basically broken down into simple jobs such as
The resourses are provided and the community built up will point you to where you can find the resources required or help required.
On the right side you can take a look at how much some people taking the jobs are paid.
This is a great platform for students who want to build up their skills and for experience developers who have moved on the management but still likes to tinker with codes.
Conclusion
To solve certain employment and social issues, a city or country may want to look at innovative ways to get it done. The ideas presented may work in your local context and with a skills marketplace it can match people with needs to the people that can do it.
The productive organizer is one who is in control of himself as well as his surroundings.He studies how others define their system and works to improve on it and in turn, educate others how to change their lives.
Here, we hope to bring you the necessary widgets to effectively organize how you work or play. Whether you are at work, on the move, or at home, we will find the right solution for you to get things done.
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