Karl Freeman

So a couple days a go I received my invite to BT owned Ribbit Moblile, I must of requested an invite quite some time ago because the service had fallen of my radar. Its an interesting service which was quite painless to set up. It essentially replaces your phone providers voicemail system which Ribbit then allows you route the ‘missed call’ to different places such as Skype, another phone, voip phone etc…

Due to it being in limited beta, Ribbit are offering the pro account for free when you manage to get an invite which means you get a ton of awesome stuff.

Reading through my morning flurry of feeds from the usual suspects, Jack Dorsey’s latest venture Square has stood out of the crowd. There are many well written articles so I won’t try to bore you with a re-write as they have covered all the awesome details of this mobile payment system. Instead I would simply just point this out as awesome and something to keep your eye on. Especially if you’re thinking, like myself about the many opportunities this system opens up for pop up store fronts, selling prints at exhibition’s, charging people admission for show’s, demo cd’s at gigs, etc…

The list is pretty endless which is what I love about this concept and execution, the amount limitless use cases for such small device for such a large amount of people.

Another swedish startup to off hit the ground running is Voddler, acclaimed to be the ‘Spotify for movies’. After finally coming out of hiding Voddler has been steadily opening the flood gates to its movie steaming service for around 3,000 lucky swedes a day. With most, including myself being Spotify advocates its hard not to like what Voddler is going to do for the movie industry. With a reputation as bad as theirs, its great to see that Voddler has wrangled them in to a new way of thinking.

Having recently signed on Disney and Paramount Voddler is on the way to becoming a game changing service for those desperately seeking to shun away the urges of piracy. Its primary business model like Spotify is ad supported but in a more cinema esq way. Whereby adverts are placed at the beginning of the movie to allow users to watch without interruptions.

Recently Voddler launched a pay per view option which lets its user’s to rent a movie for 5 Kroners ( 0.48p ) over 24 hours and has plans to offer a monthly subscriptions early next year. The combination of these options make it difficult to see how this isn’t going to be a success.

Although at a very young stage in development Voddler has been working in the backgrounds way before Spotify had become the poster boy for streaming digital content. Starting back in 2005, Voddler have been slowly brewing the service which will most likely spread like wildfire once they have fully established themselves out of beta and with plans to expand to Norway, Denmark and Finland its going to be great to see this gain more traction.

Being a brit I would like nothing more than for Voddler to launch over here next but as others have proved expansion is a pr disaster for services that can’t handle it and with Voddler being in the business of HD movies, I can’t see that being an easy task. Although I haven’t been able to test the service the concept alone has huge advantages over competing products which I can only assume is Blockbusters, LoveFilms and Sky+ in the UK. Needless to say Voddler is leading the way in the move for on demand entertainment delivered in a format consumers want.

** oh and imagine the extra offerings a service like this could do for you’re movie watching. Last.fm for films? Amazon esq automatic trailer downloads from your history? Rotten Tomato feedback integration? iPlayer local cache? etc…

Having just received in invite to Insync from what I can only assume being the Web Work Daily Post a couple days back I’m very impressed so far with Insync. Being that file synchronisation is a crowded marketplace with Dropbox clearly being the main contender and Microsoft’s Live Mesh trying to do the best it can, Its nice to see another company taking the approach of solving file synchronisation from a business angle.

Being quite a Dropbox fan I must admit its going to be a tough one to contend with, but I feel some of the raw concepts Insync is offering and the way its set out has already got a great contending idea. Dropbox when it first came out early 2008 set its goals to be a personal synchronisation service for professionals with multiple computers and without criticism it has done this very very well. As a side feature Dropbox introduced the idea of shared folders, where users could share a folder with another Dropbox user, therefore one folder in both Dropbox user accounts would show both peoples changes. This has been a fantastic utility for Dropbox users and has spawned many hacks for synchronising various other Settings, Passwords, Profiles Etc…

The one problem Dropbox has had with the idea of sharing files is that it has always been an afterthought particularly for large teams or even Noded teams. Dropbox has always been about individual file synchronisation whereas Insync is solving the problem of team based file synchronisation by letting companies signup co-workers to the whole folder, which means you don’t need someone to have a an existing account to join in and share files.

With a generous 5 gig limit for free accounts I would highly recommend you sign yourself up for an invite sooner rather than later. If your a small business looking to give your co-workers an easy way to send files to each other I would jump aboard this because I can see this being just as popular if not as popular as Dropbox is for personal use ( email beta [at] insynchq dot com for an invite )

Insync

After trying a limetless amount of twitter clients I was struggling to find a balance of Tweetdeck’s multi column view, Hootsuite’s multi account features with Bit.ly as the url shortner of choice ( Although very tempted by Shawn Inman’s Less.n though as a bit more of a personal shorttner )

I eventually found Cotweet. Now Cotweet is being touted as “How business does twitter” but having used Cotweet for a couple weeks being a single user, I would recommend it to anyone over some of the competitors. Although it has advanced features for business such as its on duty notifications and assigning specific tweets to a coworker which being a single user i won’t ever use, It also has some great features for non business users.

The first thing that should shine through would be Cotweet’s polished application like interface, which is a real treat to start seeing more of for RIA’s.

Other great features of Cotweet is its built in click tracking from your bit.ly, archiving of messages and scheduling of tweets which provides a great

If all of that wasn’t enough it includes a great column based keyword tracking view a built in way to view threaded conversation with profile information.

Overall I couldn’t recommend this enough over many alternatives out there, I can imagine that perhaps one of the things holding you back is that its browser based, well if you’re on a mac Fluid will sort that out and I haven’t looked in to a SSB alternative for PC but I’m sure there must be one or two out there somewhere.

Check Cotweets feature list out