Posts Tagged ‘Blog’

Google Voice

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

GoogleVoiceIcon

I just read a good article with some first impressions of Google’s Voice service.  It’s worth a read and cover most of the good and bad points.

If you’ve not come across Google Voice (GV) before it provides you with a single phone number that you can link to multiple phones – for example your mobile, home and work phones.  When someone calls your GV number all phones ring until you pick one up.  GV will also forward text messages to mobile phones.

Through the web interface you can setup groups for your contacts and set behaviours for voicemail etc. on those groups.  It also does things like transcribe voicemails.

It’ll be a few months before it’s available here in the UK, but I can’t wait as I have a couple of numbers that I use and consolidating down to one number will be fantastic. 

Anyways, take a look at the post here:

http://paulstamatiou.com/first-impressions-google-voice

Engineering Windows 7

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

I’ve just read through the latest posting over on the Engineering Windows 7 blog, this time a follow up post on Desktop Search.  Reading though the posts on there I keep thinking about just how good blogs can be when used properly.

In that blog the product team are able to talk about not only the product itself, but also the ‘why’ aspects of the design decisions they’re making.   I’m not sure that’s ever been visible before outside the usual marketing pitches.  For me it’s fascinating reading – but then I am a bit geeky.

I’ve been trying hard to increase the visibility and transparency of the design decisions made during work here.  It’s not always obvious to the customer or end users, and making the reasoning behind your decisions available should make for more open discussions and hopefully a better product and happier customers.  I think there’s a lot to be learnt from MS and Windows 7 teams approach.

Mark Andreesen on MS/Yahoo

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

There’s good post on Marc’s blog about what the potential MS/Yahoo deal might mean for small start ups.

http://blog.pmarca.com/2008/02/silicon-valley.html

More good twitter advice…

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

…From Steve Clayton.  I’ve only really been on Twitter for a few weeks but already I spend quite a bit of time on there.  In fact along with Google Reader and Outlook its one of the apps I seem to have open all the time.  At the moment I use it more as a feed, but that’s really because Twitter hasn’t quite sparked yet in my circle of friends and colleagues.  That seems to be changing though, a few people have picked up on it from the Facebook app – my Facebook status is updated with my Tweets.

For now though Steve’s post has some good advice and links.  Take a look and get over to twitter.com.