text

As already noted, I'm a big proponent of the SMS text message. So much so that I was willing to pay $.50 a text sent from Australia! But on a more serious note, there was a 5.6 earthquake here in the Bay Area on Tuesday night. I was at dinner and I thought my dinner date was shaking the table or that there was a washing machine somewhere that went awry. But no, it was a bona fide earthquake. While there was no damage and it was minor, we both got text messages from our friends as soon … Read more

One of the more interesting voice-to-text companies out there is SpinVox, which has been kicking around for the last four years. This week they've added a really cool new feature that adds voice-to-text support for some popular "microblogging" networks like Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, as well as status update and wall support for Facebook. Once you've registered your logins with the service, you can call a single telephone number and post to all of them at once, or pick which ones you want your message to go to.

The service is aimed at people who don't … Read more

When you need to paste text--and just plain text--without any fonts, pictures, or style markers, what do you do? Microsoft Word users might employ the Paste Special feature in the Edit menu. And if you're not using Word? Then you might copy the source text and paste it into Notepad, TextPad, or another top-rated text editor. Then you would copy that unformatted text and paste it to the destination document.

What bother. PureText is a scrappy clipboard app that cuts out the busy work. It assigns a hot key combination to facilitate format-free pasting from the source to the destination without you ever needing to launch an additional app or detour to Word's Edit menu. Holding down the Windows key while pressing "V" is the default setup, but users can choose from a number of other hot key options. Note though, the ALT key isn't one of them.… Read more

So this month I will have traveled more than 20,000 miles via plane, train and boats to various destinations and various time zones. The iPhone has proven adept and adaptable - so long as you activate the international roaming and data plans - which you have to do in person or via AT&T's operators before you leave the country - as my friend Max found out the hard way.

Anyway, upon landing at each airport the iPhone will find the applicable AT&T network or AT&T compatible network - oftentimes in seconds. But … Read more

This morning Web-SMS service Joopz is launching a new Outlook plug-in that turns your desktop e-mail client into a one-stop SMS hub. Once tied into your Joopz account, you can send and receive text messages like you would e-mail. The tool also syncs up with your Outlook contacts, to let you send notes to anybody with a phone number.

The service is flouting the new plug-in as a handy way to keep in touch with friends, but for business users who use SMS to communicate with their colleagues while out on the road, this could be a handy, finger-saving tool … Read more

Is Twitter going to turn your mundane messages about salads, cats, and Arcade Fire concerts into revenue dollars? Signs are pointing to yes, as oddball messages appended to Twitter's microblog "tweets" indicate that the company is dabbling in text message ads. Some other folks around the tech blog world are picking up on this, and they seem to be in agreement.

Like so many things, it all started in Gotham--and, in the interest of full disclosure, it involves yours truly. On Monday morning there was a bit of New York tech-scene chit-chat over Twitter, as local entrepreneur … Read more

Links are the fundamental vehicle that gets us from here to there on the web. Without them, we'd have no where to go, or at least a much harder time getting there. Links are, of course, deeply important to search engines as well. In fact, links and PageRank are at the very core of Google.

Spend a little time on just about any website and it won't be long before you come across a "click here," "click this," or "more" link. You probably wouldn't trade a $20 bill for $5, yet … Read more

Text-message spam may go up this November for voter-age youth.

Turns out that young people are more likely to vote when they receive a text-message reminder, according to a new study published this month by researchers at Princeton University and the University of Michigan.

The researchers ran their test in the November 2006 election, with text reminders sent to roughly 4,000 young voters. Researchers pulled data and cell phone numbers from voter registration records at the Student PIRG's New Voters Project and Working Assets Wireless; and following the election, they matched the files to find out which registrants … Read more

Here's a useful concept: say you're really sick of dealing with your phone's tiny keypad to type in text messages. What if you could simply say what you wanted to write down, and have the tool fill it in for you? Yap is a new service that's trying to fill that need with their new mobile phone client. It's aimed at teens, who the company claims 66% of text while driving. Yap will read off your friend's responses, meaning you don't have to pay attention to what they're writing. The service works … Read more