Aug
23
2008
Not more than a day after I posted my review of Jott, they sent me an email stating that they are out of Beta. They now offer three tiers of service– Jott Basic for Free, Jott for $3.95/month and Jott Pro for $12.95/month. Unfortunately they took away emailing, and Google calendar from the basic (free) service, but you still get 15 second notes with the free plan. The Jott ($3.95/month) plan is pretty much the same as the free Beta service I reviewed in my earlier post. I would have hoped they left some emailing on the free plan since I think that was Jott’s best selling point, but beggars can’t be choosers. If you need to do emailing on the run, from a non-email enabled cell phone, the $3.95 a month plan may be worth it to you. I am still planning to use the notes feature myself since I forget stuff frequently, and its faster than writing.
Aug
20
2008
I stumbled upon a really cool tool that can supercharge any cell phone (or landline for that matter). It lets you use your phone to send emails and text message to individuals or groups; make notes and to-do lists; add entries to your Google Calendar (and many other apps)…but that’s not all…. you also can get news, weather and RSS feeds as well. And the news gets even better, you won’t need to extend your cell phone contract or go into debt to get it, because its a free
voice recognition service that works with any phone called
Jott.
To use it, you register at their website and do some basic setup. You can enter names and email addresses so you can email from your phone; you can setup notes and to-do lists so you can dictate to them from your phone; you can link to your Google calendar so you can add appointments, and you can setup news and weather feeds so you can listen to them. While the setup sounds complicated, the site is actually very well designed and easy to use. In addition there is quite a bit of help with examples so its easy to learn how to use all of the features. Once you’ve done some setup, all you do is call the 800 number that Jott provides, tell it who you want to email/text or what note you want update, dictate your message, and in a few minutes, your note is saved or your email is sent. You can even call to have Jott read news, weather, or any custom RSS feed (like one from irunabiz.com) back to you.
According to their web site Jott is “free while its in beta” which means that it could either become a pay service on the turn of a dime, or disappear for lack of a viable business model. But, I plan to use it for as long as I can (and I’d even consider paying for it if the price was right). If you need to have some basic messaging and note functionality on your phone and don’t want to cough up the big bucks for a smart phone–give Jott a try.
Aug
06
2008
I can’t quite figure twitter out, I’m still ooh-ing and ah-ing over You-tube. (Thats so two years ago). I trying to get caught up on this social networking stuff. So while I was reading some of my daily blogs, I came across this
post about “Twitter For Business” with a free pdf report on
John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing blog. This report is an easy to understand overview of twitter and how you can use it to grow you business. John’s Blog is a great to follow for advice on marketing in the Internet and social networking age. I suggest you check it out frequently.
