So email has been around for a while now, but I’ve been using it for something else for a couple of years now and wanted to share of few of my points on how to leverage its power through daily/periodic emails. It’s wonderful having all of these cloud based data and analytics services out there, but it’s very difficult to remember to log in to all of them periodically and check the data. Here are a few of my favorites:
1) Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/)
I get monthly emails from analytics for all of my key websites - it summarizes all of the key points that I want to track on my sites and makes it a nice PDF I can forward on to others.
2) Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts)
Easily one of the most useful tools offered by Google. You setup alerts by keyword. Midnight of every night google runs the search and emails you the new results - that way you don’t have to filter through the results you’ve already seen.
3) Connected HQ (http://connectedhq.com/)
Now a part of the LinkedIn family, Connected HQ has proven to be a great solution. It hooks in with all of my social media outlets and my calendar and email. It then looks in my calendar each day and emails me a summary of who I’m meeting with the next day and includes their recent social media activity.
4) LinkedIn Group Summaries (http://www.linkedin.com/directory/groups/)
LinkedIn Groups have become a great way to network with your colleagues. Group Summary emails make it even better by emailing you a summary of all the key activity in your groups.
5) Twitter Summaries
You can setup a similar alert in twitter that sends you key activity from the people you follow in twitter.
6) USA Today and BBC Daily News Summaries
Both USA Today and BBC have daily email signups that send you highlights plus any sections of interest on a daily basis - much easier than remembering to check the news website.
When we moved to our new house in February, Kathy & I decided not to get bundled cable/satellite television. To people who know me at all, this has been a super surprising development. I consume television pretty voraciously, and love live sports of just about all kinds. I love great television…
So I’m six months into having Amazon Prime and I had to write about how much this seemingly innocuous service has transformed how I buy things. The major reason that I went into an Amazon Prime subscription was to get the free 2 day shipping. I really wanted to try ordering more things and going to stores less for the regular non-perishable grocery items that we buy at the house. I can say that after a half a year, this is just part of the experience that I’ve had - ordering basic dry goods led me to the subscribe and save items on amazon, where you can basically subscribe to groceries being delivered to your house. And while Amazon has lost the sales tax benefit in Texas, it still saves a ton of time not having to go to the store for all those cereal bars my kids consume. I’ve also found some great products on Amazon that simply aren’t carried in my local grocery stores. Stuff like organic grass fed beef jerky and organic almonds (welcome to my Primal diet). But it doesn’t stop there. He’s a summary of what you get with Prime, and it’s awesome:
1) Free two day shipping on pretty much anything that amazon fulfills directly
2) A slew (thousands and thousands) of free movies to stream (and if you have a Roku, you’ll love this). I think netflix should be very concerned about this offering.
3) Thousands of books from Amazon Kindle (yes, we still read our books on kindle despite my previous post about picking up the paper sometimes). It’s a borrowing system that Amazon put together that means you basically get a bunch of books to read for free.
Give it a shot - you can try it out for free and get hooked on it. Oh, and go by a Roku if you haven’t already - awesome device that should give the apple tv a good run for the money.
What to do with that old Sprint Android phone…
So since the iPhone came to Sprint, I switched my primary phone back from AT&T so I could get unlimited data for my phone and get 5GB of tethering (Something you cannot do on AT&T). As such, I replaced my sprint line, which had an HTC Evo attached to it, with the iPhone, so the question begged itself, what to do with the old Evo? After all, the battery life stinks, it was kind of slow, and really didn’t work that well.
After some thought and picking through the settings menu, I discovered a feature I didn’t know that it had - a SIP phone. I logged into Skype and enabled the SIP gateway function and tied a phone number to it. I then used the given SIP server settings from Skype to turn the Evo into a dedicated SIP phone for Skype. It’s been a phenomenal dedicated Skype phone and worked quite better than the old dedicated Skype phone I purchased from Skype a few years ago. So for all of you out there with used Android phones, don’t throw them away - go SIP and enjoy!
For all the talk about cloud apps, businesses have to focus their efforts on cloud apps that can deliver a tangible return. Here’s my top 8 apps and the reasons I love them:
So I came to an unsettling realization about two months ago. I realized that I hadn’t read a whole book in several months. SEVERAL MONTHS. And this is from a guy who has read hundreds upon hundreds of books. All of the novels Robert Ludlum, Roald Dahl, Vince Flynn, and many, many more. This was a really disturbing. So I tried to figure out how to do something about it.
I started buying several books on Amazon for my Kindle/iPad/iPhone, figuring that if I spent the money and got them on my device, I would get with the program and read them. But, alas, no reading occurred. I started them, but for some reason never finished them. I started getting frustrated, then annoyed, then sad. I really missed diving into a book and not being able to put it down.
Then I realized what the real issue was. Distraction. Plain and simple. These devices have wonderful apps, great screens, lots of buttons (at least the Kindle does) and I was getting VERY distracted by all of this “gadget noise”. So a week ago I tried an experiment. I locked all the devices away in my home office and settled down with a nice…. book. That’s right. The guy who hates paper cracked open a wonderful hard-cover book by my good friend David Gregory and dove in. It was splendid. It was miraculous. I was able to read for hours on end and dig into what turned out to be a great book (Thanks Mr. Gregory!) So I tried it again, and, lo and behold, it happened again.
So while I will continue to use my iPad for all my news and my Kindle and Kindle App for the light, quick reading, I’m going back… back into time. Dust off the hard-covers, let’s go for a read and kick that ol’ enemy called Distraction in the butt.
In light of the incredible levels of heat and drought we’ve been experiencing in Texas, I thought I would take some steps to cut our home’s energy and water usage - all kinds of fun, so here’s my list.
So that’s about it for now, but there’s lots more to do than this. Just gotta take it one step at a time!
Being the tech geek that I am, I’m always asked what my favorite iPhone/iPad apps are, so here goes, in order of favoritism:
That’s it for now - I’ll keep it coming as more apps come out!
