Google Calendar Sync

3/05/2008 04:15:00 PM
Posted by Shirin Oskooi, Product Manager, Google Calendar

clipped from googleblog.blogspot.com I've suffered major headaches trying to sync all my calendars. I used the Microsoft Outlook calendar on my desktop computer at home, but since I wanted to be able to access my schedule from anywhere, I also kept a copy of it on Google Calendar. When I traveled, I'd import my Google Calendar data into my laptop's Outlook calendar so I could access it offline. This was not only annoying to maintain, but also quite error-prone. If I made updates on any of the copies of my calendar, I had to make sure to make those same exact changes to the other copies, too. This was my life for a whole year before we started working on Google Calendar Sync, a 2-way synching application between Google Calendar and the calendar in Microsoft Outlook. I was probably the most excited person on the team when we started developing it, because now I can access my calendar at home or on my laptop, on Google Calendar or in Outlook.

FastCompany: Infographic: Numerology: SXSW

Over the last 20 years, the South by Southwest Festival has grown from a small Texas gathering of songsters into a star-launching mega-event with music, film, and tech components. This year, it runs from March 7-16.

clipped from images.fastcompany.com

Motivate yourself with "Loss Aversion"

stickK.com was developed by Yale University economists who tested the effectiveness of Commitment Contracts through extensive field research.

clipped from www.43folders.com NPR: Put Your Money Where Your Girth Is Merlin Mann writes: I really enjoyed this Morning Edition story on “Prospect Theory,” or the idea that loss aversion can be an effective motivator in goals related to health improvement like weight loss and smoking cessation: “What we know about incentives is that people work a lot harder to avoid losing $10 than they will work to gain $10,” explains Ayres. “So something that’s framed as a loss is really effective at changing behavior.” Related to that question I was asked at Macworld: I wonder if a gym membership might be even more motivating if you received a daily email updating you on the wasted dollars you’d spent by not working out in the last n days. When I started paying most of my own college tuition, I remember realizing that every class I skipped was equivalent to throwing away about a day and a half of the money I’d earned from waiting on tables. It was very motivating for me, and I started missing a lot fewer classes as a result.

Outcomes: The Common Language for an Efficient Nonprofit Marketplace

Hosted by Debra Natenshon
CEO, The Center for What Works

clipped from www.socialedge.org The movement for an efficient online capital marketplace is gaining attention, momentum and players.  Recently, a variety of organizations including Great Nonprofits, Social Markets, Give Well, Root Cause, and even GuideStar and Google, have taken steps toward solving the enigma of connecting greater donor dollars to the highest performing nonprofits.  Logic Models and the theories of change have proven useful first steps to help nonprofits to plan.  Beyond planning, nonprofits have struggled to implement their goals; how can we in the social sector measure our performance toward our stated missions in a way that both stimulates our own improvement as well as satisfying the requirements of the grant-maker and donor communities to measure and assess impact? Foundations have the ability to dictate reporting requirements, but until the sector is able to speak a common language, with a common framework for the outcomes, reporting serves primarily as additional burden.  browse our resource

Fontography of the Candidates

clipped from www.onthemedia.org MotherPie/flickr The fonts that presidential candidates select for their campaign logos reflect an important act of political branding. Sam Berlow of The Font Bureau Inc. says the logos all speak volumes about the candidates they represent. The Bush/Cheney was great. It just had that incredible NASCAR feel with the slanted sans serif saying, "We're going really fast. Hang on." If you look at Hillary’s campaign, it’s really a throwback to Reagan and Bush. It has that feeling of old typography from the '70s and '80s. It’s serif. It’s sort of highwaisted, as if the lower case, the pants had been pulled up too high. It feels sort of like a bad Talbots suit. Doesn't quite fit right. Well, there are several oddities about the Huckabee design. The six stars that sort of floating down like snowflakes are a bit odd, and the swash that reminds me of Coca-Cola. And then there’s this yellow element in the type.

How I Live: A study of an ethnographic self-study

Graphic facilitator and all-around cool kid, Brandy Agerbeck, sent out this bit of real world documentation of her compact, creative domicile. She writes: " Oh, remember my shiny, pretty apartment in the Reader last year? Well, here's how I really live."

She documents almost everything she does or creates on her website and has just jumped into audio podcasting, too.

clipped from www.loosetooth.com I needed to clean the apartment. Instead of cleaning the apartment, I took pictures of the mess in the apartment. It's a colorful mess. A muffin tin holding plastic bags of beads and some jewelry tools. Haven't worked on jewelry in a long time, so this has been sitting out for a long time. Da guys on the shelf next to the movie chair, owl, creature from the black lagoon, Stripus McGreenley the sock monkey, water bottle, more Mr. Sketch markers, Good magazine.

Kindle: Future Book

See what Amazon's Kindle is like. Besides being wireless (with no service plan!), the display uses electronic ink instead of backlit displays, allowing for easy reading outside in any light.

An electrophoretic display is an information display that forms visible images by rearranging charged pigment particles using an applied electric field.

clipped from www.amazon.com

The Smart Pen: The Past and Future of Pen and Paper

Check out these video demos of the pen that records what you write while recording the audio of the conversation. It also imports both the audio and visual notes into your computer.

Smart Pen uses the Livescribe Paper-Based Computing Platform that turns a spiral notebook into a user interface. The pattern of simple, micro-dots enables a patented dot-positioning system to precisely track the smartpen’s movement on paper. As a result, anything you write – words, numbers or drawings – can be stored, recognized, and intelligently responded to by the Pulse smartpen.

clipped from livescribe.com

From prehistoric cave walls and charcoal to the modern notebook and fountain pen, the human need for spontaneous self-expression through drawing and writing has endured. People have actively used writing tools and paper, in one form or another, for thousands of years.

Livescribe Chief Executive Officer Jim Marggraff introduces a new solution to this age-old problem and a long-term vision on how paper-based computing will advance the next chapter in mobile computing. Livescribe’s intelligent writing system includes an innovative smartpen and dot paper that together bring traditional paper to life.

By developing a paper-based platform, Livescribe will fundamentally change the way people capture, use and share information with pen and paper, making the possibilities of pen and paper endless. With Livescribe, people will no longer have to settle – they can have the best of both the paper and digital worlds.

Nokia's Nanotech Morph

The future may be here already (and just not evenly distributed) but I want to know where to buy i!

clipped from www.engadget.com Why is Nokia always trying to outdo everyone with its fancy-schmancy concepts and designs? Why can't they just get in line and keep it simple? We may never know the answer to those questions, but what we do know is that the company is presenting a new concept device called the Morph that would be right at home... in the year 3000. The unit is included in the MoMA's "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition catalog, and boasts the ability to stretch and flex to almost any shape a user could think of. The nanotechnology-based device would deliver transparent electronics, self-cleaning surfaces, and the malleability to transform into any number of configurations. Of course, the actual technology required to put this together is years or even decades away, though Nokia expects to see some of these innovations making their way into high-end products within seven years. See the device doing its thing in some photos after the break.