Saving time and money on email

We use email for everything from notifying a co-worker in the next cube that we're ready for lunch to storing important documents for later use. Despite all the collaboration software out there, email is still the workhorse of the office and often the home.

So now comes Google with the idea to create something like a spam folder but for the really good stuff. InformationWeek reports:

Priority Inbox relies on a filtering system to sort significant messages from less significant ones. It differs from Gmail's existing user-configurable, keyword-based filters in that it filters automatically, can be corrected when it fails, and tries to learn on its own.

Google suggests that Priority Inbox is like the Gmail spam folder, except for the good stuff. Training is simple: A "+" icon puts e-mail into the Priority Inbox; a "-" icon takes e-mail out. The system also considers frequently e-mailed people to be important.

Here are some numbers from Google.

• The average information worker receives 150 messages per day.
• Testers spent 6% less time managing e-mail using Priority Inbox.
• With the estimate that information workers spend 13 hours per week on e-mail, that works out to about 46 minutes saved per week.

For employers, InformationWeek says, that could translate into a productivity savings of over 40 hours per year. In monetary terms, that would be worth over $1,100 annually per Gmail user for private sector companies and almost $1,600 annually per Gmail user for government agencies,

Your own newspaper from Twitter

Using Twitter as a source of news? Like the look of an old-fashioned newspaper? A Swiss startup called Small Rivers has taken that idea and turned it into a service called Paper.li. Here's how it works:

The site takes your Twitter stream and extracts links to any news stories, photos, videos, etc., which it then analyzes using what the company calls “semantic text analysis tools” to determine whether the stories are relevant. It then displays the links and related content in sections based on the context of the link.

The service also creates themed pages based on specific topics using hashtags, such as #privacy or #climate, in much the same way that newspapers create special sections around an event or topic. Paper.li also automatically creates topical sections like Technology, Arts & Entertainment, Photos, Politics and Business. If you hover over the source of each link or photo, you can reply, retweet, follow or unfollow and favorite that user. Users can also now create papers using a Twitter list.

You can see several of these here, courtesy of Gigaom:

• Jeff Nolan (technology blogger and VC — @jeffnolan)
• Umair Haque (director of Harvard’s media lab — @umairh)
• Ross Mayfield (co-founder of Socialtext — @ross)
• Wired magazine (the Wired Daily account — @wired)
• Stowe Boyd (online consultant — @stoweboyd)
• Alex Howard (O’Reilly correspondent — @digiphile)

What’s interesting about using Twitter for such a service, Mathew Ingram notes, is that you don’t have to explicitly say which articles you like, or wait for the software to learn what you’re interested in; you choose the people you follow and those people choose the links they want to share, and that constitutes your newspaper.

Deciphering those family cell phone plans

We have one, and it seems to work well. However, Verizon isn't doing this as a favor to us. For one thing, it hangs on to us a customers. 

“Once you’re on a family plan, it’s really hard to switch everyone over,” says Carl Howe, the director of Anywhere Consumer Research at the Yankee Group, a Boston-based market research firm.

And these things aren't always easy to figure out or compare. “These plans are very simple if you have your Ph.D.,” Howe says.

Here from Smart Money are some tips on family plans:

Handset requirements 

Be cautious giving in to teens’ pleas for the latest handset. Many, especially smartphones, come with voice and data plan requirements, says Schwark Satyavolu, the president of cellphone comparison site BillShrink.com. Depending on the carrier, those strings can effectively force consumers into a more expensive family plan. On T-Mobile, for example, buying a smartphone requires a Family Talk + Text + Web plan, which starts at $140 per month for two lines and 750 minutes, and charges a per-phone unlimited web fee of $10 to $30. (That’s at least $40 more than the same number of minutes on a Family Talk + Text plan.)

Even if a new phone isn’t on the table, review requirements on family members’ current handsets to get a sense of the minimum coverage needed.

Individual vs. total usage

Carriers may offer a choice of add-ons such as text and data on a per-line basis, or as coverage for everyone on the plan. Look at recent bills to gauge the family's usage as a whole, as well as each individual’s, says Allen Keiter, the president of comparison site MyRatePlan.com. That can help you decide whether to cover one line or everyone. Sprint tacks on a per-line fee of $5 for 300 text messages, $10 for 1,000 and $20 for unlimited on its $70, two-line family talk plans with 700 minutes. Or consumers could trade up to a $100, 1,500-minute plan with unlimited texting.

Minutes required

An unlimited plan isn’t necessarily the best deal, Keiter says. “Any family plan is already going to have unlimited mobile-to-mobile in network and unlimited nights and weekends,” he says. Consumers have a relatively small window to actually use plan minutes, and adding lines to an unlimited plan is significantly pricier than adding them to a limited-minute plan, he says. On AT&T, additional lines beyond the first two in a family plan cost $10 per month on plans with up to 2,100 shared minutes and rollover. On unlimited plans, they cost $50.

Reviewing the new Kindle

David Pogue at The New York Times on the new Kindle:

This week, Amazon unveiled what everyone (except Amazon) is calling the Kindle 3. You might call it Amazon’s iPad response. The Kindle 3 is ingeniously designed to be everything the iPad will never be: small, light and inexpensive.

Now, the Kindle is almost ridiculously lightweight; at 8.5 ounces, it’s a third the weight of the iPad. That’s a big deal for a machine that you want to hold in your hands for hours.

Then there is the $140 price. That’s for the model with Wi-Fi — a feature new to the Kindle that plays catch-up to the Barnes & Noble Nook. A Kindle model that can also get online using the cellular network, as earlier models do, costs $50 more. But the main thing you do with the wireless feature is download new books, so Wi-Fi is probably plenty for most people.

In case you were indeed considering the iPad primarily for its e-book features, that the Kindle’s catalog of 630,000 current books is 10 times the size of Apple’s. 

In sum: what makes the Kindle so successful isn’t what Amazon added to it; it’s what Amazon subtracted: size, weight and price.

Computers and your eyes

I have trouble looking at the computer screen, which I do all day. I use the control plus plus sign function all day long to enlarge or reduce the type on the screen. I'm not alone.

More people are showing up at eye appointments complaining of headaches, fatigue, blurred vision and neck pain—all symptoms of computer-vision syndrome (CVS), which affects some 90% of the people who spent three hours or more at day at a computer, according to the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Healthy.

Yes, I talk to my opthamolagist about it, but, as The Wall Street Journal reports:

But vision prescriptions mainly focus on myopia (nearsightedness) or presbyopia (the difficulty focusing on near objects that comes with age). Since there are no set standards for measuring mid-range vision, ophthalmologists and optometrists typically just cut any reading prescription they give patients in half for computer distance. With people sitting anywhere from 18 to 40 inches from their screens, that can be wildly off. 

What to do?

It's best to measure your work environment, noting exactly how far your eyes are from your computer screen, keyboard and desk surface, as well as from any laptop or hand-held devices you use. Some eye-care offices have a device called an accommodation rule that allows a technician to slide an eye chart back and forth to simulate different distances.

Patients should also keep track of how many hours they typically spend focusing at each distance during the day. More than 40% of Americans spend three or more hours a day staring at a computer or hand-held, according to the American Optometric Association. "Every individual is different, and too often, in the hustle and bustle of seeing patients in practice, we don't stop to ask, 'What is your working distance? What are your hobbies?' If you go fly-fishing, you need to focus up close for hooking your flies as well as seeing at computer distance," says Glen Steele, a professor at Southern College of Optometry in Memphis, Tenn. 

The Journal article lists a number of solutions involving various types of lenses and even surgery.

Talking to you on gmail

If you are a Gmail user in the U.S., you can now make free Web-based phone calls to any phone in the U.S. and Canada right from the Gmail interface. You can also make International calls for fees starting at $0.02 per minute.

ReadWriteWeb has the details:

To use this new feature, you will have to install the Google Talk plugin, which is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Google plans to roll this functionality out over the next few days, so it might be a bit before you see it in your Gmail account. In addition, Google Apps accounts won't have access to this feature yet.

If you are a Google voice user, your Google Voice number will appear as the outbound called ID number on calls made from Gmail. You can also opt to receive inbound Google Voice calls from inside the GMail interface.

Gmail users were already able to initiative VoIP and video calls with other Gmail users, but the added telephony feature and integration with Google Voice makes this feature far more useful. You can now, for example, simply initiate a call by simply clicking on a phone number in an email signature.

So I'm paying land line and cell phone bills ... why?

Are your passwords long enough?

Size matters.

Georgia Institute of Technology scientists used clusters of graphics cards to crack eight-character passwords in less than two hours. But when the researchers applied that same processing power to 12-character passwords, they found it would take 17,134 years to make them snap.

It's hard to say what will happen in the future, but for now, 12-character passwords should be the standard, said Richard Boyd, a senior research scientist who also worked on the project. The researchers recommend 12-character passwords -- as opposed to those with 11 or, say, 13 characters -- because that number strikes a balance between "convenience and security."

They assumed a sophisticated hacker might be able to try 1 trillion password combinations per second. In that scenario, it takes 180 years to crack an 11-character password, but there's a big jump when you add just one more character -- 17,134 years.

Security experts are already recommending that people use full sentences as passwords. Here's one suggested password-sentence from Carnegie Mellon University:

"No, the capital of Wisconsin isn't Cheeseopolis!"
Or maybe something that's easier to remember, like this:
"I have two kids: Jack and Jill."

Some tips:

• If a website will let you create a password with non-letter characters -- like "@y;}v%W$\5\" -- then you should do so. There are only 26 letters in the English alphabet, but there are 95 letters and symbols on a standard keyboard. More characters means more permutations, and it soon becomes more difficult for a computer to generate the correct password just by guessing.
• On a Microsoft website devoted to password security, the tech giant tells the password-creating public not to use real words or logical combinations of letters. That keeps you safer from a "dictionary attack," which uses a database of words and common character sequences to try to guess the code.
• A website called Password Safe will store a list of passwords for you, but Boyd and Davis said it may still be possible for a hacker to obtain that list.ionary attack," which uses a database of words and common character sequences to try to guess the code.
• Some sites -- Facebook for example -- are marketing their log-ins and user names as a way to access sites all over the Web. That's potentially dangerous because if hackers figure out a single password, they can access multiple banks of information, the researchers said. 

I like the idea of using a sentence, or perhaps the first line of a favorite song.

Where are you?

Facebook has launched a new feature called Places that helps mobile phone users broadcast their whereabouts and track their friends: They can see who else 'checked into' a museum, shop, park or theater, what they did there and what they thought of it.

Facebook's Silicon Valley rival Google Inc. has already staked a claim with its own location service and is in the process of building a social networking service to compete with Facebook rumored to be called Google Me. Both companies are keenly pursuing the potentially lucrative location-based market, which remains largely up for grabs.

Advertisers are eager to target consumers based on their location by sending coupons or special offers to people near specific stores, bars, movie theaters and restaurants. That mobile advertising market could grow to $3 billion by 2014, up from $200 million this year, the consulting firm Borrell Associates predicts. But checking in has not yet become mainstream. Forrester Research reports that only 4% of adults in the United States use location services.

Beware: Places is far better in terms of protecting user privacy than previous new feature roll outs such as the Instant Personalization service launched in April. Nevertheless, Places can still reveal important data about you if you don't take the time to adjust your privacy settings.

If you're not convinced that posting your location can be a bad thing, check out PleaseRobMe for some evidence.

Details on how to protect yourself here.

Plotting your path with a cell phone

GPS signals aren't available everywhere -- a parking garage, for example. Microsoft researchers have come up with an app for tracking where you have been, GPS or not. Technology Review reports:

The device would collect the trail data while the user walked indoors, underground, or in other spaces where GPS signals are unavailable or weak--such as multilevel parking garages that can baffle people who forget where they parked.

They have produced a prototype phone called Menlo, which packs a suite of sensors: an accelerometer to detect movement, a side-mounted compass to determine direction, and a barometric pressure sensor to track changes in altitude.

What's new about Menlo is an app called Greenfield, which aims to solve the Hansel and Gretel problem by harnessing the data from the sensors. The goal is to count a user's sequence of steps, gauge direction changes, and even calculate how many floors the user has traversed by stairs or an elevator. The app stores the trail data so that a user can later retrace his path precisely.

Greenfield could be used for new kinds of urban street games, to recover lost items, to find friends at a stadium, or to rescue hikers and mountain climbers.