Saturday, April 23, 2011

Can't Recall the Company Name Dropkicked by shopkick!

Can't Recall Their Company Name had been owned by Shopkick for at least a year, but then - without ANY warning or heads-up email - the Android (iOS?) app called Can't Recall Their Company Name, turned into Shopkick with absolutely ZERO points accumulated crossing over.

They made a big mistake.  As in: They just could give a shit about their app USERS.

Mergers & Backquisitions

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Groupon buys Pelago-owned Whrrl.



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Demand Media buys CoverItLive



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Tagged buys Digsby (essentially a more efficient, more on-top-of-it Trillian)
     About Tagged: "Other social networks are for staying in touch with people you already know. At Tagged, we make it easy to meet new people through social games, friend suggestions, browsing profiles, group interests and much more."
     About Digsby:          
  • One combined buddy list for all your AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber, and Facebook Chat Accounts.
  • Manage multiple conversations with tabbed conversation windows. You can drag tabs out into their own windows for important conversations.
  • Rename contacts with an alias so you don't have to remember buddy names like 'giantsfan123'.
  • If one of your friends has more than one IM account you can combine them into a single merged contact to eliminate duplicate buddies.
  • Send your friends SMS messages right from the IM window.
  • The InfoBox lets you check everyone's status message and profile just by moving your mouse down the list.
  • Changing your status has never been easier. just one click right on the buddy list!
  • Multitask while you chat. Minimize the IM window and you see popups of new IM's. Best of all, you can reply right from the popup and get back to what you were doing.
  • Log conversation history and find the information you need with our search-enabled log viewer.
...and you were worried about Apple "tracking" you!

Please comment if we need to add anything.

Monday, November 29, 2010

Steve Martin and why is his name in this title?

This now is the first blog post of many regarding Deprovements, a word coined recently by Steve Martin, yes THAT Steve Martin (@stevemartintogo) on a TWiT.tv show, "Triangulation" with Leo Laporte and Tom Merritt (at time of air) - yes, that Leo, of TheTechGuy radio show, Starring Leo Laporte, "The Tech Guy!" from Petaluma, California on the Premier Radio Network via KLA-FM and Premier affiliates.

A De-provement is a piece of software that was working until JUST recently, where it was "improved" [in the eyes of the developer and the developers' perceived loyal following], but actually after the "improvement" is now either non-functional, missing a key piece or feature that drew you to the software in the first place.  I will add to this definition: Android software that you pay for, then almost immediately permissions increase that can amd usually are either superfluous to the proper running of said software or worse, permissions that increase the potential misuse of their perceived "...need to be in the software."

Let's begin:

Evernote; probable the worst asking for 19 permissions - 17 of which they clearly do not need.

Where (aka Yowzaa! on the iPhone); from the brains of your Hero and mine, "The Cop" - Grundberg - and his coding buddy.  They have backed off permissions (specifically Read Phone State and Discover Known Accounts - the former probably the worst as it has only one function of which even native Google apps don't need or ask for)

Finance by the Google Finance Team; as of Aug 2013, not sure Google even cares about it (R.I.P.  Google WAVE, Reader, Knowles, _______ )