These apps include one that makes it super simple to make phone calls without cell service, an app that pushes you and your business up in search results, one that introduces you to people you might like, another that analyzes your business’s e-mail, and a service that banks and protects your personal data.
Here’s a closer look at five products I believe have a fighting chance to make a difference in people’s lives in the year ahead.
Sonar, one of a new breed of “ambient social networking” apps, is an iPhone app that can detect where your friends are and what they’re doing and saying at any given time. But that’s just the start. Sonar also searches through many different kinds of publicly available social media information (tweets, Foursquare check-ins, Foursquare data, event RSVP lists, and Instagram pictures) to find commonalities between people (also running the Sonar app or not) who might enjoy meeting each other. Example: Sonar detects that two blocks away my friend is at a patio bar. It also detects that another person close by who checked in via Foursquare is a Facebook friend of another person I know. And, wouldn’t you know it, that this person works for the same company I do (Sonar knows this from her LinkedIn profile) and recently tweeted about a band I like.
Vox.io is an iPhone app that makes connecting with people by voice or video simpler than I’ve seen with any other service. It requires nothing more than a Wi-Fi connection to place calls between users, but it can also work with traditional phone numbers routing Wi-Fi-connected handsets to landlines. The service is free between Vox.io users, while calls routed between the Vox.io app and traditional phones cost 1 cent per minute for domestic calls and 10 cents per minute for international calls. The rates are very similar to those of Skype and Google Voice.
What makes Vox.io amazing is how easy it makes initiating calls. You can invite a non-Vox.io-using friend to a call by sending them a simple link via e-mail, Twitter, IM, or Facebook; when they click the link on the other end, two large squares appear on their screen—a green one saying “accept,” the other a red one saying “reject.” After the friend hits “accept,” the call is connected. You can create a group call by sending the same link to a group of friends. You can also “search and call,” wherein you search for another Vox.io user using the terms “call [your friend’s name here]” within the app. Next, just click the contact’s name, and the call is initiated. Personal: Putting ‘Private’ Back into Personal Info
The idea is that one day, Personal will serve as a marketplace for your personal data, data that can be bartered, shared, or exchanged with third-party services. That’s better than the way it works today, says Personal, where Web services just take your data and treat it as a their own commodity.
Right now Personal offers a secure place to bank your personal data and throws in a set of tools to manage your online identity. Personal then gives you easy ways to give other Web companies access to your data on your terms, not theirs. This is a complete reversal from the way it works now, where we hand over our personal data to large companies like Facebook, and they decide what to use it for, Green says. Aside from the convenience and control you get, your agreement with Personal might assign real value to your data, in a legal sense. Personal chief policy officer and general counsel Joshua Galper explained to me that right now there is no basis in the law to say that my personal data has real property value. It is considered to be “information” by the courts, not property. The devices that carry your data, like smartphones or computers, are considered property, but not the data itself. But when you sign an “owner data agreement” with Personal, you enter into a contract with the company. And if some company misused or lost the data it “borrowed” from your Personal account, they would be in violation of that agreement, and could be held liable on that basis. Personal can run on your desktop, and the company has a cool Android (and soon an iPhone) app. You can divide up your personal data into all kinds of categories from health information to financial to social. Correlate: Culling Insight from E-mail Overload
Brandyourself.com
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should be on the minds of small business owners and job-seekers all the time. It determines how highly the information about yourself or your business shows up in Google searches. It makes the difference between whether you are seen or not, or whether or not what is seen is positive or negative.
