Archive for August, 2007

GrandCentral takes all of your individual phone numbers, and provides you with a single new number, which forwards to all of your existing phones.

I’ll leave the in-depth overview of each feature to the GrandCentral site. They’ve done a great job of organizing the multitudes of fun things you can do. Rather than repeat it word-for-word, I’ll focus on the real-world, practical side of GrandCentral.

Pownce lets users post messages, links, files, or events. Messages posted to an account page are viewable by friends and “fans” of an individual. Once a message is posted, it can be replied to and forwarded, and there are a couple options for recipients (such as users that have not yet received the message). Pownce requires an age and zip code to create an account, somewhat intrusive by today’s privacy standards. The sign-up page has a real-time validation effect that is very nice, and the website and application are very attractive in general. Sign-ups are by “invitation only” at this time, but anyone can sign-up for an invitation on the Pownce site.

While browsing the web - it’s a luxury that we don’t have to manually type in a URL, because our favorite sites are already saved as bookmarks. But sometimes it’s necessary to go in and manually edit a URL in the address bar.

Tim Westergren was in Minneapolis Thursday, July 26th, to talk about Pandora, the company he founded in 1999. Tim is originally from Excelsior, MN which is a suburb of Minneapolis–a good piece of local trivia. Pandora is an internet radio service growing in popularity, recommending music in innovative ways, and attracting droves of fans from around the world (though recently Pandora was forced to disable service outside the US to the chagrin of Pandora and its happy non-US users).