at&t to raise prices

Ralph de la Vega, at&t's top guy in the wireless division, told a group at a UBS conference yesterday that the reason for all of the dropped calls in the big cities, is the heavy smart phone data usage.  He promised improvements in these areas, citing New York and San Francisco specifically.  At the same time, he promised a new pricing method to account for the heavy data usage by those of us that rely on our smartphones.  I thought that I already paid for a separate data package, but I guess he thought I should pay for it and then not really use it.  He did cite that a large chunk of the data usage was from only 3 percent of the users, and one would have to make the conclusion that those people are streaming a lot of video.  So, at this point, all we can hope for is that the new pricing module sets a very high cap on the data usage that all but this 3 percent can live with.

Review of RescueTime

RescueTime is a cloud based tool for measuring time spent using your browser, and has an optional feature to measure documents and offline time.  I didn't try the offline time, but did use the document feature.  It categorizes your time spent on each site into various categories like social media, news, search and reference.  Just having this, done "automagically", as they call it, can be a huge help in boosting your productivity.  I found the categorization to be more accurate than I expected, and required only a little work to adjust it.  The software requires that you install an application that runs in the background, but you set it and done.

So what do I do with it?

You've installed the app and collected some data, and now you have some pretty charts on a website.  What now?  The thing that I didn't really play with too much, as I could take it or leave it, was assigning a point value to each of the categories.  The website will chart all of your activity, and then you can assign a value as to whether you think it it a productive task or not, on a sliding scale.  Then at the end of the day, you get an overall score.  To me that's OK, but I'd rather try to target the amount of time that I need to spend in each category, then manage those buckets as a percentage of total time spent.  So, if I think that I need to spend an hour a day doing email, then it doesn't matter if it's a 1 or 2 in terms of productivity since I have to do it.  So, instead of a sum of your -1's and 1's telling you if your productive, you should see if you're one hour of email is turning into two hours, or if you're improving and trending toward half an hour.

Rescuetime.com

I started using Rescuetime today.  It seems to be a pretty sophisticated tool for time tracking and requires virtually no work to set up.  This ties back to my post two weeks ago about how to boost productivity, which outlined several ways to track the places that time goes, so that you can later make a judgment about the best way to budget or manage time for improvements in productivity.  This tools seems on the surface to be a much easier way to accomplish the task.

I'll keep you posted with a full review at a later date, but please post a comment if you have any experience with the tool.

Google OS available NOW, but now quite

Google announced today that it's new OS will be a cloud computing web appliance, which is a little different that what was expected.  It won't really be an OS, but instead will be more like a portal for full blown cloud computing.  They are releasing the source code, as well, starting immediately, but the Google release of the end product won't be until next year.  This news is a little disappointing seeing that cloud computing is still so young.  It could still make improvements in productivity, by allowing traveling persons to have a quick and mobile OS, but probably will do little for more stationary persons.

See more info, from this article from infoworld.com, about Google.

So much for Leapfish!

It looked like Leapfish might have gained a small advantage on Google, with it's "live search" as I wrote about several days ago.  But, the announcement from Google basically makes it moot.

From the Google blog:

"Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you'll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information."

Google Chrome OS to Launch Within a Week

As a big google fan, I hope that this is true.

Google Chrome OS to Launch Within a Week

5PM is working beautifully, two weeks into our implementation, for tracking our tasks.  We're more focused and more productive for the time period.  The only downfall so far is the inability to quickly add multiple tasks.  I'm finding that laying out a new project is a little time consuming because a new form has to be populated for each task, and I'd like to be able to quickly create multiple tasks at one time.

5PM is the choice.

Well, I've officially tried all of the expensive and crappy PM software in the world. The vast majority of it sucks. All that I can say is that this is a good example of throwing it against the wall and seeing what sticks. For me, there were a couple of decent choices like Basecamp and it's look-alikes. Then there's 5PM. Which has everything that I need except milestones, and for me this one is a second tier requirement because most of my projects aren't the kind that have tons of people all working on it at the same time and they don't last for a year. I mainly want a timeline, tasks with meta data and sub tasks, and email integrations, and 5PM has all of the above. It's a little bit expensive, but still 25% cheaper than Basecamp at $18/month.

What kind of comments do you have about PM software?

Will Leapfish be the new internet gateway?

Like most of you, I've been using Google for my internet gateway. This weekend I discovered Leapfish.com, and I'm not sold that it's going to be the new Google, but it's a definite step in the right direction. The big thing that Leapfish.com is adding to the scene is aggregation of many different data types. In Google, you have to search for blogs from the blog search, and images from the image search. Leapfish rolls it all of this along with Twitter and Facebook posts into one portal. You still have the regular web search if you click on "web", and from there you can also get to Google, Yahoo or Bing results. Aggregating the three sets of results is enough for me to try it out, but the real time search has big potential to reign in all of the Web 2.0 information.