signals

Open sourcing help wanted ads

I really like the advice in this 37Signals' blog post about writing good 'Help Wanted' ads. As with open source, the general theme is to be transparent. No hiding behind superficial buzz words and such:

The kind of help wanted ad you write can help determine what kind of applicants you get. Write an honest, thoughtful, clear ad and you're more likely to hear from candidates with those qualities. Spout a lot of buzzwordy nonsense and you'll attract people fluent in bull[potty].

Amen.

VoiceSignal enables voice recognition in the iPhone

One of the more obvious features lacking from the iPhone has been voice recognition, especially since the iPhone is sans an actual keypad. Well the folks over at VoiceSignal have apparently developed a couple of "proof-of-concept" voice command applications and managed to transfer them over to the iPhone. VSearch lets you search for certain keywords, and VTunes lets you bring up your favorite band/artist on the music player just by saying the name. Thankfully, VoiceSignal has recorded a couple of YouTube videos demonstrating the applications, as seen here. We're curious to see if this takes off … Read more

Vlingo, a new voice-to-text service launches

Vlingo is a new mobile voice service launching today. It centers around a small Java app that lets you talk into your handset to create a text message instead of using your phone's keypad. The service is its own SMS client, piggybacking off your phone to send the message, although it forgoes using your phone's native SMS app, or word dictionary. In addition to texting, Vlingo is launching with voice to text services for mobile music stores and mapping services. The maps come courtesy of Yahoo, and can be zoomed and navigated just like accessing the mobile version … Read more

Fielding calls without a ring or vibration

There aren't many, but one of the downsides of the digital revolution is noise pollution. The proliferation of gadgetry in our society has given rise to a constant cacophony of beeps, rings, buzzes and Beyonce ringtones. On any given day, the sound of our own phones is enough to push us over the brink, which is why we usually keep them on vibrate. But even a vibrating phone can sound like a buzz saw when it's bouncing around on a wooden desktop.

Here's one possible solution that could work equally well in a deafening office where a … Read more

Legal end of an era

My grandparents lived very long lives. My mother's father was born in 1893, grew up on a sheep ranch in Australia, fought for the British in World War I, suffered numerous life-threatening calamities and collisions as a semi-professional adventurer, and lived 86 years. My father's parents both lived to the age of 96. And my mother's mother lived to be more than 100 years old. She was a professional musician who played in the big bands, backing movies like Abbott and Costello's Here Come the Co-eds and played most famously in Phil Spitalny's Hour of Charm All Girl Orchestra, chronicled in the book Swing Shift. (Sadly that book was written after the memories of most of the sources had begun to degrade.)… Read more

SignalMap: Cellular coverage gone social

There's really no better way to see how well you'll get coverage with a phone until you get your hands on it. This usually requires a purchase, or a friend or neighbor who has got the phone and service you're interested in. The next best thing is checking your carrier's site to see if it has a coverage map (here are links to AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint). A third option is SignalMap, a user-generated service that lets people search for and review cellular phone coverage by location.

It's about as simple as … Read more

SportSnipe: A souped-up Original Signal for sports fans

SportSnipe is a new single-page aggregator the likes of Original Signal, PopUrls, and others, although it's focused specifically on sports feeds from all over the world. Users can browse through headlines and video thumbnails for various leagues, genres, and teams. Like Original Signal, SportSnipe has the option to hover over any headline to read the first few lines of the story, along with a comment button that lets registered users add their own commentary to the story--separate of the parent site.

The service claims to pull its headlines from over 1,300 different sports feeds. It also doubles as a regular old build-it-yourself feed aggregator similar to Netvibes and PageFlakes, albeit a little less flashy. Users can add RSS feeds as either text or video feeds. The video feed catcher is especially cool and gives you a little thumbnail for each clip. If you do this with a text feed, you won't get anything but a black box.

SportSnipe has a few ways to sort and share content. You can bookmark pages you'd like to share with others through a variety of social bookmarking sites. You can also turn off comments and hover over previews. With a quick toggle you can rearrange the feed boxes and extend the feeds to see more than just a few headlines. There are also embed codes for putting your feeds on a blog, Web site, or social networking profile (which I've done to the right.)

In many ways, SportSnipe isn't very original as a single-page aggregator. Pageflakes and Netvibes do a much better job with their presentation, and the resemblance to Popurls and Original Signal is unquestionable. However, SportSnipe has a really great directory of sports feeds that aggregate quickly and are far more comprehensive than what Original Signal offers. The video feed implementation is a nice touch as well.

More screens after the jump. … Read more

Forget your meds? Try an Internet pillbox

Due to a combination of aging and parental amnesia, we've often noted our appreciation for anything that improves our failing memory. (At least, we think we have.) So even though this device may have been intended mostly for the elderly--we're not there yet, thank you very much--it's something that just about anyone could use.

"MedSignals" is a pill container that automatically keeps track of when you take your medication, beeping when it's time for a dose and making note of each time a lid is opened to avoid duplication, according to Medgadget. The portable … Read more

News Roundup: Original Signal, Google Mobile, eJamming

Original Signal rolls out meme tracker. The single-page aggregation service has added a new front page to their Web section. The page displays the top 10 most popular stories at any given time. The new service uses an algorithm that decides when a story is worthy of being on the front page without any additional user interaction required beyond browsing the site. Something similar was done with Spotplex, which we checked out last month.

eJamming launches. The virtual garage for musicians to 'jam' in different geographical locations launched their AUDiiO service this morning. The app has versions for both Windows … Read more