texting

Qipit is a free service for turning digital photos into sharable, online documents. It works with any photo taken with a digital camera, or from your mobile phone. Like ScanR (review), Qipit will store and host your photos, and let you rotate them to your heart's content. This works the best with shots of documents taken at an angle, and with whiteboards, business cards, etc. Once uploaded, Qipit will tweak the contrast of your shot, drawing out the text, and doing its best to correct perspective warp. Unlike ScanR however, you're not getting the archival goodness of optical … Read more

Last week I took a look at TextBookFlix, an invite-only service that ships loaner text books at a sizable discount to cash-strapped college students. This week I've been browsing BookSwim, a similar service that's been around a little longer, and is open to everyone.

BookSwim makes strong self-comparisons to Netflix, with its own books-by-mail turnaround service that lets you keep anywhere from 3 to 11 titles out at a time with five different subscription plans ranging from $20, all the way up to $36 per month. Like Netflix, BookSwim gives each user a queue of books, and will … Read more

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

We've told you about Callwave already, but now we've had the opportunity to put the company's Vtxt application through its paces. Vtxt takes spoken voice mail messages and converts them into text. When someone calls and leaves you a voice mail, Vtxt will send you a text message and an e-mail with a transcript. You don't get the message word-for-word; rather, Vtxt gives you the gist of the message so you can understand what the person said.

The result is a useful and user-friendly service. Both the text message and e-mail arrive within seconds, so you … Read more

Here's a concept for textbooks that's almost as cool as library checkouts. It's called TextBookFlix, and as the name would suggest, it's pretty much like Netflix for textbooks--with a twist. There's no monthly subscription fee, just a one-time fee to "check out" a book for an entire semester. It's kind of a hybrid between the "no late fees" mentality of Netflix, and the loaner system you get with libraries. The service already has more than two million titles available and a search tool that lets you find your books via … Read more

Met Vivee yet? If you're one of those folks who types text messages while barreling down the highway, you might want to. She's an animated avatar who appears on the screen of your mobile device and reads your incoming e-mail and text messages to you. That way you can keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road--unless of course, you can't keep your eyes off cute little Vivee, in which case you're really screwed.

The new online service from USTelematics connects to the Internet through the Verizon Wireless EV-DO high-speed network, so … Read more

I usually get up in the mornings and go to my office and turn on my desktop CPU to check the day's news, my email, etc. But before I even turn on my desktop on a given morning, the iPhone, which sits atop my office desk, will now tell me if I have new email that has come in overnight. (Note: I have to leave my iPhone outside of my room because the GSM signal interferes with my iPod/JBL music dock's speakers, making that noise--you know that noise). Being aware that I got email overnight is nice, … Read more

After months of clearing Department of Transportation hurdles over the foreign ownership of U.S. airlines, Virgin America launched its inaugural flights today from New York's JFK airport and Los Angeles to San Francisco. The flights mark the entry of yet another airline into the already crowded U.S. market, but Virgin America hopes to steal some of Jet Blue's thunder by offering low fares, high-tech airplanes, and a hip image.

The Airbus A319 and A320 fleet features mood lighting that will change from day to night, and leather seats with adjustable headrests. What's more, Virgin America'… Read more

Every computer user needs a basic text editor for Readme files and simple note-taking capabilities. That's why Windows comes with Notepad and Mac OS X comes with TextEdit. However, if you want a program that is useful for more than just looking at Readme files, you need to look elsewhere. The best type of text editors come with numerous features and work great for writing quick notes, keeping a journal, coding Web sites, and pasting excerpts from the Web when aggregating research for a project.

While Notepad and TextEdit are useful in their own right, if I want added … Read more