talki

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Hasbro let the Internet choose the new Monopoly token and this is what they picked.

- Pebble watch gets growing pains.

- USPS to stop Saturday mail delivery.

- "Walkie Talkies" are shoes you can use as phones.

- Beyonce's publicist desperately wants these removed from the Internet.… Read more

Walkie-talkies don't offer stellar range unless you spend hundreds for them. This free app gives you a similar experience over the phone. HeyTell doesn't give you a large amount of time to leave your message, but it works just as quickly as a text. It's a good way to sneak someone a voice mail when you can't find working voice coverage.

HeyTell only gives you about 2 minutes to speak your message. This should be enough to say what you need to say, but you might fill up a person's inbox if you try to … Read more

Walkie talkies have been around since before cell phones, but until now they weren't easily accessible on the same device. Sometimes when you need to send out a quick message, making a phone call can be time-consuming (especially if you don't have the time to chat), and sending out a text message can be a hassle. Typing out those longs strings of letters and hitting 'send' is a huge pain when you're juggling five things at once. That's where these apps come in. Voice messaging finds a happy middle ground between the solemn phone call and … Read more

Phone calls can turn into long, drawn-out conversations once you land on a tangent or 10. This is why a lot of people use texting as their primary way of communicating when they just want to share a quick thought or piece of info. Unfortunately, a lot of emotion can get lost on a text message. The person on the other end might take something seriously that was supposed to be a joke.

Voxer is a great app for people who prefer sending a quick voice message over a text. The app is available for Android and iPhone, and can … Read more

Pretty soon, the Nextel in Sprint Nextel isn't going to make much sense anymore.

Sprint's Nextel network won't completely shut down until next year, but the company is already working to turn off the iDEN network. During the company's quarterly conference call today, executives laid out plans to decommission cell sites this year and talked up the financial benefits to come.

Nextel merged with Sprint in one of the most ill-advised deals in corporate history, with consequences of the disaster still apparent seven years later. Today, the company reported yet another unprofitable quarter. Nextel, which at … Read more

There are plenty of apps to send text messages and photos to your friends, but what about voice messages? The idea with HeyTell is, instead of calling or sending a text message to a friend, you can send an instant voice mail--as long as your friend has HeyTell installed. Start by touching the green-on-white person-shaped icon to add people from your contact list. You also have the option to connect HeyTell to your Facebook account, but we wonder whether people really want everyone they've ever known sending them voice mails. When selecting friends from your iPhone contact list, HeyTell … Read more

Web forums may seem like an unexciting idea given the increasingly public and real-time nature of Web discourse. But the aging medium still has some tricks up its sleeve.

One recent entrant to the Web forums game is Lefora, which launched around this time last year. This week, the company is introducing its follow-up to that, called Talki.

Unlike Lefora, Talki is not a forum system designed to be integrated into just your site. Instead, it's a distributed chatter box that can be placed in on a single page or post, as well as on the site of anyone else who embeds it. In other words, the discussion is not limited to one community or content creator.

"With Talki we're targeting a different demographic," Talki's co-founder Paul Bragiel told CNET on Thursday. "We're not going after super hard-core forum users that want to mod the hell out of everything. It's for the 'hey I have a blog, and it's a very big audience, and I'd like to have my users talking to each other,' or 'hey I'm a large media entity and I want to have a couple big sites and put them up very quickly.'"

Bragiel says the company was contemplating creating a "lite" version of Lefora but what came out of development was too different of a product to have in the same brand or category. "Working on Lefora we realized that there are these two types of users that want forums. These hard-core users who wanted to tweak every single option...and then we saw these people who have Web sites or commerce sites and who wanted something clean and simple, but not necessarily with all those features."

The result is a stripped-down version of a forum that's still quite similar to Lefora but one that requires less set-up. For instance, Talki can be set to automatically detect the look of your site and change its coloring to match. And on the user end, people don't even need a Lefora account--they can use Facebook or Twitter to log-in instead.

The one challenge it faces though is competing with existing commenting systems, something Bragiel said he thinks Talki can peacefully coexist with. "Comments still thrive off of a stub--the main page. Somebody reads an article and it's always the editor of a site. And then comments kind of come off it," Bragiel said. "Here, this is a purely main-to-main discussion. So anyone can go out there and create their own discussion...and everyone has control to do this."

As for the moderation of these discussions, that's still something needs to be managed by the creator of the Talki widget--at least for now. Bragiel said that Lefora users and customers have been asking the company to offer a moderation service, especially on the enterprise side. "We've thought about it," Bragiel said, "I've never been a big enterprise guy myself. Every single company I've done has been consumer-oriented."

On the business side of things, Talki is free to use but caps off the number of forum topics that can be created, as well as how many recent topics can be seen. Forum creators can pay for one of several premium service tiers that allow for unlimited topics and replies, as well as things like custom branding and live customer service.

Update at 10:25 p.m. PST: I've removed the embedded Talki widget from this post, as it was causing some users to experience problems reading the post. If you want to give it a spin, you can tool around with one of the company's example forums here.

Update at 10:50 a.m. PST on April 25: The embedded widget is back and after the page jump. It wasn't playing nice with one of the widgets on our site, but it works now.

See also: Tangler which has been kicking around since 2006.… Read more

Charlie November Echo Tango, this is Crave, do it to us, over.

We got ourselves a couple of chopped-top CBs from Motorola--a.k.a. the Tlkr T7 series--so you'll have to put up with the radio slang. Sorry. Over.

The T7 is a serious piece of kit. It's about as powerful a walkie-talkie as you can buy without requiring a special license or unwittingly interfering with the emergency services, and in optimal conditions, two or more handsets can communicate 6 miles apart.

We recently came back from testing these bad boys out in the Italian Alps, where … Read more

If Motorola does end up getting out of the mobile phone business, we hope it's not counting on walkie-talkies as the future. Moto has already launched its fashionable "TLKR" line, and now we hear that it's launching a new "Talkabout" two-way radio with a camo design and a choice of five hunting-call "buddy tones"--duck, goose, turkey, elk, and coyote, according to Slippery Brick.

Yes, it's not exactly the same as downloading the latest Beyonce ring tone (that could be suicide around people with firearms anyway), but it sure seems to … Read more