Another vote on Nov 4

There isn't anyone reading this blog whose life hasn't been transformed by wireless technology. In fact, the odds are that you're reading these words on a wireless device right now. Well on November 4th the FCC will be voting on whether to open up unused airwaves between broadcast TV channels to make even more innovation possible. Please help convince the FCC to vote in the best interest of the people and against the powerful broadcast lobbies by taking just a few minutes to checkout FreeTheAirwaves.com and sign the petition. Thanks.

Shortcut Spotlight: Google Spreadsheets

We're starting a new feature here on the blog that we're calling the Shortcut Spotlight. Basically, every so often we'll take a shortcut we think more of you should know about or is new and deserving and showcase it here. Besides describing it, we'll also include some examples on how you can use it to make your life easier.

Today we want to tell you about a very flexible shortcut that works with Google's online spreadsheets. I'm a big fan of spreadsheets because they're great for keeping all kinds of lists or tracking pretty much anything you might ever want to. And if you're geeky enough you can even use them to make all sorts of helpful charts and graphs.  

Well the Google Spreadsheets shortcut helps you with getting the information into the spreadsheet from wherever you need to. For example, I like to keep track of various stats when I run like how long, how far, and how many calories burned. With this shortcut as soon as I'm done, before I've even had the chance to forget it, I'm sending a message to txtful with all those stats in it.  In turn txtful dutifully turns right around and enters it into whichever spreadsheet I tell it to, along with the date and time when it was sent.  Awesome.

Another member of our team uses it with his wife to keep a shared grocery list that they can both add to whenever they run out of something. Then whichever one is at the store can just quickly scan the list on their phone and make sure they pick it up. There are a bunch of other examples too like keeping track of business expenses, calories, or a mileage log to name just a few.  I bet everybody out there could come up with something that would help them, so give it a try and let us know what creative uses you come up with in the comments.

Web 2.0 Expo in NYC

A few weeks ago, part of the txtful team got to go to the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC. We had a great time and learned a lot from so many people who were eager to share and help others. So in that spirit of sharing here are a couple of my takeaways from the conference.

One thing that I learned is that users really want to talk to each other, and every website needs to give them a place to do it. We plan on adding features on the site around individual shortcuts where you can go beyond rating and talk about anything relating to that shortcut that you want to.

Another lesson was to create more value than you take. This was from a great keynote given by Tim O'Reilly that you can watch here. We definitely agree with Tim here and have always felt that txtful could be a great and affordable way for charities and non-profits to connect with their users as well as bring the power of the web to people who don't even have regular access to the internet. So we're expanding our efforts to work with organizations to bring some new shortcuts on this theme. Keep an eye on the blog and we'll showcase them here.

We learned plenty of other things as well, and we'll be making changes to our site in the coming weeks to reflect that and which we hope will make txtful even better for you guys.