Gruber’s site has some sort of cachet but I have yet to figure out exactly why. The vast majority of the posts are links to articles on other sites. Often this is accompanied by a direct quote from the article and maybe a short sentence from Gruber. His comments are frequently snide if the content of the article is about either Google, Microsoft or Amazon.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not suggesting that this site is a shining example of what all technology blogs should be like but at least it contains original content rather than posts cut and pasted from elsewhere.

I also cannot explain why Daring Fireball annoys me so much. Nor can I explain why I continue to read it, but I do.

As part of my love of all things tech I subscribe to and read a lot of technology blogs and there are some exceptional ones on the web. The problem is that there are an awful lot of blogs chasing the same information and sometimes information is in short supply. This in turn leads to the publishing of some pretty questionable posts. 
Nowhere is this more evident than around mythical products and, in particular, those that Apple may or may not be releasing. Apple’s products are so in demand that there is a huge market for information on the next great release be it the iPhone 6S or the iPad 7 inch.
 
So you end up with stories such as this one on Boy Genius Report yesterday “Next-gen iPad may feature double the battery capacity of iPad 2” quoting “anonymous” sources. Of course the most important word in all of this is “MAY”. Yes, it may include a bigger battery but then again it might also include a teasmade. 
 
I understand why these reports get run – there’s a blog post to fill after all and people are clamouring for news but they are just vapourware that serve no purpose other than to drag a few readers towards their blog – and successfully too, as I read it!
 
I would like to propose a moritorium on reporting on anything that is not backup by a direct quote from the company in question until a month before the likely due date, which has to have been confirmed by a direct quote from the company in question.
 
In the meantime I am off to write an article on the new teasmade feature that may appear in the iPad 3.

It’s completely awkward for any social encounter where you’re meeting two or more new people at the same time.

I just cannot imagine saying to someone “do you know I am really likely to forget who you are so do you mind if I take your picture?”. That’s going to kill the conversation right there. Maybe that’s a British thing but I suspect not. However, I do like ReadWriteWeb’s ideas for contact management in Evernote.

The iPhone camera is pretty good for a phone, particularly on the 4S, and it is always in my pocket so available in a way that my “other” camera isn’t. That said there are times when I just want to do things other than point and shoot and that is where this little gadget comes in.

It’s serves two purposes as you can see from the pictures below. Firstly it has a slot on the top into which you can place your iPhone and on the bottom is a standard tripod thread allowing it to be attached to pretty much any tripod. The second role is as a simple iPhone stand. A groove in the base allows you to slot in the iPhone in a couple of ways. However, I am not convinced by this as the angles seem wrong to me.

My major concern was how well the iPhone would remain in the groove but it seems pretty secure, although I don’t think I would try using it upside down! Other than that it’s a great piece of kit, get yours here.

One are where there is plenty of choice is in the personal profile space, in fact Google has it’s own extension for this too. In this context I am talking about the ability to display detailed personal information for a contact alongside an email that you receive from them. There are a number of players in this space including Xobni and Google themselves but my favourite is Rapportive (shown left).

All three work in a similar way by  displaying information about an individual to the right of an email in Google Mail. The information that you get depends on the extension that you are using. Google’s own has only very basic information while Xobni has lots of information about your interaction with the contact and is nicely presented but, to me Rapportive, just displays more useful information without you having to go hunting for it.

Rapportive has details about the contact including phone numbers, job title and even latest tweets and Facebook posts. All this information is culled from a variety of sources and to make the most of the service you need to hook up your Twitter/Facebook and LinkedIn accounts but once you do the richness of the information makes it well worth the effort.

What I particularly like is how easy it is to make use of the information shown in the panel. Clicking on a web address will open that site in a new tab. Clicking on the Facebook , LinkedIn or Twitter links will open the users profile in the appropriate social network. Not connected to that user? No problem. Just hit the connect button and an email request is sent. Easy.

And it’s free.

Check it out here.

Now I am getting comments where they have clearly been set up  to get round this problem by providing those entering the comments with some standard text and some parameters that can be changed. You can see some examples below.

But these are just being posted verbatim without any changes which somewhat defeats the object!

Of course if the comments don’t get published they are worthless anyway and I assume that the SEO companies are working on the fact that if you post enough comments some will get through. But not here!

{Hey|Hello} There. I found your blog using msn. This is {a very|an extremely|a really}
well written article. {I will|I’ll} {be sure|make sure} to bookmark it and
{come back|return} to read more of your useful {information|info}. Thanks for the post. …

{Pretty|Attractive} section of content. I just stumbled upon your
{blog|weblog|website|web site|site} and in accession capital to assert that I
{acquire|get} {in fact|actually} enjoyed account your blog posts.
{Any way|Anyway} {I’ll|I will} be subscr…

{Simply|Just} {want to|wish to|desire to} say your article is as
{astonishing|amazing|surprising|astounding}. The {clearness|clarity} in your post is
{simply|just} {spectacular|nice|excellent|cool|great} and i {can|could} assume
{you are|you’re} an …

Heya {i’m|i am} for the first time here. I {came across|found} this board and I find It
{truly|really} useful & it helped me out {a lot|much}. I hope to give something back
and {help|aid} others like you {helped|aided} me….

Apple seem to have managed to succeeded where I singularly failed a few years ago in persuading people that mobiles where it’s at. And that’s great, I really “get” mobile and applaud anyone who wants to be seen in the hands of every user. But, but, writing the app is only half the story.

Let me explain with a practical example.

On my iPad I have a great app from the BBC called Good Food Quick Recipes for iPad and I use it a lot. It has a large number of recipes but there are only a few that I would want to make again and again and that’s exactly what the Favourites function is for. Or at least it would be the answer if it worked. You set a favourite and then we you restart the app they are all cleared.

So I thought I would enquire of the BBC if there was likely to be a fix for this issue any time soon. Using the support link from iTunes I posted a question and this is the response I got:

This is not handled by ourselves therefore please contact Apple Customer Services who will be able to assist you with your query.

Except of course that’s not right and I can see me getting short shrift from Apple if I raised the issue with them. It does, however, highlight my point that there is no point building an app to promote your company if you cannot back it up with proper support. Why? Because if you don’t it will tarnish your brand when someone blogs negatively about it.

So to all those out there that want to be in one of the hottest technology spaces right now remember that publishing the app to the app store is only the first step in your relationship with your mobile advocates not the last.

So, let’s play spot the difference. The first screen grab is from the US sign-up page:

and this one is from the UK sign-up page:

They look exactly the same right? If you can’t spot the difference then click on the images for a larger version. Or maybe I’ll just tell you.

The only difference on each page is that the dollar sign has been replaced by a pound sign.

At today’s exchange rate that is a whopping 61% increase in the price for UK users.

In the past when US providers charge UK customers at a 1:1 exchange rate these are typically the reasons given:

• that there are additional costs in marketing the product in the UK. I can’t remember ever seeing an advert except online so that can’t be it
• that there are costs in translation. Americans typically think that their brand of English is good enough for the British so that can’t be it
• there are additional costs in transportation. Nope
• Servers are located locally for a better user experience. Nope. An IP lookup shows that the slideshare servers are in Dallas, Texas

So what could it be then? I emailed the sales support line to find out why and this was the response:

As we roll out prices in different parts of the world, its not going to be exactly equivalent in every part of the world. If we were to do this, that would mean we would have to adjust prices daily to account for currency exchange rate changes.

Instead we have opted to have a different price in each market.

Since we launched pricing in pounds, we have had an enthusiastic reception and a lot of people have been interested in buying SlideShare Pro in their own currency.

Humm. I get that different markets are, well, different but none of the above explains at 61% price difference for doing, well, nothing. And if slideshare are so worried about the changing exchange rate then just let everyone buy in dollars and let the credit card companies work it out. Also I note that “a lot of people have been interested in buying” which is very different from actually buying.

I did reply to the email to ask why I couldn’t pay in dollars and this was the response:

This ticket has now been marked as closed. If its a mistake and its not solved, then please reply to me and I will immediately get back to you.

So keen to give it one more try I went back with:

This is a mistake as I have yet to receive a reply.

I am still keen to become a paying customer. Are you keen to have my money?

I never received a response so tt would seem that slideshare are not that keen on having my money and I an not going to pay a 61% premium just to give them additional pure profit. So I am off to check out authorstream, slide rocket et al to find one that isn’t going to rip me off just because I live in the UK.

Originally these were held in special wallets and then when they became full stacked in a piles on the window sill!

Now they get put into either my contacts or my CRM system and despite there being huge advances in technology nothing seems to have replaced the good old business card (perhaps we need Apple to reinvent it!).

So I need a  good way to quickly and accurately scan these cards without spending a fortune, so that ruled out a dedicated reader. Enter the iPhone. There are at least a couple of apps available on the App Store that allow you to take a picture of a business card and have it scanned for information and then have a contact created. This seemed ideal and so I checked a couple of them out.

WorldCard

WorldCard provide dedicated scanners so they ought to know a thing or two about business card scanning and recognition.

The app is simple to use when taking a picture of a card – you simply press the camera button on the home screen and then line up the card with the guides and click the button to take the picture. You are then shown a view of the card to allow you to rotate it through 90 degrees, change the language etc. before running through the recognition process.

WordCard has two advantages over BC Reader at this card capture stage: first the app changes to accommodate both portrait and landscape cards and secondly it has a button that only takes the picture when there is no shake, thereby increasing the chance of a clear image to scan from.

A real bonus is the option to be able to create a new contact by copy and pasting text in from an email signature (or any other place that has contact details). I already use something similar on the desktop so to have this on my mobile too is great.

But what really counts is the accuracy of the character recognition. In this respect there is very little to choose between the two apps as the recognition is equally as good. On all the sample cards I tried the level of accuracy was the same – even down to making the same mistakes. For example a number of cards have the contact details in the followinf format:

t 01234 5678910

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that in many case the “t” was also scanned and recognised as part of the number.

The only think I didn’t like about WorldCards’ scanning was its insistence on formatting telephone numbers with hyphens between groups of numbers – which is how numbers are formatted in the US but not in the UK. Not all forms of English are the same!

Download from the App Store. (£3.99)

BC Reader

BC Reader is very similar in operation to WorldCard. You take a picture and then it scans the output. The difference really comes down to the bells and whistles on offer. BC Reader offers no anti-shake option so you have to have a steady hand. Also if you want to capture a card that is portrait then you still have to hold the phone in landscape mode which means you can potentially end up missing part of the car and capturing vast quantities of table.

However, on the plus side the level of accuracy is pretty good and the equal of WorldCard. I also like the way that the letters that it is less sure about it shows in a lighter font (see below) giving you a quick visual reference for areas you maybe need to correct. BC Reader also has integration with LinkedIn allowing you to capture links to the individuals profile if they exist.

I was able to crash the app though when trying to process a previously captured card that was saved in the application.

Download from the App Store. (£2.99)

Conclusions

Overall both applications performed well at the basic job of capturing contact details from a variety of cards. No character recognition software is 100% accurate and this proved to be the case with these apps but the amount of corrections was minor making it worthwhile using them in the first place.

For me WorldCard was the more polished of the two and I really liked the anti-shake and its ability to work in both portrait and landscape mode but I did miss the LinkedIn integration of BC Reader.

http://dsktp.net/rndrk