Is it just me or has there been a sudden wave of innovation in the techno-world over the past few weeks? It just seems as if there is, suddenly, a whole bunch of cool stuff I need to try.
I am not normally prone to gushing (in fact, I find it a distasteful trait in a columnist), but I’d like to enthuse about three cool tech things that have captured my attention lately: a gadget, a great local bandwidth-busting internet service and a nifty, free piece of software.
All three chip away at my usually cynical view of what happens when big business interferes in free-for-all tech world.
Blackberry
First, the gadget. Blackberry, the global “internet in your hands wherever you go” phenomenon, has finally hit South Africa. Now sending cool e-mails from weird places is no longer the prerogative of our friends and acquaintances in the United States or United Kingdom. Now you can be wired everywhere. From the top of a mountain, on the beach, while stuck in traffic or (if you’re really sad) while in a cinema or at a rock concert.
Opinions vary about whether it is desirable to remain connected wherever you go, whenever you go there. You need to decide for yourself where you stand in that particular debate. But if you, like me, are hopelessly hooked on being wired, then the Blackberry should top your list of fashion accessories this autumn.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Blackberry is that it’s not Japanese, Scandinavian, Taiwanese or American. It’s Canadian, proving that those gentle mountain people have more to offer than Celine Dion. Thank God.
Vodacom are the most visible punters of the service locally for now, with MTN muttering quietly that it is available, but only if you first stand on one leg and sing the Canadian national anthem through a noodle (no, it’s not My Heart Will Go On, but it should be). Clearly, there’s no glory to be had in coming second, and MTN is feeling the pinch.
I’ve got mine (I didn’t have to do the noodle thing) and am in love already. I’ll do a full test drive and let you know if it lives up to my expectations, once I’ve had a chance to push it to its limits.
All you can download
All you can eat? “That’s not a tech innovation, it’s an offer from Mike’s Kitchen,” I hear you cry. Well, it is. But it’s also a cool new service aimed at bandwidth-choked ADSL subscribers.
The background is that our national phone carrier (variously called Hellkom or Telscum by renegade T-shirt manufacturers and visitors to at least one chat room I’ve seen) caps the speed of its subscribers’ ADSL lines once a three-gigabyte data transfer is reached in a calendar month.
For most internet users who plod along, using e-mail and doing a fair bit of web surfing, that target is almost never reached. But for habitual downloaders of (ahem) music, movies or other large files, those who work with and need to e-mail large graphic files, or for online gamers, the cap is a regular irritant that runs out as quickly as a pay cheque in December. Once you hit your three-gig limit, your internet connection slams on its brakes until download speeds become nonsensically slow.
Enter Allyoucaneat.co.za. No one knows how it does it, but for R480 a month you get 10 times the download capacity — a massive 30 gigabytes. And that upper limit is only there because of restrictions placed by the people from whom it buys its bandwidth (see previous references to large telecommunications company). Even so, it’s not a bad deal. And I’ve tried it — it works with no discernible speed difference to the other, capped, offers.
How sustainable is the business model behind Allyoucaneat.co.za? No idea. But get it while it’s hot.
Picasa
Those good people at Google have done it again, bless them. This time they have turned their search-engine technology to the task of sorting and arranging the image files on your computer.
If you’re anything like me, then you will have taken hundreds of pictures with your digital cam and buried them away in directories across your computer with obscure names such as “HOLIDAY_1_pics by mom_-DO NOT DELETE” and “PICS_of the time Dad sang MY HEART WILL GO ON through a noodle”.
Picasa solves the confusion for you by elegantly browsing through your computer and arranging all of your pictures into a date-ordered file system. From there, you can move pics around, rename them, crop them, take out red eyes, adjust brightness and colour contrast (or click a button and get the software to do that for you intelligently).
It creates contact sheets and web pages, and then, in a final flourish, it puts all your pictures into a stylish timeline. Using it, you can burn CDs to share your pics with friends and family. Picasa rocks. And the best news? It’s free, and easily installed after downloading from www.picasa.com.
While testing all three of these services and products, I’ve paid my own way where payment has been necessary, so what I’ve written here is my unblemished take on them (as opposed to the blemished take I’ll write when they leave a briefcase stuffed with unmarked banknotes under my desk).
But before those behind the products get too smug, let me issue a small warning. Early adopters of technology are notoriously fickle and generally unforgiving. So, Google, if you start charging for Picasa, or Allyoucaneat.co.za, if you suddenly begin introducing lower bandwidth caps, then your invitation to the “make me cool” club will be hastily withdrawn. You have been warned.
For now, though, hats off to all three for some great innovation.