Technology Highlights from David Pogue’s Keynote Address

Kicking off the AALL conference in Portland was New York Times technology columnist David Pogue. In his columns in the Times, Pogue presents technology reviews that are always enjoyable and relatively free of technology jargon. You can find much of what he has written here:  www.davidpogue.com. His keynote speech was a very entertaining and energetic look at technologies to watch in the near and coming future. Also, it was a great way to kick off the conference, as the audience left excited and ready to focus on the future.

Taken from his keynote presentation, following are summaries of a few cool technologies David Pogue mentioned. At the end of this article are highlights of a very entertaining song medley he performed on stage to close his keynote speech.

• Free Business Directory Information: You can get free directory assistance for any business in the United States by calling 1-800-GOOG-411 (466-4411). Interacting with their automated speech recognition software, you can either ask for a specific business (Washington , D.C. - Café Berlin) or a category (Arlington, Va. - car wash). No carrier directory assistance charges apply.
• Free Information via Text Messaging:  You can get simple information in just seconds by sending a text message (SMS) to 466453 (that’s GOOGLE). Examples:  ‘m 20001’ - find movie listings near this zip code. ‘‘weather Portland’ - gets you the weather forecast, defaulting to Oregon, not Maine. You can also translate words, get flight status or perform simple currency conversion. There are several other short commands for commonly-needed information. You can try this out with an online demonstration:  www.google.com/sms.

• Human-Powered Search via Text Messaging (www.chacha.com):  Want to check a quick fact or do you need help finding something? Try sending your question as a text message to CHACHA (242 242). Unlike with the two Google services, messages are answered by real people. You simply text your question to ChaCha, and then a human reads it and sends a response. To test it, I asked ‘Other than George Michael, who was in Wham?’ and when flying back through Minneapolis, I asked ‘Where is the Larry Craig stall at the mpls airport?’ - I got adequate responses to both questions, each within a minute. Of course this isn’t a replacement for a good reference desk or authoritative online database. However, it’s fast and free.
• T-Mobile Wi-Fi Hot Spot:  Telecommunications company T-Mobile has an interesting service provided by no other phone carrier. With a particular plan they offer, subscribers can make unlimited phone calls using a wireless internet router that connects calls over a user’s home network. Also, it automatically switches between the home wireless router and the T-Mobile network when you get out of range of one service. As Pogue pointed out, this service was introduced on the same day that the original iPhone launched, so it didn’t get a lot of coverage.
• Phone Number Management with Grand Central (www.grandcentral.com):  This service, owned by Google, lets you use one phone number to ring to multiple phone devices. Also, you can consolidate multiple lines to use a single voicemail box. You can personalize greetings based on caller (casual for friends, professional for your boss). Grand Central also lets you change calls between devices without breaking the connection. For instance, you could take a call on a land line and switch to your mobile phone while you walk out the door to get in your car.
• Voice Mail Transcription:  There are a growing number of companies that will transcribe your voice mail so you can read it. David Pogue mentioned three of them:  SpinVox (www.spinvox.com), PhoneTag (www.phonetag.com), and CallWait.
• Eye-Fi Wireless SD Memory Card:  This is a standard-sized SD memory card intended to use in your camera. As you take pictures, the camera is able to connect to a wireless Internet router and automatically upload pictures to an account you establish. Read more at www.eye.fi/

Keynote Closing:  A Medley of Songs

Probably the funniest part of David Pogue’s opening keynote was an ending music medley he wrote, described as “the history of downloadable music and movies on the Internet – a medley in two minutes.” Following are just a few of the lyrics from the presentation:

Sung to the tune of Piano Man:

It’s 9 o’clock on a Saturday, the record store’s closed for the night
so I fire up the old iTunes music store, and soon I am feeling all right
I know Steve Jobs can find me a melody, with one dollar pricing that rocks.
I can type in a track, and get album names back, while still in my undies and socks.

Sell me a song, you’re the music man. My iPod’s got 10 gigs to go.
Yeah, we might prefer more compatability, but Steve likes to run the whole show.

Sung to the tune of I’ve Got You Babe:

They say we’re young, don’t watch TV
they say the Internet is all we see
but that’s not true, they’ve got it wrong,
see all our shows are just two minutes long.

Hey, I’ve got YouTube.
I’ve got YouTube.

Tribute to the RIAA (sung to YMCA):

Young man, you were surfing along,
and then dumb man, you downloaded a song,
and then young man, copied it to your ‘pod
then a phone call came to tell you

You’ve just been sued by the R-I-A-A
You’ve just been screwed by the R-I-A-A