404 Tech Support

Perhaps you were the romantic last weekend and popped the big question on Valentine’s Day or maybe you were the one asked. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a few tech solutions to ease some of the stresses and worries of planning a wedding?

My wife is amazing! I mean, not only does she put up with me on a regular basis, but she also came up with a ton of great ways to reduce some of the stress that comes with planning a wedding. She deserves a lot of credit for providing the knowledge about these services, sites, and traditions (and explaining them to me) so that I can publish them here for you. I also may have contributed a few of these ideas to the list… There has to be some benefit to marrying a geek like myself.

Since not everyone has their own in-house librarian, Aardvark is a service that may be of interest to you. Publicly launched in October 2009, Aardvark didn’t take long to get a lot of attention and was just acquired by Google this month. Aardvark, found at vark.com, is a social search engine that doesn’t seek to return pages but instead responses from people with knowledge in that area. Essentially, Aardvark takes the typical question and answer service like Yahoo! Answers but moves it into real-time and across multiple mediums, like IM, e-mail, and web. In the company’s own words:

With today’s high processor clock speeds and multiple cores, almost every home user has a few processor cycles to spare. The question is, what do we do with them and how do we make use of them for good? Distributed volunteer computing uses software and hundreds to thousands of computers around the world to create a super computer via the Internet. Distributed computing or grid computing is certainly nothing new with some of these projects having been around for quite a while, but both computers and the software have advanced quite a bit since you might have last thought about joining the grid to help further science. There also might be some projects listed here you didn’t know about that interest you and if you know a grid computing project that I didn’t list, certainly share that information in the forum.

Early Tuesday morning, Google announced the launching of a revamped Google Voice mobile site. This web app allows Google to circumvent restrictive factors like Apple’s App Store. It also makes the app relatively device agnostic. Though it is only currently supported by the Palm Pre and iPhones with OS 3.0 or higher, the app would work for any phone supporting HTML 5 in its browser app.

This web app has most of the functionality of native app you would download and install on your phone except it doesn’t have access to your contacts, though you can easily store your contacts inside Google Contacts. Being web-based, this also means you won’t take up any space on your phone with the app’s installation footprint.

Google Reader, a popular RSS Feed Reader, has gotten a bit better with the addition of a new feature that will allow you to create “feeds” even on a page that doesn’t have an RSS feed. This feature works alongside the Google crawlers, it compares the cached version of the page to the version it’s looking at currently as it crawls the site and then generates a feed based on any changes it finds and creates an entry in your Google Reader.

One of the things I find most fascinating about technology is old-school, military-industrial complex style R&D. Research and Development differs from even the coolest and most innovative products that tech companies come out with because their commercial products are expected to turn a profit, R&D products don’t have that expectation though they’re supposed to have potential in the long-term. R&D in the tech industry seems to take some of the best and brightest minds and sets them loose on their passions with all the creative energy they can muster. That’s why R&D is the thing to watch in my opinion and has the most interesting products. Microsoft Research is one of those organizations that is more  than just a think-tank and comes out with cool new products all the time.

Although it’s a tough argument in a recession, some people are looking for an opportunity to invest. Some times, it’s not about making money or earning interest with your money, but instead it’s about doing good. Kiva, FINCA, Kickstarter, and more websites can provide this option if you’d like to make a difference in your community or around the world.

Kickstarter

Kickstarter is the place for creative and ambitious entrepreneurs to test their ideas and get the funding they need to see them lift off the ground. All sorts of projects can be hosted on Kickstarter from getting a book published to making a national concert tour to creating a revolutionary new engineering method and on to an even wider variety of projects.

Wibiya creates a Javascript-powered toolbar that attaches to the bottom of the screen and stays there without any jumping as the user scrolls. Wibiya is currently in invite-only mode, but you can request an invitation be sent to you and a few days later be creating your account, invite in hand. The toolbar improves the user interface of almost every website by providing a consistent location for users to clearly find different aspects of your site. It also engages your visitors, allows you to communicate with them directly, and encourage them to further explore your site. You may have seen the Wibiya toolbar on a number of sites because it is very simple to implement and its functions are very comprehensive as to the needs a website will typically have. Not only is the Wibiya toolbar very comprehensive, but it’s also customizable. You can choose everything from the color scheme of the toolbar to the apps that appear on your toolbar.