Dilbert clearly illustrates why so many people use Qipit rather than buying a scanner. It costs less and can be used with your digital camera or camera phone, which you probably already own, and it is much easier.

I hope you have a fun and safe Labor Day Weekend.

~ Conrad

How do you send a fax, when there are no phone lines, power plugs or fax machines?

Ever since fax machines became a staple of business in the 1980’s this problem has faced business travelers, long haul truckers, construction site workers, emergency responders, sales professionals, anyone on a remote job site and people caught in an emergency situation after a natural disaster.

To solve this problem using existing wireless networks, you can take the brute force approach, and build a specialized piece of equipment such as a portable facsimile machine. The problem with this solution is that it is expensive and still a little bulky. One example of this approach is the Greta (aka PM-70), which uses GSM networks and costs almost $1,200 plus a monthly recurring wireless data plan.

Our approach is to use a device as familiar, cost effective and ubiquitous as the mobile phone in your pocket. Why carry any more than you need? Plus your mobile phone makes phone calls, sends texts messages, probably can check email and does a lot more. Even making a call with a portable fax machine can be a little awkward unless you are calling flipper.

LG Dare (3.2 Mega-pixel camera phone) from Verizon Wireless
Dimensions: 4.1″ x 2.2″ x 0.5″ (Weight 3.76 oz)
Cost: $199.99 plus monthly data plan

Of course there is a lot going on behind the scenes to allow you to use your camera phone to fax documents anywhere in the world. A traditional or portable fax machine has a very controlled environment to create scans. Qipit does not have this luxury and must compensate for uneven document illumination, shadows, glare, motion blur and noise. Qipit must also dewarp (or straighten) and crop the document to eliminate unwanted background information.

But you don’t need to know all that, nor do you probably care. All you need to do is take a picture of your document then send it to Qipit (copy@qipit.com). Include the fax number in the body of the message, if you want, type your fax subject in the subject field. It’s that simple, no need to buy any more equipment or download any software. Best of all Qipit is free and works any time and any where, just like you.

How to Send a Fax Using Your Mobile Phone

If you want to learn more about faxing with Qipit, just check out the post I did a while back, Four ways to use Qipit to Send a Fax for Free .

There is always an elegance to simplicity.

~ Conrad

Back in March, at the South By Southwest Interactive conference, yes this was the conference with the now infamous interview of Mark Zukerberg by Lacey Peterson, where twitter helped, well you know…..

Also checkout this graphical recording of the interview by Marilyn Martin if you missed it, click the image to see a full size view.

Now back to my point. At SXSWi, I picked up some information on Dan Roam’s new book “On the back of a Napkin”. For those of you who are not familiar with Dan, he is an author, speaker and thought leader in the field of visual thinking. In his recent book, Dan explains how simple drawings can express ideas that can be universally understood. Dan believes that anyone with a pen and a piece of paper (Dan likes to use napkins as he believes they are less intimidating) can convey the most complex business ideas, as well as communicate better with customers, vendors, and employees.

In his book, and in the video of his workshop below, Dan draws on twenty years of visual problem solving combined with the recent discoveries in the field of vision science, to lay out simple tools to take advantage of everyone’s innate ability to look, see, imagine, and show. In his workshop, Dan relates a simple example which takes us back to the days of elementary school. As kindergarteners we all knew how to draw and visually express ourselves. This is something I discovered to be true when I visited Westwood Elementary school a while back. Children at that age show no inhibition towards putting what they are thinking onto paper. But Dan points out, if you visit that same kindergarten class ten years later, hardly anyone will say that they can draw or use visual images to describe a problem. Something in the education process happens to push us away from visually expressing our ideas, even though it is so fundamental to how we think.

Here’s a video of Dan Roam’s workshop, from a visit he did to Google’s Mountain View, CA headquarters, this event took place on May 27, 2008, as part of the Authors@Google series.

The video is about 55 minutes, but I think it is worth taking the time to watch. In the workshop, Dan lays out our 6 visual pathways:

• What
• Where
• How
• When
• Why
• How Much.

Dan shares simple techniques to enable anyone to visually express even the most complex of ideas, but don’t just take my word for it. Here is a video interview by the Wall Street Journal of Tim Armstrong an Advertising Executive at Google. In the interview Tim explains how he uses a simple pen and paper as a visual tool to explain their advertising model, rather than a complex Power Point slide deck. His methods are exactly what Dan preaches in his book and workshops.

Dan’s techniques along with a pen, your writing surface of choice, and Qipit to easily save and share those ideas, make for a powerful combination. What do you think?

~ Conrad

Through out my life I have always been a visual thinker. Concepts seemed to solidify when I could see them, whether it was in an illustration, graph, chart or video animation, for me visualization is the quickest way to learn. Professionally my career has taken me to Asia, Europe and Africa, far from my roots in Texas, and when faced with language and cultural barriers my universal translator has always been a pen and a whiteboard, flipchart or a piece of paper, along with some visual expression of a concept, problem or question. People universally, seem to understand pictures and illustrations, charts and graphs, maps, timelines and flowcharts.

Visual thinking is so fundamental to how we think, that when the tools of visual expression are used can understand what our ancestors where trying to express over 32,000 years ago. This illustration is from a cave in Lascaux, France and is among the oldest known drawings in the world.

You can clearly see a bull running in a herd, and then you can imagine the animals that existed and how fundamental they must have been in the life of early man.

This got me thinking, if I was to express my life today what would a visual expression of my environment look like, there weren’t any cave walls close by so I used a writing surface more familiar, called a whiteboard.

The visual expression of my environment shows a computer, my mobile phone, buildings, construction, and a herd of cars (aka traffic). Of course the caveman was a much better artist than me. Please share a visual expression of your environment. We will store them here for future generations to ponder.

Check back next week for part two.

~ Conrad

First things first, pick the best professors. There is nothing worse than getting a professor who doesn’t inspire you to learn, or one who you can’t even understand. Checkout PickaProf to see who everyone thinks is the best. There is even a PickaProf facebook application.

Online Books

Rather than buying paper books and having to go to the store, get your books online. Read them on your computer, and print the pages you need.

Questia is the world’s first and largest online library of books and journal articles. It even includes textbooks. Yes there is $14.95 per month fee, but it is much more complete than Google Books, this is much cheaper than purchasing your textbooks.

Google books is Google’s answer to Questia, it is free, but it is not as complete. Not sure why they just didn’t do a deal with Questia, but that have to do something with all that money.

Online Study Guides

Pink Monkey and Spark Notes offer free online study guides, book notes, book reviews, online chapter summaries, and analysis for literature.

Get Organized and Stay Productive

DailyLit manages your class reading schedule by sending you regular installments of your latest reading by email (on your PC, mobile, etc.). Helps keep you on track, so you don’t have to cram.

Remember the Milk is an easy to use online to-do-list for all of those activities and projects students always have.

Drop.io is a very simple way to share files online with other students. It is really quick and easy and does not require others to sign-up, nice!

Timebridge is a tool that helps you coordinate meeting times with others for those projects you get assigned. This tool makes it easy, rather than playing middle man with 4 or 5 others.

Online Reference Resources

BBC Languages offers resources in multiple languages including Spanish, Mandarin, English, French, German and more – resources include MP3 downloads, tutorials, and testing.

Ninjawords is a free online dictionary that emulates three ninja characteristics – they’re smart, they’re accurate, and they’re really fast. Plus it is just cool use the word ninja in a blog post!

Refdesk is a great all around reference resource. Interested in learning the value of a dollar in Mongolia, how to make soap by hand, what happened on this date 20 years ago, which are the top 100 US newspapers, and the definition of “omniscient” – it’s all here.

Wikipedia is the mother of all encyclopedia Wikis. It is a great place to start your research. Just don’t copy what it says, because your professor certainly uses it too! He may have even written or contributed to the article.

Other Lists

Here are a couple more links to some of the better comprehensive student resource lists I have stumbled upon over the years.

100 Insanely Useful Web Tools You Never Knew You Needed

Top 50 Web 2.0 Tools for Info Junkies, Researchers & Students

And of course, Qipit has a facebook application called Qipit NoteShare, specifically designed for helping students share class notes. If you have more student friendly services to add, please share the knowledge.

~ Conrad

MMS is an evolution of Short Messaging Service (SMS) or text messages, that allows for the sending of multimedia attachments, such as images, audio, video and rich text. MMS is typically pre-configured on your mobile phone, and is what most people use to send pictures to email address. Most carriers market MMS as Picture Messaging, but they are both referring to the same thing. One problem many people do not realize is that most wireless carriers limit the size of picture messages sent over the their wireless network. This process of reducing the image size is called MMS resizing.

Some mobile operators give an option to turn off MMS resizing but most, especially in the U.S., do not. So even if you have a two, three or five mega-pixel camera phone, if you are sending your pictures using picture messaging, then you are probably not getting the maximum image resolution out of the images from your camera phone. Although not a requirement, the current standard recommended size of an MMS for wireless carriers is to not exceed 300 kb. This is due primarily to network limitations at the WAP gateway. Another common restriction for MMS is that only one image can be sent at a time. You will need to check your handset manual or call your wireless carrier to see if you can turn off MMS resizing. My experience with the major carriers here in the U.S. is that you cannot turn it off, and for the most part when you call, and ask about MMS or picture message resizing they do not know what you are talking about.

These MMS limitations take away from the quality of your pictures, your qipits, and limit you from creating a multi-page qipit on the fly. After all you paid extra for those increased mega pixels on your camera phone, and if you are sending the picture or scanning something, it is probably important to you. So you need a solution.

As an alternative, I suggest that you use Mobile Email to send your pictures and to create your qipits. Mobile Email is just what it sounds like, it is an extension of your PC-based Internet email, on your mobile device.

The advantages of sending your pictures using Mobile Email include:

• Full Size Images (The size of the images are not reduced or “resized”)

• Send more than one at a time (You can attach multiple images in a single message)

• Saving Money (It typically costs less, since you are charged only for the actual data sent, not by the message).

Of course, all of these advantages do not come without a little work on your end. Most mobile phones require some configuration to connect to your email account and some carriers charge for this capability. You cannot use the preset WAP or other browser-based email services, such as Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc. to send attachments, so these will not work. You will need to configure your POP3 or IMAP settings. It is very similar to setting up your email client on your PC such as Outlook.

Once you are setup, you will save money, time and get the most out of your camera phone. If you have configured mobile email on your phone, please share your experience as each carrier and handset is a little different.

~ Conrad

~ Conrad

As most mobile industry professionals have discovered, or will discover very soon, the mobile industry demands a tremendous sense of pace to keep up with the ever-evolving trends and fads, groundswell applications, industry-shifting paradigms, not to mention technologies, platforms, ecosystems and business models. Yet, those who tend to impose pace on mobile software developers are not always as fast as they expect from their partners. Especially, when it comes to integration, be it with a handset or on a carrier platform, what was an emergency yesterday may well become a long wait before the developer actually sees a return.

For those who are patient enough - and this includes VCs! — there may be light at the end of the tunnel. Technologies that were brought to market 12 or even 18 months ago, without a strong early pickup may hit their sweet spot just a few quarters later. Of course, waiting for your product or technology to emerge is a huge cost. A balanced product portfolio with some cash cows is a good configuration to sustain your growth without your latest wonder. Recent events have shown that the mobile industry is far from being stabilized around a few technological consensus, and that patience may therefore pay, if you’re ready for that next industry shake-up.

Think egomotion, as an example. Egomotion is the ability for a handset to understand its own motion in space. At RealEyes3d, we introduced our Motion Cortex™ egomotion estimation and Motionized™ handsets and applications to market almost two years ago, as an innovative way to navigate the phone UI. The technology and its far-reaching applications were very well received by the industry. We won the Jury Award at that year’s Mobile Monday Global Peer Awards in Barcelona (held during the 2007 3GSM World Congress).

A visionary company, ACCESS immediately recognized the potential of software-only egomotion estimation. ACCESS integrated Motion Cortex into NetFront Browser 3.5 and offered it to its customers shortly thereafter. But it took several more quarters, and the help of the iPhone-triggered UI revolution across all handset vendors, to see real traction begin for Motion Cortex.

Today, as the award winning Samung Instinct has a Motionized browser, we are reaping the benefits of patience, as this technology seems to be now ready to enter the mainstream handset market.

In a nutshell, run fast, save your breath and dough, and keep looking far ahead!

~ Philippe DeWost

What is Motion Browsing?

Motion Browsing lets users tilt their phone to pan through a webpage to find the desired content or link. When used in combination with features such as touch sliding navigation (a la Apple’s iPhone), and tactile feedback (using haptics), Motion Browsing provides one of the most intuitive and efficient ways to navigate web pages on small mobile phone displays.

“We believe we’ve created a new usability paradigm that effectively moves the mobile experience away from mimicking a PC’s keyboard and mouse, to one that is a direct extension of a user’s perceptual experience through motion and sense of touch. The Instinct is just the first of what we expect will be many mobile devices that will incorporate our technology in the coming months and years.” – Benoit Bergeret, Founder and CEO of RealEyes3D

The problem with browsing full HTML pages on your mobile phone

Anyone who’s attempted to view full web pages on a typical mobile device is often frustrated by the limitations of the screen. The problem is you are trying to fit content designed for a 15 to 19 inch screen into a 2-inch display. Motion Browsing technology makes navigating large full screen displays more natural, making the bridge from a large to small screen almost seamless. Think of your normal camera phone screen as a window peering into a full HTML web page, as you move your hand, you move the window. You glide effortlessly to the exact spot on the web page you are looking for, and unlike pure touch screen navigation, Motion Browsing minimizes those annoying accidental clicks that are nearly impossible to avoid when touching the screen to navigate. Once you reach the desired content, you switch from Motion Browsing to sliding your finger to click the exact link or button.

How It Works

Motion Browsing uses the phone’s built-in camera to estimate the motion of the phone (or,“handset egomotion”) and translate it into commands for the browser to pan the web page that is being viewed. Because Motion Browsing uses thumbnail sized images, it works regardless of the resolution of the camera. It is a very compact solution that is easy to integrate into any camera phone, and is very responsive to user movements. And because this is a software-based solution leveraging the existing camera module, it does not need additional expensive hardware such as an accelerometer or a gyroscope.

The Motion Browsing solution is available for all the major mobile web browsers, including Teleca’s Obigo and the ACCESS NetFront Browser, as well as other mobile browsers. As this is an embedded software solution, the software is loaded on the phone by the handset manufacturer. Sorry there is no download, you will need to buy the Samsung Instinct to experience it for yourself.

As entrepreneurs and users of mobile devices, we are really excited that this innovation has finally reached the market. We expect this cost effective Motion Browsing solution to enable a powerful new user interface paradigm for all camera phones, not just the higher-end, expensive ones. Shouldn’t everyone be able to efficiently browse the Internet wherever they are, not just when they are in front of a computer or if you own a high-end mobile phone? Let us know your thoughts on this solution to the mobile browsing problem and what phones you would like to see with this added feature.

~ Conrad