Recently the Dumb Little Man blog made a back to school post, which included Qipit! The post got me thinking how close we are for school to be back in session. As I live in downtown Austin, home to well over 100,000 College Students (not including faculty), back to school means everything downtown gets more; more cars, more people, more everything! So in the spirit of reducing the need for students to leave the dorms, apartments or libraries, I thought I would share a few more online services.

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

After seeing Batman The Dark Knight I couldn’t resist doing a quick review of one of the best movies I have seen in a long time. My twist is I used Qipit to show how you can go “old school” in a new way and use your handwriting to make a post even more personal. I just cut and pasted the pictures right on my paper, then used my camera to take a quick picture. The other cool thing, is you can write anywhere, even when you are unplugged. Let me know what you thought of the movie and if you haven’t seen it yet, go see it! ~ Conrad

Most mobile phones today are equipped with two ways to send the pictures you take with your camera phone to an email address: Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) also known as picture messaging and Mobile Email.

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

Qipit had the hiccups this morning, and was down for a little while. All functions are back up and running, and no “qipits” were lost or hurt in the process. Thanks for your patience and for using Qipit.

~ Conrad

In the fast paced, always race ahead, high speed world of mobile startups, there is a virtue that may sometimes prove as valuable as the sense of emergency: the ability to wait.

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