Tech I Use

I’m spending some time in Europe (Paris and Tuscany) this summer and trying to figure out the best cell phone approach for me and Amy. We are both iPhone users – me on AT&T and her on Verizon. In both cases, the “use your US iPhone in Europe” seems like a total fail on pricing so we are looking for other options. I’m also a Google Voice user (that’s my main phone number) so I’ve got more flexibility than she does. In both cases, we care about voice, data, and SMS, but don’t have to have an iPhone (e.g. Apps are nice to have but not critical). ...

Today Google announced that they had now raised the limit on number of contacts to 25,000 (from 10,000) for all Gmail users (including Google Apps users.) Boom – done – deployed for everyone – and announced in a short and to the point blog post. 70 days ago I wrote a post titled Dear Google, I Have More Than 10,000 Contacts where I bitched loudly about this problem. I have about 6400 actual contact records and the other 3600 had been autofilled by Google’s magic “create a new contact record whenever you respond to someone” feature. This is a great feature as I get 100+ emails a day from people I’ve never communicated with before who I respond to. Suddenly, I couldn’t add any new contacts at all. ...

I’ve had a number of interesting conversions about the intersection of the virtual and the physical world since I wrote the post Did Someone Ruin Foursquare For Me Yesterday? Kashmir Hill in Forbes did a quick email interview with me titled Venture Capitalist Gets Creeped Out by Foursquare which captured a few new thoughts and I spent some time the other night at a TechStars Mentor dinner talking with Alex Rainert, the head of product for Foursquare, who had spent some time digging into this issue to try to figure out what was going on. ...

We’ve decided to implement a new phone system in our office. When I posted about our search for our video conferencing system , we got a ton a great feedback so I’m once again looking for your help. We’ve been using an older version of Cisco’s Call Manager (VoIP based) that we’ve had for the past decade. While it has worked flawlessly and has a ton of bells and whistles, we simply do not use them. Occasionally someone will transfer a call and that’s about it. Call Manager is currently fed by two T1’s that flex between voice and data. We have a total about about 20 phones in the office. ...

I love when the combination of Google Search and the a great discussion board quickly solve something that has been driving me batshit for a while. I finally stopped procrastinating and started the final two day edit push on Venture Financings: How To Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer And VC. However, for the last month I’ve become increasingly annoyed by the horizontal scrolling thing that happens within Microsoft Word 2011 on the Mac when I accidentally brush my fingers horizontally on the magic mouse. In an effort to continue procrastinating (which I clearly have succeeded at) I went looking for a solution this morning. ...

I just received the “amusing email of the day” from Google. I feel like I’m in one step forward / one step back with Google Enterprise Support. If you read my two recent posts on this, you saw that I started by saying that it’s Time For Google To Get Serious About Enterprise Tech Support and I followed up with My Increasing Love Affair With Google Apps . A few days ago, I realized that Google was no longer allowing me to enter new contacts. When I checked Contacts in Google Apps, I saw I had exactly 10,000. That triggered some neuron in my brain to fire at which point I did a – ahem – Google search and quickly found that the Apps limit is 10,000 contacts. I complained to Ross (our IT guy) who sent Google the following email: ...