Utah Geek Dinner, Twitter and Jott

Last night I went to the Geek Dinner in Draper, it was a lot of fun! Ash Buckles has a roster of who was there so I won’t duplicate it here. I met a few folks I hadn’t met before and had a good time visiting with everyone. The range of topics was vast and it was nice to hang out with fellow geeks! Here’s a couple shots I took at the dinner:

I signed up on Jott.com earlier this week and I LOVE it! I had been looking for a voice recorder for my Treo and had found one for 30 bucks on handango.com that I was thinking about buying but Jott takes care of it! It’s totally free (in fact, I haven’t seen any ads on it) and totally simple. Once you’re registered, you bind your phone with your account and then store the number. Now, I just call Jott and record a voice mail of anything I want written down. About 5 minutes after recording the voice mail, I get an email of a transcription of what I left! It’s great because all my email is aggregated into Outlook and I can just drag that email to a task or to my calendar or notes and add it there. Every day I get an email called ‘The Daily Jott’ that has a link to all the mp3 files and transcriptions that I’ve left on Jott. It’s a perfect and totally simple solution. The hardest part of it is remembering to actually use it!

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about real-world uses for Twitter and how it will become a useful tool instead of just an update of what you’re doing (which I enjoy btw). I’ve seen a couple blog posts with ideas here and here and Janet started a discussion about it today. I can’t remember if I read this idea directly or if I came up with it after reading something similar, but I think a great business application would be to Twitter a limited time special or coupon, Woot style. I can see Starbucks doing something like this – Twitter a special of $1.00 off any cup of coffee to anyone that mentions twitter at starbucks in the next hour. Today, Ash Buckles did a quick poll of his followers on Twitter – he asked for feedback on what mobile phones had the best web service. That gave me an idea, a Twitter account that was just for polling, firepoll.com style. So today I created a new user on Twitter called TwitterPoll – just to see if it would work. I’ve had some other thoughts that I won’t go into, but I really think there are legitimate uses for an instant online service like Twitter.

Another service I just heard about today is JotSpace.com I haven’t tried it out yet, but it’s a free collaborative whiteboard that lets you collaborate live with drawing, and editing on the screen. I have no doubt the time will come when I’ll need to use this, there have definately been times in the past that I wanted something like it.