Edward Kiledjian

The CBC is Canada's public broadcaster and offers an array of TV, radio , internet and mobile device oriented content in English, French and 8 aboriginal languages.

Like most private companies, they are constantly trying to stretch every dollar and deliver the best bang for every buck. They evaluated the 2 major offerings :

• Google Apps
• Microsoft 365

They wanted an easy to deploy solution that offered flexible pricing, real-time collaboration and excellent availability guarantees.

Once the decision was made to go with Google, the CBC leveraged the migration expertise of a Google Apps partner to transition its entire staff within 90 days. During deployment, they realized that many of their employees were already using Google's GMAIL service for their personal communications so training was minimal.

It was interesting to read how moving to Google Apps also changed their corporate communication culture. Instead of discussing issues via conference call (which is more impersonal and costly), their employees started to use the video chat features of Google Hangouts (which is accessible from anywhere and from almost any device).

The CBC also liked the real-time communication features of Google Docs that are built into the product. A globally distributed team can collaborate on a single version of each document making the process simpler and more efficient.

The rivals (Microsoft and Google) are really turning up the heat and competition is becoming fierce. More competition means consumers win with better pricing, more highly refined features and companies thinking about improving the user experience.

When searching for a telephone number on my smartphone, I head straight to Google and enter the name of the establishment.

I then clicked on the Call button and was presented with an interesting new dialog box (which I saw once the call was completed and I was returned back to Safari Mobile).

Google was asking me to validate the number it had provided. 

I tried to reproduce this dialog box by clicking the call button (for the same establishment and some others in the area) but it never reappeared. 

Maybe the number was flagged as wrong by someone? Maybe Google periodically checks the validity of all numbers? Have you ever seen this before?

I use In Ear Monitors (aka headphones) 95% of the time so I rarely test products made for typical button style earbuds (think the old Apple earbuds.) A couple of readers wanted me to review the Slic-Sound product so here it is.

The manufacturer claims these enhancers will:

• help you hear better by sending the music deeper into your ear canal
• help keep the earbuds in place by going deeper into your ear canal
• help make your earbuds more comfortable because they will be held in place by soft silicone

So are any of these claims true? Read on...

The test

For testing purposes, I used a pair and distributed 4 other [pairs] to "normal" users. 

Fit

The first complaint many had was related to fit. many could not find a silicone insert that fit properly thus making it feel too tight and muffling the sound or too loose and falling out. My pair fit fairly well and the silicone inserts kept my earbuds in place even when I was jogging. 

rating 3/5

Improved sound quality

For those who could not find the "right" size, the sound quality was severly degraded. 

Those that found the right size mentioned a slight improvement in bass and a small improvement in clarity. This echoed my own experience. This doesn't convert a $2 pair of earbuds into $100 perfomance speakers but it did offer a very slight improvement in sound quality. 

It did not block out external sound.

rating 2/5

Improved comfort

The silicone is soft and comfortable. When the size was right, it also held the earbud in place fairly well.

These were nowhere as comfortable as Comply foam earphone tips but were more comfortable than using the naked earbuds.

rating 4/5

Conclusion

I love trying audio gear and accessories so I was excited to try these. Unfortunatly many in my small test group experienced fit issues which rendered the tips useless. In the rare case where it did fit properly, it offered a very very small improvement in sound quality and didn't block out external sounds. 

Overall I think this product is a pass. Better to spend money on better earbuds than on accessories like this.

Pictures

This is what one of the earbud tips looks like.

Here is the tip installed on standard Apple earbuds

"tailored map for every search"

As a leader in a multinational organization, I meet dozens of people every week and need a way to easily (and reliably) capture their contact information and make it available anytime/anywhere I need it. There are dozens of Business Card OCR apps in the Apple itunes AppStore but most have one fatal flaw, they rely on technology to recognize the information on the business card which means you will  have to manually correct all of the transcription errors.

Human transcription is better

Enter the wonderful world of manually transcribed  business cards provided for free by CardMunch. The app is very simple to use, you snap a picture of the business card (making sure it is legible) then it uploads the image to a magic fairy world (aka Amazon's Mechanical turk service) where the card information is transcribed by a human for you. There is a delay between the time you snap the image to when the transcription is done. The wait is usually between 15 minutes and a couple of hours.

When the app was just purchased by LinkedIn, I had some transcription quality issues (info not being transcribed or info being wrongly transcribed) but since then, LinkedIn has really improved the quality and I now very rarely have to "resubmit" a card for transcription. If the transcription isn't up to your standards, you have a nice resubmit button to have the work redone.

Free as a bird

When the app was first released many years ago, customers had to buy transcription packs (you paid per transcription) but since the product was acquired by LinkedIn, they have made the entire service free.

The "catch" is that you need a LinkedIn account (which is free itself). 

Value added LinkedIn Information 

Until recently, each Google service had it's own distinct Google Storage and unused space couldn't be shared between services. As an example, you have 10GB of GMAIL storage but only 5GB for Google Drive. If you want to use 10GB for Drive and 5GB for GMAIL you couldn't.... until now.

The sultant of search has informed its citizens that it will henceforth consolidate all storage into one giant shareable pool of 15 GB. This means you can use any of that storage with any Google service you want (no more artificial storage walls or barriers.) If you decide to fork over some of your hard earned money for storage, it is now accessible from all services (in the past, extra storage wasn't accessible from Gmail.)

So go forth an rejoince in your newfound freedom citizen of Google-ville.

This consolidation has started to roll out but it may not have reached your account yet. Paid Google Apps account will see their storage bumped to 30GB.

Google blog post regarding the consolidation can be read here.