Cactus Chords

Bubble Motion, the Sequoia-Capital funded, voice blogging site has launched Bubbly in early February. Imagine Twitter with no text and just voice. Ok, now this isn’t something people didn’t think about and eventually one company has come out with it. And they have come out with it pretty well. Kudos. But how well will this fair with the users?

Around 80 celebrities are already using the service and more are joining each week. They have also roped in content owners like BBC, Bloomberg, UTV, and Balaji Telefilms, among others.

Besides India, the company is in the process of launching the service in 6-7 other major countries throughout Asia and expects a similar success.

Say you register with them and you start following celebrities for a subscription charge per month. They start posting voice messages and you will receive an alert. It is free to send messages, but the user will be charged to listen to messages. Would you call that number and actually listen to every little thing that person says? Yes, there will be an initial craze because you will be able to hear your favorite celebrity’s voice, but then will you listen to it even 1 year down the line or even 6 months? What if you call the number and waste money and listen to a message that might be a reply to someone else’s question. I would not. I would get tired of voice messages and revert to Twitter, where it is free, much easier to follow and actually view the tweets than have to call a number to listen to a post of every person.

But a twist to this is Bubbly is planning to introduce video blogs  and text alerts as well where users can post video blogs. This can be an interesting feature whereby celebrities post their home made videos. Since the userbase to Twitter is huge, Bubbly also stands to gain from this. They can ride on Twitter’s success story and eventually become the mobile Twitter for users.

But it is crazy the way things become a craze overnight. Whether Bubbly becomes a craze or not is something we have to wait and see.

They have a pretty good revenue model though. They get a pie of every call that any user makes from the mobile operator, which from a company point of view is a sensible move than what Twitter did. But Bubbly has learned from Twitter’s monetizing delays.

CEO of Bubble Motion, Tom Clayton said, “As listeners get exposed to a wider variety of content, there will be many creative ways people will use voice-blogs to build community – from politicians reaching voters, school leaders communicating with parents, employers messaging their employees, sports enthusiasts sharing their analysis with other fans, comedians telling jokes, investors sharing hot tips – the range will surprise us all. This is the sort of service that once people get a hold of, anything can happen.”

All the best to the Bubble Motion team. It is indeed a smart product for mobile users.

image reference: http://media.photobucket.com/image/mobile%20calls%20frustrated/ohkulala/1%20hit%20wonders/frustrated1.jpg, http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2010/03/11/BubbleMotion_Logo_RGB_Medium.jpeg, http://rlv.zcache.com/overnight_success_tshirt-p235032639472238010tmn7_210.jpg

It is with great pleasure and pride that I bring to you TweetMyPC. Have you ever wondered whether you left your computer running at home and wanted to control it remotely wherever you are in the world?

Now here is a state of the art innovation by my dear friend and partner Shoban Kumar. It is a very simple, 2 minute installation, masterpiece that gives you the power to control your PC from anywhere in the world. All you need to achieve this are

- A twitter id (which am sure most of you have)

- Download and install the application. You can download it TweetMyPC. It is FREE and SAFE.

Steps to install the application.

- Download the application from the link above
- Unzip it and install it
- Click on the icon that appears on your desktop (after this, you will see the icon appear on the bottom right corner of the desktop)
- Enter your twitter username and password and click on Save. It will hide the new window automatically
- You are all set to control your PC from anywhere now.

If you find some problems, then try this alternate option after installing;

- Goto Program Files, open the folder CodeGeeks, then TweetMyPC
- Right click on the .exe file and Run as administrator

How will I control my PC now?

Sign in to your twitter account from anywhere and tweet the following commands and you will be able to achieve the respective actions. You can find your commands here.

It is indeed a brilliant piece of innovation. This is version 3. The previous versions had crossed 18,000 downloads within a mere span of 6 months and with only two commands of shut down and lock compared to the present 30 commands.

Someone has also made a video on this application and uploaded in on YouTube which has earned 32,206 views, 222 ratings and 203 comments. Watch it here

It is that simple. Shoban has developed a series of applications that are up for downloads and if you are interested to know more or connect with him, you can follow his technical blog CodeGeeks.

Let me know what you think about this. For any doubts, you know where to reach me or Shoban.

Cheers!!!

image reference: http://blog.nationmultimedia.com/home/blog_data/5/5/images/PuppetMaster.jpg

Command	Purpose
shutdown	This command will shut down your computer after showing a warning and a wait-time of one minute.
restart	restartsyour computer after a warning and a one minute delay
standby	Don’t want to shutdown? Then you can make your pc go to standby mode with this command.
hibernate	This command will hibernate your computer after showing a warning and a wait-time of one minute
lock	This command locks your Windows pc – TweetMyPC will still continue running and answer to tweets
logoff	Locking the account is not what you want? Try logoff to log off your Windows-Account and close all programs
abortshutdown	You accidentally tweeted shutdown or hibernate? Don’t worry. You still can stop it by tweeting “abortshutdown” to stop it – if you are fast enough!
physical memory	As the name says, this command will let you know the free Physical Memory of your pc
virtual memory	Want to know the free virtual memory of your pc? Just tweet virtual memory
os	This is one of the command which does not have much value. Tweeting “os” will make TweetMyPC to tweet about your Operating System version.
ip	Know your pc’s internal and external IP-Address from anywhere in the world with this command
screenshot	Want to know what is happening in your pc when you are not around? Just tweet screenshot and TweetMyPC will take a screenshot of your desktop and post it to Twitpic.
getprocesslist	This is one of the very useful commands. On receiving this command TweetMyPC will generate a list of running programs, along with the process ID, and email it to a predefined email address.
kill <process id>	This is used along with the above command. Once you receive the process list you can close a program using the kill command.
download <URL>	Want to download an interesting video but you are on the move? Don’t worry – just tweet download followed by the download URL and TweetMyPC will download it for you and it will be ready when you return back. Note: Twitter automatically converts long URLs into short one using bit.ly. TweetMyPC can download files only if the URL is in the short form for security reasons. Please use bit.ly to shorten your URL before posting.
getfile <filepath>	Missed an important document and you are traveling somewhere? No problem. Just tweet get followed by the file path and TweetMyPC will email the file as attachment to a predefined email. Don’t know the path? Don’t worry. Just checkout the next command.
getfilelist <drive>	This command will make TweetMyPC to send you the list of files and folders in a drive. You can use this command to email you a file once you know the complete path of the file.
volinc	Increases the volume of the main speaker by 20%
voldec	Decreases the volume of the main speaker by 20%
volmute	Mutes the main speaker
volunmute	Un-mutes the main speaker
wallpaper <URL>	You found a nice image and want to use set it as background at your TweetMyPC-Computer? Just use this command with the URL of the Image to set it fast and easy from anywhere!
url <URL>	This command helps a lot for example if you find a website, a document or a download-file you want to review it at your computer. Then you can just open the URL by using this command, and see it at the screen when you are back at the pc. (the url has to start with http:// or www
powerstate	This tweets the battery-state (Charging or not, if power-cable is plugged in and how long the remaining battery-running-time is)
ping	When TweetMyPC reads this, it will answer that it is running and checks for tweets – This is really helpful to see if TweetMyPC is working and if your commands will have any effect. +fun link try it!
message <your message-text>	Thanks to this command you can send a custom message to your computer, which will be shown as message-box, so you can communicate with other people sitting in front of your computer or just send a notification to yourself to read them later.
stopscr	This stops the screensaver
darkscreen	darkens/turns off your screen for example to save energy or to hide what the desktop shows
print <URL>	TweetMyPC will download and then print the specified file – currently just .doc, .docx or *.pdf supported
<Custom Command> <optional with parameters>	This is the most interesting feature of TweetMyPC. You think the above list of commands is not enough? No problem! With this new release of TweetMyPC you can start any program or shell-command with parameters just by using twitter and this program! You can start any program you want by adding it in the CustomCommand-Window of TweetMyPC and then tweeting the specified name of it. But also you can just add parameters to the tweets. Thanks to this you can now for example start your torrent-client with the torrent download-url as parameter or you can open Winamp and play a webstream, local file or whatever you want. (Example: add %windir%\system32\cmd.exe in the custom-commands window and tweet “command /K defrag /M /U” – see http://ss64.com/nt/cmd.html