austinpreneur

Noise canceling cell phone

Did you ever notice that people on cell phones talk really loud but people on landlines often whisper into the phone? I've heard that the reason is because you can actually hear your own voice in the speaker on a landline but you can't on a cell phone, and without that feedback we make our voices louder. Another theory I've heard is that when people can't hear the other party well, they instinctively talk louder.

Regardless of why it happens, it definitely happens. And if you're not the one on the phone, its really annoying. I was riding a train in Boston a few months ago and even though I was sitting at one end of the train car I could hear a woman gabbing away on her cell phone at the other end of the train car and it was so annoying that I moved to a different train car. And these are big train cars! Can you imagine how bad its going to be when you can use a cell phone on a plane?

One approach is to try and get people to talk without making any sound but I think that's unlikely to catch on (I saw this demo of a band you where on your neck that senses the impulses of speech without you actually having to make noise - can't find the link to it right now).

What we need is some sort of noise canceling cell phone that would pick up your voice for transmission but would cancel it out from spreading to those around you. That cell phone would sell faster than iPhones... 3G is great but imagine the privacy of being able to talk without everyone around you listening? This would be viral in that you have an incentive to get everyone else to use it (so they don't bother you!).

Will somebody please invent this? Bose maybe?

I need an iPhone application that times how much I use each other app

A recent New York Times article about a dispute over whether checking your email on a blackberry should be counted towards overtime pay made me think about the benefits of tracking usage of specific apps on your iPhone or Blackberry.

I wish it would send me a daily or weekly email report showing how much time I spent talking on the phone, checking my email, text messaging and browsing the mobile web. For simplicity it could just break it down by application. Ideally I could drill down on a particular day and see my usage pattern of certain applications over the day. Or maybe it would just give me an iCal feed I could subscribe to that showed my activity.

If they went the iCal feed route, you could then pipe that into your contact management software to log phone calls and text messaging or into your time tracking software for logging hours spent doing email at the pool.

We need Twitter and IRC integration for PowerPoint

A recent story on CNN talks about the real-time backchatter that is often happening at conferences and presentations. While the panelists are up on stage talking, the audience is having their own conversation on Twitter, Meebo and in chat rooms. I was in the crowd at Mark Zuckerberg's notorious SXSW interview this year which was probably one of the highest profile examples so far.

I was impressed to read how Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester was able to use this to his advantage and change the course of his presentation mid-stream based on feedback over Twitter. Smart presenters are going to pay attention and smart entrepreneurs will find ways to turn this into an advantage.

At some of the geekiest conferences that I attend, they have put up an IRC chat window on a projector so that participants inside the room and outside the room could interact.

We're now starting to see a new generation of web 2.0 presentation software from companies like SlideRocket and Google - where the slides can incorporate real-time data from the web, video, flash and other interactive components. But this is all focused outward on what the viewers see.

PowerPoint or Keynote show a presenter view if you have 2 monitors in use that includes the current slide, next slide, time elapsed, time remaining, current time and your slide notes. A great opportunity for this new generation is to provide a real-time presenter view that brings in this other real-time information. So in addition to the slide notes and timers, there would a twitter feed, Meebo client and IRC client so that each presenter can monitor the online audience in addition to the one sitting in front of them.