John Jantsch, The Duct-Tape Marketer, says to reexamine FourSquare http://bit.ly/nUCBvT, particularly by piggybacking on popular businesses in your area, collaborating with other Check-In locations all over town to create a referral web and taking advantage of FourSquare’s flash specials.

Meanwhile, according to News Backbone http://bit.ly/nKkahS, ShopKick, which has spent most of its first year recuiting national chains, is now beginning to court local merchants like coffee shops, but only in major markets: Austin and Dallas/Fort Worth, TX; Chicago, IL; Detroit, MI; Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, CA; New Orleans, LA; New York, NY; Seattle, WA; and Washington D.C.

Then there’s Yelp, Google Places, Facebook and even Groupon and AdzZoo’s just-launched Groupon competitor.

On the other end of the spectrum, there is customizing, or at least private-labeling, an existing app, using HTML5 or completely going native. Someone must have these options laid out in a flow chart. More research to be done, but I think in a year’s time, it will be pretty common to have an app (in some form with increasingly blurred lines across all these options) for many of your favorite stores.

(Image credit: Review Unit)

Image via Wikipedia

My cell phone usage for work was so much less in the past.  Today, the app explosion for smartphones has rendered these portable little gizmos computers in their own right.

Whether it’s an iPhone, Blackberry, or Android-based device, there are apps available for nearly everything I used to only be able to do from a full computer.  A sampling of apps I now have on my iPhone 3GS and their workflow relevance…

1. Trillian:  a great IM platform that ties into multiple accounts such as AOL and Hotmail (among others).  I can now chat in real-time with a wifi or 3G data connection with my coworkers while at various locations away from the office.  Great for letting people know of last-minute schedule changes or asking quick questions of co-workers.

2. Salesforce: being able to reach into fields of data in our Salesforce database from a phone is a very powerful tool.  Looking up contact and account information as well as opportunities, tasks, and events is a real boon when out on the road.

3. Chatter for Salesforce:  Being able to dip my toes almost immediately in the “stream” of ongoing internal company conversations with my phone is another nice feature.

4. Apps from online retail sites like BestBuy and NewEgg provide handy, easy ways to search for new technologies and products, as well as customer reviews and ratings, while passing that 5 minutes waiting for an appointment or meeting to start.

5. The obvious foundational smartphone apps for today like Twitterific for Twitter, the Facebook app and the LinkedIn app were not-so-obvious as foundations apps a year ago.  Today, not having these on your mobile phone places you a generation ago in terms of technology!

6.  The Dark Horse:  Chipotle! Having a burrito paid for and waiting for me at the counter is a great way to minimize down time in a busy day out and about!

The moral of this story:  I used to dread cell phones for their intrusiveness into my privacy.  I still do when it comes to voice calls.  But the enhancements to my lifestyle and workflow efficiency provided by the mobile app universe have converted me.  I now feel “slow”, “inefficient”, and even “lost” at times when I realize my battery has died or, worse, I left my iPhone at home or the office.

(Photo Credit: DroidX)

Touchdown has provided fantastic email functionality on the Droid, but after three months, we’re only now realizing how much its failure to integrate with the resident Contact app has held us back.

We originally got Touchdown because it would allow us to sync with as many Exchange email folders as we wanted, whereas the resident HTC email app only works well if you have a small number of folder. If you’re like me and have many, it seems to select a subset at random and usually makes poor choices.

So with email working great, I never understood why it would take me so much longer to search through and edit contacts. It turns out Touchdown had been making multiple copies of contacts each time it synced, and finding the right copy got reduced to random chance as well.

Ultimately it was a failure of Touchdown to properly integrate with the Incredible. So we removed Touchdown and its superior email functionality in favor of more reliable contact functionality. In the end, the Droid is still a telephone and contacts are very important. Now hopefully I won’t feel left behind in a room full of iPhones when people start rapidly capturing each other’s contact information. My next business trip in a week will tell!

The breakthrough, though, was when Matthew Frye figured out the main problem. HTC has written proprietary software that “overlays” on top of Windows and provides selected bits of information, like certain appointments. But the pattern is mysterious. I guess it caps the number of appointments it will display across an unspecified period of hours. For someone like me with a lot of appointments, seeing only some–almost at random–made us conclude the unit was broken.

We actually swapped it out for a replacement, costing us many more hours, before we figured out that we just needed to remove the Outlook calendar from that software’s sorting function. Now it seems to work much better. Verizon has excellent customer service, so having them as a carrier has really helped.

I’ve now incorporated into most of my routines, and it’s great being able to clearly see emails, Outlook task lists, OneNote and (for the most part) websites, wherever I go. We may get a Franklin Planner overlay that’s supposed to improve the Task List functionality, but I still need to understand better what I’ve got first. But now I can begin to reinvest some of the time it’s begun to save me into understanding its deeper functions. Pretty soon I may even learn to speak “alien.”

Sleek Style Over Hopefully Lots of Substance

That still leaves the incomplete syncing. I guess I can compromise and use one portable device for Internet browsing and the other for Outlook, but I just can’t afford yet another technology wrestling match these days.

Of course, technology problems aren’t the best way to get me thankful for Thanksgiving, so I got some new perspective from Louis CK’s appearance on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien at Everything is Amazing; Nobody’s Happy. He probably didn’t need to slam the entire Millennial Generation, but his comments are both insightful and hysterical. Hopefully, with a little more insight and laughter, I’ll soon be amazed with my HTC Imagio in a good way….

Meanwhile, Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Jott and reQall are services that allow you to make a call from your cell phone and record a message. This message is then transcribed to text and emailed to you along with the attached recording. You get home, open up your email, and there’s the idea you wanted to remember waiting for you. You can also manage your messages on the services’ websites, and you can setup reminders that will text message you at the time you set.

Each service is a little bit different. Jott has lots of options for sending messages to other people by transcribed text message or email. reQall seems more aimed as a task manager/mini calendar, with the ability to choose between categories such as Tasks, Meetings, or Notes, and to assign a date and time using natural language (Jott just added organizational folders too). Jott, however, has the power to be connected to web services via their APIs, giving it a leg up on reQall. Some of the services already connected include Twitter, Blogger, Remember the Milk, and Google Calendar, letting you blog by cell phone or let your social network know what you are doing. The Cranking Widgets Blog has a nice post about how handy Jott is.

If you use web services to manage your life then give Jott a try. If not, reQall might be better, especially if you have lots of appointments during the day.

To use Jott you must be in the United States or Canada, but reQall also has you covered in the U.K..