Chrome: Yawn. Firefox, OTOH, is coming along nicely. I now run it side-by-side with Safari on my Mac. Safari is still my fave, but I don’t rail at Firefox like I used to.
The user interface of the iPhone is actually a hugely subversive paradigm shift in computer design: Tapping, multi-touch, micro- and macro-spatial awareness — these are all new things under the sun. Cathleen has been hearing interesting rumors about this UI being the basis for a MacTablet computer. And Apple has an event scheduled for next week…
I mentioned a week or two ago that I’m having Cameron build a session-tracker for our web sites. What he’s working on will live at the top HTML level of our server, so that, if necessary, he can track activity from the same one IP address across multiple domains. In other words, if someone follows a link from here to BloodhoundRealty.com, then from there to one of our single-property web sites, we should be able to see every movement.
I find myself wanting something like Jott without the limitations. When I’m previewing a house, I’d like to be able to dictate my impressions on the spot. I’d also like to be able to dictate emails, weblog posts and miscellaneous memoranda. Is there anything out there like that, ideally phone-based like Jott?
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, technology
Todd Carpenter says:
Do you need it transcribed like Jott? If not, Evernote is pretty cool. There’s even an iPhone app. Whatever you record on your IPhone is then available on your desktop.
September 2, 2008 — 9:57 pm
Greg Swann says:
> Do you need it transcribed like Jott?
Yeah. There are speech-to-text APIs for the iPhone, but so far no good apps.
September 2, 2008 — 10:02 pm
Todd says:
“…I’d like to be able to dictate my impressions on the spot. I’d also like to be able to dictate emails, weblog posts and miscellaneous memoranda. Is there anything out there like that…”
Sounds like Qik, or Pinger to me. Add a “dot com” to the end of both those product names to check them out. I was a beta tester for Pinger and I think it works better than Jott.
P.S. There is a bit of a gotcha in Chrome’s ULA, read number 11 very carefully. Reading the details of an agreement is something real estate agents do very well, its part of the job, and I would be interested in hearing everyone’s opinion on it.
September 3, 2008 — 6:50 am
Greg Swann says:
Following up on Todd, here’s the Register on section 11 of the Chrome EULA.
September 3, 2008 — 10:13 am
John Pollard says:
Greg,
thanks for the post.
If you’re interested in longer recording times, you might consider our pay as you go plans. They offer up to 60 second recording times, and at about a 90% discount off of most web based transcription businesses.
Some trade offs we had to deal with when designing the post-beta plans were a) whether to make jotts unlimited, or some kind of count, and b) what to do about recording times. We decided that it was more important to give most people no-worry unlimited jotts of 15 to 30 seconds (well within the average for the vast majority of people), but also have a plan for longer jotts (but not unlimited in number, as this would have been cost prohibitive on the transcription side).
So the natural question is, if you are paying per minute anyway, why not just let people record for as long as they want? Well, that’s a good question. What we figured is that unless you’ve got a lot of experience with dictation, or you’re reading off of a script, leaving the door open for longer recordings ran the risk of people unwittingly going on a bit…and we didn’t want people to have a bad experience, feeling they’d ‘wasted’ time. We’re looking very carefully at how people are using this, and may choose to extend the time limit.
The real estate community has been really important to us from the first days. We’ve actually looked to how agents use Jott to model some of our engineering roadmap: some of what you do is productivity (notes, lists, reminders), and a lot of what you do is in car communication. We think of Jott, a simple tool that puts all of that behind one speed dialed number, to be an ideal tool for agents.
Yes, we have to eat, so it costs money (13 cents a day). Our customers want us to stick around because they depend on us, so we’re trying to do that the old fashioned way.
Thanks to everybody for their support!
John Pollard
Founder and CEO
Jott
September 3, 2008 — 11:39 am
Greg Swann says:
Mr. Pollard,
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us about Jott’s design philosophy.
Even though I would like to have a longer dictation times, I want to stress for inlookers how much I love and have grown to depend on Jott. For Realtors, there is no better way of staying out of trouble than phoning in quick notes as issues arise out in the world. The simple act of calling in the reminder is good marketing, since it tells your clients you want to make sure you will follow up on your promises. This is money in the bank.
In that light, note that the free Jott service you have known and loved goes away on September 8th. Thereafter, the free service will be curtailed, and you will need to sign up for a for-pay plan to retain Jott’s wonderful functionality.
Go here to explore your billing options and give these folks the money they’ve already earned from you.
September 3, 2008 — 12:16 pm