Tag Archives: service

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Quick Screen Capture

Jing (by TechSmith) is a free service that allows you to instantly share images and video from your desktop. Once installed, Jing sits unobtrusively on the top of your screen waiting to capture an image of your desktop. Hover your mouse over the logo, and with one click you can activate the screen capture utility.

After you select the screen area you wish to capture, you can save it to the clipboard, e-mail it, store it as a local file, or store it online at Screencast.com. Screencast.com is TechSmith’s media hosting solution that Jing uses to securely host your content. It’s perfect for the kind of images and videos you’ll want to make with Jing. You can use Screencast.com to ensure everyone has access to a free, secure hosting option. You can upload or save your content in many other places, too! A free Screencast.com account provides you with 2 GB of storage and 2 GB of bandwidth per month.

You can download a copy of Jing at www.techsmith.com.

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Google Fast Flip

Google has launched a new service through its Google Labs called Fast Flip, a visual version of Google News. Fast Flip is a visual browser of online publications, designed to give you a quick snapshot of what’s being blogged and talked about at many major news sources.

Current sources include Esquire, BBC News, New York Times, TechCrunch, and Salon.com, in addition to about 35 other magazine, news, and general information sites that receive regular updates. You can browse these by popularity, subsection, topic, or by source using Fast Flip’s new visual interface that works a little like Apple’s Cover Flow technology. Each site is represented by an image capture of the relevant page.

Clicking on a displayed page does not actually take you to the site. Instead, it opens the article in an interface that displays a portion of the article as an image file. This allows you to see a quick preview before clicking through to the full story at the site itself.

Arrows at the side of the image in Reader View allow you to browse other stories in the category you’ve chosen, and an expandable tray allows you to access the thumbnails of all stories in that series. You can also e-mail and “Like” any story you find, which requires sign-in with your Google credentials.

Is it useful? It might be for those who use the Internet as their primary news source. You can quickly see what the major news outlets are talking about without having to visit each individually. An RSS reader might be more efficient, but for people who process information visually, Fast Flip might prove more effective or more comfortable overall.

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Google Voice

It can be tedious to manage multiple phone numbers—office phone, home phone, mobile phone, and any other numbers. Google’s new Google Voice service can help.

Google purchased GrandCentral Communications two years ago. That service has now been renamed Google Voice. For the last two years, only people who had a GrandCentral account were able to use the service. Google recently purchased over 1 million phone numbers and allowed a limited number of people to sign up for a new account.

Google Voice is a free service that lets users unify their phone numbers, allowing them to have a single number that rings a call through to all of their phones. Google Voice has a number of unique features, including call transfer between a user’s devices, multi-party conferencing, conversion of voice calls to text messages, cut-rate international calling, and call transcription. Google also has integrated the Voice service with Gmail contact lists.

The real gem is the fact that you get one phone number others can dial to reach you, regardless of where you’re located. Google Voice uses VoIP to link collections of phone numbers.

To sign up for an invitation to acquire a Google Voice phone number, simply complete the registration form. You will be notified when a block of numbers becomes available.