David Strom

I have been using Pandora’s online stream music service off and on for several years. What got me more interested lately was it being one of the many services on my Roku video streaming box, which my wife and I use mostly for watching movies from Netflix’s “watch instantly” queue. As I investigated the service more, I came to understand exactly the challenge of what it takes to be truly multi-platform in the current era. It isn’t just about having both Web and mobile phone versions of your service, but how you have to go deep into a lot of different devices to appeal to your customers. The cool thing about Pandora isn’t that you can create your own custom radio station that will try to find music based on a particular artist or genre. But that once you set up your account on one platform, you can access it in your car, in your home, and on the road in between. All w... (more)

CTOedge: Better Collaboration Tools Than Google

Google Wave on Ulitzer Google has certainly been busy building a lot of different software tools that can be used for collaboration, including Google Docs, Google Voice, Google Sites (formerly Jotspot) and Google Calendar. But there are a number of specialized tools that are more useful than these Google services for particular circumstances. These can be big productivity boosts for enterprises. You can read the entire post in this week’s story for a new IT site called CTOedge here. ... (more)

Forget the new Pepsi Amp Up iPhone App

There has been a lot of press in the past week or so about a new iPhone App from Pepsi and energy drink Amp, called the Pepsi Amp Up Before Your Score. I tried it out, in the interests of reporting, and can’t see what the fuss is all about. The use case is a single guy on the prowl at a bar, and you pick one of several icons of the woman that you are trying to hit on, to gain insightful conversational banter and nearby destinations. Yes, it is sexist. Yes, it is smarmy. Yes, it doesn’t work well on giving you real-time destination results — searching for nearby ice cream stores i... (more)

It's Maybe Time to Consider Crowdsourcing

Web 2.0 Magazine on Ulitzer We all know about outsourcing, the ability to farm out work to people, often overseas, that will work for less, and sometimes for a lot less. But a not-so-new trend is changing the way that outsourcing happens, called crowdsourcing. The idea is to take a job and divide it into small enough pieces that someone can do it quickly in their spare time. Think about transcribing an audio recording. Or Photoshopping a series of photographs. The difference between regular outsourcing and crowdsourcing is that you don’t necessarily know your contractors, and th... (more)

A new way to learn languages

I am an adviser to LangLearner.com, a local STL-based software business that has developed a series of tools to help people learn languages. Unlike their well-financed competitor in the ubiquitous yellow boxes and obnoxious TV commercials, this software can be used to go from any-to-any language rather than a particular pair. They offer a variety of learning tools including hearing the words spoken, seeing any nouns displayed as pictures, particular lessons, and games. They have a series of products now: Their Web-based subscription service LangLearner.com that starts at $30 a ... (more)