Tech-Informer.com

Facebook fan page email notifications are BADLY needed

by Ron Bertino on March 10, 2010

Although most people use Facebook to keep in touch with their family and friends, Facebook fan pages are a great way for you to keep in touch with your customers.

When someone on your personal Facebook page leaves a comment for you on your wall, by default, you’ll be notified of this via email.

Unfortunately this is not the case for fan pages. Facebook currently acknowledge that this functionality is not currently available.

Do Facebook seriously expect us to have to manually monitor every single fan page we create every single day? This is beyond a joke and needs to be fixed immediately.

There are a bunch of people already trying to persuade Facebook of how important this functionality is in one of the Facebook discussion forums.

I’m adding a helping hand myself, and have created the following YouTube video which explains everything clearly, tells you a potential work-around, and also tells you the two action items we need to take to try to get Facebook to come to their senses and provide us with viable email notification options.

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Windows Mobile 7 completely re-invents itself

by Ron Bertino on February 16, 2010

Windows Mobile 7, which has been rebranded to a new name of “Windows Phone 7 Series”, is a completely redesigned system.

Ok, let me voice a few gripes I have with just that initial paragraph content.

Firstly, if you are going to completely redesign something from the ground up, and on top of that you’re going to be choosing a new brand name for what you’ve just built, then you can’t call it “series 7” rather than “version 1.0”.

Don’t get me wrong, I fully understand how most people are nervous about a 1.0 release, and it may be better to tell them that it’s really a version 7 release, but you and I both know that this is BS.

If you look at the interface, it seems that they heavily borrowed code from the Zune HD, so a name such as “Zune Phone” may have been a much better fit.

Secondly, I can’t help but keep wanting to slap Microsoft around every time they come out with one of these awful long-winded names. This would have been a great time to choose a nice and catchy short name.

“iPhone” vs “Windows Phone 7 Series”. The latter really rolls nicely off the tongue, right? I guess I should be happy they didn’t call it “Windows Zune Phone 7 Mobile Edition with Software Assurance”.

For the sake of simplicity, I’ll call it just “Windows Phone” for the rest of this article.

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Apple iPad: some live hands-on demos

by Ron Bertino on January 28, 2010

It’s nice seeing demos of the Apple iPad, but you never know if the demo looks great because of being a great product or if the demo looks great just due to the fact that it was carefully prepared.

So if you’re a fellow cynic like me, then you may be interested in watching these two live hands-on demos, recorded by real people just having a play with the iPad.

You can now also watch the full Apple iPad launch event from yesterday.

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Apple iPad: a Kindle killer?

by Ron Bertino on January 27, 2010

Today Apple released their highly anticipated tablet device, which they named the iPad. To me, this name is too similar to iPod; iSlate or iTablet would have been better.

In a nutshell, think of this device as a huge iPod Touch.

Let’s go over some of the features of this device.

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Get push email, contacts and calendar to your mobile with Gmail or Google Apps

by Ron Bertino on December 21, 2009

Push email is when your mobile will notify you that you have a new email the second it arrives in your inbox.

I’ve never had a big need for push email. I don’t want to be interrupted 100 times a day with the emails coming into my inbox. I prefer to manually fetch email a couple of times a day.

I did have a need to keep my calendar and contacts in sync from my iPhone to my Google Apps account though. The way I’ve had this configured for the past year or so was:

create an email account on my iPhone linked to Gmail (which accepts a connection profile to Google Apps as well)
create a second email account to the free service hosted by NuevaSync, which enables you to get live sync for your contacts and calendar between the iPhone and Gmail/GApps. This second account is configured to sync calendar and contacts but not email.

The above has worked perfectly for me for the past year. The only downside is that it doesn’t support push mail, but as mentioned, for me this wasn’t a big deal at all.

Today I was catching up on some blog reading, and I found out that you can now do push mail, contacts and calendar sync natively from almost any mobile to Google.

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