CECA 2008: Surviving & Thriving in an e-Literate World- Keynote

I'm trying not to let to many days go by before posting my reflections of CECAs annual conference, but that's hard with work and an 18 month old who only hours ago ripped the "D" key off my laptop!

Last week Lori and I attended CECA 2008: "Surviving & Thriving in an e-Literate World" in Hartford, CT. While the long drive and ludicrous parking situation had us worried about "surviving" the day, there were a few sessions that kept us "thriving" when we returned to school.

The keynote speaker was David Pogue, a personal technology columnist for the New York Times and Tech Correspondent for CBS NEWS. This Westport resident gave a lot of great tips and tricks that we could all benefit from.

The first hack, I mean trick, he mentioned was Voice Over IP on Cellphones. With T-Mobile, if you start a call in a wireless hot spot anywhere in the world, the call is free, no roaming, no long distance, nothing. Just start the call in the hot spot and then walk out the door (it automatically switches from wifi to cell tower) and keep talking until your battery wares out. While the cell phone costs $20 more per month, none of your wifi minutes count, so you don't use as many cell minutes. (T-Mobile can offer this, while other cell phone companies can't, because they don't offer landlines.)

While I shared GOOGLE411 with friends, family and faculty two years ago (add 1-800-466-4411 to your speed dial on your cell phone, or home phone and get directory assistance for FREE), I had no idea that you could get the phone number, address and even a Google Maps link sent to your phone via text message (just interrupt the recorded message and say "text message" after you hear the exact location of the business you're looking for.)

You can also text Google for directory assistance. Let's say you're looking for a pizza place in Wilton, just text "Pizza 06897" or "Pizza Wilton CT" to 46645 and GOOG411 will text you with the address and phone number of all the pizza joints in town. You can also use this feature to find movie show times, the status of flights, etc. Ans it is a whole lot faster than using your phone's browser.

On a personal note, I have always been jealous of my husband's voicemail system at work. When he gets a message on his work phone, it sends him an email with a link to the sound file. Well now, thanks to David Progue I can impress him. Using SpinVox or Callwave, I can have my cell phone messages transcribed into text messages or emails for free!

I have been using hulu.com for a few weeks now, but for those of you out there that don't know about it, NBC and Fox have teamed up to provide all of the network’s TV shows with 15-second ads for commercial breaks (I'm still not sure how I feel about this, I love good commercials, but I also hate when they interrupt a good show...)

We have Cablevision at home, but if you have Comcast, you have access to Comcast Cable's TVPlanner, which includes an HD video gallery, an On Demand page, and free Full TV episodes. You can also get Comcast Cable's TVPlanner™ on the go! If your cell phone has a WAP 2.0 browser, you can access the Comcast TV listings by entering http://m.comcast.net in your phone's browser. Pretty neat!

My husband and I got a free Tivo box back in 1999 when the company first started, so I have been recording, pausing and rewinding live TV for almost 10 years. If you ask my husband he can tell you about the day I tried to "rewind" the neighbors. We were sitting on the couch in front of the TV when I looked out the window and say the neighbors doing something that my husband just had to see. I pointed the Tivo remote out the window and actually hit the pause button while I called my husband to come and look (needless to say, it didn't work). What led me to this story was the statement David made about kids expecting to be able to "pause, rewind and fast forward".

I'm not sure if he mentioned this one, but I created an account over the summer (have yet to really use it) for GrandCentral. It allows you to give out one phone number, to say my daycare provider, and when they call it, all of my phones ring, my work phone, my home phone and my cell phone. This also means you only have one voicemail box that you need to check!

David reminded the audience that first "tech shifts, then culture shifts." He also shared this interesting bit of trivia. Over the last year, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have each shrunk one inch in each direction. When I looked into this further, it seems that the NYTs has gone from 13.5 inches to 12 inches in width will the WSJ has lost 3 inches.