Kigo Footwear Takes Customer Service to Web 2.0

Every job I’ve had has been sales or customer oriented in some capacity, so I always geek out a bit at innovative ways to improve customer service. Today I came across a company that used Twitter very effectively to reach out and interact with me as a customer, and I wanted to share that story. I found out about Kigo Footwear on the Runner’s World forums and thought their “Kigo Shel” shoes sounded really cool. So I poked around their website and learned the company is as interesting as their shoes. They use recycled materials, and their whole business model is…

News

Complete a Survey on Your Twitter Usage; Help a Grad Student

Cindy Kelly is conducting a Twitter Research Survey for her grad school project, and she could use your help. If you are over the age of 18, and you don’t mind answering simple questions about your motivations and expectations from Twitter usage, you’d be doing your good deed for the day if you clicked the link and helped Cindy with her project. Cindy Kelly’s Twitter Research Survey

Gear Bits

Please Rob Me; the Perfect Compliment to Foursquare and Twitter

If you’re a burglar, and you are tired of staking out homes only to be stymied as you break in because the owner is still there, have I got an application for you! Stop staking out houses and start staking out the new site, Please Rob Me. Instead of watching to see if there is activity in a house, you can locate users in your area who are mindlessly using Foursquare to broadcast their location to everyone on Twitter. Picking a mark is easy! Enter your area and look for someone who is eating a meal, attending a sports event,…

How to Do It Yourself!

Twitter rolls out lists – once again you can view your contacts through the noise

Twitter has started to offer the ability to create lists of contacts within your Twitter account. This feature is being rolled out to a few users right now so if you don’t see the feature in your account when you log in then you’ll likely have to wait for it to be added. What do Twitter lists add? Well for one it’s an opportunity to quickly view similar types of contacts. For example I’ve set one list to display my company contacts and another list displays all the Gear Diary team writers.

Reviews

qTweeter Gets New Name, Apple Approval But Loses Key Functionality

qTweeter is one of the best reasons to jailbreak. Once installed via Cydia all you do is draw your finger down from the top of the screen and an input window appears and allows you to quickly update your Twitter or Facebook status. Now the app has been approved by Apple and released in the App Store for $.99. That’s the good news. The bad news?? The key drop down functionality that lets you launch the app from the status bar is missing.

News

Rollip Makes Your Photos Look Like Polaroids

OK, I am definitely a product of the 80’s & 90’s…nothing beats GI Joe (uh..the original!), Saved By the Bell, Alf (yeah that just happened), and Polaroid pictures! Unless you are able to track down one of these relics at a yard sale or flea market, what can you do?.

Reviews

Palm Pre App Catalog. 30 Apps in 30 Days. Day 9: Tweed

Do you Twitter? Are you a Twit with your Tweets? I’ll be honest here and tell you that I really don’t Twitter. Sure, I have an account, and have tried to understand it, but it just never did much for me. That being said, I do understand that millions of people out there send what must be billions and billions (sorry, Carl Sagan) of Tweets on Twitter every day (does this make anyone else think of a little yellow canary from Looney Tunes?)

Reviews

Twitterena+ Pro for iPhone OS Review

If there’s one thing the iTunes App Store is not short on it’s Twitter applications. Anyone who knows me knows I’m a huge Twitter user. I’ve tried at least ten different Twitter apps on my iPhone and usually end up returning to three or so of the apps I call the “big guys.” Software developer Andrew Weeks has just recently released his newest Twitter client for the iPhone Twiterena+ Pro. Is there a new contender for top iPhone Twitter app? Read on to find out.

Reviews

Simply Tweet for iPhone Review

For whatever reason none of the big names in Twitter clients have released their updated versions that support push notification for Twitter. However, several solutions have emerged over the past few weeks to solve this issue. I recently took at look at Boxcar which is an add on to your existing Twitter client to enable push and then I looked at TwitBit which was the first full fledged Twitter client for the iPhone to support push. Now comes Simply Tweet, from Motion Obj, which has thrown its hat into the ring of new full Twitter clients with push notification for…

Editorials

China Blocks… Pretty Much Everything

It’s amazing that in these troubling times filled with economic uncertainty and unbridled social woe, the petty-minded governments of various countries still manage to find the time and resources to censor media outlets in order to protect their citizenry from the corrupting influence of free speech. Iran briefly blocked access to Facebook, ahead of its June presidential elections. China has upped the ante by blocking, amongst others, Twitter, Flickr and Hotmail. Even Microsoft’s newly unveiled bing search engine hasn’t been spared. The ongoing media blackout occurs ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre this Thursday (June 4).

News

PhoneFace Adds Improved Contact Search Integration

PhoneFace, the Photo Speed Dial application for BlackBerry and Android, has been updated for improved contact search integration to select your friend’s photo ID based on their Facebook or Twitter profile pics — or selecting a photo that you saved directly to your phone. Simply start typing the name of your contact, and PhoneFace will bring up the listing of all of your contacts’ photos to quickly locate the person you’re looking to reach. PhoneFace has a free 7-day Trial. The full, unlocked application is $ 9.95 (Pssssssst. CrackBerry.com currently has PhoneFace available for $7.95 until June 1st for…

Editorials

Is Greed Good on the Internet?

[begin rant] Why does everything have to be about money? Why is someone always looking to get something for nothing? Free this, free that, promotional item here, promotional item there. Has capitalism ruined the beauty of some of the things that are free on the internet? I do video reviews on YouTube. Earlier this week I posted a chat video I recorded, about some of the things which were bothering me about YouTube reviews. I haven’t been doing video reviews long, and I have small following so far. And that’s fine. I do it because I enjoy it. I do…

Reviews

Twitter Desktop Clients for Mac, Dual Review

By now most of us are aware of Twitter. If you’re not Twitter is a “service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?” Twitter is popular. The service doubled its user base in March alone (See this link). And as a result, there is no shortage of desktop Twitter clients out there available to download. In this comparison review Larry (Nambu and Tweetie) and Wayne (TweetDeck and Seesmic) take a look at four of the more popular Twitter desktop clients available for the…

Reviews

New Twhirl beta turbocharges Twitter – becomes must have Twitter client

If you’re not into the whole Twitter scene – stop reading now. If you’ve tried Twitter and just didn’t get it (which some days I don’t either) – an update to a popular software program called Twhirl was just released that may win you back. This incredible upgrade (beta) to the Adobe Air based Twhirl application now uses Ping.fm (built in) to update ALL of your social network sites in one tweet. It also finds all occurrences of your Twitter @name in a message – not just those at the beginning of a message. But that’s not what I’m most…