New Version of Kiko Calendar

Right when I was about to forget about Kiko Calendar I received this announcement in my inbox yesterday:

We've spent the last few months with our heads down, and we've finally released the new Kiko. We're sporting a brand new, much cleaner tabbed interface and a whole host of new features:

• Appointment reminders via email, text messages, and AIM
• RSS feed for upcoming events
• Natural language appointment creation
• Import appointments and contacts via iCal and vCard
• Sharable URLs for your calendar

Check out the new site at http://kiko.com/. You can sign up with a new login or migrate your old account by signing in with this email.

Cheers,
The Kiko Team

Just by curiosity I signed back into my Kiko account to check it out and I must say the new version doesn't seem that bad. Overall the look and feel is better than before and reminds me a lot the screenshots of the upcoming Google CL2 calendar. Even a few CL2-like features for example drag-to-create are nicely implemented in Kiko and the whole thing is a bit more stable than before.
So will I switch back from 30Boxes to Kiko? I don't know yet, 30Boxes is very easy to use and has some nice features but Kiko is catching up and I haven't used both calendars enough to say that I couldn't live without them as I am still waiting for Google to get their thing going. Even if Google is a bit late to this race they will probably end up winning it because of full Gmail integration and their large user base. What the heck, they should just buy both Kiko and 30Boxes!

Listen to Dani California online!

I am really looking forward to the RHCP's new album "Stadium Arcadium" due out on May 9th. Since yesterday I have been listening their new single "Dani California" and I must say that Anthony Kiedis' singing becomes better with every new album and John Frusciante's guitar play is outstanding! You can now listen to Dani California online at the Chili Pepper's site.

Walk / Don't Walk

Walk / Don't Walk
Originally uploaded by oHoTos.

Saw this while walking around in Barcelona on saturday - pretty confusing!

Writely now part of Google

Well, when this day started I thought this was a nice rumour, I didn't expect this to happen that fast. Google announced on their official blog that they have just acquired Writely, my favorite online word processor:

Official Google Blog: Writely so
For the last five months, I've been part of a Silicon Valley startup called Upstartle, which makes Writely, a collaborative word processor that runs in a web browser. Well, as of Monday, I'm happy to say that I, and the rest of the Writely team, are now part of Google.
...
To be clear, Writely is still in beta, and it's far from perfect. Upholding our great user experience means everything to us, so we're not accepting new registrations until we've moved Writely to Google's software architecture. If you're interested in giving us a try, we hope you'll get on the waitlist so we can let you know when you'll be able to try out Writely.

Google, Writely In Talks?

A nice rumor to start the day. Hopefully this will turn out to be true, I would prefer to have more of the services I regularly use under my Google account and Writely is one of them:

Google, Writely In Talks?: So you all know that Google’s got designs for a G:Drive and doing an end run around Microsoft? Now what if you can simply store and save data on that drive, but that’s not clearly as much fun. What if you could write a document in a browser, much like you write on Microsoft Word, but then save it directly to the G:Drive? That would increase the utility of G:Drive tremendously. Maybe that explains why Google is rumored to be in talks with Writely, a browser-based document processing application, for a possible acqusition. Writely, is the first product of Upstartle, LLC. (More on them here.) Writely is one of the Business 2.0 Next Net 25 companies. The pending deal has been making the rounds in the Valley today. I picked up this very strong rumor from fairly reliable sources, when visiting the money corridor (aka Sand Hill Road) this morning. Now I am still waiting to hear from Google and Writely about the rumors, and will treat this chatter as just that, unless of course I hear otherwise from the two companies. Now buying Writely is in line with Google thinking of using browser for everything. I mean an online word processor, and online excel spread sheet make a lot more sense than making people switch to OpenOffice. Anyway will update the story later when I hear from the two respective companies.

Now is the Google calendar coming or not?

TechCrunch has some exclusive screenshots of Google Calendar . I really hope that I won't be disappointed and that "CL2" will be available soon (...April 1st???). Currently I am still using 30Boxes but I am missing the tight Gmail integration that Google will probably offer.

Theee Simpsooons... dü dü dü di dü...

Now this is really, really cool. The Simpsons intro as live action recreation, they must have put a lot of work into this, it's so true to the original! Found this through one of the better blogs out there WWdN

Speed limit

This experiment with the speed limit makes a good point, see for yourself:

What if Microsoft designed the iPod's packaging?

Yesterday I watched this cool video:

Schmap city guides

Schmap, apparently a new online city guide service just contacted me through Flickr because one of my CC-licensed photos was shortlisted for inclusion in one of their guides. I previewed their San Francisco guide after downloading their small viewer and it doesn't look bad but if Google would come up with something similar integrated into Google Earth it would beat them. Their service is going live by the end of March it seems.

Google Pages

Google Pages is another new Beta from Google. It's an ajax WYSIWYG-editor and you can host a whole site on Google's servers. I just tried it and it's very easy, here my first try at a Google page: oHoTos' stuff

3GSM Congress in Barcelona

Chocolate fountain
Originally uploaded by ohotos.

Yesterday I dropped by the 3GSM Congress for two hours, my employer kindly offered me a pass. If you're not interested at checking out the gazillions of new mobile phones it's actually quite boring. This chocolate fountain at the Oracle booth was quite a success it seems.

Red Hot Chili Peppers or Stones?

I just wanted to look up some tour information from the Red Hot Chili Pepper's site and the result that came up from my search Google Search: red hot chili peppers was somewhat weird. They are both great bands but I already have tickets to one of the next Stones shows. Did the Stones hijack these search results or what?

New online calendar

30 Boxes , a new online calendar is starting to open to the puplic now. I have been toying around quite a bit with Kiko Calendar lately and liked it so far, but 30 Boxes is likely to make me switch for now. After five minutes of use I already prefer it over Kiko, it is way faster and less bugged. Now where is my Google Calendar ?

Changes

So I finally took some time to change the design of this blog, the colors are not definitive yet and some more CSS and graphics stuff have to be changed. But at least it's starting to look better.

Nice weather today!

weather Barcelona - Google Search

Cleaning up!

My BlogOhotos became a bit cluttered and out of control with too much code that I added to the template. For now I have cleaned it up - back to default. Hope to get some time to set up everything again soon.

The Great Flickr Tools Collection

I just upgraded to a Flickr pro account. I've had an account for quite a while now but only started really using it a few days ago and was quickly reaching the upload limit.
Now I have to check out this Great Flickr Tools Collection

ohotos'Photos - a photoset on Flickr

pic'oHoTos - a photoset on Flickr- some of the first photos I took with my new Olympus E-500.    

How to fold a shirt in japan - Google Video

Now this t-shirt folding video is resurfacing again. I 've been using this method eversince I saw it for the first time about a year or two ago.
how to fold a shirt in japan - Google Video