Paypal.com finally goes Mobile

Finally!

Paypal is going into the mobile payment provider area. What does this mean? This means that you can send money to another person or entity using your mobile phone. It's basically your paypal account linked to you phone. You send a text message to a phone number with the amount. To verify the transaction, paypal calls your phone and you enter in your PayPal Mobile PIN number. Once the payment is confirmed, the transaction is completed and the money is transferred to that person's/entity's account.

The best part is that Paypal is introducing a service called Text to Buy, where you can buy things like buy DVDs, electronics, books, etc securely through your mobile phone. The Text to Buy signs can be put on posters, in a magazine ad, at event/convention. You can buy the item texting the item number through your cell phone, complete the transaction with the callback, and the item will be sent to you by mail.

I first read about it in this blog then I went to the paypal site to activate my phone. Definitely check it out.

Personal Trainers…. on your mp3 player!

Someone told me about this website where you can purchase personalized training programs and download them on your mp3 player.   There are different sets of training routines and it looks like they have new routines every month.  Looks good to me!

iTrain

The joy of unintentionally spamming my 350+ email contacts

I’m usually really good about filtering out the spam from the rest of my “good” emails. I keep two accounts: one for my personal emails and the other for registrations, sign-up, etc where I know my email address is going to be sold to a third-party to send me things like a “Free PS3″, when they become available. I’m pretty good about not falling for that stuff.

Then just recently, I got an email from a friend who I haven’t seen in a long time with the title “Let’s Share Photos”. This is through my personal account, which usually does a great job of filtering out spam. I opened it thinking that I would be able to see this person’s shared photos. I went to a website called Ringo.com and they asked me for an email address (for registration purposes) and a password. Now, what I sometimes do is to use the same password for registration as my login to access my email.

When I did that, it logged into my email account, extracted all my contacts’ email addresses, and sent them invites to “Let’s Share Photos”.

WTF?!?!

Needless to say, I was pissed. I’m still in the process of emailing all my contacts from my email account telling them that the “Let’s Share Photos” is spam and not to register. I went through their “contact us” section on their website, told them to cancel my account, and reiterated how furious I was and how this was just poor marketing. Not to mention an invasion of privacy.

iFill

I read about this on iLounge last night and it’s pretty cool. It records streaming radio stations and tags the corresponding songs with their titles, artists, etc. I configured it last night, hooked my iPod up, and went to sleep. I woke up this morning with a playlist containing with 159 FREE songs, all labeled by song/artist. You can then deleted the songs as needed and record a whole new set. It doesn’t record them in format that is recognized in iTunes, so they are stored as files in the hard drive. Hence, the amount of songs that you get depends on how much space you allocate on your iPod. It definitely beats going to the music store to sample music. It’s $20 software, but it’s a great investment:

 

iFill

Video iPod…. not bad!

I was one of the lucky people who managed to get a black 30gb Video iPod and I have to admit, I love it. I’ve been on the fence about getting one for a long time, but after seeing what the new iPods are capable of doing, I had to get one.

For anyone who already owns an iPod and wants to upgrade to the 5G Video iPod, I would say to wait until the 6th generation comes out, whenever that may be. The video is very slick but only lasts 2-3 hours. Think of this 5G iPod as a music player first and a video player second.

For anyone who was on the fence about getting one, all I have to say is this:

GET ONE. Get one NOW.

The audio is incredible, the interface is slick, and the look is stylish. It’s pocketable and the battery life is damn good If you let it run via playlist, it can give you around 14 hours of battery life. No joke.

I seriously can go on-and-on, but I’ll be blogging must-need accessories later on and some cool slick software that I tried.

great tool to clean up MP3 tags

So, I found this great article shows you how to clean up any messy ID tags on your MP3s.  One of the tools is an app called MusicBrainz Tagger, which looks at your MP3, compares it to a database, and tags it with the correct artist, album, and track info.  If it can’t identify the track, then you can manually lookup the information and tag it yourself.  Great tool to clean up all my files in iTunes.

Tidy Up iTunes MP3 collection

flock.com

Whenever you get the chance, you need to try out this new browser from flock.com. It uses the Mozilla Firefix code base and builds on top of it. It’s got some great potential since it incoporates all the cool Web 2.0 features.

13 things you can do with Flock (and how to do them)