PhoneMyPhone (phonemyphone?)

http://www.phonemyphone.com/

Thot this service was cool enough to quick-blog about. Basically allows you to call any specified phone number (immediately or setting future time/date), allowing the forgetful minded among us (who don’t have convenient access to another phone) to hear their lost cellphone ringing.

As LifeHacker mentioned – great way to get out of awkward dates and unfortunate meetings.

Apologies to all readers for lack of activity – am busy launching my first (real) company, news to come! Stay tuned

Just registered my company!

Officially known from now on as “Mobilism”, registered as a fictitious trade name with the New York County Court. Look for more to come soon! I plan to stop posting here (except maybe the occasional random post) and to move my writing over to http://mobilism.wordpress.com – which will chronicle the journey I’m currently taking to start my new company

Stay tuned for more

Citibank/Citicard Visa is a piece of crap

Tried to dispute a double charge on my platinum dividend Citibank visa card today. Boy is customer service crappy. I have to go through the following steps before they’ll even START an investigation into the double charge.

1) Close my account and current card

2) Reissue me a card and confirm its receipt

3) Fill out paper fraud dispute forms (the really ridiculous part about this is that all the information they ask of me in the forms is already available to every customer service agent online)

4) Have the forms NOTARIZED

5) Return the forms to begin an investigation – which will likely take at least 15 days before they’ll know if my dispute is even VALID. IF it’s valid, THEN they begin the process of an in-depth investigation and eventual chargeback (if confirmed an invalid charge) to the vendor (which can take however many more days)

6) There is no way they can tell me upfront if my dispute is potentially valid (putting me through this ridiculous process before I even know if I stand a chance of them STARTING an investigation)

7) During this whole time, they don’t give me any provisional credit for the dispute

By contrast, American Express is awesome. I had a dispute there once – they automatically gave me provisional credit for the investigation, took my dispute online and through the phone, and were prompt in keeping me posted about the investigation progress and outcome.

Twine and smart web filters

Read a cool article in Wired today (or was it Entrepreneur?) about a company called Twine – basically a service that interprets your content interests and recommends cool stuff on the web for you. It’s an invite-only beta and I have no invite, so can’t comment on the service, but the concept is pretty sweet. Ultimately, this type of thing will be immensely helpful to websurfers – the ability to find and filter relevant content for users. Given the information overload that we suffer from today, it will enable us to be that much smarter and more focused on the things we care about.

This harkens back to the idea I had about a web recommendation engine – a comprehensive survey where you can fill in everything about yourself (demographics, behaviors, etc), maybe feed a little data on your web browsing history and your current pains (e.g., too much email, can’t do tasks on time, etc), and the neat little survey spits out a list of the services that you need to use (and you can use only those).

It would suggest Xobni for people who can’t remember past email threads, Netvibes for those that can’t manage their blog feeds, FriendFeed/Spokeo for those who spend too much time browsing social nets for updates, and so forth…

Idea only half-baked and lot harder than it looks, but here’s to wishful thinking

How TurboTax saves my life on an annual basis

Today is April 14th, less than one day from the official tax filing deadline of April 15th. Logged into TurboTax, and for $64.95 (Basic + State), filed my federal and state returns in less than an hour and a half. Got a nice little refund to boot. Wow…what disorganized procrastinators (and NP types on Myers-Briggs) would do without it is far beyond my understanding.