News from the New Jersey Technology Venture Conference
Have you ever wished that your email program had an unsent button? As the sender of more than a few embarrassing e-mails, I sometimes wish just that. Folks at Bigstring expect that many people wish the same as well.
Today at the New Jersey Technology Council Venture Conference, the company’s CEO gave a presentation on their self-destruct, Mission Impossible style e-mail. The service allows you to recall, modify or set an expiration date on e-mails. I confess I had a mixed reaction to this service. Yes; it would save me some mortification, and jail time for a few CEO’s, but as someone who finds a treasure trove of information even in the junk mail folder, the idea of self destruct e-mails is distressing. I don’t know about you, but once that message hits my inbox, it is mine and I want it!
I heard a lot of presentations today on many fascinating technologies, but I was especially interested on those services that allow you to distribute content over the web.
There was emusicblast.com, an online community and digital music distribution site. Artists can upload their music, sell it at the music store and send it to music labels executives. Users can rank the songs, post messages, events, photos and of course buy the
songs.
Viddler is a service that allows you to upload, edit, tag and share video with whomever you chose. You could create a training video or sales presentation, upload it, add comments and then send an e-mail to your clients with the link to the site. No self destruct e-mails please.
Now, even if you don’t care to use a computer, you can still send an e-mail with Celery.com. I don’t get the name, but this is an e-mail by fax service. Using a fax you can send a hand written note or a picture to the Celery site where it is transcribed to e-mail using hand writing recognition software and then transmitted to its destination.
I like this idea, but found the Indian government version more remarkable. According to a recent article in FastMagazine, India has E-post gram, a service that allows people to send e-mails to friends or family members that have never seen a computer, may not even know how to read and live in remote areas with no phone or internet connection. The e-mail is sent to the nearest post office where it is transcribed and hand delivered.
Imagine spam can now reach you even in the farthest corners of the world. A flat
world indeed!
