One of my early complaints with the first generation iPhone, which remains to this day, was the inability to send my “card” to another iPhone or smartphone user. Just days before the purchase of the Apple phone, I was able to transmit my contact card to any other Windows Mobile or Symbian user via Bluetooth or even Infrared. So why wasn’t this greatest phone ever allowing me this same convenience? Well, with no IR port and a severely retarded Bluetooth stack, it just wasn’t going to happen. What a shame and yet another ding against the Enterprise user by Apple.

Tapulous, a group of guys in Palo Alto (home to Apple CEO Steve Jobs), have thought that iPhones should be able to share contacts. Not just your contact but any of your contacts. The makers of the widely popular Twitter application for the iPhone, Twinkle, will be releasing a new application called friendBook. In its third application for the iPhone (the other the popular game Tap Tap), Tapulous brings a more powerful contacts manager to the iPhone. Not only will one be able to trade contacts, but better manager them right on the iPhone away from the connected computer. Easily find duplicates, merge contacts, and even dial a member of your virtual black book by a picture of the person, friendBook is surely to be a hit once on the App Store.

There is no immediate release date or pricing details for friendBook but rumor has it that the application has already been submitted to Apple and is merely awaiting approval. So look for it through the week and download it quickly! Who knows, Apple may deem this “bad” and remove it like it did Netshare.

The Internet is a great thing and so are Macs. Together, the “i” in iTunes and iPhoto can now really take advantage of that Internet with giving you access to your photos, music, and files (the iMac part) on your Mac from any other computer in the world.

With the new beta of Share, you’ll be able to create a secure user account (or more) that gives specified access to certain items or all of them as you deem worthy. This means, when you go to a friends house and say, “Hey, have you ever heard that song about the balloons by They Might Be Giants?” and when your buddy says, “No,” you’ll be able to log onto your Mac and play “Where Do They Make Balloons” by those crazy guys right there from your iTunes collection.

Showing off your weekend at Bernie’s is a piece of cake as well as is grabbing that Word doc you forgot to put on your thumb drive before coming over for the BBQ now with Share!

Now Share is in beta, so things may not work as planned (no, your Mac won’t blow up,) so give it a try. If you like it, then get in on the 50% price reduction during the beta stage or pay $19.99 when it goes gold.

Spymac announced yesterday that it has sent out it’s first wave of checks to users who have posted on their site, Leapfrog 2.0, the most popular content. Users receive a cash award for having the most popular music, videos, and pictures uploaded onto the website. Winners are chosen using two criterion: 1) most revenue collected from that users uploaded content and 2) the popularity of that content. Spymac is sharing the money it earns from the website with the people who helped earn that money, not a bad deal!

“Our unique revenue sharing model has proven to be a hit with uploaders, we’ve already sent out thousands and we’re now getting ready to pay out the large monthly jackpot to January’s top contributors” said Spymac’s CEO Holger Ehlis.

With Spymac, users have unlimited storage space for whatever they wish to post, and several useful tools they can use to promote their uploaded items. Users also have the ability to chat with other people and network to share their content around the globe. There are versions of Spymac available to 95% of the online population in 18 different languages. This gives pretty much anyone and everyone the chance to win large daily and monthly Jackpots.

“Last week, we were getting more than 500 uploads a day, and that number has quickly climbed to more than 1,000 uploads from around the world every 24 hours — about a new upload every minute of the day…Already in the first month, we have individuals making enough money that they can literally quit their day-job and spend all day creating videos and uploading to Spymac,” joked Ehlis. “We are paying out between $3,000 to $5,000 a day.”

ShoZu is a free service for your phone that makes it incredibly easy to send and receive photos, videos and music while you’re on the move. ShoZu is transforming the way that people use their mobile phones — from better photo messaging and automatic multimedia content delivery to groundbreaking mobile advertising that is non-intrusive to the user. ShoZu now has:

• Mainstream appeal, with support for 40 U.S. handsets (including high-profile models such as the Moto Q, Samsung Blackjack and T-Mobile Dash) and 117 worldwide.
• Innovative mobile advertising strategies that enable advertisers to reach mobile consumers without random push advertising to the phone.

Check out ShoZu for your phone. It’s free.

One thing all Mac users have had to come to accept is that we live in a Windows world. Because of it, file sharing was a major sticky point for OS X when it first appeared and it tried to answer this problem with a UNIX technology called SMB. SMB helps emulate Window shares for UNIX operating systems. Since OS X is based on BSD, an UNIX variant, SMB was a no brainer to implement. Well, not quite a no brainer. There were problems early on and Apple has done a pretty good job of fixing the problems but many still linger.

The great folks at Objective Development have graciously shared a little program, called Sharity, it made for itself. Their problem was a bit different as Obdev’s team wished to integrate more seamlessly with Windows from UNIX clients such as Nextstp/Openstep and then later with later, “SGI/IRIX, Sun/Solaris, (and) HP-UX”. It just happens that this would be an easy port to the Mac.

Using a more robust CIFS (Common Internet File System) client than Apple, Obdev is able to handle many of OS Xs short-comings. My main beef with how Apple handles Windows shares is that I am always losing my connections to them. Reboots is the most frequent place I am forced to re-establish the share and waking up my Mac from sleeping is another place this occurs. But with Sharity, I don’t have this issue, they’re always there! In fact, browsing directories and shares is way easier than with Apple’s solution. It’s how things should have been from the get go. Read the rest of this entry »