Results tagged “sms”

From the tallest skyscraper in the City of Brotherly Love to Canadian tourism copywriting brilliance, here's what you should know from our -ist cities: This week, Phillyist took a gleeful listen to the White Stripes' exciting new release, watched in awe as their new tallest skyscraper was finally completed, found a cheaper way to get to Gothamist, invented a tasty new dessert, and brought back their Craigslist Round-Up feature with a bang. Bostonist watches...

On the brink of the Summer music scene, two weeks from EarthFest 2007 music doesn’t stop in Boston. Good shows are still to be had on the cheap before the summer festival season is truly upon us. Take a gander at this week's picks and keep on rocking. Wednesday 5/16 The Blow With the release of their latest record, Paper Television, Portland, Oregon's The Blow have finally hit their mark. Earlier recordings were scattered...

Text messages aren't just our favorite way to vote Sanjaya off of American Idol, they're also the quickest way to get in touch, no matter where we are. The mobile is always close at hand (and usually in the pocket) if we're at a concert, in class, or even in the cube toiling away on our TPS reports a text message won't likely go ignored for long. A number of US colleges and universities have...

Not all technology startups are out for big money. Tourfilter began as an idea to develop a tool so the founder, Chris Marstall, so he wouldn't miss his favorite bands when they were in town. Unlike some of the other sites like Pollstar or Tourb.us, Tourfilter doesn't track bands from their tour calendars but off of the venues in a specific area. Bostonist has been on board from early on, it's almost a year old (turning 1 on April 1), and the site has seen a fair amount of media attention from the likes of the Boston Globe, Metro, and recently both Wired and Rolling Stone. Tonight the site takes center stage at River Gods in Cambridge where Marstall will DJ the evening using all bands tracked in Tourfilter.

Deval Patrick has something on other politicians. He admits mistakes. That's the good news lead in to the story. The bad news is that he makes mistakes. Stupid mistakes. And keeps making them. A couple of weeks ago, on the eve of the swelling of caddy-gate and the great drape fiasco, the Governor made a phone call on behalf of the company he'd resigned from during the campaign as to eliminate conflict of interest. He took off his Governor hat, picked up the phone, and placed a call to Citigroup on behalf of Ameriquest Mortgage. The call to Robert Rubin, a top executive at Citigroup, was made to ask for the company's support of an urgent request from Ameriquest. At the time Patrick didn't think that he was doing anything wrong in making the phone call – but has since changed his tone, allowing the media to once again use the phrase well on it's way to defining the first few months of the new Massachusetts executive branch: mea culpa.

Patrick, a former assistant attorney general, pointed out that he had worked with Rubin in the Clinton administration and that the conversation with Citigroup's executive lasted "at most a couple of minutes."

The call was short – only a couple of minutes, that's got to count for something. Phone calls last only seconds in a lifetime. New drapes, however, are there for the term. The length of the call doesn't really have any bearing on the ethics of the actions – it wouldn't really have been any better if Patrick just sent an SMS. "Rubin – it's me Deval, the Governor of Massachusetts we used to work for Slick Willy together. Could u swing some $ to Ameriquest – they need it. Thx." The real issue is that Citigroup is subject to regulation from the state, directly and through some quasi public agencies which Patrick oversees. If the administration is to live up to the mandate on which they were voted into office with it would behoove them to start focusing on policy and quit making blunders tangential to leadership.

Web 2.0 has been established as a way of life for many users of the vast network of tubes internets. From social networking sites, wikis, to tools of collaborative authoring, the web has become a different beast than it once was. Perhaps a better web than it once was. Personal relationships in that thing called "real life" or unwired relationships are touched by email, MySpace, Flickr, instant messaging, among others. So what happens when you're crossed by a lover? You get dumped, or need to dump someone? Or the break-up has happened and you need to implement a necessary no-contact period?

Tuesday, 1/23

Bostonist is more familiar with Kramer filling in for MovieFone service on Seinfeld than we are with the service itself. The line "Why don't you just tell me the movie you'd like to see?" in Kramer's computer voice is indelible. But today some bots took over our Instant Messenger client. We've never been able to get all our friends together on one service so we're running GAIM. It's open source and runs our AIM, MSN, GoogleTalk, and our nerdy ICQ client (for which we have a really low number) all in one package. We're happy to say it operates with out the pesky 'TravelZoo' ads that popped new windows with a simple mouse over. We thought we had escaped the grip of AOL service muscling itself onto our desktop, but today, we were proven wrong. AOL added ShoppingBuddy and MoveFone to our buddy list tagged 'AOL Bots'. The services aren't new, AOL has ten of them in stock. Luckily we're free to tell them who's our friend and who isn't. Call us a sell-out but we may keep MovieFone around for a little while, movie times are only an instant message away. Tell the Bot your zip and desired movie and pow! Movie times on your screen. This is good until we can figure out this whole Google SMS thing.