Two more lightweight web applications to help you manage your life…

Stikkit

This is a “sticky note” application that allows you save to-do lists, create reminders, and lists of your “peeps”.(which can then be exported to your eMail application). Looks promising. Doesn’t quite pass the Five-Minute-Test….but maybe ten?

Sandy

From the same developers, Sandy is an eMail version of the stikkit application. This is currently in beta…I received a login within 24 hours of trying to sign up. Nice 50’s graphics…where is her apron?

Tim Nulty has been the spear-head for our local municipal fiber optic network. He has announced his resignation. My hope is after a well-deserved rest he’ll continue to help other local towns get their own fiber network. Excerpts from his letter:

The BT project has demonstrated the viability and desirability of publicly owned, universal, open-access fiber-to-the-premise telecommunications networks. Such networks are the “electronic public roads” of the future and proving their feasibility is a major contribution to our society. Having established this important principle, I would like to spend the remainder of my working life building other such networks elsewhere in Vermont where they are needed.

The communications scene in Vermont presents various points of interest:

• Verizon is trying to sell all of its dial-up land-lines (voice lines) in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont
• FairPoint communications wants to buy these…via what looks like a very strange financing deal, that among other things, appears to reduce Verizon’s tax obligations by millions of dollars.
• Verizon is buying Rural Cellular, (Unicell) which was the major wireless competitor in our region. We don’t have ATT here…and that means no IPhones (!) So, on the one hand, while Verizon is buying additional wireless capacity, they are attempting to unload their wirelines.

And no…Verizon isn’t installing FOIS in Vermont, (fiber to the home). That’s why Burlington Telecom are the heroes. They sell a triple-play tv, phone, internet connection for $99.00/month.

Digging down into the pile on my desk, I ran across a packet from NCIIA the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance. http://www.nciia.com/. Among other things, they have grants in the amount of $2000-$50,000 to colleges and universities to help improve existing curricular programs or build new progams in invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Next application deadlines are December 3rd, 2007, and May 9, 2008.

They know what they are about…in the first item of their instructions, they say…”Start Early! We require approval from deans and grants administrators.”

Still, December would probably be doable.

Photo by Al Utzig

Welcome to Tech for Non-Profits, the unplugged version of Microdesign Consulting. Part lab-notebook, part brain-extension, it is a repository for new and half-baked ideas that we run across as we provide software and database development, network support, and R&D for a growing list of clients in education, health care and non-profit organizations.

Postings have been a little thin lately as we have stepped up work with one non-profit client, chaired the board of the outreach committee of another, and moved into a business incubator, (which is also a non-profit). All this while attempting to stay on top of running a for-profit consultancy. (I actually was wondering about re-incorporating as a non-profit myself, mostly to be able to apply directly for grants that are restricted to non-profits…but that discussion is long in the future).

Occasional features here include Tech Friday, which may include code(!), our (mostly) annotated VoIP resource guide, Stuff That Works for hardware and software items that have passed the Five Minute Test, and Chron This Week, which is a synopsis of technology articles of interest in the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Topics on grantwriting and fundraising appear as we seem to have one or more grant application in progress most of the time.

Users plead for OneNote for Mac.

Of course, many Mac users say something along the lines of “Except for OneNote, I’d be 100% happy with my Mac, or I’d convert to my Mac and dump those clunky Windows machines.”

So is a port to the Mac likely? I don’t think so, for exactly that reason. OneNote is one of the few “must have” Windows programs that keep people from moving to the Mac (or Linux even). Too bad.

Paul Krugman in the Times nails it.

Sometimes it seems that the only way to make sense of the Bush administration is to imagine that it’s a vast experiment concocted by mad political scientists who want to see what happens if a nation systematically ignores everything we’ve learned over the past few centuries about how to make a modern government work.

Now that Times Select has gone away, everyone can read his Times columns. While I don’t miss Times Select…I had paid the $50.00/year, I’m sure that now we’ll pay for web access to Times columnists by more intrusive animated pop-up ads. This will escalate to the point that the web-based Times will become unreadable in a few months, like so many other news and financial sites.

Another event of interest is the looming presidential veto of the expansion of a health insurance for uninsured U.S. children. Even David Brooks, the Times’ chief apologist for the Republicans, thinks its a good program. So, why, when there are currently three relatively effective US government health plans; Medicare, Medicaid and S-CHIP, are we resisting doing what almost all other western democracies provide as a benefit of citizenship?

In the “Just When You Think It Couldn’t Get Worse” department… I don’t even know how to title this post. I just urge you to read this appalling account of private equity firms buying up nursing homes and then reducing services. At Many Homes More Profit and Less Nursing.

This is part of a series of articles by the Times called “Golden Opportunities” illustrating how older people are getting screwed.

Welcome to Tech for Non-Profits, the unplugged version of Microdesign Consulting. Part lab-notebook, part brain-extension, it is a repository for new and half-baked ideas that we run across as we provide software and database development, network support, and R&D for a growing list of clients in education, health care and non-profit organizations.

Occasional features include Tech Friday, which may include code(!), our (mostly) annotated VoIP resource guide, Stuff That Works for hardware and software items that have passed the Five Minute Test, and Chron This Week, which is a synopsis of technology articles of interest in the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Topics on grantwritng and fundraising appear as we seem to have one or more grant application in progress most of the time.

From this morning’s Washington Post:

Tell me something I don’t already know…we are repeating the same mistakes that we did with cell phone service; multiple technologies fighting it out in the cities, lack of access in the countryside, service that is way too expensive and speeds that are dismal.

TOKYO — Americans invented the Internet, but the Japanese are running away with it.

Broadband service here is eight to 30 times as fast as in the United States — and considerably cheaper. Japan has the world’s fastest Internet connections, delivering more data at a lower cost than anywhere else, recent studies show.

Accelerating broadband speed in this country — as well as in South Korea and much of Europe — is pushing open doors to Internet innovation that are likely to remain closed for years to come in much of the United States.

And why is this the case? The Bush administration always favors companies over consumers and customers, even if consumer-friendly policies would ultimately create a market exponentially larger than what we end up with all the regulation in place which favors (and is written by) the old-line communication companies.

[In Japan…]For just $2 a month, upstart broadband companies were allowed to rent bandwidth on an NTT copper wire connected to a Japanese home. Low rent allowed them to charge low prices to consumers — as little as $22 a month for a DSL connection faster than almost all U.S. broadband services.

In the United States, a similar kind of competitive access to phone company lines was strongly endorsed by Congress in a 1996 telecommunications law. But the federal push fizzled in 2003 and 2004, when the Federal Communications Commission and a federal court ruled that major companies do not have to share phone or fiber lines with competitors. The Bush administration did not appeal the court ruling.

“The Bush administration largely turned its back on the Internet, so we have just drifted downwards,” said Thomas Bleha, a former U.S. diplomat who served in Japan and is writing a history of how that country trumped the United States in broadband.