Saturday, July 2, 2011

Taking Friday for a Spin

I recently received a private Alpha invite to try out Friday, an Android application made by Dexetra, http://goo.gl/42auo .  Dexetra is a private company located in Cochin, India and primarily focus on smartphone platforms such as Andriod, iPhone, Symbian and Blackberry. 

Friday http://goo.gl/2r0RR is a logger for your activity with your phone.  It basically logs places your go, the calls you make, the chats / SMS messages you make, pictures and locations you take, etc.  Overtime it becomes a journal of your activities and allows you to recall events such as what did I do in Denver.  To do this you have to give Friday access to everything on your phone which is a bit scary but required to provide you detailed analytics of your daily patterns.

Two things I find that are fairly interesting to me, although not very useful are:
  • Hourly Profiles
  • Daily Trivia facts

The hourly Profiles basically shows how many calls, sms, mails messages, places, and lists over a 24 hour period.  You can see when you get the highest call volume or receive the most emails daily.  It is interesting to see over a daily period when you have spikes in activities.  The question is how can I sue this information to have a  more balance profile.  


The daily trivia facts is just kind of fun.  Facts like that I have the highest emails on Monday and the lowest on Tuesday or that the majority of calls from X are never answered.  BTW I know I never answer those calls.  It’s just fun facts about your daily habits.

Since I just started with Friday my plan is to have it monitor my work life over the next month and then see if I find utility in using it.  So more to come.

QR Codes - Getting Started

I’ve been playing around with QR codes and readers lately.  You see QR codes popping up all over the place these days, especially within magazine advertisements and now on business cards.  Generally QR codes are used to provide more information about a specific product, service, event, or person.

I’ve looked at the following readers/scanners for my Android Nexus S phone:
QuickMark QR Code Reader: http://goo.gl/auE4A
i-nigma Barcode Scanner: http://goo.gl/8L1F3
MobiScan QR: http://goo.gl/lUUxE

I’ve settled on using QuickMark QR Code Reader as my go to app.  This isn’t a dig on the other apps, they all have really high and good reviews within the android market place, but I went this way primarily due to the cost (free), functionality of the app, an extension that is available for my Chrome browser, and the integration of business card QR codes with my android contacts.

It does require that you create an account and log into both the browser extension as well as the Android app but that is the bulk of the setup required.  The only drawback that I see is the manual sync that is required to sync from the handset to the browser; but that isn’t a big deal.

Try it out on the below: