Plaxo Mobile Plus is the #1 download

on Verizon’s Get it Now Business Tools section anyways

If you’ve downloaded it and have tried it out, contact me and let me know how it’s going for you. We’re the #3 download overall:

More blog conferences

I’m scheduled to be on another blog related conference panel at the beginning of November. Bulldog Reporter is putting on a seminar entitled “Advanced PR Technology in Practice” and I’m on the “Blogs 2.0: The Next Generation” panel. Here’s some info about the conference:

Advanced PR Technology in Practice

November 3 · New York City · The Yale Club
November 10 · San Francisco · Marines’ Memorial Club

An intensive One-Day Update on How to Exploit the State of the Art for Increased Visibility, Greater ROI and Crisis Management

If you only attend one PR technology event this year, make it this one. You’ll bring yourself absolutely up to date on where PR technology stands today, on how to put it to use safely and cost-effectively, and on what new advances you can expect to see over the coming year. Best of all, you’ll learn it all from the nation’s most experienced practitioners of these techniques. They’ll candidly share their war stories, successes, and mistakes—so you can move forward more confidently. In just eight intensive hours, you’ll discover the most powerful techniques for increasing your visibility, improving your ROI, and managing the online conversation.

I think you can get $200 off if you mention my name when you register If you’re in the audience, please do come up and say hi after the panel!

Plaxo now syncs with mobile phones (at least on Verizon)

Yesterday we launched Plaxo Mobile Plus on our first mobile carrier – Verizon. If you have a Verizon phone, go to “Get It Now” -> “Get Going” -> “Buisness/Tools” and try out Plaxo Mobile Plus (it should be available on most phones). Plaxo Mobile Plus actually provides full sync between your phone and Plaxo, which means you can now connect your mobile phone up to Outlook, Outlook Express, Mac, Thunderbird, IE, Yahoo, and AIM – and you can also get access to your info on Plaxo Online too. Wow, that’s a lot of sync endpoints

After you download it, you’ll be greeted with a nice splash screen:

And here’s the app in action:

There are quite a number of features in there including:

• Select which contacts you want to sync to your phone’s native address book
• See any contact’s full contact details (including addresses, e-mail addresses, etc.)
• Getting a map of a contact’s address
• Sending an e-mail or SMS to the contact

Ack, too bad I’m on Cingular. I’ll just have to wait until we roll out for our next carrier

and if you try out Plaxo Mobile Plus, please do drop me a line and let me know what you think!

Another blog conference speaking engagement

I gave a talk at Advanced Learning Institute’s blogging and podcasting training seminar earlier today. Personally, I wasn’t sure how the event would turn out (I’d never heard of A.L.I. until this event), but so far the conference has been pretty good. I’ve finally gotten a chance to meet Chris Barger from IBM face to face (we e-mailed back and forth when we both released our blogging policies publicly early last year) and it’s also been a good opportunity to chat with people from a wide variety of companies who are thinking about getting into blogging.

Here’s a weak cameraphone shot of the scene

For people who attended the talk, I mentioned some links which I’ll throw up here for you:

Blog search engines

• Technorati (http://technorati.com)
• BlogPulse (http://blogpulse.com)
• Google Blog Search (http://google.com/blogsearch)
• Feedster (http://www.feedster.com)
• PubSub (http://www.pubsub.com)

Blog aggregators

• Bloglines – online blog aggregator
• NewsGator/NetNewsWire/FeedDemon – online & desktop aggregator (costs money)
• RSS Bandit – free .NET desktop RSS aggregator
• Rojo – another web based aggregator

Plaxo Blog Policy
My official post about getting fired (check out the comments!)

And finally, here’s a PDF of the notes that were handed out. Of course, since Shel and Chris pretty much covered a lot of this stuff before my presentation, we didn’t really follow these notes. Feel free to contact me if you want to discuss anything in particular!

Pumpkin launcher and straw maze

This past weekend, Rose and I went with a bunch of people from small group to the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival. As with any such event, there were of course a ton of people, lotsa traffic, and parking was a headache… soooo the Pumpkin Festival itself wasn’t so interesting. BUT, on our way home, we stopped by a massive straw maze and saw a sign for a pumpkin launcher and we knew we had to go check it out.

At first, we thought it would be a Lord of the Rings style catapult pumpkin launcher, so we were slightly disappointed when we just saw a large slingshot. But then we observed a few pumpkins being launched and we knew we had to try it. We bought some launching pumpkins…

And let ‘em fly!

Those pumpkins actually fly pretty far!

So after firing off a few pumpkins, we went to the straw maze. It was $5 / person ($18 for 4) and the lady at the door said it would take 30 minutes, so we figured it’d probably take 10. But since we were there, we decided to go in and run around.

All told, it took us about 45 minutes to get through the thing. It was much larger than we anticipated and it was actually a ton of fun. Dan, being an search engine engineer at A9, suggested a depth-first search algorithm. Clearly the people who constructed the maze were a bit smarter than that algorithm because it pretty much got us completely lost in less than 5 minutes. Eventually, we did make it out though (although we probably ran into every dead end in the entire maze).

Verdict: highly recommended!

Yay! I can play with Legos again!

For my birthday yesterday, Rose got me a Lego Mindstorms set

For those who don’t know, Lego Mindstorms is a Lego set that has a module that hooks up to electronic servo motors and can be programmed from your computer. Basically, it’s programmable motorized Legos.

While I was growing up, I’d always played with Legos. I had multiple large plastic bins filled with various pieces from different Lego sets all mixed together. Recently, I’d noticed that Lego has been coming out with some new sets that seem to be targetting my demographic – the childhood Lego fanatic, now working professional with plenty of expendable income

Browsing around Lego’s Mindstorms site a little bit, it looks like there’s tons of stuff you can do with the set and they’ve got some pretty active user forums too. Completely brilliant play on Lego’s part.

Annoy some Plaxo employees for a change :D

If you haven’t heard yet, we recently hit 15 million users here at Plaxo

We typically have Joseph’s Nabaztag announce our user count every day and so on the day it announced we had crested 15 million it was pretty exciting. We posted a blog entry about it but the best part is we also pushed a page that allows anyone to send us a message via the Nabaztag!

So, for all those out there who’ve been annoyed by Plaxo e-mails in the past, here’s your chance to turn the tables! We’ve got the Nabaztag in the middle of the office and anything you tell it to say, it will announce to us in realtime

Happy Nabaztagging!

What the inside of a trailer tire looks like

Rose moved from Seattle down here to the Bay Area last weekend and I flew up to drive down with her. We rented a 16′ Penske truck and a tow dolly to move her stuff and her car. (A tow dolly is a half trailer type thing that hangs off the back of the truck which you put a car’s front wheels onto and it allows you to tow the car behind the truck.)

So we loaded up Rose’s stuff and attached her car to the back of the truck and started off to California last, last Friday (9/22). We were a bit weary of the tow dolly at first (we kept wondering if the car was still back there), but it seemed to be OK after the first few stops so we stopped worrying about it…

10 hours into the drive, Rose is driving the truck through Northern California and I’m asleep in the passenger seat when all of a sudden she wakes me up. “Mark! People keep driving by, flashing their lights, honking their horns, and pointing at the truck!”

We look back there and there’s flames and sparks shooting out the back of the truck. Uh oh. We pull over and find this:

Niiice. What you’re looking at is what was left of the tow dolly tire. It must’ve blown on the freeway, at which point with the weight of Rose’s car pushing down on it, it burst into flames and was literally shredded. Fortunately, Rose’s car was still attached to the tow dolly (although barely) and there was no noticeable damage to her car.

Worst part of the ordeal was that it took over 2 hours for Penske to send a repair guy to replace the tire. Argh >:O

Anyways, I didn’t really know that’s what a tire looked like on the inside. Here’s a closeup of the insides:

Best part: I ask the tire repair guy how this could’ve happened. He shrugs and says “you never know with these trailer tires. They just blow like this all the time.”