I must confess, I’m a could-man. These days, I have all the relevant applications and files for my job and my personal life stored in the cloud, easily accessible from my Mac and my Smartphone, always updated to the latest version, always in sync. Last but not least, accessible from everywhere.

Except for the music.

I have over 5K songs on iTunes and my iPod is my music-companion since 2004. I’m also used to connect it to my car stereo hi-fi system, since most of the time I listen to music while driving.

This configuration, unfortunately, suffers of a few downsides:

• my library is mostly made of evergreen songs (I love Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Dire Straits, Rolling Stones and many others…) but I’d like a way to easily discover new bands/singers that I could like
• need to sync to my Mac in case I buy new songs from iTunes. Easy? No. I don’t have time, just remembering to take the iPod out from the car and syncing it could be a challenge…

That said, I tried to explore the opportunity to join Pandora or Spotify. No way. Both services are not available in Italy. A shame.

Fortunately, an italian Twitter follower recommended  GrooveShark, a service similar to the previous ones but available in Italy, too. Plus, they also have an Android, BlackBerry and iPhone client. Looks good, right? No, it is AWESOME.

A nice interface on my browser, very well designed app for my Android smartphone, lots of music, very easy to use. What else could I ask?

Last but not least, the best part of this story has been connecting my Android phone to my car. Straming music, no pauses (thanks to the excellent italian 3G coverage), all inclusive (in my data plan).

Just awesome! What are you waiting for? Get Grooveshark now!

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Cloud Is Nice For Music, But Vital For Video (techcrunch.com)
• Thumbplay Brings Your Music to Your Mobile Phone (appscout.com)
• Data Monday: Pandora (mobile music) (lukew.com)
• Apple to launch cloud-based iTunes service? (venturebeat.com)

Image by denharsh via Flickr

The wonderful theme that is powering this blog and that I’ve been using since early 2009, just got updated to v1.8.

Thesis developers don’t rest one second… They released v1.7 just a few weeks ago and now a major release that makes this theme (better, this CMS – Content Management System) the best available in the market.

What’s new in v1.8?

• ability to upload your custom header directly from the Thesis admin panel
• even more SEO optimizations
• access to Google Fonts – 28 new web fonts now at your fingertips!
• support for the navigation menu builder provided by WP 3.0
• FAVICON uploader (forget your FTP client for updating your favicon…)
• custom loop API – now Thesis gives you even more control over your pages

Do you have a WordPress Blog/Website? Get Thesis now, I can assure you it’s worth it!

I read lots of similar posts and most of them share a common “philosophy”: turn 3G off, turn Wifi Off, screen brightness to 1%, turn GPS off etc..

I’m more aggressive.

Turn. It. Off. Period.

Before starting using the new HTC Desire unit I received, since I’m used to the 48 hours long battery life of my BlackBerry 9700, I made sure to use all the tricks to get as much battery as I could from the Desire.

Thats said, this trick suggested by HTC should make your HTC smartphone’s battery last almost 2x:

To also help with Battery Life you can do these steps exactly: 1) Turn your device ON and Charge the device for 8 hours or more 2) Unplug the device and Turn the phone OFF and charge for 1 hour 3) Unplug the device Turn ON wait 2 minutes and Turn OFF and charge for another hour Your battery life should almost double, we have tested this on our devices and other agents have seen a major difference as well.

I did it before starting using it and now, after 3 hours, the battery indicator is still full. It should be working, hopefully.

Did you try it? Let me know.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Tips to Extending HTC Evo Battery Life (And Brief Rant) [Evo] (gizmodo.com)
• How to Get Better Battery Life with Your Htc Desire (quazen.com)
• HTC Droid Eris Battery Problems, Tips on Saving and Replacements (brighthub.com)
• OLED – Another Microsoft Requirement for Windows Phone 7? (pocketnow.com)

I just received an Android-based HTC Desire unit for testing purposes and my first 24 hours with it make me say “wow!”.

As many of you should know, I’m a BlackBerry man. I love my 9700 and the other time I left it to give a Motorola Droid a try, I felt much better the day I switched back to my faithful BlackBerry.

This time I have to say this Android phone looks ages ahead of the Droid. I didn’t spend much time on it, but I can easily feel the differences already.

First and foremost, the speed. The 1Ghz processor the Desire is equipped with makes a big difference. Everything looks faster and smooth, moving from an app to another is a really a joke. Not to mention internet browsing… with the standard Android browser, pages load crazy fast both under 3G and WiFi coverage.

Well, I have to say that a big difference is made by the OS, too. This unit is equipped with the latest Android 2.2 Froyo, that offers an overall improved speed in all the apps and, in particular, internet browsing. Moreover, HTC did a great job with their “Sense” interface, definitely better in terms of user experience than the “standard” interface.

Another point I complained about with the Droid has been fixed with Froyo. Gmail App is now way more usable and since I use “labels” as the main way to categorize my messages, the fact it now shows “colored” labels makes a big difference, too.

Last but not least, screen and form factor. For the former, no comparison with the Droid. The Amoled touchscreen’s performances are incredibly better than what I experienced with the Droid. For the latter, the Droid was too heavy and it was very difficult for me to operate it with one hand (something I’m used to with the BlackBerry). The Desire, on the contrary, is easily usable with one hand only and the trackpad (not available on the Droid) does the rest.

In conclusion, this is my first question for the Desire I’m going to use in the following weeks: “are you gonna work as a “real” phone, too???”

Stay tuned for the answer

Related articles by Zemanta

• Vodafone’s HTC Desire Getting Android 2.2 Froyo on August 23 (intomobile.com)
• Froyo For Vodafone’s HTC Desire Officially Starting Monday, Rolled Out Over 2 Weeks (phandroid.com)
• TATA DoCoMo unveils HTC Desire in India (intomobile.com)

Today I came accross aninteresting tweet by Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone. He basically invited to “Bing” something and he wrote it uppercase.

Gabe Rivera, Techmeme‘s founder, immediately noticed it, too. And tweeted:

Irrefutable proof that Microsoft will soon acquire Twitter… RT @biz BING IT AND DECIDE.

Does it mean something? Is Microsoft buying Twitter anytime soon?

Maybe it’s just nothing special, but I would keep your eyes open…

Today, I want to tell you an interesting story.

As many of you should know, one of the latest ventures of my company is Twimbow, an innovative web Twitter browser/client. It’s in pre-alpha and thanks to the support of many users, we are shaping up the beta release that will be available soon.

Today, in the effort of finding valuable users to get feedback from, I came accross the tweets by Mark (I don’t want to mention him here since I don’t want to give him free publicity, but you can easily find him…).

Apparently, he was using Twitter to monitor brands and I wanted to get his feedback about a Twimbow feature called, guess what, monitor

Filos: @mark……… have you tried to monitor them through Twimbow? Still alpha, but you should check it out. Can get you an invite

His reply to my tweet was a sequence of tweets that wanted to demonstrate I was a spammer and had to be blocked. The tone of his tweets was really upsetting, while he could have been simply writing: “no, thanks” or “yes, I’ll be happy to give you a feedback” as others did. On the contrary, he defined me “mind blind” and much more, as you can see from his tweets (if you find him).

Who knows me is aware I’m far from being a spammer and I rather use my face directly to engage conversations on Twitter, to get feedbacks about Twimbow, for personal stuff, to share news or in whatever other context. I don’t use automated replies, I don’t send unwanted automated DMs and so on. And I always reply to everyone on Twitter.

But our dear Mark, an apparently “all about himself” type of guy, wanted to share his “deep” knowledge about social media marketing and took me as a bad example not to follow. And he blocked me.

Thanks for the gift, Mark. I now have one less “Social Technologies Expert & Microblogger” to deal with. The bad? I was actually following you!

Unfortunately, Twitter is full of people like this. Low-level former employees of big companies who have been laid-off or “consultants” who give themeselves the title of “experts” or “gurus” to try to get more attention. But at the end of the they, most of them never proved their skills with successful facts and remarkable actions.

My recommendation? Beware of this type of people on Twitter. Twitter must be about interaction, engaging conversations, sharing news and knowledge, listening to your customers (if any).

Here are a few wonderful photos I found while browsing Flickr about this subject. Stunning!

All Rights Reserved (c) Cuba Gallery

All Rights Reserved (c) Ben Heine

All Rights Reserved (c) Job Earth

All Rights Reserved (c) Cuba Gallery

All Rights Reserved (c) Lord V

All Rights Reserved (c) Ben Heine

All Rights Reserved (c) Adam Foster

All Rights Reserved (c) Adam Foster

All Rights Reserved (c) Patrick Smith Photography

All Rights Reserved (c) Katarina Stefanovic

I think that the graph below speaks by itself, right?

It’s pretty clear that doubling the unique visitors in a few months is a big deal, right?

At the same time, you can notice that Techcrunch‘s number of visitors has been frozen in the past year, definitely not a good sign. I’m myself reading it less and less while one my first sources of tech news is slowly becoming TheNextWeb, the new entrant that is slowly getting a big slice of the tech-news pie.

Mashable, instead, is always growing without any pause. No surprises about that and both Mashable and TheNextWeb deserve that.

Do the graphs above mean that Arrington is really focused on selling soon so he’s not putting into the company enough effort to grow the numbers?

The Problem
I wanted to create a stream of all the stuff that I shared online, including (1) photos taken on the go or (2) interesting news found everyday on Google Reader. Then, I wanted this stream to be posted to various social networks, in realtime. At the same time, I didn’t want to use this blog for this purpose.

The Alternatives
After some research, I found that Tumblr and Posterous were the two best alternatives to make that done. While I knew those two services since their launch, I never had the time to really look into them. My only experience with Posterous was in regards of our Twimbow’s blog, but we just needed a quick way to push updates to our users without spending too much time in creating a blog from scratch. On the contrary, I never used Tumblr so far.

The solution

Well, I have to say that none of the alternatives above succeeded in solving my problem completely. While both could easily become my centralized repository for photos shared online and Tumblr could also import my Google Reader Shared Items‘ feed, the latter fails in doing this in realtime since it seems it doesn’t support pubsubhubbub, that is a way to get realtime updates about the news I favorite on Google Reader. The result is that these news get posted all together, something annoying for my Facebook/Twitter friends.

At the same time, I didn’t find an effective way to get my favorite news imported to my Posterous’ stream and auto-posted to my social networks. So, why both could perform the first task, both failed with the second.

The Winner

Despite what I said in the previous point, I ended up sticking with Posterous. You can find my stream here: http://lucafiligheddu.posterous.com.

I found it way lighter than Tumblr and, for sharing photos, the ability to easily do that by email is a winner. Frher om this standpoint, Posterous is just perfect. Moreover, while Tumblr provides a very nice app to share things from my BlackBerry, I found it almost unusable because of its tremendous slowness. Lots of attempts failed because of connection errors and timeouts.

Last but not least, while I clearly understand what Posterous is, Tumblr looks too much for being like Posterous itself and offers few features to compete with WordPress.

Bonus

How did I manage to post my Google Reader shared items to Twitter (at least) in realtime? Well, Google2Tweet does it very well, despite I haven’t found any way to post them to Posterous yet (with an excerpt…).