Last night, I was at Palm's launch party in New York City for the new Palm Centro (thanks Paul) and was intrigued by it. Not simply because it was a new, shiny toy - a $99 smartphone for the "hip set", but because of the possibilities it could have for remote access.
Yes, this blog is still about political technology and how you can use technology to improve your chances of winning. So, why would the introduction of a $99 smartphone help you win?
Consider the fact that most "political operatives" have Blackberries (known as "Crackberries") and their own version of the treo (in 2004, I remember it was the hot thing to be seen chatting on your treo 600 and getting your email). Most of the senior staff have the Blackberry connection, but how about the rest of the staff? At the salaries they are being paid (or not), they were never going to be included in the information flow that existed at a higher level.
The Centro is one of the first entrants in the sub-smartphone market - or better said, the phone that other people (like your recent college grad or local volunteer coordinator) could purchase and get up to speed to be fully connected. The phone is easy to handle, clear and bright screen, and has all of the "kit" that the more expensive 755p treo has, with half the memory, but all of the buzz. It has a hardened shell and two attractive colors (I assume the after-market for phone kit will be available from treocentral).
Is it worth the purchase? That will be entirely up to you. I think it is a rreasonable entrant in the market, though not as sexy as the iPhone or business clean as the treo 755p. But, in terms of general staff use, well worth the $99 a pop.
Full disclosure: I am going to be testing out the Centro in the coming week on my network, after keeping my trusty 650 for the past three years. I will give you more, real-time experience feedback then.
Tags: Palm Centro
]]>
1. Add holidays, moon phases, sporting events, and other public calendars. Click the “+” button next to “Other Calendars” in the Calendars list on the left-hand side of the page. Select the Browse Calendars tab. You can add the holiday calendar of your choice and also add phases of the moon or a Google Doodles graphical calendar. Are you a devoted sports fan? Search on the name of the team and you’ll be able to add all their scheduled games to your calendar. Couch potatoes can add TV show schedules.
2. Customize your view. You’re not limited to just the view options showing in the tabs along the top of the calendar. You can change the tab “Next 4 Days” to something that works better for you like “Next 2 Weeks” or “Next 3 Weeks” on the Settings page under the General tab. That’s where you can also specify date and time format, what day your week starts, whether to show weekends or not, and show weather for your location. Use keyboard shortcut “x” to move to your custom view. I’m partial to “Next 3 Weeks” because that’s about as far in advance as I’m thinking.
5. Add events without even being on the GCal page. Elias Torres has developed a 
9. Or access your calendar from your IM client. 
11. Add To Do lists to your calendar. 
13. Share your free/busy information on your blog. If your email is overrun with back-and-forths about scheduling telecons or face-to-face meetings, you might want to let everyone know up front when you’re available. You don’t have to share all your event details; just go to “Settings” > “Calendars”, click on “Share this calendar” for the calendar with the information you want to share, choose “Share only my free / busy information (hide details),” and save.
15. Add events from GMail. GMail includes some natural language processing that looks for event-related information and if it finds some, it will offer an “Add to calendar” link to the right of the message. Click on the link and you can edit the event information then save. Alternatively, if there’s event information but GMail didn’t catch it, use “Create Event” in the “More actions…” dropdown to launch an event editor popup form, where you can type in event information right as you’re reading it in the email.
17. Add a popup agenda with notifier to your Firefox status bar. The 
I know - been a while since I have written a post on PoliticalWarez - and things have been busy. But wanted to share the love in terms of things that can help the campaign out as you move forward. On Political Gastronomica, I left a post for people to understand how to improve their search engine ranking though do-it-yourself SEO/SEM efforts. Today, from my experiences with Goodnight Burbank, I wanted to help in terms of twitter use.
When Julie Germany sent out an email alerting me to her publication, "Person-to-Person-to-Person: Harnessing the Political Power of Online Social Networks and User-Generated Content", I was happy to speak with her about it - and see if the contributors that be were contributing to the education of the political class. After spending the weekend going through the publication, I must say that there are some pearls of wisdom found with, and then there are some obvious plugs for technology plays that you can accept as advertorial or not. The following provides a bullet-point list of the articles within.
Suddenly, I am shown a high-end smartphone running google Mobile Maps. It has been a while since I was impressed with a simple app, and within five minutes, I had it running the same app on my treo 650.
The Politxt system is absurdly simple - create a campaign that inspires people to enter a message to a "shortcode" (a five digit number that acts like a URL for mobile services) which will trigger a response message to further engage the user. The result: a stream of self-selected supporters who have given their names, emails address and mobile numbers for further communications by the group that can be integrated into any constituent management solution (e.g. getActive, NGP, Convio, Kintera, etcera) or just left as simple CSV files to be read into Excel.
Daniel Lopez, founder of 
Last week, I posted my opinion about Yahoo! Groups and how it still was a leader in the space in terms of group communication platforms. Well, soon after publishing the post, I got an email from one of my google Engineering friends who suggested I take another look at the new google Groups, now offered in beta. I have been on a number of google Groups already, and knew the chief architect of the original build. This version has a lot of changes that definitely improve the service in such a way that it makes it a much more servicable application from the web, unlike Yahoo!'s reskinning of the eGroups interface. And, if you like gmail, my earlier post on google Calendar and understand the power of a wiki, then you will definitely enjoy using google Groups.]]>
One of the most amusing discussions I have been having with people have been on the discussion of social media, which you can read as podcasting, vidcasting, vblogging, videoblogging, audioblogging - whatever. People are doing it any number of ways - using Macs, PCs, simple MP3 recorders, video cameras, Treos, etcera - and, from an outsider's point-of-view, it can seem somewhat daunting. What is RSS? What is an "enclosure"? Can I "blog" it? How do I work it? Do I need a "techie"?
There are a number of solutions out there, including the reliable standby, 
