Google announced earlier this year that they would be adding support for presentations to their existing Google Docs suite of word processing and spreadsheets. Last night, they delivered on their promise as Google Docs now handles presentations.

Presentations — the like the existing documents and spreadsheets — are accessible from any location as they are stored online. Additionally, the same Google Docs collaboration capability is built-in and changes to presentations can be seen in real time.

When you start a brand new presentation there are a number of themes you can select from, otherwise you can always import an existing presentation and edit that as well. Perhaps the coolest feature, though, is the ability to walk your remote audience through your presentation in real time. By clicking a link to follow along, all parties will be able to chat about the presentation collectively.

It’s great to see Google adding to their office suite and creating some more competition for Microsoft. By no means will this ever become a replacement for PowerPoint, especially in the corporate setting, but for personal use at home Google’s suite is starting to make a name for itself as a free alternative to Microsoft Office and its massive price tag.

To check out Google Presentations and the rest of the Google Doc applications, simply browse to docs.google.com.

Yesterday I received an invitation to join Dopplr, an online service for habitual travelers. Dopplr allows you to share your upcoming travel plans with friends or fellow travelers within your network. You can also leave notes about a city that your friends can see, for example where to go out for sushi or to catch a live band. Additionally, when you have grown a network, it will remind you which of your friends live in the cities you’re planning to visit. Members can use the service from their personal computers or mobile phones.

According to Dopplr, membership is geared toward people who “travel more than five times per year and have friends who do as well.”

My initial observation is that Dopplr definitely has some potential. Given my hectic weekly traveling schedule for work this is a site I could get some quality use out of were the membership to substantially grow. A few days ago they received some funding from investors, so hopefully they can spawn this into a nice social-travel site. You can see some of the potential with this site in the mashups that have been made for Facebook and Google Earth.

The site says I have “unlimited invitations to Dopplr,” so if anyone is interested in checking it out for themselves leave a comment and I’ll shoot you over an invite. In the meantime, here are some Dopplr screen shots for your enjoyment:

1) Home Screen (Not Logged In)

2) Home Screen First Login

3) Account Management

4) Add Trip

5) Home Screen with Trips

6) Text Messaging Setup

7) Journal

8 ) Invite

9) Search

10) City View - Austin, Texas

11) Avatar Upload

12) Home Screen with Avatar

Ever been out on the town and had to go to the bathroom badly? How about being out on the town and having to go very badly? And what about being out on the town and having to go very badly. If you answered yes to one or more of these questions then smile, because going to the bathroom in public just got a whole lot easier.

MizPee is a new service from Yojo Mobile that will find the closest and cleanest toilet for you. And not only that, but it will also provide you with reading material once you get there, for those number 2s that should really be 3s.

There are two ways to use MizPee. The first way is to navigate to www.mizpee.com from your mobile browser. Once there, click on “Find Toilet,” then input your location and click find to browse the results. A second way is via text message. Simply send your city and state (ex: “New York, NY”) to 415-350-2290.

Outside of the humor department I really don’t see much of a use for this, but it will certainly be fun to play with. I am going to have to try it some time to see what kind of reading material I am provided. If it’s something like the Wall Street Journal or New York Times, I just might actually use this thing.

It doesn’t matter who your carrier is, unlocking your cell phone can be a huge pain. Call your carrier’s customer service department and ask them about unlocking if you don’t believe me. Why do I need to unlock my phone you ask? Well, you don’t need to, but there are a few reasons why you might like to. First, unlocking your cell phone allows for it to be used on different carrier networks. For example, you could unlock a Cingular phone and use it on T-Mobile’s network. The only thing to keep in mind with using phones across different network is that GSM and CDMA do not mix together. Secondly, a phone that is application unlocked allows you to install basically whatever you want on it, making it essentially as customizable as you want.

Before we get into how to unlock your T-Mobile Dash, I want to note that there are two types of locks on a cell phone: SIM and CID. The SIM lock is what marries the phone to a specific service provider, and as mentioned above removing this will allow you to use it on multiple carriers. The CID lock is what ties the phone to a specific OS and software, and as I just said removing this will allow you to install whatever you want.

OK now that we know what we’re doing and why we want to do it, let us proceed.

Unlocking your T-Mobile Dash is very easy but not free.

1. Go to http://www.imei-check.co.uk/dashunlock.php

2. Enter your IMEI into the form and hit continue. To find your IMEI number just dial *#06# on your Dash.

3. Complete the necessary PayPal form — comes out to around $40.

4. Save the DASHv2Unlock Program to your computer — downloadable from the Web site in Step 1 .

5. Go into your email account on file with PayPal and save the UNL file that matches your IMEI to your computer.

6. Turn on the Dash and establish an ActiveSync connection.

7. Extract and run the DASHv2Unlock program from Step 4.

8. Supply the DASHv2Unlock program with the UNL file from Step 5.

9. That’s it, just wait until the program finishes and your phone reboots.

Today I received my invitation to sign up for Reinvigorate, an up and coming web analytics solution that has been well received from many beta testers in the blogosphere. Now it’s my turn to become one of them.

I received an email with a special URL that brought me to a unique registration page. At the registration page I had to give the usual information for any analytics site: username, password, email, URL, site name, you get the idea. After completing that form I was brought to the accounts page where you can view all of your accounts, add a new site or group, or view/edit your details. Every site you are tracking is listed at the bottom and you have the option to view reports, edit preferences, delete or as in this case install the tracking code.

There are three installation options: standard, WordPress and Drupal (standard can be used for WordPress or Drupal if preferred). I chose the Wordpress option which involved downloading a plugin, uploaidng to /wp-content/plugins, activating from the plugins section of the admin panel, and configuring a custom tracking string within the plugin settings. For those who have installed Akismet, the process is very similar.

Once we finish implementing the tracking code we are good to go and you can begin viewing reports (obviously you need to wait for data to start coming in). One thing I did notice — and this is not official just through my observations — is that tracking seems to be real-time. In the course of taking some screen shots I saw the numbers start to crawl up slowly; so that is a huge plus. Here is the main reports screen:

I haven’t included screen shots of other sections yet as there wasn’t really any data to work with after two minutes of having this thing installed. However, metrics you can view on other tabs are as follows:

Traffic - Hourly, Daily, Monthly, Yearly, Hourly Distributions
Visitor Detail - Browsers, Platform, Screen, User-Agen, Timezone, Geolocation, Language & Region, .NET
Session - Visitors, Activity, Detailed Activity, Active Pages, Visit Duration, Visit Duration (Page), Visit Depth
Site & Path - Popular Paths, Popular Pages, Entry Pages, Exit Pages
Search & Referrer - Referrers, Top Referrers, Referred Visitors, Referred Pages, Referred Searches, Keywords

Anything ground-breaking or revolutionary at first peek, not exactly. But certainly at the front of the pack with the others in terms of what metrics are offered — especially given the price (free). Where Reinvigorate really separates itself apart from the rest of the pack is with UI and usability. What good is a stats program if it cannot portray the numbers to the user in a format that is understandable and actionable.

I look forward to seeing the real power of Reinvigorate unfold as it collects more data moving forward. If you’re interested in exploring Reinvigorate for yourself you can apply for a beta testing account by going to their home page and clicking on the “Beta Registration” link (I would post the link but the form is only accessible via AJAX drop down). Cheers!

Yesterday Google launched a new service into Google Labs called Google Voice Local Search, aka GOOG-411. Google describes the service as an “experimental service to make local-business search accessible over the phone.”

To use the service is very easy, simply dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-4664-411) from your phone. Best of all it’s absolutely free, no more paying $2+ for 411 calls through your mobile service provider. From GOOG-411 one can search for a local business by name or category, get connected to the business (free of charge), and get details by SMS by saying “text message.” The system is completely voice recognition and there are no human operators.

Carin and I just tested this out and I must say it’s very easy and very efficient. We dialed 1-800-GOOG-411 and an operator asked for city and state. She said “Paramus, New Jersey” and the system recognized it immediately. Then it asked for what location we wanted, and Carin said “Nordstrom.” After a split second it said it had found two locations matching our criteria. It said the first one, Nordstrom at Garden State Plaza and then said say “one” for more information about this listing. Carin said one it gave a detailed description of the location including address of phone number. I should mention you don’t have to listen to the details, you can have it immediately connect you to the location without hearing more information. After we heard the additional details it said “say text message” to receive more information to your phone. Carin said “text message” and it said message sent and began connecting us to the location. About 1.5 seconds after we hung up she received the text message.

Wonderful feature Google has going here. The system itself from a technical standpoint was flawless and everything worked without hitch. The results it returned too, were perfect. This is definitely the future of where mobile service is heading and it’s no surprise to see Google leading the pack. Hats off to you again Googlers!

I finally had a program freeze up on me just now; 6 days after getting my Macbook. At first I wasn’t sure what to do, I mean as a primarily Windows user up until this point I am used to hitting ctrl-alt-del and loading the task manager, selecting a task to delete, and waiting for Windows to actually carry out my request (which can take several minutes). Or in Linux am I used to loading up a terminal window and typing ‘top’ and selecting a pid (process id) to kill.

My first instinct, knowing that Mac OS X is fundamentally a Unix OS, was to load the terminal and try the same technique as on Linux. This didn’t work, however, as I later found out that this method only works on older versions of Mac OS X, before 10.3 (mine is 10.4.9).

The solution: a program called “Activity Monitor” found in Applications > Utilities. Using the Activity Monitor was very straightforward and efficient. Upon loading, it showed all of my current processes and highlighted in red was Safari with a “not responding” message. I simply clicked on the Safari process and selected the “Force Quit” button and the program was removed from my screen immediately. Quick, easy, safe, like everything else on my Macbook.

What caused Safari to freeze up you ask? Trying to make a new Yahoo Pipe. Go figure, my Google applications have yet to even hiccup.

I came across a site called Freelance Tipster that calculates your hourly rate, or rather, what you really deserve to be making per hour. It’s a short questionnaire (5-10 minutes) that asks a series of questions in regards to business type, annual salary, billable hours, overhead and profit. Then, it uses whatever formula is programmed into it and mixes and matches accordingly to come up with your hourly rate.

I’m not sure how reliable this little tool is, obviously its nothing official but it’s certainly fun to play around with and dream, especially since it told me my hourly rate is $102.85 with an annual salary of $207364.

Beginning tomorrow, February 17th, FeedBurner members like myself will finally be able to see true subscription numbers from Google. The Google Reader team announced today that their crawler is now counting the number of Google users subscribed to a feed. This number will include subscribers from Google Reader itself as well as subscribers from Google’s Personalized Homepage, with the potential to include other Google products in the future. Up until this point, Google has only reported 1 subscriber, whether you had actually had 1 or 1,000 Google subscribers.

All I have to say about this is that its about time. I know for a fact that most of my subscribers (friends and co-workers at this point) use Google, either Reader of Personalized Homepage, so I am excited to see some accurately reported subscriber figures. Maybe I’ll even post them, provided they’re not too embarrassing.

I mentioned in comments of my introductory post about Yahoo Pipes that I would be creating a few of them to better illustrate some of the functionality that is possible. If you recall, my first Yahoo Pipe was a visualization of this blog in Flickr photos, specifically the recent entries in my RSS feed.

Today I have created another Yahoo Pipe to highlight a different kind of functionality. This would is a bit simpler to create than the last entry, yet it is just as useful if not more so. The Yahoo Pipe I have created is called Jon Holato in German. As you’re certainly aware, the internet is a global market with a global audience, and not everyone in the world speaks English. Today I’ll be showing you how to syndicate your site in German through Yahoo Pipes, for the benefit of all our friends in Germany. For the record I do not speak an inkling of German so everything you will see is straight from Yahoo Pipes.

This pipe is very simple as there are only two necessary steps to achieve of goal of syndicating in German. Step 1 is pulling in the data source that we want to turn into German. To accomplish this we simply need to use a Fetch pipe where we will copy and paste the link to our RSS feed. The pipe we’re using for step 2 is just the Babelfish operator, where we select a “from and to languages,” in this case I selected “English to German.” Once these two pipes are made just connect the Fetch to Babelfish and then connect Babelfish to Pipe Output and you’re done. If you’ve done this correctly your pipe should look as follows:

If this is how yours looks go ahead and run the pipe and check out your RSS feed in German.

Now you are syndicating in another language and are able to reach millions of potential customers. Recall that “Subscribe” drop down menu on the right-hand side of this output page.