Here are some great tools, tweaks, hacks, and other cool stuff for your iPhone.

I’ll probably be posting more stuff like this so stay tuned.

If anyone has any good tools that may be useful, feel free to drop a comment with the url(s).
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If you’re aware of how much technology integration is going on on the web 2.0 sphere, you’ve probably heard the term ‘mash up’ more often than not. If you’re a google maps lover you might find GeoCommons a powerful tool for fun and for business alike. It’s a mash up between Google Maps and Heat Mapping technology (shapes and heatmaps) that maybe marketing folks might be interested in to track where they have more of an audience or it could be used visualize demographic data for school projects. The possibilities are endless and who knows what we’ll see coming out of this intelligent mapping toolkit!

A recent article on PBS’s website has raised an interesting scenario about Google’s inevitable fall.

The idea of a company beating Microsoft was in Bill Gates’ mind back in the 1990′s. Gates himself predicted the inevitable rise of a company, yet to be founded, to threaten Microsoft. He had the right idea. But what is going to make Google fall?

Some pundits are suggesting that the 80/20 rule that Google encourages it’s employee’s to adopt could be the catalyst. Google wants it’s talented people to spend 20% of their time on personal projects that might help themselves or others and don’t we all wish we were able to have this opportunity. Well the more Google rejects the ideas that come out of this 20% of time, the more people may feel the need to rebel and get out of the Google umbrella so that they can pursue their entrepreneurial goals and ideas. Perhaps Google is encouraging people with the 20% play time but they may not realize what effect it could have in the long run.

As with other large companies, Google also provides everything to their employees for free, further pushing their employees to work even more than others would. By design each worker is no more than 100 feet from a bathroom or food or drink and it’s all free. You don’t have to leave to get lunch, a snack or whatever. With the extra time, people goof off, bond, brainstorm on the pet projects which Google and others leverage. The only thing Google doesn’t do is provide their technical people with guaranteed sense of satisfaction since 99.75 of the pet projects have been REJECTED by the company.

Consider these issues along with Google’s 4-yr stock vesting policy for employees, and Google could end up with even more dissatisfaction from those people who decided to move on before the vest period. In any high-tech company there is an employee change of attitude that comes with being fully vested. At Microsoft in the 1980s some people wore buttons that said “FYIFV,” which stood for “F**k You I’m Fully Vested.” At companies that have gone public, as Google has, there is often also an outflow of employees around that four-year anniversary. Google has even made it easier for its employees to leave the company by instituting a program in partnership with Morgan Stanley where Google employees can sell their vested, but unexercised stock options.

With hundreds — and soon thousands — of Google employees vested and solvent, we’ll shortly see a dribble, then a river, then a flood of former Google employees with time, money, and experience, and some of them will have the drive to realize the dreams of those thousands of ideas that were rejected by their former company.

After setting up multiple Google Apps domains / mail accounts to use with Firefox’s great tabbing feature, I discovered Firefox was using more memory on my PC (300MB+ out of 2GB RAM). I found one particular blog post from last year on blogspot.

They suggest tweaking the about:config page of Firefox which gives you access to every config property and more in Firefox. So far I haven’t seen a major improvement in memory footprint for Firefox, but I definitely see a speed improvement.

If you try it out and have different results or know of any other ideas, please leave a comment.

Well I’ve finally had enough of dealing with non-web mail based email clients like Outlook. I still like the calendaring features of it but other than that, making sure my email is stable is no trivial task. My friend Vidyut Luther, http://www.linuxpowered.com, has been kind enough to host my email and some domains for a few years and I hate to bother him with requests for new email accounts and so forth.

With the popularity of Google and it’s ever growing number of tools and free services, it seemed time for me to evaluate all of the new Google Apps suite that is now being offered. Without reading Google’s marketing blurbs, in a gist, Google Apps is a suite of simple, powerful communication and collaboration tools for your organization without the usual hassle and cost to maintain.

I was concerned about a few things for the various domains/accounts that I needed to migrate:

• Easy to migrate and administer email accounts and mail domains
• Easy to import old mail
• Reliable access to my webmail
• Better spam protection / filtering

If you follow Google Apps setup instructions most of the above concerns are pretty easy, although the one remaining item “Easy to import old mail” was a mystery to me until today.

This is an excerpt from another gmail import tool site on how to import mail from your existing pop3-enabled mail server:

UPDATE 12/29/06: If your mail is stored on a POP3 server, Google has an option that allows you to directly import that mail into GMail. Inside your GMail account, click the “Settings” option, choose “Accounts”, and then complete the “Add another mail account” information to have GMail fetch your mail from a remote POP3 server.

If you have multiple email accounts and/or Google Apps domains, I suggest you immediately install the Gmail Manager. It will alert you when you get new mail for any of your accounts. It’s unobtrusive and doesn’t clog up your task bar (XP).

Find out more and install Gmail Manager Firefox add-on now