Posted by Matt Singley on March 30, 2007 | 
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I’ve recently signed up with Spin-my-blog from SpinVox. & I think it’s a fabulous idea. I can call a specific No. anytime I want from my cell phone or another phone leave a voice message & it converts all to a blog text how sweet is that?
Voice-to-Screen messaging – powered by SpinVox
Posted by Matt Singley on March 28, 2007 | 5 Comments to Read
I just watched a 6 minute and 6 second video over at glumbert.com that is effectively a PowerPoint presentation with music. I rarely watch online videos that are over 2-3 minutes…especially one this basic. This…boring? Who has time?
This one has no bells, no whistles…just facts. Sobering facts. I watched it twice. I think after I post this I’ll watch it one more time, just so I have something to really think about as I drift off to sleep.
Posted by Matt Singley on March 12, 2007 | Read the First Comment
Thanks to those of you that commented in the previous SpinVox post. What I find terribly interesting is that traffic spiked big time for the post (thanks to Technorati and Google Blog Search), but the lurkers didn’t leave comments. Weird. I had many people contact me directly saying something like, "Free? What’s the catch?" There is no catch folks…it’s a free offer for SpinVox and the following people’s lives will be much better off because of it. So…without further delay, our big winners:
Congrats to you! You should receive an email from me shortly detailing how to sign up for your free (no strings attached) SpinVox account. Wahoo!
Posted by Matt Singley on March 9, 2007 | 23 Comments to Read
At the end of January I reported on a new service that I signed up for called SpinVox. The summary is this: a service that converts your voicemail into email or text messaging. My personal conclusion: one of the greatest productivity tools ever! I love this service! When people call me while I am in a meeting (which is most hours during the work day), instead of awkwardly checking my voicemail, I get a transcription of it pushed straight to my email (which also gets pushed to my smart phone). This is an incredible service, it has helped me in so many ways!
Recently the fine folks at SpinVox sent out some referral invitations, telling me that I could give out five free accounts. I have handed those out. I asked for five more so that I could offer them to my blog readers. This morning they said yes.
So here is the deal…I’ve got five FREE accounts to give out, and I want to give one of them to YOU. It’s pretty simple really, here is how you can get one of these accounts for free: I want you to leave a comment in the comments section of this post telling me (and the rest of the readers) why you NEED a SpinVox account. The top five entries will receive an invitation via email from me, and they will be up and running with their new accounts within a day or two. For free. For as long as SpinVox is around (which is going to be a very long time I think since their service is so flippin’ cool). A couple of things to note:
A preemptive note to all of my readers: even if you don’t get a free account, you should seriously consider this pay service. I cannot state strongly enough how much this has refined my productivity! It can save you countless labor hours if your purchase this service for your high-octane staff members who live and die by their cell phone voice mails. Let the contest begin!
Posted by Matt Singley on March 8, 2007 | 6 Comments to Read
Jason put up a post recently about a DNS based FREE internet filter called ScrubIT. What timing! I’ve been wondering about a home solution that I could deploy without going through a paid service or building my own proxy server. My 9 year old is quite web savvy and is using our home computer (set up in a very public place) for homework research. Since he and his sister were able to find this video of David Hasselhoff without any help at all from me or their mom, I figured they could stumble upon other things too. So this subject has been on my mind recently.
Here is what I like about this service: it’s free and very easy to set up. I chose the manual configuration, but they appear to have a downloadable executable that will make the change for you. I logged into my home router, changed the DNS to point to the ScrubIT servers, and *POW*, a quick IP release and renew and I was in business! I went to a known porn site (yes, my wife was looking over my shoulder, just to keep things on the up and up), and I was met with the page you are seeing displayed here. Excellent!
I like the premise of this so much we have actually deployed it at the church. Is it fair to say “deploy” when it’s about 60 seconds worth of work? 
If you are interested in this, I strongly recommend the service. Go to their website and check it out.
Posted by Matt Singley on | 8 Comments to Read
I’m giving a presentation to our staff in a couple of weeks that I’m calling "Outlook Hacks". Outlook is the most powerful and most underutilized program that I know of, and I’m hoping to change that a bit at our workplace.
As I look through server reports I am made aware that some of our staff have thousands of emails in their inbox, many of them unread. I also know that many (most?) do not use the calendar, tasks or notes portions of Outlook, they basically use it as an email client only. What a shame.
So as I prepare my presentations I will put the videos and papers up here for you to use as well. My hope is that because of this tips and tricks you will be able to do more, but with less effort. Not a bad deal, eh?
