Which technology services made a significant, positive impact on you as an individual in 2008? Which most impacted the market as you see it? We performed an in-depth evaluation of the services we covered this year and combined it with your feedback to compile a list of the cream of the crop.

Vonage: VoIP has taken the market by storm. Switching to Vonage (Gallop Forum) can result in amazing monthly cost savings, and the provider shines amidst the competition thanks its features, price and reliability.

Netflix: Implementing the first mainstream DVD-by-mail model was impressive enough, but Netflix (Gallop Forum) did not rest on its deserved laurels.  It is constantly working on new ways to deliver content to your TV set - as well as the other screens in your home.  It has formed an impressive number of partnerships this year to to improve their video-on-demand offerings.

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©2008-2009, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

Google released its latest gadget for Gmail out of Labs today: Tasks. Essentially, it allows you to manage simple to-do lists right from your inbox. We at Gallop are already big fans of free web-based task managers, as we currently use Remember The Milk. So how does Gmail Tasks compare? Here’s a first look.

As can be expected, Gmail Tasks is very light-weight, but it has all the basics, and even a few extras. You can create multiple lists, set due dates, and create groupings by indenting tasks beneath a higher level one. Completing the higher level task completes the associated lower level ones automatically. You can also add notes to your tasks and create tasks from an e-mail. This will create a link to the e-mail that allows you to easily open it.

So what’s missing here? Well, we often wished for more features geared towards usability, such as being able to re-order items by dragging and dropping. Gmail compensates for this shortcoming by providing easy keyboard shortcuts to move your tasks around, but there is no way to share items, create recurring tasks, or set priorities. Finally, (perhaps the biggest deal breaker for us) it’s not available for the mobile version of Gmail, and it has no offline capability. Since the very nature of task managers is that they need to be available whenever you need them, this is a crucial failing.

Bottom line, if you already have a task manager, it’s unlikely that you will switch to using Gmail Tasks. But if you don’t currently have one, this is a great way to get easily organized with a service that is a already tightly integrated with a convenient e-mail tool.

©2008-2009, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

Everyone knows that the Internet can provide e-mail, web browsing, and shopping services.  However, with the increasing presence of the Internet in our daily lives - at home, on our mobile phones, at work, in hotel lobbies, at the coffee shop, etc - something interesting has been happening.  The nearly universal access to the Internet itself has spawned countless projects from companies and groups that leverages this access in ways that many of us have never imagined.

We’ve provided extensive coverage on how you can use online services to complete your data backup strategy, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  Every day, more and more services are available that can improve the way you perform the tasks in your inbox or provide you with ways of achieving tasks you never realized you’d need to do.  We’ll take a brief look at one such today - a service called Evernote.

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©2008-2009, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

What is today’s biggest annoyance for heavy web app users? Although the answer will most certainly vary depending on who you ask, it is very likely that the following item will rank high on everyone’s list: the number of seperate login IDs and passwords that must be maintained. Indeed, if you’re using 20 or 30 sites that require authentication, you’re likely to have just as many credentials. Some sites use e-mail addresses as logins, but even then, you need to manage the myriad passwords, which often must adhere to specific, varying rules set by the site administrators. All of today’s big web companies are keenly aware of this obstacle, and some have been trying to collectively tackle it.

You may have heard of the OpenID solution that has already adopted by over 10,000 sites, including President-elect Obama’s change.gov. While the number of sites implementing the solution is promising, OpenID has also been critized for having too many usability issues.

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©2008-2009, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

Google launched video chat in Gmail yesterday in what is viewed by analysts as an effort to catch up to the competition in the web mail space, namely Microsoft Live Mail, Yahoo Mail, and of course Skype (Gallop Forum).  So how is it?  The Gallop staff tested it out today, and here are our first impressions.

First, although the video chat is launched right from the browser, you do need to install a client-side component.  We were a bit disappointed by that.  To download it, just select ‘Add voice/video chat’ from the ‘Video & more’ menu off any contact name in the Chat box.  You will then be prompted to download an executable file for your computer.  Shut down your browser, install the program, restart the browser and you should be video-enabled in Gmail.

I tried to start chats with a few people with varying degrees of success.  Sometimes it connected easily, and other times I’d get an error message saying ‘There was an error with the call.  Click here to upload an error log to Google.’

The video quality was okay, not quite as good as iChat or Skype, but definitely good enough just to chat  The sound quality was fine.  When I initially tried to start a videochat, I instinctively clicked the green video icon.  Instead of starting the chat, it minimized the chat window, which I find pretty counterintuitive.  As far as I can tell, there is no way to video conference multiple users.

All in all, I was a bit underwhelmed.  I don’t see myself ditching iChat for this anytime soon, but then again, this is the first iteration of the service, and I’m sure Google will improve it over time.

©2008-2009, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

You may have been following the recent news regarding the broadband monthly usage caps that providers like Comcast (Gallop Forum) and Frontier Communications (Gallop Forum) have been implementing.  This article does not debate the relative merits of these policies but simply examines ways to monitor your usage.  This way, you can avoid accidentally exceeding whatever cap you may be subject to. We’re going to take a look at how to do this, whether you only have one computer at home or several of them behind a router (the latter takes a bit of elbow grease).
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©2008-2009, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

We’ve been talking a lot about data storage and the importance of having a comprehensive solution to protect your digital content (look at our Featured Article section for links to the excellent series by Phil Hagen). In the last article of the series, we focused on remote storage. Some of the mentioned options were JungleDisk, Carbonite, iDrive and Dropbox.

Today we’re going to focus on another alternative, box.net. Box stores your data in the cloud and makes it accessible from anywhere. It advertises network security (256 bit SSL encryption), data security and a privacy policy. In addition to the core service, Box also comes with additional features such as file sharing and collaboration, version history, and the ability to use third party services such as Zoho to edit your files directly in the browser. Since it offers an open platform for developers to use, the list of its available services is bound to grow.

The pricing and space ranges from 1GB for free to 15GB for $19.95. There is also an offering for enterprises at $15 per user with additional customization options. You can look at this page for more information on the various plans. To make it easier to access your data from anywhere, Box has a mobile specific page at m.box.net and now also offers a free native iPhone application, a huge selling point for me.

Although there were a few turn-offs about this service such as the file-size limits (25MB to 1GB depending on your plan), Box offers a simple and easy solution to your remote storage needs.

©2008-2009, Gallop Services, Inc. All rights reserved.