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Filed under: Text, Utilities, Web services, Freeware

Five ways to SMS for free

Admit it, you're addicted to text-messaging, right? Well someone is, because lately I've been bombarded with ads proclaiming a national epidemic of texting and related fees. Won't someone think of the children! Well maybe someone has, or maybe all this is just silly. Why not send a bunch of text messages for free? I mean, that's what the web is all about, right? Free stuff? As in beer?

Katie over at GigaOM wrote up a neat little roundup of some free SMS tools you can use to send out for free. She points out the usual caveats: these services could be used for nefarious purposes (spam), and often it costs the recipient some cash to get a message. So use it wisely or wind up on some silly national TV ad.

Filed under: Utilities, Windows Mobile, Productivity, Microsoft, Freeware, Social Software

The Mobile Secretary for Windows Mobile

The Mobile Secretary for Windows MobileNow this is an idea that should have made its way into the as-yet underwhelming and upcoming update to Windows Mobile, version 6: a built-in secretary. BCross at the MSDN Windows Mobile blog has decided not to wait, releasing an app he simply calls The Mobile Secretary. It offers some clever features for auto-responding to missed calls with text messages, for example: if a contact calls from their home phone and you miss the call, The Mobile Secretary can respond to their mobile phone number with a custom text message, optionally attaching any calendar information as an excuse explanation for your absence. Contacts can also be added to custom groups, which in turn can receive their own custom text message replies.

This is a great idea, and BCross plans to post the source code soon for all to learn from, especially since it makes use of the Smartphone .Net Compact Framework v2.0 (which needs to be installed on your phone). I haven't tried this out yet as I'm still getting to know my new BlackJack, so if you give it a whirl, please share your experience with the rest of the class.

Filed under: Windows, Office, Productivity

SMS reminders synced with your Outlook calendar

messagingreminder.comIf you use Outlook's calendar a lot it's only natural to want to be able to have your cell phone remind you about events, but unless you have a fairly high-end phone, there's not always an easy way to sync your phone's calendar with Outlook's. messagingreminder.com (not the snappiest name, guys) is a cool service that integrates with your Outlook calendar and skips your phone's calendar entirely by sending you SMS reminders about upcoming meetings, etc. The services isn't free—it costs about $15 a year—and certainly isn't the only way to get the job done (Yahoo! Calendar does the same for free, for example), but unlike Outlook plugins that do the same, it works even when your computer isn't turned on.

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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