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Eight months ago I wrote on here wondering whether the Meebo iPhone app was actually ever going to be released. Today the waiting has finally paid off – it is here!

Things I noticed

• Log in with your Meebo account or register for one
• Maintains your buddy list groups like you already had
• View chat history
• Funny Meebo emoticons
• Add/Block/Remove buddies
• Push notifications work! (not sure how long it keeps you logged in though)
• Options to TURN LANDSCAPE OFF, auto-capitalize messages, timestamps, and sounds on/off
• Swipe between conversations to quickly maintain multiple conversations
• Lets you know your friend is typing

From what I can see, this app blows eBuddy and Nimbuzz out of the water. I have tried a number of other apps (IM+..) and they were unusable. Can not comment on Beejive as I never grabbed it since I was holding out for Meebo. Get this app!

Here are a few screenshots of the app in action:

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My latest observation on the Gazaro Insider, the Super Bowl causes HDTV prices to Skyrocket!

One example: this Samsung HDTV jumped up $800 for the Super Bowl then immediately back down after the game.

Read all about it on the Gazaro Blog

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Last weekend my roommate Neil dug out his copy of Wall Street so we could watch it again. This viewing was spurred by this great trailer for “Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps” – coming to theatres April 23, 2010.

Here is the trailer:

There are always people who trash sequels, but I will be rushing out to see it in April!

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As part of the ADM 3378 E-business course I did a group presentation on the topic of “Getting Started with E-commerce”. My part of the presentation covered domain names, web hosting, and e-commerce software. The presentation was very brief, only five minutes, and could not go too deep into these topics.

My slides from the presentation are embedded below or you can view them on DocStoc:

Getting Started With E-Commerce –

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A parade balloon of my favourite children’s book character Arthur. This video is fantastic, thanks to Derek who sent it to me.

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Currently I am taking a course on E-business with Professor David Wright (ADM 3378). We had the opportunity to write an article for the Telfer School of Management’s E-business Wiki. I chose to write about URL Shorteners, such as Bit.ly. You can view my article embedded below from DocStoc or check it out on the wiki.

URL Shorteners –

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As a full-time student I don’t have much money coming in, however I seem to constantly be spending it. Recently I was tracking my expenses and attempting to determine a reasonable budget with an app called Cha-Ching (iPhone and Mac). However this solution was imperfect. I religiously entered every single transaction into the app on my iPhone, but something was missing – I was not able to easily visualize my financial standing over time.

Watch your money

As part of Telfer’s Entrepreneurial Culture Challenge that I am competing in, I have received some really interesting financial advice. Eugène Tassé said:

“You have to work and you have to save… I can assure you today, I never spent more than $0.50 of every $1 I made. It is impossible, unless you want to throw your money away”

As a student this may not be possible, however I am going to see what I can do. In the third workshop, successful entrepreneur, and uOttawa grad, Renaud Brault said:

“I always lived below my means” .. and… “produce a financial statement for your personal finances to see where you stand throughout the year”

Although I could create a financial statement manually from what I have learned in Accounting/Finance classes, I would rather find a better solution for this. Luckily the exact financial software I need is out there.

Dough

Dough is a web app for tracking your personal/family finances. It is the perfect solution for what I am looking to do, allowing you to easily:

• enter in every transaction you make
• track all bank accounts, credit cards, and investments
• visualize your finances over time in a financial statement format

It has been perfect for my requirements, and would definitely be a good application for any student looking to watch their money. It is simple to use and maintain, yet provides a thorough output on the Summary page.

As a web app, Dough accessible from anywhere you are connected and keeps all of your data online. My only wish is for either an iPhone app or iPhone optimized web interface for using the transaction entry function on the go.

Check out Dough here: http://yourdough.com/

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UPDATE: ReMail was acquired by Google and the app was removed from the App Store!

Apparently I have over 26,500 e-mail messages in my willw.net account!

I’ve been using this address for three years, which works out to roughly 8,833.33 e-mails/year.

A neat application for the iPhone called reMail is what brought this random fact to my attention. reMail provides full-text search for any IMAP capable e-mail account, something Apple’s Mail app sorely lacks (it searches headers only). It does this by downloading every e-mail message in your account to your iPhone, all 26,500 in my case.

If you are used to the great search in Gmail or Google Apps, like I am, there is a free version of reMail available on the App Store. If you are using any other IMAP capable service there is the regular version for $4.99 (which also includes support for multiple accounts).

By the way, if you have thousands of e-mails like I do, you may want to start downloading your messages in reMail as you are going to bed, and leave it running overnight, as it takes awhile to download!

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Reading the StartupNorth blog, a specific post caught my eye: “Hire a co-op!”

From that post:

For each co-op student hired, your organization can take advantage of the Co-operative Education Tax Credit.  The Ontario Government recently increased the credit to 25 per cent of salaries or wages and benefits (30 per cent for small businesses) to a maximum of $3,000 per student, per term. For more

Sounds like a great deal to me. I know of one student looking for a CO-OP placement for January-April or January to August.. if interested, contact me!

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While working on campus I found a few promotional flyers for the University of Ottawa’s new mobile version of their website, “coming this fall.” It will be called uoMobile, similarly named to the also coming soon uoZone.

Based on this flyer, I am hoping this uoMobile proves to be useful and work well on my iPhone. It would be nice if it were comparable to the mobile website MIT has for their school.

Here are the cool flyers:

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