This YouTXT site is really interesting…
It is set up by a few guys in Auckland and serves the New Zealand market. The basic idea is anyone can create a keyword which users txt to the short code (8808) and in return get the keyword owners predefined message.
The keyword owner gets to edit the return message at anytime and gets basic stats to show how many people have requested the info. So simple but quite effective for small businesses who want to use txt as a way to diseminate info.
The rub is that the premium text costs the end user (customer), but if the info is worthwhile the $0.50 won’t be a big deal.
This won’t serve everyones needs but I am sure some niche applications for the service will quickly popup.
I nabbed the keyword “joke” so if you text “joke” to 8808 you’ll get back my joke of the day…yak it up :)
[eminimall products="canon g7"]
Nothing better than a lazy Sunday morning at the park. This weekend we captured it on our new toy, a Canon G7. That’s Jennifer pushing Flynn on the swing.Our last digital camera was a fairly lame point and shoot that we got free on Amex points about 4 years ago so I don’t have much to compare the G7 with, but I can say that it is a revelation in terms of picture quality, shutter speed and feature wise generally.
We decided to take the plunge when we went to an old friends wedding a couple of weeks back and wanted to make sure we got some decent pix. We didn’t go the digital SLR route only because we didn’t want something too bulky, and quite honestly we are not that passionate about photography…we want good pix (and we take a lot), but we’re not what you would even call prosumer level photographers. We’re just amateurs who want good pix.
So there’s tonnes of options out there and we arrived at the G7 based on a bunch of good reviews. I was also kinda taken with the old school looking body in black anodized aluminium. The G7 has 10Mpx and out of the box offers 6x optical zoom so it’s about as highly specified as anything of a comparable size, but it has a cool feature where you can swap out the lens for a 12x optical zoom if you really need the extra reach. We havn’t yet, but I am totally tempted.
We’re still coming to grips with all the features, but have been really stoked with the picture quality and options like sports mode which makes taking action shots pretty easy. The movie mode is cool too. Our old camera took movies but they came out really grainy and about an inch and a half wide…not sure if that wasn’t out fault, but whatever, the G7 in comparison takes great movies of a really good size.
The other thing we did was buy a decent 2Gb SD card to go with it and that was a great decision. It was just a little extra and having that capacity is cool for taking loads of shots even at a higher quality. We used to carry around a couple of 256MB cards, but having a big card is just way easier. I’ve subsquently learnt that some of the cheap cards have slower read/write speeds, so buy the best you can afford.
Overall, extremely happy with the purchase.
