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Filed under: Macworld, Video, iPhone, App Store

App Cubby has some of the more popular apps in the App Store. Whether it’s Gas Cubby for tracking car maintenance, Trip Cubby for capturing mileage information, or Health Cubby for motivating ourselves to get into better shape, the company keeps customers coming back with well-executed and full-featured software.

We talked with App Cubby’s David Barnard at Macworld Expo 2010 to see what’s new from the company. While we won’t tell you about the new and completely different app he has recently submitted to Apple, David told us a lot about the free version of Gas Cubby — Gas Cubby by FRAM — that provides the functionality of Gas Cubby in an ad-sponsored format.

Check out TUAW blogger Steve Sande’s video interview with David by clicking the Read More button.

We apologize for the sound quality, which was hindered by interference picked up by the microphone.

TUAWMacworld 2010: TUAW talks with App Cubby’s David Barnard originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 13 Feb 2010 22:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If it’s time for a self-assessment of where your workday time or cash go, 1DayLater can help. If you’re a freelancer looking for lightweight client tracking, 1DayLater’s also got game. It’s a really lightweight, web-based tool for watching where everything goes.

After signing up and signing in, you’ll see 1DayLater’s basic interface: Value, Project, Date, and the optional “Note.” If you drove 18 miles earlier to pick up poster something for a project, simply enter “18m” in Value, “Smith Account” in Project, and “Today” in date, and type in “Poster supplies” in note if you need to. That’s it—your data’s entered in. If you’re about to start working on something right now, there’s an on-site timer that automatically plugs your time upon pressing Stop into the Value field.

When you want to get it out, you can export to Office Open XML spreadsheets, which can be opened by most office apps (including Microsoft, OpenOffice, and the Apple iWork suite). You can also put together a rather neat-looking graph of your time, money, and miles. More options and tools, including automatic invoices and mileage claims, are coming soon, according to the developers, as 1DayLater is currently an open beta test.

1DayLater is a free service that requires a registration, and would’ve made a worthy addition to our top 10 tips and tools for freelancers, had we seen it earlier.

To save time and gas money while running errands or long trips, it makes sense to map out the best route so you can hit all the places you need to go without doubling back. Have Route4Me do the planning for you.

Before heading out the door, jump on the internet and enter the addresses of all the places you need to stop or fire up the iPhone app (more on that below). Route4Me plots your whole route for maximum efficiency. It will also map out a round trip so you can get back to where you started, without trying to backtrack using the initial directions. For a more global approach to navigation—if you’re traveling beteween cities, for instance—furnish airport codes, landmarks, cities, or even zip codes, to find optimal routes.

The free web-based service is pretty slick, but its iPhone app really shines. It uses Google Maps to plot out your stops for you and is a great way to access Route4Me when you don’t have an internet connection (like in the car).

Route4Me figures out where you are using your iPhone’s geo-location feature. If you want to skip that step and enter your own starting location, you can do that, too. Then simply add the addresses of everywhere you want to go and the app does the rest. You’ll get estimated trip time and mileage to help you plan ahead, and turn-by-turn navigation so you won’t get lost along the way.

Route4Me stores your favorite locations so you can return to them quickly in the future. it also snags addresses from your phone’s contact book and tracks places you’ve visited recently to make adding destinations really easy.

The app runs $1.99 in iTunes but it’s a handy tool to have on-hand when you need it. It’s perfect for getting organized before you run errands, but it’s also a terrific way to plot out impromptu carpooling situations, and great for sightseeing while traveling.

What tips do you have for optimizing your errands and multi-destination car trips? Share them in the comments.

Google keeps adding new features to Google Maps and Google Earth. The latest: As of today you can type in a restaurant or other place you like in Google Maps and receive recommendations of nearby places you might like just as much or more.

Sure, it’s not quite as radical as something like the rumored store interior pics in Google Street View, but it’s always good to see more robust location services. Yelp offers something vaguely similar with a “people who viewed this also viewed” box, but Google’s algorithm is probably more sophisticated.

Google has beaten location-focused services like Foursquare to the punch with this. That’s too bad, because we imagine Foursquare could in theory use your check-in history to provide much better suggestions just like Netflix suggests films based on which movies you’ve already rented or streamed and how you’ve rated them. It’s not surprising that Google did it first, though; Google has a lot more experience using algorithms to determine what you’re looking for than Yelp or Foursquare do.

Google wasn’t very clear about how its algorithm works in its blog post on the subject. You’ll just have to try it for yourself to see if the results are helpful to you, but your mileage may vary.

We viewed the place page for the Indie Cafe sushi and Asian fusion restaurant on the far north side of Chicago and received a bunch of — you guessed it — sushi and Asian fusion restaurant suggestions in adjacent neighborhoods. But when we looked up Big City Swing dance studio in the same city, the results were a bit less precise. Some were great, like the Lincoln Tap Room and Tango Chicago. Others made a lot less sense, like a barber shop and other unrelated venues in a distant suburb almost an hour’s drive away.

Try it out and let us know what you think: How does it work? Do you think it’s helpful enough that you’ll be using it regularly?

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Reviews: Foursquare, Google, Yelp

Tags: foursquare, Google, google earth, Google Maps, location services, yelp

For a platform billing itself as the business user’s best friend, BlackBerry’s list of unsupported protocols that have achieved ubiquity is actually astonishing: you can’t do two-way read status sync with an IMAP email account, for example, and amazingly, you can’t natively connect to an Exchange ActiveSync service without being routed through RIM’s back-end software. In a shocking move that’s straight out of 2002, it seems at least one of those niggles is going to get patched up soon thanks to a leaked list of email features in BlackBerry Internet Service 3.0, the software carriers deploy to marshal all data connectivity on the handsets they’ve deployed to customers. Yes, that’s right: you’ll be able to synchronize read status and sent items with your Gmail account, just as if you were using virtually any other phone produced in the last several years! It’s hard to fathom that it’s taken this long, but hey, we’ll take it — unfortunately, it’s up to each carrier to decide when they’re going to deploy BIS upgrades, so your mileage may vary on the wait time. Of course, RIM could just add IMAP support directly to its phones so that this whiz-bang tech would work with any third-party email service and wouldn’t have to go through BIS in the process, but that would be crazy talk, right?

[Thanks, Jeff]

RIM’s BIS 3.0 email features apparently leaked, finally does Gmail justice originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In a rather disappointing example of “your mileage may vary,” market research firm Northstream has put TeliaSonera’s shiny new LTE network — the world’s first to go commercial — to the test, coming away with some disappointing conclusions. The bottom line is that they never managed to go above about 12Mbps downstream, a pretty wild figure considering that Ericsson is in the process of rolling out 84 purely theoretical megabits per second right now using plain old HSPA+ for 3 Scandinavia. The bright side is that they managed a fat 5Mbps on the upstream and experienced consistently lower latency than on the area’s 3G networks; in fact, the firm ended up coming away with a glowing impression of the service, assuming (probably accurately) that this is just the first baby step in finding out what LTE is really capable of. And hey, some lucky jerks are getting over 42Mbps down, so it’s a crap shoot anyway.

Not so fast: testing finds world’s first LTE network isn’t very 4G-ish originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 22 Jan 2010 18:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Odds and ends, iPhone, App Store

Want to check the charge on your electric car? There’s going to be an app for that — our friends at Engadget report that the upcoming Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid electric car will have an iPhone app that goes along with it. Features aren’t firmed up yet, but ideas being passed around after a demo at last week’s LA Auto Show include both setting up functions inside the car like scheduling when a charge happens (to take advantage of late-night power rates) and receiving notifications from the car, including when it’s charged and/or when you forgot to plug it in for the night or other worrying situations like that. I’d love to even see an app that can track mileage from the car, or give you diagnostic information when something is wrong.

Obviously, this is pretty pie-in-the-sky at this point (and implementation is obviously tougher than coming up with ideas for it), but I’m all for it. With the advent of the iPhone and all of the things it can do, it’s quickly becoming a one-stop shop for communication between all your various networks and appliances. Why not have your car text you when it needs something? Oh wait, I’ve got to go — my car just texted me that it’s lonely out there in the parking lot. Back in a bit.

TUAWChevy Volt to get an iPhone app originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 11 Dec 2009 07:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google’s extension gallery for its Chrome browser opened for business this morning. We’ve taken a look around the offerings—most of them, anyways—and pulled out a few picks that deserve a spot in your formerly pristine browser.

Actually, rating these extensions by “worth the slowdown,” as is often the case with Firefox, doesn’t seem applicable here. Chrome renders pages just as snappily on a Linux install with eight extensions loaded, and the memory use seems not all that different. Your mileage may certainly vary.

We pulled out extensions from the gallery for highlighting that do something a bit different from widely-available bookmarklets, or at least fill a crucial need for those who use the web productively. You can disagree with our picks or tell us how blind we must be to miss a great one—do so in the comments, and if we missed a really great one, we’ll update the post.

You need to be running either the Windows dev version of Chrome, the just-released Linux beta, or a daily build that supports extensions. Mac users are, unfortunately, left out of the add-on party for the moment.

Google Mail Checker: Just what it sounds like. It sits in your address bar, keeps track of your unread messages, and opens Gmail when you click it. Take note that the author states it “does not yet work well” with Google Apps mail.

RSS Subscription Extension: Puts an RSS icon in the address bar when standard feeds are detected, and delivers the feed to a reader selection page when clicked. You can add custom readers beyond the standard five using URL syntax.

Xmarks for Chrome Beta: Just like the early Chrome alpha, this extension ties Chrome into your Xmarks bookmark account, synchronizing you between Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and across multiple profiles, if needed.

iMacros for Chrome: We haven’t had nearly enough time to discover what this cool tool is capable of, but it seems like a nice solution for anyone missing their crucial Greasemonkey scripts and other Firefox-only helpers.

Aviary Screen Capture and Picnik Extension for Chrome: We’ve already spilled some digital ink on the neat Aviary extension, but Picnik does the same type of instant web page capture—and also lets you pick a particular image from a quick list that pops down.

Flash Block and FlashBlock: Both do the basic task of turning off Flash on all web pages, until you turn it back on for all pages from that domain. FlashBlock uses a keyboard shortcut, while Flash Black has a settings dialog with a list you can edit.

AdThwart and AdSweep: As you might guess, they both block ads, though they use different blacklists to do so. We’ve previously covered AdSweep in its early days. At the moment, AdSweep’s gallery page returns an installation failure—from Linux, at least. AdThwart is proving more popular, perhaps due in part to AdSweep’s troubles.

Brizzly: The helpful, time-saving, at-a-glance Twitter/Facebook client for the web integrates smoothly into Chrome. Click the button, and you get a quick read on what’s happening in your social streams, with images automatically shown and videos embedded. You can, of course, also tweet or update Facebook from here.

Google Voice Notifier, Google Wave Notifier, and Google Alerter: The first two do just what you’d think they do, but make lots of sense for services you want right away and might only occasionally check, respectively. The last is a kind of uber-notifier that checks Gmail, Wave, and Reader for new items. If you’re a heavy Reader user, you’ll obviously want to turn those pings off in the settings.

Chromium Delicious Plugin: All your recent bookmarks from the Delicious bookmark service, as well as quick saving of bookmarks from selected text/links or manual creation.

ChromeMilk: There are many, many tools that bring to-do manager Remember the Milk into your browser, but this one’s notable for popping up your task list right from the address bar—and offering Remember the Milk’s very slick iPhone interface as an option for pro membership owners.

LastPass: As previously mentioned, this extension fills in the gap that Xmarks’ lack of password syncing leaves on Chrome.

Fittr Flickr: Adds keyboard shortcuts, additional photo information, lightbox-style galleries, and more to Flickr photo pages, in the style of Gina’s own Better Flickr for Firefox.

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What have you foun that’s worth installing, and bragging about, in the Chrome Extensions Gallery? Share the links and love in the comments.

Pantyhose are rarely so damaged when they are thrown away that they couldn’t be used for anything else. Get as much mileage out of those expensive pieces of nylon with these reuse tips.

Photo by gjogili.

What can you do with pantyhose that have a run or two but are otherwise intact? Frugality-centered blog Wise Bread created a list of ways you can reuse pantyhose.

Stretching a piece of pantyhose over the lens of your camera diffuses the light and can create a star-burst effect—think “Guiding Light” soap opera lighting. Not a photographer? You can stuff those annoying little slivers of leftover bar soap into a knotted section of pantyhose to create a soap-satchel you can hang from the faucet for quick hand scrubs in the workshop or laundry room. Fill a leg with onions, knotted between each onion, and you’ve got an easy way to hang them in your pantry to keep them cool and dry.

For over a dozen other reuse tricks, check out the full list at Wise Bread. Have a tip or trick of your own for recycling pantyhose or other disposables? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

Every year consumers turn to the web to scour for the best holiday shopping deals. Black Friday has practically become a holiday of its own, with retailers jumping on the bandwagon earlier than ever to satisfy deal-hungry consumers. This holiday season you have an opportunity to leverage social media channels for trackable giveaways and discounts that can not only boost your holiday sales but improve your social media presence.

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1. Direct Message Discounts

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If you’re looking for fun and innovative ways to drum up your follower count on Twitter, or create more engagement between you and your customers, consider offering direct message-only holiday discounts.

Here’s how this could work. Come up with a holiday deal that is significantly better than any of your existing promotions and make sure to share it with your entire team. Then use your social media channels to send out shareable clues about the promotion. You could tweet something like, “exclusive holiday Twitter deals on X,Y,Z, DM us for details.”

For this type of promotion to work, it’s all about the details. First, make sure you follow new followers back so that they can send you a direct message. Also, determine whether or not you want this to stay underground, or whether you’re open to having the deal spread online. The benefit of the former approach is that select customers feel privileged, but the downside is that you’ll need to generate a new discount/offer code or “password” for each person.

On the flip side, if you have one password/coupon/discount code, then anyone can get it via direct message and share it with their friends, which means you could get more mileage and buzz, but fewer followers. Figure out what your goal is and go with it, full steam ahead.

You might even get more mileage out of the deal if you offer a double deal (double whatever the original deal was) when you hit X amount of followers before a certain date. That could give deal-seeking customers the incentive to promote you in the hopes of saving even more.

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2. Facebook Freebies

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We’re seeing more and more brands use their Facebook Fan Pages for fan-only deals, discounts, and coupons, and there’s no reason why you can’t use the holiday season to do the same for your small business.

This works for both online and offline retailers, but should you have a physical store, using your Facebook Fan Page to create a holiday coupon for an extra X% off already discounted merchandise would be an instant way to gain more fans and please holiday shoppers on the hunt for a bargain.

Since Facebook is so ubiquitous, if you go this route, make sure to inform your team members to tell customers about the deal while they’re shopping. You can even teach employees how to show customers how to become your fan on Facebook from their mobile phones, thereby making them eligible for the extra savings instantly as well as getting a new fan on the spot.

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3. Social Media Sharing

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Whatever your sales goals are this holiday season, chances are you want to sell more of your products and services, but usually it’s your customers and super fans who do all the real selling for you. Here’s where social media can help.

Use your email newsletter, Twitter account, Facebook Fan Page, and website to encourage your customers to share what they love most about your small business online. Encourage them to upload a photo, create a video, or pen a blog post about the products or services they love most. Also make sure to instruct them to tag the content with a predetermined tag. You can make the incentive whatever you want it to be, but offering each participant an X% discount off existing sale prices would be well received.

This approach works best if you make the announcement on your own blog and request that participants include a link to their shared media in the comments section of the post. Also, remember that due to new FTC guidelines, you should encourage participants to disclose the deal or discount.

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More business resources from Mashable:

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- Why Social Media Is Vital to Corporate Social Responsibility
- HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI
- 5 Important Web Video Lessons for Small Business Owners
- Top 5 Must-Read Social Media Books
- HOW TO: Use Twitter Hashtags for Business

iStockphoto, YinYang

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Reviews: Facebook, Twitter, iStockphoto

Tags: business, Holiday, List, Lists, small business