Love: Quicksilver

Quicksilver is the best (more than) launching, searching, organizing, personalizing tool ever created. And you don’t even know it’s there until you summon it and then it goes right back to sleep.

There is no quicksilver for Windows. Most people who have ever used a mac (and quicksilver) and use windows know that it is something to cry over.

The Vista start bar – search and launching is quite neat! And with Start++ there is some respite – it allows commands such as
Sudo, allows web search, widgets, and integrates with windows vista search folders. But No aliases yet

Other palces to look at

Enso http://www.humanized.com/
Skylight Launcher and Automator http://www.candylabs.com/skylight/

For more information if you share the pain of not having quicksilver on windows:

http://lifehacker.com/software/quicksilver/windows-equivalents-to-quicksilver-fall-short-249426.php
Dash – Command for Windows http://trydash.com/home/ [looks nice]

An international cellphone service provider

This is a classic example of disruptive service innovation to cut down International calling by placing the calls through IP. The system right now has a lot of glitches but with the doors open now, i am sure there would be more such services which cut down on the costs of talking across the globe.

An extract of the original article from NYT:

"On this phone, rates can fluctuate. But at its launch a 20-minute call from the Bahamas costs costs $7.40 (that’s 87 percent off T-Mobile’s rate). The Cubic price from Russia is $1.24 a minute (75 percent lower than AT&T).

Calls from the U.S. to Greece cost $1.77 a minute (37 percent off), to Iraq, $2.02 (28 percent off) and to Australia, $1.77 cents (51 percent off).

It works like a prepaid phone, where you put some money in your account and use it up as you talk. There’s no traditional monthly fee, although you’ll be charged 1 Euro a month (about $1.42) if you don’t use it. "

you can read the full NYT article here