SMS Backup automatically uploads all of you incoming and outgoing text messages to you gmail, storing them in threads like email conversations. You can opt to have the uploaded messages threads auto-archived which will prevent them from appearing in your inbox. You can also have them auto-labeled with a label such as SMS making them easier to find and reference later.

SMS has worked well for me on all my Android phones. I’ve never even realized it was there as it does its job effectively in the background after the initial settings are configured. Check it out today and let me know what you think.

Jacob S Paulsen

Now Dropbox has released a new Android app that enables the same synced folder on your Android device. You can open files (assuming you have an app capable of reading the file type), email files, and share them via other means. All around this is an amazing way to have quick access to all the most important documents and files you need from anywhere.

Dropbox also allows the sharing of sub-folders with other Dropbox users making it easier than ever to coordinate with others with one constantly synced document or file.

Download the Dropbox app today and get your account started.

Jacob S Paulsen

When I first heard about Foursquare several months ago I thought it was a little silly to be announcing to my social circle everywhere I was, not to mention a little less than secure. When I finally got around to visiting the Foursquare website I explored the benefits to local businesses who participate and was very impressed.

Foursquare is an online social gaming website that is gaining popularity VERY quickly. Essentially users using their cell phones check in at “venues” around town throughout the course of their day. Check ins earn you points and badges. The highest prestige to be made mayor of a venue. The mayor of any particular venue is the person who has checked in the most in the last 60 days.

Local advertisers can offer special discounts or other types of offers to users who check in. Additional visits or check ins within a 30-60 day window can earn you higher level discounts from the venue. Mayors can also earn an exclusive offer from the business. Advertisers have a strong incentive to offer a special discount to people who check in since the check in process notifies all of the users Facebook & Twitter friends. This serves to socially spread the word!

Try it today. Download the official Foursquare application from the Android Market and start checking in! The application makes it very easy to setup your account as well as check for Foursquare friends on Twitter, Facebook, and your contacts.

As far as Foursquare applications go I’ve been very impressed with the Android app over the Foursquare app on other platforms. My friends with Palm, Blackberry, and even iPhones have has less luck with finding the right venue and seeing their points and friends activity.

Jacob S Paulsen (Currently Mayor of 3 Venues )

Today I want to give you a very basic understanding of how you should be viewing and using Facebook and Twitter to bring in the cash. Remember that marketing is marketing regardless of being online or offline. It’s just as important to drive traffic to your website as it is to drive traffic to your local business or store. Likewise, it’s just as important to build a list of potential customers online as offline. I’m going to separate our discussion into these two categories.

First, Building a List from Social sites:

Twitter and Facebook can be a strong way to bring new people to your site and sell your products and services but you must first have an audience. Start with a Facebook Page (not a group or personal profile) and ask friends and family to “like” your page. Go to Twitter.com and setup your profile there right away also. We can now split the work of building a list into two action steps. First you must create content that is worth people looking at. Second, you must let enough people know about you and give them a reason to follow you. The easiest way to create content is to Blog. Setup a blog page on your website and consistently write articles on the blog about your core competency. This can be done by ANY industry. Content can be educational, entertaining, or even a little personal in nature. Once you start blogging you can automate the process of feeding that information into Facebook & Twitter. On Facebook you can use the “Notes” application to import your RSS feed (provided by your blog) into your page. For twitter there are a variety of ways to auto-post your blog entries to Twitter depending on what blogging software you are using but I personally like HootSuite.com which is free to use and can effectively syndicate your blog content into Twitter. Other types of content for your facebook page can be the tedious updates such as a new line of product or type of service you offer, specials & coupons, upcoming events, pictures of loyal clients or customers, etc.

Now that you have some content you need to let people know about it. Put up a sign in your business or store letting customers know they should follow you on Facebook & Twitter for special updates and offers. When you do business with a new customer or client ask them if they are on Facebook and ask them if you can send them a page suggestion for your business. They will always say yes. The easiest and fastest way to build a following on Twitter is to follow other people on Twitter. People are likely to follow you back if you follow them first. Don’t randomly follow anyone on Twitter. You need to target potential customers. There are a variety of tools that you can use on Twitter to search for users based on their location, or based on keywords they use in their tweets.

Second, Driving Traffic from Social Sites:

Now that you have consistent content to share with your followers on Facebook and Twitter, and your following is growing we need to focus in on bringing those people to your website or in the front door of the business to buy product. Everything you post on Facebook or Twitter should have a link that takes the user back to your site to view the picture, the “whole story,” the full blog post, or complete details about a promotion or sale.

Utilize a URL shortening service such as www.bit.ly to shorten your URLs and track how many people are clicking on them. This will help you zero in on best practices including the best time of day to post, the best type of content to post, and even the right type of wording to use in new posts.

Remember that building a following in social media is SUPER important but you must learn to utilize the tool to bring you more traffic and more business without it becoming a huge drain on time and resources to maintain it.

Jacob S Paulsen

I use a Travel app called Flight Stats to keep track of upcoming flights and other travel arrangements. Flight Stats is the very best at helping you organize your travel itineraries including hotels, rental cars, and flights. The widget displays your upcoming flights along with times and statuses. You can update or refresh the widget at any time by touching the refresh button in the top right of the 2×2 widget.

I use the gTasks app to manage my own to-do list. gTasks syncs with gmail’s built in Task Manager program that can also be found on your online Google Calendar. There is a free and paid app available from the developer. The added value in the paid app is the auto-syncing capabilities. The paid app is not available in the Android Market so you have to buy it and download it from the dev’s website. The widget is 2×2 and can display your full list or any sub-list of tasks.

On my previous post I talked about a calendar widget called the Android Agenda Widget. I no longer use it. I am now using a new widget called CalWidget. It offers every combination of different sizes of widgets to fit the space you have available on your screen. This is an improvement over the new default calendar app that now comes with newer versions of Android. It is very clean and they have updated the widget several times since I first downloaded it to increase performance.

For those other travelers or international business men check out an app called WorldWideTime. This is of course a world time clock to display and monitor time zones. The widget (2×1) can be a great resource as a quick reference to the local time date and more in any city in the world.

Google Goggles has been available in the Android Market for some time. Users can use the app to search the web by taking a picture of about anything. The app scans the image and does a search. This works equally well for images and text and while its really impressive I’ve never come up with any real practical purpose… until now.

I’ve discovered that Google Goggles will read the text from the picture of a business card and give you the option to create a contact from the information scanned. This is very handy and saves me a lot of space in my desk.

If you have Android 2.0 or above you can also check out the Camcard app in the market. I’ve seen good reviews but the free version is limited and since Google Goggles is free and available on all versions of Android I can’t justify using the camcard app.

Jacob S Paulsen
www.jacobspaulsen.com

It is my opinion that the best apps to facilitate your travel are FlightStats and Tripit. Lets get into the details…

Tripit.com is a free online platform to facilitate in the creating and tracking of travel itineraries. The genius of the system is that you do not need to manually enter your flight, hotel, or rental car info. When you get your confirmation email from any airline, hotel, or rental car company just forward that email to plans@tripit.com (assuming you have already setup your free account at tripit.com) and their system will crawl the emails to build you a chronological travel itinerary. Nothing could be easier.

After you have setup your tripit.com account and forwarded your emails to tripit you should download the Tripit.com Android App from the Android Market. The app is free and does a good job of accessing and displaying your information. It also inserts directions and weather into your itinerary which is sometimes nice but mostly it annoys me.

The bad things about the app:

1. It doesn’t store any of the information locally which means that everytime you open it you will have to wait for it to download your travel itinerary. If you don’t have a connection (like while on the airplane) you can’t access the data.
2. There is no widget available.
3. It does not give current flight status. (Although it does have a flight status link that will open flightstats.com in your browser)

So if you want to really go the extra mile I suggest downloading the Paid version of FlightStats from the Android Market. FlightStats does a lot of things that the Tripit app does not including:

1. It stores the info locally making it available all the time and much faster to load
2. It has a great 2×2 widget that displays upcoming flights
3. It allows for immediate and local flight status updates both from within the app and from the widget on your home screen.

The downside of FlightStats is that you have to manually enter all of the information. This makes for a lot of energy and effort compared to the ease of Tripit’s system. THE GOOD NEWS is that now FlightStats offers a Tripit Import Add on App that you can download for a small fee. This app works seamlessly to import a trip with its flight, hotel, and rental car info into the FlightStats application.

Now you have the best of two worlds. You can forward your travel emails to Tripit and then import your itineraries into FlightStats on your Android phone.

Jacob S Paulsen
www.jacobspaulsen.com

NOTE:  The Tripit.com website also allows for a lot of social sharing features. Be cautious when sharing your travel information on networks such as Facebook that will allow anyone to know that you will not be home.

OTHER NOTE: If you are too cheap to buy the FlightStats app or it’s Tripit Import App, you can still setup a free Tripit account and download the tripit.com Android app at no cost. This will just prevent you from having any actual flight updates or status info.

The New York Times has decided to grace the Android Market with their news app. So far I’m impressed. It loads quickly and has a very Android style pull down menu to select different categories of news. The black and white color scheme is very easy on the eyes and stays true to the NY Times.

The 28 different “sections” or categories allow the user to really be selective about what they want to read/watch. I say watch because there is a video category.

There is also a widget that comes with the new app. The widget takes up a 4 wide by 1 tall space on your screen and scrolls through the latest stories of the “section” you choose. It also works very well for me.

On this screenshot picture you can also see some of the other most popular news apps on Android. The USA Today, CNN News, and the Associated Press also have apps for Android. If you are a Fox News Junkie there is also a good Fox News widget/app available in the Android Market.

Whatever your news passion Android has you covered.

Jacob S Paulsen

www.jacobspaulsen.com

So I have been looking around checking out all the blogs and behind the scenes sites that seem to get all the sweet tech gossip before I do and I start seeing these phones and I am overcome by this feeling of, “Meh, I’ll wait.”  I love my qwerty keyboard on my G1, the buttons are all so responsive and the number row that is separate, saves me a measurable amount of time because I am a travelling salesman and i am constantly typing addresses and contact info into my phone so to be able to skip the shift button is sweet and i bet saves my life a little bit because I can do it quickly and not die as I am entering text and speeding down the road to my appointments. I also LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE that I can gain root access to my phone and make it do all kinds of crazy things.

So here is where I’m at, I have checked out Motorola and i cant get on board with any of them. Verizon’s Droid is cool but I have Verizon beef just like I have Sprint beef. Why have a super sweet android phone on a network that can’t support voice and data at the same time. I cant tell you how often I drive down the road talking while listening for my Google Navigation voice to guide me to my next address. Can’t do that with CDMA. Not to mention the fact that Sprint cant seem to update a phone past 1.5 anyway leaving a whole slew of Android users that don’t even know Google Navigation exists! Then with AT&T is still under the crushing weight of the Evil Apple Empire, I don’t know about you but that dang apple logo reminds me of an unfinished Death Star. They know that the only thing thats keeping them in business is the fact that they are in Apples pocket. Before the iPhone AT&T was losing market share faster than Sprint did 2009! Granted, the LG Ally looks like it might be cool, its getting tied pretty hardcore to the Ironman movie though and as a general rule I feel that the more “they” have to artificially hype something, the higher chance it has of being a disappointment.

So that leaves me with T-Mobile, the nations #4 carrier to depend on to keep delivering super sweet phones with good rate plan pricing, but only marginal network. You get what you pay for, unless your paying for an iPhone, but thats another post entirely. T-Mobile is releasing the myTouch Slide, I was stoked at the original teaser pictures, qwerty keyboard, but in the photos it was only showing the bottom of the keyboard and it took forever for them to release the photo that broke my heart, the number row is not separate its a 4 row qwerty instead of a 5. Bummer. But there are rumors starting again that a new possibly sidekick branded phone that our friends over at Droiddog and TmoNews have all perpetuated (we might as well jump on that yeah?) so hopefully this will be the phone of my dreams. HTC is making it which means that it wont be too hard to figure out how to root it, Its running Android 2.1, a possible snapdragon processor……. but then sidekick…. dang it, I’m trusting you T-Mobile! PLEASE don’t ruin this! Or i’ll be getting a N1, which i guess wont be so bad after all.

-ASM

The Good news is Google just made their Voice service available to anyone with a .edu Email address. Rather than putting in your application for a Google Voice number and waiting until your lucky day when the invite actually shows up in your email inbox, now you can go to the website www.google.com/googlevoice/student, enter your .edu email address, and your new Google Voice invite will be delivered to you within 24 hours.

A Google spokesperson said that they are specifically targeting students with this offer but understands that teachers and faculty are going to want in on the craze too. “We’ve heard college students in particular really appreciate getting their voicemail sent to their e-mail, sending free text messages and reading voicemail transcriptions rather than listening to messages (especially handy while in class), said Jason Toff of the Google Voice team. So here it is. You spoke Google Listened, now go forth and communicate. I am Android, and Google Voice was MY Idea.