After a few failed manual sync attempts, the next option was to update via BlackBerry Desktop Manager, with the phone connected via USB.

Assuming there was an issue with the phone’s contacts list, I have deleted them all and attempted to sync them from an exported Google contacts CSV file.

It didn’t work. Entries in the contacts list on the phone were uploaded all scrambled up, fields’ data didn’t match with what it supposed to be displayed there.

Decided to try again, and this time to check on the option in the BlackBerry Desktop Manager that allows you to quickly review the items that are about to be synced.

The top entries did show up well, but while scrolling down I’ve noticed that, starting with a specific entry, the fields began to contain mixed data that belonged to other fields.

After reviewing in Google Contacts the last entry that showed up well in the list of items almost ready to be synced, I’ve noticed that one of its fields contained a text with… quotes.

Name: John Smith
Company: Apple, Inc.
Title: “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…”

Peeking inside the CSV file I was importing from (and that was exported from Google Contacts) I’ve noticed that the quotes from the title field were doubled and the entry looked like this:

[...] John, Smith, “Apple, Inc.”, ““”Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…“”“, [...]

The first quote from the Title field is a standard CSV character that acts as a delimiter for the data that belongs to a specific field.

But the other two quotes supposed to tell the sync application that there was a quotation mark included in that field’s text.

It eventually did not work this way, so the sync application thought that the second quote is the end of the previous field, so it moved on to parsing the data from the following fields. This wrongful assumption ended up scrambling the next data processed to be imported on the phone.

There were three options to fix this:

• in Google Contacts – search for quote character (“) in the contacts list and remove it or replace it with another special character.
• in the exported CSV file – search for triple quotes (“”") and replace them with a single quote (“) before attempting to sync again.
• in the Sync App – ask the sync application’s developers to parse the CSV data correctly.

I picked the first one, then successfully synced wirelessly via Google Sync, like it used to work before adding the entry with quotation marks.

Both Google Sync and BlackBerry Desktop Manager seem to process well the Calendar entries containing quotes, so it must be just the Contacts sync process that would eventually need to be fixed.

With 7 new topics presented last Monday May 24, 2010, at the amazing Skylight Coffeehouse, both speakers and attendees were busting the “don’t care” myth once again.

Next event is as soon as the end of June 2010. If you have something going on, make sure you shout it out – lafayettech.com/envolve.

Facilitating Early Literacy Experiences: Good Outcomes for Lafayette

Stacia Pleasants – Literacy Initiative Coordinator, Book Cycle

OurTown.com Lafayette/West Lafayette

Clyde Hughes – Local Editor, OurTown.com Lafayette/West Lafayette

Should I Repurify?

Matt Hunckler – Technology Evangelist at BlueLock, and Entrepreneur at Repurify

Demystifying Youtube

Nina Vintila – PhD Student, Purdue University, Electrical and Computer Engineering

The Ukulele Ladies

Jodi Taylor and Emily Carter – The Ukulele Ladies

IFN (Indiana Filmmakers Network) Lafayette Chapter

Nathan Bechtold – Board Member/ Operator, Indiana Filmmakers Network

Education as Entertainment: why the future of entertainment lies in stimulating and engaging talks

Shea Hack – Founder, Greater Lafayette Intellectual Entertainment

John Fry, co-founder Envolve – wrapping-up

Jay Patzcshke of JP Video Productions in Lafayette, Indiana – making Envolve #2 memorable

Saturday, May 22nd, 2010

There is a garage sale open to shoppers between 8:00 AM and 3:00 PM, this Saturday, May 22nd.

How to find the garage sale

Local people may find the location instructions on Twitter or Facebook if they follow my accounts.

On Foursquare mobile, the location may be found by searching for “Commons” while attempting to check-in around Lafayette, IN South area.

Mayor specials on Foursquare

There will be three moments of the day when the Foursquare mayors of this garage sale’s location will be awarded:

• May 22nd, 11:00AM – The identified mayor at 11am sharp will get:
  • 1 lemonade + 3 home-made cookies for FREE

• May 22nd, 12:00PM – The mayor at 12pm will get:
  • 1 lemonade + 3 home-made cookies + 1 Auto Vacuum Cleaner for FREE

• May 22nd, 13:00PM – The mayor at 1pm sharp will get:
  • 1 lemonade + 3 home-made cookies + 1 Business or Personal Blog setup and initial instructions by Lafayettech for FREE

Step by and become mayors!

And ask your questions in the comments below.

Photo by willie_901 on Flickr

What I wanted to highlight here about this event – and I may sporadically quote the other organizers – is that we really hope that the dreams discussions that actually happen every day around us anyway will eventually be heard louder due to this megaphonic local performance. We are anxious to see most of the best ideas spreading their wings and people returning on stage with outstanding results.

The current plan is to schedule this for the last Monday of each month.

Here is how the first edition of this local dreams igniter, engager and involver looked like.

John Fry @Electricelm introducing the Envolve event #1

@NeluLazar giving some insights on the Envolve event #1

Localism. What it is.

Duke Long – Real Estate Broker/Owner

Tippepedia, an encyclopedia for Tippecanoe County

Zachary Baiel – Archivist, The Media Collective

Building your dream on a cloud

Matt Hunckler – Technology Evangelist, BlueLock LLC

The current and future potential of community gardens

Ian Thompson – North 10th Street Co-op Garden Coordinator

Smart bikes and public bicycle lending

Zoe Neal – Owner at Virtuous Cycles

Center for Entrepreneurs

Diana Morris – Social Entrepreneur

7 Ways to choose the right contractor

Chris Voglund – Owner @ Artisan Electric. Self-proclaimed community activist!

Photo Balakov

Back in December of 2008 I was still pushing out the 2006 idea (web archive, in Romanian) of “travel offers inquiries”, where travelers didn’t have to spend so much time with looking for the right accommodations for their trip, but have somebody else looking for them instead, some entities like the travel agents or similar.

For that travel system a Facebook app has been developed down the road (2008), with primitive location-based status capabilities.

After a while, Twitter API rang a bell some day and I started to implement a module that enabled users to search keywords on Twitter, mainly travel related, and saved the terms for later use.

Few days later, @gapingvoid tweeted something that captured my attention:

So my next thought was that PR and companies’ “tweeples” need to be educated on how to better use their “ztatus” updates. How can they do that? By simply asking for help from the people that can give good advices. And by paying for the best answers.

And so Tweetvisor was born (aka “Tweet Advisor”). With multiple columns of tweet timelines, a search box in the middle of the screen, save search terms feature (with a never-published internal API) and multi-account capabilities, here goes out the first version of the application, ready to face the world – (it didn’t have the “advisor” feature implemented though, and it still doesn’t have it even today).

Then, almost entire year of 2009 was a race of keeping the app updated with the latest API changes and the new features users requested to be implemented, or new ideas and visions I tried to add to the system in order to make it an even better tool for the social media “ztatuses”. Customer service resulted in making new friends among the users, most of them I still haven’t met in person. I have also interacted with Twitter’s people relatively rarely asking for their support whenever API suddenly drained my server while attempting to retrieve 20 lines of “ztatuses” out of a clogged system #justanexample. And finally, I have learned a lot of cool things about people, developers and third party ecosystems.

2009 was an year in which conversations, events, interactions, new friends, developing a tool that people really used because they loved it or needed it, innovating features that people appreciated made a lot of sense in my life.

But with time, most of those innovative features ended up also being implemented in other new applications and even Twitter.com itself.

I’ve so expected that, but I went ahead, in the middle of a normal developer ecosystem.

Until a few months ago, at the end of 2009, when I started contemplating on changing Tweetvisor’s name and diversifying the services - there are dozens of new ideas that keep brainstorming in there. At that time whois.net reported that “ztatus.com” was still a free domain, ready to receive the “ztatuses” of people willing to share them.

But I passed over registering that domain.

Which was probably a bad move, because today, due to multiple reasons gathered over the time and also the interesting news last week with Twitter finally confirming what I have predicted just a while back, I would have really loved to have the chance to buzz a headline like this:

“Tweetvisor is chaging its name to Ztatus.com and diversifies the social status services.”

But since ztatus.com was taken in January 2010 (the frustrating reason of this article :^), I obviously can’t do that this way (and, damn, I really liked that domain name).

Moving forward, I am not really sure how the plan is drafted, but my actions as a 3rd-half-of-the-day developer will surely continue to diversify, just like they did prior to Tweetvisor and the way they were since a few good months now, since I’ve realized that any ecosystem has its pitfalls.

And I will continue to closely listen to my own visions.

20 slides. 15 seconds auto-advance. 5 minutes.

This is one of the perfect recipes that keep us connected to breathtaking stories of other people. They break news about how they think the world is evolving, publish their opinions on various topics or products, revolutionize things, or point to sensitive aspects of life.

I’ve enjoyed every presentation last night at Ignite Indianapolis and, judging by the intense and realistic applauses each speaker had received, I am positive that everyone in the packed Indy Fringe Theater felt the same way. I am looking forward for the next editions already.

Pat Coyle giving the intro

Fueling Creativity: Lessons From A Former Imagineer

Ken Christie – President, The 543 Group

Anime In America: One Of America’s Secret Obsessions

Dustin Wortman – Student, Ivy Tech

Designing Innovation

Ann Edwards – Design Strategist, Point Brake

iPad: iMportant or iRrelevant?

Joe Wikert – General Manager & Publisher, O’Reilly Media

Revolutionizing Education Through Technology

Stacie Porter-Bilger – Chair & CEO, Hoosier Academy

Six Degrees Of Awesome

Daniel Poynter – Founder, GNIC.org

Platforming The Empty Middle: Opportunities In A Post-Recession Economy

Jason Moriber – Principal, Wise Elephant

Getting Along With Our Robot Overlords: How To Approach Design Of Human-Robot Interaction

Kevin Makice – PhD Candidate, IU School of Informatics & Computing

Why Houses?

Bob Mattax – Developer, Developer Town

Bison: Back From The Brink

Brian Shafer – Co-owner, Walnut Valley Bison

Viruses: The Seventh Ring Of Computer Hell

Dan Miller – Owner, VCS Indy

Meet Or Die

Douglas Karr – CEO, DK New Media

Pat Coyle, wrapping-up

Here are some things I have tried in the past, while searching for the right names for various projects. And I am going to reference a process where there was a team of people working on this same task.

Add few names on an initial list

You will not really like many of them, but at least that’s a good start for passing them to the next steps. Make sure the names will distinguish your product or service, not fully describe them. You may follow some of these top tips for selecting a brand name.

Browse for synonyms and combinations of words

If you have more than one keyword to play with and want to make all of them part of your new brand name, you may use tools like http://nameboy.com to inspire on combinations of words or look for synonyms and thesaurus tools you can use.

Search and research

Search for the term on different search engines or other resources. Look for any variations of the term and make sure they don’t create confusion at a larger scale. Return to this step any time in the process.

Pay close attention to existing competitors’ names

Make sure you don’t name your product Jahoo if you are creating a new search engine, or Anazon if you open a new online bookstore.

Trending keywords

SEO skills will definitely help you in the process. You may use Google Trends as well, or other similar tools.

Consider keywords from other languages or ancient terms

Look for translations for your keywords in other languages and add them to the initial list. You will have the chance to filter them along with the other regular terms.

Brainstorm

Assume no idea is bad. But, still, come out with real good arguments if you are to suggest one out. “This *name* sucks” is not a good reason.

Don’t give up suggesting new names

If you are a decision-making member and the team is making a habit of rejecting names, don’t assume it will keep doing this forever and don’t give up.

Periodically revise initial criteria

First rules for choosing a brand name will always be updated, while advancing in the process. Make sure you review and revise the initial filters and targets for your future name.

Domain name lookup

If you believe your thing is really going to be big or if you want to brand it online, you may start looking for .com availability (I’d suggest doing so even for smaller products and even for local startups). Start checking them out with whois.net or find domain name lookup tools that best fit your needs. Add the available domain names to the list in the initial step then go from there through the process.

Beware of the registered names

This might be different in various countries, make sure you check the trademark laws for your targeted region. In the U.S. you may use tools like the Patent and Trademark Office search.

Some results

For my personal projects I came up with unique brand names like Jooveler (2007, travel inquiries website), lookwhatINeed (2007, online wish list), Tweetvisor (2008, web-based Twitter dashboard), aiDizain (2009, web and brand design), Doocide (2010, decision-maker tool, the end of polls). The latest one I helped picking out as a member of a team was Envolve (2010, local vision promotion event).

Below are two of the latest somewhat name failures from the big players in the gadgets industry, since the Nexus One hasn’t been approved for a trademark and the iPad got lots of jokes about its name – but both names seem to target female customers, was that a bug or a feature? I am interested in what your suggestions or experiences are.

Let’s tweet about this with #tippygoogle and talk more next Thursday at our local tweetup. Meanwhile, you may go ahead with this survey:

To determine participating communities, Google is asking people across the country to participate in an online survey to determine their existing service.

The survey is available at www.greaterlafayettecommerce.com

» Read more on Journal and Courier

What’s that, again? A tweetup?

Since it turned out that not enough people in town really care about an actual “tweetup”, the way it has initially been defined and the way other cities in the world are organizing, a handful of attendees at past events will continue with something new.

Ever heard of TED, Ignite, Pecha-Kucha etc.?

The actual idea is not new, but our concept is. We will announce more details pretty soon, most likely on the local tweetup’s website.

It’s all about seeding your visions, engaging your dreams and involving your thoughts.

Entrepreneurs of Lafayette, Indiana – Our Greater Lafayette in Indiana has many talents launching awesome startups that more people should learn about – this is something we’d like to encourage next year (later note 2010), by organizing local workshops and special startup events. – from LafayeTweetup blog, Dec 2009

Well, ENVOLVE!

Mark your calendar for April 26th, 7pm at Knickerboker Saloon.

Register as a speaker and share your dreams:

http://lafayettech.com/envolve

View Larger Map

On the same topic

March 10, 2010, the local newspaper Journal and Courier published news about another local initiative that seemed similar with ours, a P3 Alliance coming from Purdue Research Foundation and planned as an angel investment network.

SXSW actually talks about the same subject these days in Austin, TX: “Don’t Move! Build A Startup Community Where You Live“. – Yup, that’s about what we’ll be doing.