Time Flies, this is an excerpt of the upcoming CRT newsletter
If you haven’t noticed, a new, yet familiar, name has bubbled to the top of this month’s CRT newsletter: Mine! I have been fortunate in having been asked to be the new Managing Director for CRT, and I am greatly honored by this opportunity. Happily, Keith is still with NAR, but in October he took on a new role; he is now the Vice President for NAR’s ITS Department, which handles NAR’s internal technology initiatives.
It’s been about 4 months since I took over this position, though it seems like only yesterday. And as with any changing of the guard, there is new vision, new direction, new insight and, most importantly, new ideas. So what’s new at CRT? Continue reading ‘Better Late Than Never’
So, does this service make NuevaSync obsolete? Well, bearing in mind that I did not use the Google service, from what I can tell there are still reasons to use NeuvaSync. The first is that, while Google’s service allows you to pull data from multiple Calendars, it only does two-way syncing for your primary calendar. For someone like me with several Calendar that I need to be able to edit from iPhone, this is a big problem. NuevaSync handles two-way syncing on up to 11 calendars. The second reason to use NuevaSync is that it will sync your Contacts with both Google Contacts and Plaxo on the same sync service, so for people that use Plaxo, that’s one less service to sync your iPhone against. Also, both the Google service and NuevaSync are in beta, so niether wins on that score.
So, if you have an iPhone you have a choice of you to sync your Google informaiton, direct to Google or through NuevaSync.
PS: People have been asking me about similar services for Blackberry. Google has a Blackberry sync service here and look fairly well supported.
I have recently been working on putting together some basic interactive flash videos that will help members get acquainted with different technologies. To create these videos, I will be using a utility called Wink. It allows me to capture all of the activity on my computer.
I have then edited the video frames and added text boxes to show what is happening in the video. I have tried my best to make this first video extremely basic so that anyone can follow along. It involves setting up a Gmail account in Mozilla Thunderbird. While many people will not find this extremely useful, I encourage even the most tech-savvy viewer to check it. At the very least, this should introduce the format of upcoming tutorials and demonstrations.
In an effort to reach more members, many of these videos will be fairly slow, yet very easy to follow. We hope in the coming weeks and months to add a number of demonstrations that we think are useful to members. I would appreciate any feedback and I will gear future videos to the needs of those who respond.
Edit:I have changed the video. It is now smaller so that the entire video can be seen. I have also sped up the frame rate. I hope that helps for anyone who had difficulties. I have also changed the video so that it opens above the current page. This should alleviate future issues of video sizes that are physically too large for the blog space.
Without further ado, here’s the first Wink video. Click the image below to display:
On February 13, Congress passed an economic stimulus package with $7.2 billion devoted to funding for broadband deployment. The bill creates a new Broadband Technology Opportunities Program administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The program will be given $4.7 billion to fund the deployment of broadband infrastructure in unserved and underserved areas of the country. An additional $2.5 billion in broadband loans and grants will be administered by the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS). Any entity is eligible to apply for a grant including municipalities, public/private partnerships and private companies as long as they comply with the grant conditions. The grants are subject to “openness” requirements to ensure that broadband networks be free of restrictions on content, sites, or platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and on the modes of communication allowed.
The bill also charges the FCC is with developing a national broadband plan that shall seek to ensure that all people of the United States have access to broadband capability and shall establish benchmarks for meeting that goal.
These provisions are important victories for REALTORS because increased broadband access promotes economic growth and expands opportunities for home sales. A 2006 Commerce Department report determined that property values are 6% higher in communities where broadband is available.
Last year, CRT was extremely fortunate to work with knowledgeable people in the areas of internet security, RETS, social media, VoIP, blogs & video, and list aggregators. Join us this year with your tech-related presentation…either during the NAR Midyear Meetings or during the REALTORS® Annual Conference & Expo!
Late last month, I blogged about 
Last year, CRT was extremely fortunate to work with knowledgeable people in the areas of internet security, RETS, social media, VoIP, blogs & video, and list aggregators. Join us this year with your tech-related presentation…either during the NAR Midyear Meetings or during the REALTORS® Annual Conference & Expo!
