I’ve written about a free service called jott.com before because I use it to capture ideas when I’m driving or reading the Sunday paper in bed. I just hit a phone number and speak my message and then I get the message transcribed and delivered to my email - or, and this is really helpful, to my virtual assistant or anyone else I have set-up, including groups of people.

Recently they’ve been hooking this service up to other services allowing you to a whole bunch of useful things just by making a phone call. You can set-up and post to Twitter, Wordpress.com blogs, TypePad.com blogs, and Tumblr blogs just by leaving a voice mail. You can add events to Google Calendar or 30 boxes calendars while you drive down the highway. You can create BackPack, Vitalist and Remember the Milk to-do lists. You can jott any question to Mosio and get an answer.

As more of these services are added this tool just gets better. A couple thoughts - this is for short messages, don’t try to create a 300 word blog post. It doesn’t always get it right, speak slowly and annunciate like you’re talking to your grandpa from the old country. It automatically creates a link to the audio file though so people can hear the message in your voice too.

9:00:05 PM    

Microsoft Window Mobile is the newest sponsor of the Duct Tape Marketing blog and is helping support my efforts to uncover and bring you the latest and greatest small business stuff by enabling mobile posting technology for this blog. You will begin to see the occasional “live on location” audios, text and photos (complete with a map it link) coming from this effort.

So, when you see the “mobile post” image you will know I’m blogging on the go.

4:00:03 PM    

Google’s machine translating technology is pretty amazing. No, I’m sure it’s not perfect, but it can open up some interesting online marketing opportunities. Adding a gadget like you see above can allow visitors from other parts of the world to surf to your site and instantly translate it to their native tongue possibly opening doors to additional sales or foreign partners. And, it’s kind of fun to see your words in other languages. You can get this bad boy at the Google Gadgets page. Simply add the code you receive and anyone can instantly translate your pages.

Google recently extended this technology to Gmail and Google Talk

We recently made our machine translation technology accessible from within Gmail and Google Talk, which gives mail and IM users instant access to translation capabilities at the point where they might most need them, e.g., when communicating with friends and colleagues around the world. If you find yourself wanting to translate a few words or short phrase, you can IM an appropriate chat-bot to obtain an immediate translation.

If you want to try it, just add en2es@bot.talk.google.com as a friend in Google Talk and send it a message to translate from English to Spanish. You can do this inline as you chat with a potential Spanish speaking prospect or vendor.

12:00:04 AM