Mark Forrester - Independent digital designer and online entrepreneur

Quite a catchy title hey? Maybe I should make “Friday Freebies” a weekly post. Hmmm…

In America it seems they have it pretty sweet, and I’m quite envious. Last week I wrote about the free TV series avaliable to Americans on the ABC website. This week, Skype have announced that calls from Skype to a landline or mobile phone in the U.S. or Canada are now free, completely free, no hidden catches, until the end of the year.

“The Skype user must be in the U.S. or Canada at the time of the call (it doesn’t matter where your Skype account is set up), and the outbound call must be to a U.S. or Canadian POTS or mobile phone. Skype calls to U.S. numbers are currently priced at $0.02 per minute.” (Source:Techcrunch)

It’s great to see calling fees slowly dissolve, in some countries far quicker than others. *cough*

Seeing this free service doesn’t apply to us, it can’t be considered a Friday Freebie. Maybe this can:

Microsoft launched Windows Media Player 11 Beta on Monday. We’ve downloaded it and I must say it’s pretty cool. Its got a great new metallic black finish, with lots of fancy Windows Vista type icons. Very visually appealing. Don’t ask me much about its new functionality because I haven’t really looked. As a designer I judge it mainly by its appearance, very shallow I know. So all of you real techies please leave your comments on how well the player functions :)

Unfortunately, Media Player is not really free either. For most of us it is, but for you Windows users running pirated software this program requires validation. Shame on you.
So what can I offer you this Friday, completely free:

• A Digital Farm wallpaper
  
• Avast anti-virus software (I installed this on my notebook and it runs beautifully)
• An OpenCD: a collection of high quality open source software bundled specifically for MS Windows users. For us South Africans we can get it posted to us for free. Haha…sucks Americans.

I’m sitting at Jo’burg airport, patiently enduring my 3 hour wait for my flight back to Cape Town. The flights are too full for me to get an earlier flight. Seems like everyone wants to be home in time for the Champions League final. Guess where I will be during the exact 90 minutes of the game? Bleakness.

Today I had the fortune to attend the Futurex Expo at Sandton Convention Centre. Its been a long day the feet, but the exhibition was most impressive, and definitely worth the visit. Last year’s Cape Town Futurex was cancelled due to a poor response from both exhibitors and visitors. This years event was jam packed with great new products and services. I won’t go into much detail now as the battery is dying, but I’ve attached a few photos of some of the products that caught my attention.

It was hard to miss the Flybook exhibit. There unique marketing plan consisted of 4 hot ladies in little clothing, shaking their booty and Flybooks in the air. Probably not the way I would have advertised, a bit tacky I thought, but defintely bought attention, especially amongst the geeky business men.

What is a Flybook you might ask? A good spec notebook/tablet running Windows XP Pro, EDGE, GPRS, GSM, WIFI and Bluetooth compatible. With the Flybook, all you need to do is plug in your cellphone SIM card and get connected via GPRS to the internet. Alternatively, plug in your 3G card and voila, your connected. It makes internet connectivity a breeze. Costing you about R18 000, it is rather overpriced, but can be rented monthly @ R699 (I think), with the advantage of upgrades when new models come out.

Evenflow had some nice VOIP products, including a very stylish Skype phone. The Shuttleworth Foundation geeks were all there with some nice new Linux based apps.

LG’s massive, 1600:1, ultra high contrast ratio, plasma screen was awesome. Probably extremely expensive, but awesome.

MTN had a huge interactive golf simulator that not only made you feel like you were playing golf on a very prestiguous golf course, but also made you feel like you were flying on top of the golf ball once you hit it. That’s if you managed to connect the ball with the screen, and not catch a rebound into some techy geek watching behind you (Didn’t happen to me, but I witnessed something similar).

It had absolutely nothing to do with the services they were selling, but also managed to capture attention.

Golf + Hot chicks + Cool Techie Toys = Heaven for men.

All in all it was most informative, and a great place to source new technologies to sell. I urge all you geeky Jo’burgers to visit the expo.

P.S. One hour and fifty minutes still to wait, and laptop battery almost dead. Grrr… what to do, what to do.

Firefox have recently launched a new add-on to their web browser that allows users to download videos from Youtube, Google, Metacafe, iFilm, Dailymotion… and other 60+ video sites ! And all embedded objects on a webpage (movies, mp3s, flash, quicktime, etc) ! Directly !

VideoDownloader adds a small icon on the status bar, at the bottom of your firefox window, and a toolbar button. Just click that and download the video you are watching !

Pretty cool. Firefox never seizes to amaze me, it just keeps getting better and better, leaving Microsoft’s IE further and further behind.

For an amateur golfer, with a pretty unpredicatable golf swing like mine, this is a must have! It has quite a hefty price tag of $260, and is avaliable online.

Luckily, I have Azland, my trusty dog, to do the ball retrieving for me (read what I’m talking about here), but there are a lot of not so lucky people out there. I strongly advise you getting this gizmo.