As a geek I’m guilty of perhaps not getting as much exercise as I need. Part of the problem is finding the time but that comes down to motivation. With the wonders of this socially networked age it’s easier to use technology to help with that motivation.

The geek in me likes stats. If I know I’m doing good, and overall improving against myself or friends then I have the incentive to keep going and doing better. You can do something simple like maintaining an excel spreadsheet or twittering your workout but as someone who’s recently rediscovered cycling after 20 years in cars I’m really blown away by SportsDo. All you need is a Windows Mobile device with GPS capabilities, a data connection and … to get off the computer and get some exercise!

Your first step is to register on the SportsDo.Net website and create a profile. From there you can download and install the Windows Mobile client (other devices are supported) or you can visit their over-the-air provisioning site directly from your phone (you can try out the application before buying – you’re just limited to the distance you can cover).

You’re not limited by specific sports (and you don’t have to pre-select or choose anything up front) – when you start a new activity on your device you can choose from a predefined list (cycling, walking, canoeing, running, snowboarding, skiing, rowing, adventuring, motor-sports, horse riding and many others) or create your own profile.

Once you hit “new” on your device it starts recording GPS data so it knows where you are and how fast you are going (and from that it can calculate calories etc).

When you are exercising – be is a brisk walk or a full out cycle race – you can stop and take photos to record the even. They are, of course, geo-tagged and will be uploaded along with the rest of the data to your online diary.

Even if you don’t stop you can check the display at any time to see how far you’ve gone or how long you’ve been out. You can also choose to have any of the statistics (location, speed, distance traveled, gradient and calories burned and others) announced via your phones speakers or headphones.

You can choose to share your stats live (if you have a phone with a data plan and coverage) and there is also an option to automatically text buddies with updates.

Once you complete an activity you can edit the description and upload it (with any photos) to the web where you can then share with friends – including a Virtual Earth animation of the trail you took (shows relative speeds), synchronized to graphs showing gradients and speed. An example of the sort details and an animation of one of my recent cycle rides.

If you are going on an activity in an area you might not know that well SportsDo also have Location Packs available. These contain details of trails, restaurants and other amenities, ski lifts etc. The packs are continually updated as information about an area improves, and the packs cover many popular resorts.

As well as documenting your sporting prowess you can use SportsDo to tell friends and family where you are (similar to the option for Navizon users). You can even embed the information in your blog if you want to share that much ;)

You’re probably very familiar with the plethora of widget or gadget technologies on the web or your desktop by now – Vista Sidebar, Windows Sideshow, Google, Yahoo and Microsofts web and desktop offerings as well as a collection of Web 2.0 offerings that it’s pointless to try and enumerate because it would already be out of date.

Well, they continue to spread and Access (the folks behind the NetFront browser which has been doing a great job on Palm and Windows Mobile for several years) have brought a gadget runtime framework to Windows Mobile Professional (aka Touch or PocketPC) devices that they call Netfront Browser Widgets.

Installation and setup on my HTC Diamond was quick and simple. You need to register at the Netfront Browser Widgets site and from there download the installer to your phone (though you can do it over the air I found it easier via the desktop browser)

The installer comes with a couple of widgets (World Clock and Weather) pre-installed, but there are several others (such as the Twitter one above) that you can download and install.

The widgets themselves seem to have a very similar philosophy to their desktop and web counterparts – development will be using standard HTML and Javascript (a subset of the W3C Widgets 1.0 specification) with some javascript extensions to access hardware specific things such as location, power and wireless status.

Unlike many development environments / tools, widgets are fairly straightforward to develop for (thanks to the HTML and Javascript basis) and are also safe – because they operate in your default browsers sandbox they’re not going to get uncontrolled access to your device or data so they’re safe to experiment with.

At the moment although there are some widgets created by Access themselves to get you started the developer information isn’t available, but I imagine it won’t be too long before we see that released and folks start to get creative…

My tree at Carbon Grove

Thanks to the folks on the Internet Explorer team I planted a Virtual tree. I’ve made some commitments to help improve the environment (for instance I don’t drive to work any more, I take the bus or ride my bike) and if I visit my tree over the next six weeks then the IE folks in conjunction with Carbon Grove will plant a real tree.

As well as supporting the environment the site takes advantages of not only some of the new IE8 features (though it will work just as well in older browsers) but the folks at Jackson Fish Market have done a really creative job in bringing the forests to life.

This is just one of many ways you can get involved in making the world a bit better – recycling, composting, reducing your power bill … it doesn’t have to be hard (just remembering to turn out your office light or shut off your PC when you’re not using it) and over a year it adds up.

Lifecasting is a big thing at the moment. One step beyond blogging and tweeting is the ability to record and broadcast live video from a cellphone to share what you’re doing – and engage with your audience.

Qik is probably the best known of these, and is slowly rolling out an early beta service for Windows Mobile users. But Qik are not the only game in town – there are a couple of existing solutions that have great support for Windows Mobile users.

LiveCast provide a live video streaming platform for Windows Mobile and laptop or UMPC users. The video is synchronized with GPS position data so your viewers can see where you are when you’re broadcasting (or when they review archived footage where you were).

While the video quality on LiveCast is pretty good for high end phones the client is not the most intuitive (so expect to spend some time figuring it it), and the web site is a bit clunky.

LiveMedia from IncaX provides very similar capabilities – private or public broadcasting from either PC or Mobile device, though as well as streaming video it allows you to insert other media from your device to enhance the presentation.

The LiveMedia GPS mobile client (currently in beta) adds GPS location data to the broadcast from your phone, and also allows you to record a broadcast to local storage for later upload. This feature is particularly useful as it allows you to keep a record of a trip without having to worry about connectivity.

Although feature-for-feature these two solutions are fairly similar my preference is for LiveMedia. The video quality is slightly less fluid and there is no audio in the current beta version but the interface is significantly easier to work with and there are more options to share your broadcasts.

The great thing is that both of these products are at fairly early stages and are evolving quite quickly, as are the capabilities of the phones they run on. Missing features and complicated user interfaces will quickly give way to slick controls and, especially as bandwith increases, high quality video and audio.

Apparently there are some people using Gmail and the Google Calendar service rather than Live Mail or an Exchange solution and they’re not sure if they can still get their email, calendar and contacts synced to their Windows Mobile phone or PDA.

Well luckily for them (and me, yes I use Gmail as well) there are solutions – and they are simple (and free or cheap).

Although connectivity is pretty good I like to make sure I have a local instantly available backup (and you can’t check your web calendar on a plane yet). Being able to store contacts, schedule and email in Pocket Outlook and work with them anywhere is one of the biggest reasons I’ve used a Windows Mobile device for quite some time.

Email

To get the most of out Gmail you’ll want to use IMAP to sync your mail – leaving the technical stuff aside (click here if you want that) it’s a two way sync so if you read a mail on the phone then Gmail knows about it when you go back to the website.

To use IMAP in Gmail you’ll need to enable it first. Once that is done you can access Gmail over IMAP in any mail client – Outlook, Thunderbird and, of course, Windows Mobile Outlook Mobile. To set it up for your device follow the steps for Windows Mobile5 or Windows Mobile6 (the instructions are slightly different because the default mail setup wizard for WM6 tries to use POP3 and you’ll want to work around that!)

Of course if you don’t want to do this there is always the Mobile optimized web version of the Gmail site but once you‘ve tried using the Outlook Mobile client you won’t want to go back

Contacts and Calendar

What use is email if you don’t have all your contact details available (and after all it probably makes sense to keep your contacts details in sync across web and the phone).

If you get an email inviting you to a meeting or a party you want to be able to put it in your calendar… but unless your phone and the online calendar are in sync how will you ever keep your schedule straight?

Well, for Live Mail users there’s always the Windows Live client which takes care of keeping that in sync for you, but for Google users there is OggSync.

OggSync supports both Outlook and Windows Mobile clients so you can choose one or both depending on what you need. Personally I usually use the web interface from a PC so just have the mobile client.

The free version supports basic calendar syncing and the (very reasonably priced) pro version adds a lot more flexibility/control to the calendar sync (including support for multiple calendars) and contact sync.

With the pro version you can synchronize multiple calendars (with mapping) to a time schedule so you never have to lift a finger.

All of the sync functionality (in either version) is bidirectional so you can update on the phone or via the web and, like using IMAP for email, know that everything will be only one sync away from being up-to-date.

Check out OggSync and … welcome to the world of Outlook Mobile

I’m never organized enough to clip coupons (or even remember to collect them from the supermarket) so Cellfire seems like an ideal solution.

It’s a small application that runs on your Windows Mobile phone (or can be accessed via a web browser interface) which downloads available local offers (you tell it your postcode) and you can search and redeem them in stores.

The offers range from half price coffee to free slices of pizza, video rental or music downloads and many others, frequently updated and offered at no cost to you (beyond data costs if you download updates over the air)

I love the idea, but I think there are some ways it could improve to make it a much more useful.

• Searching and filtering offers is a bit rudimentary, I’d like to see more granularity so I can quickly see if there’s something relevant to my current needs, but at the same time it’s important for their business model to have the serendipity of discovering new stores so a general browse mode is still needed. I’d like to be able to specify things I’m not interested in (diapers or all-you-can-eat Seafood Diners for instance) and raise the priorities of things I am (eg non-chain coffee shops, organic produce, independent music stores).
• Location appropriate offers. I’m not going to drive 20 miles for a half price latte so it’s not worth showing those to me when I look for coffeeshops, but by talking to the GPS on my phone (or maybe integrating with something like Navizon for users without GPS) the offers can be much better targeted to where I am right now. A neat, but slightly freaky, extension would be to look ahead in my calendar to see what locations I’ve entered and find offers in those areas as well.
• Smart sorting. Similar to the location appropriate offers it makes sense to show me the closest offers first as I’m more likely to use them, but it would be good to have options to also sort based on other factors such as value of offer or loyalty to a specific store.
• Mapping integration. Don’t just give me the address give me a hot link to Windows Live Search for Mobile or (if not available) to Live Maps so I can get directions. Also with map integration you could plot offers and let me optimize my shopping trips ;)

The other thing I’d like to see is better integration with supermarket coupons – I’d be willing to pair my QFC Club Card to my Cellfire account in order to have relevant offers/coupons made available electronically (and it would be great if I could scan them at the quick checkout and not need to queue at the counter – similar to what we showed at Advance08). It would greatly enhance the value of the application and make more more likely to take advantage of some of the promotions offered. In fact if managed well it could be a real loyalty bonus as you’d have a constant reminder of the value of your continued patronage.

One new feature Cellfire could accommodate would be Club Card membership. Rather than me need to carry around the barcodes for QFC, Blockbuster and Borders I could enter the information (either in the app or via their website) and have the card image delivered to my phone so I can scan that and dump the plastic chits. It’s a much simpler solution and even more practical than some other solutions I’ve seen.

Just like the Zune commercial no-one has ever seen when I see things like this I wonder why Microsoft are not smarter with their advertising.

Sync has made a good start but to start fighting back, and maybe there’s more of a move in the right direction.

Over the last 20 years I’ve worked on several systems that rely on pushing data around to the right place at the right time in order to be effective. Hotel reservations systems need real-time availability information, LPG distribution needs to know what state various tanks are in, streaming video to cellphones needs to get over the air to the user and live video needs to get over the network to the broadcast center.

40 years ago much of this wouldn’t have been possible as the lines of real-time communication didn’t exist or were prohibitively expensive (compare the cost of a telegram message in 1900 to a text message today, or a transmission from the Hubble Telescope.

In 20 years will networks exist as we know them today – patchy, unreliable and certainly not ubiquitous enough to rely on consistently? Or will the promise of an always on connected affordable  cloud become real.

Imagine film of a normal street right now, a relatively busy crossroads at 9AM taken from a vantage point high above the street, looking down at an angle as if from a CCTV camera. We can see several buildings, a dozen cars, and quite a few people, pavements dotted with street furniture.

Freeze the frame, and scrub the film backwards and forwards a little, observing the physical activity on the street. But what can’t we see?

One of the biggest problems with using the Internet for crucial day-to-day applications is when you can’t get connected. On a plane, at a WiFi hotspot you don’t really trust, or even in a building with poor data network reception for your phone.

For most desktop applications the answer is simple… your data lives locally and you work with it there not rely on connectivity, and then sync what you need to. At MIX this year for instance we demonstrated a prototype of a Cirque du Soleil application that demonstrated exactly that.

For web applications it’s a little harder as they run inside the browser sandbox, and for mobile web applications… well, logic dictates that should be even harder.

Well… turns out it’s not that hard for developers to build an off-line version of their site that’s able to cache data locally and the really interesting thing for me was discovering how well it works on Windows Mobile. That solution is Google Gears.

I use Buxfer to try and make sense of my personal finances (a pretty major challenge). The reason I’m leaning more to this solution rather than, say, Mint (an otherwise excellent solution) is that they let me take my data offline and access it on my Windows Mobile phone.

Now they could have developed a native Windows Mobile application to do this, which would have given them a rich UI and dynamic synchronization and probably a whole load of other goodness, but they reasoned that they’re web developers, they don’t really “get” mobile app development and there’s probably a dozen different platforms they’ll want to support so… why not let someone else do the heavy lifting (and that someone is Google with their Gears API and javascript extensions) – all they have to do is develop the application using the Gears API and they get, for very little additional development overhead, a portable offline solution that runs anywhere Gears does (Windows Mobile, OSX, Windows XP/Vista and various flavors of Linux)

I think it’s pretty impressive that Windows Mobile is the first supported phone platform and a testament to how popular it is as a data access device.

Gears is only a 0.2 release so there’s probably lots of things that will be added over time. My wishlist for those additions is pretty simple:

• Ability to synchronize changes back to the web (MS SQL Sync Framework supports this
• Ability to auto synchronize – as a user I have to manually choose to go “offline”… if I don’t do that before disconnecting then I don’t have the latest copy of the data. It would be great if a Gears enabled app could detect it was running on an authorized device and in the background update me and then if I try to return to the site in (say) Flight mode it automatically switches to offline mode.

Native apps will always have a richer interface and more powerful capabilities because they operate outside the browser sandbox, they have access to the hardware (eg camera) and features like the network stack directly so they are ideal for more sophisticated users. But for simple look-up applications like mobile versions of Buxfer or Zoho this is a great solution

A short while ago Live Search allowed you to sign up to get something back when you bought through participating vendors you found when using Live Search

Now you can contribute to good causes every time you do a search

By signing up at www.searchandgive.com, you can start donating one-cent to more than 100,000 schools and 900,000 non-profit organizations worldwide, every time you use the Internet to find whatever you’re looking for. Once you’ve signed in and set your default recipient you can set Search and Give as your default search provider for your browser.

You can also convert the tickets you earn playing games on Microsoft’s Live Search Club, into donations for those same schools or charities, and make donations just for chatting with Windows Live Messenger.

So what are you looking for? Find it at www.searchandgive.com