I discovered a really simple solution to

1) get all the features I wanted from YouMail,

2) use Google Voice as my voicemail manager and transcription service

3) STILL keep my existing number.

From your cell phone just dial this exactly as you see it
*004*1XXXXXXXXXX#
where the X represents your 10 digit Google Voice number.

That’s it. You are done. All calls are forwarded to Google Voice and it acts as your voicemail inbox and transcription service.

Please Note: This worked for my iPhone. Please let me know in the comments if it worked for you or not.

[Updated:] This will not work if you have your Google Voice forwarding back to your cellphone. I did not realize it at first but my Google Voice was forwarding to my land line.

via That Was Fast: Kindle, Meet the iPhone. | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD.

Now we know. As of today, you can now read Kindle titles on your Apple iPhone AAPL.

The free Kindle for iPhone App is just what it sounds like: It lets you read e-books that you’ve bought from Amazon AMZN. It won’t let you actually buy the titles from the online bookseller, though. To do that, you will need to use your Kindle or a Web browser.

But since you can use the iPhone’s built-in Safari browser to buy a Kindle book, that’s a fairly minor distinction. More important: Once you own a Kindle title, you can sync the titles between your iPhone or iTouch and your Kindle.

Wait a minute. Aren’t Amazon and Apple competitors when it comes to music and video sales? And won’t they be competing for years to come for all sorts of digital content sales?

Sure. But Apple’s Steve Jobs has been publicly dismissive of the e-book market, and Amazon clearly sees the Kindle as a superior e-book reader to the iPhone — it imagines that the iPhone, or any other non-Kindle device, will be something you use to read an e-book when you can’t actually get your hands on a Kindle.

The bigger picture: Apple is still, for the moment, a hardware company that uses content to make its gadgets more attractive. And Amazon is basically the inverse: It wants to sell a lot of Kindles so it can sell a lot more Kindle e-books. So the detente here makes plenty of sense.

Which is probably what Walt Mossberg had in mind when he reviewed the Kindle 2.0 last week:

Amazon says it is working to make the Kindle e-book catalog available on other mobile devices, such as smart phones, that people already own. The online merchant, which is so secretive it makes Steve Jobs seem like Joe Biden, isn’t saying which devices will get the Kindle service or when. I would bet it will be sooner rather than later.

via Facebook’s “In-House Sociologist” Shares Stats on Users’ Social Behavior.

Been using feedly for a few days now.. besides a few quirks, I really enjoy the paper layout going for rss feeds. The best thing going for it is that it maintains the state with google reader as well. So I am seeing the same new posts on mobile, reader and feedly.

Kudos to the feedly team!

Interesting.. with real spam on the decline (http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2007/11/google_spam), is “bacn” the new “spam”?

Great article today(with poll) about state of office/web-office tools. The interesting thing to note is that the audience is primarily early-adopter crowd, who still seem to have a huge hurdle in trying to get past the MS office suite.

I think its primarily 2 factors – feature set(includes navigation of menu, buttons, shortcuts, macros etc) and also convenience(Word icon is right there on your desktop and everyone knows how to use it). IMHO, the best web-office tool is one that is going to be a combination of desktop/online integration and zoho is one step closer than google docs(Maybe MS Groove too but I never really could figure that out).