Sree's Thoughts on iPing.com
Thursday, March 15, 2001

Consider it a wake-up service for the Internet age.

If you live in the U.S. or Canada, this is a must-visit site. It's like traditional phone wake-up services, but just more versatile and updated for the Internet age. You can use the site to, among other things, schedule wake-up calls, birthday and anniversary reminders, and voicemail messages for other people. Basically, you use your computer and Web connection to get reminders via the phone.

You can even record a message to wake up to, in you own voice. So when I need to get up early Thursdays to get to the WABC studio, I am awakened to my own voice yelling "WAKE UP, YOU SLEEPY-HEAD, WAKE UP!" A major advantage: you can program repeated calls up to four months in advance, so you don't need to remember to call the phone company every time the way you do with regular phone services.

The "Mr. Dose" feature reminds me to take my vitamins every day (haven't missed a day since I put the service to work). Also available is "Ms. Followup" -- "she" tracks your courier packages for you and lets you know when they are delivered.

"Mr. Dollar," meanwhile, will read you headlines from The Wall Street Journal every hour, if you wish.

It does all this free of charge -- the site is ad-supported .iPing is easy to set up, too, but remember, you get what you pay for, so no guarantees.

One question people have is what keeps pranksters from setting alarms for others. You have to log on with a private username and password to use the service, so it keeps track of what you do. Besides, the phone system I used to use allows me to set alarms for anyone, without tracking me -- so these hazards are not new to the Internet.

So, try out iPing, knowing that you are now running out of excuses for oversleeping or missing birthdays.

http://www.iping.com

Send your ideas for coverage -- and feedback: techguru@sree.net

 

Sree's Site of The Week


Ireland.com St. Patrick's Festival
http://www.ireland.com/events/st.patricks/2001/

Just in time for this week's St. Patrick's Day festivities in NYC, here is a site that celebrates all things Irish, including the good saint's day.

Ireland.com is the site of The Irish Times and offers a wide range of items dealing with the holiday, including reports about the parades in various cities.

You can learn about the history of the day, send virtual postcards and enter a contest to win air tickets to Dublin.

Unlike a lot of other St. Patrick's Day sites, this one is (naturally) much more newsy and explains how the current outbreak of foot and mouth disease in Ireland has postponed many of the major celebrations there.

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