1-800-FREE411

*Note* The following is a shameless promotion for a company that I've invested in.

I really like 1-800-FREE411. There is no need to ever pay for directory assistance again. Not only is 1-800-FREE411 totally free, but it is better and usually faster than the old fashioned "pay a $1 per call" directory assistance. It works from your cell phone or your land-line. This is a really great idea. I wish that I would have thought of it.

www.free411.com

It's totally free for consumers. The company makes their revenue from advertisers who pay for placement...think Google for directory assistance. So now finally you can call 1-800-FREE411 and ask for a specific company, or simply ask for a general category like "pizza places in San Francisco that deliver". Isn't that cool?

Another patent

A second TuneTo.com patent has issued! These things literally take years to get through the patent office. This one, 7,020,637 covers different claims than the first one that issued in 2003 and is a continuation of one I originally filed before TuneTo.com was acquired by Listen.com. It is great to know that Rhapsody has additional patent protection now. Although patents by themselves do not gurantee success, they will help keep competing digital music services such as iTunes, Napster, Yahoo Music (MusicMatch), and MusicNow from ripping off Rhaposdy. That will help to insure that Rhapsody continues to bring in hundreds of millions of dollars per year of revenue for RealNetworks.

Video out Cable for Video iPod

After some frustration I discovered that a regular video cable from Radio Shack will in fact work for displaying composite video from your Video iPod. However, Apple in an attempt to force their customers to pay $20 for a "custom" cable that most early adopters own already anyway (the one that came with your digital video camera for instance), simply switched the "yellow" and the "red" connectors on a standard video cable. So if you hook up the red cable to video in and the yellow and black cables to your audio in then a standard video cable like this on will work just as well as the $20 Apple cable.