A quick rundown of the ones we haven’t mentioned before on WWD:

AudioBoo – Using an iPhone app, you can easily record a message or podcast. The sound quality is good. Ease of use, check. Upload time — not too bad, but keep in mind this is eating your data plan, so make sure you have a good one. Listen to a sample recording.

Chirbit – You can upload an MP3 or record straight from your computer, just like Utterli. Sound quality is not so great, so if that’s a concern, you want to try a USB mic. Without an iPhone app or number to call into, this app lacks true portability, unless you have your laptop with you wherever you go. Listen to a sample recording. You can also record a Text 2 Speech Chirbit. I’ve always thought Text 2 Speech sounds very creepy. You be the judge.

Trottr – Like Utterli, Trottr has a call-in number. Unlike Utterli, Trottr is much more international with multiple access numbers. Call in using any phone (you can register multiple phone numbers), speak into your phone, hang up. A cinch. Sound quality is fuzzy, so the quality of the phone connection definitely affects the end product. Listen to a sample recording.

Using an Audio Microblog

As I’ve been playing around with these sites, here are some ideas I’ve had about how we can use audio microblogging for our work.

1. Memos – The obvious use of private audio microblogs are audio memos to yourself or memos to people to whom you give access. I used to have a tiny digital recording device for this and frankly never used it. The few times I’ve tried to get in the habit of leaving myself audio reminders, I’ve forgotten to listen to them! But some swear by audio notes and memos.

2. Notes – While recording someone else’s speech or a meeting could be infringing on privacy or copyrights, using this for your own noncommercial and private purposes could certainly come in handy. Most audio microblogs do have a time limit, so they’re probably not ideal for trying to record an entire meeting or workshop, however, you could take notes or record snippets to share publicly (if appropriate) or use privately. I could see using it to recap meetings and phone conversations and sharing it with the people involved as a way to make sure we’re all on the same page.

3. Internal Tutorials – One of the hardest things to do when training new people is to get consistent instructions down in writing and then get new hires or team members to actually read them and follow them. I’ve started experimenting with audio podcasts of instructions for how we like to do things at our company. Using an outline is helpful so you don’t ramble. Shorter audio tutorials are also more effective than longer ones, so focus in on a single task per tutorial.

4. External Tutorials - In the same way audio recordings can be good teaching tools, you could extend this teaching outside of your team or organization and publish quick tips and how-to’s. While people tend to expect good production value from podcasts, I think they’re more forgiving about audio microblogs because they are more “in the moment” and conversational. Still, if you are going to go public with your audio lessons, a script is probably in order to keep the recordings concise and on track.

5. Audio Diary - If you are traveling, attending an event or are somewhere that others would like to be, you can send “audio postcards” or audio diary entries from the road. I can see how an audio recap of a workshop or lecture could be much easier to produce than writing out a summary and posting to a blog. If you are pressed for time or on the move, you could record your update in transit (as long as you have the right app, device and connectivity).

6. Conversation - Many of us use Twitter daily as a watercooler. An audio microblog could be the next step in these impromptu conversations. I do think, however, that the adoption of audio conversations will be slower going, as they’ve been on video microblogging sites. There are a core of avid users conversing with one another, but there is still something a little unfamiliar and odd about holding a conversation with audio or video that is not real time. We seem OK with this time lapse in text but less so in multimedia. Non-synchronous conversation is certainly handy when communicating between time zones. As people continue to adopt audio microblogging as another means of communication and publishing, I think that back and forth conversation among several or many will begin to come into its own.

What ways are you using or thinking about using audio microblogs?

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How much are you willing to pay for your favorite web apps and services? That’s the key question to which every app developer wants an answer. It seems as if the provider of every once-free service is now pondering ways to make money and extract revenue from their members, which makes sense when you consider that they are, after all, businesses.

Remember that old adage, you get what you pay for? Will we continue to see more of our favorite free services following this model of offering stripped down freemium accounts along with feature-rich premium plans? Will online advertising ever allow these sites to generate enough revenue to avoid going this route?

Proven Winners

Here are a couple of services that have found the right formula for success when it comes to charging their members. There might be some valuable lessons learned by examining these successful services to see how they managed to get their users to take out their wallets rather than their pitchforks and torches.

Flickr was one of the first sites to capitalize on the fact that its members needed its services. They knew that people love their photos and they would be more than willing to pay a small fee for the convenience of storing and sharing their precious collections online. The paid accounts offered a few other bells and whistles, too, which only made the decision to pay easier.

Evernote is another service that was clever enough to jump on a need it knew its members would pay for — storing notes and information in the cloud, and then having them accessible via the web from their desktop and mobile devices.

When the iPhone was released with its feeble notes app, Evernote swooped in with its own much more fully featured app, which allowed even more users to tap into their service, and thus into their wallets.

Contenders or Pretenders

Here are a few services that show promise as they venture into paid subscription territory from the freemium universe. They originally hooked their users with totally free service, and only later announced their membership plans. Time will tell if they made the right move.

Jott emerged on the scene with an ambitious service that allowed its members to save their audio notes to the web via their mobile device. It also cross-posted to other services such as Twitter, Facebook and Remember the Milk. For the longest time it was free and in beta, then it announced its premium plans. There’s still a free plan but it’s extremely limited. Many members opted out, but many of them stuck around for one of the new paid plans.

Box also enticed members with free online storage but then later added premium plans with greater features such as larger file size for uploads (25 MB vs 1 GB, for example) and much more storage space (1 GB for free accounts vs. 30 GB for Business accounts).

While there are a slew of online storage services comparable to box.net (including some free ones with much larger storage), Box has wisely continued to innovate and has released many new features and options to make its service stand out. For example, its ability to work with your desktop applications as well as mobile devices is very handy. It has also released its own online apps to create documents and save them directly to your account.

Dropbox is another online storage service. It’s similar to Box but it does things a little differently. It provides the ability to automatically synchronize your files from multiple computers and provides twice the space of box.net for free accounts (2 GB). It also has premium accounts for far greater amounts of data.

Services That Will Start Charging Someday

Hulu is extremely popular these days. It remains free, but look for it to trot out some premium services soon. The companies behind it, NBC and ABC/Disney, are no slouches when it comes to making a buck, so hold on to your wallets. Clear signs of its financial plans is the way it has thwarted boxee’s attempts to share its content with its user base. The message is “No pay, no play”.

Yes, even the red-hot popular media darling Twitter has been struggling with the subject matter of monetization. Its difficulties with discovering a way to make money have been analyzed to death by countless financial experts and business gurus. It has looked at charging users for premium services, implementing advertisements and charging third party services for access to its API. Ultimately, no one knows how Twitter will cash in on all of its recent media coverage. No matter what it does, they will become the perfect case study in courses for future web entrepreneurs.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, most sites will fail if they aren’t careful when it comes to charging for their services. Recession or not, there are only so many services anyone can pay for, no matter how slick the interface or how many bells and whistles they offer. However, they also need to conduct themselves as a business and find a way to pay the bills.  At the end of the day, it’s always going to come down to a question quality of service and quantity of need.

Do you use mostly free services, or mostly pay? What factors help convince you that a service is in fact worth paying for?

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For paying users, you can choose between a $3.95 per month plan that gets you back all the services and adds Outlook integration, or $12.95 per month for one that also brings in Blackberry connectivity and a 30-second recording time. If you’re a current Jott user, you have until September 8 to decide whether you’re ready to pay, forgo the premium services, or look at less-functional (but free) alternatives like Dial2Do.

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In a previous article, I covered tips for getting more from BlackBerry email. One application I didn’t mention is Jott for BlackBerry, which is an extension of its main service that lets you reply to messages using your voice. Jott transcribes your verbal message to text before sending it on to the recipient and includes a link in the email to hear the voice recording in case of transcription errors. The Jott voice recognition engine is amazing – even my laid-back Aussie drawl, which is usually a challenge for anyone out of the country to understand, let alone a machine, was transcribed with 100% accuracy.

eOffice

eOffice is the only document editor for BlackBerry currently available, but its real killer feature is integration with Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Using this program, you can open and edit files in your online account, as well as save files you’ve created on the BlackBerry directly to your Google account. But it still needs work: in my testing, the connection would time out more times than not, or throw up errors that the document I was trying to open was empty or invalid.

RDM+

Another means of accessing files that aren’t stored locally is RDM+, a remote access program that lets you connect to your PC, navigate your desktop using the BlackBerry’s trackball and keyboard, run programs and transfer files between your BlackBerry and PC. Using it over an EDGE connection is interminably slow, but it’s easy to set up and pays for itself the first time you leave an urgent file on your PC and don’t have any other means of retrieving it.

PocketDay

If you use your BlackBerry for time management, PocketDay is a must-have as it aggregates all of your PIM items and unread messages into a single screen. I’ve never subscribed to the idea of having tasks and appointments in separate applications – I need to see all of my meetings and to-do items in one place so I can organize my time effectively, and PocketDay provides that functionality, in addition to letting you save individual emails as actionable appointments or tasks and view other information like weather, stocks, world time and RSS feeds on one screen.

JiveTalk

If you use IM for chatting with colleagues and clients, JiveTalk will make your life a lot easier. It works across all major IM platforms, supports file transfers and chat transcripts (and even lets you email transcripts for a permanent record of discussions), and makes it easy to switch between multiple chat windows.

BlackBerry Call Screener

Finally, I’ve found BlackBerry Call Screener indispensable for managing my calls. When I’m ‘in the zone’, I don’t like being interrupted with phone calls, and rather than turn my BlackBerry off altogether, I can set up Antair CallScreener to block all calls save for people on my ‘whitelist’ (mainly my partner and family) – anyone else can send me an email or leave a voicemail! Other options in the program include blocking all calls, blocking all calls save for people in your address book, and allowing all calls except for people on your blacklist.

Got any other BlackBerry applications you can recommend? Let’s hear about them in the comments.

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Every once-in-a-while I find an application like Jott that truly revolutionizes the way I organize my life.

We all write notes on pieces of paper, napkins, etc.; but they often get lost in the shuffle. Jott comes along and helps you consolidate your tasks, notes, and events into one spot. All you do it call the Jott number, and you hear a voice that says: “What do you want to Jott?” You then give the folder name you’ve created, contact, or application and simply speak your message. Jott translates voice into text and then, based on your preferences, either e-mails you or adds the event. It also stores the message for historical purposes on the Jott website.

The premise is simple, the sign-up is easy. After signing up you can then call the Jott number to record messages instantly.

Jott has tapped into some of the most popular APIs including Google Calendar, Twitter, Tumblr, and even WordPress.com amongst others. You can do things like create a folder, associate it with a co-worker/team member, and when you post to that folder it sends them an e-mail with the tasking. You essentially have an on-the-go project management utility.

Jott can extend beyond its predefined Jott links. For example, to use Jott with Outlook, simply use the Plaxo application as a synchronization tool between Outlook and Google Calendar. Now, when you post to Google Calendar from your Jott account it will automatically be synced with your Outlook calendar.

Wishlist:

• An add-on for managing Jotts directly inside Microsoft Outlook. It would be nice to create tasks, notes, events, etc. without using an extra application such as Plaxo.
• The ability to send text messages to my Jott number and have them be translated into Jotts.

Have you tried Jott? Are you finding it useful?

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