Remember those films when they’d show a kid screaming, “Extra, extra!  Read all about it! (insert cool thing here)!”  Well, I’ve been using the brand new reQall Pro and I have to tell you that it is indeed something you should “read all about!”

The team at reQall have had their heads down and working late nights in the office to build their newest and most comprehensive tool to date.

Does this sound familiar?  Every time you drive past your accountant’s office, you think, “Drats!!! I need to get my tax documents pulled together and get them to Frank before it’s too late!  Why can’t I remember to do this?!  I don’t want to be running around frantically at the last minute like I did last year.  ACK!!”   Okay, well, that’s what I sound like anyway…

And imagine this:  I’m driving past Frank’s house and an alert comes onto my phone.  I stop the car (because you wouldn’t read and drive at the same time, would you?) and check to see what’s up.  Oh man!  My taxes!  Cool!  They’re right in the back seat and I’m going to pull over and see Frank now.  What a relief!

Then I’m heading home and remember I have to pick up some laundry detergent.  But I know there was something else I needed to get.  Maybe some Gingko to help my memory….  No!  I look at my BlackBerry and reQall knows I’m in Safeway and reminds me to buy OJ, dog food and three Cadbury eggs.  Life saver!

We all have our memory lapses and we could all use a bit of help from time to time.  reQall makes it easy by turning your phone into a back-up brain.  Just talk into the reQall app and it transcribes your voice into reminders to be sent to your calendar, email, IM, etc.  Want to remind your hubbie to pick up your dry cleaning – reQall will do that for you too!  Kids need reminders to clean their rooms?  reQall to the rescue.  You just tell reQall and reQall figures out the best time and place to do the reminding.  So you can get on with your life with one less worry.  And that’s a good thing.

Related articles

• Top 7 Smart Phone Applications to Make Your Life Easier (ABC)
• ReQall Goes Pro: Smarter Task Management for the iPhone (readwriteweb.com)
• Every Memory in Place (Technology Review)
• Forget-me-not helper reQall launches Pro service (CNET)
• New reQall offers location-based reminders (ComputerWorld)
• reQall Goes Pro:  Smarter Task Manager for the iPhone (ReadWriteWeb)
• reQall Pro:  Contextual Reminders Location and Time-based (Ubergizmo)

Last night we descended upon Bar888 in the Intercontinental Hotel to greet movers, shakers and opinion makers in the gaming, virtual world and technology scenes.  Monday was the first day of the Game Developers Conference which took place in the Moscone Convention Center, and as far as I could tell, it appeared that gamers were recession proof as throngs of games developers, producers, publishers and reporters filled the rooms to hear speakers talk about every aspect of gaming you could imagine.

One of the speakers was our very own Raph Koster, President of Metaplace.  Raph is a superstar amongst gamers – so much so that he can’t even walk down the streets of San Francisco without people snapping his photo.  I quipped it was like walking with Sean Penn (not that I’d know what that really felt like… but I can imagine).

At 5:30pm, we joined together with Riccardo Zacconi, Robert Norton and Matthias Schmidt-Pfitzner of King.com to greet the guests that ranged from start-up entrepreneurs, to games bloggers, mainstream reporters to execs from the biggest games companies in the world.  We noshed on crab cakes and goat cheese puffs, sipped wines, and talked about the past, present and future of games.  A good night of casual conversation indeed.

If you want to see the full details behind the event and who was on the list, check out the link here:  Keeping it Casual – Monday Night Mixer.

P.S. If you want to see who’s in the photos, just hover your mouse over the pic and the details should appear – but here’s a quick synopsis:  Top photo: Summer Richards, official bouncer and name checker; 2nd photo:  Robert Norton, King.com and me; 3rd photo; good friend Tomio Geron, Dow Jones VentureWire, BFF Shireen Piramoon, TumbleCloud, Riccardo Zacconi, CEO of King.com, and me; 4th photo: journalist turned Consort,  Mark de la Viña, casual games queen and founder of the Casual Games Association, Jessica Tams, and me; 5th photo:  Mark de la Viña, Sunil Vemuri, co-founder of reQall, Chris Bauman, US Head of Swoopo, and me.

And yeah, I guess you can tell I had my photo arm stretched and ready…

Related articles

• Boing Boing Video (and Offworld!) coming to Game Developers Conference 2009 (boingboing.net)
• GDC 09: conference to reflect a more global game industry (venturebeat.com)
• GDC Cometh [Note] (kotaku.com)
• An Early Glimpse at GDC [Gdc09] (kotaku.com)
• GDC 09: Team CrunchGear invades San Francisco (crunchgear.com)

I’m now back from attending DEMO’09 where I had a chance to catch up with several people I haven’t seen in a long time. Last night was especially fun as Don Clark of the WSJ rallied a group of musicians together and rocked out the crowd. It was a wonderful end to a productive day of new company launches and networking, many of which were focused on saving time and money – probably a smart thing during these shaky economic times.

This week we’re preparing some new stories and will have announcements coming up.

Related articles:

• From small tech show, new ideas (Wall Street Journal)
• DEMO has started, keep an eye on our live coverage (ubergizmo.com)
• At DEMO, it’s all about content discovery (CNET)
• DEMO’09, a smarter internet (PC Magazine)
• DEMO Trend:  The Smarter Web (ReadWriteWeb)
• DEMO Roundup:  Doing more with less, a smarter Internet, and more (VentureBeat)

We’re now in Palm Desert and enjoying all the palm trees and desert weather!  The presenters for DEMO ’09 are now here and the attendees are registering and getting settled.  The official program kicks off tomorrow with 39 companies launching their latest innovations.  The last time I was at DEMO, there were almost 80 companies presenting, with several on the waiting list, so the recession is palpable simply in the numbers of CEOs staged for their 6-minutes of DEMO time.  Meanwhile there are almost 70 members of the press here, so the companies should be happy that they will likely get face time with journalists.

DEMO just informed us that they are broadcasting the entire conference live on the web starting at 8:30AM PST on March 2nd and 3rd here:  www.demo.com/live

Related articles

• How to monitor Demo 09 live (news.cnet.com)
• Demo conference getting new boss from VentureBeat (news.cnet.com)