Adam Weiss

Digital Media Strategist | Podcaster | Science Communicator

Founder/CEO of AppDemoVideos.com

Digital Media Strategist
Podcaster
Science Communicator

Robo-Call Reminding Me to Vote TOMORROW

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IMG_0319I received a voicemail at 2:23 PM today (November 3, 2009 — election day) encouraging me to vote for Tom Menino for mayor of Boston. Not unusual on election day, right?

Right, except that it asked me to vote tomorrow, not today.

I don’t know if this is a case of computer/operator error or a legitimate case of electoral fraud through misinformation, but I was asked to record and share it by a number of people on Twitter, so here it is.

Because it was left today, I could not figure out how to get the voicemail system to say the actual date it was left. If I wait, I can get a properly timestamped version, but that will take a few days. In the meantime, I’ve included a screenshot of my iPhone voicemail screen taken at 2:41 today. I don’t think iPhone screenshots have EXIF data, but it’s the best I can do.

Did anyone else receive one of these calls?

For the record, I didn’t campaign for or support either mayoral candidate this year, so this isn’t an attack on anyone. I just found it curious and thought it was worth sharing.

Click the play button below to play the message.

The Sound of Millions of Technophiles Screaming

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Two big tech glitches happened last night:

  1. The TurboTax servers went down hours before tax returns were due.
  2. The main servers for BlackBerry email went offline.

According to a spokesperson for TurboTax maker Intuit,

Yesterday was a huge volume day for our back-end electronic filing. As a result, we had a significant slowdown in our ability to process and transmit electronic returns to the IRS.

Luckily for those last-minute filers who got burned, the IRS is going to allow extra time for those people who couldn’t get their returns through the clogged pipes.

As for #2, the BlackBerry servers at Canadian Research in Motion went down overnight, cutting off email to most subscribers in the Western Hemisphere. This was a great quote in the New Zealand Herald:

“I felt like my left arm had been amputated,” said Joe Shoemaker, communications director for Assistant Senate Democratic Leader Dick Durbin of Illinois.

As for me, I did my taxes in February and I’m not addicted to email on my phone, so I barely noticed.

BBOutage

A “Traditional Media” Experiment

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The Boston NOW paper I mentioned before was launched this morning, and I’m in it twice.

There’s a blurb about the Museum’s podcast and a callout box on the page of Boston Marathon coverage featuring the latest Boston Behind the Scenes.

I wanted to see if this would convince people to go to my website, but the early returns aren’t good. Boston Behind the Scenes has  seen exactly one unaccounted-for hit from the Boston area today – and that was from the servers of the Community Newspaper Company in Taunton. I’m pretty sure they were just thoroughly investigating the new competition.

1-800-GOOG-411

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Google has just launched Google Voice Local Search, and experimental phone-based search system.

According to the website:

Google Voice Local Search is Google’s experimental service to make local-business search accessible over the phone.

To try this service, just dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) from any phone.

Using this service, you can:

  • search for a local business by name or category.

You can say “Giovanni’s Pizzeria” or just “pizza”.

  • get connected to the business, free of charge.
  • get the details by SMS if you’re using a mobile phone.

Just say “text message”.

I’ve tried it out a few times, and it seems to work alright. The system was down for a while, but that’s to be expected with a service that’s less than a week old.

To hear a test call, listen to the MP3 below. Here’s the text message I got from Google during the call:

Subject: Burger King

Burger King
128 Tremont St
Boston, MA 02108
617-556-8299