Eric Tong's MessageStream

New MessageDance features -

Geoff Wolfe (rooffire) — 2008-03-05T10:12:47Z

Hello my friends! Check out why you haven't seen much of me lately . . .

Digital Media Sharing - on the Cream and Clear

March 5th, 2008 by Geoff · No Comments

Roundup: YouTube to Twitter, Photo-Blogging, Share Email Attachments & more.

We've been insanely busy at MessageDance the last few weeks adding features requested by our beta users. The enormous value we believe MessageDance will bring to the social media is starting to take shape. MessageDance is revolutionizing messaging by enabling a single publishing of content to be transformed and distributed to disparate end-points. Huh? OK, enough of the marketecture buzzwords. Share whatever you want — videos, photos, music, rich content, text — to where ever you want in your network — all from one message. We'll take it from there, transform it, and render nicely for its final destination.

Portable YouTube Playlist: all the way to Twitter: If you're into YouTube and want to share videos to your friends in Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, its ridiculously simple to do with MessageDance. Music-video-philes can even create and update a playlist and display it in their MessageDance widget. When you've found a video on YouTube, you just need to click on "Share" and put in your or your friend's MessageDance email address (or send to all of them using "friends @ messagedance.com"). It will go to all of the places you and your friends have MessageDance — this includes Twitter. I sent this video from YouTube.com and it went to my blog, Facebook profile, and Twitter. Clicking on the link shows the video rendered in MessageDance.com where my friends can make comments about it.

Photo-Blogging: I got an iPhone for my birthday and it really hit me as to how easy it is to share anything with all of my social channels. I can take a picture of something I see at the park and send it to my network of friends from my iPhone. You can even make a game of it. The next evolution of this is to have the easy-ability to reply or comment by photo. It's in the works.

Share Attachments: We believe in the future of email. It is easy to use and is an efficient way to transport messages and data. It's just being abused. MessageDance doesn't clutter your or your friends email inbox. We just use email as the vehicle to deliver digital media and share it in ways no other service does. One thing our beta users constantly ask for is the ability to share actual file attachments. Now you can. Send photos, images, music, videos, PDFs, Word, Excel, whatever you want as attachments and they can be shared with your friends.

And since the first release, you can embed and copy & paste in rich content into a rich email client (like Gmail!) and it will render in MessageDance.

The next few weeks you'll see some more stuff that will make your social sharing even easier. To reward you for reading this far, here is an unreleased feature that you can try (we're working on something sweet to make it better). If you're a MessageDancer and added us to Facebook, you can email photos to "photos @ messagedance.com" and we'll automatically drop it into your My Photos section of Facebook Photos. With Facebook, only cellphone users can upload photos using email, but with MessageDance you can use any of your email clients to send photos. Freeeeeeeedom!

Happy Holidays

Eric Tong (tongsitat) — 2007-12-27T16:21:43Z

Wish everyone a happy new year 2008.

Social Networking

Eric Tong (tongsitat) — 2007-12-27T16:07:49Z

A few months back I started to reconnect with tons of old pals and ex-classmates on Facebook, these social networking tools have become more than just a trend but essential in our real life.

Looking back 2007

Eric Tong (tongsitat) — 2007-12-27T16:05:15Z

It's been a very interesting year for me. As I reflect on these considerably negative experiences, I do find positive changes that can be made in near future.

Another MessageDance user

Geoff Wolfe (rooffire) — 2007-12-27T14:23:09Z

Hey Eric, glad to see you here! See if your friends wants to check it out too!!

Some good memories at Firepond . . .

Former Firepond exec arrested on fraud charges upon entering U.S.

A former executive of Firepond Inc., a company formerly headquarteredin Waltham, was arrested Tuesday as he attempted to enter the UnitedStates at the Lewiston Bridge in Niagara Falls, N.Y.

James E. Reid allegedly faked $4.8 million in deals, forgedcustomer signatures and was paid $156,000 in commissions for one of thedeals, according to a federal indictment.

Reid, a Canada-based executive, was acting vice president ofFirepond, a software company. He was charged upon his arrest with onecount of mail fraud and nine counts of wire fraud, which occurredduring his Firepond employment from March 2001 through June 2002,according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Further, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civilfraud action suit against Reid on Tuesday. The SEC says Reid forcedFirepond to materially misstate its financial results for two quartersin 2002.

The federal indictment alleges that Reid concocted a scheme thatincluded e-mail exchanges, telephone calls and phony meetings relatedto a deal with Montreal-based Bombardier Inc. Reid went so far as tohave someone impersonate Bombardier executives in telephone calls withFirepond executives and to set up a joint meeting that was canceled atthe last minute, the indictment said. Reid also forged a Bombardierexecutive's signature on a sales contract, the indictment said.

Reid told Klaus Besier, Firepond's CEO at the time, that Bombardiersigned a $3.4 million contract, which entitled Reid to a $313,393commission, according to the indictment. Reid earned a 9 percentcommission on deals, above his $150,000 annual salary. Besierdiscovered the alleged scheme in the spring of 2002 when he e-mailedBombardier's COO directly, after having a telephone conversation withsomeone identified as the COO, and learned that the real COO did notknow of the call or deal, according to the indictment.

Reid was also charged with fabricating a $450,000 contract withPennsylvania-based Joy Mining Machinery Inc. and a $900,000 contractthat expanded a previous deal with ABB Ltd. of Switzerland. Reid'scommission on those two combined deals would have been $121,000.Firepond's CEO discovered both deals were frauds before the commissionswere paid, according to the indictment.

Reid was indicted and appeared in federal court today in Buffaloand will appear at a later date before Chief U.S. Magistrate MarianneB. Bowler in Boston federal district court for arraignment.

If found guilty, Reid faces five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for each count.

Firepond was based in Waltham until 2002. It is now based inMinneapolis and is a subsidiary of Jaguar Technology Holdings LLC.

Welcome to MessageDance!

Ask Sam (AskSam) — 2007-12-04T22:58:57Z

Looks like you are ready to go! Check out this quick video.

Below are a couple of more videos about other cool things you can do with MessageDance. You can also check out our Help Section for the nitty gritty.

Blog from Email, YouTube, Facebook, Google Reader and more!

Sharing Videos to Twitter

Sharing Photos with iPhone to Twitter, Facebook, and more