Currently, Boxcar is a most excellent app for that straightforwardly pushes notifications from services like Twitter and Facebook to the iPhone. Boxcar 4.0 is going to make your iPhone feel like it has a million, constantly connected tentacles.
Android and Mac/Windows/Linux: If you don’t want to deal with your phone while you’re at your computer, free app Android Notifier will send all your phone’s call, SMS and battery notifications to your desktop.
Gmail and Google Calendar notifications, pushed to your iPhone home screen? Yes please. This might be enough to lure me away from the iPhone’s native mail app.
The kiddies have been using ultrasonic ringtones to secretly take calls/texts in class since 2006, but if you’re an adult who can still hear these frequencies then by all means head over to Lifehacker for some of your own [Lifehacker]
Microsoft Research is set to present a paper this week outlining an entirely new set of notification tools for mobile phones, including communicative tapping and rubbing mechanisms, complementing the blunt, simple, and often not-so-silent ‘vibrate’ function with a set of truly quiet ‘rub’ and ‘tap’ notifiers. They argue that user notification is a communications bottleneck for current cell phones, and that rubbing or tapping motions could notify users as well as communicate common messages, to which there could be assigned simple patterns of movement.
Visas and eight banks (“PNC Bank, SunTrust Bank, U.S. Bank, Wachovia, and Wells Fargo in the United States, and Royal Bank of Canada, TD Bank Financial Group, and Vancity in Canada”) are testing real-time SMS notifications whenever your card makes one of a few types of transactions. The 2000 pilot beta customers can pick alerts for ATM cash withdrawals, internet or telephone charge, an out-of-country charge or a charge that’s over a pre-defined amount. You can choose to have these alerts go to your phone or your email (if you’re cheap like us and don’t want to burn up all your messages), which you can then immediately use to alert Visa to any fraudulent activity. Great idea or greatest idea? You be the judge. [Slashphone]
