When Rohit Nadhani contacted me on Skype a while back he told me he had something that made Gmail’s search much faster. I almost hung up on him. Why?

I thought Gmail’s search was fast enough. I’d used it hundreds, if not thousands of times and it always found me the emails I was looking for. In other words, I didn’t think it was slow, so Rohit’s pitch seemed to solve non-existant pain.

But he was a persistent person and said “please, just try it.”

I’m glad I did because my first reaction was “damn” after trying CloudMagic. What is it? It is software you load on your Mac, Windows, and soon Linux machines that indexes your Gmail. Makes it wicked fast to search Gmail.

Keep in mind this was more than a month before Google announced its “instant” search result feature. I have been using it ever since and it’s really great. You’ve gotta watch the video demo I filmed today to see just how much faster it is than Gmail.

Even better, he told me today that soon he’ll add Salesforce, Google Docs, and LinkedIn support. Can’t wait.

After the cameras were off we started talking about things he’s seeing happen in the tech world of India and he told me stories of how geeks were getting brave enough to start their own companies because of the anti-offshoring stance of American policy makers and corporate leaders. He told me that we’ll see a ton of companies, like his, who’ll do something innovative and try to build world-wide brands. I turned back on my iPhone and recorded an audio CinchCast, you can listen here, where we talk about that and other startup and trends in India.

I love seeing innovations. Especially ones that are so easy to understand you slap your head and say “why didn’t I think of that?”

Shopkick showed me one of those. What does it do?

It is a mobile app that can tell when you’ve actually walked in a store. How did it do that?

Use Wifi? Nope.
Use near-field communications? Nope.
Use GPS? Nope.
Use RFID? Nope.

All of those had some significant disadvantages, co-founder Cyriac Roeding told me. So, what did his team come up with?

Audio.

Huh?

Every cell phone has a microphone, and they found a way to put an audio signal into the air that humans can’t hear, but the microphone in your cell phone can.

So, at the front of a store there’ll be a little speaker that Shopkick designed. When you walk into the store (you must have the Shopkick app running for this to work) it’ll know you are there and can reward you for doing that.

There’s a lot more on the video and article over on Building43, but it’s great meeting innovative companies like Shopkick.

It also shows that innovation in the location-based space is not over. In the video I wonder why Shopkick only focused on shopping. Imagine they put this system into Disneyland. Now a customized Disneyland app could do a LOT of things when it senses you are in a new area or waiting in line for a ride.

Do you have an innovative solution to a problem like this? Would love to hear about it: scobleizer@gmail.com

I was just at Twitter’s headquarters where they announced a new design. I have the only video of the press conference. You can watch here:

I’ll have a deeper post on the good and bad later, but here’s my first impressions:

Overall design: good. I like this overall.
Keyboard shortcuts: good. That makes reading down lists, homepage, and retweet pages a lot faster.
Threaded conversations: good, but could be more.
Retweet page: bad and good. Doesn’t show me how many people are retweeting an item unless I click on the tweet.
List support. bad. It doesn’t add much and makes me click more to get from Twitter.com to all my lists.
Suggested follows: bad. The “people we suggest to follow” page isn’t in the new style yet and no improvements here that I can see.
Infinite scroll: good, you can scroll down forever. Well, @dougw says that there’s a limit, but I haven’t gotten to the end yet.
Home page detail pane: bad, I really could care less about who is following me, or what the latest lame Twitter trends are. Let me get rid of those things I don’t care about and let me add things that mean more to me (like lists).
Follow/follower pages: good. Shows bios and is nicer now.

Anyway, I’m sure there will be lots of feedback on this new design. Techmeme is already going crazy.

It’s not everyday that I meet someone who has actually changed the world. Cliff Kushler is one of those guys. He invented T9 texting, which ships on hundreds of millions, if not billions, of phones.

But now he’s making my phones much easier to use with Swype. Hear and see how this new keyboard technology makes devices much faster to key in information and get behind the scenes in their Seattle headquarters.

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This video was originally run on Building43 this morning here.

Loic Le Meur, CEO of Seesmic, and I were arguing last week about whether RSS has a future or not. He speaks up for “it has a future” on his blog. Dave Winer today has a great post on how to reboot RSS.

First, lets separate RSS readers from the format. You know, Google Reader is not the XML that flows underneath. Truth be told, even in Twitter and Facebook a lot of what I read gets there via RSS even though we really don’t know that and don’t care (just like most of us no longer type “http” at the beginning of a web page, and we don’t care that the system that delivered my words to your screen was built on top of HTTP).

What is dying is our RSS reading behavior. Over and over people tell me they are using RSS readers less and less and that they are using Facebook and Twitter more and more. Dave Winer is right about one of the reasons: that Google Reader wasn’t a river of news.

But there were lots of other problems with Google Reader as well. For one, it lost me when it added Friends in an attempt to become Facebook, but when I added more than 1,000 friends it got dreadfully slow. The only way the team could fix that problem was to delete all my friends. Twitter works, and works fast, even though I am following 22,000.

Also, normal people couldn’t figure out what RSS was, or how to use it. Facebook’s “likes” and “shares” and Twitter’s “follows” and “RTs” are much easier to use, and more consistent.

Now that those buttons are all over the web it’s going to be very hard for a new news reader to get us to add yet another “share on RSS system” button. Sorry, but that’s just not gonna happen unless some RSS system is able to get a billion people to use it before Facebook can.

Instead of arguing about RSS reader’s future, I will instead focus on Twitter’s and Facebook’s future.

For me, that future includes a few things:

1. Tracking and filtering. You really must watch the video on DataSift. DataSift is going to make RSS very much less relevant as we’re able to build new filtering systems.
2. Client innovation. That includes the new TweetDeck and Seesmic (last week Seesmic shipped a new client and plug-in platform) as well as new pagination systems from Paper.li, Twitter Times, and Flipboard (I’ll be at Flipboard today, they are working on a new version that will be out soon).
3. Content optimization systems. SocialFlow is being used by the Economist, GigaOm, and RWW. The video I did with the founder gives a hint as to why I think SocialFlow is something that content-producing teams should consider.
4. New advertising systems. CompassLabs has built a new platform that delivers much more relevant real-time ads to Twitter and Facebook clients. My video gives insights into that.
5. Curation tools. There’s a couple of good ones coming from Curated.by and Storify. More when they hit the market over the next few weeks.

All that innovation is happening on top of Twitter and Facebook, not on top of RSS, and I’m seeing signs that we’ll see even more soon (Demo is this week, Techcrunch Disrupt is in a couple of weeks).

Maybe because I worked at Microsoft for three years I really can’t stand Microsoft PowerPoint. Every time I start a presentation I joke that I will not force my audience to sit through boring slides so I won’t be using PowerPoint today. This joke NEVER fails to get applause. Why? Because we’ve all seen boring presentations.

To undernote just how powerful PowerPoint’s pull on people is, one day I was hanging out in the Starbucks on Sand Hill Road with a famous venture capitalist. We came across the team from RedBeacon. You know them because they won Techcrunch 50. But this day the team was going up and down Sand Hill Road looking for funding (they were successful on that visit because they raised $7.4 million).

But they were working on their pitch, using Microsoft PowerPoint. I could tell it was the kind of pitch that bores the hell out of me. You know, the standard nine slides with nine points each. A slide for the market opportunity. Another one for the team. That kind of thing.

I turned to my VC friend and asked him whether he liked sitting through PowerPoint slides like this. He answered “no.” But the team went back to work on the slide deck anyway.

It’s too bad, because there’s a far better tool to use for doing presentations. It’s Prezi and here I interview CEO Peter Arvai about the new collaboration features they turned on last night and also see some of the ways you can use Prezi to make better presentations. (You can follow Peter on Twitter here).

I’ve studied why PowerPoint is so boring. There are several problems with it:

1. It forces you into linear thinking. “First we’ll talk about the market opportunity, then we’ll talk about the team, then we’ll talk about the challenges, etc etc.”
2. It encourages you to put a lot of words on screen. The best way to make a boring slide is put more than nine words on it. Have you ever seen Steve Jobs with a slide that has more than nine words on it? I haven’t. Yet in PowerPoint it happens nearly every slide. Why? It affords that.
3. PowerPoint doesn’t give you control over typography. All slides have the same crappy look. Why? Because you can’t use custom typography easily. I remember watching the guy who designed Bill Gates’ slides. He rarely used the tools inside PowerPoint, rather he’d design the slides in Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, and import them into PowerPoint as graphics. That’s why Bill Gates’ slides always looked better than average PowerPoint users, but it was very hard and took a very talented graphic designer to do.
4. PowerPoint doesn’t let you collaborate nicely with other people.
5. Adding motion to PowerPoint is difficult and when Microsoft makes it easy it rarely is to focus on the message. With Prezi you can zoom in, which gets your audience to pay attention to the message. It’s the ultimate “drill down.” But with PowerPoint, when you find the animation tools, it affords flying text or goofy cartoons that will fly in on your slides. Looks like amateur hour, which is why most professional presenters don’t use these tools, but even when you use them they don’t add much to your points.

Anyway, if you want to do better presentations, you should visit the Presentation Zen blog, and you should use Prezi instead of Microsoft PowerPoint.

By the way, Prezi is hosted on Rackspace and we’re very proud to be hosting this very cool company that was invested in by TED, too.