vufone is here!

November 25th, 2008 Rafi Posted in General, Mobile Phones, Mobile Technologies, NewACT, Personal, vufone No Comments »

Hoora! I can’t believe we’re finally here! vufone is launched!

Before we begin with vufone, let me first catch my breath. Perhaps it would be a good idea to start where it all began and tell you what brought us to this point.

About 2 years ago, 716 days ago to be exact, I bought a new mobile phone. After nearly 20 years of Nokia addiction I decided to jump back in the water and I got the new (at that time, of course) Sony Ericsson k800i. The walkman capabilities, 3.2MB camera and slick interface just did it for me.

Excitement turned to dismay as the next few days were hard to imagine. The phone itself was great, don’t get me wrong, but I just couldn’t get my old data on it. Imagine the ultimate black book, my mobile contact list, after all these years. The ringtones, some of them cut specifically for me by a DJ prodigy who also happens to be my sister in law, were they all destined to be gone? and what about my messages? could they ever be salvaged? I was sweating bullets!

For the first couple of days I juggled PC suites, Nokia’s and Sony Ericsson’s respectively. I couldn’t get them to communicate with each other. I then pulled my bluetooth capabilities to the max. Finally, I registered to 3 different internet services that asked me to master guru terms like SyncML and forced me to dig deeply into my phone settings. In the end, I managed to transfer most of my contacts, some of my ringtones and none of my messages.

It sucked, it was cumbersome, it was tiring, it was frustrating and in the bottom line it was a failure. Then came a wonderful moment of Eureka. And we sat down, rolled our sleeves and decided to solve it.

2 years and later vufone.com finally opens to the general public. Vufone was primarily designed so you won’t have to go through what I went through, but we realized it can actually do much more. You don’t need to learn any technical term, just register and follow the instructions. The rest is up to you.

So what exactly can you do with vufone? Well, to start with you can back up, restore and manage all of your contacts, meetings, pics, clips, tracks, ringtones and messages. This means you can switch phones without losing a single bit of information. You can manage your appointments and meetings from our web or using our MS Outlook plugin. In addition, you can upload your pics and clips on an ongoing basis and share them with your friends via your favorite social networks. You can also synch your music tracks with your phone and play them on the go. Come to think of it, you can actually manage your phone using a friendly web based interface.

You may say “these guys probably support only a handful Windows mobile device” - well, No. Our focus was on mass-market phones. Sure, the service supports Windows Mobile and Symbian, but more importantly, it also supports your standard feature phones such as Nokia S40, SonyEricsson, Motorola and others. Take a look at the Supported Devices page to see a full list of supported phones. Don’t see your phone there? drop us a note in the support forum. Supporting many languages was also a priority for us, realizing that as weird as it may sound, there are other spoken languages other than English. So, we launched the service in the following languages: English, French, German, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Italian.

Oh yeah, we realize our service ain’t perfect yet and we appreciate your support in making it such. For the next 3 months we offer it absolutely for free. For the lifetime of your phone that is. That’s right, join vufone now and get it all for free for the lifetime of your phone. 100% FREE. Guaranteed.

Happy to be here and thankful for your support and feedback, both good and bad (good is fun to hear, bad helps us improve).

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A Piece of History (or my first PHP/MySQL tutorials)

April 4th, 2008 Rafi Posted in General, PHP, Personal 1 Comment »

One (somewhat boring) evening (which means I had about 10 free minutes) I did the thing most of us do when they are bored - Googled my name in….well, Google.

Other than the obvious results (LinkedIn, Facebook and other profiles) I found my old tutorials on PHP and MySQL from 2000 which I posted on WeberDev. Back then I thought that PHP and MySQL are the answer to most questions in the world, and wrote a series of tutorials on the subject. I was amazed to see the tutorials translated to many languages and numerous sites - a good ego trip, recommended to anyone from time to time.

I still see people sending comments to these tutorials to (long closed) email on WeberDev. I deeply apologize to all the people that sent me emails and wondered why I didn’t answer.

Here is a list of the tutorials I posted on WeberDev:

  1. http://www.weberdev.com/ViewArticle/Beginners-guide-to-PHP-and-MySQL
  2. http://www.weberdev.com/ViewArticle/Beginners-guide-to-PHP-and-MySQL—Creating-a-simple-guest-book
  3. http://www.weberdev.com/ViewArticle/Beginners-Guide-to-PHP—Introduction-to-cookies
  4. http://www.weberdev.com/ViewArticle/PHP%3A-A-simple-MySQL-search
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NewACT on IVCJ

February 5th, 2008 Rafi Posted in Mobile Technologies, NewACT, Personal No Comments »

This article was published in the December 2007 edition of IVCJ - The Israel Venture Capital and Private Equity Journal on NewACT.

For more information about IVCJ, check out the IVC website at www.ivc-online.com.

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Hello world!

June 30th, 2007 Rafi Posted in General, Personal, Uncategorized 1 Comment »

I wanted to start my blog few years ago. The idea was to develop a php/mysql based CMS web software and post entries as I write the site. Time has passed and I got involved in a much more interesting venture so the original idea was abandoned. Instead downloaded WordPress, installed and configured it in a matter of few minutes. Very cool.

I have no master plan behind this blog just wanted to record my thoughts, comments and maybe provide some useful data to others.

Cheers,
Rafi Ton

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