Jay-Z & Adele – Won’t Go/Wishing (Urban Noize Remix)

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TouchBase for iPhone

TouchBase for iPhone is an app that is so useful and innovative, I need to share it with you.

It effectively replaces your iPhone Calendar app and does all the regular things (creating/editing calendar entries, inviting others, et cetera) that you would expect. It really shines, though, when you’re running late to meet someone or need a map of the venue to navigate to the meeting venue quickly with GPS.

Here’s an example. If I create a calendar event called “Lunch with Tony W. at Grim’s Seattle”, TouchBase will automatically go through my iPhone contacts and find Tony W. and associate him with the calendar event. The app will also run a Google search for “Grim’s Seattle” and insert the top-ranked search result’s address into the location/address field of the calendar event. Since TouchBase knows who I’m meeting with and automatically fetched his phone number from my address book, I can call or text Tony DIRECTLY from the calendar event, and because TouchBase has automatically fetched the meeting venue’s address, I can navigate to it and get driving directions–also straight from the TouchBase calendar event. If I’m stuck in traffic for our lunch meeting, I can simply hit “I’m running late by 20 minutes” and TouchBase will send Tony a text to let him know (or I can call him).

This is the kind of useful extension of the calendar that I wish Apple had built into the standard iPhone calendar. Anyways, you can now have this functionality for just $0.99 (the price is set to quadruple to $3.99, so get it soon!).

TouchBase App (iTunes)

Via GeekWire.

New York Times Errs On Government-Regulated Lending

Oddly enough, my favorite news source (The New York Times) is one that I often find myself at odds with. Usually it’s limited to economist and champion-of-the-left Paul Krugman, what with his defense of big government and socialist policies, but occasionally I find other problems with their reporting.

While reading Binyamin Appelbaum’s piece for NYT’s The Caucus blog, I came upon an egregious error that I must point out:

Subprime Mortgage Lending

Earlier in the [Republican] debate, Michele Bachmann suggested that the federal government caused the boom in subprime mortgage lending by pushing banks to lower “platinum level” lending standards.

[...]

The assertion [...] mischaracterizes the historical relationship between the government and banks. Regulators can sometimes prevent banks from acting, but there is almost no evidence that the government can push banks to make loans they don’t want to make. This point has been underscored over the last two years, as the Obama administration has begged and pleaded with banks to start making loans, and banks have largely declined to do so.

Banks did make subprime loans in large numbers, and the reason they did so, according to their own executives, was that they saw a chance to make lots of money.

Has Mr. Appelbaum ever heard of the Community Reinvestment Act? It’s often been pointed to as one of the partial causes of the subprime mortgage/debt meltdown of 2007-2011. The CRA requires banks to lend money to lower-income and less-creditworthy borrowers, which consequently increases future loan losses and imperils the creditworthiness of banks, potentially risking the health of the entire economy.