My husband is in the biomedical industry. Certainly technical in nature, but in a very different realm than the software business I’m in at Intuit. He’s technically savvy but doesn’t quite see the usefulness of Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, MySpace, etc. That hasn’t stopped me from exploring and using these apps but we have interesting discussions on their reason for being and how they can possibly be relevant to the work I do.

So imagine the conversation when he starting playing with Cuil and typed in my name, compared to what came up on Google. I have to admit it made me a little uncomfortable that the first several results on Cuil were Twitter related. Really, not that interesting or relevant in the whole scheme of things. Tweets are, in my opinion, only valuable in context and timeliness is important. You learn a lot more about me and what I do just by looking at the first few results on Google. That makes a lot more sense to Chris too, much easier to explain. Hard to argue when his Google results (I’ll save him the public link) reveals all his patent filings. Ugh!

I don’t consider myself a gadget geek or particularly technically savvy and yet I imagine I’m more plugged in than most. It’s kind of an occupational hazard working in the iLab at Intuit. We’re supposed to be on the cutting edge of trends, technology and innovation. As such I’ve experimented with various technologies, particularly mobile ones since I’m in the car far too much, out of the office at customer visits often and have a busy family with two kids so I’m always on the go. I’ve found a few services, tools, apps that really work for me. True I tried most of them because of work but I’ve kept using them because they do make my life easier and more comfortably mobile.

I have a Blackberry Pearl and resisted the urge to activate the email push feature for about a year. I succumbed in January and slowly became obsessed with my crackberry, I de-activated the feature before I went on vacation in July and have been much happier since. In the process I discovered Gmail mobile. I love this. because it keeps me connected to my friends and family away from the office and the computer. although not addicted to the service, SMS is my new love. It helps me stay connected with my husband when he’s traveling in Europe and coordinate easily with babysitters. I regularly use echominder for reminders to myself. Recently my husband sent me a SMS message to be his wake up call in the Netherlands. I created a reminder call in echominder so I’d remember to call him at 9pm Boston time so he’d be up in time for the cab. I haven’t used Quicken Beam yet, my husbands the tracker in the family, but I imagine it would be useful to me since I don’t know where every cent goes like he does. I like the idea of having just a quick view of our balance and last 5 transactions. It would make my decision to impulsively buy a new pair of shoes easier.

I can’t close without mentioning my ipod. It lets me take my music with me, wherever I go and carry pictures of my kids. It’s become such a constant in my car that my kids know to ask if I have it so they can hear their favorite songs, lately that’s Blue October.