There was a great movie years ago called Night Shift (1982). In it, Michael Keaton’s character carried around a mini tape recorder to capture his brilliant business ideas. One of my favorites was “Feed Mayonnaise to Tuna Fish” – something about making better tuna sandwiches – but I digress!

I’ve been playing around with a new service called jott. Jott allows you to use your cell phone much like the tape recorder above, but it does some other very useful things.

Once you create an account, you can call a number and rattle off all manner of things and automatically they show up in your email inbox transcribed. So, you’re sitting in the back of a cab and you get a great idea, boom, send it via your phone. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had an idea for a blog post when I’m out and about and this would be a great way to capture it in the moment. In fact, you could actually write posts on the fly with this service and then just cut and paste later.

Jott also allows you to create groups. If you have an entire list of people you often need to communicate with you can set the group up and then make one call to your account and everyone on the list gets a text message of whatever you speak into your phone. I can see using this with clients to send a recap of a meeting.