Fresh ringtone offers: New York Times Launcing Its Mobile-To-PC Content Sharing Service

The New York Times Co (NYSE: NYT). is launching a service today called ShifD that sends your content to the cloud to make it easily accessible from your computer, phone or other devices. The service works like this: let's say you see a headline for a news story that sounds interesting, you can clip it and read it later on any device. If you are at a restaurant, you can send yourself a message with the name of the wine you enjoyed, so you can buy it later. Or, when you are at the grocery store, you can pull up the recipe you wanted to make for dinner to ensure you have all the right ingredients. (Screen shots below in the slide show)

The person's account can be accessed online or on the phone's browser. It's simple UI has just three buckets where information is stored: notes, links or places. The notes are things you want to remember, such as a book or DVD recommendation, and the links are for news articles or other sites, and the places are where maps and addresses are stored. The information can be added from any Web browser, or by sending a text message. It should work on everything from the iPhone, to Blackberries, to a Razr or Palm (NSDQ: PALM) Treo.

ShifD was the brainchild of Nick Bilton, NYT's design integration editor and UI specialist, and Michael Young, NYT's creative technologist. They came up for the concept at the 2007 Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) BBC Hack Day London competition. The application won the competition's award for Best Overall Hack, and when the two returned from the contest, they decided to implement it. First, it had to be tweaked. Originally, the service required a RFID chip in the handset and a RFID reader for the computer. When the person was at the computer, they'd place the phone on the reader to be able to send information between the two devices. Bilton said the idea came about because: "we would always send e-mails to ourselves of articles, notes, a book that someone tells us about, the place where you were going. It's clunky and confusing," he said.

The service, which goes live at http://ShifD.com, is a beta, and appears to be a good alternative to sending e-mails as helpful reminders. But it has a few downsides. For instance, if you store a map of where you are going, but then don't if you don't have cellphone service, the information won't be accessible. For now, that also means the NYTimes doesn't have any immediate plans to integrate the service into the site, and advertising is a potential business model, but Bilton said they are waiting on that, too. "We want to see how people use it over the next few weeks, and see the best way to add this stuff," he said.