Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Borrow/Lend Things With Friends

If u need to borrow something, just look here. If u have something to lend, just post it here. You'll never have to buy again, especially that "thing" u only have to use once.
BorrowMe.com

Looking for a Volunteer Project?

If u want to volunteer to help build a website, translate documents, tutor, etc. this organization will match u with the right opportunity. Non-profit organizations around the world r looking for help and u can find a project u may be able to help with.
VolunteerMatch.org

Monday, August 28, 2006

Buy Direct From China Suppliers

It as easy as ordering online. Of course, to really save u need to buy in bulk. Find your Chinese product supplier here, no matter what type of product you seek.
Alibaba.com
Made-in-China.com

Lumalive: A Futuristic Fabric

The future of fabrics is now upon us. This new fabric contains embedded light-emitting diodes and yet remains soft, flexible, washable, etc. You can now view simple graphics right on your clothes. Of course, in the future everyone will be walking around with commercials showing on their backs to earn a few extra bucks from advertisers.
Lumalive

Friday, August 25, 2006

zeeDive: Reverse Auctions

What? Reverse auctions? The concept: instead of stating how much you would be willing to pay for an item, you state how little you would want to pay. When the price drops to the amount you state, the item becomes yours. The fun happens when there are multiple bidders on the same item and you do not know what their lowest bid is. You really want to buy the item, but you don't know how low you should go. Sounds like fun to me. Good luck.
zeeDive.com

Common Folk Producing Free AudioBooks

Anybody can now lend their reading skills to produce audio versions of public domain books. And anyone can download the free audiobooks.
librivox.org
telltaleweekly.org
literalsystems.org

Open Up Your Website to Any Programmer

This new tool automatically creates a Web API for your website which can be accessed by any programmer. For example, u have an online catalog of all your products. This tool can make your catalog available to any affiliate so they can show your catalog on their website without a consumer ever knowing the original source of the products. Of course, the affiliates r still selling your products, so u still get credit.

On the flipside, if u r a programmer, u can now make a web api for any website. For example, u found this really neat site that has ongoing updates of the latest events in your area and u want to show this same info on your site. The tool will generate an RSS feed, etc of that other website so u can use on yours.

Dapper: The Data Mapper

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Nifty Porn Filter

Feel safe at home while your children surf the net with this nifty tool that scans images and detects and filters out porn images.

ContentPurity.com

Quirkle

We take classic toys and gadgets and re-engineer them into super-performance devices. Hi-tech toys if you like. Conversation pieces if you prefer. They are fascinating to play with and a challenge to analyze how they work.
Quirkle.com

Monday, August 21, 2006

Your TV With Your Commercials

Some big company is going to replace all those worthless TV commercials which u r not interested in, with commercials that u want to see based on your personal preference settings. Since TV is going all digital, it would be easy to dynamically insert any commercials based on your preferences. Guess who is going to do this?

Google CEO Eric Schmidt believes television viewers should not have to stand for tv commercials that are "a waste of your time." Schmidt is frustrated that "When you watch the television you see ads that are clearly not targeted for you." What does he plan to do about it?

Google CEO wants $74 billion TV ad market

Spam Phone Calls Coming

We've all heard of spam email. Now get ready for spam phone calls. This new service allows u to record a message and send it to any number of phone numbers. Can't u already think how a spammer could use this? Here is the service's self description:

Pheeder is the new way to talk on your cellphone: you use it to communicate with groups of people simultaneously, with a single phone call. Just call Pheeder, leave a message, hang up, and seconds later all of your friends receive the message at the very same instant on their phones. Then, if they want, they can reply to your message, or forward your message on to their friends.

Pheeder.com

Thursday, August 17, 2006

New "Spaces" for Mac OS

Here comes an existing concept reworked by Apple to make it more appealing and user friendly. Later it will make its way into Windows, Linux, etc. "Spaces" is just like a different room. Each room has different windows. So now the Mac desktop can have 4 different rooms all with different windows open. It's like having a room for playing games, one for working, one for shopping, and another for relaxing.

Take a tour of Spaces

Add a Google Map to any web page in 30 seconds

Use Wikimapia to quickly add a Google map to a website, even without a Google key license.

Window Shopping On Your Desktop

I know I just posted something about Slide.com but I thought I should give this story a different perspective.

Imagine yourself window shopping at the mall. You are interested in shoes so you window shop all the shoe places. Some shoes catch your attention so you go into the store to look at the shoes a little bit closer. On another occassion you are interested in getting a new cellphone. You window shop again in much the same way.

Now instead of going to the mall, you want to do the same window shopping all from the convenience of your desktop. That's what Slide.com is going to be all about (not just yet). Just pick an item type, say handbags, then pick from a handful of matching online stores, say JCPenney, Old Navy, etc. Now just sit back or keep working and watch a small window on your desktop automatically present a slideshow of possible items you might like.

NYT review

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

More Power 4 Online Shoppers

Two new tools will give online shoppers more information with which to make decisions.

1. Mpire.com is Kelly's Blue Book for everything. It uses data from Overstock, eBay, Craigslist, Amazon, etc. to show the average prices paid for an item for the past 30 days in a nice looking graph. Now you won't be easily cheated when you know the average price other folks have paid for a particular item.

2. Slide.com gives users another way to browse items in which they are interested. A user can see a slideshow on their desktop of products they are interested in buying. When the right one appears, just click and the browser pops up so you can buy it. You choose the types of products from which sites you would like to browse.

NYT review

Monday, August 14, 2006

What is Flash Paper?

One of my friends recently asked me this question and if Flash Paper is better than PDFs. Well you be the judge. Take a look at these catalogs. You can zoom, browse by thumbnails, fast forward, rewind, add notes, add bookmarks, etc.

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Put All Your Library Online

Just scan the barcode on all your books, CDs, DVDs, etc and instantly the info is downloaded from Amazon and added to your personal library. You can even track to whom you have lent an item and when it is due back. It uses the video cam on your Mac to do the barcode scanning.
Delicious Library

Resell Awesome Email Marketing

These people have enabled anyone to resell email marketing services, even privately branded. That just goes to show that any service can be configured for reselling. What service would you like to resell?
MailBuild

Do U Have a Mimobot Yet?

Portable flash drives selling for $500 just because they are made as cute toy characters.
Start your Mimobots collection.

Online "Can I Help You?"

More online stores will be using live chat sales reps to help upgrade/close the sales. If a customer has any questions there will be a live person available. This company is providing this service to any online store. In the near future you may get a pop-up chat window saying "Do you want fries with that?"
LivePerson.com
Demo
NYT Review
NYT Quote:
"Making this process social is important, because the acquisition of goods has never been just about the acquisition of goods. There's always been a social element to it."

Monday, August 07, 2006

Say Thanks to Our Troops

If you go to this web site, www.letssaythanks.com you can pick out a thank you card and Xerox will print it and it will be sent to a soldier that is currently serving in Iraq.  You can't pick out who gets it, but it will go to some member of the armed services.
 
Sent to me by my friend and fellow high school classmate, John Garcia.

Friday, August 04, 2006

How To Create Great Logos

Interesting, easy to follow article talking about a technique for creating an awesome looking logo.
Create Your Logo

Awesome Local Video Producers

Need a commercial, documentary, video shoot? These guys are purely incredible. Based in San Antonio, Texas.
Shootz.com

Thursday, August 03, 2006

Java Going Down, Ruby Going Up

The fact of the matter is that no one had ever seen any programming language and framework such as Ruby on Rails. Now that people are starting to learn it, they are simply amazed at what u can do with it. I wish I had the time to learn this thing inside out. Take a look at this study about the trends of several computer languages.
Computer Languages

Yahoo's YUI Library

Very cool programming features every web programmer should know.
YUI Library

Open Source Film-making

Want to help make a new movie? Now u can contribute scenes/scripts to an open source movie. Suppossedly in the future movies will be made according to what consumers want, not what Hollywood thinks u should be watching.
A Swarm Of Angels

Awesome Code For Handling Webservices

If u r coding webservices or consuming them, u must check this out. This is the future for all programming languages.
REST on Rails

Future of Human Modeling

Forget wearing a special suit or sensors. This new technology can model a human being almost perfectly, even the wrinkles and facial expressions. It uses glow-in-the-dark makeup. Toy Story, here comes Human Story.

Robot Suits Are Hot

Star Wars is no longer science fiction as engineers and the military are creating everything from the silver screen into reality.
See The Landwalker
Read The Review

Fancy Tooltip Using jQuery

This tooltip is cool, cross-browser, small code, can have an image and html inside the tip, etc.
jTip

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Sorry LightBox, ThickBox Is Better

Smoother code, less code, easier to use and implement, etc. It uses jQuery.
ThickBox Original
Thickbox 2.0