Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Coolest Javascript Components

These are some of the coolest javascript components I have ever seen. They have a bunch of demos. Nitobi.com
 
Of course, there are some other ones too like:

Friday, September 21, 2007

oSkope Visual Search

You can now search Amazon, eBay, Flickr, and YouTube in a different visual manner with this Flash-based service.

oSkope.com

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Cool Flex Photo Editors

The best photo editor I've seen is Picnik.com and second to that is FotoFlexer.com, both of which were written in Flex. Here is a TechCrunch review of some other ones based on AJAX. Happy Editing!

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Kerpoof

I think this is really cool for kids. Here is an excerpt from TechCrunch.com:

Kerpoof is aiming to become a leading destination site for children through a suite of activities that are enriching as well as entertaining. On Kerpoof, kids can create art, stories, and animated movies using a simple 3D interface, and when done, can save it to their gallery, share it with others, and vote on their favorites.

Krista Marks, CEO for Kerpoof presenting. Aims to change the way kids interact with the computer. Most of what kids do today is mindless, a waste of time - Kerpoof wants to change this.

Goal: to be a site where fun is not separate from learning, but integral to it. Kids can create art through the site, write their own stories, create their own movies.

Parents are no longer buying software for their kids with the explosion of broadband - they are turning to websites for them. Neopets and Club Penguin are very popular, but are not as educational as they could be. At the same time, CS majors are plummeting. Bizworld saw this trend and came to Kerpoof to create software to educate children using the web.

Easy tool for kids to make their own picture scenes - cool effects when you add particular elements to the scene (add a moon and it becomes night, etc.). You can share your pictures with friends.

To make a movie, pick a scene then a backdrop. CEO claiming the movie creator teaches kids object oriented programming. You put objects in a scene and then make the objects do things (objects and methods). Looks like a basic Flash applet creator. Still, looks impressive. You can add music to the background. You can add multiple scenes to an entire movie.

If you want to add interactivity to a movie, you can have prompts at different points in the movie that change how the movie proceeds (makes it more like a game created by kids).

Kerpoof is live and freely available now.


Monday, September 17, 2007

Shared Short Codes

Are you trying to start your own two-way text messaging service but cannot afford the annual $2000 to have your own short code? There are now services which charge you much less if you are willing to use one of their short codes. There are even some services which are free. (Google: shared short codes) Mozes.com is one such service. Here is a review of them.

Friday, September 07, 2007

Pay To Get Votes On Digg

With this service your business can buy as many votes as it wants, at $1 a vote, so your business can make the headlines and get Digged by hundreds of people.

SubvertAndProfit.com

Here is a review found at Wired.

Subvert and Profit runs an ever-expanding black market for votes on social media sites. We are simultaneously the easiest way to make money online and the cheapest form of advertising in the web 2.0 sphere. We are the crowdhackers, and we are very good at what we do.

Other "social media optimization" sites can only advise their clients on ways to design their sites for Digg and StumbleUpon. Subvert and Profit actually gets you the votes, and for cheap!

By crowdsourcing our operation to over 3000 anonymous Internet users, we can provide a cheap, effective form of undercover marketing. Read the FAQ to see how it all works.

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Upcycling

This interesting NYT article talks about how people are repurposing items from IKEA and using this store as a source of raw material for totally new products. Some call this repurposing of materials "upcycling"

Romancing the Flat Pack: Ikea, Repurposed

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Photo2Text

Upload any image and see it all done in ascii characters.