Tuesday, October 30, 2007

India China Creative Economy

This is one of the best podcasts I have ever heard on the subject.
It's about globalization, what it means to your career and even what it means to the banking industry. Towards the end you will hear what a major global bank is doing.

Try either one of these links:
http://libsyn.com/media/philmckinney/KI_20061210.mp3
http://cdn.libsyn.com/philmckinney/KI_20061210.mp3

Friday, October 26, 2007

Use Your Phone Remotely

These two new services provide you the ability to use and update your phone's content from a website. You can even send text messages which supposedly get routed via your phone's text messaging service. If you have unlimited text messaging then you can theoretically set up your own text messaging service online and the only cost to you is the cost of your phone's service.
Dashwire.com
Bloove.com

As of this writing, Dashwire only works on phones with Windows Mobile 5 and 6, with support for more phones coming soon. Bloove supports all modern Symbian and J2ME phones from Nokia and Sony Ericsson.

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Instant TagClouds 4 Your Site

I've started looking around for any service out there that can give me tag clouds for my website. I'm looking for a service which will give me a piece of javascript code to insert into my webpages and I instantly get a tagcloud of the content on my site. The tagcloud contains any descriptors that I have predetermined. When a user clicks on a link, a descriptor(s) (text) associated with that link is sent to the tagcloud service. The tagcloud service keeps a database of the frequency of these descriptors and thru the javascript provided to me I can display the tagcloud on my homepage, for example.

This is useful for keeping track of what kinds of products my website is selling. Each time an item is added to a shopping cart, a set of that item's descriptors are sent to the tagcloud service. These descriptors may include size, color, style, etc. which in turn are represented by different tagclouds. For example, I could have a tagcloud of all the styles I am selling and another tagcloud of the most popular colors.

So here is a short list of what I have found. Please add to this as you discover some more:
TagCloud.com
ZoomClouds.com
ContentRobot.com

Steve Thomas built his own with PHP, MySQL and CSS

Friday, October 19, 2007

The Wired iPhone

This company hooked up an iPhone to a circuit board to access all its inputs and outputs and anyone can access it over the web to do all kinds of testing and experimenting. They hooked up a bunch of other phones as well. It's like a phone simulator but better because it is the real thing executing your commands. Very incredible.

Inside The Matrix for Mobiles

SMS coming to your mall

Text Messaging service is coming to a mall near you. You will be able to instantly search for pricing and availability of any item at that mall.

A Richer Trip to the Mall, Guided by Text Messages

Brokering a Deal, Carefully, Between Malls and the Web

Instant Messaging Passion

Check out this story about how passionate teens are about instant messaging and how one solution, which costs $150 and no monthly fees, can help. It is called the Z2.

New Option for Teens Passionate about Instant Messaging
zipitwireless.com

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

PicClicks Wants Cell Pics

PicClicks allows you to post your camera phone pictures directly to your online profile. It's simple and as easy as sending a picture message to another mobile phone. You are given a code to paste onto your social network profile like MySpace, Hi5, and Facebook and when you send your pictures in from your phone; your online profile is automatically updated with your most current pictures.
I think I will start using them when I get an iPhone because it takes great photos and I'll be using the camera phone a lot.

MindCaller.com

These days VOIP and SMS are drving new innovations. Checkout this free voice broadcasting service for sending for up to 10 phones. With the paid service, you can send even more. This is useful for communicating your message to a group without having to dial each one individually.
MindCaller.com

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Ruby AMF Tutorial

Just in case you've been using ColdFusion, Java, etc to connect your Flex front-end to the database, as I have, I think it is time to put the pedal to the metal and start using Ruby AMF. Like all of RoR stuff, once I learn this new stuff it will be a piece of cake to connect my Flex projects to MySQL.
Ruby AMF Tutorial
Ruby AMF Blog

Monday, October 15, 2007

All-in-one Messaging Service

This messaging service promises to provide all your messaging needs, such as SMS, VOIP, email-to-voice, two-way text messsaging, etc. They seem to do a whole lot. I haven't checked into them yet, but I thought you might need to know about this asap.
 
I am using Clickatell.com but I think Group2Call is worth looking into. Clickatell is a global SMS provider in 200 countries so they are a much bigger player.

School Utility Sites

Here are just a couple of neat sites for students and teachers. You might want to mention these to your kids' teachers so they can start using them at school.
 
Kindersay.com This site shows a pre-schooler a picture along with its written word and a woman pronouncing the word.
 
HotChalk.com This site allows a teacher to quickly create a website for the class. Assignments can be created, students can comment and post their solutions. An online grading system is built in. Too many features to comment on.
 
Kerpoof.com My kids love this. They create their own animations and stories. Very cool for young kids. I wrote about it .
 

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Requesting Help

Hello Everybody,
Thanks for reading my blog. I am putting out an open call for anyone to help me with my current project. Perhaps by helping me with this you can gain a valuable insight into some current trends in ecommerce. Here is what I need:
 
I am developing a social ecommerce site with KickApps.com and want to add a shopping cart with FatFreeCart.com or BlinkCart.com. I previously commented on the new turnkey social networks and the new shopping carts . I have figured out how to use KickApps to some extent and have read thru the shopping carts' features. Now I need to figure out how to integrate the two so that anyone can post images and/or videos of their products and start selling them on my site.
 
If you help me figure this thing out then perhaps I can help you out in some other way. I am a developer and have extensive experience on the web. I love doing Flex, am excited about RoR and do lots of other things, like jQuery, etc. Or perhaps we can work on the site I am developing together.
 
Thank you in advance.



ROBIN: Here is my response to your question. I understand you built Fat Free Cart. That is pretty awesome. Here is the deal from a developer's perspective.


If you sign up for a free account on KickApps.com and start creating your own social network you might see what I see. Once you create your network anyone can sign up to become a member and thereby be permitted to upload videos, pics, and blog, tag, etc. Basically anyone can join your community and start contributing.


Now I imagine one of these social networks (or communities) can be used as an ecommerce site. Anyone wanting to sell their stuff can upload pics, videos, etc describing their products. Anyone wanting to buy the products can browse the site and click on any item to add to the cart.


So here is the trick. Every member of your community who is selling products has a unique id which is generated by KickApps. You must attach this id to each product that person is selling. You must then pass this id (and the product's own id, etc) to the shopping cart. When the order is completed, the community owner (you) must receive all this info and pass the order requests to the individual sellers for fulfillment.


I imagine one can use jQuery to create the cart's code on each product with the seller's id attached. I am probably thinking outside the box and really need to look into all these details further. If you can shed any light on this, please do so. Thank you.

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

A Cutter Like a Printer

Image a printer with a knife instead of ink. That's what this cutter is all about. Just send it a "print" job and you'll get the thing cut out for you.
Cricut.com

Cool E-commerce with AirApps

AirApps.net has developed a quick Flex plugin for collecting payment for any AIR application you may want to publish. They have some cool demos what this is all about. I think I will use their service very soon.