Monday, December 31, 2007

PlaceShout: A Mini-Yelp

Ever heard of Yelp.com? You know---the place to leave good/bad comments about your experiences with local businesses. Well, now there is a similar site, but a whole lot simpler to use and limits comments to 100 characters. I tried it on my home town of San Antonio and it sure was easy to add a comment. I wonder if they intend to allow new comments via text-messaging, since text-messages are limited to about 150 chars?
PlaceShout.com

Sunday, December 30, 2007

Photographer's Templates

If you are a photographer, you may want to take a look at these professionally done templates for showcasing all your photos to your clients. In addition to so many features, you can simply drag-n-drop your a group of photos into a template and instantly have an amazing composition/arrangement of photos only seen at high-end studios. This can really add value to your services.

Friday, December 21, 2007

Photology: Cool Photo Sorting

This new service can sort your photos by Morning, Night, Month, Vertical, Horizontal, Inside, Outside, Subject Matter, Color, etc.
GetPhotology.com
Demo

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Common Short Code Administration

R u having trouble making sense of the whole mobile internet picture? Here is one source of information which has helped me make sense of all this. It is a nicely done diagram of the different levels of service providers and their roles.
I particularly find the following chart useful to know some of the big players with whom I will eventually deal with when I get my mobile application going. Good luck in your mobile strategy. If you ever need additional pointers, just let me know and I will probably find some info for you.

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Outsource to Programmers

Here is another service to outsource your programming work. Your employer is outsourcing, why not do the same?
oDesk.com
I have previously covered getacoder.com and rentacoder.com. Between these two, I get more bids at more reasonable rates from rentacoder.com.

Another Outsourcing Service

Here is a new one I found on KillerStartups.com for hiring people to do the work for you.
PeoplePerHour.com

Track Ur Package on Any Service

This service can track your package on any service, whether it is DHL, UPS, FedEx, etc. Just enter your tracking number. If they have an API it would be really helpful for a plugin into your current shopping checkout experience.
TrackThePack.com
KillerStartups.com review

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Shopping with SMS

Here are three different approaches for using your phone to help you shop.
Here is a short review of all three services.

Friday, December 14, 2007

Fluid: WebApps 2 Desktop Apps

This cool new service can turn any service on the web into a desktop app that behaves just like any other application on your computer. Now you don't have to use your browser to checking your Gmail or to read the News.

Just fire up Fluid, enter the url of the app you want to create and give it a name. Fluid will then create an application and even add an icon based on the site's favicon. Fluid created applications show up on the desktop, in your dock and in the application switcher. In short, they behave just like a normal app. (It only works on a Mac.)

Wired Review

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Another NetFlix Biz Model

Here is another business modeled after NetFlix, but for books instead of videos. This is a very interesting model that could be applied to other things as well. I wonder what other things you can think of applying it to. Paperspine.com

I have previously written about a car club where you get to drive any car you want and then return it and get another one.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

YouTube for Ringtones

Check it out. Free ringtones, wallpapers, videos, etc. for you phone uploaded by users like you. It is a community of people creating their own ringtones for others to use.
Cellware.com

Friday, December 07, 2007

Eric Meyer's Resources

CSS guru Eric Meyer shares his favorite websites of CSS knowledge in an interview. Here is an excerpt from that interview:
 
One of the best CSS resources I know is the css-discuss wiki, located at css-discuss.incutio.org. It's the distillation of more than five years of wisdom and experience from the css-discuss mailing list. There are pages covering the pros and cons of various CSS techniques, basic information on obscure parts of CSS, tons of links to other resources, and more. It's literally my first stop when I need to look up something about CSS.

Some other worthy stops are positioniseverything.net, the various materials at the House of Style , and Russ Weakley's compact tutorials. For decoding convoluted selectors, I recommend the SelectORacle. And of course there's the all-seeing eye of Google.

Let's not forget another great resource: Eric Meyer's own blog, meyerweb.com.

 
 

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Write on any webpage

Diigo.com is a new service which allows anyone to
  • Write on any webpage
  • Interact on any webpage
It is like adding sticky notes on any page. Granted there are many other services available, including one from Google called Notebook, this one adds many new features. For example, your sticky notes can be private or public, meaning you and others can share each others notes on any web page. You can send your sticky notes to your blog, email, etc. with a few clicks. I think it is worth thinking about how one could use such a service to build another unique service. I can't tell you what I am thinking about, so think about it.