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.

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.
 

Friday, August 31, 2007

Need Text Link Ads?

Why not include some more text link ads on your site or email marketing and start making some additional revenue?
Get some ads at:
LinkWorth.com
TLA

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Flash Based VOIP

You can now do Voice Over IP all within Flash. If you don't think this is a big deal, then you don't need to follow the link:

Flash Based VOIP


Adobe has introduced their own version, codenamed Pacifica.

Monday, August 27, 2007

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Local Merchants

Here is a service which aims to match local merchants with local clients.
MerchantCircle.com

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Gen Y Blog

Here is one Generation Y blog about Yers so you can keep up with trends in this group.

Generation Y Blog

Buzzword

These people are building Buzzword, the first real word processor for the web. They're using Adobe Flex 2.0 as the development environment and Flash 9 as the runtime platform. Beautiful typography. On-screen pagination. Rich text, tables, and graphics. And your friends, teachers, and colleagues can add comments right on the page. Your documents, everywhere you need them.

virtub.com

Monday, August 20, 2007

Collective Intelligence

This fascinating book demonstrates how you can build web applications to mine the enormous amount of data created by people on the Internet. With the sophisticated algorithms in this book, you can write smart programs to access interesting datasets from other web sites, collect data from users of your own applications, and analyze and understand the data once you've found it.

Thursday, August 16, 2007

My Album Site

If I were doing photography, these are the people who would do my online albums. I did some research for my cousin in Dallas and after looking at a bunch of similar services, this company is the best I saw.

http://www.smugmug.com/

Some of the highlights:
  • Excellent upload tools.
  • All the metadata of your photos is captured in the upload, such as date, time, GPS, and a bunch of camera details, like Focal Length.
  • Very slick interface for browsing the photos and very fast
  • Very easy for anyone to order prints.
  • You can set your own pricing on the print products and you keep the difference from the actual cost of the prints.
  • Many print products, like calendars, cups, t-shirts, etc.
  • You can have unlimited number of photos and albums.

Sure, it is not free like Flickr.com but you get so much more for very reasonable pricing. If I were doing this for a living, every client of mine would get an online album of their event and all their guests could order prints from there.

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Snif Tags

Put a SNIF (Social Networking In Fur) tag on your dog and take it for a walk. When your dog comes in contact with other dogs also with snif tags, the magic begins. The tags exchange information about the dogs and their owners. When you get home go to the company's website and see what this info is. So now you can use your dog to hook you up with somebody.
SnifLabs.com

Friday, August 10, 2007

Nightly Flex 3 Builds

I'm working on a Flex project and I think these are handy instructions for how to install the Adobe's nightly builds of their new Flex 3 SDK into Flex Builder 3.

Instructions


Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Send a Buzz

Send a voicemail message to any U.S. cell phone without the phone ringing.
SendABuzz.com
Review at 160characters.org

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

What Do U Think of My Style?

Sites are popping up where users can upload photos of themselves and get feedback on their fashion. So before a girl goes out, she can get her friends to comment on what she intends to wear. This just goes to show, if you can think of some "fashion service" you can hit it big time.
TechCrunch review 1
TechCrunch review 2

Flex Style Explorer

The Flex Style Explorer allows you to see what styles are available for
Flex components, and you can adjust those settings in real time and see
the generated CSS to create the style settings. You can view the Flex
Style Explorer

Friday, July 20, 2007

SWFObject: Best Flash Detection

The best way to detect for a Flash Player on a web page and have an easy fail-over is using the SWFObject.

My favorite option with this is: SWFObject has full support for the Adobe Flash Player Express Install feature. Your users never have to leave your site to upgrade their player.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

BlinkSale: Easy Online Invoices

The easiest, fastest way to send invoices to anyone online. Send elegantly formatted invoices to anyone with an email address. Send a bill to your clients with these professional-looking invoices or design your own with CSS.
BlinkSale.com


Another easy invoice solution is at:
SimplyBill.com

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

3Jam: Group Text Messaging

Now you can send a text message to a group of friends (up to 15) and they can reply to all the friends very easily. The replies always go to all the members of the group. When you initiate a conversation you choose which friends will be in the group.
3Jam.com

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Go Big !!!

The Go Big network can connect you with the right investors. They have a nice site.
GoBigNetwork.com

Friday, July 13, 2007

Moo Card & Stickers!

These people may have cracked the holy grail of unique printing. No more ordering one design in minimum quantities of 100's. If you have anything to market, try doing it with their minicards (half the size of a business card).

Moo.com

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Magento: Easy eCommerce Platform

This is a feature-rich eCommerce solution for any website that enables you to give your visitors some common Web 2.0 experiences, such as tagging, auto-completion of searches, and easy product comparisons. It sounds very promising.

MagentoCommerce.com

T-Mobile's WiFi Service

Just think this is cool and shows how some companies are rapidly responding to Apple's threat.

T-Mobile is now giving away free WiFi wireless routers and a special phone that will automatically switch between your cellular service and any available WiFi service so you won't be charged minutes when using VoIP on WiFi.

NYT review

Nifty Shopping Cart

Free and very easy to add to any site. It works with both Google Checkout and PayPal. Too bad it is not multi-lingual, yet.
TechCrunch review
FatFreeCart.com

Here is another one called BlinkCart.com

Saturday, June 30, 2007

JS-Kit: Threaded Comments

Add threaded comments to any site for free with just one line of code with JS-Kit.
js-kit.com

Friday, June 22, 2007

Social Shopping

Find out what other people are recommending or recommend something to others. Get your product listed here so others can learn about it.

NYT article: Like Shopping? Social Networking? Try Social Shopping
ThisNext.com

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Turnkey Social Networking Solutions

Here are some of the players in providing easy solutions for creating your own social network. Hopefully I can develop an e-commerce social network with one of these.
KickApps.com
Pringo.com
SmallWorldLabs.com
Ning.com
CommonGate.com
CrowdVine.com
OneSite.com
Another List

Here is a nicely done comparison between Kickapps and Ning.

Here is TechCrunch's Comparison Chart

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Monday, June 18, 2007

Ten CSS tricks you may not know

This guy does a good job of discussing a few CSS tricks that can come in handy from time to time.

CSS Tricks

Thursday, June 14, 2007

The Threadless Story

Read Guy Kawasaki's interview of one of its chief officers


Record Your Calls

Here an easy way to record all your calls, just buy the Ipevo Free.2 phone for about $45.

Ipevo.com
NYT article

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Thursday, June 07, 2007

Product Life Story Labels

If you sell a product, you will want to add labels to it by which a consumer can know the history behind it. One way is to put a code on each label by which the consumer can retrieve the product's history on your site. This is a growing trend which we will see across many more products.

Product Life Stories

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Guide to CSS Support in Email

Here is a very good writeup on what CSS support is included in various email clients.

CSS Email Guide

Friday, June 01, 2007

eBook Retailers

Sometimes I have a hard time finding an eBook for a book I want to buy. Here is a list of some possible retailers that may carry your eBook.

AcademicMaterials
BooksOnBoard.com
CONNECT
CyberRead
Diesel-ebooks
eBookimpressions
eBookMall
eBooks
eBooks About Everything
eBookwise
eChapterOne
eFollet
eReader
Fictionwise
Franklin
Mobipocket
PaperbackDigital
Powells

The Ten Day MBA

This book claims to teach you in ten days what an MBA learns in college. It may be worth the time. Can MBA programs be compressed, allowing a reader to "get at least $20,000 of MBA education at 99 percent of the list price," as the author promises?

The Ten Day MBA @ Amazon.com
The Ten Day MBA @ eBooks.com

Thursday, May 31, 2007

What is Web 2.0 Marketing?

This article seeks to explain how user-generated content can help you create an online marketing campaign.

Web 2.0 Marketing

What is Social Software?

This article seeks to explain it.

Social Software

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Add Affiliates Easily

Here are a couple of ways to easily support an affiliate program on your website. Just let the experts handle the affiliate relationship.

ShareASale.com
AffiliateFuture.com

Practice Your Programming Skills 2

Code Kata - Dave Thomas, one of the Pragmatic Programmers, took the idea of coding practice and made
something....well, pragmatic out of it. He created a series of what he
calls Code Kata, which are small, thought-provoking exercises that
programmers can do in the language of their choice. Each kata
emphasizes a specific technique or thought process, providing a concrete
flexing of one's mental muscles.

Practice Your Programming Skills

TopCoder.com is a long-standing programming competition
site. You can register for an account and compete online for
prizes. Even if you're not interested in competing with others, Top-
Coder offers a practice room with a large collection of practice problems
that you can use as excellent fodder for your practice sessions.
Go sign up and give it a try.

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

UShip: Who Wants to Ship This?

Let shipping carriers compete for your business. Just list your shipping need and get bids from interested shippers, then go with the cheapest. Supposedly shippers often have extra room in their trucks which they would like to fill up but their problem is finding stuff to carry there. Now these same shippers can go to this site and try to win your business so they can fill up their trucks.

UShip.com

Friday, May 18, 2007

Fotolia.com

Here is another great photo resource:
Fotolia.com is the revolutionary image bank that is fast, easy and always on. More than 3.2 million images starting at $1 are ready for downloaded. 1000 new members a day are inspired by our spirit!
  • Over 3.2 million professional images
  • High quality images starting at just $1
  • Free membership
  • Revolutionary images
  • Industry disruptor
Join now for a free Fotolia account and get 3 free images. Visit Fotolia.com and enter promo code VAU3IEZN during registration.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Adobe Lab's Color Schemes

Check out Adobe Lab's own version of what a color scheme picker should look like:
kuler.adobe.com

Thursday, May 10, 2007

FlirtingInTraffic.com

I think this is a nice concept with lots of potential. ABC News Nightline did a story about it. However, there are some security issues to be concerned about. Would you want a predator who saw you to know who you are?

On the Fast Track to Love
FlirtingInTraffic.com

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Openkapow

You have to see this to believe it. You can now create "robots" which can navigate anywhere in the web and feed you back the info as REST, RSS, etc.

Openkapow.com

Review by Infoworld

Thursday, May 03, 2007

MySpace for Kids

There are various sites for pre-teen, pre-MySpace kids who are too young to blend in with the older kids on MySpace. Here is a NYT Review:
My Daughter, the Burger-Flipping Penguin

Some of the mentioned services are:
ClubPenguin.com
WebKinz.com
Imbee.com
Whyville.net
Nicktropolis.com
Disney Xtreme Digital

Monday, April 30, 2007

Catalog All Your Stuff

New services aim to be your online catalog of all the stuff you own. Then you can share all the stuff you own with your friends and eventually buy/sell with each other. Online retailers also can automatically register the stuff you buy with these services and then advertise related items to you when you view your stuff.
NYT Review: Got Roomfuls of Stuff? Now Sitew Will Help Keep Track of It

Zebo.com
MyThings.com
iTaggIt.com

Another Shopping Experience

Here is yet another online shopping experience which aims to ease online comparison shopping and searching.
Glimpse.com
NYT Review: A Narrow Window Into the Future
Here are my previous shopping experiences I discovered.

Upload Your Cell's Videos

Upload all your videos and photos from your cell and let others watch them, even live.
Kyte.tv
NYT Review: Social Networking Leaves Confines of the Computer

Friday, April 27, 2007

Trend Hunters

Here is another site to keep track of trends.
TrendHunter.com

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Mapki: Google Maps Mashups Wiki

For help on anything concerning the Google Maps API this wikipedia-style site has all the info and links you will need to create your own Google Map Mashup.
Mapki.com
For seeing examples of Google Maps Mashups visit the Google Maps Mania blog.

Monday, April 23, 2007

JSONER: Library for JSON

The next hottest thing in dealing with JSON is a new Javascript library called JSONER. And if you don't know what JSON is yet, you better start finding out. It is a more efficient way to transfer data with AJAX instead of using XML.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Human-powered Local Search

Here is another service that is moving away from software to human-powered. It is local searching, which basically means searching for business info, attractions, events, history, etc. at a localized level usually from a local expert. Here is one of the first services to attempt this with real humans, presumably available thru chat 24x7:

AskPoodle.com

Human-powered Transcriptions

Normally one would expect for computer to automatically transcribe voice to text, but because of accuracy problems and having to "train" the software to your voice, there is an effort to get a human network of transcribers to be available 24x7 to alleviate all these problems.

One of the first to do this is Jott.com. They have a toll-free number you call and speak for up to 30 seconds. Real humans then transcribe your message to text and send it to your destination(s) which you will have previously setup in your free account at jott.com.

This is a very interesting trend of using human networks to usurp the normal role of computers. Can you think of other industries or services where this is happening?

Human-powered Searching

Obviously computers by themselves are not smart enough to answer all our search request, so now some folks are using real humans to power searching. Some searching is done in real-time by humans over the phone, for example Scott Jones's ChaCha.com. Other searching will apparently be an amalgamation of user recommendations of the best search results, for example Jimmy Wales' Search Wikia.

On Wikipedia I searched for "human search engine" and also found Jatalla.com

These new services depend on a network of people doing all the work. If I were building a network of people I would definitely get pointers from these two big players.

Monday, April 16, 2007

Crowdsourced Startup Advice

Read about other entrepreneurs' experiences and advice for starting up a business and sustaining it.

Startupping.com
FoundRead.com

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Learn Chinese With Podcasts

I just got my first iPod (I know, I know, I'm a little slow at getting up to speed on gadgets) and I discovered, through iTunes, a great source of daily Chinese lesson podcasts. I've tried the first intro and I think I'm hooked on this stuff. The instruction is excellent. If you want to learn Chinese, then I definitely recommend this.

ChinesePod.com

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Bad Fads Museum

This museum showcases many of the past fads. Check here to see if your idea has not been a fad before.

BadFads.com

How to Get VCs' Attention

Need help getting the attention of Venture Capitalists? Listen to what Guy Kawasaki has to say:

How to Get the Attention of a Venture Capitalist

Monday, April 09, 2007

All In One Searches

Both Yahoo and Google are developing a new interface for search that gives you the usual results but also results from Blogs, YouTube, Flickr, etc all on one page.

Yahoo's Alpha

Google's SearchMash

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Monday, March 26, 2007

BumpTop: New Desktop

In the near future we are likely to see an interface for our computer's desktop much like this one called BumpTop.

NYT review
YouTube Demo

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Democratizing Innovation

Need to improve your product? Just let its users do the innovations. In this sense then, you become not a product innovator but an innovation facilitator. You empower its users to contribute and collaborate on improving your product.

NYT article
Free Democratizing Innovation book

Friday, March 23, 2007

The Intention Economy

The mentality is changing from: don't tell me what you are selling. Instead, I'll tell you what I want to buy.

In this new intention economy, a buyer has full intention to by something in particular. The sellers will not only need to offer the exact user specifications but compete on price, service and quality.

Checkout the Intention Economy at:
TrendWatching.com
LinuxJournal.com

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Here Come the Flex Components

I ran across this article at Basement.org about the coming influx of new Flex 2.0 components.

Basement.org

Who Visits Your Blog?

Add a small code to your template to keep logs of all your visitors and what they clicked on.

MyBlogLog.com

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Wall Street for YouTube generation

Groovy, hip, cool view of Wall Street news in easy to digest bite-sized videos.
Wallstrip.com

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Managed RoR Hosting

These guys will handle all the deployment, infrastructure, scaling, etc for your Ruby on Rails apps.

EngineYard.com
Review at GigaOm

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Trends in Ecommercio 2.0

Here are some thoughts on what E-commerce 2.0 means. They are very interesting and I think most certainly these ideas are going to be broadly implemented across the ecommerce world.
The Velvet Revolution
The Next Generation

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Some RIA Shopping Sites

A whole new generation of shopping sites is on the horizon based on Rich Internet Application technology. RIAs, also known as AJAX or Web 2.0 applications, are transforming how the Web looks and feels because they are designed to take advantage of broadband Internet speeds and are not based on the traditional Web page metaphor. Instead of sending you a page of text and images to view, an RIAenabled site first sends you software that takes over some or all of your Web browser and delivers the experience the Web site owners have developed.

RIAs for the Holidays
ShopComposition.com — great-looking, full-blown RIA shopping for designer home goods.
Nike.com — another RIA shopping experience from the folks who "Just Did It."
Etsy.com — serendipitous product finding interfaces; try the Shop by Color, Time Machine and Sampler features.

Ecommerce 2.0 Trends

Here are some thoughts on what Ecommerce 2.0 means. They are very interesting and I think most certainly these ideas are going to be broadly implemented across the ecommerce world.
The Velvet Revolution

Reviews & Ratings 4 your site

If your ecommerce website does not have product reviews and product ratings entered by users, then you can easily add them using these two services. Of course, you can build your own infrastructure to do the same, but considering that PowerReviews is free, you might as well give them a try and save yourself some time and effort.
PowerReviews.com
BazaarVoice.com

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Allurent: Radical New Shopping Experience

Allurent is using Adobe's Flex to building totally different shopping carts and online stores. U need to look at the demos to really know what this is all about. It may be called Rich Internet Applications for eCommerce.
Here is a demo.

Exponential Growth 4 Your Biz

Social networking sites are starting to open up their web APIs. Facebook, Friendster, and others are starting to let third-party developers build new features to attract more users—and profits. What does this mean for your business? If u r smart enough, u will figure out how to leverage the APIs to put your product/service in front of all those millions of users.

SlashDot article
Biz Week article

Online Video Industry Index

There are now so many companies vying to be the next YouTube, it's easy to lose track of them all. So let's take a look at the entire online video industry and categorize the major players. 

In this post we've summarized the latest video industry innovations under the following categories:

  • Video Sharing
  • Intermediaries
  • Video Search
  • Video eCommerce
  • Video Editing & Creation
  • Rich Media Advertising
  • P2P (Peer To Peer)
  • Video Streaming
  • Vlogosphere

Monday, February 12, 2007

Minipreneurs: Instant Biz Owners

Set up your free shop in a few minutes. Have all your friends shop at your website and u shop at theirs. Everyone makes commissions. Even shop at your own website and get cash back from buying the items. If u already have your online store, sign up with one of these services to get others to sell your stuff.

Shop Here
Give Me Cash
FavoriteThingz.com
Zlio.com
MyPickList.com
Springwise Report

Friday, February 09, 2007

Time to Get Rich

Here's a guy from Stanford who has lots of advice about how to get rich. I actually went to Stanford University as well, Class of 1989.
iwillteachyoutoberich.com

DIY Instructables

Another social network for sharing instructions for making all kinds of tangible stuff and for people who want to learn about it.
"This is a great place to start if you're looking to find a cool DIY project to try out"
Instructables.com

Another one is Make found at makezine.com

Tutorials 2.0

Tutorials on graphics, coding, etc. submitted by you for you. It's another social networking site, but this one targeted at people who want to share their expertise and at people who want to learn from others. Sign me up for that one.
Tutorials20.com

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Hey!Watch: Universal Video Encoding

These folks have a service that can take any video from practically any online source, such as YouTube, and encode it to practically any format, such as for the PSP, Wii, iRiver, etc. You decide what video u want to watch and what device to watch it on. This service does the magic of transforming the file to your needs.
Hey!Watch

Movers 2.0

These are the movers and shakers of Web 2.0. Keep on eye on them and on any new ones. There are other sources as well, which I have elsewhere in this blog. If u know of any others, please let me know and I'll make a comprehensive list of Web 2.0 lists, that is a list of lists.
Movers 2.0

How to Harness the Power of Web 2.0

Good, practical, succint advice about what to do to keep up with Web 2.0.
BizWeek

What's a ScrapBlog?

Create your own scrapblog, which is just like a scrap book with pictures, comments, nice backgrounds, etc. But since it is digital, you can also have music and videos. Once you are done, you can share it on MySpace, Facebook, etc. You can even print it out or get a DVD of it.
ScrapBlog.com

Bleeding Edge Programming

Of course RoR is rocking, but there are some other great programing paradigms shifts happening. Two of these are Adobe's Apollo project and Yahoo's Pipes. If u r a developer and want to do some awesome stuff, then u need to know about these.

Adobe's Apollo
Yahoo's Pipes

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Gigantic Ecommerce Deal

There is news that eBay and MySpace may be teaming up to create an extremely large ecommerce shop. What this means is that any MySpace registered user can sell items to any of his/her friends. So that's millions of friends being able to sell to millions of other friends. And of course, any person is more likely to buy something from a friend than from anyone else.

MySpace and eBay

Friday, February 02, 2007

Share2Me

With this new service u can share any digital item to:
> Instant Messenger
> Email Account
> MySpace Page
> FaceBook Wall (coming soon!)
and more...
Share2Me.com