Biz Action, Not Biz Plan

PlanHQ.com seeks to equip you with the online tools to execute your business instead of documenting your business plan. When you get a team together for working on your idea, you may want to use a set of tools like theirs.

Learn Mandarin: Use LiveMocha

I just signed up with LiveMocha.com to learn Mandarin with the help of a social network, and it is all free. It has lessons and real people you can converse with.

More How-to Videos

This one is worth noting the next time you are looking for something fun to do. These videos show you how to do a ton of different things, just about anything.
Graspr.com

Ript: Desktop Scrapbooking

You have to download and install this app to appreciate what it does. The interface is dead simple. Just drag and drop pictures into the pile icon which always sits on top of your browser or any other Windows app. You can move it around. To customize your "scrapbook" just double click on it and the app will open for you to rearrange, resize, etc. all the images you have dropped into it. Add text and do more.
Ript.com

Multiculture Social Network

With this new service you can create your own multi-cultural social network. It's an interesting concept and I'm not sure what they are doing to facilitate communication between different languages. It is worth keeping track of this service to see what they come up with.

Mixxt.com

CakeMail: Email Marketing 2.0

This service is another white label email marketing tool by which anyone can become an email marketing service. The service is similar to MailBuild.com which I previously blogged.

CakeMail.com

Another DIY T-shirt Store

Here is yet another design your own t-shirt service, like threadless, zazzle, etc.

smegshirt.com

Joopz 2-way Web-to-SMS

With this new service you can send text messages from the web and receive replies back on the same webpage. The text conversations can go back and forth and are automatically archived. One of their plans costs $2.96 per month for unlimited text messaging.
Joopz.com
DEMO review

Search Thru Your Social Networks

This new service seeks to turn your search into searching for the info through your establish social network. Because social networks are so immense, it assumes what you are looking for is already on someone else's page, blog, etc. I think they have done a very good job of simplifying this kind of search into a very easy to use interface.

Baagz.com
DEMO review

FastCall411

Need service and can't get through to any merchant? Go online. Enter your phone number and the category of service you seek. FastCall411 does a local search and calls all the matching merchants. Each merchant hears the FastCall411 promo and that a customer needs service. The first merchant who takes your call gets connected to you.

DEMO review
Online video demo
FastCall411.com

Big Apple Mobile Coupons

8Coupons.com is collecting specials from all businesses in NYC and sending the coupons to your cell via text messaging. All you do is browse for the coupons that interest you and send them to your phone. When you show up at the merchant you show them the text message. One wave of the future are promotions via text messaging.

Read the KillerStartUp.com review

Another HTML/CSS Service

Here is yet another service that takes your designs (png, pdf, etc) and converts it to HTML and CSS, saving you lots of time.
xhtmlmagic.com

The others I have previously talked about are:
xhtmlized.com
psd2html.com

uLocate & Where

Want to write GPS-enable cellphone apps? Partner with uLocate and use their free Where platform, the first no-cost GPS programming platform that can work across multiple phones and carriers. Here is the story on Business 2.0

uLocate.com
where.com

Tag Clouds Gallery

Examples and good practices for using Tag Clouds, very useful for whenever I get around to using tags on my site.

Tag Clouds Gallery

Top 100 Mac Apps

I just think this list could be useful someday when I get a Mac. The trouble is they are more expensive, bur they are superior.
Top 100 Mac Apps

The Chumby

The Chumby is a new tiny device which rotates internet content in a small screen. It's almost like having a digital frame with rotating photos, only this thing can rotate more than just photos. I found out about it from an online eseminar about Flash Lite for devices. The Chumby is also powered by Flash Lite and all its content runs under Flash Lite, which is also powering more mobile content on phones.

 

Chumby.com

TextBack 4 Textbooks

I ran into this at killerstartups.com and thought their write up on it is really good. So here is what they have to say about this new service called TextBack.net

College students today know they can save money buying textbooks online. They go to the campus bookstore and write down ISBN numbers for their courses. But do they know for certain they wrote down the correct ISBN? They joke about it on their web site, humorously naming a condition "Chronic ISBN Transposition", as if it was some kind of disease. Seriously though you can write down the wrong number or switch number positions which is transposing. Therefore you have the wrong ISBN and will have to go back to the campus bookstore. TextBack has made it easy. While in the bookstore simply send keyword "ISBN" followed by the 10 digit ISBN number to short code 4INFO (44636). Isn't it better to text the ISBN to confirm you have the right textbook when you go online? After you send a text message they store the book on the website in a mobile cart so can purchase online from Amazon Market Place. They also send you a text with online pricing and the title. Giving you confidence knowing you have the right textbook. You don't have to sign up or join. More importantly, you don't have to give them your cell phone number. They place a numeric code in their response messages. All you need do is enter the code on the site and they will display all of the books for you. The system is good for any book not just textbooks. Technical professionals can use the system for those expensive tech books too.

Blogger and Podcaster

I just thought this site I ran into may be worthwhile keeping up with because they cover everything about Blogs and Podcasts. With their coverage you should be able to have a good understanding of the industry and discover some trends or useful services.

BloggerAndPodcaster

iPhone Success

I recently read the iPhone could very soon overtake the Motorola RAZR as the best-selling phone ever. Here is the story on Forbes.

I also read that Apple makes about $18 per monht per iPhone from revenue sharing with AT&T. Over the course of a 2 year contract that is about $500 in profit per iPhone. Here is the CNET story.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Group2Call.com

 

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 .

 

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.

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.

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:

ui.jquery.com

script.aculo.us/

oSkope Visual Search

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

oSkope.com

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

Photo2Text

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

 

Photo2Text.com

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

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.

Pics: Goliaths and Davids

The Goliaths of online photography (pics) are:
Corbis
Getty Images
iStockPhoto

and the Davids are:
Fotolia
Dreamstime
Shutterstock

Local Merchants

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

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

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.

Programming Collective Intelligence

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.

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

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

Send a Buzz

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

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

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.

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

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

Go Big !!!

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

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

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

JS-Kit: Threaded Comments

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

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

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

Build Your Own Web App

Here are some of the players in this crowded space of drag-n-drop web apps:

LongJump.com
DabbleDB.com
CogHead.com
BungeeLabs.com

TechCrunch review of this industry
StartUpSquad review
8 Start ups to watch for in 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

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

The DYI Phenomenon

Dion Hinchcliffe's take on what widgets, badgets, etc, all means.

DYI Phenomenon Part 1
DYI Phenomenon Part 2

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Adobe Lab's Color Schemes

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

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

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

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

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

Trend Hunters

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

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.

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.

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.

Crowdsourced Startup Advice

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

Startupping.com
FoundRead.com

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

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

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

Be a Ticket Flipper

Have some extra tickets and want to sell them?

StubHub.com
RazorGator.com
Craigslist.org
eBay.com