PhotoJoy: My New Screensaver

Photojoy is really cool. It has some amazing effects for showing photos on your desktop as a screensaver. I use it to show photos from Flickr that I find interesting. For example, at the moment I have mine showing backpacks, bags, skateboards and students.

Photojoy.com

Interactive Video Objects

What are interactive video objects? Adobe is experimenting with turning any objects inside a video into interactive objects you can manipulate. So for example, if a video contains a group of friends you can separately fast forward or backwards that one person without changing the others. The way Adobe is achieving this is very clever. You'll have to see this demo video to get a better grasp of this.

This is radically crazy! Can you think of what people might do with this? I think it may turn out to be like a Photoshop for videos. With Photoshop you can take parts from different photos and blend them into a new photo which never was real. Now people will blend parts from different videos to create a new video which never happened! You will be able to create hilarious America's Funniest Videos or frame your worst enemy and show the video evidence to the police. I think Adobe is creating a monster.

Adobe's Interactive Video Object Manipulation

Smaller SLR Cameras Coming

The new technology these cameras are based on is called Micro Four Thirds. It works by eliminating the complicated mirror system inside today's cameras. These mirrors are used to direct the image to the peephole. Someone got clever and added a really tiny LCD inside this peephole which now acts as a replacement for the real peephole. The benefit is professional digital cameras can now be much thinner.

See David Pogue's review of one such camera, the Panasonic G1.

2itch: Your Midnight Taco Run

Help is on the way. Now you don't need to go out scavenging late at night to find something good to eat. Just visit 2itch.com and you'll find all sorts of businesses open 24x7. Hurry and submit your own locations so you can help other lost souls out there.

2itch.com
Springwise Review

LeadVine: Your SalesForce

The concept:crowdsource the sales force. The "crowd" finds sales leads for you and you pay a referral fee.

What this means to you: Now you don't need to hire your own salespeople. Just let the "crowd" sell your stuff, anywhere in the world.

Leadvine.com
Springwise Review

Carpooling With iPhone

Look what you can now do with the iPhone and soon with other phones. The iPhone keeps track of your travel routes and matches you up with others who travel similar routes. It also shows you pictures so you can decide whether to share a ride or not with any of these matching people.

 

iPhone RideShare App

Prawn: Fast Nimble PDF Generation

If you are using Ruby then this provides an easy way for you to dynamically build PDFs on the fly. Suppossedly it is super fast and super easy to do.

 

Prawn

Get Your Flickr ID

If you do not know what your Flickr ID is, then you can use this 3rd party service to find it. http://idgettr.com/.

CIDA: Creative Industries Development Agency

If u r in any creative industry, these people might be able to help.

Here are their own words:

Welcome to CIDA - the leading support organisation for the creative and cultural sector.

We support those working in all areas of the creative and cultural industries - in fact almost any creative sector you can think of!

If you're a creative individual, business or arts organisation looking for support to take your creative business or project further, you'll find it here, whatever stage you're at.

YouNoodle: Startup Predictor

Take the test to see if your start up will make it and if it is worthy of investor's attention and money. If you are passionate about the idea you are working on, the results of this test will not mean much to you. But if you are a bit uncertain about your idea, perhaps the results might help you refine your idea.

YouNoodle.com
NYT article: A Start-Up Says It Can Predict Others' Fate

10 Adobe AIR Apps

You must know about these. Know what they do and how they do it. Know about their interfaces. Then apply this new knowledge to your own AIR app. Google all these mentioned apps to get the downloads.

10 Multimedia Adobe AIR Applications You Must Know

Flash 10 Fabric

You have to see this to believe it. Look at what you can do now with Flash Player 10. You may need to download it and install.

http://justin.everett-church.com/fp10demos/cloth.html

Drag the clips to make it spin. It's so wild. I think it's soooooo crazy!!! It just makes me wonder about the algorithms and mathematics behind this. The people at Adobe are brilliant!

So what can you do with this? Perhaps someone could build a game where one of the scenes is a character jumping on a trampoline, which can now be made to look more realistic. Or how about a game with Superman and his cape realistically waving thru the air. Or how about the game of Joust with the ostrich wings really flapping. I think any scene where wind is interacting would be a great place to use this new technology.

Free CSS Templates

I ran into this site that offers free templates based on CSS layouts, as opposed to using tables.

 

FreeCSSTemplates.org

 

Here are some highlights taken from their site:

Released for FREE under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license

Very lightweight in terms of images

Tables-free (ie. they use no tables for layout purposes)

W3C standards compliant and valid (XHTML Strict)

Provided with public domain photos, generously provided by PDPhoto.org and Wikimedia Commons

SMTP to SMS Address List

Here is a list of the email address domains for major cellular providers. This is handy for DIY developers who want to build their own SMS-based service:

 

 EmailTextMessages.com

 

Here is another:

http://www.notepage.net/smtp.htm

iPhone VOIP Options

Here are various sources for saving on calling minutes on your iPhone and instead making a phone call using any of these Voice Over IP services.

11 Great Tools for Making VoIP Calls on the iPhone

10 Online Photo Editors

If you are a photographer, these are apparently 10 Online Photo Editors That You Definitely Need To Bookmark. Not everyone can afford a full-blown Photoshop software so these are definitely worth looking into for saving some big bucks. In some respects, some people even prefer these online tools over a fat-client software.

Future of Social Networking

This is a very interesting glimpse of what the potential for mobile social networking could be like.

I Saw The Future Of Social Networking

More Free Icons

Some of the best things in life are free. When it comes to icons and icon sets, there are many talented designers and artists that choose to provide beautiful and useful icon sets for commercial and/or personal usage.

In this collection, you'll see 40 beautiful, free icon sets that you can use in a variety of ways (websites and/or your desktop). In total, you'll find close to 3000 invidual icons showcased in this article.

A Useful Wireless Service

Here come the new services based on wireless hardware that transmit signals via BlueTooth, WiFi, RFID, etc. One such service is a wireless home security system that can be installed by a homeowner without tearing up the walls. It uses stick-on sensors that use tiny "watch" batteries and communicate back to a console you can place anywhere in the house.

NYT article entitled: Wirelessly, Home Security Becomes A D.I.Y Project

Broadcast Your Ideas

If you want your ideas to really spread, make a video about them and post it to YouTube, Instructables, MakeZine, etc. Read about what this guy did with the Wiimote and then see his videos.

NYT article entitled If No One Sees It, Is It An Invention?

RailsPlayground: Excellent Support

I just need to mention this because these people are far and above any other hosting service I have ever had.

Over the course of the last ten or so years I have done business with different hosting companies for my personal shared hosting needs. Up to now I have not experienced any other service as good or better than the service I have received from RailsPlayground.com. Their technical support to me has been quick and very helpful.

However, I think their level of support has gone beyond what I expected. Whenever I have needed to install any type of component or application on my hosting, they have generously done it for me for free, plus they have done it very speedily. Of course, with any installation there are unforeseen issues that arise after testing the new installation. Incredibly, they turn around and fix the issues until the installation is done right and again all for free. I have even offered to pay them for their time and effort and they say no thank you.

In a world where people are losing their jobs and tightly holding on to what they have, I asked myself, "are these people for real". Thank you RailsPlayground. I am extremely satisfied with your service. I wish you great success. The least I can do for you is brag about your excellent customer service. Visit them at RailsPlayground.com.

Stanford's Entrepreneurship Corner

Stanford University has some very good lectures given to their students for viewing by anyone for free. The lectures are aimed at people with an entrepreneural spirit. Needless to say, the lecturers are the cream of the crop in their respective fields. I hope to learn as much as I can from them.

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/

CrowdSourcing Primer Videos

Don't know what crowdsourcing is? Do you want to take advantage of a crowd to source your product? Take some hints from these short video clips at the Wired Video Library.

 

Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe

Free Adobe Flex Training

Adobe has a week's worth of free online training for Flex 3.

 

Check it out

Omgili: Relevant Search Results

I just started using Omgili and for what I need to find, it sure beats using Google. Omgili returns results from conversations people are having. It's results are more subjective than objective. I think I like this type of searching better, however, there is still sometimes when I definitely need to use Google. This just proves, the world is not entirely dominated by Google.

Omgili.com

Map of Foreclosures

I'm not sure why I did not write about this sooner. I have know about this service for quite a while. With it you can browse across all the nation for homes that are for rent, for sale, or foreclosed.

HotPads.com
TechCrunch review

Built-in 3G for PC

Looks like there is a PC manufacturer who has already decided to include 3G connectivity on its laptop, along with WiFi. To mobile professionals this makes a lot of sense. One question I have is: will I be able to easily send SMS and make voice calls from this laptop?

 

Asus Eee PC to get embedded 3G

Earth Class Mail

I saw David Pogue's video coverage of this new service and think it is pretty cool. You sign up for a new mailing address. You have all your mail forwarded there. They scan the front and back of all your mail. You then have the options of Archive, Shred, Scan, Transport, etc. If you chose Scan, you can view your mail's internal content the next day. If you choose Transport, they send you the mail to your true physical address. Of course, there are fees for all this and it is more than I want to pay at this time.

http://www.earthclassmail.com/

A New Kind of VC

Read NYT's story entitled A New Kind of Venture Capitalist Makes Small Bets on Young Firms to get a leg up on how to get venture capital and who other entrepreneurs recommend.

Best Notebook Ever (for Mac)

I've been listening to the MacCast.com podcast that I download from iTunes, and I recently learned about what may be the world's best notebook of all time. Of course, it works on the Mac. They have an extensive video tour of their product broken up into separate movies. If I had a Mac, this is one app I definitely would need to use all  the time.

Check out Notebook at CircusPonies.com

CellSpin Uploads Your Phone's Multimedia

Don't you hate taking all those pictures and videos with your cellphone and then having them "stuck" inside your phone because you can't figure out how to upload them to your computer and then to the web? Now there is CellSpin.net with which you can instantly upload to many different sites all at once. You can upload to Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, etc.

Read Demo's Review about CellSpin

SkyFire: Super Fast Mobile Browser

SkyFire.com has produced a super fast mobile browser for your phone that
compresses any website and speeds up delivery to your phone. It supports all
javascript, AJAX, and Flash. This is now the mobile browser to beat because
not even the Safari on the iPhone can currently play Flash.

OpenClip: iPhone Opensource Clipboard

OpenClip.com has an open-source clipboard for the iPhone that works across applications. It is worth looking into and supporting their work.

Fonolo: Cut Thru Phone Menus

Now you don't have to navigate through all those phone menus when you call a business number. Just register the business phone you wish to call and the menu options you wish to get to. The next time you need to call just go to http://fonolo.com/ and it will call you back when it has reached its destination and you can continue with the call. It is amazing.

Here is SpringWise's review.

Mobile Banking: BIG, HUGE, ASTRONOMICAL

This story found at Bank Technology News, is one of the best stories I have read concerning the global mobile banking trend. If you want to understand what is happening around the world with mobile banking, you really should read this story. If you are in the banking or financial industry, you must inform yourself about this stuff now.

It is now foreseeable that in the future banks may never again directly interface with its customers, via its present use of tellers, ATMs, websites, etc. Banks may become just back-end processing service providers. The mobile banking providers may become the real banks of the future.

Big Calling

Wipe Out Malware

Here are some links a friend sent me to wipe out malware with some simple tools.

Lesser Known Weapons To Trick Out Your Malware Arsenal

Malwarebytes

Startups in India

Want to know about the latest startup companies in India? This website keeps track of all this and has an RSS feed.

Pluggd.in

UK/Germany SMS Payments

The U.K. and Germany now have their own mobile payment system called LUUP. There are so many of these popping up. It's going to be a real battle to see who will dominate the world. These kinds of services are being coined peer-to-peer payments systems.

eTranzact: Nigeria's Mobile Banking

Nigeria has a new service called eTranzact.com by which its people can conduct transactions by cellular phone. This is just one more example of the growing trend for using phones to conduct monetary transactions. Stay tuned for more stories like this because this really interests me. Here is the source from which I learned about this:

eTranzact, Nigerian banking system and the future of e-Payment in Africa

Path to Mobile Payments

This story about mobile payments sheds light on what decisions need to be made in terms of payment processing before mobile payments can really take off. A lot of the terms discussed are over my head, but it's good to know these discussions are already happening because I intend to take advantage of mobile payments for myself and for my clients.

I recently read this story in Bank Technology, a magazine I get for free:

How Will Payments Ride Rails

2Lingual: Bilingual Google Search

I am fluent in Spanish and English and so the 2Lingual.com service is very useful to me when doing Google searches. Be sure to have the Google setting to show results for both languages you are using.

PicLens

If you have a site with photos or videos you may want to partner with PicLens.com because they offer an incredible interface for browsing your photos or videos. I definitely plan to use them once I have my site up full of photos. I am now using it to browse my Flickr and SmugMug photos.

Plurk: A Twitter Killer?

I recently ran into this article entitled Social Media Wheels Keep On Turning‚ And Fast! and discovered a service called Plurk.com which is similar to Twitter. According to the article Plurk does many more things better than Twitter. It argues that Twitter is more popular because it was first to market. I took at look at Plurk and it has a very interesting interface. I'd like to know what you think of it in comparison to Twitter.

Managers for Outlook Email

If you use Outlook for email there are two plugins you can use to help you manage all your email. Wired magazine has a good review. Here is an excerpt:

Among other cool tricks, Xobni spots hidden patterns in your email usage. It identifies, for instance, who your most important contacts are, what time of day they typically send email, and how long it takes you to reply to one another.

Xobni.com
ClearContext.com

International E-Commerce Blog

I stumbled upon a new blog about International E-Commerce.

http://www.dobbeltaa.dk/

I am sure if I use Technorati.com I can find more.

China Payment Systems

I finally got busy searching for payment systems for China, and I stumbled upon some new ones I had not heard about. It turns out payment systems and trust are lacking in China and just beginning to get known. I read an interesting article that sheds light on the current situation in China. Here are some payment systems to keep an eye on.

Ecapay.com
YeePay.com
Alipay.com

If you know of any international payment systems, please let me know.

mChek: Another Mobile Pay

A while back I wrote about the California-based Obopay. India has their own version called mChek.com. There is also news that Obopay plans to expand its services from the States to India. Hopefully into China soon.

Need a Voice?

If you have a script for someone to read who has a really nice-sounding voice then you can find voice talented people at:
Voices.com
Voice123.com

On the other hand, if you have a great voice, you can sign up to sell your voice talent.

PollDaddy: Create A Poll

Want to create a poll? Just use PollDaddy.com and send out to your targeted audience to participate. Then collect and analyze the data.

Flip It ʇı dılɟ

I found this Flip tool from the story on TechCrunch. I tried it within my corporate Lotus Notes and yes it works there too. ¡ǝɯosǝʍɐ sı sıɥʇ

SlideShare.net: My New Research Tool

I started using SlideShare.net as a research tool because it provides me with concise information in the form of slides. People who want to share their presentation slides upload them for anyone to see. I am current conducting research on "social e-commerce" and "social networks". Many slides provide links to other useful information such as books, blogs, etc.

ThisNext: Explore, Shop, Rave

Here is a social network of people who are exploring products, shopping and raving about products they like. It is a good source of people to which you can push your product so they can spread the word about it. I need to do the same, once I get my product done. I have seen others like this service and will need to review what those are. I will come back and update this list. You can also help by commenting about others you may know. Thanks!

ThisNext.com

Watch Global Twitters

At TwitterVision.com you can watch near real-time twits (or tweets) as they happen. It's like watching TV but only of all the global twitters talking. It is amazing to ponder that this is happening live, perhaps with a few minutes of delay. What else could be possible to monitor in near real time across the world that is useful for individuals?

What about all this data that TwitterVision is showing? Is it possible to build some historical trends about its content? For example, where are the most tweets coming from? What are the top 10 things people are doing in the morning, at noon, and at night? What two countries mutually follow each others' twits the most (does this mean these two countries are the friendliest to each other)?
Is it also possible (perhaps using Microsoft Labs Translations) to translate all the twits into the viewing user's preferred language?

It is very interesting that today there are people all around the world talking about the iPhone. For example, I just learned the iPhone has sold-out in Seattle city-wide. People all over are mentioning the long lines. Just from this, you can tell the world needs more iPhones and you can tell people hate long lines. What other needs do people have that are obvious in these conversations?

TwitterVision is almost like being God and watching all these conversations. Of course, it would be overwhelming for any individual to monitor all of them as they happen. Perhaps one could apply various filters to refine the types of conversations one is interested in. The hard-core monitoring and trend analysis would need to be done by super-computers.

SocialCalc: A Wiki Spreadsheet

Need to build community-managed spreadsheets of data? Use SocialCalc along with SocialText to get a full-featured wiki with spreadsheets. What would this be useful for? Think of any public data that would be useful to have online and managed by the same people who use it.  You could initially seed the data yourself. Then let anyone who uses it be able to manage it as well.

SocialCalc

iPhone Incredible Apps

I'm sure everyone is hyped about the iPhone being available in stores tomorrow and I'm sure every other blog has some kind of story about the iPhone, so I decided to put out my two cents worth of blogging on it as well.

I just got done reading the NYT article For iPhone, the 'New' Is Relative and here is an excerpt I like about some of the apps coming for it:

Apple has demonstrated 16 of these programs, including an instant message program, an eBay auction tracker, medical references and a touch-sensitive musical keyboard; the best of them exploit the iPhone's orientation sensor, wireless technologies and other high-tech components.

One coming program, called iCall, will give you free phone calls when you're in a Wi-Fi hot spot. Another, called G-Park, exploits G.P.S. to help you find where you parked. Yet another, Urbanspoon, is "a cross between a magic eight ball and a slot machine:" you shake the phone, and it randomly displays the name of a good restaurant nearby, using the iPhone's G.P.S. and motion sensor.

You can also expect to see a time and expense tracker, home-automation remote control, voice recorder, Etch-a-Sketch, a recipe box, tip calculator, currency converter, e-book reader and so on.

Above all, the iPhone is about to become a dazzling hand-held game machine. The games revealed so far feature smooth 3-D graphics and tilt control; in one driving simulator, you turn the iPhone itself like a steering wheel, and your 3-D car on the screen banks accordingly. Other games exploit the multitouch screen, so you and a buddy can sit at opposite ends of the screen and fire at each other.

myJambi: Market Your Services

Here is another service by which to market your skills to the world. On the other hand, if you are looking for a freelancer, you can look here as well.

MyJambi.com

Others I can think of now are:
freelance.com
guru.com

They are easy to find, just google "freelance"

Citi Mobile: Pay by SMS

Citibank is testing a new system in the Philippines that allows registered users to pay merchants by texting. This sounds a lot like one of my concepts for paying by text for which I have reserved the domain textpaying.com. So when you go to a restaurant, your waiter will ask, "Will you be textpaying today?"

Read about CitiMobile.

Ashley Furniture Uses SMS

Read about the success Ashley Furniture is having with text messaging.

Also take note of how they are building up their database of permission-based phone numbers of users.

Also note how they use different keywords appearing in different print ads so they can measure the response of each ad.

Very interesting. I'm sure you can think of how to apply this knowledge to other industries.

They are using MobileStorm

Tips For Own RoR Social Network

Nice list of tips/plugins for coding your own social network site with Ruby on Rails (RoR).

Building A Social Networking Site in Rails

Acrobat.com

This is really cool. Adobe has put together some really nice collaboration online tools, such as Buzzword, ConnectNow, Create PDF, Share, and My Files. Creating your own account is free. I think I will need to plan on using these tools more and more. The interfaces are really good looking and are based on Flex.

Acrobat.com

Build Your Own Wikipedia

Just follow these instructions to install and host your own Wiki site using MediaWiki, the same engine that runs Wikipedia.com, and runs on Apache, PHP, and MySQL.

Lifehacker's Set Up Your Own Personal Wikipedia

As an alternative, they also recommend Instiki which runs on RoR (ruby on rails).

SMS Information

I think this site has some very useful information about SMS, modems, gateways, etc.

http://www.smssolutions.net/

All Flex Explorers

From time to time I need to look at examples and samples of some things that are possible to do with Flex. Here is one person's list of so called Flex Explorers which I think is very good.

Sharp Mind Flex Explorers

Firefox 3 Features

I will keep this list of new Firefox 3 features handy so I can learn to use it better. Since Firefox is the one application I use the most, I should definitely learn to use it better.

Freshbooks

Just in case you are in need of an online accounting package, I have heard and read very good reviews about Freshbooks. In their own words: "FreshBooks is an online invoicing and time tracking service that saves you time and makes you look professional..."

The Web20Show.com interviewed one of its leaders and he sound very cool and funny and is a very down-to-earth guy.

Web Developer Tools

As a web developer, be sure you are familiar with these tools with which you can optimize your website.

15 Tools To Help You Develop Faster Web Pages

Build Your Site for iPhone

With this new tool you can build your website to appear great on an iPhone.

iUI

Pitch Your 60 Seconds

New site of 60 second video pitches of startups. Get yours in today, or watch what others are thinking.

Elevator Pitches

First Signs: SMS Getting Cheaper

It has long been argued that present SMS rates are excessively expensive in contrast to other data transfer services. Now there is a story coming out of the Philippines that Telcos are being pressured to reduce their rates. If your services depend on SMS, now may be a good time to look overseas for your SMS provider.

Telcos get 7-day deadline on lower voice, SMS rates

Here is another story on the NYT entitled Europe Moves to Cut Charges for Text Messages.

Send E-mail Thru SMS

A new service offers you the ability to send emails via text messaging. Check out the details:
Now, send e-mail through SMS

Company:
http://www.myduniya.in/

My Tech Needs

I have started a new blog to better describe what my current technology needs are for my own personal projects. I like the wordpress format for blogs because you can more readily see other people's comments. My new blog will contain any solution which I am looking for and any suggestions from my readers. As I put together my personal projects, I often run into nice things to have but which I cannot locate or do not yet exist. Perhaps you can provide me one of these solutions and we can mutually profit.

MyTechNeeds.wordpress.com

Mashable's Open Source Social Platforms

Here is Mashable.com's list of their top 10 social news, social networking, and social bookmarking open source projects for building your own social site.

Open Source Social Platforms: 10 of the Best

Lovdbyless Open Source Social Network

In reading about Insoshi.com I just found out about Lovdbyless.com, another open source social network project built with Ruby on Rails. It seems these things are just getting started. It is so good to know there is a lot of interest in using RoR for social networks. Thanks to all the contributors and the funders to these projects. Please support them with your blogging, money, etc.

Insoshi Open Source Social Network

I just found out about an open-source social network built with Ruby on Rails. I found out from the author of RailsSpace.com, Michael Hartl. The project is called Insoshi and is actively being developed. If you are developer you can help build it. If you want your own customizable social network, download it and install it. I hope these guys can make it, because RoR is awesome. Insoshi could become very hard to beat.

Business Use For Twitter

This 3 Minute Twitter Challenge video talks about how companies should be using Twitter to monitor everything that is being said or asked about their own company. The narrator talks about how he posed a question to a company and within three minutes got a response because someone who works for the company was monitoring all conversations about the company using such services as Tweetscan.com, Terraminds.com, Technorati.com, etc. I actually need to start using Twitter as well. They have some nice videos at Twitter.com about what it is used for. I can't get you the exact urls right now because twitter is down for the moment.

Mobile Coupons With Mobeam

You hate to clip out all those coupons you get in the mail or in the newspaper and then you even forget to take them with you to the grocery store. Would it be great if you could look online for the products you intend to buy and then see if there are any coupons for those products? Then send a collective barcode of those coupons to your cellphone and redeem them with a simple scan at the register?

Enter Mobeam.com. Check out their videos at:
http://www.bnettv.com/player.php?id=905
http://www.ecrio.com/products/mobeamdemo.htm

Gen Y Is Changing The Web

Find out why Gen Y is changing the web and how they are doing it. If you want to keep abreast of where the web is heading then you need to understand this group of people and what their expectations are.

Why Gen Y is going to change the web

Pose Question, Get Answers

Here is another site you may want to keep track of. It is interesting to read to know what kinds of questions are popping up. It seems one could ask the right kind of questions to get people talking about your service/product. You could turn this into a marketing tool.

Fluther.com

Most Popular Videos: How-To's

Make a "how to" video, post it on YouTube and you could get plenty of hits. That is a trend covered by the NYT.

Read the article "Making Money, The How-To Way"

Here are some how-to sites: WonderHowTo.com, VideoJug, Howcast, ExpertVillage, Graspr, and MetaCafe

Shanghai World Financial Center

 I saw the documentary about the building of this structure on the National Geographic Channel and decided to look for it online. Here is one awesome video about it. This is one place I hope to visit in my lifetime with my family. I want to walk across that glass-floor observatory 1600 feet above the ground. It looks amazing.

http://www.shanghaihills.com/en/highlight/oim.html

China's Micro-Retailers

Stories like these get me excited about my personal project. People all over the world are getting ready to sell to other people around the world. The financial services needed for these transactions are also starting to pop up, such as Alipay and PayPal (International).

This is a must read, to know what I am continually envisioning.
Ebay Heads East by Fast Company

Get Your Own LiveMesh

Microsoft is giving you 5GB of storage that you can share across all of your devices (desktop, laptop, cellphone, XBox, etc) and even among your friends. Here is one of description of one of Microsoft's examples for using LiveMesh

Microsoft rolled a quick clip illustrating Mesh power: A mother uses a smart phone to capture footage of her son jumping into a pool. As the video is saved to the mobile device's memory, it's transferred to a digital photo frame. Meanwhile, it's also synching with the father's iTunes account, allowing him to watch the nearly live footage whilst waiting in an airport. It's then sent to a Zune, a car dashboard, another smart phone and back to an Xbox 360 console that two other boys are playing poolside.

--Taken from the article "Microsoft Seeks Mesh Sizzle"

HEMA Online Store Jam

HEMA is a Dutch department store. The first store opened on November 4, 1926, in Amsterdam . Now there are 150 stores all over the Netherlands . HEMA also has stores in Belgium, Luxemburg, and Germany In June of this year, HEMA was sold to British investment company Lion Capital. 

Take a look at  HEMA's product page. You can't order anything and it's in Dutch but just wait a couple of seconds and watch what happens.
This company has a sense of humor and a great computer programmer.

Nice Way to Compare Fonts

I found this online tool with which to compare fonts to each other, up to three at a time. It seems very useful when I am trying to fit some text into a narrow space, like a table cell, and want it to be as legible as possible.

Typetester

Obopay: Transfer $ w/ Cellphone

Forget banks and all the hassles of setting up external transfer accounts to and from other banks. Needless to say, any of your friends may have reservations about giving you their account numbers. But which of your friends would ever hesitate to give you their cellphone number? I doubt this would be of concern.

Well now, that is all you need. Transfer money from your cellphone to their cellphone. It works by registering your account information at Obopay.com. Anytime you send or receive money, the system will know your account info based on your cellphone. Your friends do not need to register their account info, unless they want to. Instead, they can go to Obopay.com and request the system to transfer the money you paid them to their bank account info.

Check out the demo at Obopay.com

Here is a nice video about what this service is all about.

MobiCash: Pay By Phone

These folks seek to put a new button into today's online shopping carts. By clicking this new button, people will be able to charge their purchases to their cellphone bill. This may eliminate the need for credit cards.

One trouble is, how will they ever pull this off, considering there are millions of shopping cars already out there? Of course, they can partner with some major players, like PayPal or Google Checkout, but it is a totally different checkout process.

MobiCash

Be Wary of Craigslist

Check out this story bit from ecommwire.com:

The bizarre event, at least, the second of its kind to strike Craigslist, involved a Classified Ad posting that invited individuals to "take what they wanted free of charge" from a house in Jackson County, Oregon. The ad was a hoax, but it generated a real world plundering of a man's home. Last year, a similar plundering scam struck a woman in Tacoma, Washington. In her case, windows, doors, and even the kitchen sink, were stripped out.

There is a better alternative for social classifieds called Collabotrade.com. Read the full story Collabotrade.com Solves Craigslist's Plunder Problem

2G, 3G, 4G, EDGE, LTE?

What do all those alphabet soup of terms mean? Sure they all refer to cellular or broadband technology, but I just don't get what it means to me or what company uses what acronym. Here is a handy short history and explanation.
What's the deal with 4G?

TableFinder: Restaurant Tables Worldwide

This English service is seeking to be your online reservation hub for reserving a table at participating restaurants worldwide. It works on the honor system. If you make a reservation thru their system at a participating restaurant, and you keep your reservation, you get bonus points which you can redeem for discounts at some restaurants. If you do not show up, then you get some negative points and after so many, your account gets disabled for a period of time or indefinitely.

If you own a restaurant, it costs you nothing. They say "we earn our money from commisions from our partners." I wonder who these partners are and how they really make their money.

TableFinder.com

England's Dot Com Boom

Check out this great news coming out of England. It seems everyone there is looking into starting their own Web 2.0 startup. There are lots of ideas and conferencing going on, and of course, lots of venture capital.

TimesOnline story "The New Dot Com Boom"

BuddyPromoter: Launch With Help

This is what I am talking about when I talk about web 2.0 marketing or viral marketing. This tool empowers you to easily spread your word by connect others to your own space. With it you can easily send friend requests in MySpace, Facebook, etc. I know I will be using this whenever I get my things going.

BuddyPromoter.com
$1 BuddyPromoter Promotion
Mashable Review of BuddyPromoter

Expensive SMS Texting

This article makes me think about how expensive text messaging really is. I do hope text messaging plan prices come down further soon.
Mobile SMS: Do you even *know* you're being ripped off?

PhotoShop Express

Photo professionals now have another choice for not only online album storage but also for photo editing. Adobe's PhotoShop Express features both. So now you only need to upload your images just once. And since these guys are the creators of the desktop Photoshop, their tools for this express version must be pretty awesome.
Read the NYT review.

Flex Filter 100K Records

This guy did an awesome flex example of using the filterFunction to search through a datagrid of 100,000 records. The performance of the filterFunction is very, very good, thanks to Adobe.

Filtering DataGrid from 100,000 data with multi conditions

Shopwindoz Global Buyers/Sellers

This marketplace serves buyers and sellers from all over the world who have or want uniquely created products. Their shopping cart is very interesting. It can have several different subcarts each with a separate checkout process. This accommodates your purchases from different sellers who may live in different parts of the world and therefore have different shipping charges to your destination.

shopwindoz.com

SMS to 30 Languages

This service is simply amazing. You can now SMS in your native language and the recipient can receive in any of 30 different languages in both text or audio. It automatically translates the text and does text to speech. You can now send an SMS to faxes, landline phones, email, etc.
CNN Money Review
SMSDemo.net

A Possible Partner: Wyndstorm

Wyndstorm.com sound pretty cool. I may want to give them a try to help me get my ideas off the ground. I picked them up on my Google Alerts for social marketplaces. Good luck to them.

gotoAndLearn() Awesome Videos!

I followed a link from my friend's blog at http://www.gorbatov.blogspot.com/ and found these awesome video tutorials about Flash, Flex, AIR, ActionScript, etc. There is one video that I am particularly interested in which is about using AIR to capture photos through a webcam. I am also looking for some info on using AIR to send out SMS through a GSM Modem. Please let me know if you find someting about AIR and SMS. Thanks. The video tutorials are at:

gotoandlearn.com

Lovely Charts

I hate using Visio because it is not intuitive. Now I can use LovelyCharts.com and get all my flow diagrams done fast and easy. I can also do site maps, organizational charts, etc. It is really cool.

Here is another service which also looks easy to use but it looks too much like Visio. It is called Best4c.com

AtlasPost: Map of Blogs

I have this blog on Blogger.com and every now and then I will click on the Next Blog button to see someone's interesting blog. It is always a random blog I see whenever I click the Next Blog button. It make me wonder what other blogs are out there. I am especially curious about what other blogs are written by people near my location.

Enter AtlasPost.com. These people have the right idea about how to connect people with blogs and photo albums. Now I can actually see what other bloggers live near me and get an idea about what they are blogging about. In the future I imagine their maps will have "layers" by which I can easily filter down into bloggers with similar interests as me. There could be layers for gender, interests, last blog update, etc. So I could search for all males who have posted something within the last month about skateboarding and who live near me.