Digital Toy Blocks

We've all played with blocks as kids. Today our kids play with computers. Now Sifteo.com has combined blocks with computers to produce interactive blocks. Each block has a tiny screen, senses other similar blocks, and produce sounds via a nearby computer. Because of their dynamic screens, as opposed to static faces, limitless games can be created with downloadable apps. Now our kids don't have an excuse for not playing with boring blocks.

David Pogue's review

Animated Mobile Alerts

This company has created alerts and notifications for your smartphone that show animation or videos, with sound, to alert you about incoming stuff. Pretty cool.

Pops

TC review

Check-In Hardware

Because NFC's are not embedded on all phones yet, this company decided to take matters into its own hands. It created a piece of hardware through which users can tap on with their smartphones and the whole check-in/check-out process is initiated. Pretty cool.

Tagtile.com

TC review

New Guitar 3.0

I don't know much about guitars, although I do play some classical guitar. This new Gibson guitar seems to be a new breed. It's feature list boasts 20 new features which are a bit too technical musically for me to understand.

Gibson Firebird X

TC review

iPad And Real Objects

Here's a neat iPad app that interacts with real objects. In this case the objects are Disney Cars objects with some kind of embedded chips that identify themselves to an iPad. As a child plays with the objects, the iPad detects their movement and appropriately interacts with sounds, scenes, etc. 

This begs the question....what other types of objects could interact with an iPad to produce some kind of valuable experience. Say for example in the health and fitness industry you have different objects such as heart rate monitors and pedometers. What kind of services would be useful if an iPad knew what object you had? If you placed your heart monitor on the iPad, it could display some neat graphs of your heart's activity. Whereas if you placed the pedometer on the iPad, it could display your activity in terms of steps or miles, or even a map of your just completed walking path.

Disney's Appmates Turn The iPad Into An Interactive Playmat

The Internet of Things

Some profound thoughts about the future internet of things, a world where trillions of objects are connected to the internet.

This is a world where people make the things you would make if you were left to invent stuff on your own. It is a world where people strap domestic digital cameras to weather balloons in order to photograph space, a world where people attach bubble machines to Arduinos and connect them to the web so that when it sees a keyword on Twitter, it blows bubbles.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15018894

Need Lyrics?

How about viewing lyrics in real time as you listen to any song on your mp3 player? That's the promise of an upcoming API from MusixMatch.com and from TuneWiki.com.

TC Review

Turn Anything Into A Biz Card

For now, any t-shirt can be turned into a business card. Just take a photo of your t-shirt and email it to Capturio. Anyone who sees you in the same t-shirt can snap a pic and email again to Capturio, which will then match the pic to your t-shirt and return your contact info to that person. So now it doesn't seem like QR Codes are even necessary.

Springwise Review

Another Images And Ads Venture

So people are trying to figure out how to mingle photos and ads and be profitable. Here is yet another such venture. It's the idea about making any photo be itself and an advertisement at the same time. The goal is to give a dual personality to any online image, that of being a plain image and of being an advertisement of some sort.

Adwords For Images

Stipple

Best TV Remote Control Ever

Hands down, unequivocally the best remote control for your TV ever made, that is if you have an iPad.

Logitech Harmony Link

Dream It, Make It

It's now time to get our kids involved in creating 3D objects of all their dreams. Imagine what could become of stories like Harry Potter?

Origo

FoldFactory

So you are into folding or origami? Check out FoldFactory.com to learn even more types of folds.

Here is the 112th Super Cool Fold of the Week from Trish at FoldFactory. Watch as she teaches you how to create the fun Assymetrical Gate Fold piece with a perfed postcard. 

Web Surf Via SMS

This has got to be an absolute quintessence of thinking outside the box. These guys have figure out how to surf the web using just SMS and MMS, no data plan required. Although it is slow, any website is viewable and fully functional. Truly amazing stuff.

New Android App Smoozy Lets You Surf The Web Without A Data Plan

Smozzy.com

MadPad: Everyday Musical Objects

There are sounds all around us. Record them. Snap a picture of them. Then lay them out like a keyboard and start making music. That's the idea behind MadPad.

Smule's MadPad Turns Your Life Into A Video Soundboard

Art to Digital Instantly

So when was the last time you drew something and then had to find a scanner to be able to put it online? And how would you like to carry around that scanner anywhere you went? Nope, that's not for me. I'd rather just carry a pen and make my drawing appear instantly online. Well, you can almost do that now. Just the "instantly online" isn't built-in, yet.

Meet the INKLING

Wacom's Inkling Captures What you Draw On Paper Digitally

Samsung's ChatOn: iMessages Competitor?

It looks like Samsung may have an answer to Apple's iMessages with their new ChatOn cross-platform service. However, I think iMessages is built into the iOS which means developers can use it within their own apps, whereas ChatOn may be just an app.

TechCrunch preview

Engadget preview

Bizness Apps

If you need to create a mobile app or web app, you might want to consider BizApps first, especially because they are very affordable.

Native Or Web? Bizness Apps Adds HTML5 Platform To Let SMBs Create Their Own Apps

DoughMain: Kids' Financial Education

I need to keep an eye on this service. It seems they have some great ways of helping parents reward their kids for doing chores and also teaching the kids about managing money.

DoughMain Raises $5 Million For Gamified Financial Education Platform For Kids

DoughMain.com

Photos Turned Into Art

So you are photo enthusiasts using an iPhone? You are now doing what's being called "iPhotography," the latest craze about turning ordinary photos into works of art just by using your smartphone.

NYT's Strolling Artists, Bearing iPhones

Webcam: The New Credit Card Reader

Guess what? If you have a webcam, you just got yourself a new credit card reader. So why bother with buying a specific hardware for reading credit cards?

Jumio Comes To Wordpress, Turns Blog Readers' Webcams Into Credit Card Readers

Diffbot: A Modern Screenscraper

There's services out there that do screenscraping, like Kapow. Most do this work by looking internally at the html code to target the exact elements to extract from a webpage. On the other hand, Diffbot, supposedly uses even more senses to accomplish a more accurate extraction of any elements on an entire website. One way is by categorizing every webpage into one of twenty different possible categories. It also uses bots, algorithms, computer vision and artificial intelligence to process the content on the Web the way a human being can. Pretty incredible. So why does anyone need a screenscraper? Well, the new services based on Diffbot are now just starting to bloom.

Diffbot reviewd by Techcrunch

http://www.diffbot.com/

NFC Stickers For Everything

TagStand.com is hoping to sell you stickers with NFC chips in them and to help you in keeping track of them wherever and on whatever you stick them on. Applying these NFC stickers to real-world objects is going to create some interesting interactions between the offline and the online worlds.

TechCrunch review

Photovine = Fun!

Now this seems like a really fun photo-sharing app. You take a picture of anything. Then someone else adds a similar picture, and so on. So let's see....share with me a picture of the best prize you have ever won.

PhotoVine.com

TechCrunch review

SPDY Faster Than HTTP

SPDY is an improvement at the application-level for transporting content across the web. Since it was developed by Google, the browser Chrome uses it to speed up all the Google services, and that's why Google Reader and Gmail seem a whole lot faster on Chrome.

Life Beyond HTTP 1.1: Google's SPDY

One of the first books on SPDY

Group Messaging Killing SMS

Here are some group messaging services that are killing SMS.

FastSociety.com

Kik.com

Textplus.com

GroupMe.com

BelugaPods.com

Yobongo.com

R.I.P. SMS

Here's another article about why SMS is going away, may be not so soon, but for sure.

An excerpt:

One thing is more clear than ever before: between iMessages, Beluga, GroupMe, Kik, Google's new Huddle feature of Google+, and now Facebook Messenger, SMS is under complete and utter assault. Yes, most of those service are compatible with SMS, but only so they can be parasitic off of it.

Facebook Just Out-iMessaged iMessage - And SMS IS More Screwed Than Ever

Worst Devastation Ever

I have never seen anything like this before. Horrific and evil.

Panoramic Views of Hiroshima After Atomic Blast

The Augmented City

Here's some news for the augmented reality crowd. It's a demo of the future augmented reality city. So it looks like augmented reality will be going 3D in the near future.

Metaio's Augmented City Demo

Instant Photos Booth

Instaprint introduces it's photo booth which automatically prints similarly-tagged or location-based photos. Each instaprint box has its own unique tag or gps-location and any matching Instagram pics are automatically uploaded and printed. Yes, I think it only works with Instagram pics.

Instaprint.me

Augmented Twin Towers

Here is a different use of augmented reality.

An App Puts The Twin Towers Back In Sight

Tivo For Radio

Here is the new service that can record any program on the radio and you can play it whenever and wherever you need. It's free, and will be ad-supported in the future.

Dar.fm

NYT review

Coming Soon Page

Make your own coming soon page by using Capturely.com

Animation With Sprites

The big news is that now you can do animations without using Flash. So how do you do that. See this cool 5 minute video that explains it all. And start using the tools at Spritely.net.

Sprite Animation Explained

Performance Test Your jQuery

With so much client-side code happening these days, we all should be concerned about keeping our code performing at its optimum. Use this site to test snippets of your code.

As AddyOsmani.com states:

• jsPerf.com - a great way to easily create tests comparing the performance of code snippets across different browsers
• Makes it simple for anyone to share or modify tests
• Used by the jQuery project, Yahoo and many other dev. teams

CSS3 Gradient Generator

If you are dumping those nice gradient-filled button images you did in photoshop, and replacing them with CSS3 buttons, here is the online tool that will generate all the CSS3 code you need for your new buttons. If you don't know, loading CSS3 buttons is much faster than loading images like jpegs, gifs, or pngs.

CSS3 Gradient Generator

Trending Tools Of The Trade

FYI, these are the tools I am studying and planning to use as I progress further in my web development career.

CoffeeScript
Node.js
SocketStream
Sass
HTML5/CSS3

Here is an excellent learning site that explains many of these new technologies.
jQuery & Javascript Articles for the Dev Community

And of course, everything is going mobile so here is an excellent site for that.
BuildMobile.com

Dump Cameras, Not SLR Lenses

Who needs a camera these days when all you really need is an SLR lense? What?! Yup, for all you photography enthusiasts, now you can dump your camera and attach your SLR lense to your iPhone. So instead of investing in the latest and greatest SLR camera, just invest in some really nice SLR lenses and get busy with your iPhone.

TechCrunch review

Novel Idea: Collection Madness

Here's a rather novel idea. Take a collection; in this case a collection of fashionable items. Now show it to the crowds and let them "add" the next item. It sounds like a winning incentive to get people to participate. That is the idea behind Stylyt, which I guess is pronounced like "style it".

Stylyt.com
Business Insider review

Offline GMaps on Android

Motorcycle enthusiast, rejoice! When was the last time you were out and about at some remote location where there was zero cellular reception and couldn't pull up a map on your phone? Now you can carry around a copy of any google map and view it anytime, even without cellular service. I hear they are using vector-based map tiles for smaller files. It also makes me wonder if they are using the new HTML 5 local storage feature.

TechCrunch review

Yet Another Social Media Manager

Use SocialSprout.com to manage all your business's online social media marketing.
The other services are Roost.com and Postling.com

Make Games With HTML5

If you have a Mac and want to develop your own games, just use GameSalad.com
TechCrunch review

exfm: Music Browsing History

TechCrunch writes:
For anyone who's ever said something along the lines of, "now what was that awesome track I heard earlier today on that music website? I can't remember, I guess I'll have wade to go through my browser history to … ah, nevermind", exfm is for you. With the entire Web as exfm's canvass, this means that music lovers have access to some 20 million songs — at least half of which weren't created Lady Gaga. That's a fairly robust library, to say the least.

EXFM
I wonder if another service could be created for online images or videos?

EchoPrint: Open Source Music Identification

I  never thought this kind of service could ever be offered for free to developers to use within their own apps. Now any app can identify the playing song. Hhmm, I wonder what kind of apps are dying for this kind of add-on feature. We'll see pretty soon.

EchoPrint
TechCrunch review

The Gnomes Are Coming

Here come the Gnomes to your smartphone. These mystical figures travel from one smartphone to another and you can keep track of where they've been all over the world.

Gnomes
TechCrunch review

Another Social Media Manager

For small businesses needing to manage all their social media content within one place.

Roost.com
TechCrunch review

WildChords: Guitar Game

Since I have kids who want to learn guitar, I'm very interested in what's going on along these lines. Although I don't have much time to look at these things, occasionally I bump into these things. Here is another iPad app that make a game out of learning how to play the guitar. What's different about this one is that you can use any guitar and it will listen and recognize what strings/notes/chords you are playing, without having to "plug in" your guitar to the iPad.

WildChords.com
TechCrunch review

Two Social Networks for Kids

Everloop.com
Togetherville.com

Embed Structured Data

If you need to embed any images, videos, etc. into your site, you may want to embed all its metadata as well and present it nicely formatted. Some standard ways of doing this are:
oEmbed.com
Embed.ly

Tracking a Product Story

Every product should have a story behind it that others can easily find. That's the idea behind talesofthings.com. Just take a pic of your product, start a "blog" about it on their site, print out a QR code, and attach it to the product. When someone buys the product, they can scan the QR code to find the story behind the product. This is a really neat service. Now can you imagine if this was used for a globally traveled product?

Valuable Tool for Small Biz

This service is indispensable for any small business.

Postling.com
Techcrunch review

Razzi.me: Share Photos, Earn $

Just another service for sharing your photos and earning some money from views and clicks via AdSense.

http://razzi.me/

What's a GigWalker?

Find out at GigWalk.com

Techcrunch review

The P2P Evolution

It's now P2P 2.0 with the likes of Zaarly.com and others. The driving force behind all of this P2P activity is the fact that today's technologies make many more types of transaction possible between average consumers by finding an equilibrium between time and money, supply and demand. Transactions once locked up and never realized now create entirely new economies, free of established brands and fat middle-men.

TechCrunch story

Moat: A Search Engine for Ads

Moat.com has a very interesting concept and one which I need to internalize and really think how this technology can be used outside the box. 

Moat has a proxy for attention. It can generate a heat map of where people hover their mouse over an ad, and where they click as well. What you end up with is something like the heatmap shown above for HauteLook. An image of a woman in the ad, while more attractive, turned out to be too distracting, whereas an image of a shoe results in 2.6 times more clicks on the join button. Moat offers these heatmap analytics to brand advertisers, to help them figure out which display ads are the most engaging and to give them tools to fix the ones that are not working.

TechCrunch review

Social Photo Aggregator

Pixable.com has some very interesting concepts. I would like to keep up with them and to try to understand what they are doing and what other possible things they could do. In a nutshell they are able to bring in all your photos, which could be in any social photo site, and bring in all the metadata such as tags/comments that go along with each photo.....all for the purpose of creating a photo album.

TechCrunch review 

Social DIY Tinkering

Bloggers who tinker are creating interactive tutorials, descriptive videos and step-by-step series of photographs that make it easier for nontechies to go forward confidently. Dozens of do-it-yourself Web sites, like Evil Mad Scientist, AdaFruit and iFixIt, also offer tools, components and kits of their own, many aimed at beginners.

Dale Dougherty, editor and publisher of Make magazine, which sells kits as well as related books and tools at the Maker Shed store on its Web site, says a new era is opening for people who want to create things. "There have always been tinkerers," he said. "But today it's a lot easier for others to join in. We've moved from the lonely tinkerer to the social tinkerer who can share ideas."

Read NYT's story Do It Yourself, or With the Help of Tinkerers Everywhere

Why Blog?

Interesting article about why startups should blog and what to talk about.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/27/why-startups-need-to-blog-and-what-to-talk-about

Smart Apps for Guitarists

If you play a guitar, here are the apps you need.

App Smart Extra: New Apps for Guitarists

Use This, Not That

What to use and what not to use for programming.

http://cloudpanic.com

Server-side Frameworks Becoming Extinct

What? Is there a possibly all we need in the future would be HTML, CSS, Javascript, and REST? It may be that today's server-side frameworks are overkill.

Could Serverside Frameworks Become Irrelevant?

Server Side Magic

I found this interesting news about a server-side javascript library called node.js. Supposedly the code you write with it will automatically support thousands of concurrent connections. Read about it on the CloudPanic website.

http://nodejs.org/

Advice for Crowdfunding

Here is some advice if you are thinking about crowd-funding your project.

More Crowdfunding

Here are more players, besides Kickstarter.com

Profounder.com

Quirky.com

IndieGoGo.com

PeerBackers.com

Funding For Advertising Upstarts

Some money for those interested in a new way of doing advertising.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/business/media/15adco.html

Chirply Greeting Cards

Chirply.com is something like Threadless.com for paper cards. Winning designs get printed and sold; designers get paid. The designers whose ideas collect the most votes are awarded a $300 prize, plus an additional 10 cents for each item that is printed with their design.

Y Cominator Backed Chirply is Threadless for Paper Goods

Monitor Your Website

Just one of probably many website monitoring services, UpTrends.com probes your site every 30 minutes and sends you the results via email, for free. Of course they have other paid services with a shorter probing interval.

Mobile Photo Sharing

Two services to keep watch on for sharing mobile photos and adding special effects:

PicPlz.com

Instagr.am

Cimbal: Alternative Payments

Another alternative payments player. This one uses your cellphone to make payments for online/offline purchases.

Cimbal.com

ZeeWee: Free HTML5 Apps

ZeeWee.com offers free HTML5 web apps for your iPhone, iPod, and iPad.

http://j.mp/gkVRP7

Social Micropayments for Rewards

These two services are using social micropayments to reward or support your favorite online contributors by enabling you to reward them tiny amounts.

Flattr.com

Rewrd.com

Zamzar File Conversions

Any file, any type can be converted to another type.

http://www.zamzar.com/

Search By Color

Glancely.com is a very interesting service that currently works with Etsy.com but may soon work with others. Their service will search for a specified product within a specified color range and the results show a spectrum of matching products.

TechCrunch review

Build Your Own Web App

DHTMLx.com

DHTMLX Touch is an HTML5-based JavaScript library for building mobile web applications. It's not just a set of UI widgets, but a complete framework that allows you to create eye-catching, cross-platform web applications for mobile and touch-screen devices.

The framework is compatible with the major web browsers for mobile platforms. Applications built with DHTMLX Touch will run smoothly on iPad, iPhone, Android-based smartphones, and other popular devices.

SimilarSites.com

Looking for similar sites to some website? I got some interesting results when I searched for "befunky" which is a site for adding special effects to photos.

SimilarSites.com

Protect Your Website

Protect your website from profanity by filtering all the text content via an API from WebPurify.com

Mobile Payments To Explode Globally

Mobile payment systems are about to surge in users across the globe.

NYT's Mobile Banking in the Emerging World

Some of the mentioned mobile payment providers:

Telefónica - Latin America

Globe - Philippines

Smart - Philippines

Orange - Africa

Vodafone Pesa - Africa

Gemalto - Latin America, Middle East, India

Trivnet - Latin America, Middle East, India

Telenor Easypaisa - Pakistan

Book Me Online

This is an awesome service to show your schedule availability and it ties into your existing calendars like Google Calendar, Lotus Notes, Apple iCal, etc.

Tungle.me

The other awesome booking service I've seen is Bookd.com but it is catered more to the services industry.

Photo-Sharing is Growing

Photo-sharing services are growing in number and popularity.

Photo-Sharing Is The Next Evolution Of Social

Instagram

Picplz

Path

DailyBooth

Got Too Many Gift Cards?

If you received too many gift cards this holiday season, you might want to sell or trade them online.

CardPool.com

PlasticJungle.com

Build Your Own Mobile App

Here is a growing list of mobile app builders you can use to make your own mobile app.

MobileRoadie.com

AppBreeder.com

GetCS.com

SwebApps.com

Sencha.com

PhoneGap.com

PyxisMobile.com

Google App Inventor

How Was GPS Invented?

If you are interested in how our modern day GPS technology was invented, watch this short video.

Where Good Ideas Come From

TED: Ideas Worth Spreading

These are some of the best talks on the planet.

TED.com
Introduction to TED

Alternative Payments

Here are more alternative payments options for customers without credit (cards).

PayNearMe.com

GreenDot.com

Review of PayNearMe

Review of Green Dot

Among others, Rixty and Coinstar offer similar services.

500 Startups

These might be the coolest super-angel investors on the planet. Dave McClure, the founder, seems to know what he's talking about. I've been reading about him on Fast Company and it's very good stuff. Keep an eye on them if you have a great idea.

500Startups.com

Look in Wikipedia for other super-angels.

The Andreessen Horowitz Fund

Seems like this fund in Silicon Valley would be good to pursue because they will educate you to be a great CEO.

Andreessen Horowitz
NYT's Andreessen Starts 2nd Fund to Invest in Tech Start-Ups

The One Sentence Pitch

Here is the perfect template for making your own one sentence pitch, to be ready for when you bump into that multi-millionaire.

Madlibs For Pitches: How To Perfect The One Sentence Pitch

It was constructed by the Founder Institute's Adeo Ressi

The sFund

I hope I can use the sFund some day.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/21/kleiner-perkins-and-partners-create-250-million-social-fund/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Excerpt from NYT: Kleiner is creating the sFund at a time when investing in social is hardly new. Several prominent venture capital firms like Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures and others, have been heavy investors in social start-ups. And several companies, like the game makers Playfish and Playdom, have already been sold for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Touch Books for the Little Ones

Upcoming touch books for the iPhone and iPad.

http://touchoo.com/

Webydo: From PSD to HTML

You might want to keep track of this upcoming service.

It takes a PSD and generates all the HTML, less tables  - meaning CSS-style layout.

Pass it along to your peers or otherwise keep them grinding at the mill the old way.

http://www.webydo.com/

My Kids Need Drawing Pad

A drawing pad for little picassos built as an iPad app. This is exactly what my kids need.

DrawingPadApp.com
NYT review

myGengo: Translation API

A service called myGengo.com has an API for human-powered translations. I'm not sure what that all means but this is one service to keep track of.

TechCrunch news

TechCrunch review

Location-Based Advertising

There are some big players involved in this arena and here is a small list of them to help you keep up.

First are the actual providers of the location-based check-in data:

1. Foursquare
2. Facebook Places
3. Twitter
4. Gowalla

Then there are the ad-campaign services that use the above data to pinpoint your marketing:

1. Context Optional, 
2. SnackSquare, 
3. Geotoko, 
4. Sprout Social 
5. PlacePunch

PeopleSmart: Look for Anyone

The new way to look for anyone is to use PeopleSmart.com

U Like Clear Wireless?

So u like Clear's 2 year commitment and excellent broadband service ey?

Well once my contract runs out with Clear, look at what I can get now:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/technology/personaltech/02pogue.html

The Virgin Mobile MiFi.....about the size of a credit card.

$40 a month, no contract, unlimited data

FutureAdvisor: Invest Like This

If you currently have a 401K and other investments and are confused or clueless about how best to allocate your investments and get the most bang for the buck, here is a new service who can help. Instead of hiring your own investment adviser, just use FutureAdvisor.com.

TechCrunch review

5Min and Answers

Answers.com has teamed up with 5Min.com to show appropriate videos for every question that is asked. I hadn't heard of 5Min before but they have a ton of videos and worth remembering.

TinyChat With Real-time Translation

This nifty chat system is fully browser-based (no download required) and features real-time language translations so people you chat with don't have to chat in your language for you to understand.

http://tinychat.com/

Grasshopper

Grasshopper.com pitches itself as the entrepreneur's phone system. They may be right.

Medical Industry Pioneers

Here is a list of some innovators in the medical industry. By reading about them you will either partner with them, know who your competitors are, or learn something from them for your benefit.

http://www.tech50.org/companies.html

Cool Video Messages

Send a cool video message of your choice to get your point across and to make a good impression.

Mogreet.com