Capture Phone Screens 4 Testing

Now you can capture the screens a user is seeing on your site, just like you can do today with regular PC browsers. This is good for improving your site by collecting visual feedback from all your users. 

Watchsend.com

TC Review

Whether the app is in beta or live, Watchsend users can specify exactly what pages they want to record, which are then encrypted and secured in its data base. All recordings come with screen annotations of taps, swipes and presses, as well as a timeline of the user's actions. App developers can then go in and view them, using very specific search terms to navigate the vast number of videos collected.

Pics.io: Collaborative Browser-based Photo Editor

I'm not sure how good this is, considering that there are other online photo editors. One key difference may be that Pics.io enables team members to work together in editing photos.

TC review

Kevo: The Smartest Lock Ever

Kevo has to be the smartest lock I've ever heard about. It works with your Bluetooth 4.0 smartphone but you don't touch the lock with your phone to open/lock it. You just tap your finger against it and it will sense your identity via your phone.

TC review

Floobits: Collaborative Code Editor

Now you can work simultaneously on the same code with another developer, known as pair programming. Floobits is different in that it is not necessarily browser-based (like Madeye.io) but rather has a plug-in for whatever code editor you currently use.

TC review

Privy Manages Ads on Networks

Use Privy to manage all your running and scheduled sales and ads on various social networks, like Facebook.

Here is an excerpt from Techcrunch:

Afterwards, they can then use Privy by entering their "chalkboard specials" — the limited-time offers they run for a specific time frame, plus a photo and description of each. Marketing teams can do this as the offers come up, or they can load them up to a year in advance if they're better organized and prepared. Privy then automates the distribution of those campaigns to the various services and sites the company uses.

From an online dashboard, businesses can see at a glance which sites are driving customers, and drill down into customer info, data on redemptions, reviews, claims, and more. Customer data can also be both imported and exported to Mailchimp and Constant Contact and CSV, to allow for more personalized targeting of the audience segments.

Froont: Responsive Design Editor

You really need to check out Froont and get a free account. It is an online drag-n-drop website designer that will output responsive design html/css.

It has a very cool slider with which you can instantly see what the site will look like on different size screens.

Plus its all done online so there's no install or download.

Froont.com

http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/06/froont/

StreetFight: Hyperlocal Biz News

An interesting blog about local SMBs. Here is one entry about thoughts on self-service ad platforms:

Over the past decade, self-serve advertising platforms have been seen as a potential lynchpin for creating successful hyperlocal business models —potentially bringing down the cost of merchant acquisition and management to the point where serious profit can be made by aggregating smaller-sized SMB ad insertions. But self-serve is easier proposed than done. And many companies have found that while their self-serve platform works just fine, many small business owners require the kind of high-touch hand-holding that only a real-life salesperson can provide.

MyAds: Self-Serve Ad Platform

Self-service advertising platform for the Rubicon Project.

Summary from Programmable Web:

The MyAds API allows users to develop applications that create and manage their MyAds advertising campaigns. Through the API users can gain access to campaigns, accounts, performance and more.MyAds is a self service ad platform that lets users build and customize ads to reach new customers. The API uses SOAP protocol and responses are formatted in XML.

The Rubicon Project

In contrast to a small company, if you are a premium publisher or large company wanting to explore what ad revenue you could be making and use the right technology to sell and trade your advertising space, then look no further than The Rubicon Project. In their own words, here is a summary:

The Rubicon Project is the leading technology company automating the buying and selling of advertising globally. REVV, the industry's largest independent technology platform is used by more than 500 of the world's premium publishers to transact with more than 100,000 advertisers across a massive marketplace that powers more than 180 billion ad trades per month.

ShinyAds: Self-Serve Ad Platform

White-label, self-server ad platform for smaller advertisers and publishers.

If you are a small company and want to offer your customers a nice interface for them to place an ad on your app/website, ShinyAds.com may be able to help. From a developer's perspective, here is a summary of what can be done:

The REST based Shiny Ads API allows developers to integate operations into their own applications. Shiny Ads provides a self-serve advertising platform that allows publishers to control the ad purchase process by directly offering an ad purchase system to their advertisers. With the API, online publishers can manage their self-serve advertising offering as well as be notified of events such as new orders. Responses are formatted in either XML or JSON. Full documentation is not publicly available.

GetStartUpTools Dot Com

A new convergence of startups and Internet companies has come together to provide other early-stage companies with the tools required to get up and running quickly, and most importantly, cheaply. It's sort of like a Humble Indie Bundle, except instead of gaming,GetStartupTools.com offers software from Wave, Box, MailChimp, Zendesk, Uberflip and General Assembly that most brand new internet companies would need or at least appreciate.

GetStartupTools.com

AllJoyn Is My Personal Cloud

Imagine walking into a new room and, like Harry Potter, being able to control all the devices in there with a few gestures. But (because you are a Muggle) instead of a wand, you use your smartphone. Developed by Qualcomm, AllJoynis an open source peer-to-peer software designed to give manufacturers and developers the framework to seamlessly connect a wide range of devices, appliances and mobile apps.

TC review

AllJoyn.org

Fade In Images

Cool javascript trick used by Pinterest for fading in images after they finish loading. This one relies on using Embed.ly

http://embed.ly/docs/tutorials/background

Social Network Data Heaven

If you have social network data anywhere, like Facebook, Twitter, etc. and you want to archive it and search it, then ThinkUp.com is the way to go.

Here is a snippet that better explains it:

ThinkUp, the social media management tool that matters most, hits version 1.0 today. It lets you store all your social activity from networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ in a database you control and search, sort and analyze it. If you have a Web server that can run a PHP application, you can take control of your social network data. Ever wanted to search for a tweet more than a couple days old? Don't bother with Twitter search. ThinkUp is the only way.

ThinkUp lets you archive all your social network activity. It's free and open-source, so it's a totally extensible platform with a growing community of developers. You can search, browse, publish, analyze and visualize your content and data in all kinds of ways. Under the terms of service of your social networks, they can delete everything you've created without warning. ThinkUp lets you own your content. This isn't a review; this is a public service announcement. Go get it.

CDN For ALL Your Stuff

Regardless, CSS, Javascript, and so on, you can probably find a reference at this Content Delivery Network: http://cdnjs.com/

LESS Compilers

So if you are using LESS to code your CSS, you must know about these compilers:

For Windows: http://wearekiss.com/simpless

For Mac: http://incident57.com/less/

You can also reference the javascript less.js file in your code from a CDN like: http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/less.js/1.3.3/less.min.js

Best 3D Canvas Javascript Library

Threejs is the best library I've seen for drawing 3D objects within the HTML5 Canvas element. The examples shown at http://threejs.org/ are amazing. There's a very nice intro to Three.js at https://learnable.com. You can even make games with it.

FontSquirrel Fonts & Converter

If you ever need to look for monospaced fonts and others, look at FontSquirrel.com

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/list/style/Monospaced

If you ever need to convert any font file to another, for example ttf to eot, woff, or svg go to

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/tools/webfont-generator

Best Wholesale SMS Provider

The best and most affordable SMS provider I have ever seen. Nexmo. International reach. All inbound SMS are free. Outbound SMS are 0.0071 USD in USA.

What's more impressive is that with their API hitting your server, you can have as many and unique SMS SHORTCODES as you want. They are also integrated into AppFog so that is very cool.

MIT App Inventor

There's a new generation of mobile app programmers and they are using the MIT App Inventor. Here is a story about all this:

http://readwrite.com/2013/05/02/this-is-what-the-next-generation-of-programmers-looks-like

CashFly: Shortens Links and Pays You

CashFly.com wants to pay for using their service to shorten URLs. Anytime you share a link and someone clicks it, you get paid. It's like a Bit.ly service that pays you.

WSJ review

Fabric Printing

SpoonFlower.com offers custom printing on fabrics. Your designs on fabric.

TC review

Niice: An Even Nicer Design Search Engine

Niice.co is yet an even better search engine for finding great design stuff. For example, I want to find "pink" stuff.

TheNextWeb review

Psddd: Dribbble Has It

You can find that freebie design you are looking for at Dribbble.com. Trouble is it is buried somewhere there and Dribbble doesn't have the search tools to find it. So here comes Psddd.co to help.

TheNextWeb review

An API for Email Marketing

Who would have thought that email marketing services needed an API for developers to use in integrating a great email marketing service into any website, whether small or large? Sendicate is introducing such an API and their pricing is very affordable. I wonder what interesting email marketing campaigns we'll soon see showing up in our in-boxes. 

TC Review

Software-based Networking

Forget about investing millions of dollars on building out your big network for that next big idea. Now you can use Pertino to build out your network with little to no hardware. The entire network runs in the cloud. So what's your next big idea that needs that great big network?

TC Review

WP Engine: Viral WordPress Protection

If you are running Word Press and feel that your site will crash if it goes viral, then look into WP Engine to provide your hosting.

WPEngine.com

AppSumo review

Very Cool Colorpicker

One of the best color pickers I've seen.

http://color.hailpixel.com

The Next Web review

Quipio: Yet Another Textagram

I recently bumped into Boldomatic.com and here comes a very similar service that lets you further customize your text and shoot it out to all your social networks.

Quipio

TC review

Vine: Share Short Videos

With the Vine mobile app you can share 6-second videos with your friends.

Photojojo review

Albumatic: Collaborative Albums Creation

You and your friends can create albums of photos at any casual event. Share them with others, even with non-friends or those who didn't get the chance of being at the event. Other services have come and gone, but it seems Albumatic may have an edge on usability. 

So now parents can share photos of their kids' sporting events. Wedding guests and the wedding couple can cherish the photos of everyone at their event.

I imagine Albumatic's business plan may include selling photo prints.

Albumatic.com

TC review

SaberBlast: Automating Marketing Alliances

It might be difficult for a small start-up to make an alliance with a big company that may have an interest in placing some ads on the start-ups website. SaberBlast intends to make this easier for all parties involved. 

SaberBlast

TC review

Boldomatic: Like a Textagram

Cool new feature. Put in any text, and you get a nice big letter billboard with a nice background color to boldly display in your social network feeds. It's like making your comments stand out in your feeds in a billboard style sort of way.

Boldomatic

TC review

Embed Instagram Anywhere

SnapWidget.com allows you to include a free widget on your website that displays Instagram pics based on usernames or hashtags. Very cool.

Swish Helps Launch New Products

Swish seeks to help launch new products by providing an ecommerce marketplace to showcase and to sell your new product. Once you receive a quota of orders, you fulfill the orders by sending the entire product inventory to Swish who then fulfills each order for you. Thus, the little guy doesn't need to worry about how to fulfill his orders should his product go viral suddenly. Bad thing is that Swish takes a 35% cut.

TC Review

Modern.IE Helps You Test

modern.IE consists of a number of free tools and resources, including a scanner that checks for common problems that may make a site incompatible with modern and legacy versions of IE. The scanner, Gavin noted, checks a given page to find common compatibility problems with the libraries and frameworks the developer used. It then recommends fixes and provides developers with information about which version of a given framework like jQuery offers the best compatibility.

TC review

Pond5 Stock Media

Here is good source of stock video and photography. Yup, video. They have some awesome clips you may be able to use. I've seen some for $20. They have updated the site and it's easier to find stuff.

Pond5.com

VinylMint, Make Beautiful Music Together

Taking the notion of online collaboration to a whole new level, VinylMint has created a cloud-based solution for musicians to jam and record in real time.
Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/02/vinylmint-online-music-recording/#aIVsc5aW6xA3r4wm.99 

Play My Tone

This is an app that makes creating music as easy as listening to it. Listening to music nowadays is almost universally effortless. But creating it? That's not so easy. Solving that problem is the idea behind Play My Tone, a social music maker that mixes, personalizes, and shares your musical creations.

Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/02/play-my-tone-announcement/#0ufCZpCQl7Mcszrl.99 

Tubifi Stock Footage

Tubifi wants to make it easier to make great videos by using lots of stock footage. But stock footage is only part of the service. With a vital social feature, Tubifi also plans to connect video makers to the marketers that need them. The other big feature of the service is online editing, which allows users to take the stock video they buy and edit it from their web browsers.
Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/02/tubifi-stock-footage/#ZQJk4LwhTfLgUOA7.99 

Almond+ Is A Modern Router

Here is the most advanced router for the consumer available today. It's a router with a touchscreen and only costs $99. It is going to rock my world as soon as I can get one. I would love to make a mobile app that communicates with it.

TC review

The Almond+

Here is a book to help you learn about its protocol Zigbee and Z-wave.

Create n Share Website Mashups

NewHive provides easy tools for making collages of websites to share. It can grab any media to produce beautiful and thoughtful art.

TC Review

NewHive wants to pioneer what co-founder Zach Verdin calls "slow social media". He describes it as "Creating something meaningful that takes more time and thought than just sharing an image. It has more emotional impact on the people creating it and the people consuming it."

Headless Browsers

If you're reading this article, you most likely know what a browser is. Now take away the GUI, and you have what's called a headless browser. Headless browsers can do all of the same things that normal browsers do, but faster. They're great for automating and testing web pages programmatically. There are a number of headless browsers in existence, and PhantomJS is the best.

In other words, the server can now act as the web user. The server-side can interact with any website  from the point of view of a site visitor. The server can submit data, click links, wait for results, and process the results. Very powerful stuff indeed. This is a step beyond web scraping.

Here is an excellent example of what you can do with a headless browser: UpstreamCommerce.com crawls your competitors' websites to compare your pricings to theirs. They may be using some other technology, but certainly using a headless browser would be one way to do it.

Real-time Node Frameworks

The Node crowd is pretty DIY, so many Node developers eschew using frameworks beyond Express. Express gives you the most control, but requires the most development overhead. You have to setup and tie together everything all by yourself - and there is a lot of stuff to tie together. Furthermore, getting everything to play nicely with eachother is much more painful than you'd think. 

Frameworks will tie everything together for you, and will ensure each piece fits the equation properly - so I recommend using a framework if you want to hit the ground running with the least amount of hassle. Conversely, I recommend choosing Express if you're savvy and want maximal control, or (as we'll see) you want cross-platform code (including mobile).

Here are some more recent ones:

NowJS

Firebase

Google search

And here is a more realistic view of the current frameworks.

Modern Web Scraping

Web scrapers are pieces of software which programmatically visit web pages and extract data from them. Web scraping is a bit of a controversial topic due to issues of content duplication. Instead, most web site owners prefer that their data be accessed by publicly available APIs. Unfortunately, many sites provide lackluster APIs, or none at all. This forces many developers to turn to web scraping. This article will teach you how to implement your own web scraper in Node.js.

Other tools are:

Jsdom

Cheerio

PhantomJS
Other Related Projects

Super Javascript Languages

I don't know which one is leading at the moment. I know both CoffeeScript and TypeScript are supported by Node.js, so that's a good thing. Dart is apparently a Google thing. TypeScript is also supported from within Visual Studio, so you know Microsoft is backing it up.

CoffeeScript

TypeScript

Dart

Two excellent editors that support these languages, as well as Nodejs, are Sublime, and WebStorm. Here's a favorable review of Sublime.

Artiphon Touch Sound Instrument

Guitar lovers out there, there's a new electronic musical instrument you may want to keep you ears on, the Artiphon.

Techcrunch says:

This CES has been a surprisingly musical. Aside from the usual headphones and speakers, we've already seen a number of electronic musical instruments including the Artiphon Instrument 1, a well-made electronic guitar analog with a pressure sensitive fretboard.

Unlike the Jamstik, the Instrument 1 doesn't have real strings but instead you play on the raised ridges on a pressure sensitive surface. The iPhone receives MIDI input from the device and you can even plug it into a computer.

The Instrument 1 is made of hardwood and can be played like a guitar, banjo, bass (by tapping on the strings), or even a fiddle. It should cost under $1,000 and will be made in and around Nashville by the creator, Mike Butera.

We spent a few moments playing the instrument on stage at CES 2013.

Best Responsive Web Framework?

Some people think so. Check out Foundation.

Review

Image Placeholders for Wireframing

Wireframing a website and need temporary image placeholders until you get the real images?

http://placehold.it/

http://imsky.github.com/holder/?js

Solutions For Responsive Images

Which responsive images solution should you use?

Here is a third party device detection:

https://deviceatlas.com/

Chute Your Photos

Chute wants to host all your photos for your apps. 

Every time a developer or a site owner wants to build photo functionality into their app or website, they're essentially forced to re-invent the wheel. Mobile developers aren't always familiar with the ins-and-outs of web development, just as the same can be said for web developers, so Chute has built a system that works for both, handling the entire backend environment for uploading, processing, authenticating, resizing, and serving images.

TC review

Instant Cloud For Devices

It would be so cool if you could buy any wifi-enabled device and have it instantly connected to the cloud and have it securely accessible to your app. That's the promise behind Yoics.com.

In a world where everything is connected to the Internet, it is actually hard to network various devices to one another. This is especially true for the various silos of LAN and mobile devices from various makers. To make a device on a LAN remotely accessible requires the network router to be configured to open a port and for the remote user to know the (static) IP address and port number to access it. This type of complex configuration is typically beyond the skill set of most consumers and also creates a security vulnerability that can be exploited by a variety of threats.

TC review

Find Any TV Show With GuideBox

Guidebox is all about TV — and just TV. It doesn't care about movies; it doesn't care about web video. Just TV! So if you are into TV, and want to watch TV on the web or on your phone or tablet, it's worth a look.

TC review

Cooler Way to Find Video Channels

9x9.tv has a cool way to search for online video content for your Android device. 

The app provides curated channels of video that are designed to mimic viewing habits of regular TV viewers. It does this by breaking videos down into various categories and showing just the most appropriate nine channels based on the time of day. It calls that "day parting," providing morning shows in the morning and late-night clips at late-night and primetime content in primetime. The idea is to make online video viewing kind of more like the way people watch TV.

TC review

NFC For Marketing & Ads

Tapit is not waiting for NFC to take off for payments. Considering iPhones don't have built-in NFC chips, that may be a long while. So Tapit thinks there is a big market for physical ads that have built-in NFC chips and that there are already enough NFC-enable mobile phones that can read these. Not a bad idea to consider how Tapit can fit into your product.

TC review

The Mobile Labor Force

Following the eminent demise of the unions, come these new job opportunities which absolutely give the right to work to people wherever and whenever they want. By understanding these services and registering as a provider, you can start making money with or without a formal job.

Recruiting the New Labor Force

Hash Cookies?

This is a big deal. RadiumOne is splitting revenue shares with sites that drop cookies onto their users' browsers based on hashtags the users are interested in seeing. It's a big deal because now site owners don't necessarily need to clutter the sites with image ads, but rather can simply drop cookies with any apparent disruption to the users. As the user navigates across other RadiumOne sites, the cookies are read and appropriate ads are shown to them.

Anyways, any startup should now consider this alternative source of revenue.

TC review

Use Your Car As A Taxi

An easy way to convert your own car into a taxi. People will find you and you can lift them up.

Lyft

SideCar

Code Playgrounds

Familiar with jsFiddle?

Here is another one: 

Plunker

Smartphone For Reading

I don't want to want my battery on reading on my smartphone. What to do? How about getting a dual screen smartphone where on of the screens is a digital paper screen like an eReader's?

YotaPhone

Followup TC story

JuicyCanvas Customizable Art & T-shirts

Nice way to customize art to your own tastes.

JuicyCanvas.com

TC Review

The experience is pretty straightforward. You go to the JuicyCanvas site and choose a piece of art that you like. Then you can tweak it to your liking, adjusting the size, rotating it, changing the colors, and so on. When you're done, you can pay JuicyCanvas to print the piece and ship it to you. You can also share your version on social networks.

Cisimple: Help For Mobile Developers

Having a hard time building, testing and deploying apps to Android or iPhone?

The platform, built on Mac infrastructure, offers a way for developers to automate builds, testing and deployment of their mobile applications. It saves time, which means developers can then run tests more frequently. Whereas before testing might be done two to three times per week, using something like cisimple can see tests run two to three daily instead.

Cisimple also currently integrates with testing platform TestDroid, as well, and plans to integrate with other services in the near future, including those for testing, crash reporting, internationalization, beta and App Store distribution, and more. The long-term goal is to make cisimple something like a dashboard for picking and choosing which of these services developers want to work with. Rohling says he wants the service to be as streamlined as possible. "Think Heroku – the ability to go in and pick add-ons, that's exactly what we have planned."

TC Review

Singly for Mobile & Web

If you need to integrate third party services into your website or mobile app, Singly.com can help.

Today, the company offers integration support for over 35 services, including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google, Github, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Klout, Flickr, Instagram, WordPress, YouTube, PayPal, Reddit, StockTwits, SoundCloud, Rdio, Yammer, FitBit, RunKeeper, Zeo and others. iOS and Android SDKs are available, and Singly works with web-based applications, too. More integrations are coming, and the team will also respond to feedback from developers to solve future challenges and pain points on mobile in ways that can benefit the developer community as a whole.

TC review

VISA To Compete With Paypal

V.me is VISA's new service to compete with Paypal. Check it out.

TC Review

StitchLabs: From Cart to Fulfillment

StitchLabs.com promises to handle all your order processing, inventory management, and order fulfillment, all in one go. 

TC review

Curated Social Media For You

With some new services, you can automatically post curated social media on your site. Just pick a topic or choose from the people you follow.

TC story

OlaPic

Chute

Nitrogram

Statigram

Some Hot Crowdfunding Sites

Here's a nice list of some up and coming services.

15 Of The Hotest Crowdfunding Sites Out There

Philips Hue: $199 Light Bulb

Philips is selling its new Hue light bulb exclusively at Apple Stores for $199. But who is going to pay that kind of money for a light bulb?

It's features are sleek. Basically, they have integrated WiFi into the bulb so that it can be remotely controlled and programmed from a smartphone.

The Smart Lightbulb

Cardrops: An Unlock Gadget

Here is an interesting gadget and use of it. This gadget attaches on the inside of your car's trunk. It serves two purposes. One enables the GPS location of your car. The other enables the service to open your trunk to deliver something to it. Cardrops delivers anything you order online to the trunk of your car, only in the UK.

Cardrops.com

TC Review

I wonder what other interesting services there could be for such a gadget.

Memoto Takes Photo Every 30 Seconds

Nice concept. Nice product. Memoto is just launching on Kickstarter. It's a tiny wearable camera that takes a photo every 30 seconds so you can capture all your daily unexpected events. Upload them to their site and you get a very nice search capability based on time and place. 

TC Review

Unbankers Rejoice! Rixty & MOL Unite

Some great news for those who don't have credit cards or bank accounts, a pretty much rely on cash. Rixty and MOL are joining forces to span the globe. They command about 500,000 payment places combined around the world. These services allow you to trade in your cash for a credit card pre-loaded with your money and that you can use online. Perhaps you have seen one of Rixty's branded cards called the Green Dot MoneyPak at your local Walgreens.

TC Review

MOOC News

Some news about Massively Open Online Courses.

It seems some universities are bearing arms to keep these new MOOC from educating their own students.

Minnesota Bans Stanford's Unauthorized Free Online Education

There are some good links there for other MOOC services.

MassPay by Dwolla

Need to do lots of payouts to your sales team or commission earners?

Look at Dwolla Mass Pay which lets you payout up to 2,000 people at once. Fees are $0.25 for transactions over $10 and free for under $10. Caveat: payouts only to US-based people at this time.

Another Cloud IDE for Mobile Development

Here is another promising mobile IDE that runs in the cloud, so no installation and minimal configuration needed.

Icenium

Others are:

Kii Cloud

Tiggzi.com

Apps Builder is an Italian newcomer

Outlook Better Than Gmail?

It seems Outlook.com is a whole lot better than Gmail.com

http://netforbeginners.about.com/od/guidesfavorites/a/Outlook-com-Review-Why-Outlook-Is-the-New-Prince-of-Webmail.htm

Generate QR Codes with PHP

Here is an easy to follow article about how to generate QR Codes using PHP.

http://phpmaster.com/generate-qr-codes-in-php/

The Gifting Bandwagon

It seems everyone is jumping on board to produce the ideal gifting service. Even Facebook is getting ready to announce their gifting initiative. 

Facebook to Launch Gifting App

http://www.dropgifts.com/

https://wantful.com/

https://www.wrapp.com/us

http://www.give.it/

Irrive: Collaborative Social Scrapbooks

I wonder what a scrapbook would look like if you and all your friends could make one together.

Irrive.com

TC review

Raspberry Pi

If you thought coding a webserver with a few lines of Node.js was cool, then try take it down another notch. This time throw away your server hardware and start from scratch using Raspberry Pi. 

The Raspberry Pi is a $35, full-blown micro computer that runs Linux. Use its video, audio, network, and digital I/O to create media centers, web servers, interfaces to external hardware—you name it. 

Update: May be the Raspberry Pi is not so easy or cheap to use.

Hot New Development Frameworks

These are cool new frameworks for developers to use for fast programming.

Firebase.com

Derbyjs.com

Meteor.com

Email APIs

The new services for programmatically accessing your emails:

Mailgun

CloudMailin

SendGrid

Nice Waiting List iOS App

These guys are probably getting it right. A very nice iPad app for restaurants to use to manage their waiting clients list. 

NoWait

TC review

Cloud-Based Mobile App Development

Forget about installing all those SDKs on your computer. Do all your mobile develoment, from Windows Phone to iPhone, using Tiggzi.com.

Mobile Development with ShoutEm

Another service for mobile app and web app development, that uses HTML5. 

ShoutEm

TC review

KiteDesk

Another service to integrate all of your personal data, from Facebook to Gmail, etc.

KiteDesk

TC review

PowerInbox

PowerInbox allows you to be more interactive with your emails. For example, you can send a post directly to your Facebook or Twitter, without having to login to those separate services. 

Sanebox: Tame Your Inbox

Sanebox.com connects to your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts to prioritize your emails at Gmail, Yahoo, Apple, AOL, etc.

Good review here

Icon Fonts

Icon Fonts are awesome. They are especially made for Retina Displays and look fantastic regardless of the zoom level. 

http://css-tricks.com/flat-icons-icon-fonts/

Google Icon Fonts

LittleBits

LittleBits Electronics Discovery Kit for kids

CSS Animations Done Right

Animations are not just done with javascript and jQuery any more. CSS3 is very good at it as well. This is the code you need to use for that.

Animate.css

Mobile Fixed Menus

On mobile devices it's difficult to implement fixed tabs or menus that do not scroll with the rest of the content, and to make it compatible across devices.

The elegant solution is to use iScroll 4

Best Mac Editor

Best all around text editor IMHO, Coda 2

Mobile App Wireframing

Here are some cool services for doing wireframes for mobile apps.

OminGraffle

Balsamiq

iMockup
Graffletopia

Konigi Stencils

Other Free Ones

Make Your Own Cartoons & Memes

Free tools for making your own comic strips and memes

Responsinator

A ncie way to check how your website will look on tablets or phones.

http://responsinator.com

Play Games, Learn Music

JoyTunes wants to teach you to play real instruments with interactive video games.

JoyTunes.com

Web Tools

From time to time I've posted some tools for web developers that I've read about. Here is another list.

Knockoutjs.com

Adaptive-images.com

Src.Sencha.io

on{X}

Html5boilerplate.com

Modernizr.com

Html5reset.org

Sammyjs.org

Caniuse.com

Css3please.com

Colorzilla.com/gradient-editor

Quirksmode.org

Titanium

Coffeescript.org

on{X} Microsoft Loves Android

Microsoft invented a service that can create notifications on your Android phone based on some triggers you set. It's all a bit blurry still but it could have significant impact.

on{X}

Tango Card

Easy gift card rewards....I'm not sure how it all works yet, but definitely one service to keep an eye on. 

Tango Card

Fun E-Learning

There are lots of different approaches to the amorphous market of 'e-learning' but only a handful ever feel much like fun. I think amongst the best of these are sites like MangaHigh which teaches Math, or Moshi Monsters which has subtle learning tasks for kids.

Another which works well is Quipper

Source: TechCrunch