I have started this blog to keep track of all the interesting stuff I read about. In some cases, friends of mine have shared their cool stuff with me. I try to keep the headlines and descriptions short, so you must follow the links to read and decide for yourself if a topic is worth your time. Want to contribute? Just comment on any of the stories and I will be notified instantly.A nice little projector for your device and wifi
Wednesday, May 11, 2016
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Wednesday, April 06, 2016
Wednesday, March 02, 2016
Monday, February 29, 2016
Tuesday, February 16, 2016
Full Tracking of User Interactions
In case u ever get asked how to track user interactions on a website, here it is.
A Smartphone Dashcam
Thinking about getting a dashcam for your auto? Maybe you don't have to anymore. Just use your phone.
Wednesday, February 03, 2016
Thursday, December 10, 2015
Insight Into Biz Cases for AR
Some useful info into why augmented reality will play a crucial role in future shopping experiences.
Tuesday, December 08, 2015
Behavioral Economics
Useful info for designing a service. It's not about freedom and open-ended ways of doing, but about controls, defaults, limits...
Monday, November 23, 2015
Friday, November 06, 2015
Thursday, November 05, 2015
Best 3D Printer
The best 3D printer I've seen so far
Not just a printer, but 3D scanner, welder, etcher, cutter, etc.
Wednesday, November 04, 2015
NightwatchJS Testing Framework
http://nightwatchjs.org/ is the new way of writing tests for your code that's easier to use than Protractor, etc.
Monday, July 06, 2015
Thursday, July 02, 2015
Storytelling with Alta
If you have a story to tell you may want to look at Atavist, built with Material Design.
Monday, June 29, 2015
Friday, June 12, 2015
IFTTT: Service Integrator
Another consumer-side integrator, like Zapier, as opposed to an API-level integrator
Zapier: Service Integrator
An enormous integrator of services, but mostly for use by consumers for their own integration of services that can best meet their needs. I could be wrong, but they might have some API-level of integration for use by developers.
Wednesday, January 07, 2015
Zone.js
Zone.js may be able to help you if you are having issues with coordinating asynchronous calls. Super sleek https://github.com/btford/zone.js/
Thursday, December 11, 2014
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Create Your API Instantly
Besides Import.io the new player is InstantAPI to use for building your API. Checkout the TC review.
Tuesday, December 09, 2014
AirBrake: Track Errors on Front-End
Another service like errorException for auto-tracking client-side errors in the code. AirBrake.io
Thursday, December 04, 2014
Film Yourself Anywhere
How would you like to have your own filming camera crew follow you along everywhere for (almost) free, capturing your every move, whether you are riding, climbing, sleighing, or flying? Well, now for the cost of electrical charging, you can have the HEXO+.
Wednesday, December 03, 2014
The Revolv
Cool gadget for controlling all of your IoT (internet of things) devices at home. A single hub with a single mobile app to use on over 2,000 different IoT devices.
Revolv
Recently bought by Nest.
Friday, September 05, 2014
Thursday, September 04, 2014
API For Any Website
With this service you can create an API to any website without even being a coder. Very cool
Thursday, August 28, 2014
Friday, July 11, 2014
Angular Gesture Support
To add gesture support to your AngularJS app running within a touch-enabled device, use these:
If you only want to replace the ng-click with ng swipe left or right then use
Mobile Website Frameworks
Want to build a mobile website that feels like a native app? Here are some upcoming players that can help.
Retain Position in Infinite Scroll
An infinite scroll kicks in more data as you scroll to the bottom of a page. For example, when viewing some galleries of pictures, new pictures are appended to the bottom of the page whenever you scroll to the bottom, and this process continues every time you get to the bottom of the page. The problem is that when you click on any picture to see its details and then click on the browser's back button, your position within the infinite scroll is lost.
Here is an elegant solution to that.
Thursday, July 03, 2014
Generate Test Data
If you are a developer and need to generate some mock data for your app, here are a couple of services that can help
Tuesday, July 01, 2014
CrowdTwist Loyalty Platform
If you are looking to add a customer loyalty/rewards program to your service, CrowdTwist.com could help.
LOYALTY SOLUTIONS
Launch a new program or enhance your existing program with the only technology that aggregates data from your brands mobile, social & transactional channels
DATA & ANALYTICS PLATFORM
Analyze data from across more than 200 points of brand interaction and leverage those insights to drive all your acquisition & retention efforts
Keen.IO Analytics
Whatever analytics data you are trying to gather and query against, Keen.io should be able to help.
GATHER IT
whatever data you want, from whatever source you need
STORE IT
as much data as you'd like, forever and ever in the cloud
LEARN FROM IT
query it, visualize it, share it – transform data into knowledge
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
Backplane: DIY Social Network
Here is another DIY platform for building your own social network, similar to Ning, SocialGo, etc.
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
OwnedIt: Social Sharing Of Purchases
OwnedIt.com aims to turn your Order confirmation page as an opportunity for your customers to socially share the description of items they purchased, with the aim of getting their friends to purchase from you as well.
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
Crated: End-to-End Marketplace for Photographers
Crated.com is a new marketplace for photographers to sell their photos and they take care of everything. Supposedly they have some new features that make it really stand out.
Thursday, May 08, 2014
Social Content From Any Source
Does your mobile app or website need to integrate social content from multiple sources, such as Instagram and Twitter, etc?
Use FeedMagnet and you'll be able to do the integration with one easy API, instead of having to learning many different APIs from each different social service.
Connect Any Cloud Storage
Are you working with any cloud-based storage such as DropBox and wish you could integrate even more data storage services?
Use Kloudless.com which provides one unified API that makes it easy to integrate a great number of cloud-based storage systems with one single API.
Thursday, April 10, 2014
HTML5 Fallbacks/Polyfills
This is the no bull-shit guide to HTML5 Fallbacks, maintained by the Github community.
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Wednesday, March 05, 2014
DIY Mobile App Templates
Want to build a mobile app and don't want to start from scratch? Why don't you buy the source code to what you have in mind and start modifying it.
Some source code sites:
Friday, January 03, 2014
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Friday, December 06, 2013
Batch Image Scaling
With Sizzle Pig you can have a blueprint of how you want your images resized or cropped and then upload an entire directory of images and they will be done.
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Sina Weibo
Sina Weibo is a Chinese microblogging website, but more like a hybrid of Facebook and Twitter.
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
The Cyclops Cap
This is an interesting concept, but it looks too bulky. And if I want to change caps, I have to buy a different one.
My praps for caps is much simpler and does not have these problems. Plus it's only $1 for two praps. The Cyclops Cap is going for $85.
CAPTCHAs Are Broken
Smartphone Arduino Shield
From TC:
Your smartphone is packed with tons of sensors — many of them the same types of sensors that you might want to strap on to an Arduino by way of a shield. It's got Bluetooth. It's got WiFi. It's got gyroscopes, and accelerometers, and a touchscreen that can emulate all sorts of keypads and display types. Why not let your smartphone share those capabilities with your Arduino, effectively allowing it to provide the prototyping functionality of dozens of different shields? That's the idea behind 1sheeld.
Very cool for prototyping future hardware projects.
Wednesday, October 02, 2013
CardFlight: App Dev Payments
CardFlight provides an SDK for app developers to incorporate payments into their apps.
From TC review:
While other companies like Square and PayPal have provided businesses with the ability to collect payments with mobile credit card readers, businesses are reliant on the provider's apps to process those payments. CardFlight provides its clients with card readers, and also gives them an SDK to build payment processing into their own branded apps.
CardFlight has SDKs available for both iOS and Android platforms, and connects with 23 different payment processors. The company's gateway also allows clients to connect apps with their own internal CRM, inventory management, fulfillment, and reporting and analytics tools.
Friday, September 27, 2013
ScreenHero: Modern Screen Sharing
With ScreenHero two people can work together on the same document with two different cursors.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Mixing Designs With Friends
Studio is an app with which you can mix and remix pictures or designs with your buddies. There is even talk about remixing with branded designs.
On Studio, you can remix other people's designs by swapping out the base photo with one of your own, and then re-share the design.
There are controls for just about anything, with options to rotate and crop the photo, add filters, adjust brightness and saturation, as well as adding the aforementioned text, borders and designs.
For example, my sister could share a photo of herself on the beach with a special border and the text "Hang Ten." I could then remix that photo and place the same border and text on a picture of my 10 toes hanging over the edge of a surfboard.
Friday, September 20, 2013
Monday, September 16, 2013
Best Responsive Table
Here is some awesome response code for table data that looks great on PC, table, or phone. Very great work indeed.
Friday, August 23, 2013
Thursday, August 08, 2013
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Monday, July 15, 2013
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.
Tuesday, July 09, 2013
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.
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
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.
Thursday, June 13, 2013
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.
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.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Fade In Images
Cool javascript trick used by Pinterest for fading in images after they finish loading. This one relies on using Embed.ly
Wednesday, June 05, 2013
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.
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
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.
Thursday, May 23, 2013
FontSquirrel Fonts & Converter
If you ever need to look for monospaced fonts and others, look at FontSquirrel.com
If you ever need to convert any font file to another, for example ttf to eot, woff, or svg go to
Friday, May 17, 2013
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.
Friday, May 03, 2013
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:
Monday, April 22, 2013
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
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Monday, April 15, 2013
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.
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.
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
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.
Monday, February 25, 2013
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.
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.
Friday, February 22, 2013
Thursday, February 21, 2013
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.
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 05, 2013
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.
Friday, February 01, 2013
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.
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