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?