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.