PlaceShout: A Mini-Yelp

Ever heard of Yelp.com? You know---the place to leave good/bad comments about your experiences with local businesses. Well, now there is a similar site, but a whole lot simpler to use and limits comments to 100 characters. I tried it on my home town of San Antonio and it sure was easy to add a comment. I wonder if they intend to allow new comments via text-messaging, since text-messages are limited to about 150 chars?
PlaceShout.com

Photographer's Templates

If you are a photographer, you may want to take a look at these professionally done templates for showcasing all your photos to your clients. In addition to so many features, you can simply drag-n-drop your a group of photos into a template and instantly have an amazing composition/arrangement of photos only seen at high-end studios. This can really add value to your services.

YouSelectIt.com

Gallery of templates

Photology: Cool Photo Sorting

This new service can sort your photos by Morning, Night, Month, Vertical, Horizontal, Inside, Outside, Subject Matter, Color, etc.
GetPhotology.com
Demo

Common Short Code Administration

R u having trouble making sense of the whole mobile internet picture? Here is one source of information which has helped me make sense of all this. It is a nicely done diagram of the different levels of service providers and their roles.
I particularly find the following chart useful to know some of the big players with whom I will eventually deal with when I get my mobile application going. Good luck in your mobile strategy. If you ever need additional pointers, just let me know and I will probably find some info for you.

Outsource to Programmers

Here is another service to outsource your programming work. Your employer is outsourcing, why not do the same?
oDesk.com
I have previously covered getacoder.com and rentacoder.com. Between these two, I get more bids at more reasonable rates from rentacoder.com.

Another Outsourcing Service

Here is a new one I found on KillerStartups.com for hiring people to do the work for you.
PeoplePerHour.com

Track Ur Package on Any Service

This service can track your package on any service, whether it is DHL, UPS, FedEx, etc. Just enter your tracking number. If they have an API it would be really helpful for a plugin into your current shopping checkout experience.
TrackThePack.com
KillerStartups.com review

Shopping with SMS

Here are three different approaches for using your phone to help you shop.

• Use mobile coupons from CellFire.com
• Use your phone as a scanner ScanBuy.com
• Look for their logo on ads and text in your order to ShopText.com

Here is a short review of all three services.

Fluid: WebApps 2 Desktop Apps

This cool new service can turn any service on the web into a desktop app that behaves just like any other application on your computer. Now you don't have to use your browser to checking your Gmail or to read the News.

Just fire up Fluid, enter the url of the app you want to create and give it a name. Fluid will then create an application and even add an icon based on the site's favicon. Fluid created applications show up on the desktop, in your dock and in the application switcher. In short, they behave just like a normal app. (It only works on a Mac.)

Wired Review

Another NetFlix Biz Model

Here is another business modeled after NetFlix, but for books instead of videos. This is a very interesting model that could be applied to other things as well. I wonder what other things you can think of applying it to. Paperspine.com

I have previously written about a car club where you get to drive any car you want and then return it and get another one.

YouTube for Ringtones

Check it out. Free ringtones, wallpapers, videos, etc. for you phone uploaded by users like you. It is a community of people creating their own ringtones for others to use.
Cellware.com

Eric Meyer's Resources

CSS guru Eric Meyer shares his favorite websites of CSS knowledge in an interview. Here is an excerpt from that interview:

 

One of the best CSS resources I know is the css-discuss wiki, located at css-discuss.incutio.org. It's the distillation of more than five years of wisdom and experience from the css-discuss mailing list. There are pages covering the pros and cons of various CSS techniques, basic information on obscure parts of CSS, tons of links to other resources, and more. It's literally my first stop when I need to look up something about CSS.

Some other worthy stops are positioniseverything.net, the various materials at the House of Style , and Russ Weakley's compact tutorials. For decoding convoluted selectors, I recommend the SelectORacle. And of course there's the all-seeing eye of Google.

Let's not forget another great resource: Eric Meyer's own blog, meyerweb.com.

 

 

Write on any webpage

Diigo.com is a new service which allows anyone to

• Write on any webpage
• Interact on any webpage

It is like adding sticky notes on any page. Granted there are many other services available, including one from Google called Notebook, this one adds many new features. For example, your sticky notes can be private or public, meaning you and others can share each others notes on any web page. You can send your sticky notes to your blog, email, etc. with a few clicks. I think it is worth thinking about how one could use such a service to build another unique service. I can't tell you what I am thinking about, so think about it.

Website Heatmapping

Want to know what areas on your website your visitors are clicking on the most or the least? Want to see this visually, not just in number of clicks? These two new services can overlay colored areas on your website from hot to cold to visually indicate what users are clicking on. It's very cool.

 

CrazyEgg.com

ClickTwist.com

Drive-Thru Outsourcing

The next time you go thru a drive-thru at your local fast-food place, don't think that person on the intercom is inside the store. Chances are they could be half-way around the world in India. This new service is already being tested by Wendy's. The foreigner takes your order via VOIP and sends it to the store's kitchen monitor for fulfillment.

 

Exit41.com

Add Buttons to Your Ads

Agendize.com seeks to equip business owners with a quick and easy way to add "clickable actions" to their online ads. These "clickable actions" are initialized at the click of a button and include such actions as:
Send this ad via text messaging
Send this ad via email
Send this ad via IM
Call the retailer via a free phone call
Print this ad
Place this ad on your social network

This is a very interesting concept which will enable users to take along any advertisement they see on the web inside their phone or PDA. See their DEMO video. It sounds like a more general service then 8coupons.com

Biz Action, Not Biz Plan

PlanHQ.com seeks to equip you with the online tools to execute your business instead of documenting your business plan. When you get a team together for working on your idea, you may want to use a set of tools like theirs.

Learn Mandarin: Use LiveMocha

I just signed up with LiveMocha.com to learn Mandarin with the help of a social network, and it is all free. It has lessons and real people you can converse with.

More How-to Videos

This one is worth noting the next time you are looking for something fun to do. These videos show you how to do a ton of different things, just about anything.
Graspr.com

Ript: Desktop Scrapbooking

You have to download and install this app to appreciate what it does. The interface is dead simple. Just drag and drop pictures into the pile icon which always sits on top of your browser or any other Windows app. You can move it around. To customize your "scrapbook" just double click on it and the app will open for you to rearrange, resize, etc. all the images you have dropped into it. Add text and do more.
Ript.com

Multiculture Social Network

With this new service you can create your own multi-cultural social network. It's an interesting concept and I'm not sure what they are doing to facilitate communication between different languages. It is worth keeping track of this service to see what they come up with.

Mixxt.com

CakeMail: Email Marketing 2.0

This service is another white label email marketing tool by which anyone can become an email marketing service. The service is similar to MailBuild.com which I previously blogged.

CakeMail.com

Another DIY T-shirt Store

Here is yet another design your own t-shirt service, like threadless, zazzle, etc.

smegshirt.com

Joopz 2-way Web-to-SMS

With this new service you can send text messages from the web and receive replies back on the same webpage. The text conversations can go back and forth and are automatically archived. One of their plans costs $2.96 per month for unlimited text messaging.
Joopz.com
DEMO review

Search Thru Your Social Networks

This new service seeks to turn your search into searching for the info through your establish social network. Because social networks are so immense, it assumes what you are looking for is already on someone else's page, blog, etc. I think they have done a very good job of simplifying this kind of search into a very easy to use interface.

Baagz.com
DEMO review

FastCall411

Need service and can't get through to any merchant? Go online. Enter your phone number and the category of service you seek. FastCall411 does a local search and calls all the matching merchants. Each merchant hears the FastCall411 promo and that a customer needs service. The first merchant who takes your call gets connected to you.

DEMO review
Online video demo
FastCall411.com

Big Apple Mobile Coupons

8Coupons.com is collecting specials from all businesses in NYC and sending the coupons to your cell via text messaging. All you do is browse for the coupons that interest you and send them to your phone. When you show up at the merchant you show them the text message. One wave of the future are promotions via text messaging.

Read the KillerStartUp.com review

Another HTML/CSS Service

Here is yet another service that takes your designs (png, pdf, etc) and converts it to HTML and CSS, saving you lots of time.
xhtmlmagic.com

The others I have previously talked about are:
xhtmlized.com
psd2html.com

uLocate & Where

Want to write GPS-enable cellphone apps? Partner with uLocate and use their free Where platform, the first no-cost GPS programming platform that can work across multiple phones and carriers. Here is the story on Business 2.0

uLocate.com
where.com

Tag Clouds Gallery

Examples and good practices for using Tag Clouds, very useful for whenever I get around to using tags on my site.

Tag Clouds Gallery

Top 100 Mac Apps

I just think this list could be useful someday when I get a Mac. The trouble is they are more expensive, bur they are superior.
Top 100 Mac Apps

The Chumby

The Chumby is a new tiny device which rotates internet content in a small screen. It's almost like having a digital frame with rotating photos, only this thing can rotate more than just photos. I found out about it from an online eseminar about Flash Lite for devices. The Chumby is also powered by Flash Lite and all its content runs under Flash Lite, which is also powering more mobile content on phones.

 

Chumby.com

TextBack 4 Textbooks

I ran into this at killerstartups.com and thought their write up on it is really good. So here is what they have to say about this new service called TextBack.net

College students today know they can save money buying textbooks online. They go to the campus bookstore and write down ISBN numbers for their courses. But do they know for certain they wrote down the correct ISBN? They joke about it on their web site, humorously naming a condition "Chronic ISBN Transposition", as if it was some kind of disease. Seriously though you can write down the wrong number or switch number positions which is transposing. Therefore you have the wrong ISBN and will have to go back to the campus bookstore. TextBack has made it easy. While in the bookstore simply send keyword "ISBN" followed by the 10 digit ISBN number to short code 4INFO (44636). Isn't it better to text the ISBN to confirm you have the right textbook when you go online? After you send a text message they store the book on the website in a mobile cart so can purchase online from Amazon Market Place. They also send you a text with online pricing and the title. Giving you confidence knowing you have the right textbook. You don't have to sign up or join. More importantly, you don't have to give them your cell phone number. They place a numeric code in their response messages. All you need do is enter the code on the site and they will display all of the books for you. The system is good for any book not just textbooks. Technical professionals can use the system for those expensive tech books too.

Blogger and Podcaster

I just thought this site I ran into may be worthwhile keeping up with because they cover everything about Blogs and Podcasts. With their coverage you should be able to have a good understanding of the industry and discover some trends or useful services.

BloggerAndPodcaster

iPhone Success

I recently read the iPhone could very soon overtake the Motorola RAZR as the best-selling phone ever. Here is the story on Forbes.

I also read that Apple makes about $18 per monht per iPhone from revenue sharing with AT&T. Over the course of a 2 year contract that is about $500 in profit per iPhone. Here is the CNET story.

India China Creative Economy

This is one of the best podcasts I have ever heard on the subject.
It's about globalization, what it means to your career and even what it means to the banking industry. Towards the end you will hear what a major global bank is doing.

Try either one of these links:
http://libsyn.com/media/philmckinney/KI_20061210.mp3
http://cdn.libsyn.com/philmckinney/KI_20061210.mp3

Use Your Phone Remotely

These two new services provide you the ability to use and update your phone's content from a website. You can even send text messages which supposedly get routed via your phone's text messaging service. If you have unlimited text messaging then you can theoretically set up your own text messaging service online and the only cost to you is the cost of your phone's service.
Dashwire.com
Bloove.com

As of this writing, Dashwire only works on phones with Windows Mobile 5 and 6, with support for more phones coming soon. Bloove supports all modern Symbian and J2ME phones from Nokia and Sony Ericsson.

Instant TagClouds 4 Your Site

I've started looking around for any service out there that can give me tag clouds for my website. I'm looking for a service which will give me a piece of javascript code to insert into my webpages and I instantly get a tagcloud of the content on my site. The tagcloud contains any descriptors that I have predetermined. When a user clicks on a link, a descriptor(s) (text) associated with that link is sent to the tagcloud service. The tagcloud service keeps a database of the frequency of these descriptors and thru the javascript provided to me I can display the tagcloud on my homepage, for example.

This is useful for keeping track of what kinds of products my website is selling. Each time an item is added to a shopping cart, a set of that item's descriptors are sent to the tagcloud service. These descriptors may include size, color, style, etc. which in turn are represented by different tagclouds. For example, I could have a tagcloud of all the styles I am selling and another tagcloud of the most popular colors.

So here is a short list of what I have found. Please add to this as you discover some more:
TagCloud.com
ZoomClouds.com
ContentRobot.com

Steve Thomas built his own with PHP, MySQL and CSS

The Wired iPhone

This company hooked up an iPhone to a circuit board to access all its inputs and outputs and anyone can access it over the web to do all kinds of testing and experimenting. They hooked up a bunch of other phones as well. It's like a phone simulator but better because it is the real thing executing your commands. Very incredible.

Inside The Matrix for Mobiles

SMS coming to your mall

Text Messaging service is coming to a mall near you. You will be able to instantly search for pricing and availability of any item at that mall.

A Richer Trip to the Mall, Guided by Text Messages

Brokering a Deal, Carefully, Between Malls and the Web

Instant Messaging Passion

Check out this story about how passionate teens are about instant messaging and how one solution, which costs $150 and no monthly fees, can help. It is called the Z2.

New Option for Teens Passionate about Instant Messaging
zipitwireless.com

PicClicks Wants Cell Pics

PicClicks allows you to post your camera phone pictures directly to your online profile. It's simple and as easy as sending a picture message to another mobile phone. You are given a code to paste onto your social network profile like MySpace, Hi5, and Facebook and when you send your pictures in from your phone; your online profile is automatically updated with your most current pictures.
I think I will start using them when I get an iPhone because it takes great photos and I'll be using the camera phone a lot.

MindCaller.com

These days VOIP and SMS are drving new innovations. Checkout this free voice broadcasting service for sending for up to 10 phones. With the paid service, you can send even more. This is useful for communicating your message to a group without having to dial each one individually.
MindCaller.com

Ruby AMF Tutorial

Just in case you've been using ColdFusion, Java, etc to connect your Flex front-end to the database, as I have, I think it is time to put the pedal to the metal and start using Ruby AMF. Like all of RoR stuff, once I learn this new stuff it will be a piece of cake to connect my Flex projects to MySQL.
Ruby AMF Tutorial
Ruby AMF Blog

All-in-one Messaging Service

This messaging service promises to provide all your messaging needs, such as SMS, VOIP, email-to-voice, two-way text messsaging, etc. They seem to do a whole lot. I haven't checked into them yet, but I thought you might need to know about this asap.

Group2Call.com

 

I am using Clickatell.com but I think Group2Call is worth looking into. Clickatell is a global SMS provider in 200 countries so they are a much bigger player.

School Utility Sites

Here are just a couple of neat sites for students and teachers. You might want to mention these to your kids' teachers so they can start using them at school.

 

Kindersay.com This site shows a pre-schooler a picture along with its written word and a woman pronouncing the word.

 

HotChalk.com This site allows a teacher to quickly create a website for the class. Assignments can be created, students can comment and post their solutions. An online grading system is built in. Too many features to comment on.

 

Kerpoof.com My kids love this. They create their own animations and stories. Very cool for young kids. I wrote about it .

 

Requesting Help

Hello Everybody,

Thanks for reading my blog. I am putting out an open call for anyone to help me with my current project. Perhaps by helping me with this you can gain a valuable insight into some current trends in ecommerce. Here is what I need:

 

I am developing a social ecommerce site with KickApps.com and want to add a shopping cart with FatFreeCart.com or BlinkCart.com. I previously commented on the new turnkey social networks and the new shopping carts . I have figured out how to use KickApps to some extent and have read thru the shopping carts' features. Now I need to figure out how to integrate the two so that anyone can post images and/or videos of their products and start selling them on my site.

 

If you help me figure this thing out then perhaps I can help you out in some other way. I am a developer and have extensive experience on the web. I love doing Flex, am excited about RoR and do lots of other things, like jQuery, etc. Or perhaps we can work on the site I am developing together.

 

Thank you in advance.

ROBIN: Here is my response to your question. I understand you built Fat Free Cart. That is pretty awesome. Here is the deal from a developer's perspective.


If you sign up for a free account on KickApps.com and start creating your own social network you might see what I see. Once you create your network anyone can sign up to become a member and thereby be permitted to upload videos, pics, and blog, tag, etc. Basically anyone can join your community and start contributing.


Now I imagine one of these social networks (or communities) can be used as an ecommerce site. Anyone wanting to sell their stuff can upload pics, videos, etc describing their products. Anyone wanting to buy the products can browse the site and click on any item to add to the cart.


So here is the trick. Every member of your community who is selling products has a unique id which is generated by KickApps. You must attach this id to each product that person is selling. You must then pass this id (and the product's own id, etc) to the shopping cart. When the order is completed, the community owner (you) must receive all this info and pass the order requests to the individual sellers for fulfillment.


I imagine one can use jQuery to create the cart's code on each product with the seller's id attached. I am probably thinking outside the box and really need to look into all these details further. If you can shed any light on this, please do so. Thank you.

A Cutter Like a Printer

Image a printer with a knife instead of ink. That's what this cutter is all about. Just send it a "print" job and you'll get the thing cut out for you.
Cricut.com

Cool E-commerce with AirApps

AirApps.net has developed a quick Flex plugin for collecting payment for any AIR application you may want to publish. They have some cool demos what this is all about. I think I will use their service very soon.

Coolest Javascript Components

These are some of the coolest javascript components I have ever seen. They have a bunch of demos. Nitobi.com

 

Of course, there are some other ones too like:

ui.jquery.com

script.aculo.us/

oSkope Visual Search

You can now search Amazon, eBay, Flickr, and YouTube in a different visual manner with this Flash-based service.

oSkope.com

Cool Flex Photo Editors

The best photo editor I've seen is Picnik.com and second to that is FotoFlexer.com, both of which were written in Flex. Here is a TechCrunch review of some other ones based on AJAX. Happy Editing!

Kerpoof

I think this is really cool for kids. Here is an excerpt from TechCrunch.com:

Kerpoof is aiming to become a leading destination site for children through a suite of activities that are enriching as well as entertaining. On Kerpoof, kids can create art, stories, and animated movies using a simple 3D interface, and when done, can save it to their gallery, share it with others, and vote on their favorites.

Krista Marks, CEO for Kerpoof presenting. Aims to change the way kids interact with the computer. Most of what kids do today is mindless, a waste of time - Kerpoof wants to change this.

Goal: to be a site where fun is not separate from learning, but integral to it. Kids can create art through the site, write their own stories, create their own movies.

Parents are no longer buying software for their kids with the explosion of broadband - they are turning to websites for them. Neopets and Club Penguin are very popular, but are not as educational as they could be. At the same time, CS majors are plummeting. Bizworld saw this trend and came to Kerpoof to create software to educate children using the web.

Easy tool for kids to make their own picture scenes - cool effects when you add particular elements to the scene (add a moon and it becomes night, etc.). You can share your pictures with friends.

To make a movie, pick a scene then a backdrop. CEO claiming the movie creator teaches kids object oriented programming. You put objects in a scene and then make the objects do things (objects and methods). Looks like a basic Flash applet creator. Still, looks impressive. You can add music to the background. You can add multiple scenes to an entire movie.

If you want to add interactivity to a movie, you can have prompts at different points in the movie that change how the movie proceeds (makes it more like a game created by kids).

Kerpoof is live and freely available now.

Shared Short Codes

Are you trying to start your own two-way text messaging service but cannot afford the annual $2000 to have your own short code? There are now services which charge you much less if you are willing to use one of their short codes. There are even some services which are free. (Google: shared short codes) Mozes.com is one such service. Here is a review of them.

Pay To Get Votes On Digg

With this service your business can buy as many votes as it wants, at $1 a vote, so your business can make the headlines and get Digged by hundreds of people.

SubvertAndProfit.com

Here is a review found at Wired.

Subvert and Profit runs an ever-expanding black market for votes on social media sites. We are simultaneously the easiest way to make money online and the cheapest form of advertising in the web 2.0 sphere. We are the crowdhackers, and we are very good at what we do.

Other "social media optimization" sites can only advise their clients on ways to design their sites for Digg and StumbleUpon. Subvert and Profit actually gets you the votes, and for cheap!

By crowdsourcing our operation to over 3000 anonymous Internet users, we can provide a cheap, effective form of undercover marketing. Read the FAQ to see how it all works.

Upcycling

This interesting NYT article talks about how people are repurposing items from IKEA and using this store as a source of raw material for totally new products. Some call this repurposing of materials "upcycling"

Romancing the Flat Pack: Ikea, Repurposed

Photo2Text

Upload any image and see it all done in ascii characters.

 

Photo2Text.com

Need Text Link Ads?

Why not include some more text link ads on your site or email marketing and start making some additional revenue?
Get some ads at:
LinkWorth.com
TLA

Flash Based VOIP

You can now do Voice Over IP all within Flash. If you don't think this is a big deal, then you don't need to follow the link:

Flash Based VOIP


Adobe has introduced their own version, codenamed Pacifica.

Pics: Goliaths and Davids

The Goliaths of online photography (pics) are:
Corbis
Getty Images
iStockPhoto

and the Davids are:
Fotolia
Dreamstime
Shutterstock

Local Merchants

Here is a service which aims to match local merchants with local clients.
MerchantCircle.com

Gen Y Blog

Here is one Generation Y blog about Yers so you can keep up with trends in this group.

Generation Y Blog

Buzzword

These people are building Buzzword, the first real word processor for the web. They're using Adobe Flex 2.0 as the development environment and Flash 9 as the runtime platform. Beautiful typography. On-screen pagination. Rich text, tables, and graphics. And your friends, teachers, and colleagues can add comments right on the page. Your documents, everywhere you need them.

virtub.com

Collective Intelligence

This fascinating book demonstrates how you can build web applications to mine the enormous amount of data created by people on the Internet. With the sophisticated algorithms in this book, you can write smart programs to access interesting datasets from other web sites, collect data from users of your own applications, and analyze and understand the data once you've found it.

Programming Collective Intelligence

My Album Site

If I were doing photography, these are the people who would do my online albums. I did some research for my cousin in Dallas and after looking at a bunch of similar services, this company is the best I saw.

http://www.smugmug.com/

Some of the highlights:

• Excellent upload tools.
• All the metadata of your photos is captured in the upload, such as date, time, GPS, and a bunch of camera details, like Focal Length.
• Very slick interface for browsing the photos and very fast
• Very easy for anyone to order prints.
• You can set your own pricing on the print products and you keep the difference from the actual cost of the prints.
• Many print products, like calendars, cups, t-shirts, etc.
• You can have unlimited number of photos and albums.

Sure, it is not free like Flickr.com but you get so much more for very reasonable pricing. If I were doing this for a living, every client of mine would get an online album of their event and all their guests could order prints from there.

Snif Tags

Put a SNIF (Social Networking In Fur) tag on your dog and take it for a walk. When your dog comes in contact with other dogs also with snif tags, the magic begins. The tags exchange information about the dogs and their owners. When you get home go to the company's website and see what this info is. So now you can use your dog to hook you up with somebody.
SnifLabs.com

Nightly Flex 3 Builds

I'm working on a Flex project and I think these are handy instructions for how to install the Adobe's nightly builds of their new Flex 3 SDK into Flex Builder 3.

Instructions

Send a Buzz

Send a voicemail message to any U.S. cell phone without the phone ringing.
SendABuzz.com
Review at 160characters.org

What Do U Think of My Style?

Sites are popping up where users can upload photos of themselves and get feedback on their fashion. So before a girl goes out, she can get her friends to comment on what she intends to wear. This just goes to show, if you can think of some "fashion service" you can hit it big time.
TechCrunch review 1
TechCrunch review 2

Flex Style Explorer

The Flex Style Explorer allows you to see what styles are available for
Flex components, and you can adjust those settings in real time and see
the generated CSS to create the style settings. You can view the Flex
Style Explorer

SWFObject: Best Flash Detection

The best way to detect for a Flash Player on a web page and have an easy fail-over is using the SWFObject.

My favorite option with this is: SWFObject has full support for the Adobe Flash Player Express Install feature. Your users never have to leave your site to upgrade their player.

BlinkSale: Easy Online Invoices

The easiest, fastest way to send invoices to anyone online. Send elegantly formatted invoices to anyone with an email address. Send a bill to your clients with these professional-looking invoices or design your own with CSS.
BlinkSale.com


Another easy invoice solution is at:
SimplyBill.com

3Jam: Group Text Messaging

Now you can send a text message to a group of friends (up to 15) and they can reply to all the friends very easily. The replies always go to all the members of the group. When you initiate a conversation you choose which friends will be in the group.
3Jam.com

Go Big !!!

The Go Big network can connect you with the right investors. They have a nice site.
GoBigNetwork.com

Moo Card & Stickers!

These people may have cracked the holy grail of unique printing. No more ordering one design in minimum quantities of 100's. If you have anything to market, try doing it with their minicards (half the size of a business card).

Moo.com

Magento: Easy eCommerce Platform

This is a feature-rich eCommerce solution for any website that enables you to give your visitors some common Web 2.0 experiences, such as tagging, auto-completion of searches, and easy product comparisons. It sounds very promising.

MagentoCommerce.com

T-Mobile's WiFi Service

Just think this is cool and shows how some companies are rapidly responding to Apple's threat.

T-Mobile is now giving away free WiFi wireless routers and a special phone that will automatically switch between your cellular service and any available WiFi service so you won't be charged minutes when using VoIP on WiFi.

NYT review

Nifty Shopping Cart

Free and very easy to add to any site. It works with both Google Checkout and PayPal. Too bad it is not multi-lingual, yet.
TechCrunch review
FatFreeCart.com

Here is another one called BlinkCart.com

JS-Kit: Threaded Comments

Add threaded comments to any site for free with just one line of code with JS-Kit.
js-kit.com

Social Shopping

Find out what other people are recommending or recommend something to others. Get your product listed here so others can learn about it.

NYT article: Like Shopping? Social Networking? Try Social Shopping
ThisNext.com

Turnkey Social Networking Solutions

Here are some of the players in providing easy solutions for creating your own social network. Hopefully I can develop an e-commerce social network with one of these.
KickApps.com
Pringo.com
SmallWorldLabs.com
Ning.com
CommonGate.com
CrowdVine.com
OneSite.com
Another List

Here is a nicely done comparison between Kickapps and Ning.

Here is TechCrunch's Comparison Chart

Build Your Own Web App

Here are some of the players in this crowded space of drag-n-drop web apps:

LongJump.com
DabbleDB.com
CogHead.com
BungeeLabs.com

TechCrunch review of this industry
StartUpSquad review
8 Start ups to watch for in 2007

Ten CSS tricks you may not know

This guy does a good job of discussing a few CSS tricks that can come in handy from time to time.

CSS Tricks

The Threadless Story

Read Guy Kawasaki's interview of one of its chief officers

Record Your Calls

Here an easy way to record all your calls, just buy the Ipevo Free.2 phone for about $45.

Ipevo.com
NYT article

The DYI Phenomenon

Dion Hinchcliffe's take on what widgets, badgets, etc, all means.

DYI Phenomenon Part 1
DYI Phenomenon Part 2

Product Life Story Labels

If you sell a product, you will want to add labels to it by which a consumer can know the history behind it. One way is to put a code on each label by which the consumer can retrieve the product's history on your site. This is a growing trend which we will see across many more products.

Product Life Stories

Guide to CSS Support in Email

Here is a very good writeup on what CSS support is included in various email clients.

CSS Email Guide

eBook Retailers

Sometimes I have a hard time finding an eBook for a book I want to buy. Here is a list of some possible retailers that may carry your eBook.

AcademicMaterials
BooksOnBoard.com
CONNECT
CyberRead
Diesel-ebooks
eBookimpressions
eBookMall
eBooks
eBooks About Everything
eBookwise
eChapterOne
eFollet
eReader
Fictionwise
Franklin
Mobipocket
PaperbackDigital
Powells

The Ten Day MBA

This book claims to teach you in ten days what an MBA learns in college. It may be worth the time. Can MBA programs be compressed, allowing a reader to "get at least $20,000 of MBA education at 99 percent of the list price," as the author promises?

The Ten Day MBA @ Amazon.com
The Ten Day MBA @ eBooks.com

What is Web 2.0 Marketing?

This article seeks to explain how user-generated content can help you create an online marketing campaign.

Web 2.0 Marketing

What is Social Software?

This article seeks to explain it.

Social Software

Add Affiliates Easily

Here are a couple of ways to easily support an affiliate program on your website. Just let the experts handle the affiliate relationship.

ShareASale.com
AffiliateFuture.com

Practice Your Programming Skills 2

Code Kata - Dave Thomas, one of the Pragmatic Programmers, took the idea of coding practice and made
something....well, pragmatic out of it. He created a series of what he
calls Code Kata, which are small, thought-provoking exercises that
programmers can do in the language of their choice. Each kata
emphasizes a specific technique or thought process, providing a concrete
flexing of one's mental muscles.

Practice Your Programming Skills

TopCoder.com is a long-standing programming competition
site. You can register for an account and compete online for
prizes. Even if you're not interested in competing with others, Top-
Coder offers a practice room with a large collection of practice problems
that you can use as excellent fodder for your practice sessions.
Go sign up and give it a try.

UShip: Who Wants to Ship This?

Let shipping carriers compete for your business. Just list your shipping need and get bids from interested shippers, then go with the cheapest. Supposedly shippers often have extra room in their trucks which they would like to fill up but their problem is finding stuff to carry there. Now these same shippers can go to this site and try to win your business so they can fill up their trucks.

UShip.com

Fotolia.com

Here is another great photo resource:
Fotolia.com is the revolutionary image bank that is fast, easy and always on. More than 3.2 million images starting at $1 are ready for downloaded. 1000 new members a day are inspired by our spirit!

• Over 3.2 million professional images
  
• High quality images starting at just $1
• Free membership
  
• Revolutionary images
  
• Industry disruptor

Join now for a free Fotolia account and get 3 free images. Visit Fotolia.com and enter promo code VAU3IEZN during registration.

Adobe Lab's Color Schemes

Check out Adobe Lab's own version of what a color scheme picker should look like:
kuler.adobe.com

FlirtingInTraffic.com

I think this is a nice concept with lots of potential. ABC News Nightline did a story about it. However, there are some security issues to be concerned about. Would you want a predator who saw you to know who you are?

On the Fast Track to Love
FlirtingInTraffic.com

Openkapow

You have to see this to believe it. You can now create "robots" which can navigate anywhere in the web and feed you back the info as REST, RSS, etc.

Openkapow.com

Review by Infoworld

MySpace for Kids

There are various sites for pre-teen, pre-MySpace kids who are too young to blend in with the older kids on MySpace. Here is a NYT Review:
My Daughter, the Burger-Flipping Penguin

Some of the mentioned services are:
ClubPenguin.com
WebKinz.com
Imbee.com
Whyville.net
Nicktropolis.com
Disney Xtreme Digital

Catalog All Your Stuff

New services aim to be your online catalog of all the stuff you own. Then you can share all the stuff you own with your friends and eventually buy/sell with each other. Online retailers also can automatically register the stuff you buy with these services and then advertise related items to you when you view your stuff.
NYT Review: Got Roomfuls of Stuff? Now Sitew Will Help Keep Track of It

Zebo.com
MyThings.com
iTaggIt.com

Another Shopping Experience

Here is yet another online shopping experience which aims to ease online comparison shopping and searching.
Glimpse.com
NYT Review: A Narrow Window Into the Future
Here are my previous shopping experiences I discovered.

Upload Your Cell's Videos

Upload all your videos and photos from your cell and let others watch them, even live.
Kyte.tv
NYT Review: Social Networking Leaves Confines of the Computer

Trend Hunters

Here is another site to keep track of trends.
TrendHunter.com

Mapki: Google Maps Mashups Wiki

For help on anything concerning the Google Maps API this wikipedia-style site has all the info and links you will need to create your own Google Map Mashup.
Mapki.com
For seeing examples of Google Maps Mashups visit the Google Maps Mania blog.

JSONER: Library for JSON

The next hottest thing in dealing with JSON is a new Javascript library called JSONER. And if you don't know what JSON is yet, you better start finding out. It is a more efficient way to transfer data with AJAX instead of using XML.

Human-powered Local Search

Here is another service that is moving away from software to human-powered. It is local searching, which basically means searching for business info, attractions, events, history, etc. at a localized level usually from a local expert. Here is one of the first services to attempt this with real humans, presumably available thru chat 24x7:

AskPoodle.com

Human-powered Transcriptions

Normally one would expect for computer to automatically transcribe voice to text, but because of accuracy problems and having to "train" the software to your voice, there is an effort to get a human network of transcribers to be available 24x7 to alleviate all these problems.

One of the first to do this is Jott.com. They have a toll-free number you call and speak for up to 30 seconds. Real humans then transcribe your message to text and send it to your destination(s) which you will have previously setup in your free account at jott.com.

This is a very interesting trend of using human networks to usurp the normal role of computers. Can you think of other industries or services where this is happening?

Human-powered Searching

Obviously computers by themselves are not smart enough to answer all our search request, so now some folks are using real humans to power searching. Some searching is done in real-time by humans over the phone, for example Scott Jones's ChaCha.com. Other searching will apparently be an amalgamation of user recommendations of the best search results, for example Jimmy Wales' Search Wikia.

On Wikipedia I searched for "human search engine" and also found Jatalla.com

These new services depend on a network of people doing all the work. If I were building a network of people I would definitely get pointers from these two big players.

Crowdsourced Startup Advice

Read about other entrepreneurs' experiences and advice for starting up a business and sustaining it.

Startupping.com
FoundRead.com

Learn Chinese With Podcasts

I just got my first iPod (I know, I know, I'm a little slow at getting up to speed on gadgets) and I discovered, through iTunes, a great source of daily Chinese lesson podcasts. I've tried the first intro and I think I'm hooked on this stuff. The instruction is excellent. If you want to learn Chinese, then I definitely recommend this.

ChinesePod.com

Bad Fads Museum

This museum showcases many of the past fads. Check here to see if your idea has not been a fad before.

BadFads.com

How to Get VCs' Attention

Need help getting the attention of Venture Capitalists? Listen to what Guy Kawasaki has to say:

How to Get the Attention of a Venture Capitalist

All In One Searches

Both Yahoo and Google are developing a new interface for search that gives you the usual results but also results from Blogs, YouTube, Flickr, etc all on one page.

Yahoo's Alpha
Google's SearchMash

Be a Ticket Flipper

Have some extra tickets and want to sell them?

StubHub.com
RazorGator.com
Craigslist.org
eBay.com

BumpTop: New Desktop

In the near future we are likely to see an interface for our computer's desktop much like this one called BumpTop.

NYT review
YouTube Demo

Democratizing Innovation

Need to improve your product? Just let its users do the innovations. In this sense then, you become not a product innovator but an innovation facilitator. You empower its users to contribute and collaborate on improving your product.

NYT article
Free Democratizing Innovation book

The Intention Economy

The mentality is changing from: don't tell me what you are selling. Instead, I'll tell you what I want to buy.

In this new intention economy, a buyer has full intention to by something in particular. The sellers will not only need to offer the exact user specifications but compete on price, service and quality.

Checkout the Intention Economy at:
TrendWatching.com
LinuxJournal.com

Here Come the Flex Components

I ran across this article at Basement.org about the coming influx of new Flex 2.0 components.

Basement.org

Who Visits Your Blog?

Add a small code to your template to keep logs of all your visitors and what they clicked on.

MyBlogLog.com

Wall Street for YouTube generation

Groovy, hip, cool view of Wall Street news in easy to digest bite-sized videos.
Wallstrip.com

Managed RoR Hosting

These guys will handle all the deployment, infrastructure, scaling, etc for your Ruby on Rails apps.

EngineYard.com
Review at GigaOm

Trends in Ecommercio 2.0

Here are some thoughts on what E-commerce 2.0 means. They are very interesting and I think most certainly these ideas are going to be broadly implemented across the ecommerce world.
The Velvet Revolution
The Next Generation

Some RIA Shopping Sites

A whole new generation of shopping sites is on the horizon based on Rich Internet Application technology. RIAs, also known as AJAX or Web 2.0 applications, are transforming how the Web looks and feels because they are designed to take advantage of broadband Internet speeds and are not based on the traditional Web page metaphor. Instead of sending you a page of text and images to view, an RIAenabled site first sends you software that takes over some or all of your Web browser and delivers the experience the Web site owners have developed.

RIAs for the Holidays
ShopComposition.com — great-looking, full-blown RIA shopping for designer home goods.
Nike.com — another RIA shopping experience from the folks who "Just Did It."
Etsy.com — serendipitous product finding interfaces; try the Shop by Color, Time Machine and Sampler features.

Ecommerce 2.0 Trends

Here are some thoughts on what Ecommerce 2.0 means. They are very interesting and I think most certainly these ideas are going to be broadly implemented across the ecommerce world.
The Velvet Revolution

Reviews & Ratings 4 your site

If your ecommerce website does not have product reviews and product ratings entered by users, then you can easily add them using these two services. Of course, you can build your own infrastructure to do the same, but considering that PowerReviews is free, you might as well give them a try and save yourself some time and effort.
PowerReviews.com
BazaarVoice.com

Allurent: Radical New Shopping Experience

Allurent is using Adobe's Flex to building totally different shopping carts and online stores. U need to look at the demos to really know what this is all about. It may be called Rich Internet Applications for eCommerce.
Here is a demo.

Exponential Growth 4 Your Biz

Social networking sites are starting to open up their web APIs. Facebook, Friendster, and others are starting to let third-party developers build new features to attract more users—and profits. What does this mean for your business? If u r smart enough, u will figure out how to leverage the APIs to put your product/service in front of all those millions of users.

SlashDot article
Biz Week article

Online Video Industry Index

There are now so many companies vying to be the next YouTube, it's easy to lose track of them all. So let's take a look at the entire online video industry and categorize the major players. 

In this post we've summarized the latest video industry innovations under the following categories:

• Video Sharing
• Intermediaries
• Video Search
• Video eCommerce
• Video Editing & Creation
• Rich Media Advertising
• P2P (Peer To Peer)
• Video Streaming
• Vlogosphere

Minipreneurs: Instant Biz Owners

Set up your free shop in a few minutes. Have all your friends shop at your website and u shop at theirs. Everyone makes commissions. Even shop at your own website and get cash back from buying the items. If u already have your online store, sign up with one of these services to get others to sell your stuff.

Shop Here
Give Me Cash
FavoriteThingz.com
Zlio.com
MyPickList.com
Springwise Report

Time to Get Rich

Here's a guy from Stanford who has lots of advice about how to get rich. I actually went to Stanford University as well, Class of 1989.
iwillteachyoutoberich.com

DIY Instructables

Another social network for sharing instructions for making all kinds of tangible stuff and for people who want to learn about it.
"This is a great place to start if you're looking to find a cool DIY project to try out"
Instructables.com

Another one is Make found at makezine.com

Tutorials 2.0

Tutorials on graphics, coding, etc. submitted by you for you. It's another social networking site, but this one targeted at people who want to share their expertise and at people who want to learn from others. Sign me up for that one.
Tutorials20.com

Hey!Watch: Universal Video Encoding

These folks have a service that can take any video from practically any online source, such as YouTube, and encode it to practically any format, such as for the PSP, Wii, iRiver, etc. You decide what video u want to watch and what device to watch it on. This service does the magic of transforming the file to your needs.
Hey!Watch

Movers 2.0

These are the movers and shakers of Web 2.0. Keep on eye on them and on any new ones. There are other sources as well, which I have elsewhere in this blog. If u know of any others, please let me know and I'll make a comprehensive list of Web 2.0 lists, that is a list of lists.
Movers 2.0

How to Harness the Power of Web 2.0

Good, practical, succint advice about what to do to keep up with Web 2.0.
BizWeek

What's a ScrapBlog?

Create your own scrapblog, which is just like a scrap book with pictures, comments, nice backgrounds, etc. But since it is digital, you can also have music and videos. Once you are done, you can share it on MySpace, Facebook, etc. You can even print it out or get a DVD of it.
ScrapBlog.com

Bleeding Edge Programming

Of course RoR is rocking, but there are some other great programing paradigms shifts happening. Two of these are Adobe's Apollo project and Yahoo's Pipes. If u r a developer and want to do some awesome stuff, then u need to know about these.

Adobe's Apollo
Yahoo's Pipes

Gigantic Ecommerce Deal

There is news that eBay and MySpace may be teaming up to create an extremely large ecommerce shop. What this means is that any MySpace registered user can sell items to any of his/her friends. So that's millions of friends being able to sell to millions of other friends. And of course, any person is more likely to buy something from a friend than from anyone else.

MySpace and eBay

Share2Me

With this new service u can share any digital item to:

> Instant Messenger

> Email Account

> MySpace Page

> FaceBook Wall (coming soon!)

and more...
Share2Me.com

Demo 07

The Demo 07 Conference is a showcase of the world's best emerging technologies.
Check them out at Demo.com

Shipwire: Small Biz Shipping

Shipwire.com²⁰ — Online shipping services for the small business owner — $30 per month, and has a free trial offer.

New Lense

Get a second lens for your camera that attaches on top of your existing lens. It will allow you to reposition the focus point on your subject. The effect is to create blurs around your focal point.

Lensbabies.com

Sewing is Back Big

Sewing skills are back again, and in a big way. Here is what the NY Times has to say:
NYT
And here are websites where all sorts of handcraft skills are sorely needed:
Etsy.com

DaWanda.com

Redroller: Compare Shipping Carriers

Compare -  real-time rates and delivery/pickup options from top carriers.
Ship -  directly from your Ship From address; print shipping labels; and then track and view shipment reports.
Save -  time and save money. It's so easy. And, best of all, RedRoller is FREE!
redroller.com

Searching by Tags

Social tagging is big now among many different websites. Now there is one site in which you can search by any tag across different websites at the same time. You can search via tag using services like Youtube, Flickr, Technorati, 43Things, and many of their competitors.

TagBulb.com

Sell on Mobiles

Sell your stuff on mobile devices. Just use Gumiyo and they will take care of the details. All u do is upload your product images, etc.

Gumiyo.com

B 4 Inviting Google to Your Site

Here is a checklist of things to have ready before inviting Google to crawl your website for their search engine.

Get Ready

BofA Keep the Change

Bank of America is running a promotion called "Keep the Change" where for every purchase paid with your checkcard they will round up the purchase amount to the nearest dollar and deposit the difference to your savings account. So it's like keepng your extra change in your savings account. Then they will match 100% of the spare change for the first three months and match 5% thereafter. Does this sound like a good deal?

When we do the math, it may not turn out to be so great. I took a look at my own spending habits and this is what I discovered.

• I have an average of 50 checkcard purchases per month.
• If you average the spare change on any purchase you get $0.50. That's because the average number from 1 cent to 99 cents is 50 cents.
• 50 x $0.50 = $25.00 you will be putting aside into your savings account.
• For the first three months, BofA will match 100% of $25.00 so in three months that's $75 BofA will put into your savings.
• Thereafter, BofA matches 5% so on average $25 x 5% = $1.25 per month BofA will put into your savings.
• In one year BofA will put $1.25 x 12 = $15.00
• $15 is nothing compared to any overdraft or under balance fees you may pay in a year.

Their deal is at:
BofA.com

Add Widgets to My Blog

Time to add some cool widgets for my blog. Or better yet, why not create my own widgets that can generate income for both those who add my widget to their sites and for me.
NYT review

Basics of Online Payment Systems

>From a programming standpoint, how do u go about processing online payments?
Here are a few summaries of the process.
Basics

Apple's Gazillion New Products

Apple has plenty of catching up to do. It better hurry up in getting these new products produced before their future products become obsolete by other emerging technologies.
Apple's Next Product

Product Development 2.0

A very interesting article about what Product 2.0, its business model and its potential. These thoughts are from Dion Hinchcliffe.

Product Development 2.0

Infonomia: Spanish Ideas

A website in Spanish to promote new ideas. They have a magazine called "if"
Infonomia.com

Internet TV by Skype Founders

After they sold Skype to eBay, the founders are at it again. This time they want everyone to access any international TV channel thru their new service to be called Joost. One of their competitors is TVUNetworks.com and another is Babelgum.com
Joost.com
Read review

Watch TV From Around the World

Watch any station, in any part of the world. It's coming soon. Actually in the beginning you'll be able to watch just some channels, but the infrastructure is being set up to support all of the world's TV channels.

TVUNetworks.com

My Ideas on Cambrian House

I submitted my iPhone ideas to Cambrian House. Vote for them if u think they are some of the best ideas you've ever known.

Cambrian House

Future Computer Interface

To complement the mouse, keyboard, stylus, pen tablet, voice, etc., we will be interacting with computers thru the use of our hands. In fact, this will open the possibilities of completely new applications.

Demo
Invented by Jefferson Han

iPhone Killer Apps

Since Apple's new iPhone runs OS X we should be seeing some killer applications for it soon. Here are three of my favorites:

1. iShopper. Scenario: u r shopping and find an item u really like but the price is 2 high. Using your iPhone's camera u upload a picture of the item to an "object search engine" such as Like.com. The search engine returns a list of similar items available in your local shopping area, along with current prices and availability. It may turn out there is an exact same item just down the mall at another store, so it just saved u a lot of time.

2. iPlacer. Scenario1: Your friend calls u and the iPhone simultaneously auto-places your friend on a Google map at his exact location. Now you can keep track of each other's location. Scenario 2: U find yourself in an unknown city or neighborhood and need a taxi. Your problem is that there are no street signs so u normally couldn't give your location to a taxi. Not a problem anymore because u and the taxi have iPhones and the taxi driver can pinpoint you.

3. iGuide. Scenario: u r touring an unfamiliar territory, such as a shopping, restaurant, or historical district. Using your iPhone's camera and its GPS you point it at a restaurant. It recognizes the restaurant and gives u its website, contact info and menu. U then point your phone at a historical landmark and the iPhone does a search and gives u all sorts of historical background info of what u r looking at.

4. iEvent. I first thought that this app should be called iSportster, but then I realized it applies to more than just sporting events. The concept comes from the movie The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. In the movie we see groups of kids watching the cars race by and using their phones' built-in videocams to broadcast the race to other groups of kids further down the racetrack. At every turn of the racetrack there are kids doing the same thing with their phones, thereby eveyone is viewing the race from different angles in real time. The phones are able to broadcast the video to other phones.

Now with the iPhone and all its glorious features, this concept can be refined. The scene: u r at a basketball game at a stadium equipped with WiFi. As u walked into the stadium your phone received a seating map of stadium. Many other fans are there sitting all over the stadium with their own iPhones. Each fan is videocaming their view of the game and is being broadcast to other iPhones. In addition, the TV cameras at the stadium are also broadcasting, thru WiFi, their video footage to the iPhones. With your iPhone u view the seating map of the stadium and see all the pin markers of all the iPhones and TV cameras available for viewing. U pick a camera and view the game from that angle in real time. U have to go to the rest room but don't want to miss a second of the game, so u take your iPhone with u. Their are also people outside the stadium with iPhones who could not get a ticket to the game, but are able to view the game thru all the available cameras as well.

Now think about a local high school baseball game, where there is no WiFi. Many fans with iPhones sitting all around are also able to share video footage by broadcasting to each other because the iPhone s also operate on the Cingular network. To navigate to different videocams, each iPhone can pull up a Google map of their location with pin markers of other local iPhones sharing their video footage. By clicking on one of these pin markers u can change your viewing angle of the game in real time.

Because this applies to more than just games, think about what other types of events this could be useful at. For example, at a parade u often wonder what's coming down the road next. Well up the road there are people with iPhones videocaming the parade and u can see their footage thru your iPhone. Think about how a security officer with an iPhone can tap into all the security cameras at a store no matter where he is.

5. iRemote. When your iPhone rings and you are at home and have an AppleTV dvr, then have the caller id appear on the screen. iPhone and AppleTV should be able to communicate with each other out of the box. This is almost the same as what Time Warner Cable does thru their cable and digital phone services. When your digital phone rings at home, the caller id is shown on the screen. Plus you can browse thru your phone's call log on your TV. You should be able to do the same call log browsing on the AppleTV. In addition, you should be able to use the AppleTV as another interface to all your functionality on your iPhone. In other words, just use your AppleTV to view everything on your iPhone, except you won't be able to use your fingers to navigate, but rather u will need to use your AppleTV remote control. This way u won't have to go find your iPhone when u are watching TV. Just answer the call on your AppleTV. The show u r watching will be muted, while u take the call or listen to your messages.

To carry the AppleTV and iPhone integration a bit further, imagine this. Some commercials have a website and a phone number that appear on your TV. Just point and click on a phone number with your AppleTV remote and the iPhone will auto-dial the number so u can start talking right away. Or click on a website url appearing on your TV and the iPhone will auto-navigate there. So u r watching a pizza commercial and decide u want to order pizza. Normally u would go hunting for your phone book to look up the phone number of your local pizza place. Now u will be able to click on a pizza commercial and the iPhone will automatically call your local pizza place so u can place your order right away.

What r your killer apps for the iPhone? Need some inspiration? Try Googling "iPhone Killer App"

ASCII Generator

Convert any text or message into a series of ascii characters such as:

     ___                              ___                  
    /\__\               _____        /\__\                  
   /:/ _/_   ___       /::\  \      /:/ _/_                
  /:/ /\__\ /\__\     /:/\:\  \    /:/ /\__\               
 /:/ /:/  //:/__/    /:/  \:\__\  /:/ /:/ _/_  ___     ___ 
/:/_/:/  //::\  \   /:/__/ \:|__|/:/_/:/ /\__\/\  \   /\__\ 
\:\/:/  / \/\:\  \__\:\  \ /:/  /\:\/:/ /:/  /\:\  \ /:/  /
 \::/__/   ~~\:\/\__\\:\  /:/  /  \::/_/:/  /  \:\  /:/  / 
  \:\  \      \::/  / \:\/:/  /    \:\/:/  /    \:\/:/  /  
   \:\__\     /:/  /   \::/  /      \::/  /      \::/  /    
    \/__/     \/__/     \/__/        \/__/        \/__/    

ACII Generator

Pack Your Javascript

By "packing" your javascript you can reduce the size of a .js file and obfuscate its code for peeping eyes. Here are some packers:
Dean Edward's
Dojo ShrinkSafe
JSMin

To Backup or Not

2007 could be the year of the backup. There are those who currently backup their hard drives and those who are going to backup their drives. Here are three services to help your online backup endeavors.

http://mozy.com/
https://www.carbonite.com/
https://www.mediamax.com/

Here is David Pogue's podcast about online storage backups

Vosky Still In The News

Don't forget to use a Vosky device to connect your home's landline phones thru Skype. This way you can dump your home phone service and go thru the free Skype international service. The Vosky device will make your landline phones ring whenever there is a call, as long as your computer and broadband internet access are on. You can also place a call from any of your landline phones via the Vosky device via Skype.

There are various reviews/videos about Vosky at:
http://www.vosky.com/pressreviews.php