Awesome Art of All Types

I hope to work with these people some day. Their art is amazing in whatever medium you can imagine, whether its graphics, video, 3D, etc. 

Wetanz.com

HTML5 Predictions for 2012

Very interesting and probably right on the money.

TechCrunch predictions

Skitch: Doodling Done Right

After choosing your starting point (a photo, screenshot, etc.), you can edit your creation using a number of built-in tools that take advantage of the iPad's touchscreen interface. Objects you draw on the screen can be moved around with your finger or pulled into the trash. A pencil tool lets you draw freehand. You can add text. And you can drag, pull and adjust other objects like arrows, circles, squares and lines.

None of this is entirely ground-breaking stuff, but Skitch does what it does very well. It's a pleasure to use.

TechCrunch Review

Skitch

Transformers Stroller

The 4Moms Origami Stroller is like a transformer that goes from being an ordinary stroller for a baby, down to a nice little buggy car for a toddler. It looks really neat.

This "transfomers concept" should be taking off very soon into other types of products. I wonder what could be next?

WoozWorld: A Facebook For Kids

Another facebook site for kids.

WoozWorld.com

Antengo: A Real-time Craiglist

It's time for a real-time craigslist alternative, now that everyone carries around a smartphone.

Antengo.com

Creative Use of Instagram API

CanvasPop.com uses Instagram's API to provide canvas prints of a user's instagram photos. Very nice and one to emulate.

Best Free Icon Sets

This guy from Germany,  Oliver Twardowski, has produced some of the all-time best and free icon sets I have ever seen.

Free Icon Sets

Map of Site Visitors

Free. Get a map on your site of all your visitors worldwide.

ClustrMaps.com

Mixel: Can't Wait 2 C What U Made!

With Mixel, your friends and the world is waiting to see what you made. Take any images from anywhere, mix'em, and you get a "mixel".

Mixel.cc

Become An Artist With Mixel's Remixable iPad Collage App

OneDrum Keeps The Beat For Office Docs

Sitepoint.com writes:

Having trouble getting your clients to use Google Docs? I know the feeling. My clients work a lot in MS Office, and many are too scared to try Google Docs, think it's too much of a hassle, or can't access it from restricted corporate networks. The result is outdated documents, endless change-merging—you name it. It seems I'm always searching my emails looking for the latest version of whatever they've sent me.

Finally, there's a solution. oneDrum, released this week, is a peer-to-peer coauthoring platform like Google Docs, based entirely in Microsoft Office.

It offers:

• automatic syncing of shared folders and files, so everyone always has the latest version on their computer
• complete version history, so you can roll back to a previous version of the file at any time
• real-time editing of documents (on PC, coming soon to Mac)
• and end to confusion between system and application keystrokes and clipboards
• all over a peer-to-peer desktop application.

Oh, and it's free.

Boxbe Manages Inboxes

I recently emailed a friend of mine and noticed I got a bounce back but it was of a different kind. The subject line said Action Requested and the body had this message:

Please add yourself to my Guest List so your messages will be delivered to my Inbox. Use the link below.

So I clicked the link and got directed to Boxbe.com, at which point I had to complete a CAPTCHA in order to deliver my original message to my friend. Lo and behold I had discovered an auto-CAPTCHA system for all of my email inboxes so I can stop all the nonsense spam. This is awesome stuff.

Lemon Slice Your Online Receipts

How would you like to organize all those online receipts you have stored away somewhere as emails? Well now there are at least two competitors in this space trying to get you to use their service to organize all your receipts stuck in Gmail, Yahoo, etc. 

Lemon.com

Slice

TC review of Lemon

TC review of Slice

Scan Photos/Art With iPhone

Cool. Now there's an app to help you quickly scan printed photos or even art, by just using your iPhone. That'll save some time.

The ShoeBox App

TC review

Modern Client Web Development

This is the new way to program all those fancy, nimble web interfaces cropping up all over the web. In a nutshell you need to use an MVC framework for all client-side web applications. With Spline you will be able to store all your data with models and whenever any change occurs to that data, both the view (HTML) and the server-side with be automatically notified and updated. CoffeeScript enables you to make javascript code sing and dance.

Use Spine.js

Use CoffeeScript

Get this book: Javascript Web Applications by Alex MacCaw

UPDATE: Better to look at Knockoutjs, Angularjs, Ember.js

Cool Image Overlays

Thinglink has some neat options for image overlays that display further info, videos, or where to buy what is shown in the image. This is just another service trying to monetize online images. Big gotcha is that users who share the images will also copy the script tags along with the image source. They are also into "printable NFC-enabled images".

TC review

New Guitar 3.0 Update!

Now there's a demo video of the new Gibson Firebird X Guitar. I just wish I knew more about guitars to really appreciate this new technology.

TC video

NFC 2.0 - No Additional Hardware

The next version of near-field communication NFC 2.0 is being pioneered by Tagattitude and is based on inaudible super-sonic signals.

TC review

Digital Toy Blocks

We've all played with blocks as kids. Today our kids play with computers. Now Sifteo.com has combined blocks with computers to produce interactive blocks. Each block has a tiny screen, senses other similar blocks, and produce sounds via a nearby computer. Because of their dynamic screens, as opposed to static faces, limitless games can be created with downloadable apps. Now our kids don't have an excuse for not playing with boring blocks.

David Pogue's review

Animated Mobile Alerts

This company has created alerts and notifications for your smartphone that show animation or videos, with sound, to alert you about incoming stuff. Pretty cool.

Pops

TC review

Check-In Hardware

Because NFC's are not embedded on all phones yet, this company decided to take matters into its own hands. It created a piece of hardware through which users can tap on with their smartphones and the whole check-in/check-out process is initiated. Pretty cool.

Tagtile.com

TC review

New Guitar 3.0

I don't know much about guitars, although I do play some classical guitar. This new Gibson guitar seems to be a new breed. It's feature list boasts 20 new features which are a bit too technical musically for me to understand.

Gibson Firebird X

TC review

iPad And Real Objects

Here's a neat iPad app that interacts with real objects. In this case the objects are Disney Cars objects with some kind of embedded chips that identify themselves to an iPad. As a child plays with the objects, the iPad detects their movement and appropriately interacts with sounds, scenes, etc. 

This begs the question....what other types of objects could interact with an iPad to produce some kind of valuable experience. Say for example in the health and fitness industry you have different objects such as heart rate monitors and pedometers. What kind of services would be useful if an iPad knew what object you had? If you placed your heart monitor on the iPad, it could display some neat graphs of your heart's activity. Whereas if you placed the pedometer on the iPad, it could display your activity in terms of steps or miles, or even a map of your just completed walking path.

Disney's Appmates Turn The iPad Into An Interactive Playmat

The Internet of Things

Some profound thoughts about the future internet of things, a world where trillions of objects are connected to the internet.

This is a world where people make the things you would make if you were left to invent stuff on your own. It is a world where people strap domestic digital cameras to weather balloons in order to photograph space, a world where people attach bubble machines to Arduinos and connect them to the web so that when it sees a keyword on Twitter, it blows bubbles.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15018894

Need Lyrics?

How about viewing lyrics in real time as you listen to any song on your mp3 player? That's the promise of an upcoming API from MusixMatch.com and from TuneWiki.com.

TC Review

Turn Anything Into A Biz Card

For now, any t-shirt can be turned into a business card. Just take a photo of your t-shirt and email it to Capturio. Anyone who sees you in the same t-shirt can snap a pic and email again to Capturio, which will then match the pic to your t-shirt and return your contact info to that person. So now it doesn't seem like QR Codes are even necessary.

Springwise Review

Another Images And Ads Venture

So people are trying to figure out how to mingle photos and ads and be profitable. Here is yet another such venture. It's the idea about making any photo be itself and an advertisement at the same time. The goal is to give a dual personality to any online image, that of being a plain image and of being an advertisement of some sort.

Adwords For Images

Stipple

Best TV Remote Control Ever

Hands down, unequivocally the best remote control for your TV ever made, that is if you have an iPad.

Logitech Harmony Link

Dream It, Make It

It's now time to get our kids involved in creating 3D objects of all their dreams. Imagine what could become of stories like Harry Potter?

Origo

FoldFactory

So you are into folding or origami? Check out FoldFactory.com to learn even more types of folds.

Here is the 112th Super Cool Fold of the Week from Trish at FoldFactory. Watch as she teaches you how to create the fun Assymetrical Gate Fold piece with a perfed postcard. 

Web Surf Via SMS

This has got to be an absolute quintessence of thinking outside the box. These guys have figure out how to surf the web using just SMS and MMS, no data plan required. Although it is slow, any website is viewable and fully functional. Truly amazing stuff.

New Android App Smoozy Lets You Surf The Web Without A Data Plan

Smozzy.com

MadPad: Everyday Musical Objects

There are sounds all around us. Record them. Snap a picture of them. Then lay them out like a keyboard and start making music. That's the idea behind MadPad.

Smule's MadPad Turns Your Life Into A Video Soundboard

Art to Digital Instantly

So when was the last time you drew something and then had to find a scanner to be able to put it online? And how would you like to carry around that scanner anywhere you went? Nope, that's not for me. I'd rather just carry a pen and make my drawing appear instantly online. Well, you can almost do that now. Just the "instantly online" isn't built-in, yet.

Meet the INKLING

Wacom's Inkling Captures What you Draw On Paper Digitally

Samsung's ChatOn: iMessages Competitor?

It looks like Samsung may have an answer to Apple's iMessages with their new ChatOn cross-platform service. However, I think iMessages is built into the iOS which means developers can use it within their own apps, whereas ChatOn may be just an app.

TechCrunch preview

Engadget preview

Bizness Apps

If you need to create a mobile app or web app, you might want to consider BizApps first, especially because they are very affordable.

Native Or Web? Bizness Apps Adds HTML5 Platform To Let SMBs Create Their Own Apps

DoughMain: Kids' Financial Education

I need to keep an eye on this service. It seems they have some great ways of helping parents reward their kids for doing chores and also teaching the kids about managing money.

DoughMain Raises $5 Million For Gamified Financial Education Platform For Kids

DoughMain.com

Photos Turned Into Art

So you are photo enthusiasts using an iPhone? You are now doing what's being called "iPhotography," the latest craze about turning ordinary photos into works of art just by using your smartphone.

NYT's Strolling Artists, Bearing iPhones

Webcam: The New Credit Card Reader

Guess what? If you have a webcam, you just got yourself a new credit card reader. So why bother with buying a specific hardware for reading credit cards?

Jumio Comes To Wordpress, Turns Blog Readers' Webcams Into Credit Card Readers

Diffbot: A Modern Screenscraper

There's services out there that do screenscraping, like Kapow. Most do this work by looking internally at the html code to target the exact elements to extract from a webpage. On the other hand, Diffbot, supposedly uses even more senses to accomplish a more accurate extraction of any elements on an entire website. One way is by categorizing every webpage into one of twenty different possible categories. It also uses bots, algorithms, computer vision and artificial intelligence to process the content on the Web the way a human being can. Pretty incredible. So why does anyone need a screenscraper? Well, the new services based on Diffbot are now just starting to bloom.

Diffbot reviewd by Techcrunch

http://www.diffbot.com/

NFC Stickers For Everything

TagStand.com is hoping to sell you stickers with NFC chips in them and to help you in keeping track of them wherever and on whatever you stick them on. Applying these NFC stickers to real-world objects is going to create some interesting interactions between the offline and the online worlds.

TechCrunch review

Photovine = Fun!

Now this seems like a really fun photo-sharing app. You take a picture of anything. Then someone else adds a similar picture, and so on. So let's see....share with me a picture of the best prize you have ever won.

PhotoVine.com

TechCrunch review

SPDY Faster Than HTTP

SPDY is an improvement at the application-level for transporting content across the web. Since it was developed by Google, the browser Chrome uses it to speed up all the Google services, and that's why Google Reader and Gmail seem a whole lot faster on Chrome.

Life Beyond HTTP 1.1: Google's SPDY

One of the first books on SPDY

Group Messaging Killing SMS

Here are some group messaging services that are killing SMS.

FastSociety.com

Kik.com

Textplus.com

GroupMe.com

BelugaPods.com

Yobongo.com

R.I.P. SMS

Here's another article about why SMS is going away, may be not so soon, but for sure.

An excerpt:

One thing is more clear than ever before: between iMessages, Beluga, GroupMe, Kik, Google's new Huddle feature of Google+, and now Facebook Messenger, SMS is under complete and utter assault. Yes, most of those service are compatible with SMS, but only so they can be parasitic off of it.

Facebook Just Out-iMessaged iMessage - And SMS IS More Screwed Than Ever

Worst Devastation Ever

I have never seen anything like this before. Horrific and evil.

Panoramic Views of Hiroshima After Atomic Blast

The Augmented City

Here's some news for the augmented reality crowd. It's a demo of the future augmented reality city. So it looks like augmented reality will be going 3D in the near future.

Metaio's Augmented City Demo

Instant Photos Booth

Instaprint introduces it's photo booth which automatically prints similarly-tagged or location-based photos. Each instaprint box has its own unique tag or gps-location and any matching Instagram pics are automatically uploaded and printed. Yes, I think it only works with Instagram pics.

Instaprint.me

Augmented Twin Towers

Here is a different use of augmented reality.

An App Puts The Twin Towers Back In Sight

Tivo For Radio

Here is the new service that can record any program on the radio and you can play it whenever and wherever you need. It's free, and will be ad-supported in the future.

Dar.fm

NYT review

Coming Soon Page

Make your own coming soon page by using Capturely.com

Animation With Sprites

The big news is that now you can do animations without using Flash. So how do you do that. See this cool 5 minute video that explains it all. And start using the tools at Spritely.net.

Sprite Animation Explained

Performance Test Your jQuery

With so much client-side code happening these days, we all should be concerned about keeping our code performing at its optimum. Use this site to test snippets of your code.

As AddyOsmani.com states:

• jsPerf.com - a great way to easily create tests comparing the performance of code snippets across different browsers
• Makes it simple for anyone to share or modify tests
• Used by the jQuery project, Yahoo and many other dev. teams

CSS3 Gradient Generator

If you are dumping those nice gradient-filled button images you did in photoshop, and replacing them with CSS3 buttons, here is the online tool that will generate all the CSS3 code you need for your new buttons. If you don't know, loading CSS3 buttons is much faster than loading images like jpegs, gifs, or pngs.

CSS3 Gradient Generator

Trending Tools Of The Trade

FYI, these are the tools I am studying and planning to use as I progress further in my web development career.

CoffeeScript
Node.js
SocketStream
Sass
HTML5/CSS3

Here is an excellent learning site that explains many of these new technologies.
jQuery & Javascript Articles for the Dev Community

And of course, everything is going mobile so here is an excellent site for that.
BuildMobile.com

Dump Cameras, Not SLR Lenses

Who needs a camera these days when all you really need is an SLR lense? What?! Yup, for all you photography enthusiasts, now you can dump your camera and attach your SLR lense to your iPhone. So instead of investing in the latest and greatest SLR camera, just invest in some really nice SLR lenses and get busy with your iPhone.

TechCrunch review

Novel Idea: Collection Madness

Here's a rather novel idea. Take a collection; in this case a collection of fashionable items. Now show it to the crowds and let them "add" the next item. It sounds like a winning incentive to get people to participate. That is the idea behind Stylyt, which I guess is pronounced like "style it".

Stylyt.com
Business Insider review

Offline GMaps on Android

Motorcycle enthusiast, rejoice! When was the last time you were out and about at some remote location where there was zero cellular reception and couldn't pull up a map on your phone? Now you can carry around a copy of any google map and view it anytime, even without cellular service. I hear they are using vector-based map tiles for smaller files. It also makes me wonder if they are using the new HTML 5 local storage feature.

TechCrunch review

Yet Another Social Media Manager

Use SocialSprout.com to manage all your business's online social media marketing.
The other services are Roost.com and Postling.com

Make Games With HTML5

If you have a Mac and want to develop your own games, just use GameSalad.com
TechCrunch review

exfm: Music Browsing History

TechCrunch writes:
For anyone who's ever said something along the lines of, "now what was that awesome track I heard earlier today on that music website? I can't remember, I guess I'll have wade to go through my browser history to … ah, nevermind", exfm is for you. With the entire Web as exfm's canvass, this means that music lovers have access to some 20 million songs — at least half of which weren't created Lady Gaga. That's a fairly robust library, to say the least.

EXFM
I wonder if another service could be created for online images or videos?

EchoPrint: Open Source Music Identification

I  never thought this kind of service could ever be offered for free to developers to use within their own apps. Now any app can identify the playing song. Hhmm, I wonder what kind of apps are dying for this kind of add-on feature. We'll see pretty soon.

EchoPrint
TechCrunch review

The Gnomes Are Coming

Here come the Gnomes to your smartphone. These mystical figures travel from one smartphone to another and you can keep track of where they've been all over the world.

Gnomes
TechCrunch review

Another Social Media Manager

For small businesses needing to manage all their social media content within one place.

Roost.com
TechCrunch review

WildChords: Guitar Game

Since I have kids who want to learn guitar, I'm very interested in what's going on along these lines. Although I don't have much time to look at these things, occasionally I bump into these things. Here is another iPad app that make a game out of learning how to play the guitar. What's different about this one is that you can use any guitar and it will listen and recognize what strings/notes/chords you are playing, without having to "plug in" your guitar to the iPad.

WildChords.com
TechCrunch review

Two Social Networks for Kids

Everloop.com
Togetherville.com

Embed Structured Data

If you need to embed any images, videos, etc. into your site, you may want to embed all its metadata as well and present it nicely formatted. Some standard ways of doing this are:
oEmbed.com
Embed.ly

Tracking a Product Story

Every product should have a story behind it that others can easily find. That's the idea behind talesofthings.com. Just take a pic of your product, start a "blog" about it on their site, print out a QR code, and attach it to the product. When someone buys the product, they can scan the QR code to find the story behind the product. This is a really neat service. Now can you imagine if this was used for a globally traveled product?

Valuable Tool for Small Biz

This service is indispensable for any small business.

Postling.com
Techcrunch review

Razzi.me: Share Photos, Earn $

Just another service for sharing your photos and earning some money from views and clicks via AdSense.

http://razzi.me/

What's a GigWalker?

Find out at GigWalk.com

Techcrunch review

The P2P Evolution

It's now P2P 2.0 with the likes of Zaarly.com and others. The driving force behind all of this P2P activity is the fact that today's technologies make many more types of transaction possible between average consumers by finding an equilibrium between time and money, supply and demand. Transactions once locked up and never realized now create entirely new economies, free of established brands and fat middle-men.

TechCrunch story

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