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

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.

SimilarSites.com

Looking for similar sites to some website? I got some interesting results when I searched for "befunky" which is a site for adding special effects to photos.

SimilarSites.com

Protect Your Website

Protect your website from profanity by filtering all the text content via an API from WebPurify.com

Mobile Payments To Explode Globally

Mobile payment systems are about to surge in users across the globe.

NYT's Mobile Banking in the Emerging World

Some of the mentioned mobile payment providers:

Telefónica - Latin America

Globe - Philippines

Smart - Philippines

Orange - Africa

Vodafone Pesa - Africa

Gemalto - Latin America, Middle East, India

Trivnet - Latin America, Middle East, India

Telenor Easypaisa - Pakistan

Book Me Online

This is an awesome service to show your schedule availability and it ties into your existing calendars like Google Calendar, Lotus Notes, Apple iCal, etc.

Tungle.me

The other awesome booking service I've seen is Bookd.com but it is catered more to the services industry.

Photo-Sharing is Growing

Photo-sharing services are growing in number and popularity.

Photo-Sharing Is The Next Evolution Of Social

Instagram

Picplz

Path

DailyBooth

Got Too Many Gift Cards?

If you received too many gift cards this holiday season, you might want to sell or trade them online.

CardPool.com

PlasticJungle.com

Build Your Own Mobile App

Here is a growing list of mobile app builders you can use to make your own mobile app.

MobileRoadie.com

AppBreeder.com

GetCS.com

SwebApps.com

Sencha.com

PhoneGap.com

PyxisMobile.com

Google App Inventor

How Was GPS Invented?

If you are interested in how our modern day GPS technology was invented, watch this short video.

Where Good Ideas Come From

TED: Ideas Worth Spreading

These are some of the best talks on the planet.

TED.com
Introduction to TED

Alternative Payments

Here are more alternative payments options for customers without credit (cards).

PayNearMe.com

GreenDot.com

Review of PayNearMe

Review of Green Dot

Among others, Rixty and Coinstar offer similar services.

500 Startups

These might be the coolest super-angel investors on the planet. Dave McClure, the founder, seems to know what he's talking about. I've been reading about him on Fast Company and it's very good stuff. Keep an eye on them if you have a great idea.

500Startups.com

Look in Wikipedia for other super-angels.

The Andreessen Horowitz Fund

Seems like this fund in Silicon Valley would be good to pursue because they will educate you to be a great CEO.

Andreessen Horowitz
NYT's Andreessen Starts 2nd Fund to Invest in Tech Start-Ups

The One Sentence Pitch

Here is the perfect template for making your own one sentence pitch, to be ready for when you bump into that multi-millionaire.

Madlibs For Pitches: How To Perfect The One Sentence Pitch

It was constructed by the Founder Institute's Adeo Ressi

The sFund

I hope I can use the sFund some day.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/21/kleiner-perkins-and-partners-create-250-million-social-fund/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Excerpt from NYT: Kleiner is creating the sFund at a time when investing in social is hardly new. Several prominent venture capital firms like Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures and others, have been heavy investors in social start-ups. And several companies, like the game makers Playfish and Playdom, have already been sold for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Touch Books for the Little Ones

Upcoming touch books for the iPhone and iPad.

http://touchoo.com/

Webydo: From PSD to HTML

You might want to keep track of this upcoming service.

It takes a PSD and generates all the HTML, less tables  - meaning CSS-style layout.

Pass it along to your peers or otherwise keep them grinding at the mill the old way.

http://www.webydo.com/

My Kids Need Drawing Pad

A drawing pad for little picassos built as an iPad app. This is exactly what my kids need.

DrawingPadApp.com
NYT review

myGengo: Translation API

A service called myGengo.com has an API for human-powered translations. I'm not sure what that all means but this is one service to keep track of.

TechCrunch news

TechCrunch review

Location-Based Advertising

There are some big players involved in this arena and here is a small list of them to help you keep up.

First are the actual providers of the location-based check-in data:

1. Foursquare
2. Facebook Places
3. Twitter
4. Gowalla

Then there are the ad-campaign services that use the above data to pinpoint your marketing:

1. Context Optional, 
2. SnackSquare, 
3. Geotoko, 
4. Sprout Social 
5. PlacePunch

PeopleSmart: Look for Anyone

The new way to look for anyone is to use PeopleSmart.com

U Like Clear Wireless?

So u like Clear's 2 year commitment and excellent broadband service ey?

Well once my contract runs out with Clear, look at what I can get now:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/technology/personaltech/02pogue.html

The Virgin Mobile MiFi.....about the size of a credit card.

$40 a month, no contract, unlimited data

FutureAdvisor: Invest Like This

If you currently have a 401K and other investments and are confused or clueless about how best to allocate your investments and get the most bang for the buck, here is a new service who can help. Instead of hiring your own investment adviser, just use FutureAdvisor.com.

TechCrunch review

5Min and Answers

Answers.com has teamed up with 5Min.com to show appropriate videos for every question that is asked. I hadn't heard of 5Min before but they have a ton of videos and worth remembering.

TinyChat With Real-time Translation

This nifty chat system is fully browser-based (no download required) and features real-time language translations so people you chat with don't have to chat in your language for you to understand.

http://tinychat.com/

Grasshopper

Grasshopper.com pitches itself as the entrepreneur's phone system. They may be right.

Medical Industry Pioneers

Here is a list of some innovators in the medical industry. By reading about them you will either partner with them, know who your competitors are, or learn something from them for your benefit.

http://www.tech50.org/companies.html

Cool Video Messages

Send a cool video message of your choice to get your point across and to make a good impression.

Mogreet.com

Social Networking Training for Kids?

Do kids need help stepping up to a social network like Facebook? Some people think so, and they've come up with Togetherville.com to help them learn some valuable skills before embarking onto a full-blown social networking site.

For Children, A Social Nework With Training Wheels

Online Bookings

If you service needs to take online bookings from your customers, here are some service providers I found:

Bookd.com
Rezgo.com
Clickbook.net
Libersybooking.nl

No Cash, No Problem

If you sell anything and are not currently accepting credit card payments, you may soon be in luck. New technologies will make it very easy for anyone with a smartphone to accept credit cards wherever they may be about.

Cellphone Payments Offer Alternatives To Cash

Here is one example:
SquareUp.com

Things To Do With A Cassette

Here are some interesting things happening with the old cassette tapes. It is interesting to me to know how creative people can get.

Hitting Rewind On The Cassette Tape

Your Own Field Agents

Post a quick job for someone who owns an iPhone. Say you need to find out the price of a product at a store down from where you are. Have someone else do that for you and pay them. Or say you have a new service and need some on-site help convincing the biz manager, just post and see if anyone is nearby to help you.
FreeAgent.net
NYT's An App That Pays

Ready To Move To The Cloud?

Companies are slowly migrating their apps and data to the cloud. Are you getting ready to do the same? Here is some news about this migration.

Companies Slowly Join Cloud-Computing

Mini-Tasks get Mini-Pay

If you have some small tasks to get done, checkout these services that pair up providers with seekers. If you have only $5 to spare, there are plenty of things people are willing to do for that. For example, one person will send out a tweet about your site to his 35,000 followers.

Fiverr.com
Springwise review of fiverr

ShortTask.com
Springwise review of ShortTask

MyTown: Check-in Game

Very interesting how some services are gaining traction that essentially make a "game" out of "checking into" real places, like restaurants, salons, etc. MyTown is one such game. I'm not sure how it all works yet. I hope to check it out soon.

Booyah! MyTown hits 1 million users before Foursquare or Gowalla

Kwedit: Do You Promise To Pay?

This is a very serious player and awesome concept in the online payment industry. I think these people have a winning concept. I really like the fact anyone can make their payments by going to a 7-11, mailing it in, or via the "pass the duck" feature.

TechCrunch Review
Kwedit.com

Practice Storytelling

This is an awesome tool to get kids to be creative with telling stories. It is a set of cards that come in two types. You pull one card of each type. The first is a character, while the second is a situation. For example, "a cashier at a dollar store" may be the first card, and "who is afraid of getting old" is the second card. The person then proceeds to tell the story based on this character and situation. Two rules: the character must change in some way from beginning to end. The character must never die.

The Storymatic

Online Language Learning

The NYT put out some useful online resources for learning a new language. I really need to give this a try if I ever want to get beyond my English and Spanish.

The Web Way to Learn a Language

No Credit Card, No Problem

If your intended clients have only cash and no credit cards, you really need to start using Rixty.com. For some odd reason, they have a slightly different website at Rixty.net.

Apparently, Rixty is growing according to the latest round of financing talked about at TechCrunch.

Android/iPhone Apps Directories

Check out these directories for apps for your Android or iPhone as discussed in the NYT's story Want New Apps for Your Android or iPhone? Here Are the Best Directories

Top Android App Directories:
Android.com
Androidapps360.com
Androlib.com
Mplayit.com

Top iPhone App Directories:
AppAdvice.com
Appolicious.com
Yappler.com
Apptism.com
Mplayit.com

The Sixth Sense

You may have seen part of this technology before, where a projector is used to cast a working, digital keyboard onto a surface, so that one would no longer need a physical keyboard but just an image of one. This guy Pranav Mistry make his own version of this and shows you so many different applications for it that it could blow your mind away.

The Thrilling Potential of 'SixthSense' Technology

Still Need Cable TV?

Read this story about how this couple got rid of their cable service and aren't missing much:

Cable Freedom Is A Click Away

Useful jQuery Tips for Select Lists

If you are into using jQuery and need to manage select lists, here are some really useful tips.

http://www.myphpetc.com/2009/03/jquery-select-elements-tips-and-tricks.html

By the way, I wrote my own routine for using an array to save a select list and its selected index when the page loads:

//Save all initial options
    var saveselect = new Array();
    $('#myselect option').each(function() {
        saveselect[this.value] = this.text;
    });
    //Save inital selected index
    var saveindex = $("#myselect option").index($("#myselect option:selected"));

Voice to Text

I may have written about this before but since the blog search is not working on my blog, it would take me a long while to find that post. Nonetheless, it is worth repeating.

These services are apparently really good and perhaps cheap at converting voice calls into transcribed text. Read all about them here:

SpinVox.com
PhoneTag.com
DiTech's PhoneTag Now Works Behind Your Company's Firewall
SimulScribe Signs Exclusive $17 Million Partnership Agreement With Ditech Networks

Nice Facebook Shopping Cart

This is a very nice shopping cart meant to work with any site, but in particular Facebook. In fact, they are set to unveil a completely new platform of e-commerce for Facebook.

Payvment.com

TechCrunch's review

Video Sites for Kids

This NYT story mentions some very good sources of videos and other good stuff safe for kids.

How to Provide Parental Guidance on Web Video for Children

Some of the sites mentioned are:
Kabillion.com
Kidzui.com
Kideos.com
Totlol.com
Zuitube.com

Very Interesting: Buzzd

This is a very interesting service. It seems it is a step above iAte.com

Read the review here:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/01/buzzd-is-an-iphone-app-built-for-party-crashing/

Buzzd.com

Note that Twitter has lots of interesting data available for "free". You just need to use their API to gather it, analyze it, and display it.

I think Twitter does have limitations on API requests per time period.

I wonder what we could do with Twitter data?

Artwiculate

Build up your vocabulary with this Twitter integrated service.

Artwiculate.com

TwitDraw

This service has lots of potential. It is a simple drawing program with which to draw and to easily send to your twitter wall. I especially like the concept of the Graffiti Chain.

TwitDraw.com

Electric Crafts

Good inspiration from a crafter who is using LEDs, motors, wires, batteries, etc. to create unique crafts.

Home Crafts Get Wired