Thursday, June 13, 2013

GetStartUpTools Dot Com

A new convergence of startups and Internet companies has come together to provide other early-stage companies with the tools required to get up and running quickly, and most importantly, cheaply. It's sort of like a Humble Indie Bundle, except instead of gaming,GetStartupTools.com offers software from Wave, Box, MailChimp, Zendesk, Uberflip and General Assembly that most brand new internet companies would need or at least appreciate.

AllJoyn Is My Personal Cloud

Imagine walking into a new room and, like Harry Potter, being able to control all the devices in there with a few gestures. But (because you are a Muggle) instead of a wand, you use your smartphone. Developed by Qualcomm, AllJoynis an open source peer-to-peer software designed to give manufacturers and developers the framework to seamlessly connect a wide range of devices, appliances and mobile apps.

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Fade In Images

Cool javascript trick used by Pinterest for fading in images after they finish loading. This one relies on using Embed.ly

Wednesday, June 05, 2013

Social Network Data Heaven

If you have social network data anywhere, like Facebook, Twitter, etc. and you want to archive it and search it, then ThinkUp.com is the way to go.

Here is a snippet that better explains it:

ThinkUp, the social media management tool that matters most, hits version 1.0 today. It lets you store all your social activity from networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ in a database you control and search, sort and analyze it. If you have a Web server that can run a PHP application, you can take control of your social network data. Ever wanted to search for a tweet more than a couple days old? Don't bother with Twitter search. ThinkUp is the only way.

ThinkUp lets you archive all your social network activity. It's free and open-source, so it's a totally extensible platform with a growing community of developers. You can search, browse, publish, analyze and visualize your content and data in all kinds of ways. Under the terms of service of your social networks, they can delete everything you've created without warning. ThinkUp lets you own your content. This isn't a review; this is a public service announcement. Go get it.

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

CDN For ALL Your Stuff

Regardless, CSS, Javascript, and so on, you can probably find a reference at this Content Delivery Network: http://cdnjs.com/

LESS Compilers

So if you are using LESS to code your CSS, you must know about these compilers:


You can also reference the javascript less.js file in your code from a CDN like: http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/less.js/1.3.3/less.min.js

Best 3D Canvas Javascript Library

Threejs is the best library I've seen for drawing 3D objects within the HTML5 Canvas element. The examples shown at http://threejs.org/ are amazing. There's a very nice intro to Three.js at https://learnable.com. You can even make games with it.

Thursday, May 23, 2013

FontSquirrel Fonts & Converter

If you ever need to look for monospaced fonts and others, look at FontSquirrel.com

If you ever need to convert any font file to another, for example ttf to eot, woff, or svg go to

Friday, May 17, 2013

Best Wholesale SMS Provider

The best and most affordable SMS provider I have ever seen. Nexmo. International reach. All inbound SMS are free. Outbound SMS are 0.0071 USD in USA.

What's more impressive is that with their API hitting your server, you can have as many and unique SMS SHORTCODES as you want. They are also integrated into AppFog so that is very cool.

Friday, May 03, 2013

MIT App Inventor

There's a new generation of mobile app programmers and they are using the MIT App Inventor. Here is a story about all this:

Monday, April 22, 2013

CashFly: Shortens Links and Pays You

CashFly.com wants to pay for using their service to shorten URLs. Anytime you share a link and someone clicks it, you get paid. It's like a Bit.ly service that pays you.

WSJ review

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Fabric Printing

SpoonFlower.com offers custom printing on fabrics. Your designs on fabric.

Monday, April 15, 2013

Niice: An Even Nicer Design Search Engine

Niice.co is yet an even better search engine for finding great design stuff. For example, I want to find "pink" stuff.

Psddd: Dribbble Has It

You can find that freebie design you are looking for at Dribbble.com. Trouble is it is buried somewhere there and Dribbble doesn't have the search tools to find it. So here comes Psddd.co to help.

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

An API for Email Marketing

Who would have thought that email marketing services needed an API for developers to use in integrating a great email marketing service into any website, whether small or large? Sendicate is introducing such an API and their pricing is very affordable. I wonder what interesting email marketing campaigns we'll soon see showing up in our in-boxes. 

Software-based Networking

Forget about investing millions of dollars on building out your big network for that next big idea. Now you can use Pertino to build out your network with little to no hardware. The entire network runs in the cloud. So what's your next big idea that needs that great big network?

Monday, February 25, 2013

WP Engine: Viral WordPress Protection

If you are running Word Press and feel that your site will crash if it goes viral, then look into WP Engine to provide your hosting.

Very Cool Colorpicker

One of the best color pickers I've seen.

Quipio: Yet Another Textagram

I recently bumped into Boldomatic.com and here comes a very similar service that lets you further customize your text and shoot it out to all your social networks.

Friday, February 22, 2013

Vine: Share Short Videos

With the Vine mobile app you can share 6-second videos with your friends.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Albumatic: Collaborative Albums Creation

You and your friends can create albums of photos at any casual event. Share them with others, even with non-friends or those who didn't get the chance of being at the event. Other services have come and gone, but it seems Albumatic may have an edge on usability. 

So now parents can share photos of their kids' sporting events. Wedding guests and the wedding couple can cherish the photos of everyone at their event.

I imagine Albumatic's business plan may include selling photo prints.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

SaberBlast: Automating Marketing Alliances

It might be difficult for a small start-up to make an alliance with a big company that may have an interest in placing some ads on the start-ups website. SaberBlast intends to make this easier for all parties involved. 

Boldomatic: Like a Textagram

Cool new feature. Put in any text, and you get a nice big letter billboard with a nice background color to boldly display in your social network feeds. It's like making your comments stand out in your feeds in a billboard style sort of way.

Tuesday, February 05, 2013

Embed Instagram Anywhere

SnapWidget.com allows you to include a free widget on your website that displays Instagram pics based on usernames or hashtags. Very cool.

Friday, February 01, 2013

Swish Helps Launch New Products

Swish seeks to help launch new products by providing an ecommerce marketplace to showcase and to sell your new product. Once you receive a quota of orders, you fulfill the orders by sending the entire product inventory to Swish who then fulfills each order for you. Thus, the little guy doesn't need to worry about how to fulfill his orders should his product go viral suddenly. Bad thing is that Swish takes a 35% cut.

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Modern.IE Helps You Test

modern.IE consists of a number of free tools and resources, including a scanner that checks for common problems that may make a site incompatible with modern and legacy versions of IE. The scanner, Gavin noted, checks a given page to find common compatibility problems with the libraries and frameworks the developer used. It then recommends fixes and provides developers with information about which version of a given framework like jQuery offers the best compatibility.

Pond5 Stock Media

Here is good source of stock video and photography. Yup, video. They have some awesome clips you may be able to use. I've seen some for $20. They have updated the site and it's easier to find stuff.

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

VinylMint, Make Beautiful Music Together

Taking the notion of online collaboration to a whole new level, VinylMint has created a cloud-based solution for musicians to jam and record in real time.
Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/02/vinylmint-online-music-recording/#aIVsc5aW6xA3r4wm.99 

Play My Tone

This is an app that makes creating music as easy as listening to it. Listening to music nowadays is almost universally effortless. But creating it? That's not so easy. Solving that problem is the idea behind Play My Tone, a social music maker that mixes, personalizes, and shares your musical creations.

Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/02/play-my-tone-announcement/#0ufCZpCQl7Mcszrl.99 

Tubifi Stock Footage

Tubifi wants to make it easier to make great videos by using lots of stock footage. But stock footage is only part of the service. With a vital social feature, Tubifi also plans to connect video makers to the marketers that need them. The other big feature of the service is online editing, which allows users to take the stock video they buy and edit it from their web browsers.
Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/02/tubifi-stock-footage/#ZQJk4LwhTfLgUOA7.99 

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Almond+ Is A Modern Router

Here is the most advanced router for the consumer available today. It's a router with a touchscreen and only costs $99. It is going to rock my world as soon as I can get one. I would love to make a mobile app that communicates with it.

The Almond+

Here is a book to help you learn about its protocol Zigbee and Z-wave.

Friday, January 25, 2013

Create n Share Website Mashups

NewHive provides easy tools for making collages of websites to share. It can grab any media to produce beautiful and thoughtful art.


NewHive wants to pioneer what co-founder Zach Verdin calls "slow social media". He describes it as "Creating something meaningful that takes more time and thought than just sharing an image. It has more emotional impact on the people creating it and the people consuming it."

Friday, January 18, 2013

Headless Browsers

If you're reading this article, you most likely know what a browser is. Now take away the GUI, and you have what's called a headless browser. Headless browsers can do all of the same things that normal browsers do, but faster. They're great for automating and testing web pages programmatically. There are a number of headless browsers in existence, and PhantomJS is the best.

In other words, the server can now act as the web user. The server-side can interact with any website  from the point of view of a site visitor. The server can submit data, click links, wait for results, and process the results. Very powerful stuff indeed. This is a step beyond web scraping.

Here is an excellent example of what you can do with a headless browser: UpstreamCommerce.com crawls your competitors' websites to compare your pricings to theirs. They may be using some other technology, but certainly using a headless browser would be one way to do it.

Real-time Node Frameworks

The Node crowd is pretty DIY, so many Node developers eschew using frameworks beyond Express. Express gives you the most control, but requires the most development overhead. You have to setup and tie together everything all by yourself - and there is a lot of stuff to tie together. Furthermore, getting everything to play nicely with eachother is much more painful than you'd think. 

Frameworks will tie everything together for you, and will ensure each piece fits the equation properly - so I recommend using a framework if you want to hit the ground running with the least amount of hassle. Conversely, I recommend choosing Express if you're savvy and want maximal control, or (as we'll see) you want cross-platform code (including mobile).

Here are some more recent ones:
Google search

And here is a more realistic view of the current frameworks.

Modern Web Scraping

Web scrapers are pieces of software which programmatically visit web pages and extract data from them. Web scraping is a bit of a controversial topic due to issues of content duplication. Instead, most web site owners prefer that their data be accessed by publicly available APIs. Unfortunately, many sites provide lackluster APIs, or none at all. This forces many developers to turn to web scraping. This article will teach you how to implement your own web scraper in Node.js.

Other tools are:

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Super Javascript Languages

I don't know which one is leading at the moment. I know both CoffeeScript and TypeScript are supported by Node.js, so that's a good thing. Dart is apparently a Google thing. TypeScript is also supported from within Visual Studio, so you know Microsoft is backing it up.

Dart

Two excellent editors that support these languages, as well as Nodejs, are Sublime, and WebStorm. Here's a favorable review of Sublime.

Thursday, January 10, 2013

Artiphon Touch Sound Instrument

Guitar lovers out there, there's a new electronic musical instrument you may want to keep you ears on, the Artiphon.


This CES has been a surprisingly musical. Aside from the usual headphones and speakers, we've already seen a number of electronic musical instruments including the Artiphon Instrument 1, a well-made electronic guitar analog with a pressure sensitive fretboard.

Unlike the Jamstik, the Instrument 1 doesn't have real strings but instead you play on the raised ridges on a pressure sensitive surface. The iPhone receives MIDI input from the device and you can even plug it into a computer.

The Instrument 1 is made of hardwood and can be played like a guitar, banjo, bass (by tapping on the strings), or even a fiddle. It should cost under $1,000 and will be made in and around Nashville by the creator, Mike Butera.

We spent a few moments playing the instrument on stage at CES 2013.

Wednesday, January 09, 2013

Monday, January 07, 2013

Image Placeholders for Wireframing

Wireframing a website and need temporary image placeholders until you get the real images?


Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Chute Your Photos

Chute wants to host all your photos for your apps. 

Every time a developer or a site owner wants to build photo functionality into their app or website, they're essentially forced to re-invent the wheel. Mobile developers aren't always familiar with the ins-and-outs of web development, just as the same can be said for web developers, so Chute has built a system that works for both, handling the entire backend environment for uploading, processing, authenticating, resizing, and serving images.

Instant Cloud For Devices

It would be so cool if you could buy any wifi-enabled device and have it instantly connected to the cloud and have it securely accessible to your app. That's the promise behind Yoics.com.

In a world where everything is connected to the Internet, it is actually hard to network various devices to one another. This is especially true for the various silos of LAN and mobile devices from various makers. To make a device on a LAN remotely accessible requires the network router to be configured to open a port and for the remote user to know the (static) IP address and port number to access it. This type of complex configuration is typically beyond the skill set of most consumers and also creates a security vulnerability that can be exploited by a variety of threats.

Monday, December 24, 2012

Find Any TV Show With GuideBox

Guidebox is all about TV — and just TV. It doesn't care about movies; it doesn't care about web video. Just TV! So if you are into TV, and want to watch TV on the web or on your phone or tablet, it's worth a look.

Friday, December 21, 2012

Cooler Way to Find Video Channels

9x9.tv has a cool way to search for online video content for your Android device. 

The app provides curated channels of video that are designed to mimic viewing habits of regular TV viewers. It does this by breaking videos down into various categories and showing just the most appropriate nine channels based on the time of day. It calls that "day parting," providing morning shows in the morning and late-night clips at late-night and primetime content in primetime. The idea is to make online video viewing kind of more like the way people watch TV.

Thursday, December 20, 2012

NFC For Marketing & Ads

Tapit is not waiting for NFC to take off for payments. Considering iPhones don't have built-in NFC chips, that may be a long while. So Tapit thinks there is a big market for physical ads that have built-in NFC chips and that there are already enough NFC-enable mobile phones that can read these. Not a bad idea to consider how Tapit can fit into your product.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

The Mobile Labor Force

Following the eminent demise of the unions, come these new job opportunities which absolutely give the right to work to people wherever and whenever they want. By understanding these services and registering as a provider, you can start making money with or without a formal job.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Hash Cookies?

This is a big deal. RadiumOne is splitting revenue shares with sites that drop cookies onto their users' browsers based on hashtags the users are interested in seeing. It's a big deal because now site owners don't necessarily need to clutter the sites with image ads, but rather can simply drop cookies with any apparent disruption to the users. As the user navigates across other RadiumOne sites, the cookies are read and appropriate ads are shown to them.

Anyways, any startup should now consider this alternative source of revenue.

Use Your Car As A Taxi

An easy way to convert your own car into a taxi. People will find you and you can lift them up.

Code Playgrounds

Familiar with jsFiddle?

Here is another one: 

Smartphone For Reading

I don't want to want my battery on reading on my smartphone. What to do? How about getting a dual screen smartphone where on of the screens is a digital paper screen like an eReader's?

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

JuicyCanvas Customizable Art & T-shirts

Nice way to customize art to your own tastes.



The experience is pretty straightforward. You go to the JuicyCanvas site and choose a piece of art that you like. Then you can tweak it to your liking, adjusting the size, rotating it, changing the colors, and so on. When you're done, you can pay JuicyCanvas to print the piece and ship it to you. You can also share your version on social networks.

Cisimple: Help For Mobile Developers

Having a hard time building, testing and deploying apps to Android or iPhone?

The platform, built on Mac infrastructure, offers a way for developers to automate builds, testing and deployment of their mobile applications. It saves time, which means developers can then run tests more frequently. Whereas before testing might be done two to three times per week, using something like cisimple can see tests run two to three daily instead.

Cisimple also currently integrates with testing platform TestDroid, as well, and plans to integrate with other services in the near future, including those for testing, crash reporting, internationalization, beta and App Store distribution, and more. The long-term goal is to make cisimple something like a dashboard for picking and choosing which of these services developers want to work with. Rohling says he wants the service to be as streamlined as possible. "Think Heroku – the ability to go in and pick add-ons, that's exactly what we have planned."

Singly for Mobile & Web

If you need to integrate third party services into your website or mobile app, Singly.com can help.

Today, the company offers integration support for over 35 services, including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google, Github, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Klout, Flickr, Instagram, WordPress, YouTube, PayPal, Reddit, StockTwits, SoundCloud, Rdio, Yammer, FitBit, RunKeeper, Zeo and others. iOS and Android SDKs are available, and Singly works with web-based applications, too. More integrations are coming, and the team will also respond to feedback from developers to solve future challenges and pain points on mobile in ways that can benefit the developer community as a whole.

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

VISA To Compete With Paypal

V.me is VISA's new service to compete with Paypal. Check it out.

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

StitchLabs: From Cart to Fulfillment

StitchLabs.com promises to handle all your order processing, inventory management, and order fulfillment, all in one go. 

Monday, November 26, 2012

Curated Social Media For You

With some new services, you can automatically post curated social media on your site. Just pick a topic or choose from the people you follow.

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Monday, October 29, 2012

Philips Hue: $199 Light Bulb

Philips is selling its new Hue light bulb exclusively at Apple Stores for $199. But who is going to pay that kind of money for a light bulb?

It's features are sleek. Basically, they have integrated WiFi into the bulb so that it can be remotely controlled and programmed from a smartphone.

Cardrops: An Unlock Gadget

Here is an interesting gadget and use of it. This gadget attaches on the inside of your car's trunk. It serves two purposes. One enables the GPS location of your car. The other enables the service to open your trunk to deliver something to it. Cardrops delivers anything you order online to the trunk of your car, only in the UK.


I wonder what other interesting services there could be for such a gadget.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Memoto Takes Photo Every 30 Seconds

Nice concept. Nice product. Memoto is just launching on Kickstarter. It's a tiny wearable camera that takes a photo every 30 seconds so you can capture all your daily unexpected events. Upload them to their site and you get a very nice search capability based on time and place. 

Unbankers Rejoice! Rixty & MOL Unite

Some great news for those who don't have credit cards or bank accounts, a pretty much rely on cash. Rixty and MOL are joining forces to span the globe. They command about 500,000 payment places combined around the world. These services allow you to trade in your cash for a credit card pre-loaded with your money and that you can use online. Perhaps you have seen one of Rixty's branded cards called the Green Dot MoneyPak at your local Walgreens.

Monday, October 22, 2012

MOOC News

Some news about Massively Open Online Courses.

It seems some universities are bearing arms to keep these new MOOC from educating their own students.

Minnesota Bans Stanford's Unauthorized Free Online Education

There are some good links there for other MOOC services.

MassPay by Dwolla

Need to do lots of payouts to your sales team or commission earners?

Look at Dwolla Mass Pay which lets you payout up to 2,000 people at once. Fees are $0.25 for transactions over $10 and free for under $10. Caveat: payouts only to US-based people at this time.

Another Cloud IDE for Mobile Development

Here is another promising mobile IDE that runs in the cloud, so no installation and minimal configuration needed.


Others are:
Apps Builder is an Italian newcomer

Thursday, October 04, 2012

Generate QR Codes with PHP

Here is an easy to follow article about how to generate QR Codes using PHP.

Friday, September 21, 2012

The Gifting Bandwagon

It seems everyone is jumping on board to produce the ideal gifting service. Even Facebook is getting ready to announce their gifting initiative. 

Wednesday, September 05, 2012

Irrive: Collaborative Social Scrapbooks

I wonder what a scrapbook would look like if you and all your friends could make one together.

Raspberry Pi

If you thought coding a webserver with a few lines of Node.js was cool, then try take it down another notch. This time throw away your server hardware and start from scratch using Raspberry Pi. 

The Raspberry Pi is a $35, full-blown micro computer that runs Linux. Use its video, audio, network, and digital I/O to create media centers, web servers, interfaces to external hardware—you name it. 

Update: May be the Raspberry Pi is not so easy or cheap to use.

Tuesday, September 04, 2012

Hot New Development Frameworks

These are cool new frameworks for developers to use for fast programming.

Email APIs

The new services for programmatically accessing your emails:

Nice Waiting List iOS App

These guys are probably getting it right. A very nice iPad app for restaurants to use to manage their waiting clients list. 

Cloud-Based Mobile App Development

Forget about installing all those SDKs on your computer. Do all your mobile develoment, from Windows Phone to iPhone, using Tiggzi.com.

Mobile Development with ShoutEm

Another service for mobile app and web app development, that uses HTML5. 

KiteDesk

Another service to integrate all of your personal data, from Facebook to Gmail, etc.

PowerInbox

PowerInbox allows you to be more interactive with your emails. For example, you can send a post directly to your Facebook or Twitter, without having to login to those separate services. 

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Sanebox: Tame Your Inbox

Sanebox.com connects to your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts to prioritize your emails at Gmail, Yahoo, Apple, AOL, etc.

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Icon Fonts

Icon Fonts are awesome. They are especially made for Retina Displays and look fantastic regardless of the zoom level. 

Monday, August 20, 2012

CSS Animations Done Right

Animations are not just done with javascript and jQuery any more. CSS3 is very good at it as well. This is the code you need to use for that.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Mobile Fixed Menus

On mobile devices it's difficult to implement fixed tabs or menus that do not scroll with the rest of the content, and to make it compatible across devices.

The elegant solution is to use iScroll 4

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Best Mac Editor

Best all around text editor IMHO, Coda 2

Mobile App Wireframing

Here are some cool services for doing wireframes for mobile apps.

Tuesday, August 07, 2012

Make Your Own Cartoons & Memes

Free tools for making your own comic strips and memes

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Responsinator

A ncie way to check how your website will look on tablets or phones.

Thursday, June 07, 2012

Web Tools

From time to time I've posted some tools for web developers that I've read about. Here is another list.

on{X} Microsoft Loves Android

Microsoft invented a service that can create notifications on your Android phone based on some triggers you set. It's all a bit blurry still but it could have significant impact.

Tango Card

Easy gift card rewards....I'm not sure how it all works yet, but definitely one service to keep an eye on. 

Friday, May 18, 2012

Fun E-Learning

There are lots of different approaches to the amorphous market of 'e-learning' but only a handful ever feel much like fun. I think amongst the best of these are sites like MangaHigh which teaches Math, or Moshi Monsters which has subtle learning tasks for kids.

Another which works well is Quipper

Monday, May 07, 2012

Steps For Learning a Foreign Language

Some useful steps for learning to be fluent in a foreign language

Steps for Making a Mobile App

Some useful steps for making your own mobile app.

How To Build An App Empire

UPDATE: Consider using Tiggzi.com from start to finish with cloud hosting and AppStore submission.

Thursday, May 03, 2012

Auto-Crop Your Photos

With Croppola.com you can upload your photos and have them intelligently cropped to some presets, like 3:2 or 4:3 aspect ratios.

Wednesday, May 02, 2012

Why Go Away To College?

With so many online initiatives to bring more college courses to the internet, is it really necessary to be physically present at a university? For some subject matter and degrees, perhaps not. Here is an initiative from Harvard and MIT to offer free online courses.


Tuesday, May 01, 2012

Real-time Neighborhood Trends

Want to know what's going on in your part of the world that's popular? It would be neat to gather this information from all the nearby Foursquare check-ins. Well that's what Livehoods.org is doing.

Review by The Verge

Monday, April 30, 2012

Marvia: Like Adsense For Print

Marvia.ads is like Adsense for all types of print publications. Read the review by TheNextWeb.

Marvia.ads provides a platform with which advertisers can create and place ads in all types of publications, removing the human cost of sales, design and traffic. All the publisher needs to do is add a button to its website and it can then receive submissions, without any technical integrations or setup.

The USPS Is On A Roll

Some great news about the massive re-structuring and all the new services, features, and pricing.

CustomMade Works For You

If you want to make something, hire someone at CustomMade.com to make it for you. Or if you are a crafter or artisan, post your experience so others can find you.

Monday, April 16, 2012

CourseHero

Online service that syndicates Youtube videos into valuable course material in many subjects.

Thursday, April 05, 2012

A Mobile Merchandising Platform

Check out Pengu.in for a developer's SDK for turning
images into merchandise. Pretty cool. One company using them is
MoPho

A similar SDK is by Sincerely.com

TC review