July 3, 2008
Do you have multiple twitter accounts that you are constantly flipping between to post messages? I do. It is pretty annoying to keep having to logout and then log back in. The Carsonified team made it a challenge to help remedy this problem with their four day development sprint which is similar to the hugs they created last year. With the creation of Matt, which stands for Multiple account twitter tweeter, you can now post to multiple accounts from one place. Simple but brilliant - thank you Carsonified.
The Carsonified team created the application in just four days and for around $10,000. They also blogged and captured the creation process on video, including a time lapse video of Day One.
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June 25, 2008
Do you want to publish your own magazine? MagCloud a byproduct of HP Labs is currently in private beta and allows anyone to create a magazine by simply uploading a hi-resolution PDF file. MagCloud does the rest from printing, mailing, subscription management, and more.
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June 7, 2008
I was in Chicago a few times in May and got a chance to visit the DVA Gallery while spending some time in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. I was drawn into the gallery when I saw artwork that reminded me of JoyEngine, the community building design company in Boulder, Colorado which was previously featured on SOMEWHAT FRANK TV. Maybe these two galleries and art communities should sync up.
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May 23, 2008
Vector graphics are something you may encounter at some point if you ever do any logo design or print work. Vector images uses mathematical equations to render thus can be resized without the pixelation concerns of non-vector images. Unless you have Adobe Illustrator you might find it difficult to create a vector image. Of course you could check out Aviary when it launches all its products. In the meantime, I found Vector Magic.
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May 14, 2008
If you are looking to have a new logo, business card, graphic or web site designed you know it is sometimes tough to decide where to get started. crowdSPRING, a Chicago-based crowd sourcing startup, might be a good option as it offers a marketplace for your design projects. Simply create a project and the design community will offer up suggested proposals. You can select the one you like the best and pay the designer a one time fee for the design you decide to choose.
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March 28, 2008
There are a number of desktop tools for designers and artists but it seems an online version of those tools is something that is lacking. From a photo editing perspective picnik and Adobe Photoshop Express offer easy to use tools for editing images. But they are fairly simple tools and do not offer vector image creation or editing. Aviary is looking to change this by offering a number of tools for the creative to do everything including image editing, typography, music and video. Aviary is a website for artists of all genres to create, edit and share their works directly in their favorite browser. This collaboration is something that similar desktop applications do not offer.
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March 22, 2008
I was walking down the street in Boulder, Colorado earlier this month and was intrigued by a storefront symbol. I looked into the storefront windows and my eyes were met with colorful graffiti-like artwork, handmade toys and lots of tees. I had bumped into JoyEngine.
JoyEngine is a brand created by the boutique design firm cypher13 and offers a place for artists and designers to unite and share their work. The JoyEngine store doubles as an art gallery for local artists and toymakers. JoyEngine also has its own line of apparel. At JoyEngine, cypher13 promotes and sells artwork created by the cypher13 team, other local artists, and provides access to ultra-limited designer art toys, offers apparel by independent designers, and supplies the local street art scene with spraypaint, paint markers, and other art supplies. Online JoyEngine offers an blogging community for designers and artists where they can exchange ideas and showcase their work. They also offers some cool artist desktop backgrounds for download.
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March 10, 2008
Kathy Sierra spoke yesterday at South by Southwest Interactive and shared some wonderful tidbits on how to "woo" users. I took some notes from the session and compiled them below. Kathy started out by saying creating a product:
"Think about ways to make your users really good at something."
She went on to explain by saying you need to work on creating a hi-res user experience. No one is passionate about something they suck at so making it easy to be awesome is a key to creating passionate users.
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February 23, 2008
If you are a hip t-shirt junkie you probably have found something on community driven t-shirt site threadless. skinnyCorp is a Chicago-based startup that offers some great community driven websites. Some of the sites that they are responsible for include:
threadless a popular t-shirt design community driven e-commerce site.
Naked & Angry a high quality clothing from fabric patterns submitted and chosen by the brand’s audience.
Extra Tasty a community driven drink recipe site.
Yay Hooray a forum that we made to help us learn how to make community-driven sites on the Web.
They have also have a few others as well. Read on to find out how they this creative shop works as I visit their Chicago-based headquarters.
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February 18, 2008
On Valentine's Day, AOL released a sneak peek of the new AOL Desktop for Mac (beta 8), available for all Tiger(R) and Leopard(R) users (10.4.8 or higher). Here are some of the highlights they list on beta.aol.com:
* Increased Speed: Installs in seconds and launches quickly - so you can begin browsing immediately, without signing in.
* New Browser: An all new browser allows you to surf all your favorite sites faster than ever before.
* Tabbed Organization: Tabs on browser windows and instant messages offer easy access and an uncluttered, organized view of all windows.
* Integrated AIM: AIM is built right in so you can see which Buddies are online, chat and more.
* Customization: A highly customizable toolbar makes it easy to keep your favorites at your fingertips, as well as access them on any Internet-connected computer.
Continue reading for additional details on the new AOL Dashboard for the Mac.
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February 14, 2008
MyBlogLog, the blog community creating site operated by Yahoo which I previously reviewed, has rolled out a slick new community widget. The widget offers a glossy finish and flyouts upon hovering to see the details on the recent visitors of the community. It seems MyBlogLog has simplified the widget by removing a number of features and customizations.
According to a recent post by Ian Kennedy on the MyBlogLog blog, the new widget was graphically inspired by Arlo Rose who created Yahoo Widgets (formerly Konfabulator). I like the new look and updated the one on Somewhat Frank.
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February 12, 2008
The latter part of last year, AOL resigned a number of its channel offerings including News, Sports and Money & Finance in an effort to increase engagement and traffic starting with AOL News in June 2007. According to a recent release by AOL, it appears that these changes are paying off. The redesigned offered a cleaner design and more blog-like social platform than before which might have contributed to increases key metrics like Page Views and Unique Visitors.
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January 31, 2008
myAOL, the personalized startpage suite, has added a little more personal flair to its offering by launching the ability to select themes or skins for each page or tab on your personal dashboard. Now in addition to changing the background color users can select from one of six themes.
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January 24, 2008
Ask.com rolled out Ask 3D search in June 2006 and I was pleased by its simple, beautiful design which enables users to select from a couple of skins or backgrounds for the search experience. Ask has just enhanced the feature to offer users the ability to create their own skins for the Ask 3D experience. Users can now simply add there own skins to customize the Ask search background to any photo that they like. It takes about a minute or less to do and is actually quite fun.
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January 21, 2008
Magnify.net, a New York-based startup previously covered on Somewhat Frank, recently unveiled the ability for any member of the community to create, share, and use design elements that have been "open-sourced" by other members of the community. For example, more complex template sets that use custom color themes, graphic backgrounds, icons, and CSS can now be used as a starting point and re-mixed by other community members. These design related updates should make it easier to customize the look and feel of a Magnify.net video channel. Additionally, Magnify.net has released a new set of templates and graphics elements that include a series of themed graphics for niche sites.
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January 19, 2008
Somewhat Frank Weekly Video: This week I got a chance to sit down with AOL's Kevin Lawver who is very well respected at AOL and in the web development community. He has worked at AOL for 13 years and worked on everything from AOL search to conceptualizing and developing Ficlets.
We sat down and discussed a new book Adapting to Web Standards : CSS and Ajax for Big Sites which he helped Christopher Schmitt, Robert Cherny, Meryl K. Evans, Mark Trammell and Kimberly Blessing author. The book is devoted to helping experienced developers to better understand the changing web standards landscape and somewhat frankly, adapt. Kevin wrote chapter 7 which focuses on AOL's move into the online space with the relaunch the new AOL.com in 2005. The chapter discusses managing "corporate swirl" and "combating the waterfall" methodology. It even explains how web development is an art and craft (not witchcraft though).
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December 28, 2007
Looking for a cool new font online might have just gotten a little easier with Fawnt. Fawnt, a startup "font" site, showcases some of the hot fonts that can be added to your computer. Fawnt's "secret sauce" lies in using a simple, large white bubble display.
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November 24, 2007
Somewhat Frank Weekly Video Selection: My old friend Benjamin Higginbotham at Technology Evangelist gives an honest and 'somewhat frank' perspective about his first 12 hours with the just released the wireless book reading device the the Amazon Kindle. Ben is a veteran e-Book reader users and lists the positives and negatives to the Kindle.
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November 5, 2007
Songza, a Chicago-based music startup, will soon launch to offer users the ability to search, play and share music online. This free music search offers an extremely minimalist and slick interface to create and play playlists online. Songza's interface was designed by Chicago-based Humanized. Songza is so fresh, they have not even officially launched yet but if you are in the Chicago-land area this week you might want to attend the official Songza launch party on Thurday night.
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September 13, 2007
While there are a number of Web 2.0, Ajax, personalized home page products that leverage syndication for content updates. I recently found three applications that seem to lean towards a more minimalist visual bookmarking startpage approach. In this article, I will take a closer look these products, so as to point out some alternative approaches to the classic personalized startpage.
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September 11, 2007
Looking for a reaction from a tee shirt? Reactee offers the ability to create customized tee shirts that might just get the reaction you are looking for via SMS text message. Reactee, a project of TextMarks, allows a user to setup a keyword to text to 41411. By simply sending a specified keyword to 41411 you will receive a response text message created by the tee shirt creator.
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August 27, 2007
Moo, a UK-based printing startup, launched Moo StickerBooks in July and Frank Gruber of SomewhatFrank.com finally got his in the mail. Check out what these Moo Stickers in the wild in this short video clip.
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August 25, 2007
Truveo, a video search startup which was acquired by AOL in 2006, recently redesigned the site and I have to is super. It offers a new layout that slices and dices its aggregation of videos from across the Web so users are bound to uncover videos that would have previously remained buried.
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August 23, 2007
AniBOOM is an animation community that partners with animators around the world to help distribute their original content. AniBoom offers an array of animation tools for animators to create, watch and share a wide range of animated video shorts and series. Novice animators with great ideas can even try and turn them into reality by leveraging the community.
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August 18, 2007
Have you ever seen fonts dance like this? To the sound of Obadiah Parker's covering Outkast's "Hey Ya", Brian Shaler leveraged Adobe Flash typography animation technology to create make fonts dance. Apparently, Brian was inspired by similar movie animation scenes in Pulp Fiction and Ocean's Eleven. Check out the video, it is nicely done.
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August 17, 2007
What's buzzing on the web? Wouldn't it be nice to know? Using a a combination of techniques which include sophisticated algorithms, click tracking and human editors BuzzFeed, a NY-based startup, is place to find out what is buzzing on the Web.
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August 17, 2007
I have written several times about my love/hate relationship with email. So I am definitely on the lookout for email management applications and I just across something interesting. Anymails, a project created by Carolin Horn as part of her thesis, allows you to visualize your received emails as microbes. The project objective is to offer the user another type of email experience.
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July 24, 2007
Uncover offers a community-powered site for local venues and people. Recently released into public beta by three twenty-somethings, Spencer Fry, Jason Nelson and Dave Gorum, aim to deliver a social network for people looking to go out and meet people at night. Similar to Digg or other community powered sites...
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July 16, 2007
Gleamd, a product created by pixelspread and design student Matthew McInerney, recently launched into private beta to offer a place to highlight, search and rate people. According to the site: "Gleamd is a place to highlight interesting people doing interesting things on the Internet." A quick glimpse of Gleamed might...
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June 13, 2007
For the past two years my brother-in-law has been completing sudoku puzzles, something he finds challenging and entertaining, but something I know little about, until now that is. A German based start-up, Sudokular, offers online sudoku and leverages syndication to send daily sudoku puzzles. Sudoku is a game of logic...
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June 4, 2007
30elm recently launched to create a hub to help connect home owners with interior decorators, home building and renovation professionals. 30elm was started by Matt Myers and Chris Conley from Matt's apartment in Brooklyn. 30elm offers a couple of different functions as it caters to both home owner and design...
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May 30, 2007
Do you ever need to gather feedback on a photo, document, web site or video? While email and wikis and products like Basecamp and Adobe Acrobat might meet some of your needs, ReviewsBasics as it aims to help by offering a feedback gathering platform which allows users to exchange ideas,...
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May 22, 2007
Rootly, a news aggregator site, has relaunched with new site design and additional features. With the help of Marshall Kirkpatrick who has been guiding Rootly looks much improved. It now looks like a news start-page. The new and improved Rootly offers highly customizable RSS feed powered vertical news search based...
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May 17, 2007
Tired of having to go open a number of browser windows to perform a search across a number of search engines? Sputtr wants to make it easier by putting search engine results to your favorite search engines in one page and just one click away from results. As it's name...
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April 16, 2007
If you are going to be in the Los Angeles, California area on May 9, 2007 then I would recommend you make your way to Zanzibar in Santa Monica to Twiistup. What is Twiistup? Twiistup, founded by Mike Macadaan, a friend and AOL colleague, is an event that aims to...
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April 10, 2007
What are some good invoicing applications to use? A friend of mine recently asked me this very question and I surprisingly drew a blank. So I made it my mission to seek out an anwser. FreshBooks, a Toronto-based startup, offers an online invoicing and time tracking application that nicely fits...
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April 2, 2007
Topix, a local news aggregator, has launched a substantial redesign and domain change (from Topix.net to Topix.com). The new design also offers an updated citizen journalistic direction which empowers users to be the editors of the news site. This is the second redesign in the last two years for Topix....
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March 14, 2007
Do you love color? COLOURlovers is an online community that monitors and influences color trends. It offers an open source and common license approach to color for users to contribute, find and rate various web colors and palettes. COLOURlovers could act as a handy tool for designers, artists and color...
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February 22, 2007
Yourminis, a Flash-based personalized dashboard of widgets created by Mark Cuban-backed Goowy Media, has been making some aggressive changes since its launch late in 2006. Yourminis offers users one of the most customizable homepage experiences I have seen to date as it leverages Flash to present desktop-like features on the...
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February 20, 2007
Is window shopping your thing? If so, you might like what BrowseGoods has to offer as it recently launched a new way to shop online. Rather than searching directly for the items you are looking to buy, BrowseGoods allows you to casually browse for items. BrowseGoods enables users to shop...
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February 11, 2007
It rained quite a bit this week in Silicon Valley so I thought this photo titled rain on tuesday taken by Daisy Romwall was appropriate. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 02.11.07 The Wizards of Buzz The Wall Street Journal took an in-depth look at some of the social bookmarking sites that...
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January 14, 2007
Daylife, a New York-based news aggregator with personalization hooks, launched a few weeks ago to offer users another way to ingest the daily news. It brings a new fresh look to a news site. Daylife is backed by many, including bloggers Jeff Jarvis and Michael Arrington but they are not...
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January 9, 2007
Woohoo, an AOL Pictures by-product, recently upgraded to offer a more robust Flash-based snaggable photo slideshow widget. The previous widget offered the ability to show images in a clickable stack called the photo collage as shown below or by visiting this link. The upgraded version of woohoo offers not only...
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January 7, 2007
It is time to start planning which conferences are going to attend in 2007. To make it easier I have compiled a list of some of the best web 2.0, technology, design, marketing and innovation conferences and events scheduled in 2007. This is meant to be a working list, so...
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December 7, 2006
innerTee, an Austin, Texas based startup, came of out private beta this week to publicly launch a social network for custom t-shirt design and creation. Community members can create their own custom t-shirt from a selection of designer contributed artwork. innerTee offers an interesting opportunity for designers that contribute artwork...
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October 6, 2006
Innovation has become an extremely hot word in the last few years as companies work to push the envelope on the products and services. On Wednesday (October 4, 2006), I had the opportunity to listen to a brown bag discussion presented at the AOL Mountain View Headquarters. The event titled...