SOMEWHAT FRANK

ffwd Social Video Discovery Site

ffwd or "fast forward," a San Francisco-based startup formerly known as "Vadver," recently launched into private beta looking to offer users a discovery mechanism for online videos. ffwd is the brainchild Patrick Koppula, former COO of music recommendations site iLike. I got a chance to take a closer look at the private beta and provided some analysis. 

TripIt Organizes Your Travel Plans

Are you tired of keeping track of several travel itineraries from your hotel, flight and car rental reservations? TripIt is here to help organize your trips for you. TripIt makes it as easy as forwarding your itineraries to plans@tripit.com and it immediately starts organizing your trips.

SimplyFile Your Outlook Email Inbox

Email management is something I have written about several times. Most recently, I highlighted Xobni which has helped organize and expose some of the hidden social aspects of email. However, Xobni does not file or read your mail for you. SimplyFile, an Outlook utility by TechHit, helps to organize and file your email in one click.

BAAGZ Startpage Built On Social Search

BAAGZ launched this past week at the DEMOfall 2007 conference to offer a social take on the personalized home page or startpage built on search. Built on the idea that a "baag" is a collection of sites, feeds, notes, videos and photos, Baagz enables users to organize and share their favorite stuff.

BeFunky To Cartoonize Yourself

BeFunky, a startup which was founded as a spin off of the more manually artist driven IamCartoon project, offers a few fun little applications to allow users to easily create and customize photos as cartoons and create personal avatars. BeFunky recently showed its stuff at TechCrunch40.

Music Shake: Create Music & Ringtones

Music Shake, a Korean born startup, captivated the audience at TechCrunch40 last week in San Francisco. Music Shake makes is easy to create music with its easy to use application. I gave Music Shake a whirl last night to if creating a song was as easy as it looked on the stage of TechCrunch40. 

Mixx: A Social News Remix

Mixx launched last week to offer up a social news site for the mainstream to explore. Founded by Chris McGill, formerly of Yahoo and USA Today, Mixx aims to offer a place for large publishing companies to get into the social media space. Mixx enables users to contribute and discover stories, video and photos as they blend their own mix of the Web.

FeedHub Personalized Feed Creator

Having problems getting through all of your feeds in your reading list? Keeping up with the latest news from all the various publications can sometimes be as difficult as keeping up with your email where "email bankruptcy" runs rampant. FeedHub, a product of Pittsburgh-based mSpoke, has launched its personalized feed and recommendation product at the 2007 DEMOfall Conference. I was part of the FeedHub private beta program. FeedHub creates a personalized RSS feed from you reading list and intelligently displays the most relevant post.

MeeVee Personalized TV Via Amazon

MeeVee, a Silicon Valley-based personalized TV startup, has recently announced a partnership with Amazon to offer TV content via their Unboxed Video Previewer widget. The MeeVee product offers a personalized TV listings and video content. With its sites set on being the a personalized Joost-like product without having to install any software MeeVee will now be leveraging Amazon's widget distribution channel. Amazon widgets can be found at: http://widgets.amazon.com.

3 Minimalist Bookmark Startpages

While there are a number of Web 2.0, Ajax, personalized home page products (myAOL, yourminis, iGoogle, Netvibes, etc)  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.

Reactee T-Shirts That Text Message

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.

Reactee tee shirts designs can include custom slogans, keywords and even images. Creating interactive human billboards, Reactee creators must have a US phone number to create account. Users can update their tee shirts as well as manage the message that a tee shirt sends.

Google Phone Details, Dapper Facebook App Maker, Clown Co. Named Hulu, Personalized & Social Search and The Sexual Relationship Database

Photo of the Week: I found this unique view of the Washington Monument in Washington, DC this weekend.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 09.02.2007

Moo Stickers Arrive (Literally)

Moo, a UK-based printing startup, puts an unique and personalized spin on traditional items like business cards and notecards. Moo loves to print as they continue to roll out additional offerings. In mid-July, Moo announced the launch of Moo StickerBooks.

New YouTube Video Ads, Google Embeds Maps, PlayboyU & MyNYTimes Launch, the Attention Economy, Microsoft's Tafiti Research Project & Bacn In Your Inbox

Photo of the Week: This photo was taken by, one of my skinnyCorp friends, Harper Reed as he captured some fresh Threadless designs.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 08.26.2007

Animoto: Video Trailers From Photos

Animoto, a New York-based startup, offers an application that generates movie trailer-like videos from your photos. Simply upload or pull in some of your favorite photos, add music and Animoto does the rest.

Animoto leverages innovate Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology and motion design to add life to your customized photo montage. Created with Ruby on Rails, Animoto produces fully-customized videos depending on what music you choose. Additionally, no two videos will be the same even if you use the same photos and music selection.