April 7, 2008
As a member of the frequent flyer club, I have used TripIt and previously reviewed when it first launched. Now TripIt has made traveling easier by adding some additional mobile support for users on the go with the TripIt Mobile release. With TripIt Mobile users can access what they need to know from their mobile phones including flight changes, and in my case cancellations, hotel addresses and phone numbers, and auto rental info. By adding additional integration components for your TripIt account, even restaurant reservations can be accessed.
Making TripIts applications available on mobile devices makes a lot sense since when you are traveling you are most likely cannot as easily get on your computer. TripIt offers applications to enable staying in touch with others in your social network, allowing you to schedule appointments if in the same area or at the same event. In checking out the mobile experience I snapped the photo shown here can be visited on your mobile device at: m.tripit.com.
Sphere It
March 26, 2008
Is email broken? I have been struggling to manage email for a long time as I attempted to liberate my inbox back in 2005 only to once again stare email bankruptcy in the eyes. Email is such a double-edged sword since I need email to communicate but get so much of it becomes difficult to use effectively. I am not alone, I have heard the same things from a number of colleagues and recently TechCrunch editor and founder Mike Arrington even called the communication crisis produced by email a opportunity for an entrepreneur.
I recently met Jared Goralnick who is a bit of a productivity guru. Jared joined me on quick SOMEWHAT FRANK TV episode number 17 (below). He recently founded AwayFind.com. AwayFind, a DC-based startup, looking to help ease some of the email burden so you can focus on your day-to-day tasks without constant interruptions. With AwayFind, which is currently in private beta, users can setup a page (like this one I created) to include in auto-response messages to anyone that emails them. The auto-response offers a little explanation as to when you might get to the mail and a form which can contact the user directly via SMS text messaging and email if the item being sent was an emergency or needs to be handled immediately.
Watch the latest SOMEWHAT FRANK TV episode with Jared Goralnick now.
Sphere It
March 18, 2008
As reported on TechCrunch earlier this week, Facebook is working on a chat functionality. They held a press conference today and TechCrunch recorded this exclusive video demo of Facebook Chat. The presenter in the video is Peter Deng, the product manager for Facebook Chat, who made it clear that this is a preliminary version of the product. Facebook Chat appears to be something that available when you are on Facebook with the ability to turn it on and off.
Sphere It
January 27, 2008
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits from around the Web gathered by Frank Gruber for the week ending January 27, 2008.
Sphere It
January 20, 2008
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits from around the Web gathered by Frank Gruber for the week ending January 20, 2008.
Sphere It
December 22, 2007
The video I decided to highlight this week happens to showcase a friend of mine, TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington as he appeared on the San Francisco Bay area local Fox affiliate discussing being named one of the Forbes top 25 web celebs. Also notables include Robert Scoble, Jeff Jarvis, Jason Calacanis and "Giga" Om Malik.
Congrats to everyone mentioned and everyone on the list that keeps the blogosphere flowing like a river. However, Forbes seems to have forgotten to give some love to more than a few excellent bloggers but most notably "Somewhat" Frank Gruber. But just like the Chicago Cubs' baseball season, I guess there is always next year. :)
Sphere It
December 9, 2007
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits from around the Web gathered by Frank Gruber for the week ending December 9, 2007.
Sphere It
November 5, 2007
What are the Crunchies? No, these aren't little creatures. The Crunchies are a first annual competition and award ceremony for the most compelling startups of the year. TechCrunch, Read/Write Web and GigaOm have teamed up to bring the Crunchies. It appears that an awards ceremony proceeded by champagne popping will be in order. Who will you nominate of the Crunchies?
Sphere It
September 22, 2007
Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, sat down with TechCrunch c0-editor Mike Arrington at the TechCrunch40 conference for a fireside chat. Mark takes about opening up the Facebook platform and announced the FBFUND is a $10 million grant fund from Facebook aimed at helping application developers. The grants range from $25K to $250K and Facebook takes no equity or debt.
Sphere It
September 20, 2007
The TechCrunch40 conference has come and gone with Mint ultimately came out the biggest winner (aside from TechCrunch itself, of course) scoring the $50K award for best demo at the event. I have given some of my thoughts and impressions of a number of the TechCrunch40 companies at the conference.
Sphere It
September 18, 2007
Metaplace, a company founded by San Diego-based Areae, has just launched a virtual world that can be embedded on the Web via a flash-based client widget. Every world is indexed, tagged and rated by users on the Metaplace portal, so virtual worlds in the Metaplace network can be easily linked together.
Sphere It
September 18, 2007
Do you know where your money goes? How do you keep track of it? Mint just launched at TechCrunch40 to offer an free online money management application. Mint offers a personalized money management application. It is all about helping to save and make you money.
Sphere It
September 17, 2007
Have you ever needed a particular type of document like a contract of lease? If so, you might be able to order these templates online or purchase them at an office supply store. Docstoc, an Los Angeles-based startup, might be able to help as it offers a repository of user contributed documents has just launched at TechCrunch40.
Sphere It
September 17, 2007
Imagine if you wanted to pull in photos, videos and music from both your desktop and multiple photo services on the Web into one place - with BlueString, now you can. BlueString, a new AOL product, has just launched at TechCrunch40 to offer a rich media aggregator for storing and sharing your memories all in one place.
Sphere It
September 17, 2007
TechCrunch40, the 2007 TechCrunch launching pad conference, is upon us and you can keep up with the event just updated techcrunch40.com website. The site offers fully-featured hub for TechCrunch40, which starts this morning and continues through Tuesday evening. It will offer details about the 40 presenting companies (as they launch), the 100 demo pit companies and speaker details. The site will upload video clips of each set of presentations. The site also has Flickr photos can view photos of the conference and messages about the event via Twitter.
Sphere It
August 12, 2007
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits from around the Web gathered by Frank Gruber for the week ending August 12, 2007.
Sphere It
July 29, 2007
Photo of the Week: This photo was taken by Brian Solis of bub.blicio.us at the TechCrunch event in Menlo Park, California on Friday evening (Suits Suck tee shirt photo explained in first story below). Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 07.29.07 TechCrunch 9 & A Funny "Suit"? I was in attendance for...
Sphere It
July 17, 2007
Streakr just rolled into beta to offer a content discovery toolbar and social networking product. You may experience deja vu when exploring Streaker as it might remind you of StumbleUpon. The Streakr toolbar offers a couple of different ways to discover and rate content that map directly to StumbleUpon. Check...
Sphere It
July 8, 2007
Photo of the Week: American Flag on Parade at Dewey Beach for the 'Running of the Bulls' taken by Matt Hirschmann. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 07.08.07 Facebook Sees Flood of New Traffic from Teenagers and Adults In the months prior to allowing open registration, Facebook.com’s traffic hovered at approximately 14...
Sphere It
July 5, 2007
TechCrunch20, the TechCrunch conference coming up in September, is offering a platform for newly launching companies to present for free in front of an audience of hundreds of press, bloggers venture capitalists and entrepreneurs and potentially win a $50,000 prize. TechCrunch has been assembling an impressive and assorted list of...
Sphere It
June 19, 2007
So you want to organize all your stuff on the web in one place? A new myAOL is coming soon. The current myAOL is solely a feed reader that offers some recommendations. The new myAOL offers a personalized homepage experience with some additional bells and whistles. Aside from an Ajax...
Sphere It
May 8, 2007
Are you looking for music videos on YouTube? You are not alone. Middio launched publicly on Cinco de Mayo (May 5, 2007) to help users find all the music they are looking for on YouTube. Middio indexes YouTube music videos so that you can search by song or artist and...
Sphere It
April 17, 2007
Graphita, a San Rafael, California-based startup, offers an online photo annotation product that will be launching in mid-May. Graphita is a Flash-based application that makes it easy for anyone to take a photo and add some bling to it via a WYSIWYG application with a toolbar that resembles a customized...
Sphere It
April 16, 2007
Looking for a fall conference to attend? Mike Arrington, editor of TechCrunch, has just announced the details of the TechCrunch20 conference at the VC 2.0 session he moderated at the Web 2.0 Expo. The conference is being co-organized by Jason Calacanis and Mike Arrington and sponsored by Sequoia Capital with...
Sphere It
April 1, 2007
Photo of the Week: Opening Day 2007 for Major League Baseball is today so enjoy the photo above by Betsy titled New hat, in honor of the start of the 2007 baseball season. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 04.01.07 TechCrunch Has Acquired F*ckedCompany.com Playing a little April Fools joke? Will Mike...
Sphere It
March 31, 2007
JibJab, the online video site which came to fame during the 2004 U.S. presidential election with videos like "The Land," has created a new video series called the "The News" and has decided to include some bloggers. Bloggers Mike Arrington, Robert Scoble and Chris Pirillo were featured around the 1:20...
Sphere It
March 27, 2007
Do you remember the movies EDtv and the Truman Show? Justin.tv launched just seven days ago to mimic these past reality-based movies by broadcasting Justin Kan on the web 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Justin Kan is formerly of the Ajax calendar startup, Kiko, which was funded...
Sphere It
March 25, 2007
Photo of the Week: The trees are blooming faster than web 2.0 startups these days. I snapped this photo, titled Flowering with my camera phone, while at the AOL Mountain View, California office this past week. Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 03.25.07 Under the Radar Office 2.0 Winners I had a...
Sphere It
March 12, 2007
Sphere, the blog search engine that launched in May 2006, has been steadily disseminating and connecting the web via the "Sphere It" contextual widget. The widget has grown in popularity as it helps readers offer content recommendations from the blogosphere, as well as related content from current sites. It ultimately...
Sphere It
February 15, 2007
Gizmoz, an Israel-based company, offers a suite of tools for generating animated avatars and buddy icons thus enabling users to create messages to share over email, the web or even instant messenger. You can create an custom animated message by selecting an avatar to deliver the message and then either...
Sphere It
February 9, 2007
Yahoo Pipes launched in beta yesterday (February 8, 2007) as a dashboard for remixing existing RSS feeds. Pipes provides a very geek-centric yet compelling application, as it empowers any user to create a custom feed. Though this product might seem simple to people within the web 2.0 industry or the...
Sphere It
February 4, 2007
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 02.04.07 First things first, today is Super Bowl XLI and I am from Chicago which means I will be rooting on the Bears today. The photo above shows the Merchandise Mart in Chicago supporting the team by shining the team's orange and blue colors. Go Bears!...
Sphere It
February 3, 2007
What is web 2.0? Time Magazine recently tagged it "You 2.0" with its mirrored magazine cover naming "You" the person of the year. However, the question has been pondered and explained in a number of video attempts including one by TechCrunch's Michael Arrington which I highlighted previously on Somewhat Frank....
Sphere It
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...
Sphere It
January 12, 2007
The Macworld was energized earlier this week as Steve Jobs introduced the long anticipated Apple iPhone. In case you missed it the phone is going to bring multimedia to the masses with a sleek new design as shown in this video. However, one detail that might be a problem for...
Sphere It
January 6, 2007
Photo Attribution: grayedMatter Congratulations to TechCrunch as it was named Best Web 2.0 Blog in the 2nd Annual Search Engine Journal Awards. TechCrunch is the benchmark for web 2.0 blogging. As all bloggers know, it is not easy to keep fresh, solid content flowing day in and day out, 24/7/365...
Sphere It
December 30, 2006
So you probably have seen by now the slew of articles that start out "What superhero are you?", "What superhero am I?" or "I am December 23, 2006
CozmoTV, a subsidiary of Cozmo Media which has offices in San Francisco and Boston, recently launched an online video site that focuses on providing users with personalized video recommendations. Users can create custom channels for different types of content. Users can also rate individual videos to on a scale of...
Sphere It
December 15, 2006
I recently highlighted current consumer feed reading habits but it's been awhile now since I authored the feed readers comparison for TechCrunch. The landscape has changed as products have released new features while other products have ducked out of the competition. SplashCast recently did a market analysis to produce an...
Sphere It
December 3, 2006
Snap an Idealab company located in Pasadena, California offers a product called Snap Preview Anywhere the ability to preview the links before you actually click them. I recently decided to add the feature to Somewhat Frank. With Snap Preview Anywhere links can be hovered over to display a thumbnail of...
Sphere It
November 18, 2006
TechCrunch 8, an event celebrating the web 2.0 movement, took its show on the road to New York City this past week (November 16, 2006) and I traveled to be in attendance. AOL supported the event by being one of the many sponsors. AOL also had space at the event...
Sphere It
November 17, 2006
Fleck has officially launched (November 16, 2006) to allow users to attach post-it like notes to any web site. Fleck is a privately funded company, founded by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Patrick de Laive and Arjen Schat. I first heard about Fleck back in March of 2006 as I reached...
Sphere It
November 12, 2006
There have a been a flurry of niche job boards developed recently to help connect employers with the right niche employees. Paul Stamatiou has previously highlighted the job board boom and had this to say: "In a nutshell, these small job boards are great places to start looking for your...
Sphere It
November 8, 2006
Like.com, a product created by Riya, launched today (November 8, 2006) to offer what appears to be the first visual image recognition search engine in a consumer facing application. The site offers the ability to search by photos to identify similar items. Like.com applies this functionality to shopping to help...
Sphere It
October 22, 2006
TECH cocktail got some more TechCrunch loving - several of the Tc2 startups from the October 12 Chicago event were highlighted. Thank you Mike Arrington for allowing me to cover the event for TechCrunch - hope you can make it out and cover TECH cocktail 3! Featured startups included: Liquid...
Sphere It
October 10, 2006
Google, finally confirmed the purchase of YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock options after TechCrunch first surfaced the rumor as, "40% likely to be at least partially true." It was a covered by just about everyone and their brother so I am going to keep this article fairly brief. Some...
Sphere It
October 2, 2006
PayPerPost, who recently announced $3 million of first round funding, is a web site that offers bloggers money for writing blog posts about a specific product. PayPerPost allows a blog post board which enables marketers and advertisers to request a blog post for a set price about a specific product...
Sphere It
September 28, 2006