SOMEWHAT FRANK

Facebook Source Code Leak, Porn 2.0, Spock Launches, Personalize Jib Jab, Change of myAOL Heart & Startup Tips

Photo of the Week: A couple of Maine Lobstahs! from a surf & turf event I attended on Friday. It doesn't get a whole lot more "summer" than this.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 08.12.2007

Social Bookmarking Explained

Social Bookmarking is a common Web 2.0 term as there are lots of sites offering great products available. However, not everyone is riding the Web 2.0 express train and staying up on all the lingo and ideas. Therefore, many people may not know what "social bookmarking" means. Common Craft has created a video (below) that explains Social Bookmarking in Plain English.

Instant Messenger Love Song Video

I recall getting online for the first time and how exciting it was to be on the World Wide Web. I am sure many people have similar stories of your first encounters with the WWW. This video of Nick Thune performing his acoustic rendition of his love story "Instant Messenger" live on The Tonight Show which talks about his first online experience. It may make you LOL. ;)

SeeqPod Scouring The Web For Music

SeeqPod, a "playable search" product born in the UC's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, offers music search that scours the Web for music in both audio and video formats. Upon finding music you can play it immediately and add it to a playlist which can then be embedded into other pages like the playlist I quickly pulled together below. Songs and playlists can be shared via email or embedded into other sites. In fact, I learned about SeeqPod from a friend of mine, David Robinson after he shared a playlist and was enthusiastic about the product.

Global Grind: Startpage For Hip Hop Gen?

Global Grind, currently in private alpha, is a New York-based web 2.0 personalized home page startup that is said to be focused on the "hip hop" generation. Being a "hip hop" listener I was curious to see what this intriguing value proposition was all about. Driven by curiosity, which was said to have killed the cat, I was expecting Global Grind personalized home page to bounce with a Jay-Z hip hop beat or something. That was not the case, Global Grind is a personal home page product with parity with a number of personalized home page products on the market (i.e. widgets, drag and drop, etc). I thought that some of its design element decisions and button placements were a little odd.

spigit Simulates To Help Innovation

Spigit launched into beta in mid-July to offer up a startup simulation game to help entrepreneurs showcase new ideas and innovations and in the process connect with a network of professionals. Spigit seems to have blended a multiply player online simulation game with a social network while aimed at creating a new company. Spigit can act as a testing ground for new ideas by helping to predict if they will succeed or fail with less invested.

Spigit is said to have developed a technology that measures and quantifies interactions on group platforms to extract wisdom from crowds. The spigit simulation game which is made up of three phases (incubation, innovation and emergence) narrows the field of ideas and winners are added to a virtual stock market and traded like real companies. By creating a reputation profile for every user, the spigit community is able to create an environment filled with metrics to help find good ideas and good users. Spigit already has 30+ startups leveraging the consumer facing platform and plans to offer an enterprise edition for companies looking to uncover employees with good ideas.

Contactify For Quick, Easy Contact Forms

I have been getting lots of people asking me lately, "how do you submit a site for review on Somewhat Frank?" So I decided to make a simple email contact for submitting a new startup, site or service by leveraging a startup called Contactify. It made creating an email form easy. Contactify makes it possible to remain contactable, with never revealing your email address.

Amazon Buys Into Amie Street Approach

Amie Street, Rhode Island-based music startup with an interesting online  music business model by allowing prices to be based on artist interest and demand, has taken a Series A round of funding led by Amazon.com. Though many were skeptical of Amie Street's model, I thought Amie Street could disrupt the music industry and it turns out Amazon.com is buying into it as well.

KnockaTV Is Coming But What Is It?

KnockaTV is coming, according to the vintage "I want my MTV" style video that is playing on the site (go to the site to see what I am taking about). I just signed up for a beta tester account for KnockaTV last night and this morning I noticed TechCrunch also is looking at the video service but we both have about the same amount of information. Founded by the inventors of ICQ instant messenger, they plan to build a democratic online TV station that is hyperactive, creative and social. KnockaTV is looking for producers to help with the site and moderate the content that will be presented in a professional TV broadcasting style. I think and this is only my own speculation, that KnockaTV will use a process similar to Digg where videos are submitted and then the community votes on and then the highest rated videos will rise to the top and be broadcast on KnockaTV.

TECH cocktail Boston Coming Soon

TECH cocktail, the tech mixer aimed at amplifying the technology signal in under served communities and having fun doing it, is going to be stopping in its third city soon - Boston.  Ironically, GigaOm recently published an article highlighting some of the startup activity in Boston and that is exactly why we have decided to make it our next cocktail location. With the help of some great TECH cocktail'er in Boston we wanted to announce TECH cocktail Boston and it won't be a tea party. We are still working out a few details but we wanted to let some of the details so you can save the date and start spreading the word.

Date: Thursday, September 6th
Time: 6:30pm - 9pm
Venue: Tequila Rain  (on Lansdowne Street right behind Fenway Park)

Thank you to our TECH cocktail Boston sponsors in advance. They include:

Compete.com

Geezeo.com

ZoomInfo.com

Northbridge Venture Partners

Without them TECH cocktail Boston would not be possible. To get in the mood you could start listening to this tune by Augustana titled Boston. Or you could watch some Red Sox baseball. Additional details and event sign-up information will be coming soon.

Photo attribution: Boston night taken by Mitul Desai.

iPhone Secret Features, Flickr Video & Tools, Google Mashup Editor, Facebook on Netvibes, Best Conferences & Twiistup

Photo of the Week: Barry Bonds hit home run 755 last night in a game vs. San Diego tying Hank Aaron for most career home runs in Major League history. John Feeley was in attendance and captured history with his zoom lens in this shot (shown above).  

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 08.05.07

Twiistup 2: 08.08.07 - Sign Up Today!
Time to for Twiistup 2, you may recall I attended Twiistup 1 on my birthday in Santa Monica, California and had a blast. If you are going to be in Venice, California this coming Wednesday (August 8, 2007) you should stop by Air Conditioned Supper Club and Twiistup too! SIGN UP HERE.

How To Become A Blogger
Stowe Boyd dishes 5 simple steps to becoming a blogger. It is a common question, I am glad he addressed it.

Facebook Meet Netvibes: Netvibes Introduces the Facebook Widget
The new Netvibes Facebook Widget launched to allow users to view their Facebook notifications and friends. You can now access your Facebook info on Netvibes, and keep up to date on what your friends are doing.

Secret New iPhone Features
Walt Mossberg points out how Apple issued its first iPhone update this week. And, while the company billed it as merely a bug-fix and security-improvement patch, in fact it has several small feature improvements that Apple hasn’t announced or documented.

FLICKR TOOLBOX: 100+ Tools For Flickr Addicts
Check out some Flickr tools that Mashable pulled together for Flickr addicts like me.

Google Mashup Editor
Read/Write Web got beta access to the new Google Mashup Editor which provides a simple interface that enables developers to make basic web applications and mashups quickly. And again, like Yahoo! Pipes, it is very definitely aimed at developers.

Reconfirmation: Flickr To Add Video
Flickr has been rumored to be adding video since August but it appears that they could do it sooner than later.

Personalize Your Site’s Content With MineKey
MineKey is a startup that makes adding personalization to any website simple through their embeddable widget.

Perform Powerful Searches Visually with SearchCrystal
searchCrystal enables you to perform powerful searches visually. Their wonderful platform makes it possible to explore and filter 50 - 500 web pages, images, videos, blogs in a single display that guides people toward relevant info in a structured way.

What Web Conferences to Attend
I wrote up a pretty extensive list of conferences worth looking into back in January. Of course a few other conferences have popped up over the last few months. Read/Write Web weighs in on the conferences to check out.

Vlogging Wine Expert's Conan TV Debut

Add Somewhat Frank Weekly Video to your page

As I highlighted earlier this week, Gary Vaynerchuk of the popular wine video podcast Wine Library TV made an appearance on the NBC's Late Night with Conan O'Brien television program this week. In case you missed watching it on Wednesday evening you can watch it now thanks to YouTube. Check out the video of Gary's entertaining appearance above. Great job Gary on attempting to train Conan O'Brien's palette.

HotSwap: Video Listings For Used Autos

Buying a car is a definitely a pain in the butt, as it takes a lot of time and effort. I have been thinking about it for a few months now but haven't yet rallied enough energy to do it. Wouldn't be nice if buying a car could be done by simply watching an online video? Now you sort of can.

HotSwap offers free online video auto listings that could make buying a car as simple as watching an online video. HotSwap users can search by color, style, price, mileage and ZIP code and keyword. HotSwap offers users to watch, save and share videos as well as comment on them too.

HotSwap could save both buyers and sellers time and money as many car dealer and car classified Web sites do not offer a rich video experience and often charge sellers to place ads. HotSwap may be the first site I have seen offering video to assist people selling cars online - oh did I mention it is FREE to create a listing?

I think HotSwap is a great idea and I am surprise it took this long to see this type of site appear. Currently, it seems to be light on the number of listings on the site might be a hint that it is going to take a little time for people to adopt. Also it appears the videos a little short in length but the limit is 100MB in size. Maybe Cars.com should take a look at this type of offering as a video plus some additional photos would be the ultimate online auto listing. Check out the screen-shot below or watch the video of the car I found on HotSwap.

Personalize Your Photos With Graphita

Does the photo below look familiar? You might recall the photo of myself with my good friend and popular blogger Orli Yakuel, which I clowned with the Graphita tool-set for a TechCrunch article I wrote while at Web 2.0 Expo last April. Graphita has officially launched Live Studio to make it easy to express yourself through annotating your photos in high resolution. Personalize your photos and make them fun with Graphita's easy to use tool-set. Graphita CEO David Shantz had this to say about photo personalization:

"A personalized picture is so much more instantly expressive, allowing people to have a “visual voice” that can be shared in an instant."

Live Studio is open and free and is looking to integrate with leaders in the image hosting and sharing world – making it possible to save images directly into accounts at other sites. Once you are have completed personalizations to your photos users can export, e-mailed, posted on a blog or website, add them to a social network profile. Graphita also offers the ability to print on dozens of items like mugs, posters, shirts and calendars through the site.

Things You Want or Have Get BoxedUp

Looking to make it easier to for people to keep track of the items that they want BoxedUp.com offers a place to help users shop and share for items that they may want.

Founded in London by Chris Osborne and Jeremy Baines, the three employee team has recently morphed and rebranded its product from Gifttagging.com, a site focused on just gift lists, to a more general social shopping and list sharing site called BoxedUp. With similar but not identical products to Wishlistr, Shoposphere and Stylehive, BoxedUp offers the ability to easily create personalized wish-lists for products, pull in Amazon wish-lists and bookmark products while surfing the Web via a nifty Firefox extension. The Firefox web browser extension offers easy bookmarking and access to existing wish-lists one click away. In addition, BoxedUp offers social networking friend lists and users can also access other users wish-lists and items when looking for recommendations. The site positions recent activity (i.e. added items, etc) in a scrolling wall for users to monitor what community members are doing in the community real-time. Items can be tagged and a tag cloud of popular items is also displayed for users to discover new things.

BoxedUp looks to leverage Google AdSense and targeted results from a shopping search engine the BoxedUp looks to generate revenue from the high degree of relevancy in the results as it primary revenue generator. In using BoxedUp, its ability to pull in prior Amazon wish-lists and easily add to my list I definitely see how it could become a repository for keeping track of the items I want or need. You can check out my BoxedUp profile (shown below) and add me as a friend - oh and don't forget to send me something from my list of "Things I want" too. I will be waiting. :)