SOMEWHAT FRANK

Drop.io For Simple Private Sharing & More

While I am a firm believer in publicly sharing your photos, videos, links and thoughts online I also know that sometimes it is better to keep things behind close doors. What do I mean? Well, sometimes there is a need to share things privately and that is exactly the niche Drop.io has creatively carved out of the crowded storage and social bookmarking landscape.

Drop.io, a New York-based startup, offers a simple private sharing solution. Users can signup for an account without even giving an email address and then are allotted a Web address to upload and share documents, photos, voice mail messages, videos, links and faxes.

Apple MobileMe Syncs Everything For A Fee

The release of the new 3G iPhone and the launch of the Application Store secured the spotlight last week but there was another release which caught my attention. Apple launched MobileMe to replace the .Mac service which has been around for awhile. Though the .Mac migration may have had a few hiccups, the new MobileMe service offers users who pay just $99 per year an Apple run exchange for keeping contacts, calendar events and email synced to a PC or Mac computer and iPhone or Touch. The release positions Apple into a new space as a supplier of personal enterprise computing solutions. Apple takes on "free" email providers by locking up new me.com users to an account on a yearly subscription. Will this change the "free" email standard?

DC Twin Tech Event With Sarah Lacy July 17th

The Washington Post recently called the DC/Northern Virginia area "Washington's Twin Tech Towns" and Peter Corbett and iStrategyLabs is hosting an event to bring them together for a night of fun at the Twin Tech Party.

Both SOMEWHAT FRANK and TECH cocktail are sponsors for the event which should see a good turnout from The Northern Virginia Technology Council andnewly combined DC Technology Council and Washington, DC Economic Partnership along with the The Greater Baltimore Technology Council.

Sarah Lacy the author of the book “Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0” will also be on hand as she will be in DC as part of her User Generated Book Tour. Sarah Lacy has reported on startups and venture capital in Silicon Valley for nearly a decade. She writes Valley Girl, a biweekly column for BusinessWeek and co-hosts Tech Ticker on Yahoo! Finance. I will have the pleasure of sitting on a panel with her at AOL in the morning then accompanying her at the Twin Tech event as well. Should be a lot of fun.

Drinks will be free only so long as our sponsorship dollars hold up…and it looks like they’ll get used up at the bar pretty quickly, so please consider chipping in. The bar will revert to a cash bar as soon as the tab is maxed. Hope to see you there. Cheers!

Which iPhone Apps Are You Queuing Up?

I just got the latest version of iTunes and have been poking around the new iPhone application store. So far I have been impressed by the applications that are offered. I started to queue up a number of applications that should be added to my iPhone as soon as the 2.0 software update is released (or I could download it early here). I took a quick screen-shot of the applications I will be adding as soon as I get the iPhone 2.0 firmware update, they are as follows:

AIM, AOL Radio, Baseball, Eventful, Evernote, Facebook, Google Mobile App, Light, Local Picks by TripAdvisor, Loopt, NetNewsWire, NowLocal, NYTimes, Remote, Twitteriffic, Typepad, Whrrl & Yelp

The two that I have not seen yet are Flixwagon and Qik as they both have made public statements here and here respectively saying they will be working on the iPhone . I am hoping they are released soon as they stabilize and perfect the service offering.

I am curious to see what you will be added to your iPhone - let me know in the comment section below.

Swurl Your Life Together Online

Swurl, a San Diego-based startup, offers a very smart aggregation of all your favorite services that makeup your social footprint online. Swurl is a place to bring all the things you do online together to share in a blog-like format.

Twitter Man Hooks Up With AIM Status

Setting  your status message on a social networking application has become fairly standard but keeping all of your status updates flowing through all your social networks can be somewhat tricky and time consuming. I previously wrote about twitterfeed which I use to send some of my updates from Flickr and SOMEWHAT FRANK directly to Twitter. I also wrote about Matt which helps to post single status updates to multiple twitter accounts. But I just found out about a new way to leverage AIM instant messenger to set my status on Twitter.

Video: Zembly 'Wikipedia For Social Apps'

There are a number of developers creating social applications leveraging APIs which can cause developers to recreate common components. Zembly recently launched to help facilitate collaboration among developers. I spoke with Zembly founder Todd Fast and he said he wants to "be the Wikipedia of social applications." What he means is that he wants to create a development community with Zembly where collaboration runs rampant thus saving rework and time. I think Zembly is a great idea and could save developers from novices to experts a lot of time while facilitating collaboration.

Matt: Twitter From Multiple Accounts

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. Personally, I love the design - lots of fun! :)

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.

TECH cocktail Boston 2 - RSVP Today

I am excited to announce TECH cocktail Boston 2 has been officially announced. We visited Boston last fall for a super TECH cocktail Boston 1 which brought out a great crowd and showed off some local startups. You can check out the photos from TECH cocktail Boston 1 to see what we are talking about.

It should be an evening of fun mingling with other technology enthusiasts, VCs, bloggers and entrepreneurs.

When: Thursday, July 24, 2008 - 6:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. EST
Where: Tequila Rain by Fenway (Boston)
What: A “cocktail of TECH people”
Price: FREE You must be 21+ to attend and must be on the RSVP list.

If you are interested in sponsoring or demoing at the Boston event please let me know.