SOMEWHAT FRANK

Shoeboxed Organizes Your Shopping History

After two of the biggest shopping days of the year Black Friday and Cyber-Monday respectively I figured it was probably important to make sure you save your receipts. You may throw them in your wallet, purse or in a shoebox under your bed somewhere. With Shoeboxed you can save all your receipts in one place online. Shoeboxed aims to make it easy to keep track of your own personal shopping history by offering an online repository with sprinkles of social candy to make sharing it easy to share some of your personal shopping history.

Rememble For Social Digital Timelines

Are you interested in plotting your life on a digital timeline? If so, Rememble might be a good option. Taking a page out of the circaVie playbook, Rememble makes it easy to tell the story in a memory timeline and share it with your friends in a number of ways. However, Rememble appears to take digital timelines a step further by integrating social sharing features.

Dopplr Radar For Frequent Travelers

Do you travel a lot? If you do you might be getting tired for having to keep all your friends and family up to speed with where you are headed next or where you have just been. In steps Dopplr, a Finland-based startup which aims to make it easy for frequent travelers to broadcast where their travel plans. Named appropriately after the Doppler radar system, Dopplr makes it easy to share your travel plans so people can follow your travel radar. 

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 [email protected] and it immediately starts organizing your trips.

ArmchairGM Blends In Social Features

ArmchairGM, a wiki platform devoted to sports, which was acquired by Wikia has decided to go totally social by adding a blend of social networking features. ArmchairGM leveraged a wiki format to form a community but felt it was missing something. 

HeyCosmo Launches Free Interactive WebCam Collaboration Service

HeyCosmo, a product of Arsenal Interactive a Mountain View, California-based startup founded by Jason Im, launched into external beta yesterday to offer an interactive webcam platform with a host of collaboration tools.

I first met, HeyCosmo founder and CEO, Jason Im at Community Next in February and then hung out with him at the W Hotel in SF and got a preview of the product after the Web 2.0 Expo. In seeing the demo I could see HeyCosmo becoming extremely popular as it adds a "real" element to normal online interaction. It blends a Meeting Place or WebEx type application with the visual interactivity via a web cam. However, HeyCosmo does not appear to be positioning itself as a business application but more a fun way to sync up and have fun with friends online. With HeyCosmo you can have up to 10 live web-cam video participants and up to 50 people can listen, watch, and chat during a session. So imagine leveraging HeyCosmo to play a crazy game of poker online. You don't have to imagine too hard because HeyCosmo is already helping you to do it - check out the screen-shot below.

Since HeyCosmo is in beta it is only currently offered for use with Internet Explorer but I would expect that to change with time as HeyCosmo works out all the beta kinks. TechCrunch offers additional perspective on HeyCosmo.

Vyew: Save & Widgetize Collaborative Work Sessions

Vyew, a Berkeley, California browser-based collaboration and conferencing platform start-up, offers a feature-rich virtual workspace for collaboration. Originally launched as SimMeeting, in September 2004, Vyew was renamed in October 2005 to and has continued to improve its web conferencing tools and first-of-its-kind asynchronous collaboration capabilities.

Vyew recently launched out of Beta and today introduced version 2.5 which improves the tools and Vyewbook functionalities which help to organize and share your collaboration sessions. Interestingly, Vyew has created "Vyewlets" which are read-only widgetized versions of a VyewBook. They can embedded outside of Vyew on blog posts, Web sites, social networks, and any online page.

Vyew is currently offered for free with light advertising served within the application. If the ads bug you and you want a business version subscription prices starting as low as $6.95 per month.  For additional information on Vyew, check out one of the fine Vyew demos.

Bottom-line: Vyew for a free to low-cost online virtual collaboration suite with group collaboration capabilities and widgetized sharing capabilities.