SOMEWHAT FRANK

Strands Offers $100K To Best Recommendations Startup

The Strands, a recommendations company with offices in Virginia, has put a little $100,000 prize to the best recommendation startup. What does that mean? The Strands seek to identify the best early stage project in the area of recommendation technologies, considering the technology, business opportunity and team behind the project. The Winner will be offered an investment of $100,000 from Strands. Winners will be awarded at the upcoming ACM Recommender Systems Conference in Switzerland. If you are interested or maybe you can recommend someone - check out the full contest details.

myAOL Turns One As Other AOL Products Sunset

I was on the road last week and weekend for TECH cocktail Boston 2 so down time and internet access were sparse, preventing me from wishing myAOL, the personalized startpage product I moved to the east coast to work on for AOL, a proper one year birthday.

Happy birthday myAOL - my oh my, you are looking good at one!

I must first note, I am no longer part of the myAOL team as I have been reassigned to the People Network which includes Bebo, AIM, ICQ, Yedda and Goowy. But I wanted to take a moment to check in with the lovable startpage product that I spent over a year and half working on to see just how it has evolved since launching myAOL in July 2007.

SocialThing 2.0

SocialThing, a Boulder, Colorado TechStars startup that aggregates all your online social updates into one slick lifestream, launched into private beta this past March in Austin, Texas at the South By Southwest Interactive event. I got a chance to get a preview of the product the week before as SocialThing showed off its stuff at TECH cocktail Boulder. I was impressed and have been using it online and via the iPhone version ever since.

Just a few weeks ago, SocialThing rolled out version 2.0 of the product. The previous version was pretty but version 2.0 looks even better than before. It offers users more control of the presentation via the settings. For example users can now sort by friends or by time. Users can also allow others to link directly to a public profile with controls on what appears in the feed. SocialThing has reworked the way they retrieve updates from all your favorite services so that updates are not pulled back in a constant flow but are batched. This allows SocialThing to indicate when there are additional updates that you might want to refresh your page to receive. Additionally, they have rolled out a new iPhone application that allows for on-the-go posting of status and trolling of your lifestream. It is pretty slick.

Filtrbox Media Monitor Service Coming Soon

Filtrbox, a Boulder-based startup which was founded about a year ago as part of the first TechStars program, will soon be launching a self-service business-grade keyword driven alerts product. Filtrbox offers keyword driven media search which includes the blogosphere & mainstream news.

I was intrigued by the five person filtrbox team when they demoed at TECH cocktail Boulder back in March 2008. I recently got a more thoroughly overview of the private beta product as they approach a public beta launch and I wanted to share my thoughts on the product as I am excited about using this product. It is probably one I will be using a lot as I look to monitor my own online reputation as well as other online activities. I also think filtrbox could come in handy in monitoring information related to your entire investment portfolio.

Eyespot Sharpens Its Video Editing Toolset

Eyespot, the online video editing site that I previously reviewed with high regard, has released a new set of tools to make personalization and syndication of videos. The tools include the ability to share to a mobile device or to a number of other video platforms with just one click.

FeedHub Updates Feed Personalizer

FeedHub, the Pittsburgh-based startup created by mSpoke, has just announced an update aimed at improving the relevancy of its personalized feed creator. I covered FeedHub when they launched back in September 2007, since then they have received a lot of user feedback which they used to plan and execute on this latest update.

myAOL Adds Some Themes

myAOL, the personalized startpage suite, has added a little more personal flair to its offering by launching the ability to select themes or skins for each page or tab on your personal dashboard. Now in addition to changing the background color users can select from one of six themes.

Ask Skins Get Even More Personal

Ask.com rolled out Ask 3D search in June 2006 and I was pleased by its simple, beautiful design which enables users to select from a couple of skins or backgrounds for the search experience. Ask has just enhanced the feature to offer users the ability to create their own skins for the Ask 3D experience. Users can now simply add there own skins to customize the Ask search background to any photo that they like. It takes about a minute or less to do and is actually quite fun.

OUTSHOUTS Makes The Music Go Round

OUTSHOUTS, a Palo Alto, California based three employee startup, takes 'making music going round' seriously. OUTSHOUTS enables anyone to act as a DJ to create and send their own mixes of your recorded voice and pre-recorded music or other content over email and text message directly to your mobile phone.

AideRSS Helps With RSS Information Overload

Managing information overload is not an easy task these days with all the blogs, feeds and other content options filling up my feed reader. How can a user better navigate to the items that might interest them the most? This is a tough problem to solve as every users is different. AideRSS is trying to solve this problem by helping to filter out the noise and deliver only the content the most popular content by sampling the wisdom of the crowds.

Dawdle Video Game Search & Marketplace

Dawdle, a Chicago-based startup, recently launched to offer video game lovers a new place to buy and sell games, gaming systems and accessories. Dawdle tries to take the hassle out searching for items online by devoting the site to matching buyers with sellers via an innovative matching engine.

Valley Earthquake Shakes Out Twitter's Value

If you don't understand the value of Twitter you might want to listen now. I was just on Twitter checking some friend updates when I saw one of my Twitter friends yelled, "EARTHQUAKE!" The earthquake hit just outside of San Jose but thanks to Twitter I had personalized alerts from several friends in the area as soon as the quake hit.

myAOL Intro at the Widget Summit

I spoke a few weeks ago at the Widget Summit in San Francisco on a panel dedicated to discussing the personal homepage space. The session was an hour long discussion with a cast of industry experts. I had a chance to get ahold of a video clip of my introduction. Additional footage will be coming out soon but I wanted to preview this video introducing myAOL to the Widget Summit crowd.

Own A Day In History On The Web

We all have special days in history for one reason or another. Maybe your special day is your birthday, an anniversary or the day you started your blog. Now you have the opportunity to purchase that day in history on the web. MyDaySpace.com, a St Louis based startup, launched recently to enable users to create a Web page dedicated to their own special day in history. 

Widget Summit Day One: Product Launches

I spent the day at the 2007 Widget Summit today as I spoke on a session about Personalized Homepages. The day was filled with some excellent sessions about, as you might guess, widgets in all ways, shapes and forms. Widget Summit closed day one with a launching pad which showcased three companies.