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.
Continue reading "Valley Earthquake Shakes Out Twitter's Value" »
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.
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.
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.
Continue reading "Widget Summit Day One: Product Launches" »
ffwd or "fast forward," a San Francisco-based startup formerly known as "Vadver," recently launched into private beta looking to offer users a discovery mechanism for online videos. ffwd is the brainchild Patrick Koppula, former COO of music recommendations site iLike. I got a chance to take a closer look at the private beta and provided some analysis.
Naymz, a web profile aggregator that I highlighted previously, offers
some interesting reputation metrics services. While you could setup web
alerts via a number of services Naymz aggregates these services into
one dashboard.
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.
Email management is something I have written about several times. Most recently, I highlighted Xobni which has helped organize and expose some of the hidden social aspects of email. However, Xobni does not file or read your mail for you. SimplyFile, an Outlook utility by TechHit, helps to organize and file your email in one click.
BAAGZ launched this past week at the DEMOfall 2007 conference to offer a social take on the personalized home page or startpage built on search. Built on the idea that a "baag" is a collection of sites, feeds, notes, videos and photos, Baagz enables users to organize and share their favorite stuff.
BeFunky, a startup which was founded as a spin off of the more manually artist driven IamCartoon project, offers a few fun little applications to allow users to easily create and customize photos as cartoons and create personal avatars. BeFunky recently showed its stuff at TechCrunch40.
Mixx launched last week to offer up a social news site for the mainstream to explore. Founded by Chris McGill, formerly of Yahoo and USA Today, Mixx aims to offer a place for large publishing companies to get into the social media space. Mixx enables users to contribute and discover stories, video and photos as they blend their own mix of the Web.
Having problems getting through all of your feeds in your reading list?
Keeping up with the latest news from all the various publications can
sometimes be as difficult as keeping up with your email where "email
bankruptcy" runs rampant. FeedHub, a product of Pittsburgh-based mSpoke,
has launched its personalized feed and recommendation product at the
2007 DEMOfall Conference. I was part of the FeedHub private beta program. FeedHub creates a personalized RSS feed from you
reading list and intelligently displays the most relevant post.
MeeVee, a Silicon Valley-based personalized TV startup, has recently announced a partnership with Amazon to offer TV content via their Unboxed Video Previewer widget. The MeeVee product offers a personalized TV listings and video content. With its sites set on being the a personalized Joost-like product without having to install any software MeeVee will now be leveraging Amazon's widget distribution channel. Amazon widgets can be found at: http://widgets.amazon.com.
Looking for a reaction from a tee shirt? Reactee offers the ability to create customized tee shirts that might just get the reaction you are looking for via SMS text message. Reactee, a project of TextMarks, allows a user to setup a keyword to text to 41411. By simply sending a specified keyword to 41411 you will receive a response text message created by the tee shirt creator.
Reactee tee shirts designs can include custom slogans, keywords and even images. Creating interactive human billboards, Reactee creators must have a US phone number to create account. Users can update their tee shirts as well as manage the message that a tee shirt sends.
Startup Mixology: Tech Cocktail's Guide To Building, Growing & Celebrating Startup Success by Frank Gruber
