Are you ever on the go and in need of answer? I often find myself in need of an answer the minute I step away from the computer and therefore cannot look it up. While having an iPhone has often remedied the problem, AskMeNow may be another possible solution. AskMeNow, an Irvine, California-based startup, is a mobile service for anyone with questions and looking for answers while on the go.
Continue reading "AskMeNow: Text Message Answers On The Go" »
Coming off the recent purchase of Quigo, AOL has acquired Yedda according to Haaretz.com and paidContent. Yedda is an Israeli community-driven answers site that I previously reviewed on Somewhat Frank.
Looking for a recommendation? Try This leverages user contributed questions and answers to offer recommendations. Try This reminds me of a cross between Digg and Yahoo Answers as it offers community recommendations by leveraging a question and answer format.
Are you looking for a little more out of the time and energy you spend on the Web? If so, you might want to check out a Passively Multiplayer Online Game or PMOG. A proposal created by Justin Hall, Passively Multiplayer Online Games look to create a game around your Web attention data. Justin Hall has been referred to by the NYTimes as the "the founding father of personal bloggers" and decided to create a game out of the Web with PMOGs as part of his Masters project at the USC Annenberg Center.
Is it just me or is Gabe Rivera turning up everywhere this week? It appears Gabe Rivera, the creator of techmeme and other news aggregator sites, had a very big week. I know Gabe is very modest, but I think the Mims song "This Is Why I'm Hot" might be an appropriate theme song for the past seven days - he has been all over the web.
First, BeetTV captured a rare video interview of Gabe where he reveals some of the details about the news aggregator platform he built and runs with his one man army.
Secondly, Mike Arrington pointed to this riveting video which leverages a Discovery Channel show format to capture a short video of Gabe in its natural habitat.
Finally, Gabe was interviewed for a piece in Wired. One of the great things about Gabe is that he is so down to earth. Though hounded by the media all week he took time out of his busy schedule to attend our first TECH cocktail in DC on Thursday night. Seems like a pretty good week to me.
Photo of the Week: Keyboard infestation could happen to anyone of us. Thanks to bhollar for capturing the moment on film.
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 04.29.07
Newsvine Relaunches... Announcing Evergreen
Mike Davidson proudly announced the first major overhaul of Newsvine since launching a little more than a year ago. It is now a personalized news page that you can customize to your liking.
The Tech Industry Is On Fire
Nick O'Neill explains how tech companies are banking these days, as one
company after another have come out with record
breaking profits.
Q&A With Google Personalization Gurus Sep Kamvar & Marissa Mayer
Search Engine Land offers up some interesting Q&A about personalization at Google.
Podcast: Taking Ajax offline
Offline
web applications are a hot topic, but often misunderstood. Dojo offers
an offline toolkit among others...this podcast talks through these
developments.
Warm Up To a Protected Advertising Climate
FeedBurner announced AdClimate, a new feature of the formidable FeedBurner ad server for blogs and RSS feeds. AdClimate gives marketers and advertisers the power to suppress their ads from being served into content they might deem questionable.
Firefox Extension: Smart Digg Button
The
Smart Digg Button extension for Firefox places a button in your status
bar. It uses the newly released Digg API to determine if the web page
you are currently viewing has been submitted to Digg.
(Text) Size is Everything When It Comes To Startpages
Kent
Newsome give some interesting perspective on the problems he sees with
text size controls on personalized startpage products. He believes
these applications need to give users a way to permanently set the text
size, preferably at the module level. He understands that you can
change text size at the browser level, but that makes every other page
look too big.
GreenDimes Reduces Snail Mail Spam
Everyone hates junk mail. Even though you tend to get more male enhancement solicitings in your spam email, real junk mail is actually harmful to the environment and keeps your counter-tops wonderfully messy. To keep it out of your mailbox, GreenDimes ($36 per year) will help reduce the amount if snail mail spam that comes your way.
DoMyStuff.com - Find People to Complete Your Chores
DoMyStuff.com is the solution to all of the chores you need to get done, but can never seem to find the time to do them. You post what you need to get done, and others post bids on how much they’re willing to do the job for.
Adobe Takes Flex Open Source
Adobe Systems announced this week that they will be open sourcing their
Adobe Flex framework so developers can access their source code to
enhance its ability to create Rich Internet applications.
The Filter Automates Playlists
606Tech examines The Filter, a service that automatically creates playlists for you to put on your computer, iPod or Nokia mobile phone. This recommendation system works similar to Pandora, FineTune and MyStrands.
Founded in September of 2006, BusinessPOV is a Chicago-based weekday video blog focused on profiling companies, people
and products that display elements of innovation, entrepreneurship and
creative culture. Following a short video format the site is organized to offer top stories and local knowledge. Both video types provide valuable insight for anyone looking to or currently running a business. BusinessPOV is produced by Mark Scheffler, a former staff reporter at Crain's Chicago Business
and award-winning contributor to the Chicago Tribune Magazine and his brother, Peter, is the co-founder of XFA, one of the largest independent brokerages at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
BusinessPOV recently attended TECH cocktail 4, an event I co-founded with Eric Olson, to highlight the event. Currently, the following videos are posted:
The Forces Behind Tech Cocktail
TechCocktail 4 Product Demos, Part 1: TimeXchange.net
TechCocktail 4 Product Demos, Part 2: Menuism
TechCocktail 4 Product Demos, Part 3: Text2Store
TechCocktail 4 Product Demos, Part 4: Zaplee.com
More to come…or subscribe to BusinessPOV updates.
If you want to attend a TECH cocktail in real life, be sure to RSVP for TECH cocktail DC 1 - coming soon to Washington, DC.
Photo of the week: robobunny by Courtney Brooke. Happy Easter.
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 04.08.07
DRM-Free Music
EMI announced DRM-free music earlier in the week and now Microsoft is hinting at doing the same. Is this the death of DRM?
500 million+!!! AOL'Sphere Goes Live
AOL and Sphere quietly turned on Sphere It in their AOL News, Sports and Entertainment articles. The Sphere It widget is great - I have one too on all my posts as it offers users the ability to find related content. Love it. If you would like one for your site be sure to check out the Sphere tools.
Google Personalizes Maps
Google Maps launched a new feature to its maps product this week (April
5, 2007) called My Maps with offers users the ability to personalize a
Google Map. My Maps enables anyone to draw, plot or color a Google Map
without having to know an ounce of coding knowledge thus bringing
simplified personal mapping to the masses.
Yahoo Testing Alpha (Beta) Multi Search
Search Engine Land covers Yahoo's launch of Alpha a new search experience. Alpha is really more of a multi-search tool that submits your query to multiple sources. It really reminds me of AOL FullView Search.
10 Things You Can Do With Mixed Media RSS
Marshall Kirkpatrick, of SplashCast Media, presents a list of ways to leverage mixed media feeds produced by SplashCast. He provides big-picture use-cases and explains how you can use other products I have previously reviewed like Tumblr, FeedBurner, ZapTxt and Rasasa to create some interesting feed mashups.
The Future of RSS
Read/Write Web looks at RSS today and asks if RSS is evolving into a tool for delivering complex, semantically rich information. A great article for anyone looking for information on RSS.
Technorati and the blog search wars
Mathew Ingram dissects Technorati's recent state of the blogosphere. It is still interesting to see how fast Technorati.com has been growing: over 9 million unique visitors in March, up 141 per cent in a single quarter, and double-digit growth every month in page views as well. Not bad.
Financing Web Work with Prosper.com
Prosper.com enables peer-to-peer loans for startups and anyone looking to do their own thing. If you are looking for funding you may want to check it out.
Zillow Relaunch - Adds Its Own Q&A Service
Every home in the Zillow database has its own dedicated page. Any user can now also add photos and information about any home and its neighborhood to the site. Users can also indicate if a home is for sale, and the asking price, as well as additional info.
Weblin’s Avatars Surf the Web with You
Kristen Nicole reviews the recent launch of Weblin, a program that lets you create a web avatar that travels with you on your web journey. According to the article when you come across a site where there are other Weblins, you’ll be able to see them and strike up a conversation. Chatting avatars on the web - interesting!
iminlikewithyou, an interesting new look at online flirting
iminlikewithyou is all about flirting, well, the art of flirting. Users sign up for the service and answer a few basic questions about themselves. Photos can be added as well as other personal information to be rewarded with valuable flirting points.
Widgets Arrive for the iPod
The iPod is still largely a closed development platform, but that's not stopping some folks from creating widgets that run on it. Steve Rubel points to two products from Kooloroo that bring handy information to the iPod.
We all have questions at one time or another and there are number of question and answer sites like Yedda, Yahoo Answers and Askville that facilitate a simple transaction between a user, who asks a question, and the web community, who attempts to provide an answer. Jabbits offers this same transaction but answers are provided by the web community in video format thus adding a rich experience to answers.
Some of Jabbits video answers could draw comparisons to those provided by VideoJug, a site that offers solely "how to" videos, but Jabbits question options are more open-ended thus offers a wider array of video options. Jabbits takes a question and answer site to the next level by providing rich media answers but Jabbits video sharing options were a little disappointing. For example, I could not find a way to embed an video into this article so you have to go back to the site to view video questions and answers. Unfortunately, video response also do not offer permanent links to enable linking directly to specific question and answers either. So without these two options it is very difficult to share any of the content. To the disadvantage of the product, Jabbits in not leveraging the viral benefits of video on the web.
Bottom-line: Jabbits is a user-driven question and answer site that offers answers in video format.
Remember having vocabulary lists in elementary school and your parents drilling you every day for the big end-of-the-week quiz? And then middle school – as if English wasn’t bad enough - enter vocabulary in another language altogether.
Thankfully, it’s been a long time since I’ve had to brave those terrors. But soon students will be able to leverage a fantastic new resource: Quizlet. Created by Andrew Sutherland, a high school student and self-proclaimed boy genius, Quizlet takes the tedium out of vocabulary.
Operating under the premise that a) students need to better retain their knowledge and b) there has to be a better way to study for those tests, Quizlet takes on many roles so that students can get those words memorized for good:
Quizlet’s functionality is pretty simple: you enter or import words and definitions, and then Quizlet tests you through various mediums including flashcards, specialized tests and collaboration with friends until the list is mastered. A screen shot of the application is shown below. Additional features include foreign language capabilities and discussion capabilities so students can vent about the merciless teachers that assign vocabulary.
Photo Attribution: density quiz 11/17 taken by Jack Lyons
There are a number of Q & A web sites, like Yahoo Answers, Yedda and Grupthink among others, that have recently emerged to embrace a large number of users looking to get their questions answered. VideoJug takes a slightly different approach to helping people to find answers online. VideoJug is a video web site with International, UK and US versions, focused on helping to explain life in 'how to' videos. VideoJug helps to answer questions like:
How to tie a full windsor knot?
How to perform the perfect golf swing?
How to conceal bags under your eyes?
VideoJug produces several of the videos itself but also offers users the ability to upload their own 'how to' videos. VideoJug 'how to' videos are accompanied by a transcribed version of the instructions which can be uploaded to an iPod 0r printed in text version. Videos are categorized into a number of different categories which all offer RSS feeds of the content. Registered users are offered the ability to save their favorite videos. VideoJug viral hooks include the ability to share videos via email and embed videos into other sites (as shown below in the How to Make a Mojito video).
Bottom-line: If you are trying to figure out 'how to' do something new you might want to search VideoJug for some visual directions.
Startup Mixology: Tech Cocktail's Guide To Building, Growing & Celebrating Startup Success by Frank Gruber
