The Christian community obviously decided that the Vatican Myspace account wasn’t enough, and they needed more ways of engaging with the online community. Thus Godtube, now known as Tangle (presumably because God told them to change the name) was developed. Their tagline:
We help unite the Body of Christ by allowing you to connect with other Christians, Share the Gospel & grow in your relationships – All for the glory of Jesus Christ.
The site is essentially a Christian themed media channel, with boards for Christian music, user submitted videos about Christianity and discussing religion in general (supposedly allowing comment from both Christians and Atheists, but you’ve got to ask yourself which right minded moderate atheist is going to be hanging out on a God-themed social networking website), profile pages for Christians, a Christian version of Flickr, where you can post your photos for Christians to look at… Basically, an ugly version of Facebook, with added Christ. Oh, and they’ve got a store, http://www.christiangiver.com/ where you can buy lots of nice Heaven Approved products.
They monitor and approve all content before it is allowed to go live, “tangle differentiates itself from other social networks by monitoring and approvingall content before it goes live on the site, which works to provide a safe and secure online experience.” [quote from their Wikipedia entry] – this may indeed help stop arguments getting out of hand, and 4chan style trolling, but it doesn’t seem to me that it would be conducive to free and open debate, and some of the things they approve seem like the usual old right wing conservative scaremongering, or lonely crackpots spouting religious diatribes. Still, we have to give marks for effort; at least they’re trying to stay engaged in discussion.
I find it a little disturbing when people try to put the seal of divine approval on essentially commercial things; this site doesn’t flaunt it’s Holiness in your face, and seems quite laid back and open, so perhaps I should be more open minded in turn, but who regulates these things? Seemingly anyone could purport to be speaking for a religious community or market you any old product with the name of a deity in their mouth, and have nothing to substantiate the support of that religion, or to differentiate their product from the next online service/coffee maker/radio alarm clock. Ultimately, religious bodies are so diverse that no one voice speaks for them all, but there are a lot of faces and voices on Tangle, and if you like your society with a whiff of pews and incense, then this might be the place for you – personally I don’t know why the God-fearing can’t just mingle with the rest of us sinners online – it seems a little insular.
So your wallet’s feeling a little light after Christmas? We’ve all got to save where we can in this dismal financial climate, and freeshipping.org is intended to help do just what it says in the URL: save you money on buying consumer goods by finding offers that save you the shipping and other costs when you make a purchase. They seem essentially to be ferreting out links and deals as they are announced online and posting them on their homepage – there’s no rhyme or reason to who is making offers at any given moment, but they have the coupons and deals organised by store, so if you’re considering a purchase from a particular shop or band you might do well to click over there and check if there’s a deal on.
They are also running a price comparison program, but it’s a little clunky and hard to navigate, and doesn’t give you a lot of information about the sources they’re searching to bring you the They do have a lot of products listed by category, from iPhones to Plasma TV’s by the way of glow-in-the-dark paintballs, but I certainly wouldn’t reccomend making a purchase based solely on what you find here – instead click around the other big sites and use them as a benchmark (yes, I know I’m teaching my granny to suck eggs here). If you happen to be based in the UK, another useful website that holds a lot of consumer information, particularly on financial products, and that mails out lists of deals and freebies from time to time is moneysavingexpert.com, from the same team that put together music price comparison site http://tunechecker.com/, a site designed to save you money on buying .mp3’s.
Lost your sleeve notes? Don’t waste time trawling Wikipedia to find out where that sample is from… Whosampled is a user submitted and moderated database of the beats samples and loops that have been used by major artists throughout their career, as well as who has sampled which of their tunes. A useful tool for research and music discovery and well worth a quick browse of your favourite artists to find out who their influences are. A recently founded website, and one that has seen rapid growth of its user base as well as its database, and one that could be useful to music producers looking for inspiration, but not likely to take the world by storm!
The iPhone app store now hosts 100,000 apps from producers other than apple, with 2 billion(!) downloads across the board. Having your own promotional application plugs you into your customers in a convenient and content rich way, whether those people are Taxicab customers, restaurant patrons, music fans or members of a religious organisation (they have a special category for ‘Places of Worship’). For the smaller operator that doesn’t have their own in-house programmer, the tricky thing is hunting down a developer who will build your product quickly and cheaply. Mobile Roadie offers a sub $2K alternative to pitching on Odesk and hoping you get a good product. Their standard product can be filled with your own content, including music, pictures, videos, news feeds, event lists, forums, twitter feeds and more, and can push user-submitted data to facebook and twitter accounts.
Their standard model is a little inflexible, but for an extra $500 they’ll design you a custom skin, and you can add things like push notification (messages that will pop up on screen for a group targeted by e.g. location, age, gender) for additional fees. A relatively cheap and simple way to get a functional tool up on the app store, just watch the costs. You might even end up making some money out of your app. depending on how you want to serve it – Mobile Roadie are keen to impress on you just how powerful a platform the iPhone is… I wonder how many Apple shares the dev. team has?
As a website owner, one normally has to pick and choose between a range of off the shelf ‘creatives’, display ads, banners or keyword sets from ad networks like Adsense, Tribal Fusion or DoubleClick that are provided by the people who want to sell their products, Dell, Amazon, Chevrolet etc. These ads often clash with a publisher’s website, and can run out of inventory and revert to remnant or filler ads selling tooth whitening products or smileys, depending on how one sets up the account. Bedrock offers a different type of ad exchange, where publishers design their own ad slots on their website – a tech blog like ours might offer a link to a web hosting service, or an ISP, and instead of using the advertisers’ own ad format, we would provide a text link, or own-branded display ad that links through to whichever approved service provider makes the highest bid for the particular click that comes through that link. The ad will stay the same, but the advertisers bid on the inventory listed by the publisher (site owner), meaning that one click on the link saying, “buy a new laptop” might go to Amazon, and the next to eBay, depending on which of them is prepared to pay the most for the traffic, on a click by click basis.
It’s an intriguing idea, but one that depends on having a large number of advertisers on the roster to compete with one another – and Bedrock will have a tough time dragging those people away from the traditional services, abandoning the freedom to use their own ads in the process. On the other hand, it does put more power in the hands of the publishers to control the content of their own website, and push the ad content that earns them money on their own terms – after all, they know their user base best, and can adapt to serve their needs better. Another tool in the advertising arsenal can’t be bad. If you have any experience using Bedrock, please post a comment!
wi.nr is a link shortening service, much like bit.ly, tinyurl.com and dwarfurl.com, except that after you’ve signed up, every time you create a link and post it in an email, tweet or webpage, people click on it, you’re entered into a sweepstake to win a prize. You also get an entry when you click on a wi.nr link, more clicks, more entries – each entry is given a time stamp, and the first one clicked on after the randomly generated winningtime gets that day’s prize. At the moment they’re giving away 8 gig iPod Nanos, but if you’ve already got one, fear not, the prize will change on the 11th of Dec.
The cost of these prizes is funded by the ads served when you click on a wi.nr link, so if you feel like your online day is already overstuffed with ads then you should probably steer away; not ideal for sending links to business acquaintances! On the other hand, if you’re forwarding that video of the sneezing panda to your circle of friends, then you might as well give it a go, if you win, it’s one less Christmas present to buy, and no-one else offers you a free lottery entry to do something you would do anyway.
Classics, Nanos, Shuffles, Touches – Apple have made so many different shapes of iPod that you need adaptors for practically every accessory you can buy. Apple likes things to look sleek and neat, so having fiddly bits of plastic to swap over for each of the many iPods they would like you to buy (you couldn’t possibly take your 60GB classic jogging with you!) is not acceptable, and so for all the neat freaks and must-have-it Apple fans, they’re developing a universal dock to accommodate all different shapes and sizes. They’ve filed a patent for, as they phrase it:
A dock for supporting a plurality of differently-shaped electronic devices, the dock comprising: a housing; a connector coupled to the housing; and a compressible support layer positioned at least partially about the connector, wherein at least a portion of the compressible support layer compresses to the shape of at least a portion of an electronic device that is attached to the connector.
Featuring:
A method for supporting a plurality of differently-shaped electronic devices in a dock that includes a compressible support layer positioned at least partially about a connector, the method comprising:attaching an electronic device to the connector of the dock; compressing at least a first portion of the compressible support layer with at least a portion of the bottom of the electronic device when the electronic device is attached to the connector; and supporting at least a portion of a side of the electronic device with at least a second portion of the compressible support layer when the electronic device is attached to the connector.
Which translates to a standard iPod connector in the middle of a squashy or springy surround, which you compress part of by pushing your iPod into, the uncompressed part supporting the sides of the device, perhaps a bit like one of those pin-art pads that were fashionable around when the Lawnmower Man came out.
Since this is a tech blog, there’s a good chance most readers know that their Domain Name System is what compares the typed URL of a website against the IP number of a given website. http://crenk.com, for example translates to 954.236.55.186 on your DNS, which then points your browser to the right place. This checking process has to happen before the page you’ve requested starts downloading, a process that generally takes a fraction of a second.
Google has decided that this fraction of a second is too long for it’s valuable customers to wait, and is now providing its own publicly available DNS. You can change your network settings to point at their service from the one that your ISP uses. Should you bother? Only if your network is making thousands of lookups a minute. For domestic use the 0.01 of a second that switching DNS could save you is largely irrelevant, but if your network is dealing with hundreds of thousands of lookups, as in a big office building or other massive corporate environment, then you could significantly reduce the wait time for your network, which might filter down enough to be appreciable by individual users on your system.
Of course, google will then know every single page that every single user on your system uses, an information gathering facility which is more likely to be their motivation for providing the service than any altruistic time-saving opportunity for users.
You’ve finished work on Friday night, you’re in the pub and you want to find out what bands are playing near you tonight. These iPhone apps are here to solve your problem: Gigzee will use your phone’s GPS positioning in conjunction with Google Maps to tell you who’s playing up to three days in advance at venues within a certain radius (default is 2 miles, but you can set it to be whatever you want). The app draws down information from Myspace, as well as from user submissions, but only a small minority of bands are using it, mostly in the US, so don’t expect a comprehensive service. That said, it’s free and easy to use, so you can’t lose out, and if you visit their website, they’ll give you a list of gigs in your area over a much longer duration. A smart thing to do might be to ask the venues in your area to sign up to the service and update their myspace profiles sensibly, but that’s a bit proactive for all but the most dedicated music fan.
Bandloop approaches the problem from the opposite angle, asking you to add a set of bands that you’re interested in, and then feeding you information on when they’re going to be where – a band based rather than a geography based approach. They also make a Strong Badreference on their site, so they can’t be bad! This is another free app, supported by ads.
The Jambase app allows you to approach from either perspective, with the same current-location GPS functionality as Gigzee (although you can still put in a different area code if you want to know who’s playing elsewhere), and the ability to add favourite artists to a roster that will update a gig calendar for you. It also features music samples dragged down from LaLa.com, and links to ticket-purchasing sites, although this only really works for major artists.
The most pro-active (read laziness enabling) app in this field is iConcertCal, which will scan through your iPhone (or iTunes) and figure out who your favourite bands are based on the plays they’ve had from your catalogue, and then auto-generate a list of the gigs that they’re playing in your area. The plug in seems to work pretty well, but since it’s based on your iTunes list, you’re a bit stuffed if you use Spotify Premium or any other apps that bypass the iPod’s official-Apple-product contents.
Any one of these products should help you avoid this kind of disaster:
I’ve got family that commute to work abroad, and there’s nothing more boring than cutting laps around the block or sitting in the short term parking waiting for them to show up only to find out that their flight has been delayed 2 hours, and you could have been at home watching videos on Crunchyroll.
Flightcaster.com has recently received $1.3 million dollars to help them develop and market a piece of software that will help avoid this situation: their service (currently only available on US domestic flights) runs a consistently (90% so far) accurate, real-time update on how late any given flight will be on arrival. Departures are harder to predict, due to the greater number of variables – did the luggage guys go on a smoke break, did Mr. Johnson in 26F check in online and then miss his ride to the airport, did a gentleman in a Djellaba walk past the terminal building, that kind of thing – but once an airplane is on the departure runway, Flightcaster uses data from:
Bureau of Transportation Statistics
FAA Air Traffic Control System Command Center
FlightStats
National Weather Service
to predict and monitor flight progress, meaning that you’ll never have to orbit the arrivals terminal again. You can also download their software as an iPhone or Blackberry app, so you can (pull over and) check the flight on your way to the airport.
Crunchyroll was born in 2006, hosting a mix of user submitted and site provided anime clips, many of which were uploaded without rights holders permission, although infringing videos were usually removed by site admin. Despite this somewhat bumpy start, Crunchyroll quickly gained a vast userbase, climbing into Alexa’s top 200 within 2 years of its conception, and got funded at the beginning of last year (March) by Venrock (a California based venture capital firm) to the tune of about $4 million USD.
A stricter approach to copyright infringement and the weight of their user base and a newly cut, seven figure cheque behind them meant that they were able to secure content licensing deals with Japanese providers, bringing exclusive and simulcast content over from Japan to their largely American audience. They now stream and broadcast only content to which they have legitimate license, and operate a membership program to get access to content earlier than it’s normally available for streaming, and to watch high-def versions of videos.
I think this is a great example of a site managing to turn popular appeal into a solid business model in the icanhascheezburger.com mould. Take a pretty unique type of content, build a user base, and exploit that user base hard and fast, while trimming away any hint of illegality. Skating the Web 2.0 copyright infringment maelstrom for a while might be dangerous, but once you’ve got the traffic, then you’ve got bargaining power, and if you can get some financial backing, or really get on top of your advertising proposition then the rewards can be huge.
Israel based company Fring have been offering VoIP calls from your mobile handset to their own users, but now they’ve introduced the ability to make video calls over your compatible mobile phone’s data connection. More than this, you can also video call people on Skype, Facebook, Google Talk and a few other video clients, as well as co-ordinating all your friends via their online buddy list. Once you’ve got your friends together on a list, you can also tie in IM conversations and posting web clips to people via Fring’s interface.
Fring video calls are currently available on Nokia X6, N97 mini, N97, 5800, N95 8G and N95 devices as well as Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile, J2ME and Linux devices, and the company plans to launch video calling on the iPhone (the VoIP app is already available on the iPhone, but it does not yet include video). Of course, while the VoIP protocol will mean you use less of your contracted minutes, it will burn through your mobile data connection; make sure you are in range of your Wireless router, or go for the unlimited bandwidth option if you’re going to rely on Fring to make calls.
Here’s an example of their application in action.
If all you want to do is get all your IM friends in one place, you could also go over and check out EBuddy, who run a pretty good service.
The Christian community obviously decided that the Vatican Myspace account wasn’t enough, and they needed more ways of engaging with the online community. Thus Godtube, now known as Tangle (presumably because God told them to change the name) was developed. Their tagline:
You’ve finished work on Friday night, you’re in the pub and you want to find out what bands are playing near you tonight. These iPhone apps are here to solve your problem: 
