Archive for the ‘Web Apps’ Category
Heard of Twitter? Sure the whole world has by now. Lone tribes on far islands have heard about Twitter. This massively immersive and widely used micro-blogging network has become a staple for both our personal and professional lives. The world seems to still be feeling the “Twitter effect” as industries adapt their existing messages to fit the fast paced world of this social network.
But do you ever feel like you’re being left behind? Perhaps not enough time to get the right message in a timely fashion? Now there’s a solution to that.
Twuffer presents itself as the buffer between you and your timed messages. By using the web application, you are able to preset messages on a timed schedule to be released on your network at the times you think most important. The possibilities of this type of functionality are as endless as your creativity.
The web app is easy to use and can serve you to better time your announcements, set reminders for yourself or others, engage in timed online activities, or, as the site suggests, make it appear as if you never sleep. The practicality of this app seems pretty straightforward.
The application is currently in beta, but your able to explore what it has to offer pretty seamlessly. I suggest you give it a try to announce regular days when your podcast or blog post will go live, or perhaps some other similar campaign to see if Twuffer is right for you!
Today finding the music you want, when you want it has been channeled to using sites like the Amazon store or iTunes. Sometimes, when looming for an obscure song that is not mainstream, you’d be lucky to find it. This frustrating experience paired with the perceived greedines of corporate music labels has forced many of us to find our music on peer to peer networks or bitorrent sites such the Pirate Bay.
Songbeat360.com is an amazingly innovative way of integrating a music player with a music search. Now you can listen to your favorite songs while searching for more. You are essentially still building your own station, much like Pandora or Last.fm, but on this music player you have the ability to download your music immediately.
Bypassing the need to go to the likes of Amazon or iTunes may please some, but does the pricing compare? Based on the site, the application is an Adobe Air app, and comes with 25 free credits. Credits are used when a search is done, and searches are supposedly capable of returning up to 500 results, ensuring you will fond what you need. For further credits, those can be purchased via a stored credit card. For $15 you receive 1000 credits for more music, which breaks down to a whole lot less than $.99 per song on the iTunes store. This is of course assuming you find what you want in one search.
Is the next revolution to your music search? I’d say know, but it’s definitely interesting. The pricing alone is attractive, and if the quality is the same, I can see this web app becoming extremely successful.
It has been reported that MSN.com is rolling uot a new version over time. You can preview the new version at http://preview.msn.com.
I never knew that more than 1/3 of all Internet users worldwide visit MSN every month. 400 million people per month. Thats nearly as good as Yahoo’s 600 million and killing AOL’s 80 million. But still, it’s the most popular Internet portal that no one actually ever goes to.
In the new version everything is a lot cleaner and easier to read. They have integrated Facebook and Twitter nicely and more videos. Additionally, you will notice the simplicity of the Bing search bar which provide no clutter.
Microsoft have also reported that more than half of their monthly visitors use Facebook on a monthly basis, as well as 15% using Twitter. These are the key reasons why these services are added but not much else.
Social networks as they exist depend on the number of friends you start off with and thus you expand your network based on your existing network and grow from there. For many, not having an online presence makes it heard to start a social network when there is no online network to utilize to start. For many this can be frustrating and for many becomes the reason why they do not adopt the social scene. What if there was simply a network that didn’t rely on existing friendships and paired you with new people based on your profile to participate in unique shared experiences?
6Rounds is the answer and the unique network is sure to make a splash in the world of social engagement.
The network itself is designed to be a fully interactive experience incorporating the best of micro-messaging and video networks. There’s now a space for those not interested in hosting entire video shows, or who lack friends to build on a social profile on
Facebook or
Twitter.
6Rounds functions as a completely unique and diverse network that no user will get the same experience from their engagement. The network allows users to come together in a “live” setting where they will be challenged with “using a combination of webcams, real-time games, social activities and media engagements, we present a wide range of opportunities: from watching videos, playing real-time games, listening to music, Facebooking and Youtubing, to shopping together and beyond,” says the site.This sound a little like speed dating with the entertainment provided, and none of the relationship awkwardness attached. I can see how this would be appealing to both veteran and new entry supporters of social engagement.
The network is free and looks to combine the best of social networking, instant messaging, and video content to create an ever changing user experience.
Allmyapps makes software installation a breeze. No matter how many applications you need, 1 click is all you need to have all your favorite applications installed on your PC. Allmyapps also keeps your applications safe! Would you need to reinstall your system, Allmyapps takes care of reinstalling all your favorite applications in the blink of an eye.
With Allmyapps, installing software applications has become so easy that you’ll soon find yourself installing a lot of great new applications! Be prepared to enjoy your computer like never before! Allmyapps provides some great application ideas that I have never even heard of, but I’m sure they can make me a lot more product, but on the other side there are a lot of time killers out there!
As the digital music market grows, there are more and more players entering the digital distribution market, getting artists music onto iTunes, E-music, Amazon MP3, Rhapsody and the other big online stores. These aggregators represent a variety of different models, ranging from The Orchard’s more traditional ‘intensively involved’ regime, where they take a hand in promoting their artists through a home-grown press network, but help themselves to a large chunk of the back end (think around 35%) of all sales of their partners’ music, to Tunecore’s flat-rate model, where they take a $0.99 a song, $0.99 a store per album fee, plus a $9.99 – $19.98 annual fee per release. Our favourite of the available digital music distribution products is provided by RouteNote; instead of charging up front or subscription fees to artists who may never make the sales to cover the charges, or gouging large lumps out of the back end profits (they take 10%, which seems pretty modest next to the Orchard’s slice).
Currently their model works out to be the cheapest route to market for artists selling less than 20,000 units online (tracks) annually, which is pretty much everyone starting out in the industry, plus they have a few tools and guides to facilitate artist self promotion. They’re still reasonably small (their artist roster is just over 1,500 at the moment) but we’re looking for them to grow quickly over the coming months, particularly if they get a little more press.
Disclosure: This article was written by Dashiel Munding. Im currently CEO of RouteNote.
So Twitter lists launched last week and over the weekend we all the the chance to take a look see, make a few lists and figure out just what it was all for. As it happens it’s a pretty cool feature which connects you with more people of the same interests giving Twitter even more of a social feel without taking away from the whole ‘Get it off your chest aspect’.
Now, the weekend has come and gone and the Twitter developers have plopped a Lists Widget into our laps for us to play with on our sites and blogs. Here’s what it looks like.
Basically, it works in the same way as other Twitter widgets except instead of showing the tweets of just one person is shows the tweets of everyone who is in that list. I can see this being a massive hit in the blogosphere because building community and adding new features to blogs are two of the most important things for a blogger to consider – well the list widget hits the nail on the head.
I tested it out and while it looks good and gets the job done the widget can be a little slow or sluggish but that’s to be expected seeing as it’s only out a single day. I’m sure the developers are on to it – they’ve had enough practice to know what to do when something is down, broken, sluggish or ‘over capacity’.
Get the Twitter lists widget for your blog right here.
I’m an online freelance writer which means that I do most of my work sitting behind my computer except for the odd event I may have to attend or journey I may have to make. My job has completely different parameters than any other job the general population would have. One of these differences is the issue of time; more specifically the amount I allocate to work.I don’t punch in so I have to keep track of it all.
I like to keep track of how long I actually work so that I know my business is actually profitable is so far as I’m not working for buttons per hour. So I could just jot it down right? I guess so. But then we all have a tendency to forget to do so and even round up our figures so we’re not working with sloppy numbers when totaling it all up. Well Yast, an online timer has solved my problems.
To put it simply, you click the play button to begin timing and the stop button to stop; but that’s putting it simply.
Along the top of the screen there is a timing bar that illustrates how long you’ve worked and when on a particular project. You can have multiple projects so for me these are the following:
Work
Novel
Blog
For the average person you could see how long you spend playing games, how much time you devote to your blog or basically any other project you partake it; computer based or not.
If you need a timer – Yast is your best bet.
eBooks are becoming more and more popular these days and Crenk just wanted to let you know the best places on the web to find eBooks.
eBook Search Engines
www.pdfgeni.com
www.pdf-search-engine.com
www.data-sheet.net
Scribd.com
Scribd is basically the YouTube of documents. They have a great library of free ebooks to choose from.
Free Ebooks For Your iPod, PDA, Smartphone, Blackberry etc.
www.gutenberg.org
www.manybooks.net
www.feedbooks.com
www.booksinmyphone.com
Free Tech eBooks
www.freecomputerbooks.com
www.freetechbooks.com
A lot of people have big issues converting files from PDF format to any other format. Today, I wanted to run through converter programs which change PDF files to JPG (image) files for both Mac and PC.
Zamzar
Zamzar is probably the most well known file conversion site. The process is simplicity personified: Choose the file to convert then choose the format to convert to (e.g. JPG) then enter your email address to receive the converted file then convert. The minuses with the free service are that the file size is limited to 100MB with just 5 simultaneous conversions. Also, you might feel a wee bit uneasy uploading sensitive data without encryption support.
YouConvertIt
YouConvertIt is a new site that lets you upload 5 files at a time and then convert them from PDF to JPG format.
Neevia Document Converter
Neevia Technology has a web interface which facilitates the conversion of PDF documents to image files. Select the conversion settings and upload your file. The converted file can be rendered in the browser or can be downloaded via an email link. Two dropdowns further give you control over image quality and resolution. The only visible restriction is the 1MB file upload size limit.
If you are wary of uploading sensitive files over the net, you need to look beyond the online solutions to something much more local. Thankfully these three pieces of free software take up the task.
PDF-Xchange Viewer
PDF-Xchange Viewer is a light feature-rich PDF document reader. The free version of the software is a capable document handler with most of the standard features expected. Add comments and annotations, mark-up pages with texts and objects, type within the PDF document along with plug-ins for both IE and Firefox are also included.
But the feature which interests us is the ability of the software to export a file or a page to the supported image formats like JPEG, BMP, TIFF, PNG and more.
Open the PDF file in the viewer, click on File – Export to Image and the dialog opens up where you can set the pages to convert, the image type to convert to and the destination folder. More importantly, the ‘Export Mode’ setting allows you to designate the number of image files for the subject PDF file. The ‘Page Zoom’, ‘Resolution’ and ‘Page Background’ also allow added finishing touches.
It’s a well-known facts that some leading products such as window cleaner or breath freshener are based on some of the most well-known products and items that we have lying around our houses – for hundreds of years. Take for example newspaper and vinegar. The two would seem utterly unrelated yet when you clean a window with the two it sparkles and shines just as it would if you had of forked out $4.50 for window cleaner.
AltUse is a cool website that I found which shows you alternative uses for almost every product you have lying around your house, office, school and back garden. From lemons to aspirin it has it covered.
Each item has it own page where all of the different uses are outlines. Each different use has its own pictures and instructions. You can also submit your own alternative uses to the site by signing up.
The site has other features for each product such as a section for users to rate the alternative use and perhaps even more appealing – how much money you can save by taking the alternative route. Check it out at www.altuse.com .
Many sites such as MegaVideo, Vreel and other offer the ability to watch some of our favourite TV shows and Movies. However, does that time limit put in place by Megavideo bother you? Or how about just wanting to watch it on your iPod? So why not download the videos? Oh yeah, they charge you for that.
Well, here at Crenk we have a quick, easy and FREE way to download videos from sites like Megavideo.
1. Get the video’s URL. Most players offer this next to the embed code for the video etc… or in the address bar in the browser. In Megavideo it’s one of the options along the bottom of the screen.
2. Go to www.clipnabber.com .
3. Enter the space provided at Clip Nabber. Press ‘Nab It!”
4. Then (required for Megavideo only), go back to the video page and right click outside of the video and view the page’s source. Or, click edit in the Browser’s menu and select to view it there. Select all of the code and paste it into the HTML box that appeared in ClipNabber.
5. Press ‘Nab It!” again.
6. Click on the link to download the video.
Now chances are that Clip Nabber has given you a .FLV video which can only be played in Real Player. To convert this into an .mp4 or .avi, use this video converter.
Now you can put the video on your iPod.
