Archive for the ‘Web Apps’ Category
Knowing what users do on your site can be extremely helpful. Why? Simply, because it gives you the opportunity to optimize your pages so that the premium features and advertisements get the very best attention.
ClickTale is a program for websites that records what users do on your website. Basically, it gives you back a video of just what they’re up to showing you where they pause, click, read and ultimately leave your site. This program can help you fix problems with your page to keep users on it longer.
There are four different membership levels. The most basic is ‘Free’ which is recommended for small-time bloggers. This will show you what 400 random users have been up to and give you somewhat of an idea of how to improve your site. However, the real goodies come as you progress up into Bronze, Silver and Gold.
With these membership programs you get a heat map which shows you the most active parts of your webpage, recordings of thousands of visitors and customer support via telephone.
This is a great piece of kit to for any website to have whether your visitor numbers are soaring or floundering. It’s always good to know where you can improve. So whether you blog or own a cool start-up, ClickTale is for you.
ScreenTunes is a free search tool that helps users find where a song has been played in any piece of professionally-produced video content. You just type in the name of the song and it tells you all the films and TV shows in which it’s appeared. You can then listen to the track right from the results (using Grooveshark), or purchase the track on iTunes or Amazon’s online stores.
Along with acting as a search tool for individual songs, ScreenTunes can be used to look up a track by its lyrics. This also works on entire movie titles, so you can type the name to get a quick track list.
ScreenTunes is a very hit and miss service at the moment and I noticed it takes a lot time to actually load the Grooveshark section at times. Additionally, I noticed there are still lots of searches that yield zero results, I guess they will build their catalogue size over time. Clearly you get better results if it’s a mainstream track, but it’s surprising to see how many places any one song can end up.
I came across a great little service this morning from one of our readers who commented on one of our other articles. They recommended that we check out the Twitter service called Geochirp. GeoChirp is a great web app that allows you to see who is talking about what in what location, all via Twitter.
With GeoChirp you input your location and then set the radius and the number of tweets you want to be able to see. Once that is all done GeoChirp finds people from that location and shows you their tweets. GeoChirp also hooks in to Google Maps which allows you to exactly see where that person is based.
GeoChirp is a very interesting idea however apart from providing basic entertainment purposes im not too sure why a lot of people who use this in their daily lives.
Voddler is a new video startup that launch back in private beta back in July 2009. Currently it is rumoured that only 1,500 people have access to the site, so we wanted to run through the service for everyone else.
Voddler won’t be launched officially until sometime this fall, and then only in the Nordic countries for starters. The agenda is to go global, though.
Voddler aims to do for movies and TV series what Spotify is doing for music. Although in private beta Voddler already seems to be getting a lot of buzz in Scandinavia, so we hope to let everyone else know about it.
Voddler is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, Voddler will also be providing a Linux-based box with a pre-installed client that you can easily connect to your TV to get that home cinema feel.
Here below is a screenshot of the latest design of the landing page, designed to work best on widescreen televisions.
Movies are of course a lot more bandwidth-intensive than music. How well Voddler works for you will depend on your Internet connection. To get 1080p HD quality you should have an 8 Mbit/s connection, for 720p HD quality you should have a 5 Mbit/s connection, and for DVD quality you should have a 2.5 Mbit/s connection. Contrast this with Spotify which only has to deal with music streaming and therefore works just fine with a mere 256 kbit/s connection.
Ever been on a buddy’s computer, at work or just in a very low-tech situation? Yet you still want to chat with your friends on your IM service of choice, or perhaps even chat with friends across all the popular IM services at the same time!? Well Meebo is a cool app that I found that will let you do just that.
It’s entirely web-based so it requires no download. All you have to do is go to the homepage and sign in. It will then detect your current friends on what ever service you decide to use and you can start chatting to them using the messaging window (which is basic but what do you expect?).
It supports several IM services such as MSN, GTalk, AIM and Yahoo IM. And it’s not only for instant messaging. Meebo also carries some of the popular social networking sites such as FaceBook and MySpace.
When you’re actually using it everything is simple and easy to use. It’s no problem at all to get to grips with – which is handy seeing as you’ll likely only use it a few times as a back-up. To summarise, a great web app that will come in handy for the power user but I fear a little outdated for most situations given the amount of mobile tech we have.
Sometimes giving something a name can be the hardest thing in the entire world. Take a look at all the successful business around you and look at their names. They all mean nothing! Esso and Texeco being a few good examples. If you’re starting a blog, website or multinational company having a name that means nothing can be one of your most important assets.
Wordoid does the job for you. It created words that sound natural and roll off the tongue easily but mean absolutely nothing. Think of them as words that could have been.
When you first get to the website, you just fill out the small criteria seen in the screenshot. This includes any actual word or syllable you want in your new word and select what languages you want it to appear natural in. When you continue a list of words will be created. Furthermore, it will tell you if the ‘.com’ and the ‘.net’ variations of the domain are available and how many times that word appears on the internet to gauge its popularity and acceptability.
It’s as easy as that. Once find a word you like you’re finished.
This web app is incredibly easy to use and you’re given results within seconds of entering the site. Next time I’m creating a blog I’ll be using Wordoid.
Trailer Reviews is a new site that is getting a bit of hype at the moment. Trailer Reviews does exactly what it says on the tin and allows users to watch movie trailers online without downloading anything. The site is aimed to provide users with up to date tailers and reviews about what is new in 35mm cinema.
The site itself comprises a comprehensive list of categories ranging from horror to action to comedy. Apart from just providing video trailers it is a great resource to see what other users think of the movies and what ratings each movie has received.
Trailer Reviews is relatively new and it is going to take some time to get all the resources in one place and build a community around the site. However, I think it is a good idea but not sure how much traction they are going to get in a very busy market.
There are probably a dozen other web apps like it, but none as cool as Ingboo, and none that do their job half as well. Keeping things in the one place isn’t that hard of a task. Just set up some RSS feeds, subscribe to a few sites, create a twitter profile and only use YouTube. Wait, that’s not really keeping things in the one place. That’s keeping things in several places with you hoping it all balances out, right?
Ingboo is a cool new web app that takes all of the feeds you have, your accounts such as your twitter and your online interests such as finding a job, low prices on products or simply flagging keywords for you and puts then all in one place. It’s incredibly simple to use also.
When you first go to the homepage, you’ll see all the services. They’re under tabs such as News, Jobs, Entertainment, Sport and Popular.
Let’s say you click on the YouTube button. You’ll be greeted by the screen seen below. All you have to do is fill out the form and all of the related YouTube videos will be keeps on file for you. Simple. It’s the same process for tweets, jobs, news, entertainment, sport, business, blogs and just about any other website form you can think of!
If you like the online realms to the point where you have things flying at your from all angles, then Ingboo is something you should be seriously considering as your new best friend.
I’m more of a Twitpic man myself. All my Twitpic pictures are of random things I saw such as a cool old train on Sunday or a weird seal chilling in a harbour. The URL which links to my pictures is of course a Twitpic one. But now, what about the millions of other people who upload photos or send links via YouTube to their Twitter. Because twitter allows a maximum of 140 characters per tweet you must make everything count.
Now, Bitly (or bit.ly as you may see it in tweets) is teaming up with Yfrog to provide an image uploading service on twitter. Bitly were given their first big break when their URL was officially built into twitter, replacing the well-known TinyURL. The new image service which will allow users to upload images via the Bitly website and automatically sync it with their twitter is due to be live by the end of the month.
Bitly is certainly getting big now with other companies such as Google (Google Reader) and Typepad now using the shortened URLs as standard. CBS is also using the service on its website.
So, from now on expect to see a lot more Bitly URLs on Twitter.
Have you ever wanted to know what was happening in the startup world in Scandinavia? Well I thought I would let everyone know about my favourite blog ArcticStartup. ArcticStartup is a technology blog letting everyone know what is happening in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Norway. The blog itself is kept up to date by some of the best technology journalists in Scandinavia and they also have a great Wiki site attached which keeps tracks of all the companies involved.
Im always a very big fan of reading what is happening from technology companies all over the world and not just in the USA!
There has been a lot of talk recently about the new Retweet site that has launched and it has the killer domain Retweet.com. Retweet is a direct competitor to the dominant Tweetmeme, which tracks what the most popular links are on Twitter.
Retweet went live last week and has received a lot of press but for the wrong reasons. Retweet seems to have just completely copied not just the basic site design from Tweetmeme, but also the code with relation to the Retweet buttons. Im a firm believer that innovation is key to a strong technology company, however im not too sure that Retweet has even thought about this.
With a domain name like Retweet. com I would have thought that the first idea would be to start a service similar to Tweetmeme, but to also add a killer domain shortening service to the site. Retweet is a great domain in which im sure Twitter would want to be associated with. Is this such a stupid idea?
Adobe has been trying to move a lot of people over from the cheap version of Photoshop onto their online version. Yesterday Adobe announced that they were adding the ability for users to upload videos to Photoshop, the company’s web based image editing and sharing service.
Adobe isn’t the first company to add video to a site that was primarily designed for images. But while Flickr limits videos to 90 seconds, Adobe is allowing users to upload videos up to 200MB through a web browser, or up to 2GB through an Adobe AIR uploader. Users can upload files in “most major file formats” and you can view them from Photoshop.com or share them with other users.
Photoshop.com users will get 2GB of free video storage.
Adobe has also rolled out the ability to create Group Albums that let you collaborate on photo albums with other users.
