Archive for: online
Back in the early 90’s there was this song, “Things That Make You Go Hmmm…”. It’s this song that I sadly have to reference when mentioning the Twitter Peek. Unlike the song that had some redeeming qualities this doorstopper is the clunkiest piece of technology I’ve seen yet (a disclaimer, I do not own one).
This product is made by Peek. The same company brought you the horrors that were the Pronto Peek and the Meet Peek. I’m not sure why I would want any of these devices since my smartphone does it all, and when I’m not at my mobile, I’m at my desk.
Perhaps therein lies the truth. It’s not geared towards me, the tech savvy geek, but rather the Twitter uninitiated.Despite the millions of users, there are still many demographics who have not embraced it. What a simple bridge to get them to join.
Clever plan or failure upward? Too early to tell, but one thing is for sure, based on their past successes, the Twitter Peek might make a small splash.
The Twitter Peek can be purchased on their website or via Amazon.
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.
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
In a very surprising move, Microsoft has started selling computers and even third-party software via its online store.
This is a small part of a much broader push for Microsoft as they think that stores like Apple’s might bring in much higher margins for them and their products. Microsoft had said it would sell PCs at its brick-and-mortar stores, but it plans to open just two of those this year, including a Scottsdale, Ariz., location that opens later Thursday.
Early on Thursday, though, Microsoft revamped its online store, which had been an outlet only for Microsoft products. The remake of the online store comes just as Microsoft is launching Windows 7.
Clicking on laptops brings up a list of 10 models, organized by price, including two models below $750. The site also offers three Netbooks and a single desktop model, Lenovo’s $999 A600 all-in-one.
On the software front, Microsoft is selling Norton 360 and Adobe Photoshop, along with Windows, Office, and other Microsoft products. Accessories include a lot of Microsoft keyboards, mice, and Webcams, along with flash drives and blank DVDs from other companies.
Audience Science, an online advertising firm formerly known as Revenue Science, announced on Tuesday that it has closed $20 million in new venture capital funding.
Investors included Mohr, Davidow Ventures; Mayfield Fund; Meritech Capital Partners; and Integral Capital Partners.
Founded in 2003, New York-based Audience Science offers both an audience technology platform and a targeting marketplace.
The company says it has powered over 50,000 campaigns worldwide, and is the eleventh-largest online ad network in the U.S.
Clients include the Financial Times, Gannett, Reuters.com and New York Times Digital.
The company will use the new funds expand its audience targeting marketplace, and bolster its offering to brand advertisers, premium website publishers and online ad networks.
So remember all those times when you ‘accidentally’ tipped the Monopoly board over on Christmas Eve because you sister was winning? Well, you cant do that in the version of Monopoly I’m about to talk about because it would involve tipping over planet Earth which is impossible.
Basically, MonopolyCityStreets.com incorporates a real-world map in which you can buy any street and develop it as you would in the normal game by building houses and hotels. You’re given $3,000,000 to start off with and you’re competing against loads of different players from all over the world.
You can invade their territory by developing around them and eventually demolishing their buildings to force them into bankruptcy. But watch your back because as Shakespeare’s Macbeth said; “there are daggers in men’s smiles”.
Overall, it’s a great game that you can log in and enjoy from anywhere at any time. Well worth a go if you want to sharpen your business acumen. Play here.
Stagevu is a new site in which im not too sure how long it will be around, so make sure you check it out before it is completely gone. Stagevu is a basic service that allows users from all over the world to search and watch movies, movie trailers, tv shows and more, all for free and without having to download any software.
Stagevu to me seems completely illegal and im sure the site will get shut down eventually, but in the meantime it is completely legal for users to use the service. Most of the movies on the service do seem like they have been filmed illegally in China by handycam, but if you keep looking you are bound to find a good version of the movie you are looking for.
Here at Crenk we have previously talked a lot about sites like Movie Watch List and Trailer Reviews in which seem to offer a similar service and have been around a lot longer, so we will see how long Stagevu can stick it out.
So school and college are starting back soon. Just a few short weeks, in fact. That means thousands, no millions, of young people will be met by costs that would normally have been put on daddy’s credit card. What makes this year worse is that there are few part time jobs around that would have normally paid for the laptops, textbooks, stationary and gadgets that are to be found in the typical student’s backpack. The situation is especially bad in Europe where students and those leaving school have led protests – even violent ones such as those in France and Ireland.
This is good news for Ebay, Amazon and the likes.
The sale of low-end student laptops online is rising. Why pay 600 big ones in store for the latest machine when you could have last year’s model that will satisfy all your needs for a quarter of the price? After all, when at college a decent word processer and internet access is all you need.
Other items which are making big sales in the ‘back to school rush’ are backpacks, art supplies, cameras, suitcases and technical equipment specific to certain courses such as design and engineering.
Here I stand tapping out this article on my phone beside Trinity College in Dublin as I’m away from my desk this week. Students walk by me with iPhones and Macbooks preparing their dorms for their third or fourth year in college. For this year’s freshmen it’s going to be Ebay all the way – in the opinion of this Crenk reporter at least.
Online dating is a huge market online and today I wanted to introduce yet another player to the game, Luuvee.com. Luuvee is a UK based paid online dating service in which users pay £4.50 per month to go through their huge database and hopefully find their love match.
Currently Luuvee is offering one month free if you signup now, but I don’t really understand why this site is technologically better than the leaders in the market, like Match.com and Plentyoffish? Previously we have profile dating sites like Smooch and BuddyFetch, but I cant see Luuvee gaining market share unless they come up with a brilliant piece of technology or become a free dating site and make their revenues from advertising.
What Luuvee say about Luuvee:
We made Luuvee to give people a choice – between the expensive, intimidating, scientific sites and the free sites that offer little in the way of quality people. We made Luuvee to fill that rather large void – oh and to help people have fun. After all, isn’t that what dating should be all about?
I guess they are right and that it is what its all about, however I don’t think can expect to make any money from this service. I simply dont understand why they didn’t put the site into private beta to build up the database and then launch the site for free, probably with some advertising in the footer, then introduce paid options once they have market share and a decent size database!
Bing is the new search engine by Microsoft which was due to launch on the 3rd of June, but for some reason it has launched today!
After using the service for the last ten minutes or so there seems to be do real major difference between Live.com and Bing.com. Search results are still terrible and it is really only the interface that has improved and only slightly.
I cant see Bing in its current form taking any search share from Google. In fact I think in its current form it is probably going to do the opposite and give Google more share of the market. Im amazed that Microsoft cant get a good search algorhythm and that Google are just so far ahead in actually providing quality results.
Microsoft really seems to just lack originality when it comes to search and the majority of their online products. MSN has never really done too much, Windows media player is completely outdated and hotmail needs a revamp but never seems to change much, now bing is the search engine that couldnt.
It would be great to hear your thoughts on the new Bing search engine. The best example of the results is that I searched ‘Crenk’ and the our own website came up 9th! Terrible!
With so many video formats and too little time to organize our video files, we need an easy-to-use and intuitive video converter that handles all our video files on the go. Here is a list of the best 5 freeware video converters that will help you keep your video collection organised.
Quick Media Converter
Quick Media Converter is a powerful freeware video converter that handles all current formats such as FLV, AVI, DIVX, XVID, MPEG 1-4, iPod/iPhone, Real Media, and M4A. In addition, this whale of a free video converter allows you to record videos from your DV camera or webcam in the classic AVI format and convert the file to any format you need.
Quick Media Converter has two modes. The Easy Mode gives you quick access to all conversion options available in an all-in-one interface. Once you have your video file or folder loaded, just click the file that you want to convert and select the conversion format that suits you. The Expert Mode is less intuitive but it gives you full control of video conversion options like codec rendering, aspect, bitrate, FPS, audio synchronization, and recording volume.
Super Video Converter
Super fits the bill for a simple, no-frills interface that converts videos on the go. Super is actually a shell for different command line conversion scripts. Super handles a large number of video formats like 3GP and 3G2 for mobile phones, ASF, DIVX AVI, MOV, MPEG, flash video, real media, PSP video, and more. Super also handles audio conversion for those who want to extract their videos and rip the audio out for easy listening. Super handles large files quickly, and you can find the settings easily making it convenient for users to set their options and start converting.
Any Video Converter
Any Video Converter is perfect for your younger mother/ brothers/sisters who do not want to be bothered with the myriad of options and just want a fast solution that gets the job done while looking good doing it. The converter handles all popular video files with batch-convert and user-defined options. Any Video Converter also has a dumbed-down interface to make video conversion as simple as possible, although it can handle advanced video conversions if you tinker behind the interface and experiment with options.
MediaCoder
Mediacoder is an open source video converter which works on a large variety of formats. New features, conversion options, and conversions formats are constantly being added to support newly-released devices. Mediacoder dubs itself as the “swiss army knife for media transcoding”… simple, quick, and does everything that it is asked. Mediacoder gives straightforward tools that you won’t easily find in other converters like video compression, extracting audio from video files, and repairing corrupted or partially downloaded video files.
Format Factory
This full-featured converter allows conversion to and from popular formats including video formats for PSP, iPhone, and other video formats. The conversion options are easy to find within the interface and you can even perform batch conversion options for mobile video, pictures, audio, DVD videos, and more.
