Picmeleo is a new Finnish photo startup that has been developing a photo editing tool.
The tool itself is sort of an external application that companies providing services online can add on top of their own service, instead of having to come up with their own tool.
The team at Picmeleo have made it amazingly simple for publishers to embed the editor into their websites, all you need to do is paste a simple code. However, I dont really see the point of adding this editor to your site. Publishers arent able to make any more revenues from adding the picture editor to their site, it just keeps the user on the site longer.
This has to be one of the weirdest startups I have seen in quite a while. Got Bad News is a simple site with a contact form in which users can use instead to send bad news. Dont like being the bearer of bad news? All you need to do is fill out the form with contact details, etc, and the Got Bad News team will deliver that news for you.
I have many questions however:
Why would the Got Bad News team want to actually give out bad news?
How do the Bad News team make money from this venture? (cause I know I wouldnt give bad news unless I actually had to)
Why trust the Bad News team with your bad news. If this something of vital importance than why not just deliver the news yourself?
I must admit this site is one of the worst ideas I have seen in quite a while!
At the moment there are several torrent sites that are leading in the way of popularity, but some are being taken down and having to delete illegal files. Here is Crenk’s list of the top torrent sites for 2009.
Mininova – Mininova is the successor to Suprnova, one of the original big torrent databases of the Web.
Isohunt – Currently in a legal dispute with the Canadian Recording Industry Association, Isohunt is a longtime favorite of P2P users. The community at Isohunt also helps police abuse within their network, and reader comments and votes help to identify those torrents which should be avoided.
The Pirate Bay – April 18, 2009: the Stockholm district court has sentenced the four Pirate Bay founders to a year in prison, and over $USD 3.5 million in fines. This is as punishment for violating their country’s copyright laws.
Torrentscan – A “meta-search” engine, which is a search engine that searches other search engines
YouTorrent – Still in beta testing format, this new torrent site claims to be the largest legal torrent search engine today. Accordingly, the result sets are much smaller than the “pirate” counterparts, but definitely try this site for yourself.
Kickass Torrents – the new player in the market with some great technology and fast indexing.
BTJunkie – One of the leading torrent search engines with great syndication across other torrent search sites.
Bitsoup – Bitsoup is a growing favorite amongst P2P downloaders.
Alive Torrents – Alive Torrents is a relatively new site. It focuses on torrents that have distinguished themselves as having a solid swarm base and an active readership.
Torrentreactor.to – Torrentreactor has made a comeback from a hijacking and an uncooperative hosting service. They have moved to a different server setup and a Tonga country domain outside the USA.
Fenopy (formerly Bitoogle.com) – the ‘original’ bittorrent search engine, which has now morphed into a metasearch engine. The results from your Bitoogle searches will point to various other torrent search sites. This site has been redirected recently.
Torrentz – very quick torrent search engine with great indexing.
IntenseDebate is a new wordpress plugin which offers an enhanced user commenting experience. Currently IntenseDebate has a easy to add wordpress plugin in which you can add straight into your platform and within a few clicks it can be live and working. Features include: commenting threading, reply by email, profiles, widgets, twitter integration and more.
IntenseDebate is one of many comment plugins that really help you try to increase traffic and build community around your site. I really think this idea has legs, but it needs to be part of a much bigger platform. It would be great if Wordpress took a few ideas from IntenseDebate and added them into their platform.
There are so many place out there these day that want to help you make money from your online videos. Here is a list of top video ad networks in the marketplace at the moment.
Auditude is a new video and advertising platform that has just received more funding. Auditude is an end-to-end solution for premium video. For websites we’ve built an ad platform for managing complex video monetization rights, for content owners we empower widely syndicated video while maintaining control over your assets and advertising, and for advertisers or networks we provide scale in premium video.
Brightroll is the first premium video ad network, and the most comprehensive. With this widely distributed platform we’re able to maximize the value of your available inventory. We have aggregated the largest portfolio of highly branded and large volume video advertising on the Internet. With this widely distributed platform we’re enabled to leverage content, demo, context, behavior, and traffic volume for the benefit of our advertiser and publisher partners.
Videoegg serves ads, you get paid every time a user engages with one of our rich media ad units on your site. Everyday Videoegg delivers millions of impressions to users across leading social networking environments, video sites and gaming applications. We develop rich user profiles that enable advertisers to start with the right audience. Our unique video advertising formats and targeting approach deliver higher engagement rates for brands and more relevant ad experiences for consumers.
Roo Media is now KIT Digital. KIT Digital is a pioneer provider of video distribution solutions in online, mobile and set top box environments. We provide strategic, technology and content services that connect our clients brands with their target markets, in an ROI positive manner.
Brightcove is an on-demand online video platform. Designed for use with professional websites, Brightcove provides everything you need to publish and distribute online video. Working with professional video has never been easier. Harness the full potential of your content through innovative and flexible online video advertising options. By integrating with leading ad servers and custom 3rd-party ad solutions, you can stay focused on your ad strategy while we handle the technology.
Adap.tv empowers online publishers to efficiently monetize and grow their online video business. The Adap.tv OneSource video ad management platform provides a simple, transparent way to manage and serve ads from multiple sources, in many formats, to capture the full revenue potential of online video content. Fine-grained control and detailed reporting help publishers maximize their online video performance. All through a single, highly efficient platform.
YuMe is a large video advertising network, representing over 400 premium video sites with over 500 million monthly streams. We are unique in that we are both an ad management platform for publishers plus a video advertising network that provides advertisers with the audience scale and premium reach they desire.
Tremor Media is a leading global online video advertising network, providing Fortune 1000 brand advertisers with the reach and scale of more than 1,400 top-tier publishers. Tremor Media can work with you to monetize your site’s traffic with higher CPMs than any other ad network. In addition to our revenue solutions, Tremor Media provides cutting-edge technology for Web publishers that are ready to grow their business through online video advertising. Our Acudeo video monetization platform enables publishers to leverage their video assets and effectively manage their in-stream ad delivery, creating new, high value inventory.
Husky Media allows publishers to generate revenues by placing videos into its own new overlap window and then sells the backgrounds as advertising. Husky works with any video player and doesnt require the videos to be your own, you can make money from any video played on your website.
Adotube is a publisher-centric online video advertising platform that enables you to generate revenue by showing brand-name ads in your video content. Monetize your video content with unobtrusive targeted advertizing. You are in control of the presentation styles and video advertizing types.
Let’s be honest for a minute. We all may not have rigged our neighbors bathroom with a shower spy cam, and we may not have binoculars powerful enough to let us see topless alien sunbathers on Mars.
But we’re all voyeurs. And we’re all competitive.
That’s why scripted realty shows like “The Bachelor” rake in big-time cash for the networks. We like to judge attractive people in a setting where we can’t be judged in return. (Hey, sometimes we’re wearing our fat pants and haven’t showered yet). CanDoBetter.com understands our not-so-secret urges, and successfully (and innocently) preys on these insecurities online.
CanDoBetter does just what it says: It lets you judge randomly generated couples from user-submitted pics. Of course, you can also press your luck with ogling mob and see whether you can do better in this mock relationship – or your virtual match deserves a better mate. If voters feel two users are the perfect match, they can fittingly choose this option, too. If you’re as old as me, you might remember an predecessor: HotorNot!
By registering on the site (it’s free), you can view your own stats, it’s just like a virtual baseball card! You can even manage multiple photos and get widgets to post on your blog or website. You can also easily hook up through Facebook.
So whether you simply like passing shallow judgments on others or you think you’re pretty hot stuff, check out CanDoBetter. Because right now, you can’t.
There are so many url shortening websites on the web these days and more and more are popping up every day. Today I was using stumbleupon when I was bored for a couple of minutes and came across a bit of a different take on url shortening. JumboURL is the complete opposite to url shortening, its a url extending service.
JumboURL claims to be the second website of its kind on the net and I’m surprised it wasn’t the first. I’m not entirely too sure what the point is of this service. Why would you be looking to extend you url? Anyways, its an interesting service and decent site to check out.
I came across a very interesting site the other day. I know its not really a startup so I shouldn’t be reviewing it, but I thought it was worth a mention anyways. The site is MakeStableMoney and it talks about how the average person can make money from home. I realise there are so many poor sites out there that seem to talk about this same issue, but for some reason I think this site actually has some quality.
Previously the site has talked about way to make money through sponsorships, best 3 google adwords books to read, 17 secrets on how to sell ebooks and more. This site can really help people make money online and I think it is a good investment of your time to check it out.
Techcrunch has changed their theme yet again. A few months ago the theme was changed for the 3rd time in a year and I thought it was really moving in the right direction. The navigation was clean, there were a lot more options to find the articles you are looking for, and the theme had some colour and character.
Techcrunch today have launched a new theme which keeps the same navigation principles but totally gets rid of all the character and colour on the page.
There are so many places on the net these days where you can track if a specific website is down for just you or for the entire internet. Today I have no idea why but I wanted to introduce you to another such startup, Are My Sites Up.
Are My Sites Up is a new web based startup that allows you to track the up time of web sites and it even sends you notifications when they are down.
Currently in the free service you are able to setup 50 sites to monitor and for that you also receive a great control panel and even set it to email you or send you an SMS update when one of your monitored sites is down. The service requires no ownership of or modification to the web sites you are monitoring, you can use it on your own site or any site you want to keep an eye on.
I have also noticed today that Techcrunch has changed their theme again. It hasn’t really been too long since they last changed their theme, probably about a quarter off the top of my head. Last time the Techcrunch theme was changed they seems to have nothing in their sidebar except advertising (i know Crenk also has a little bit of advertising), however that being said this new theme really addresses the key issues of the older theme.
The site itself is a lot more compact in the header and key change is that the 728×90 advertisement is no longer above the site, but fitting in with the header itself. The key green is not really as predominant, but it makes it easy to distinguish between Techcrunch and the other network sites. In the old theme they just had excepts on the home page, but now they have an additional three slots in which they can feature certain articles. Navigation has really improved within this new theme and now it is a lot easier to find new content. As well as feature articles in the header on the home page they have also added eleven featured articles in the sidebar sitewide. If I didnt have an RSS reader or use it everyday, with the previous theme it would have been impossible to keep up with the new content, however with this new theme it provides me with a better idea on what is happening in the tech space.
This new theme is far from perfect but it is a huge improvement from all the previous themes they had on the site. I would really still like to see a lot more integration between the Techcrunch home page and the other network sites, but im sure that will come within the year.
Youtube seems to have added a very interesting feature to their off site video players. I’m really not too sure if anyone has already reported about this, but Youtube video players which are hosted off the Youtube site now have their own drop down search tool. I have added the video below so you can have a look:
This is a great idea! Now any Youtube off site video player is pretty much as useful as being on the Youtube site itself. Any video can be played in the one player. I admit because the player can be quite small at times, the search results don’t show too many results at once, so you have to be pretty specific to find the exact video you want. However this is a great addition from Youtube!
Additionally, when searching for an image to use I came across this,
When using Google image search instead of searching then finding an image then if that isn’t the right image, then you have to go back and keep doing the same process. Thus getting a little annoying. However, now you can search straight in Google image search while still looking at a page. I know, not big news but just thought someone actually might be interested in this.
Adap.tv
There are so many url shortening websites on the web these days and more and more are popping up every day. Today I was using stumbleupon when I was bored for a couple of minutes and came across a bit of a different take on url shortening. 
