Archive for: web

Web Cupcake Icons

The Regali Kitchen has released a great free rance of web cupcake icons. You might also notice that Myspace is missing!

GoDaddy for Sale: 1 Billion Dollars

The biggest company for domain registration and web hosting, GoDaddy, has put itself up for sale; and according to the Wall Street Journal the price would be around 1 billion dollars.

I guess if we have the money we can buy anything, including top web companies like GoDaddy, which holds currently 43 million domains. But that’s not all, GoDaddy provides web hosting, security features, and other electronic and web offerings. The estimative revenue for this company is U$S 750 and U$S800 million; making the 1 billion price like a lot reasonable.

GoDaddy, based in Arizona, started in 1997 with Bob Parsons who is currently the chief executive. Qatalyst Partners is the company in charge for handling this GoDaddy auction and expects that the magic number of 1 billion dollars can be actually a bit more; considering that other competitive firms like Register.com and Web.com are not anywhere near the kind of profit GoDaddy can achieve.

Web Strategist Jeremiah Owyang’s Mobile App

For those of us in the business of online marketing, brand building, or building web strategies for companies, Jeremiah Owyang is a familiar name. His innovative thought leadership has defined the world of online web strategies and how companies interact with audiences.

His blogs have been a ranked as one of the top sites in Technorati, and his career board has increased the number of visitors to his website simply because of his strong belief in connecting people. Jeremiah “strives to define and deliver user and community needs, business goals, and web technology to craft and deliver long term successful web programs for companies.”

Most recently the web strategy guru has released a mobile app that now allows fans and followers to keep up with what’s happening on the blog and career board via their iPhone or iTouch. MotherApp‘s creative innovation has brought to life a clean and intuitive application to life. Via the interface you get access to his thoughts via the blog, his Twitter stream, and the ability to favorite tweets or blogs posts you find interesting.

If you’re into online marketing or strategizing web initiatives, check this app out. I’ve found that the information on here is useful and applicable immediately for just about any brand you develop for.

Web Design Ease with Axess.im

Web design used to be only for those savvy enough to code and design original graphics. Not to take away from the skill it takes to do good web design, many of us are simply looking for a way to display content: video, photos, and text. We’ve come a long way since the days of Geocities, and are now able to do so much more with the web apps that have been developed for the everyman.

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Going Backpacking? Then CouchSurf!

“I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads. Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.” – Roasalia de Castro

This famous quote and many others like it inspire hundreds of thousands of people to buy a big backpack, a pair of Levis jeans and hit the road every single year between college and ‘life’. Yet, sleeping in a bus stations isn’t too appealing. And seeing as this is a technology site I thought I’d offer a solution – CouchSurfing.

Couch Surfing basically means living life to the fullest and recharging your batteries on people’s couches. And now there is a social network by the same name that is dedicated to finding you a place to lay your head down at night. They now have more than one million members who are travelers and hosts willing to let you spend the night on their couch. All you have to do is take out your iPhone while you’re on the coach to Budapest, do a little search and give whoever lives there a call to see if you can do a spot of couch surfing. Easy.

The site covers in excess of 55,000 cities in over 230 countries all over the world so no matter where you’re going you’ll find somewhere.

Screenjelly Records Your Screen

Screenjelly is perhaps the easiest screen recorder you'll ever use.

There are a lot of applications that claim to be the leader in capturing and recording your screen. Well I’m not making that claim with Screenjelly, but I will say it’s the easiest I’ve ever used.

Why?

Well unlike most other free screen capture applications, you don’t need to create a profile or sign up for an account. You also don’t need to download anything or log-in for access, you simply go to the site and start the process. The ease of use is a welcomed approach for new users who are not familiar with existing screen recording applications. There is little barrier into the service and users do not get mired down with having to check their emails to authorize emails and other such necessities when creating a new account.

Screenjelly also has a close relationship with Twitter, where you can easily share your recordings directly with your followers, and instantly get feedback. It’s pretty tempting if you’re looking at doing something quick. There are no screen share capabilities to pass it on to someone else, there’s not meeting function for chat function to share with other users, this is just purely setup to record what’s on your screen and the audio being sent via your microphone.

26 New And Awesome Web Apps You Probably Don’t Know About

Ten years ago, who would have thought that most of our work would depend on the internet? The internet allows us to have easy access to our files, anywhere, anytime. We chat face to face with friends, meet clients virtually, process payments in a flash and much more. The internet is huge and you can’t get enough of it. It has no end.

While on the topic of the internet, you can call the current scenario, the Web 2.0 revolution, the next dot com boom. Web apps are torrenting the internet with their numbers and new ones pop-up everyday.

Today, I will talk about the latest additions to the pool, of course; the ones you probably don’t know about.

So, without further ado…

TinyChat

With TinyChat you can create your own chatroom and invite people through one simple link. Chat rooms are disposable and can be created within seconds.

KeepHD

With KeepHD, you can download the high defintion version of youtube videos and also fetch the FLVs and 3GPs for your mobiles.

Prezi

With the help of Prezi you can create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way. Move beyond the slide, it only takes 5 minutes to learn how to use Prezi.

Wix

With Wix, you can create stunning flash websites for free, all from your internet browser! It offers you a simple powerful online platform to make flash websites, MySpace layouts and more. No downloads or programming needed.

Nice Translator

NiceTranslator is a fast, easy to use online translator designed with simplicity and functionality in mind. It is ajax powered, so you get the translations on the fly!

Task Five

A to-do list with a twist. It streamlines tasks in an elegant calendar view

Pizap

Pizap is a fun free photo editor that lets people easily create wacky images with their digital pictures. You get a very easy to use photo editor that lets you add photo effects, custom text or speech bubbles and much more.

whspr!

Need to receive a message by email, but can’t (or don’t want to) give out your email address? whspr! gives you a URL to share instead.

WobZip

WobZip is an online tool which lets you uncompress compressed files online. It supports many formats including the major ones as Zip, RAR, 7Z,  Gzip, TAR, ISO etc…

Anyvite

Create an invitation in seconds, add entries from mobile, twitter, email, iCal, gCal or Outlooks. And of course, send them with ease from withing the app.

Fliggo

Fliggo is an out-of-the-box, all-in-one, solution for creating your own video website. It can be a video blog, a YouTube-like community or a private site for your company or family.

Yidio

Yidio combines over 200 million videos and offers one of the largest video search engines on the Web.

SlideRocket

SlideRocket is an online, flash based tool for creating slides and presentations. It brings together a complete package of online slide making with features such as an intuitive interface, themes, flickr integration and much more

Ziddu

Ziddu is a new free file hosting solution with features such as unlimited storage space, fast uploads and downloads, file management, a sharing community a referral program and the ability to earn money with your downloads.

Mufin

Mufin is your music discovery engine, that will let you easily discover new music among millions of tracks. With the sound that you dig!

YouTube Reloaded

YoutubeReloaded creates an embeddable playlist of YouTube videos that can be added to any website. Simply choose a playlist type to create your free youtube playlist.

FriendPaste

FriendPaste is a an online tool where you can paste code snippets of many different languages to share with friends. It sports and intuitive interface with support for syntax highlighting.

Survs

Survs is a collaborative tool that allows you to build, deploy and analyze online surveys. With a great user interface, Survs is currently in private beta, though a single request fetched us an invitation.

SendPhotos

With SendPhotos Mobile, Web and PC you can upload photos, edit them, create photos albums and share them online with whoever you want. Also available for Android, iPhone and BlackBerry.

BackupURL

BackupURL creates instant cached copies of web pages. The content of a web page  stays the same while you share the link provided. The cached page can also be used for referencing or even mirroring data. The cached page will always be online (html,css,images) no matter whether the original site is up or down.

RapidStack

Rapidstack is a realtime Rapidshare link searcher. It scans the links before they are displayed as results and only working links are displayed.

CC:Betty

CC Betty organizes your message and its contents – photos, addresses, documents, links – and create a mailspace where everyone can track replies, view and add content. You just CC your messages to her!

Sigpad

Make your emails pop with signatures that reflect your personality and change with every email you send! Create signatures with your twitter status, flickr photos, blog entries, youtube stream and much more, all realtime.

FeedWeaver

Create your own RSS feed by combiningRSS feeds from your favorite websites, and use filters to choose what you want in it!

Twe2

Twe2 is a service which sends you your twitter replies, direct messages and custom searches that you specify free to your mobile as SMS. Available in more than 230 countries.

Markkit

Markkit is a web2.0 text highlighter. Drag’n’Drop the markkit yellow pen into your browser toolbar. Whenever you want to highlight text in a web page, click on the markkit bookmarklet.

So which ones are your favorites? Discuss in the comments, and dont forget to give it a digg

(By) An avid freelance writer and technology enthusiast, Keshav Khera is young geek from India. Fanatic about the web, he also writes a blog and makes unsuccessful efforts to avoid twitter.

iPhone App Reviews for Social Media News

There aren’t very many social media applications yet on the iPhones that are based around social news or social bookmarking. Digg has a an unofficial app which is much improved than the last unofficial app that was in the iTunes App Store which is no longer available. Delicious has quite a few apps that are decent but lack a few important features. Disappointingly, StumbleUpon doesn’t have any applications and neither does Mixx or Yahoo! Buzz.

Reddit is currently leading with three apps to make the mobile experience much more enjoyable. One of theirs is an official app from the Reddit creators themselves. Will Digg be releasing an official app soon?

I’ve taken the liberty to do a review of the three Reddit apps and Digg app that are in the iTune App Store. I am in no way associated with any of these apps, know any of the owners, or am promoting any of them in any fashion. This is merely a review from an avid Reddit and Digg user with a love for social news and social media.

Shovel – Digg App

Author: Scott Fitzhugh

Price: Free

Ratings: 147 Reviews – (at the time of writing)

iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/d5yqhu

iTunes Description:

Shovel is an app that provides top stories from the social news website Digg.com in a native application. Browse the front page stories, or delve deeper into an array of topics and subtopics of interest.

Personal Review:

Shovel is a great application for viewing Digg.com content easily on the iPhone. Overall, the design and interface is pretty clean and simple. It gives you a variety of topics and listings to select to view so you can access all of the content on Digg.com. You can view:

• Popular Stories
• Top Stories
• Movers & Shakers
• Brand New Stories

All listings are applicable to any category or sub-category in Digg.com. If you select a Digg story you can then scroll down the commentary to see what people are saying, who’s replied, how many votes each comment has received, etc. After that, you can click further to view the story live on the Web. Which is nice about it is that it doesn’t load Safari as a separate app to view the content so there’s no back-and-forth between the apps.

Unfortunately, what you cannot participate in digging, burying, or commenting through this application. The developer disclaims, “Now we’ve gotten the message loud and clear that the one thing that would turn this 3.5 star app (currently 3 stars) into a 5 star one is the interactivity of the original Digg site. You guys (and gals) want to be able to Digg, comment, and bury, and who can blame you? Right now, however, there is no way to do this using the legitimate Digg APIs, and quite frankly, it makes us sad. I’ve been trying to court the help of Digg in making this app all that it can be, and if you want to help that along, you should drop them a line yourselves requesting the same!”

Another drawback is that you cannot personalize this application because there is no way to login. Therefore you can’t weed out content you don’t want to see, view your account profile, see your friend’s submissions, etc.

In doing some research the Shovel app used to be named “Diggerific”. Apparently, they have changed the name of it and redid the UI just a bit as you can tell from the video review of Diggerific below:

Overview

Pros

• Easy to use
• Clean interface
• Ability to access all Digg content

Cons

• Free of charge
• Can’t Digg, comment, or bury content
• No Digg account profile/community features or functionality

iReddit

Author: CondeNet

Price: $1.99

Ratings: 41 Reviews (at the time of writing)

Feedback Contact: http://getsatisfaction.com/reddit/products/reddit_ireddit

iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/ce6tt2

iTunes Description:

The official Reddit iPhone app. Never be bored again. With this app, you’ll only be a tap (or shake) away from the most interesting stuff on the web.

All of your favorite Reddit functionality is here: view the hottest, newest, top, and most controversial stories of the moment, explore, individual subreddits, vote, comment, share, and save links for later. The entire commenting system has been optimized for the iPhone app so you won’t have any trouble contributing to an epic pun thread.

Save time by never having to reload the Reddit homepage. You can even use handy next/previous navigation to move between websites without going back to the main list. And those sites work in portrait and widescreen modes too.

It’s never been easier to be entertained. Just shake your iPhone to enter “serendipity mode” where you’ll be served a random, interesting site. Pro-tip: Turn on “play sound on shake” for a special treat with every jostle — the iPhone is an elegant phone for a more sophisticated age.

And if you’re feeling the economic downturn (what are you doing with an iPhone?) there’s a tree, ad-supported version to come.

Personal Review:

The Official Reddit application is pretty cool. You can input your username and password so that you can vote and comment on stories. Initially, you come to the Reddit homepage. Along the top you can choose between “Hot”, “New”, “Top”, and “Controversial” stories. When selecting a story, there is an overlay on the footer that allows you to upvote/downvote the story, go to the comments section of the story, save the story, and email the link.

Three subreddits will fit on the bottom bar overlay that you can quickly navigate to. You can edit the subreddits with the ones you want to use the most, but you only have a small selection of subreddit’s to swap out with. Those subreddits are:

• Programming
• Funny
• Science
• Tech
• World News
• Entertainment
• Business
• Comics
• Gaming
• Best Of
• Economics
• Cappuccino

It is the most expensive application but I feel it’s the cleanest and easiest to use. Unfortunately, you can’t browse all subreddits and there’s no search function. Nor is there a function to view your account’s saves, karma points, submissions, comments, etc.

I would recommend this app to anyone looking to quickly and easily view Reddit news, vote, and participate in the more popular subreddits. The free Reddit app doesn’t allow for this.

Overview

Pros

• Easily vote on stories from the actual story page
• Save links to view/read later
• Comment participation
• Customization of footer subreddits

Cons

• Most expensive Reddit app
• Not a wide-range of subreddits to customize on your footer
• Can’t browse all subreddits
• No search functionality
• No personal account status functionality

Open Source Reddit

Author: Joseph Pintozzi

Price: Free

Ratings: 10 Reviews (at the time of writing)

Feedback Contact: reddit@pintozzi.com

iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/cpjzvj

iTunes Description:

The Reddit application allows users to view the stories from www.reddit.com without having to deal with loading massive webpages. It displays the stories in a nice table view, providing details about each submission, and allows the user to easily view the submitted content. The ability to vote on a submission is currently being added.

Personal Review:

This app is very bare bones with very limited functionality. If you’re looking to vote on stories or participate in the comments this app isn’t for you. If you’re just looking to read “Hot” news from a select few subreddits then this is a good app for the cost of nothing. The included subreddits to choose from are:

• reddit.com
• bacon
• politics
• pics
• WTF
• funny
• technology
• programming

The nice thing about it is that it’s open source and the developer leaves it open for people to add on what they want to it. Hopefully, in the future, this will be a great application for Reddit.

Overview

Pros

• Open Source
• Free

Cons

• No commenting
• No voting
• Can’t browse all subreddits
• No search functionality
• No personal account status functionality

Satellite Reddit

Author: 3Cube Technologies

Price: $0.99

Ratings: 8 Reviews – (at the time of writing)

Feedback Contact: satellite@3cubetechnologies.com or http://twitter.com/3cube

iTunes Download Link: http://tinyurl.com/cx8eec

iTunes Description:

Satellite 2.0 is now available and brings a host of improvement to the mobile Reddit experience.

Change in this version includes:

• Greatly improved performance
• New, Controversial, and Top views are available for all subreddits
• An overlay displaying the full article title and comments count shows while loading an article
• The subreddit list is reorderable
• A beautiful new icon and splash screen have been added
• New lower pricing.

Satellite is a full-featured client for Reddit.com, a social link aggregation site. With Satellite, you can browse links appearing on the front page or drill down into the Subreddits you are subscribed to. When viewing an article you can vote the link up or down, save it to your Reddit account, or share the link with others. With the click of a button, you can shift into commenting mode to browse comments or post your own back to the Reddit page about the link. The interface provides a substantially more streamlined experience over the mobile Reddit site and incorprates the unique capabilities of the iPhone to make your day to day Reddit’ing much more fun.

Additional Satellite features include:

• Shake the app at any time to explore random content from Reddit
• Next/previous buttons are available at the screen edges to move through content without returning to list view
• Full portrait/landscape modes, including upside down. Great for handing the phone across the dinner table to share your discoveries!
• Returns to the content you were browsing at start-up. Pick up right where you left off when that call came in.
• Highly addictive content discovery available anywhere, at any time!

Personal Review:

This app is definitely worth the 99 cents. After entering in your login information you can view ALL of your subscribed subreddits. It also gives you an option to edit your subreddits for your account. After selecting a subreddit you can choose between “Hot”, “New”, “Controversial”, and “Top” categories in the footer bar. Once selecting a story, it takes you to the story and overlays the story title, submitter, and point count. At the bottom footer you can choose to vote, go to comments, save the link, or email the link. Again though, there’s no search feature with this app either.

This app is a lot like the official iReddit app except it’s more personalized. You can also view your saved Reddits on your account to follow up on how your saves and submissions are doing.

Overview

Pros

• Personalized
• Nice User-Interface
• Good functionality for voting and commenting
• All Reddit content accessible through this app

Cons

• Isn’t free
• Can’t see your karma points
• No search functionality

Don’t Get Sued… Use Tunerec

With the RIAA already suing teenagers for downloading pirated music, it’s time you move to the safer side and try another alternative. And yes, that ‘other’ alternative can be free and legal.

Tunerec is a web based service, that ‘records’ songs off  internet radio streams and then tags them all for your convenience.  Since it has to ‘record’ the streams first, it takes some time to save them in your database. But the patience is eventually rewarded. It has an iTunes like interface, where you can search for artists, songs and albums; Make playlists and also share them with friends.

Although I don’t understand why it has to ‘record’ songs for each user, and not just once for all its users, it probably doesn’t take much time as the number of songs i had last week jumped a whopping 100K this week, taking the total, as of now, to 1 Million.

It may not have all the songs you want, and likely demands patience even for those it has, the audio quality is commendable with very less buffering interuptions. As for the ‘legal’ thing you may be wondering about, the site mentions that it is completely legal and RWW also notes that Tunerec “ has worked out an agreement with the Swedish songwriters association STIM and the musicians (or at least the labels) get paid for every every song played on the service. ”

You can also invite your friends to the service and share your playlists with them.

Tunerec is currently in currently in closed beta but i was able to get into the service right away after i signed up. People living in Europe have a better option than Tunerec and that is Spotify. But sadly, Spotify is only available in Europe and will take some time untill it opens up to the U.S and rest of the world. Untill then, you have Tunerec. If you don’t like it, go buy your own CDs

(By) An avid freelance writer and technology enthusiast, Keshav Khera is young geek from India. Fanatic about the web, he also writes a blog and makes unsuccessful efforts to avoid twitter.

Crenk Interviews… Zentact

Following our recent review of Zentact, we spoke to the team behind the service. Read on for insights from Jared Brandt, John Sampson and Eric Marcoullier about their previous work with MyBlogLog, a hint of what’s to come with new service Gnip, and what makes them and their fab social networking tool tick.

What is the Zentact philosophy?
(Jared) We are creating a product that integrates into already existing work flows, helping our users build better relationships. We do this without any BS. (Eric would say the our product will make the baby jesus cry…)

Sharing information with your contacts is something that Mr. Marcoullier seems to be a fan of! What makes Zentact different to other content sharing websites?

(Jared) Social networks are a lot of work for traditionally very little payoff. CRM tools are worse.

(Eric) Zentact aims to flip that on its ear and provide loads of tangible results for little ongoing effort.

(Jared) Typical content sharing websites and apps have focused on the user always remembering whom to share with. We are trying, in effect, to whisper in the user’s ear and suggest whom they can share this with in a meaningful way – we make sure you share what matters. We will be adding more social aspects in the near future as well.

How has the web 2.0 landscape changed since the coneption and subsequent selling of MyBlogLog to now and the work you’re doing with Zentact?

(John) MyBlogLog allowed users to create profiles that traveled with them where they surfed, adding value to both the mybloglog member and website owner. More Web 2.0 apps today are leveraging this concept, be it scripts, widgets, and even in browsers. The value that is created by individual apps and even apps created mashing APIs together is significant.

Some commentators have said that they’d like Facebook integration, in particular to help when tagging – is this something you and the team are looking into?

(Jared) We will be integrating in with Facebook to help with both tagging, tracking last connection and posting to the wall.

Will you be looking to include integration with other social networking services – if so what is the liklihood of this happening before Zentact comes out of Beta?

(Jared) We are in a private beta now and working on launching our public beta. We will likely integrate with other social networking services and other communication platforms before leaving beta. We are also listening to our users – feedback will help lead the way.

What is really exciting you on the web (Zentact aside)?
(Jared) Gnip
(John) Apple app store

I would argue that 2008 has been the year of Twitter and that it will become more mainstream in 2009 – what do you think will be the big social media development in the next 12 months?

(Jared) We think that there will be a big movement towards information – instead of just data. More products will become contextual.

What has been the main challenge for Zentact since you founded the company?

(Jared) Our number one challenge has been to prioritize features since, as a team, we have many features we want to do quickly.

And what has been the achievement that has made you most happy?

(Jared) We have gotten feedback from users ranging for “wow” to “Zentact helped me close a deal”. This feedback is what makes us tick!

What are the next key milestones you’ll be looking to meet?

( Jared) Public beta and our IE version.

What can we expect from Zentact in 2009?

(Jared) A killer product that will seamlessly improve your life.

To try Zentact for yourself, we have a few private invites to test the private beta, which you lucky boys and girls can get here.