Posted on August 1, 2008 by Steve
You knew it was coming. Now, for a low monthly fee starting at $9.95, you can rent books like you would movies on Netflix. There are four different plans, 3 allow you to have 2 books out at a time, while the Family plan allows you to have 5 at at time ($24.95/mo.) 4 of 5 plans have free shipping. If you read a lot of books and you’re sick of paying $15-20 a pop, this is a great service for you. They estimate that if you read just 3 books a month, you could save up to $400 a year with the service. It also promotes conservation by keeping books in circulation between readers.
Filed under: Start-ups | Tagged: book rental, paperspine | Leave a Comment »
Posted on August 1, 2008 by Steve
Do you suspect your ISP is throttling your BitTorrent traffic? Now you can find out. Hours before the FCC was expected to rule against Comcast for violating net neutrality principles, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has released “Switzerland,” a tool that allows you to test the integrity of your Internet communications.
You can download the latest release of Switzerland here. Note that this uses command line prompts and is for experienced users.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: bandwidth throttling, bittorrent, isp, switzerland | Leave a Comment »
Posted on July 25, 2008 by Steve
Dabbleboard is a digital drawing board that helps people communicate ideas remotely. You can share and collaborate drawings in real-time. It also has a really cool feature where it will detect the shapes you’re drawing and clean up the strokes. Dabbleboard is free to use, with premium memberships coming soon.
Dabbleboard, Inc. was started by Zohair Hyder. He spent a few years designing GPU hardware for ATI/AMD, where he was often frustrated by the clunky interface of digital whiteboards, leading to the creation of Dabbleboard.
Filed under: Start-ups | Tagged: dabbleboard, drawing collaboration | Leave a Comment »
Posted on July 23, 2008 by Steve
Google’s Wikipedia killer, Google Knol, has just been unleashed to the public. A Knol is an authoritative article on a specific subject, which can be authored and updated by several people collaboratively. It has been described as Wikipedia with moderation. Authors can make money via a revenue share from AdSense monetization of the articles they’ve written, giving writers more of an incentive to create good content. SEO guys are probably drooling over how they can use this for their efforts.
Filed under: Google | Tagged: Google Knol, Wikipedia | Leave a Comment »
Posted on July 17, 2008 by Steve
Come2Play, a developer of a unique platform for multiplayer casual Flash games, today launched a white-label social gaming network platform. The new platform offers Web site and blog owners the opportunity to create a social gaming network by means of embedding a multiplayer games channel. All games can be spread from this channel as an applications and widgets.
Come2Play allows Web site and blog owners to create a private labeled/skinned version of games galleries, channels, applications and widgets. By integrating fully featured multiplayer game channels with widgets, and applications into their Web site, digital content providers can lay the basis for a social gaming community.
“Now, almost every Web site owner can create his own social gaming network. By using our free platform, Web site owners can create a social community that combines players from different social networks, personal pages, blogs and Web sites based on live, real-time interaction,” said Alon Barzilay, co-founder and CEO of Come2Play. “More than 39 million matches have already been played courtesy of Come2Play and the number is constantly rising.”
Come2Play’s game channels include some of the world’s most popular games, such a Chess, Checkers, Go, Reversi, and Sudoku, and will soon offer original new games based on unique concepts.
Filed under: Start-ups, social networking | Leave a Comment »
Posted on July 1, 2008 by Steve
Humyo, a new online storage service, has launched with a free service that gives you 25 GB of media file storage – or, for $5/mo. you can get 100 GB with lifetime guaranteed storage and no advertisements. Also included is mobile access and the sending capabilities.
Every few months it seems that another online storage company raises the bar for the amount of free online storage it provides. 25 GB is quite a lot of data; more than the average user needs. You can sign up for free here.
Filed under: Start-ups, online storage | Tagged: humyo | Leave a Comment »
Posted on June 25, 2008 by Steve
The Nouveau Riche are people who have amassed wealth in their generation without kickdowns from others and who mostly came from a lower standard of living. Many tech startup entrepreneurs are good examples of how you can go from “rags to riches” almost overnight - from Yahoo’s Jerry Yang to Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
How can you tap the disposable incomes of this upper-class? Well, it depends. The Nouveau Riche in Moscow, for example, hit it big in the early 90s from oil money. Why not build a social network for this crowd? Russians love showing off their status – flaunting material goods is a way of life. Letting them express this via an exclusive social network would be a great way to tap this underserved market. That’s not to say there are already players in this arena.
Many VC’s are flocking to places around the world like Moscow where people have accumulated huge disposable incomes that make it smart for businesses to cater to them. The only tricky thing is how to classify a group of people just by socioeconomic status. Solutions like social networking are a good idea because they appeal to any personality type. Whether it’s true or not when the old money players say that the Nouveau Riche lack sophistication, there is obviously some room to tap this market.
Filed under: Start-ups | Leave a Comment »
Posted on June 25, 2008 by Steve
It turns out that the Google Trends for websites launch was just a precursor to a much bigger event – the launch of Ad Planner. With this tool, advertisers can find sites to place media buys based on various demographics and statistics. But where is Google getting the site data?
One possible way is via the Google Toolbar. Let’s face it. Google isn’t providing this toolbar to help us do anything but gain valuable traffic data (in aggregate). Maybe this valuable data is being reported back to the Ad Planner tool? Google can’t rely on Google Analytics because many sites haven’t installed it. The vagueness of Google’s data collection explanation leaves this question wide open for the time being. Your thoughts?
Filed under: Google, Tech News | Tagged: google ad planner, google analytics | Leave a Comment »
Posted on May 19, 2008 by Steve
Google’s controversial and much-anticipated Health portal is expected to launch today at the Factory Tour of Search. Google is hosting this event with members of the press, where they are speaking about various search subjects including local search and search quality. Melissa Mayer is expected to announce the launch later this afternoon. Google Health is a service that organizes patient information, making it accessible and useful.
UPDATE (1:31 PM EST): You can now go to http://www.google.com/health/ and create your account.
Filed under: Google | Tagged: Google Health | Leave a Comment »
