Amazing Startups » User Gen. Content

RestyleMe – a great style advice website has been launched

admin — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 08:25:12 +0000

Restyleme is an innovative website has been launched to fill a gap for a service providing free personal style advice. It achieves this with its revolutionary voting system and tools that have never been used for this purpose on the internet before.

RestyleMe.com is a style advice website that allows you to rate other people’s style or fashion sense. RestyleMe.com is very different than other photo rating applications. Instead of using a 1-10 rating or stars, RestyleMe.com allows people to indicate what exactly they should keep or change regarding their style (hair, clothing and etc).

RestyleMe.com is loaded with never-seen-before features on a fashion website such as pinpoint photo marking, you can mark on users’ photos with a single click and give them feedback about their style with pinpoint accuracy; tagging of clothing items, you can tag style items or brands by selecting areas on your profile photo; detailed bar graph results, you can view detailed stats about people’s opinion on your style shown with bar graphs.

Also featuring social networking components like friend / favorite lists and userfriendly messaging, RestyleMe.com offers you unique tools to show off or improve your style.

The secret of watching videos that have been forbidden by Youtube…

admin — Sat, 24 May 2008 18:34:54 +0000

You probably remember our discussion about Deletube, the site that used to allow users to watch videos that have been forbidden by Youtube. Nowadays, there DeleTube is down and everyone is trying to find an alternative… and I am sure that you are one of those guys who are impatient to know how to do it…

It’s really simple. There is a site called YouTomb, nice name isn’ it? Whenever a video is deleted by YouTube, they publish it! So next time you write, what a pity I haven’t seen it, check it out… you might find it there…

So what’s the site about? YouTomb is a research project by MIT Free Culture that tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation. More specifically, YouTomb continually monitors the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown. The goal of the project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm. Sounds like a really ambitious project.

YouTomb was built by MIT Free Culture, a student organization at MIT. Active Free Culture chapters exist at many schools and universities; they work together to promote open access to knowledge and culture. Here is a list of contributors.

When a user-submitted video is suspected to infringe copyright, the rights holder is contacted and given the option to take down the video in question. In addition, rights holders can submit DMCA takedown notifications at any time that cause YouTube to immediately remove alleged infringing content.

MIT Free Culture became especially interested in the issue after YouTube announced that it would begin using filtering technology to scan users’ video and audio for near-matches with copyrighted material. While automating the takedown process may make enforcement easier, it also means that content falling under fair-use exceptions and even totally innocuous videos may receive some of the collateral damage.

As YouTube is not very transparent with the details surrounding this process and the software used, YouTomb was conceived to shed light on YouTube’s practices, to educate the general public on the relevant copyright issues, and to provide helpful resources to users who have had their videos wrongfully taken down.

Ok, I know. It’s not perfect, but right that’s the best site in its category. I don’t know if this is an amazing startup for you, but to me it definitely has potential… what I personally don’t like is that you can’t (theoretically) download the videos…

Pangaeaa – an innovative online community for unsigned, unpublished and undiscovered talent

admin — Tue, 06 May 2008 08:22:14 +0000

Pangaea (pan-GEE-ah), as many may know, was the name of the Super Continent before the continental divide. Instead of a divide, the concept of Pangaeaa came about because of the need for a place where artists could come together and express themselves and share their unique talents with others. As the concept grew from an idea for a community, the thought that not only should artists have a place to share their art, music, and literature but they should also be able to achieve some financial gain from their hard work. The internet has changed the way we communicate, entertain ourselves, and purchase goods and services. So the internet offers the perfect place for Artists to come together, share their talents, and participate in e-commerce.

Pangaeaa.com is an innovative online community for unsigned, unpublished and undiscovered talent. Through Pangaeaa’s unique design, members are able to create a personal home page to share and discuss their various talents. Pangaeaa.com also gives artists the ability to not only share their talents with others, but to receive a percentage (up to 90%) of all sales of their artwork through the website. Art, Music, and Literature are just the beginning. As membership grows so will the areas of interest. Pangaeaa’s goal is to become the #1 website on the Internet for people to discover new talent of all kinds.

Skewz – a media rating site for political news

admin — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 21:49:30 +0000

Simply put, Skewz is a media rating site for political news. You can rate anything on the Internet in terms of its political bias whether that’s liberal or conservative. The bias could be “good bias” or “bad bias”, that’s up to you. That’s pretty much sums up the site.. Users can do the following among many other things:
(1) Read political news while knowing the article or blog entry’s perceived political bias and popularity.
(2) Submit political news from media sources (articles, videos, picture, editorials, etc.) or blogs and rate that submission in terms of political bias.
(3) Vote on submissions already found on the Skewz.com site in terms of liberal or conservative bias.
(4) Comment on submissions.

Anyone whether you are a registered user or not can read the submissions on skewz.com. These submissions come from all over the Internet from main stream and corporate media sources to blog entries from the blogosphere. Anyone can also explore the debate surrounding each submission in the comments section. You can also easily sort the news in terms of categories, newest/most popular, and in terms of political bias (conservative or liberal). For a specific story, you can also easily find a similar submission or that submission’s political opposite (learn more about how to read on skewz now).

Registered users can submit articles, videos, blog entries, pictures, or any other posting they find on the internet and rate that posting in terms of political bias – either liberal bias or conservative bias. Bias does not necessarily have to be negative. You can submit postings that support your point of view whether that point of view is liberal or conservative and indicate the bias of the posting as a proud advocate. Or you can blow the whistle on what you perceive are biases that taint the postings ability to objectively discuss an issue. The most important thing to remember is that you are rating that specific article or posting and not the subject being covered.

Livebook – books written by Facebook and Bebo communities

admin — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 08:46:20 +0000

LiveBook is a book (to be more precise, two different books) written by the communities of the Facebook and Bebo networks. Each book has its own hero – a girl, Helen, who recently entered the Facebook network and a fellow Brian, who registered in Bebo.

The books are written entirely by the community – each Facebook or Bebo user is free to propose their versions for the course of events in the life of the corresponding hero. Will the user’s sentence be entered into the book or will it be rejected – the community decides, voting “for” or “against.” The first sentence to collect the necessary number of votes is entered into the book, and the work is continued on to the next sentence. So gradually, line by line, the story of the heroes of the book unfolds before our eyes.

Dripbook – an online portfolio and community site for artists

admin — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 07:58:46 +0000

Dripbook is an online portfolio and community site for artists. Dripbook’s mission is simple – to allow artists to easily publish their work online by taking the hassle, guesswork and expense out of creating a well designed, easily modifiable web presence. Dripbook takes the best of technology and directs it where it should have gone long ago—into making an easy, quick, and really cheap way for artists to show their work. Whether you already have a web site or need your first web presence, Dripbook is a fantastic promotional presence within a larger art community.

Key features include:

A clean, professional design and user interface highlights the display of art without a bunch of distracting clutter.
Dripbook allows artists to set up and present entire portfolios of images.
An intuitive, easy, drag-and-drop Organize function allows users to upload, organize, and publish a web portfolio without any of the traditional hassle and cost.
Dripbook’s got all of the networking, messaging and profiling of other sites, but not all-up-in-your-face. We put the art first.
Dripbook encourages users to export their artwork by providing dynamic widgets, feeds and other components ready for export. Have Dripbook run your other portfolios on other web sites.
Powerful and user-customizable browse features allow all users to survey the Dripbook community via an easy Browse function and a live-updated world map. Search by genre, tag, geo-location, or any combination of them.
For all accounts, private Dripbook portfolios can be custom tailored and delivered to specific recipients. Need to send a “work-in-progress” portfolio to an editor or gallerist but don’t want the whole world to see? Perfect.