SocialSplash – the next generation social networking site
Posted on April 24, 2008
Filed Under Social Networking | 3 Comments
SocialSplash is the next generation social networking site where members connect and keep in touch with friends. SocialSplash.com is unique in the sense that it does not just offer the user the option to meet other young people from all over the world; it does something no other social networking website does. Other than the ability to communicate with friends, share photos and videos, create blogs, use the forums to discuss current issues and events, create and join groups, play flash games, takes quizzes, and even create funny pictures using the great option of SplashPix.
In addition to all these great options, SocialSplash.com gives back to the user, unlike all other social networking websites, you earn the so called “Splash Points” which you can convert into gifts. I have never come across such a great concept offered by a community website like that. Whatever you do on the website, like uploading photos, creating a blog or a group, or even use the forums, you get Splash Points, and the more you collect, the better, because if you get a good number of points you can get a gift from the Splash Store.
Each registered SocialSplash member can earn Splash Points by actively using our website. Each day you can earn points by doing simple things like uploading new photos, blogging, communicating with others, and more. Splash Points can then be exchanged for cool free gifts.
Xoost – share your search skills with your friends
Posted on April 23, 2008
Filed Under Search | 2 Comments
What is this startup about?
Do you Search the Web for your favourite topics and you would like to share your search skills with your friends? Xoost is the only place for you. With Xoost you will web search what you like most, your search stream will be continuously added to your profile, and you will socialize with other Xoosters on the basis of common search interests. Your searches and related websites will be automatically stored in your account and you will be able to access them anytime. In addition, you can share your Xoost searches with your friends on other networks such as Facebook or Twitter and you can tag or delete any search and related website as you like most. Xoost is simple, viral, scalable, enjoyable and is currently in private beta test: join the beta if you like the concept.
What makes this startup special?
Xoost shows you a new way of searching the web. With Xoost you will search what you like, you will connect with other Xoosters who are searching the same thing and you will contribute to the search relevance optimization for everybody. According to the traditional web search concept a Weblink is a piece of knowledge. In Xoost’s view a connection is the basic piece of knowledge and it is made by the unique combination of User+Search+Weblink. A Xoost connection is a much more powerful knowledge unit because it contains a relevant semantic factor. That makes Xoost unique.
EcoLibris – makes reading sustainable and ecological
Posted on April 14, 2008
Filed Under Beta | 3 Comments
An interesting project has been recently launched:EcoLibris
“Let’s start with the bottom line: we believe in providing people with easy and affordable ways to take responsibility for their actions and go green. We don’t believe in preaching doom and gloom. It’s not our style. We do believe in taking action and in the power of small changes to make a big impact.
Books are everywhere, just look around: on bookshelves at home, in college students’ backpacks, in the mail from the book club or in that pile in your room right now. For some people they’re for education, for others they’re an entertaining escapade and for some, reading is really a passion. Eco-Libris is for everyone. It is a green businees that enables people to do something reasonable, affordable yet with an impact: plant one tree for every book they read. We believe that taking responsibility for the environmental costs of the books we read is only natural.
We strive for a world where reading books doesn’t have adverse effects on the environment, and therefore our mission is to make reading much more sustainable than it is today. We are committed to doing our best for this to happen as quickly as possible. This is why we decided to aim high and to set a challenging goal for ourselves: we want to balance out half a million books by the end of 2008.
Eventually (and hopefully sooner then later), books will be made from recycled paper or other eco-friendly materials. But till then, we can still do something to make the world greener. We hope not only to see more trees being planted, but that the Eco-Libris sticker you get to put on the books you balance out will inspire you to keep looking for more ways to make a difference”.
Skewz – a media rating site for political news
Posted on April 13, 2008
Filed Under User Gen. Content | 2 Comments
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
Posted on April 12, 2008
Filed Under User Gen. Content | 1 Comment
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
Posted on April 11, 2008
Filed Under User Gen. Content | 2 Comments
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.
FreeDrive – personal storage and file sharing for social networks users
Posted on April 11, 2008
Filed Under Social Networking | 2 Comments
FreeDrive is a personal storage and file sharing service designed for users of social networks, such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. With just a single FreeDrive account, users can access both their own files and their friend’s files from within any social network they happen to be on. By focusing exclusively on building a service to support social networks, FreeDrive makes it easier then ever for friends to share files between friends.
Mark: 7/10
Photosynth – reconstructed three-dimensional space with photos
Posted on April 10, 2008
Filed Under Photo | 3 Comments
Photosynth is an amazing new technology from Microsoft Live Labs that will change forever the way you think about digital photos. It takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.
With Photosynth you can:
- Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.
- Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photo whether it’s megapixels or gigapixels in size.
- See where pictures were taken in relation to one another.
- Find similar photos to the one you’re currently viewing.
- Send a collection – or a particular view of one – to a friend
A Photosynth experience begins with nothing more than a bunch of digital photos. They might all have been taken by one person, or they might be a mixture of images from many different cameras, shooting conditions, dates, times of day, resolutions, and so on. Each photo is processed by computer vision algorithms to extract hundreds of distinctive features, like the corner of a window frame or a door handle. Photos that share features are then linked together in a web. When the same feature is found in multiple images, its 3D position can be calculated. It’s similar to depth perception – what your brain does to perceive the 3D positions of things in your field of view based on their images in both of your eyes. Photosynth‘s 3D model is just the cloud of points showing where those features are in space.
Your brain knows that your eyes are about two inches apart. But when Photosynth does its magic, it doesn’t know where the cameras were, or which way they were pointing. Fortunately, when there are many cameras, and many features in common, the algorithms behind Photosynth can figure out not only where the features are in 3D, but where all of the cameras would have to have been, and which way they were aimed, consistent with the features they “saw”.
The Photosynth client shows you the 3D point cloud, but more importantly, it also shows you the original pictures overlaid on the model. Imagine a slide projector placed at each original camera position, aimed how the camera was, and projecting the picture that camera took. A screen is placed in the 3D environment at an appropriate distance from the projector. As you move around in the Photosynth environment, projectors turn on and off, giving you a changing perspective on a world built entirely out of the original photos.
Photosynth provides an immersive interface where you can “walk up” to any object in a photograph…or place yourself where the photographer was when the picture was taken.
Photosynth provides easy controls for exploring a collection of photos in 3D with a click of a mouse. Imagine being able to see your favorite band from either the front row or the bleachers, walking around that new motorbike you’ve been thinking of buying, or flying over every nook and cranny of a famous landmark.
In a future version of Photosynth, you’ll be able to see your own photographs displayed in 3D, forever changing the way you think of taking – and viewing – photos. Add the ability to see your pictures photosynthed together with those taken by other people and you’ll start to see the endless possibilities that Photosynth promises to provide.
Booklamp – an interesting book recommendation system
Posted on April 9, 2008
Filed Under Beta | 2 Comments
BookLamp is a book recommendation system that uses the full text of a book to match it to other books based on scene-by-scene measurements of elements such as pacing, density, action, dialog, description, perspective, and genre. In other words, BookLamp.org is a Pandora.com for books, based on an author’s writing style. If you match against multiple books, the self-learning system adjusts your formulas to make the match specific to your tastes.
Because the system matches books through objective data from the text itself instead of relying on social networks to generate recommendations, the recommendations are impervious to outside influences such as advertising or author popularity. It also allows you to match to a far greater detail than alternative systems. With BookLamp, you can request a book similar to Stephen King’s The Stand, but half the length, first person, literary mainstream fiction, with slightly more dialog, less description, and a rising action level across the first 10 scenes. If that’s what you’re looking for.
ReadTheWords – a free voice to read your text loud
Posted on April 8, 2008
Filed Under Audio/Music, Design/Developer | 4 Comments
ReadTheWords.com is a free, web based service that assists people with written material. This is done by using TTS Technology, or Text To Speech Technology. Users of our service can generate a clear sounding audio file from almost any written material. A voice is generated that reads the words out loud, that you request it to read.
Text to Speech technology is the ability to turn text information into clear sounding, speech. While the concept has existed since the early 1930’s, only until very recently has ReadTheWords.com, and their partners, made huge breakthroughs in the quality of this technology.
What can you read?
“We provide users various ways to let us know what to read. You can always write text, or copy text from another file, and paste it into our text box. We also have a file upload section, where you can upload any Microsoft office document, Adobe PDF, txt, and HTML document. You can also tell us a website address, or RSS feed url, and we can read that as well”.
