Monday, December 24, 2007

MindBites, your place on the web to learn directly from other real people

What Company Is Offering:
MindBites, your place on the web to learn directly from other real people and share what you know with the world. A self-publishing platform and social marketplace for instructional content.

How It Works:

MindBites enables people to share their unique knowledge, skills and passions through audio and video lessons, earning money for themselves or for charity. The result is a unique community of discovery with content that simply can't be found anywhere else – from Teaching your Baby Sign Language, to Cooking Tandori Chicken, to Surviving a Knife Attack. By enabling people to learn, connect and share as never before, MindBites promises to revolutionize the way the world shares knowledge. MindBites – What do you know? .

MindBites is a place where anyone can design, create and post instructional content for sale. They offer real people, individuals like you, a self-publishing platform to share their knowledge, skills and passions with others through audio and video lessons. These lessons can be promoted and previewed across the web, where others can purchase and download them using credits costing as low as $1.69. The result is an inspiring community of discovery that hopes to revolutionize the way the world shares knowledge.
With customized titles, descriptions, and preview images, your lessons are promoted with ease and professionalism to a worldwide audience. Additionally, authors can upload auxialliary materials to compliment their lesson, such as text documents, pictures, and graphs.

Users are then able to browse, preview and purchase the author's lessons using credits purchased at MindBites for as low as $1.69. Once purchased, the media files are available to be viewed in the user's browser or downloaded for future use. Documentation of these purchases can be found under your MyMindBites page.
More at:http://www.mindbites.com/

LetterMeLater.com

What Company Is Offering:
LetterMeLater.com allows you to send emails to anyone you wish, with the ability to have them sent at any future date and time you choose.

A feature missing from every email service is the ability to schedule when an email gets sent - you must click the "send" button at the exact moment of delivery.

How It Works:

With this service, you can write emails with your existing email address, and they will get sent at the exact date, or dates that you specify - down to the minute.

Unique Features:

# Send emails later from your own email program!.
# Create HTML emails! Use rich content to add style and structure.
# Send emails from any of your email addresses.
# Send recurring emails.
# Share your letters! See what others have shared.
# Your email will be the return address on the emails you send.
# Import your contacts and create group mailing lists.
# Send emails with carbon copies 'cc' and blind carbon copies 'bcc'.
# Manage your emails, and edit them before they get sent if necessary.
# The time of day to send can be specified in your local time.
# No advertisements will be sent with your emails.
# Send scheduled text messages to your cell phone!.
More at:http://www.lettermelater.com/

GigTide is the next generation of resume development --Get Noticed ,Get Hired

What Company Is Offering:
GigTide.com is an online resume builder containing resume samples and writing tips - A complete online resume development and job-seeker solution. Users can build, post and manage resumes, contacts, cover letters and portfolios online. GigTide’s intuitive, easy-to-use interface, resume writing tips, resume examples, resume samples, spell checking, tracking features and stunningly designed resume.
How It Works:
GigTide.com is an online resume builder containing resume samples and writing tips - A complete online resume development and job-seeker solution. Users can build, post and manage resumes, contacts, cover letters and portfolios online. GigTide’s intuitive, easy-to-use interface, resume writing tips, resume examples, resume samples, spell checking, tracking features and stunningly designed resume templates help job-seekers prepare unique employment resumes and stand out from the competition. Users can build and store unlimited resumes, contacts, cover letters and web links for a monthly subscription fee as low as $8.25. GigTide.com is offering free subscription until January 1st, 2008.
GigTide’s interface takes users through a simple resume development process of choosing a resume template, entering in information such as a professional objective, work history, education, etc., previewing and saving. Throughout the process, users can review formatting information to evaluate whether a chronological, functional or combination format is most appropriate for them. Resume writing tips, a reference list of action verbs, resume examples and suggestions throughout the process help users create professional, well-written resumes and cover letters. Users can also create and manage an online portfolio which is automatically integrated into the resume. Online resumes can then be distributed to prospective employers who can access the resume online, download a PDF or Word version, view a portfolio and contact the applicant with one click of a mouse.

The tracking and dashboard reporting system allows users to enter and manage unlimited contacts, track how many people are viewing their resumes and where the visitors are coming from. “Job-seekers taking advantage of GigTide’s services no longer have to wonder if anyone is paying attention to their applications,” said Johnson. “GigTide is the next generation of resume development and the first place job-seekers should go to jump-start their career search in 2008.”
More at:http://www.gigtide.com/

EasySearchLive---Next Generation Search

What Company Is Offering:
Live View Adds a new dimension to the search results they supply, By opening a Live View window below a listing using the link next to the flashing Green Button you can surf the listed site and locate the information you seek without leaving the results page.

How It Works:

The Live View window acts like a mini-browser and you can open multiple Live Views on the same page.
Email Link allows you to instantly share a listing with up to 5 of your friends and include a personal note as well.

More at:http://www.easysearchlive.com/

ProWorkflow is a powerful solution, which has the potential to increase your companies productivity

What Company Is Offering:
ProWorkflow is a fast, easy to use project management, workflow and time tracking solution for small to medium businesses. The application has been designed from the ground up with your most important asset in mind: Your staff!.

How It Works:

ProWorkflow enables you to keep accurate time-keeping records, organize, plan, and delegate jobs and tasks whilst using the timeline to have an overview of company activity. The information ProWorkflow collects allows you to measure and analyze your company performance so that you can streamline to improve profit margins.
ProWorkflow helps to make the most of your company's time, by efficiently managing your workflow. Managing time effectively within your company will help deliver projects on time, on budget and increase profits. ProWorkflow is a web-based solution, full of features, that is easily accessed from any location, and allows you to see the activity within your company in real-time.

Whether you need to manage projects, track time, view a timeline, store information, assign work to staff or contractors, or simply regain control, ProWorkflow will come to the rescue!
ProWorkflow has a reporting section that allows you to produce reports on any particular project, client history, current work in progress, or staff performance. All reports can export to XML and CSV.

These reports also include invoice ready information for projects. This allows you to quickly view an outline of all time spent during a project, as well as what requires invoicing and how much income is due for payment.

If you are a small company without an accounting package, ProWorkflow is a great tool to use while you grow. Whether you are large or small, ProWorkflow reporting allows you to measure and analyze areas within your company that you can streamline to improve productivity and profits.

ProWorkflow is a powerful solution, which has the potential to increase your productivity substantially, equating to better quality, and faster delivery of projects. The ProWorkflow 'Professional' solution has been designed for small to medium companies, and the 'Enterprise' release designed to be a solid platform to integrate into larger firms. For an affordable price, you can have a tool that will save you tens of thousands.
More at:http://www.proworkflow.com/

Who knew that writing a cookbook about how to disguise veggies in a meal could be a make her millionaire?

Who knew that writing a cookbook about how to disguise veggies in a meal could be a winning formula?

Missy Chase Lapine recently appeared on The Big Idea TV show. Turns out she has such a passion for family and food that she quit her day job.

The former publisher of Eating Well magazine says the book is about how she developed a “hiding technique” to get her daughters, both picky eaters to eat what she gave them.

Missy was propelled into action after reading an inspiring quote on a card that said, “Never let the odds keep you from doing what you know in your heart you were meant to do.” As Missy chimed in saying, “The response has been incredible” Donny enlisted her to talk about the details of her phenomenal success.

Here’s are some of the things Missy mentioned: She’s sold 120,000 copies of her book, “The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids’ Favorite Meals,” since April 2007. The book has been on the New York Times Bestseller List. Missy just signed with a licensing firm. Frozen Entries are coming soon. She is filming a TV pilot. Missy received a 6-figure advance for a Sneaky Chef Men’s book to be released next year.

All this from putting veggies in food!
More at:http://tunedin.entrepreneur.com/2007/10/24/sneaky-food-chef-rakes-in-a-fortune/

Evite.com ---Personal Private Planner ---Use It For Your Xmas Party

What Company Is Offering:
Evite.com is the top online destination for invitations. A free service, Evite.com estimates it saves party planners millions of dollars in paper invitations and postage each month. With party-planning tools and content, the site helps hosts be more successful while saving even more money and time.Evite.com is the leading social event planning site on the Web, facilitating more than 16 million invitations to more than 450,000 events each month. Evite.com offers everything a host needs to throw a great event, from free online invitations to planning checklists to a budget estimator and drink calculator.

How It Works:

Evite.com works like a personal party planner, without the cost. Evite guides party hosts through every step of the event planning process – from deciding on the party specifica and inviting guests to preparing the party to finalizing the menu and sending eCard thank-you notes after the event.
Some of the planning tools include:

Checklists for every event. The checklist tool at Evite.com helps hosts keep track of all their party tasks. This convenient tool provides hosts with a list of tasks and dates associated to each task.
Budget Estimator. Before deciding how big to make an event or even agreeing to be the host, consumers can calculate out how much the entire event will cost by using Evite.com’s budget estimator. By simply plugging in event type, number of guests and the estimated duration time, potential hosts can calculate a true estimate of the overall cost.
Invitation flair. With new designs always available, Evite.com offers options to fit every party. Additionally, hosts can design their own invitation by uploading images and different design components.
Drink Calculator. Whether a host is planning a casual get-together or a formal affair, the drink calculator provides an estimate of how many beverages are needed, depending on the number of guests and whether light, average or heavy drinkers are invited.
My Notebook. Save planning ideas, menus, checklists and other relevant party details in the personalized notebook, which helps keep hosts’ party information organized and in one location.
eCards. Evite.com’s free eCards are perfect for sending guests or the host a thank-you note after a party.
More at:http://www.evite.com/

The evolution of Web search---Interview With Google's Director Of Research "Peter Norving"

As director of research at Google, Peter Norvig is intimately involved in the attempt to manage the world's information.An expert on artificial intelligence, he has taught at universities, held research jobs in the corporate world and at NASA, and cowritten the influential textbook AI: A Modern Approach.
TR: Google has many innovative products, but the look and feel of Web search hasn't changed much in 10 years. Why?

Peter Norvig: We've hit on something that people mostly liked. We weren't the first to do it. Go back to Excite and the search engines before: you have a box, and you get a list of 10 results, with a little bit of information accompanying each result. We've just stuck with that.

TR: What has changed?

PN: The scale. There's probably a thousand times more information. It used to be just Web pages; now it's video, pictures, blogs, and all sorts of media and formats. Also, the immediacy has changed. When I started, we were updating the index once a month. We thought of it as a library catalogue, a long-term thing. Now we're seeing it more as up-to-the-minute media. When news breaks, you want to be able to read it in minutes, not in days, weeks, or months.

TR: You claim that Google's accuracy is pretty good. How do you know how good it is, and how do you make it better?

PN: We test it in lots of ways. At the grossest level, we track what users are clicking on. If they click on the number-one result, and then they're done, that probably means they got what they wanted. If they're scrolling down, page after page, and reformulating the query, then we know the results aren't what they wanted. Another way we do it is to randomly select specific queries and hire people to say how good our results are. These are just contractors that we hire who give their judgment. We train them on how to identify spam and other bad sites, and then we record their judgments and track against that. It's more of a gold standard because it's someone giving a real opinion, but of course, since there's a human in the loop, we can't afford to do as much of it. We also invite people into the labs, or sometimes we go into homes and observe them as they do searches. It provides insight into what people are having difficulty with.
TR: Companies such as Ask and Powerset are betting that the future is in natural-­language search, which lets people use real, useful sentences instead of potentially ambiguous keywords. What is Google doing with natural language?

PN: We think what's important about natural language is the mapping of words onto the concepts that users are looking for. But we don't think it's a big advance to be able to type something as a question as opposed to keywords. Typing "What is the capital of France?" won't get you better results than typing "capital of France." But understanding how words go together is important. To give some examples, "New York" is different from "York," but "Vegas" is the same as "Las Vegas," and "Jersey" may or may not be the same as "New Jersey." That's a natural-language aspect that we're focusing on. Most of what we do is at the word and phrase level; we're not concentrating on the sentence. We think it's important to get the right results rather than change the interface.

TR: How much will Google search become personalized to individual users?

PN: We're doing some of that in various places. One good example is in news personalization, where we give recommendations for news articles. There, it's easier to do than in larger Web databases, because there's a limited number of news stories. We track what news stories you look at, and we compare it to other people. And that seems to work out well. It's harder to apply it to something as vast as the whole Web, but we're starting with the easy parts.

TR: Where do you see Google search in two to five years?

PN: You'll see integration of various kinds of content. We're getting into speech recognition and all the kinds of interfaces on phones, where you have a tiny screen and awkward keyboard. You'll see that gaining in importance. You'll see integration of our various properties. We used to put the onus on the user and ask them if they wanted Web search or image search or video search. Now we're trying to solve that for them and serve up the results in a way that makes sense.
Via-TR

Bravos are electronic awards that you can send out by email

What Company Is Offering:

Bravos are electronic awards that you can send out by email. You can draw your own Bravos or pick from a selection of pre-made illustrations.
Bravo Bucks, or Bruckos for short, are a simple currency.

Updates:

Once the system is fully up and running, you’ll be able to grab an API and make Bravos (their name for the awards) for your site. Suggestions from next.yahoo.com includes ideas such as commenter of the day, 100th post, 2 years of membership and so on. People will then be able to use the awards wherever they like such as on their blog.It seems Yahoo thinks that the idea of earning achievement badges on video game systems is such a cool idea that people on the web want to have their success noted in some way also.


More at: http://bravo.yahoo.com/

Fanurio is an organization and billing tool for freelancers

What Company is Offering:
Fanurio is a time tracking and billing application designed to help freelancers manage their work and be paid for it. It runs both on Mac OS X and Windows.

How It Works:

Fanurio is an organization and billing tool for freelancers. It helps you keep track of how many hours you’ve logged on a project and stay organized while working. It also creates invoices. The set-up is straight-forward and easy to use. Enter the details of your business—contact info, what you do, rates, and taxes. After that, you’re ready to get working. For each project, you’ll create a project folder complete with a thorough listing of items and expenses, as well as your rate (you can choose if it’s hourly, flat, or simply non-billable). The next step is timing. Fanurio comes with a stylish little mini-view timer that tracks how long you’ve been working (or not).
More at:http://www.fanurio.com/

ShangBy takes you to the best stores in Shanghai

What Company is Offering:
Through their revolutionary video shopping concept, they broadcast a live video feed from different retail stores in Shanghai. Those shopping with them watch the video feed at their computer, while interacting directly with the retailer and their shopping agent, Nina in a conference call. They have also made it possible for people to "buy anytime" through their secure e-commerce website!”

How It Works:


ShangBy takes you to the best stores in Shanghai. You can shop anytime online and be assured each item was selected and priced by a ShangBy customer. 100% Satisfaction Guarantee forever!
You can also shop live during our "Open Hours" most evenings from 6PM PST / 8 PM CST. Viewers can call in dialing 1 866 212 0875 to ask questions, express their delight or concerns, and even get down to some proper Shanghai price wrangling. If you miss the live show you can still shop browsing through the site’s catalogue.Once you’ve decided to go for that pearl cream or silk handbag, simply give Shangby a call. A 15% handling fee plus $30 shipping for all orders under $400. If you shop live you can get host Nina to try on an item, bargain for a lower rate, and joke with the shop owners.
More at:http://www.shangby.com/

Map My Tracks is the easy way to accurately map or share in real-time, your location over land, sea or air using your mobile phone

What Company Is Offering:

Map My Tracks is the easy way to accurately map or share in real-time, your location over land, sea or air using your mobile phone.Map My Tracks is all about training smarter and improving sporting performance. It’s about sharing your sporting passion with the others in real-time. It’s about making training fun.

How It Works:

Map My Tracks turns your mobile phone into your personal real-time GPS tracking device. Using a mobile phone with built-in GPS or an external GPS receiver you can map and track your location in real-time. Map My Tracks brings a new insight into your sporting activity, provides a competitive edge and makes training fun. Map My Tracks let your friends, competitors or parents know where you are right now.

It’s ideal for tracking activities like sailing, cycling, running, canoeing, skiing, walking, windsurfing, orienteering, mountaineering, horse riding, hang gliding, gliding, snowboarding, paragliding, hot air ballooning or just for fun to show your friends where you are right now. You can use it in any country. Just make sure that your phone has access to a data network (i.e., you can use the internet on your mobile phone).
Each time you start tracking you have the option to make it private. Private tracks are only seen by you.
You will need a Bluetooth GPS receiver that will connect with Map My Tracks Mobile on your phone.
More at:http://www.mapmytracks.com/

Treemo--Web+Mobile application that allows users to upload and share their original videos, photos, and music

What Company is Offering:
Treemo is a web and mobile application that allows users to upload and share their original videos, photos, and music. Users program their own channel and share with their friends, strangers, and the world.
Treemo is a online and mobile community dedicated to sharing digital media, empowering self-expression, and transforming creativity into action. By offering an ever-evolving gallery of video, audio, photography, words, and visual art, Treemo inspires visitors to create their own digital expressions, and to share those creations with the world - on the web and on mobile phones.

How It Works:

Treemo offers innovative tools that make it easy to post, manage, and share all manner of digital creations in your own multimedia channel.Treemo provides equal access to everyone - by recycling unused digital gear, we provide a voice for people with something to say and no way to say it.Treemo is web-based with no additional software to download. They will have optional software tools in the future that integrate with video and photo applications and/or search your hard drive for photos, video and music and allow for easy upload.

Who Is Backing Them:
The Treemo team is comprised of passionate individuals, pioneers in creating Internet and mobile applications with companies like Mobliss, MountainZone, MSN, AT&T Wireless, Cingular, McCaw, Lucent, and a wheelbarrow full of others.
More at:http://www.treemo.com/