Sliderocket, the online presentation tool, has today come out of private beta and is now public, open to all. If you did not get in to the private round, you've got to check this out now. Sliderocket is one of the most fantastic web apps out there. It has features that help you create stunning presentations very easily, and is organized in a collaborative way that would work really well for a small business, or perhaps for a department that relies on frequently creating presentations with shared assets (images, templates, videos...) such as a sales or marketing department. With the ...
Polar Rose, a facial recognition based search engine that allows you to find photos of people by their name, is getting ready to enter public beta. Yesterday I received an e-mail from them with my invite (at last, I was subscribed since around November 2006!), and their blog states that they have a "public beta coming up".
Polar Rose works by having people tag images through a browser plugin (see picture to the right), and then building a model of that person using some sophisticated technology that came out of EU-backed research projects at the universities of Malmö and Lund in ...
Less than two months after moving to our new home at Webfaction and activating Akismet on the blog (previously I used Spam Karma), Akismet today reports that it has caught an astonishing 1000 comment spams. Considering this count starts on March 19th, and that the blog has very little traffic, this is quite astonishing, isn't it? According to Google Analytics, I haven't even had that same number of pageviews ever since I started tracking the blog... Where will this end? And I wonder what it's like for the very large blogs, how much spam they must surely get. Any of ...
This one is for the people who often ask me, when I embark on another "for pleasure" project, "when are you going to do something that makes some money?". Well, how about this for an example: Marco Kaiser, a german developer, had his own little personal project called Twhirl. Twhirl is a Twitter client written for Adobe's AIR - I use it, and it's the best Twitter client there is. Who knows what motivated him to do it, he was probably a Twitter user frustrated by the state of current desktop clients, so the guy goes ou there and makes ...
Pay It To Me is one of those odd ideas that just might work out. Conceived by some guy from Belgium (of course, given that they put mayonnaise on their French Fries, what can you expect from people like that), the idea is strange enough that it might actually work: people send pictures of stuff they want (anything) and their Paypal username to the site. The picture gets posted, and if an advertiser likes the idea, he/she pays you the amount of money your posted item costs. For that, they get a link to their site for 15 days, one ...
Comapping has released some new features to their excellent online mind-mapping tool, and they asked me to take a look and write a few words about it. Took me a while to do it (seems like everything does lately), but finally I managed to give this the attention it needed to come up with a decent (I hope!) review.
Comapping is one of the better online mind mapping tools, and I first heard of it while researching for the first series of mind mapping tool reviews here at Daily Iteration. The newly added features were really important things that ...
Google has launched this week a technology (I'll call it technology, as I think "browser extension" doesn't quite fit here) that allows you to use web applications offline. This is pretty cool stuff - imagine writing all your emails on the way to work, on a bus or train or whatever, using your webmail client, and sending them off once you get to your workplace's wireless network - much in the same way that you would do today with your email client such as Thunderbird or Outlook. This feature is actually slated to appear on Firefox 3, due ...
Spock is, according to their own blog, a search application for people. When you visit their URL, you are greeted by a simple interface which looks like your standard search engine, but shows a few search suggestions under three categories: In the news, People and Searches. From this standpoint, Spock behaves pretty much like a regular search engine. However, start typing and you will get an AJAXified drop down list of names to search for.
A couple of interesting features: search results are tagged (ah, the golden sound of buzzwords - Spock has them all), and people can add ...
Spock, a kind of search engine for finding people, has just reached private beta, and I have received an invitation. It looks a little rough around the edges, I'm getting lots of errors, but since this is the first batch of invites, I guess it's part of the game. Spock lets you search for people based on any criteria, and users are encouraged to give details about themselves to make it easier for others to find you. Check out their home page to get an idea of what it's about, I should be publishing a review ...
This one was too much fun to let it go: Slashdot tells us that the folks over at Freedom to Tinker have created a script which generates a random 128 bit integer number, and uses this number to encrypt a haiku for which they own the copyright. They then give you all the rights to decrypt their haiku with the number generated for you (after all, it's their copyright). That's all very nice, but what's the point? The point is, that number has just become your very own circumvention device, which, if it falls in the wrong hands, allows people ...