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September 17th, 2008 at 11:30 am

If you want to take social networking and do something productive with it, within a local setting, Amazee may be the thing to give you the value-add you crave. Rather than offer you a place to play board games or chat with friends, Amazee is built to serve one purpose: getting stuff done.

Through collaboration with friends and strangers alike, users can manipulate the powers that be at Amazee to simply get a better handle on things that require proactive organization. The way I might describe the service is really the organizer behind the organization, keeping everything in tune and in sync from steps A to B to C to Z. This goes for ensuring basic order to promotions, sponsorships, and advertising.

One example of a major party that will trial Amazee is Chicago2016. Chicago2016 is an advocacy group that is tapping the toolkit to help residents of Illinois and states elsewhere keep contact with the effort to ultimately try to win the role of host of the Summer Olympic Games eight years hence, after a stop in London, England in 2012.

Having origins in the Swiss capital of Zurich, and now keeping an office in San Francisco, Calif., Amazee appears to be well-developed as both an internal manager and news delivery mechanism. The dashboard alone is both nicely featured and simply designed. Definitely not to be too sparse nor too chaotic. Projects of course command the majority of real estate in Amazee. And for followers of a particular project, blogs can be produced; for each project or routinely for an extensive task. (The Chicago2016 being one very detailed vision.)

These are of course part and parcel of promotion online today, so it is only natural that Amazee offers this option in addition to its root organizational qualities. Nevertheless, the ingrained access to a publishing component provided by Amazee makes for an even further streamlined process, and efficiency is increasingly crucial as numbers of members and associates grow by leaps and bounds.

Several utilities other than Amazee’s own will of course conquer some of the tasks that Amazee is able to handle, and perhaps others that Amazee ignores. Some fairly customizable platforms, such as Ning, perhaps deliver more in the way of social features. But on the whole, Amazee does what its creators intend and does it well. It’s a powerful venue for members and inclusive to the curious visitor. And that is eminently important to Amazee’s future as such a multifaceted actor, given its specific activist devotion.

Source:Mashable!

If academic learning via the Web is something that intrigues you, there are a number of places to go. But if you’re interested specifically in learning via live video instruction and tutoring, the name eduFire is something you might want to familiarize yourself with. In fact, you already may have done so.

What began as a language learning engine, eduFire has grown handily, to tens of thousands of visitors per month. And now, eduFire has expanded into a new area, providing coaches and trainers for test preparation purposes. ACT, GMAT, GRE, PSAT, SAT, LSAT, and MCAT tutors are now featured.

As one might expect, several of the abovementioned exam titles offer more tutors than others. The ACT page on eduFire, for instance, lists 51 tutors available for live video interaction, either on-demand or through set scheduling. This is much more than even the combined totals of the CPA, DAT, NCLEX, and TOEIC, each of which users will find hosts only 4 aids or less. The only grouping of tutors larger than that of the ACT column is the figure for SAT help (73 people). Of course, there are tutors which specialize in multiple tests.

Having browsed several test pages to observe the user profiles of some instructors, it seems that more students will prefer less expensive sessions than the pricier sort. There are exceptions to this short-lived trend (short-lived in the sense that eduFire’s test prep center is a new feature on the site, not test prep in general), but on the whole, tutors who stay below the $40 level in per-session fee will probably have the most success in registering time with students. Whatever the case, visitors unsure about whether the style of learning eduFire provides is appropriate for them will like the post-session payment model it employs.

EduFire’s chance at long-term sustainment is fairly solid. The company operates on a 15% per hour flat fee from hourly sessions paid for by users. This seems reasonable both for instructors and for users, and if the website’s stated growth is a good indication of things to come, it will move forward in kind. In light of fiscal woes and increased pressures to employ test prep anyway one can, without having to consult costly private, local institutions, a place such as eduFire seems to target a need that is almost definitely going to become more evident with time.