TechAddress

The Best Web App for Ideas

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 20:37:51 +0000

I am all about applications and sites that tap into the power of the lazyweb, and Ask500People definitely falls into that category. We reviewed Ask500People when it launched, and over the past few months since then the company has gotten feedback from users on how to be a better resource. They seem to have taken those suggestions to heart, coming out with a long list of new features.

Admittedly, I am a Twitter junkie, and I do most of my crowdsourcing in real time via Twitter polling. I was convinced that I should give Ask500People a look, and can safely say that if nothing else it is a huge time sink. The dynamic visual results sucked me right in and cost me at least ten minutes - that’s a large time investment for my short attention span online, especially with something I’d never used before.

What’s changed since our last review? Ask500People is introducing demographic polling: poll for results by gender, age, location, team, education. That is huge, and definitely something you can’t do with a casual poll on Twitter. Knowing this level of details for an answer to your question is valuable information, and seeing it visually represented is even better.

The company will also be adding the ability to follow polls via a “favorite” system. This is handy if you want to track results over time. Coupled with the demographics and the new embed functionality, Ask500People should pick up a real presence in the online polling sector. Up until now, the fact that competitors like Twiigs and others have had embed capability from the start has put Ask500People at a disadvantage for getting noticed and used.

Other new features include the ability to vote on comments in a way similar to Reddit (arrows that give you an up or down option), and a way to vote on the poll questions as well. Ask500People has also improved the site navigation and given you a way to search past polls as well as integrating with Gnipcentral for volume control. You can also see the more popular question via RSS now, and follow Ask500People on Twitter (@ask500).

If you are a developer, you can now get access to the Ask500People API to develop your own use for Ask500People in the way that best suits you or your company. Last, but not least, the folks behind Ask500People are also giving away rocket logo stickers. If you are a laptop sticker junkie, you can request yours via an email to (Ryan Oazawa) ryan (at) ask500people (dot) com. I know I will be using Ask500People a bit more now that they have added demographics and embedding. That makes it much more useful for me than it was before.

Source:Mashable!

We shed light on Microsoft’s first Live deal with Blackberry maker Research in Motion back in mid May. At the time, both had partnered to deliver Live Messenger and Live Hotmail to smartphone owners held within RIM’s embrace. Today the companies have announced a kind of extension to the contract to involve Live Search among some of the mobile applications present on the devices, including Blackberry Browser and Blackberry Maps.

As with the companies’ previous agreement, the Live Search functions won’t be immediately present on Blackberry devices. “Available later this year,” is RIM’s estimation. Similarly, Live Hotmail and Live Messenger were at first mention said to be ready for a rollout in summer. That was before summer had arrived. Nevertheless, the Live Search feature is perhaps the most essential component to add to its partnership with RIM, as it is mobile search that is, particularly in location-sensitive scenarios, seen to be increasingly valuable. Microsoft’s primary target in the search space, Google, has made no secret of its desire to tap the advertising potential made possible with the increased ubiquity of small screens in consumers’ hands.

Of course, it has traditionally been the case that the Blackberry is the domain of business, which alone perhaps makes this arrangement among tech giants not so very impactful. Yet it clearly is the consumer that is in the sights of RIM with recent design releases like the Pearl, the Curve, the Bold, the newly announced Pearl Flip, and the much-anticipated “Thunder.” The advent of premium hardware from the likes of Nokia and Apple have only served to spur RIM in their direction. And so the financial incentive for RIM to sign with Microsoft - and vice versa - only grows with time. Today’s mention of the Live Search agreement also notes, as with the other services of Microsoft origin, multiple language support will be provided.

Source:Mashable!

Pete Cashmore, my boss and our beloved leader, is an Idea Man. Tons of ideas flow between our email and IM chains throughout the course of a day. While I might not be an Idea Man, I certainly have my fair share of ideas, not all of them are winners though. So, a task that I’ve taken upon myself as COO is to figure out what tool or Web app out there can not only organize our ideas, but also give them some right of passage to approval. I’ve tried Google Notebook, Zoho Planner, Remember the Milk, Zapproved, Salesforce’s Ideas App and a few others here and there.

Unfortunately, my success at finding the perfect Web app for the hundreds of ideas has run dry. Google Notebook lacks email interactivity, ability to approve an idea, and has a severe lack of organization. Zoho Planner was great for a while, but lacks organization and approval. Zapproved is great too, but there is no way to take action after ideas are approved. To clarify what I’m looking for, here are some bullet points.

Items that I need:

- Organization through tags/categories and search

- Ability to have a comment chain on a single idea

- Ability to have an idea “approved” for future projects

Desired Features:

- Ability to “Clip” pieces of text and/or images from the Web

- Email Interactivity (daily updates or able to email in ideas)

- Desktop app would be amazing too

- iPhone app and/or mobile version

- Ability to move an “approved” idea to a categorized list

So to help Mashable move forward, I ask you, our readers for help. What is your favorite app for your ideas?

Image via Flickr/Bart

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21 iPhone Food Apps to Eat Your Heart Out

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:44:31 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Sure there are plenty of foodie sites online like Yelp, Zeer, Dishola and tons more. But how many have actually merged into the iPhone space, the most portable way to figure out what you want to eat?

Here are 21 food-related iPhone apps, both free and paid, that will let you eat your heart out:

Where (free) – A location-based app that works with Yelp as well as Starbucks. So you can find food and your coffee wherever you are. The app also works with GasBuddy (for the cheapest gas nearby), Eventful, Buddy Beacon, ZipCar, and Quibblo Quizzes.

Yelp (free) – The Yelp app is GPS-enabled and will find you places to eat nearby (amongst other things). The problem with this app is that it lacks Yelp’s best feature – the ability to review.

UrbanSpoon (free) – A fun app if you’re close to a city. It’s not as limited as the LocalEats app (above), but you’re not going to find anything nearby if you’re more than 20 miles from a city. It’s a slot machine application that lets you pick how much you want to spend or what kind of meal you want to eat. You shake the iPhone and it gives you a list of results within the categories you selected.

iFob (free) – This app goes against GPS technology and encourages Wi-fi connections. So when you’re at a restaurant that has wi-fi, you can walk away with a friend? The idea is to connect people that are within close range of each other. So maybe you’ll have an eating partner.

Restaurant Nutrition (free) – The most disturbing of the nutrition fact iPhone apps is this one. It lists the nutrition facts for most popular chain restaurants. You won’t believe how many grams of fat are in a chicken caesar wrap at Chili’s.

iWant (free) - A (possibly better) version of the Where To app (below) that’s free. Like the Where To app, it works easily like the POI navigation on a GPS device. Easy to use, easy to drive with. It has 3.5 stars at the iTunes store with the biggest complaint being that it doesn’t list enough results under some categories.

Nearby (free) – Works like other geo-locating apps, you search for things around you; only this time there will be various types of commentary about a particular spot: photos, notes, reviews and “virtual graffiti”.

YPMobile (free) – When worse comes to worse, hit up the Yellow Pages.

Where To ($2.99) - This is a cool little app that works like the POI (point of interest) function on a regular GPS. It finds your location, you choose a category, and it finds all of the places in that category that are near you. Food & Drink is just one of the 600 categories that you can choose from. It works kind of like a front-end to Google Search, however makes using it while on the road very easy and simple to use. Is it worth the $2.99? Well that’s less than a tank of gas in most places, so sure.

LocalEats ($0.99) – Based on the site wherethelocalseat.com, this app gives you the best 100 restaurants in the top 50 U.S. cities. The interface is extremely easy to use and it mostly avoids chain restaurants. The downside is that it’s only applicable if you’re near or in a big city. Still has 4 out of 5 stars at the app store.

There are also some good Web apps for foodies:

Menus – Offers menus for many fast food restaurants and includes a Google Maps link so that you can direct yourself to the nearest drive-thru.

TopChef Recipe Finder – Hosted by the Bravo network, this Web app will help you find recipes when you’re grocery shopping or just plain looking for something to make. AOL Recipes and 101Cookbooks are other Web apps like this.

iFood – If you’re feeling like an extra fat day, you can turn your phone into a slice of pizza, bag of popcorn and other things with this app.

CookBook – So you have all these ingredients in your house but you’re not sure what to make with them. This Web app will let you input ingredients and will try to come up with some recipes that you can make using those ingredients.

Steak Timer – You didn’t think someone would spend the time on this one did you? Yeah this little Web app shows a piece of steak on a timer from raw to well done. I think I’d do the meat thermometer test first though before trusting this app.

GrubOntheGo – A little Web app that has you enter what you’re craving and where you are. Will display local results and the distance (approximately) from your location. A lot like the other iPhone apps but I like the twist of “what you’re craving”.

And when you’re done, maybe you should download the FatWatch app. Mmm… I’m hungry already.

[Image credit: Ernesto Andrade (attribution)]

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PropertyPreviews Adds Video Slideshows to Real Estate Listings

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 18:32:24 +0000

Source:Mashable!

CNBC is reporting that Microsoft and Facebook have signed a search and advertising deal. The partnership involves integrating Microsoft Live Search on Facebook, which will include the software giant’s search advertising. Microsoft Live Search will launch on Facebook sometime this fall, according to the report.

Currently, Microsoft serves contextual advertising on Facebook, and the company made a $240 million investment in the social network back in October. At the time, it was unclear whether or not search was part of the deal.

MySpace has a similar deal with Google, which includes a guaranteed $900 million in revenue to the News Corp-owned social network. That partnership has had lukewarm results so far for Google, who has indicated during its quarterly earnings announcements that it is struggling to effectively monetize social networking inventory.

These deals are par for the course for most big online media companies. For example, in addition to its MySpace deal, Google powers search on sites like AOL and The Washington Post, while Yahoo powers search at former Web 1.0 darling Lycos. While most people ultimately keep searching via their service of choice, the law of huge numbers means that at least a few people will do their Google, Yahoo, or Live searches via a partner site.

So far, the MySpace deal is just a simple implementation of Google search under MySpace branding. What will be interesting to see is if the social networks begin to do innovative things with social search by leveraging your friends list. Yahoo recently released Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS) to allow developers to do just that, with Me.dium signing on as an initial partner.

Source:Mashable!

So you’re a real-estate agent or a homeowner toughing a sales effort on your own, and you are interested in going above and beyond the requisite listing of photos, overview, and geo-tagging. Maybe you want to work in a little video slideshow for shoppers. If so, PropertyPreviews is a free service that automates the process of creating such clips without need for any software downloads. Just upload your images, include any relevant information, and the service will do the rest.

It can also send your video tour off to a number of real estate listing services and video sharing sites of your choosing, including Trulia, Zillow, and YouTube. Agents can place videos on their own websites if so desired.

Though PropertyPreviews general manager Jeff Harris touts the service as offering a sort of 24-hour open house, suffice it to say that you won’t be awed by its powers. Magic is minimal, but for a good number of users, it’s likely to do what it needs to regardless. It cost nil to the user, after all, so if anything, it provides just a bit of extra window dressing if desired.

A word of warning. While PropertyPreviews proudly displays generic samples on its front page, it does so with an unfortunate selection of music. What’s more, it appears that the service itself mandates the addition of an audio track. Silent playback isn’t an option. So choose wisely!

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