Posts by Category: Cool Web Apps & Sites

Cool web services and sites we really like.

Cool Web Apps & Sites February 7, 2008 posted by

Ript – online scrapbook makes it easy but hard to gather information

Ript. Not quite getting this, but apparently it’s a new way to “organise your thoughts, tasks, inspirations, ambitions and so much more”. I tend to cringe a little when I hear the word organise linked with Web 2.0 nowadays, there’s just so much organising a single person can do with one web browser, see? Anyhoo, it’s a software download rather than a pure online play, which makes it slightly different. I guess…  Part scrapbook, part “to-do” list (or to-buy list),…


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Bookmark This! February 6, 2008 posted by

Moonk – convert your media to Flash for sharing and playing

Moonk. New service converts and embeds various media types in a spangley fresh Flash player skin which you can embed on a website or blog. You can create video shows, photo slideshows and music jukeboxes. Looks very pretty although it wouldn’t accept my .mov video file as a valid URL, but apart from that seems OK. Shame it won’t accept YouTube video either, but maybe that’s not a useful feature. You get 500 MB of storage for your stuff, which…


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Bookmark This! February 4, 2008 posted by

40 Free Downloadable Open Source Social Web Applications – short cut your new web empire

40 Free Downloadable Open Source Social Web Applications. So you want to step up and mix it with the Facebooks, Diggs, Friendsters et al, eh? Well here’s your chance. A whole bunch of free open source web applications focused around social, community, Web 2.0 type functionality. Although there’s no guarantees on the speed of development and fixes on this stuff, it’s a good way to check out what’s available and maybe even add to the pool of goodness by contributing…


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Bookmark This! January 30, 2008 posted by

Roxer web site creator – fast, simple and very cool web design tool

Roxer is cool. Very cool. Yes it’s just a web site creator, but my how far we’ve come since the drudgy days of Geocities peeps. The whole thing takes minimalism to a new dimension. Want to edit your page? Click the padlock bottom left, and drag and drop your elements around the page instantly. No mess, no fuss. Text, menu items, images, makes no difference. The control panel for all this editing loveliness is a tiny bar, again bottom left…


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Cool Web Apps & Sites January 30, 2008 posted by

Hands on with the Qtrax music service – or rather hands off…

Well, this probably has to rank as one of the most disastrous tech launches of recent times, possibly even rivalling the infamous boo.com fiasco of Boom 1.0. Qtrax, the much hyped ‘free and legal music download’ service, finally sent out beta download invitations yesterday, and we were as keen as mustard to get a look at this important new tech in action. So naturally we rushed off and patiently downloaded the beta software and installed the rejigged Songbird music client….


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Cool Web Apps & Sites January 29, 2008 posted by

Free television shows – wanna shift your viewing from the couch to the Aeron?

See I’m beginning to understand what you want. And what you want is to watch your fave TV programs on the laptop when you’re away from the den/couch/living room or any other traditional viewing position. So here you go, a small rash of online television services for you to experiment with. TV Duck. Well what can you say? A bunch of links to popular and less well known television shows collated from around the net. Playback performance is predictably patchy, but you may be…


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Awesome January 28, 2008 posted by

Ponoko – design, test and make stuff using the world’s first online craft factory outlet

Ponoko. This new online craft factory service has got to be one of the most ambitious applications I’ve come across in a long time. It’s basically an online DIY custom product factory outlet, complete with design, manufacturing and sales functionality. Totally wild! OK, so you come up with brilliant idea, right? Maybe a new design for a desk clock, some cool jewelry or a rad shelving unit. Pop along to Ponoko, download their starter kit with size templates and instructions for…


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Bookmark This! January 23, 2008 posted by

Stickk – achieve your goals by agreeing to a commitment contract

Stickk is a free online service that is designed to help you achieve those nagging goals that always fall by the wayside once life intervenes. You know the sort, stop smoking, lose weight, marry Brad Pitt. The idea is you set up the goal and then commit to it through a signed contract with the site. To make it even more binding, you can add a financial element to the contract, which goes to a nominated person or charity via Paypal if…


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Bookmark This! January 23, 2008 posted by

Dewey Name Card Designer – create your own business cards online

Dewey Name Card Designer is a cool tool for creating business and name cards for private or commercial use. It’s a snap to use, just drag and drop elements using the Flash interface and throw in some text and you’re done. The service comes with some free logos and layout templates, or you can upload your own stuff if you prefer. When finished you download the finished JPG artwork to your hard disk for use on a website, in email or…


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Bookmark This! January 21, 2008 posted by

Hashrocket – your web application developed in 3 days

As a timely follow up to my Groupzz search engine post last week, here’s news of a new development house called Hashrocket which is promising to deliver a full blown Ruby on Rails web application in 3 days flat. It’s fixed bid pricing at around $30,000 to $60,000 but again it goes to show that traditional barriers to entry are all but gone in the web world nowadays, whether it’s at the $99.00 level or higher. It’s a great time to…


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Bookmark This! January 18, 2008 posted by

The $99, 4 hour search engine – or why zero barriers to entry mean your web app will probably fail faster than you can blink

Groupzz. The meta music search engine. OK, so here’s the thing. There’s too much stuff out there, and it’s getting worse. More web apps, social networking, community drivel, tagging, blah… So it gets me thinking. How hard is it to make a simple web application today? Really? Step 1 – Spend half an hour searching, locate a $99.00 script on Sitepoint (there’s probably free around, but I’m in a hurry see?) Step 2 –  Spend a couple of hours creating and tweaking a simple logo…


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Cool Web Apps & Sites January 15, 2008 posted by

Collablog – start your own blogging community for free

Collablog. Got some spare web server space lying around? Fancy yourself as a bit of a blog network mogul? Or a mega-blog community owner? Then download either version of this freeware package and give it a go. From the sparcity of the site it looks like early days, but the two packages seem fully equipped with everything you need to set up a new Metafilter or TypePad type service. Free for non-commercial use, but there are no terms for commercial use…


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Awesome January 14, 2008 posted by

CoveritLive – superb service lets you blog live from anywhere with a net connection and browser

CoveritLive. Ever wanted to do a live blog of an event but didn’t know how? Well now you can with this brilliant new service from Canada. Just sign up for a free account and you will instantly have the power to blog about any event anywhere, anytime as long as you have a net connection and a web browser to hand. You’ll need to cart a laptop around with you of course. I did try it out on a Nokia…


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Bookmark This! January 10, 2008 posted by

ClayValet – personal online shopping service delivered by…gasp… real people

ClayValet is a bit of an anomaly in this digital mechanised age. A real human shopping service. You register and post your request, they find a human to search for the product you want. They send you an email with the suggestion, complete with relevant reviews and alternative pricing. It’s got a nice feel to it, especially for gift buying, but we’re wondering where they’ll go with this as it scales? How do they make money for instance? Ah well,…


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Bookmark This! January 3, 2008 posted by

Free Music Zilla – free music downloads from social music sites like Imeem and Last.fm

Free Music Zilla is a neat new free music download tool which lets you grab tracks to your hard disk from social music sites like Pandora, Last.fm, Imeem and MySpace. Suddenly music sharing becomes all trendy wendy again. Download and install the software, then fire it up, surf to the music site of your choice and the program will automagically download the tracks you listen to (max of 10 tracks a day for this free version). The file saves in a Flash…


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