Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Friday, September 12, 2008

Top 10 Up-and-Coming Products [Lifehacker Top 10]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/388803744/top-10-up+and+coming-products

More than 100 companies are strutting their stuff at the Demofall '08 and TechCrunch50 conferences out on the West coast this week. At events like this, which involve dozens of beta demonstrations of new products in development, a lot of the items blend together into a white noise of over-hype, but a handful of this week's debuts are intriguing. Let's take a look at 10 of the neatest up-and-coming offerings that aren't yet available—and the tools already available to you that replicate some of their eyebrow-raising tweaks. Photo by TechCrunch50-2008.

10. Rate Surfer

Not to sound like a doting parent here, but Rate Surfer is really a tool of last financial resort. Still, for those carrying balances between multiple credit cards, it can help you put more dollars toward getting back to financial freedom. You give the webapp access to your credit card accounts, and it monitors them for rate changes. If one card's got a better rate than another, it suggests moving your balance over. It may not be the best situation to be in, but Rate Surfer is nothing if not an honest tool for those with a serious credit fix.

9. RealDVD

There are, of course, many, many tools for any system that let you take a commercial DVD and copy it, or put it on your hard drive for as-you-like viewing. Until now, however, no major media player has stepped forward with a consumer-level, legal software package. RealDVD aims to be exactly that! —i t keeps the DVD's copy protection intact, and adds an iTunes-like layer of its own. At a $30 introductory price, it's still paying a ransom to use your own possessions, but it might make an easy-to-use solution for legal-conscious parents or less-geeky friends.

The alternative: Adam covered this ground when RealDVD was announced earlier this week, offering up a guide to ripping full DVDs without the nasty DRM.

8. Postbox

Aiming to serve as an intelligent index for your inbox, Postbox is a mail client that focuses on auto-sorting emails into topics, rather than just showing what's newest. So if you're part of a team of writers who are, for example, covering the latest browser release, Postbox keeps track of every URL, image, and all the text about that browser are available in a front-and-center tab, while your bills, PR pitches, and other get-to-laters are in discrete topics lists in the lower-right. That's how it looks, anyways, and we're always intrigued by new approaches to email.
The alternative: Taking the reins into your own hands and setting up a system like Inbox Zero or a personalized version, like Gina's Trusted Trio.

7. Popego / Angstro

There are a lot of startups dedicated to hooking into, organizing, or ot! herwise taking advantage of people signed up to multiple social networks and social media. Most aren't going to help you get much done, but these two deserve some mention, and together might work quite well. Popego looks at what you look at on the web, checks out your social profiles, and recommends web content with adjustable filters. You can see sites that Popego thinks you and your friends enjoy in common, show only videos that you might find interesting, and make other adjustments. For those who use social media mainly as a career-boosting tool, Angstro is perfect—it shows you news and items about the people you follow on Facebook and LinkedIn, not all the stuff they've dashed off and posted. So if one of your clients makes an announced sale, or your old boss suddenly winds up at a company you'd really like to work for, Angstro is the one letting you know. Now, that's some helpful network noise.

6. 2Pad

If you only had 10 seconds in an elevator to pitch 2Pad, you'd do well to say it looked a lot like the Gmail-only Xoopit, taking all the photos and videos in your inbox and setting them up in a easy-browse gallery. 2Pad, however, works with Hotmail, AOL, and other webmail services, and offers separate storage and retrieval for varying-price plans.
The alternative: For Gmail users, well, Xoopit.

5. OtherInbox

If you're your own worst enemy when it comes to stemming the high tides of email, OtherInbox can act as a personal levee. The web-based mail client provides you with an email address tha! t you tw eak for all the email sign-ups for deals, alerts, notifications, and other bacn you invite. So you'd give Facebook an address of facebook@yourname.otherinbox.com, and OtherInbox's interface separates out all your commercial/non-human email for quick reading, archiving, and deletion.
The alternative: Users of advanced filters and disposable addresses in Gmail or other advanced email systems already have these tools available to them.

4. MessageSling

MessageSling wants to replace your plain vanilla voicemail with a web-archived, SMS-alert-ready, voice-to-text email forwarding system. Signing up and switching is ingeniously easy—just type in a forward-enabling string on your phone—and the results look pretty neat, although the voice-to-text functions aren't explained fully at this point.
The alternative: As noted by our commenters this morning, also-free service YouMail offers many of the same features, with a slicker interface and personalized greetings.

3. Fitbit

The makers of Fitbit have their hearts in the right place—for many of us, keeping track of exercise and daily physical activity is just another task that makes getting in shape seem a chore, on the order of paying quarte! rly tax estimates or organizing receipts. The Fitbit is a small, wireless, rechargeable device that can be worn on your pants, shirt, wrist, or undergarments, and tracks how far you walked, how many calories were burned, and even your sleep patterns. From the screenshots, it looks like a data geek's dream, but time will tell if the tracker is comfortable enough to fit into people's lifestyles.
The alternative: If you're an iPod owner, and not all that interested in tracking your non-workout time, the Nike+iPod combo is a cheaper solution. The newest line of iPods actually have Nike+ receivers built in, so the chip alone only runs you $20.

2. Snipd

The idea of "web clipping"—running through web pages, grabbing text or entire pages as you go, organizing them later—isn't very new. Snipd, however, brings a cross-platform, anywhere-you've-got-a-browser bookmarklet into the game. Of course you can search through all that text later, and organize your clippings into different job buckets, but what really might help is that, for the time being, bookmarklet tools like this are really helpful in extension-less browsers like Google Chrome.
The alternative: Setting yourself up with Google Notebook, which integrates nicely into Google Bookmarks and can serve as its own helper for Getting Things Done.
Check out a video of Snipd in action below:

1. UsableLogin

This password-aggregating service hews closely to the secure password system our lead editor proposed two years ago: One password you can remember, modified for every web site login by a system you can understand. UsableLogin automates the second part of that equation—you type in a passcode, and it adds bits of cryptographic data to it for each site. The system appears to work through an extension, so time will tell if it ends up being a Firefox-only novelty or a great idea in password security.

What product on this list are you most interested to try out for yourself? Let us know in the comments.

Patent Search Finds Ideas and Their Owners [Webapps]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/388930198/patent-search-finds-ideas-and-their-owners

Access worldwide patents with Patent Search, a comprehensive and powerful webapp that features over 450 million patents in 15 languages. The unique thing about Patent Search is that the entire text of each individual patent is indexed in addition to offering the PDF application for download. Better yet, if you're interested in a particular patent, you can contact the owner and check availability for a possible project down the road. Patent Search seems to be miles ahead of Google's patent search, which searches through a mere 7 million patents and only provides the publicly-accessible PDF. Looking ahead, Patent Search seems like one of the better sites for finding inspiration for your very own project.

Patent Search [via Webware]

WebSource.it Compares Search Term Popularity [Search Techniques]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/388979404/websourceit-compares-search-term-popularity

Simple web site WebSource.it compares the number of search results for multiple search terms to help you determine which term is more popular. There are a lot of potential uses for a simple app like this—some of which are more useful than others. For example, after arguing with my brother-in-law for years that the phrase "play it by ear" is not "play it by year," WebSource.it works as a quick poll that gives a pretty clear answer. To compare more than two queries, just hit tab to create a new search box (up to five inputs). It may not do anything you can't already do with separate Google searches, but if you're looking to quickly compare the internet's barometer on a couple of topics, WebSource.it is up for the job.

WebSource.it

Yahoo OneConnect Brings Free SMS to Your iPhone [Featured IPhone Download]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/389114646/yahoo-oneconnect-brings-free-sms-to-your-iphone

iPhone/iPod touch only: Yahoo OneConnect is a free application that brings a handful of communication and social networking tools to your iPhone or iPod touch. Off the bat, the most notable thing about OneConnect is that it supports sending SMS messages to contacts in your Yahoo Address Book (provided you have a phone number in their contact card). That means you can text all day long from your iPhone (or iPod touch, if you have a Wi-Fi connection) without taking any texts away from your meager AT&T SMS plan.

The app's Pulse feature also supports a ton of social networking sites, from Facebook and Flickr to MySpace and Twitter. (Oh yeah, it works with Yahoo Messenger contacts, too.) It connects to and retrieves contacts from every single service, and you can update your status on all supported services from one box. Aside from all the functionality, it's also one of the more slick apps we've seen. OneConnect is a free download from the iTunes App Store, requires a Yahoo account to use.

Yahoo OneConnect [iTunes Store]

Google Docs Adds Table of Contents, Dictionary Tools [Google Docs]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/389612095/google-docs-adds-table-of-contents-dictionary-tools

Google Docs has gone and made the table of contents, dictionary, and thesaurus functions (once accessible only through JavaScript hacks) official in its "Insert" and "Tools" menus. The TOC creates live bookmarks from each heading in your document. [via]

Buy Online at the Holidays for HDTV Deals [HDTV]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/389666223/buy-online-at-the-holidays-for-hdtv-deals

The New York Times' Bits blog takes a look at surveys and pricing trends for LCD and plasma HD television models. The short version? If you wait until the holidays and buy online, waiting for a no-shipping-or-taxes deal to come along, you could save yourself more than 20 percent off the cost of screens anywhere up to 60 inches. Confused by all the jargon and numbers of big-screen buying? Check out our short and sweet HDTV guide. Photo by DeclanTM.