From time to time I must admit that, as hip as I think I am, I retreat into my corner of the net, refusing to acknowledge any new trends or technologies out there. It’s even more shameful that I consider myself a web entrepreneur, hell bent on bringing the world the next awesome web service.

Apparently I’ve been ignoring Facebook, and FOR SHAME! It’s great!

Why?

• No songs playing
• No seizure inducing backgrounds
• No autoplay videos
• Intelligent contextual prompts
• Consistent, fast loading css layout
• Small font
• Advertising is minimally invasive

That’s enough to get my vote.

Posted in Rants No Comments »

Facebook, Blogger, MySpace, TypePad - how many times have we heard the importance of leveraging the viral potential of Apps and Widgets to attract an audience? Many, many times, to be sure.

There is good reason though. Widgets and mini-apps allow companies to distribute portable, stylish technology packages to whomever wants to use them, getting their name out there, increasing their website traffic statistics, and earning the trust of users from demographics and niches they probably wouldn’t reach on their own.

I’m looking into developing a few small widgets, just to get my feet wet, and discovered Widgetbox . This site is the first step for anyone interested in seeing the potential of widgets, for creative inspiration, or to download and add high quality widgets to their own blogs and social networking profiles

http://www.widgetbox.com/

Posted in Programming, Tools 1 Comment »

This morning Google’s Official Blog announced it would be expanding its incredible Google Translate services, adding 10 more languages.

Now, users can view and cross-translate pages in Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish.

Recently I had a great experience with Google Translate - while working onsite at a client’s office, it came to my attention that one of the phones wasn’t configured properly. As usual, no one had any idea who to contact for the setup details or maintenance password… After about 5 minutes of google searching I found an obscure page, in Chinese, with the factory default password and troubleshooting steps (albeit occasionally hilarious ones).

Read more at the Google Official Blog article on this topic.

Posted in Tools 4 Comments »

As reported by TechCrunch here, a San Francisco based startup named PowerSet is all set to launch pretty soon, albeit with limited abilities. This company’s product focuses on natural language searching, allowing users to search for information the same way they would in English

Most of us have heard of how this sort of thing will one day change the way we look for information, but thus far no company has really shown us a product that lived up to the hype. The good news is that the wait shouldn’t be much longer, as the market is ripe for a well implemented search technology to raise the bar for the rest of the industry.

You can sign up to become an Alpha tester on PowerSet’s main site, or visit their blog and leave a few comments. Good luck guys.

Posted in Companies No Comments »