Popdeck is an ongoing skateboard deck design contest. Just like Threadless.com (and others) anyone can submit a design, then the website members vote for their favorite designs. The design with the most votes wins $200 (currently) and gets a free deck. I love the concept of popdeck and that business model in general.
It’s been a few months since I’ve posted here, as you might have noticed. The last quarter of 2007 was crazy busy for me, so I neglected blogging. I hope to make more time to blog in 2008. There is so much stuff to blog about. Stay tuned.
I just got my invite to the latest entrant in the Music Discovery/Community web world, called Jango.com. At first glance it seems to be a cross between Pandora and Last.fm but with a lot more Ajax and a really nice user interface. The jury is still out on the music selection though. They don’t have a lot of the artists that I like, instead they tend to have more main stream popular stuff. Hopefully that will improve over time. They are in invite only Beta now, so you’ll have to work a little to get your invite. You can go to the jango.com homepage to signup for an invite or give inviteshare a try.
You can read more about jango at readwriteweb
I’ve recently been doing online Marketing consulting with an ecommerce client. They’re an old school ecommerce company with not very sexy products. Never-the-less they’ve been around for a longtime and will be going public soon. So, as a part of the process I put together a list of 5 ideas for their internal marketing team to review and hopefully implement or improve. I thought I would share those 5 things here. I know that most ecommerce companies do most or all of these, but you’d be surprised at how many “old school” companies that are out there that do not.
The important thing to remeber is that all of these will work, but you have to be diligent and understand that it doesn’t happen overnight.
Here’s the deal… If you have a 3rd generation ipod that’s currently on the “fritz” you can take it back to the Apple store and they will give you 80gig ipod classic for $71. Apparently for a limited time apple doesn’t have any spare parts for 3rd genetation ipods so they decided to give everyone the upgrade deal. I took mine in on Sunday, under the advice of an Apple employee and was in and out less than 10 minutes. My “battery” was the problem with mine and they didn’t even turn it on to see if it worked. So if you have 3rd Gen iPod take it on down to the Apple store to get your new 80gig classic. If someone was enterpriseing enough I’m sure you could purchase a broken 3rd generation for next to nothing and then take to Apple for a new ipod classic. But hurry up because this will only last a couple of weeks at the most.
Digg lunched some new feature today that makes them a bit more like Facebook and myspace. They’ve added 50 new features, but most revolve around social networking.
- Digg will notify you via email when certain activities happen, such as when someone adds you as a friend or a story you submit becomes popular. You can control what emails you want to receive in the Email Settings section of your Digg User Profile.
- You can easily find your friends’ Profiles on Digg by searching for them by their email address. If you don’t want to enable others to search for your Digg Profile by your email address, or if you want to manage what personal information to display in your Digg Profile, you can reflect this in your Privacy Settings.
You can check out their blog for a video rundown of 5 of the new features.
Lots of folks are waiting to hear from Apple about the latest and greatest iPod’s and iPhone’s. So far a new ipod Nano and new touch screen design for the iPods, including WiFi have been announced. Get real time news from CrunchGear.
pic via crunchgear
Early last month Flock released the latest version (0.9) of their browser. This release moves them “significantly closer to their 1.0 release”. Some of the features that’s included with the 0.9 release are:
The Flock browser has gotten a lot of media attention since day one and I’ve been a frequent user of their browser since early on. When this latest release came out I was very excited about the new feature and the possibility of switching from Firefox permanently. At first glance the Flock browser looks great and all of the unique features are easy to figure out. I really like the Media MiniBar as it’s a great way to see my friends Flickr photos and video. Additionally, I really like the convenience of the uploader tool which makes it real easy to upload your latest photos to flickr. Now I know that this is not their 1.0 release and that they’ve come a long way since their first release. But, I’ve been using this browser “full time” on my laptop for more than a month now and have threatened every day to move back to Firefox becasue of how incomplete this version is. First of all, I use two different computers everyday and if I’m going to use the Flock browser I’m going to need some sort of way to sync the two. As you might imagine, it’s pretty frustrating when you save something on your laptop but when you flick on your desktop computer you have to start all over. I would be happy to signup with Flock for an account and sign in to my browser just so everything can be synced. That shouldn’t be to hard, should it? The other feature that needs some work is the “star this page” or favorites. I use Del.icio.us for my bookmarks, which Flock favorites is integrated with however they’re lacking in execution. For example, you have to many steps (2) to enter a Del.icio.us tag and you don’t get a list of the previous tags that you’ve used. The most frustrating thing about the favorites is actually trying to locate one of your saved Del.icio.us bookmarks. If they were to copy how del.icio.us does it then it would be perfect. Another feature on Flock that will need more attention is the RSS reader. It’s fully integrated with the browser and is a great feature, however there are a few improvements that should be made that would make it even better: For example when you add a new RSS feed to the reader you don’t have any option to organize that feed. You have to wait untill it’s added to the list and then find and then drag it to the folder that you want. Additionally, there’s no way to edit the feeds. The last thing that I’m going to bitch about is the Blog Post tool. I can’t use it until it has a post to draft.
All in all I see a great future for Flock but I think they still have a ways to go before I can make the switch. As of writing this post I’m switching back to Firefox and will be anxiously awaiting the next release of Flock.
Mashable.com has been on a roll lately with all of their “top” lists of tips, trick, tools and resources for just about anything online. Including some tools for web surfers, wordpress users and just about anything else you can think of. So, I decide to put together a list of our own that includes more than 2500+ of the lists that Mashable.com has put together over the last couple of months. I would like to eventual build a data base to make this kind of information easier to access. If you have any interest in helping me achieve that, then let me know.
