Spectone has a new tabletop Ipod dock stereo speaker system called Specktone Retro. I haven’t tried it out yet, but it looks super cool. Here are some of its features:

• Sleek & Stylish Retro design
• Analog Circuitry for rich, deep tone
• High-gloss lacquered wood cabinet
• 4″ subwoofer and LOUD 28 watt output
• 1/8″ mini plux AUX input
• Backlit ‘green glow’ volume knob

If anyone has one of these, let me know what you think.

technorati tags: ipod, specktone

I spent yesterday trying out a new online application called Cooqy. Actually, it’s a ebay shopping assistant with a really cool reputation tagging function.

Robert Yeager, Cooqy’s founder stated, “eBay’s Feedback system is flawed. eBay users typically have two personas…one as a buyer, one as a seller. An eBay Feedback rating is much more important when listing items for sale, so much so that buyers become afraid of leaving well-deserved negative feedback to sellers and risking their own feedback rating.”

Cooqy’s Social Tagging feature allows the eBay shopping community a way to organize and police eBay sellers without fear of reprisal to their eBay Feedback rating, which is of so much importance when listing items for sale on eBay.

In addition to the really cool reputation feature, Cooqy also is a awesome Ebay shopping assistant that allows you to surf Ebay auctions faster than with eBay’s own website. Besides offering a faster surfing experience the Cooqy application also provides shopping features not available on Ebay:

• View up to 48 items side-by-side without scrolling
• Display item locations in the USA on an integrated map
• Inspect all item photos with built-in magnifiers
• Find auction bargains with tools not available on eBay
• Watch animated auction end times

Overall I found Cooqy to be a really useful app. I plan on digging a little deeper into the search features later this week. In the meantime, check out Cooqy for yourself.

technorati tags: ebay, reputationmanagement, shopping, auction

I got my copy of the June issue of Business 2.0 yesterday. On the cover is a big teaser pic for their feature article, written by Michale V. Copeland and Om Malik. How to build a bullet proof startup. With the exception of a few, there are no bullet proof startups. Don’t get me wrong, the article has some solid advice and um, cool illustrations. I think they had the wrong approach when writing the article. Lots of companies don’t start with VC money these days and most sure as hell don’t have $500k to $1M to develop a beta product. As I’ve written in other posts, the tools are available now that will allow you to start a legitimate company with much less capital than Business 2.0 trys to tell you.

You can read more at the following:
Business 2.0
GigaOm
SignalVsNoise

technorati tags: startup, web2.0, CEO, business2.0

Bubbleshare has been kicking ass lately. Well, at least we think so. We did a Bubbleshare webcast last week because we (meaning me) loves the functionality and ease of use. Well, today they released some cool improvements that make the functionality and ease of use even better. I’ll do a more indepth post next week but until then, here’s a list of new stuff.

• Improved navigation system: All your own albums, received and bookmarked are now under main tab ‘my album’
• New visual design: Checkout the new visual design for a list of albums. We think it is much better!
• Search: Finally you can search through your photos and albums as well as any album on the community. Search will search through captions and bubble captions.
• Tags: Now you can tag your photos or your albums! Tags are a great way to organize your photos. Simply add a tag to an album (on overview tab) and it will be applied to every photo in that album. Also tag individual photos in ‘photo view’. We are aware there is about a 10 minute delay before your tags are searchable. We hope to address this in the next few weeks.
• Printing: Now you can order prints and gifts from our partner Qoop. Simply click ‘Prints and Gifts’ on any album
• Vertical Slider (Flash): Checkout our new flash integration tool. Now you can add your album onto the side of any website or blog and it will be displayed in a cool vertical slider mode (in one of 3 sizes). This requires your visitors have flash 7 or 8 installed (most do)
• Contact Manager:Now we remember the email address of anyone you send an Album to. Next time you share an Album you can quickly and easily select their email address from a list just to make your life a bit easier. We are working on a full-featured contact manager in the future.
• BubbleShare Screensaver for Mac: Sync photos to desktop to include in your screensaver.

technorati tags: bubbleshare, tagging, folksonomy, photos

MSN Money has a really good article on entrepreneurship for young entrepreneur. Good stuff, well worth the read. You can check it out here.

technorati tags: entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, msn

There is a really cool documentary posted over at Beautiful Losers. If you have any interest in art, skateboarding or alternative music, check it out. If you’re not familiar with Beautiful Losers then find out more about it here.

Via skatedaily

According to Shop.Org/Forrester Study online retail will $211.4 billion. Wow! That’s a huge number for a industry that’s so young. It was just 3 years ago that $100 billion was the magic number. You can read more at The Houston Chronicle.

technorati tags: ecommerce, shop.org, Forrester, etail

Somehow, 30Boxes added a ToDo list to their calendar application without me noticing. You might recall (but probably not) that I did a post back in October about my quest to find the perfect calendar solution. Well, now that 30Boxes has added a ToDo list…it is a perfect solution. Some of the features of the ToDo list are as follows:

- drag and drop sorting

- one box entry with tagging: Example “call joe 344-2000 tag work tag @calls”

- metadata on items (tags, create date)

- shortcuts: add To Do items via the One Box by having the word “todo” in your text. Add them by email by sending something like “todo buy flowers for mom” to “add at 30boxes.com”.

You can read more about the features at the 30Boxes blog.

You can read/see other posts I did about 30Boxes here and here.

technorati tags: 30boxes, calendar, todo

This might be old news but I just caught wind of it this weekend.

Popular social networking website MySpace.com has announced that they have started to gradually roll out the subscription phase of their business model. The service, dubbed MySpace Plus, will be offered to the site’s 79 million unique users at an introductory cost of $9.95 a month. Subscribers to the service will enjoy faster page loading, access to unique content, and ad-free surfing for as long as they continue to pay the additional fee. They will also be provided with the real names, addresses, and phone numbers of all of the “friends” displayed on their homepage.

Sounds to me like a disaster waiting to happen. Now teen stalking predators will be able to get the name address a lot earier than before.

technorati tags: myspace, socialnetwork, community

I did a product spotlight webcast on Bubbleshare earlier in the week. One of the things that I brought up that could improve Bubbleshares reach would be to add tagging. Well, I guess I should have read their blog.

We are working hard to put out a new release of BubbleShare this week. Some new features will be added that have been requested for some time. We will finally launch Tags & Album/Photo Searching! There are also a ton of little fix-up’s that we’ve been meaning to do. Stay tuned.

technorati tags: bubbleshare, tagging, folksonomy, photos