AfterTheDotNet

Buxfer is a web 2.0 social networking website that, like many others, was developed to manage the developers problems. Fed up with haggling over shared debts, Carnegie Mellon University computer science graduate students Shashank Pandit, Amit Manjhi and Ashwin Bharambe three years ago created Buxfer, short for “bucks transfer.” The social-networking site with a personal-finance focus allows users to form groups of friends or housemates and track who owes what for utility bills, dinner tabs, day trips and other shared expenses.

Buxfer helps you in managing your expenses as it can track who owes what part of the joint gift, rent or dinner bill for a group. Buxfer also tracks personal transactions with tags. One of the good feature of Buxfer is the ability to sign in using an existing Google, Yahoo or Facebook account (it doesn’t force you to create yet another login!) and the ability to SMS transactions to your account.

Buxfer automatically e-mails the user and other account member in the users groups about new transactions and payments. And when a user logs into Buxfer, icons on the home page show him how much he owes or is owed. The users can leave messages for other users of the account which are shown when any user logs into Buxfer.

Buxfer’s creators acknowledged that many users have asked for online debt settlement. They said they’re exploring options such as working with an online payment service like eBay Inc.’s PayPal or a bank. Doing so might incur the site fees. Pandit said he and his friends are determined to keep access to the site free.

Decipho filters the search results by user preferences and breaks them into categories. It is able to do this by allowing users to categorize the results – shopping, info & categories of your own choosing– and then storing them for future searches. Decipho input from the user community and from individuals to create both regular and personally targeted search results.

The search results have “keyword rankings”  link next to all of the search results breaks down user-votes by categories for each keyword that a site is ranked under, and displays them in percentages. Social meter tool allows you to select what percentage a websites user ranking for a specific category must be equal or greater than. Users while signed into their accounts may add their own categories to rank websites.Some other features include the circles next to the results, which are the breakdown of categories and let you know what category the circle represents. To tell what category a circle represents, put your mouse over the circle and a box will appear with the category name.

Decipho tries to address the issue of search engines which put too much emphasis on how many results they have and not how efficient the results are. Decipho has over 6000 different web sites by January 2007 that have been ranked by its users since it started. New features are being added as well and soon email updates would be there which would inform users of new members and if they have ranked websites. If you have a spare 5 minutes it’s worth trying out.

Empressr is a Ajax/Flash-based web application that lets you create, share and store presentations online. It goes beyond current presentation applications by enabling you to incorporate rich media features, like streaming video and animation, to create and share the most dynamic presentations possible. The Flash UI of Empressr is quite impressive and looks good on eye.

Empressr has incorporated an easy to understand set of steps to help users create crisp looking presentations without prior knowledge of Flash technology. Empressr is free to use and store up five presentations on its secure servers and premium options are available additional presentation storage space. Finally, Empressr presentations use addressable URL to offers users the ability to share presentations with easy. Empressr is easy to use and offers a great solution for anyone looking to create solid presentations without purchasing PowerPoint or other types of presentation creation software. The only negative is that you cannot currently export your Empressr presentations for offline use. This could be troublesome in the case that a conference hall or other venue does not have an Internet connection.

However, the developers on the Empressr blog mention that “I know we have been quiet for the last two months. We’ve been busy making some major rewrites to the way the backend operations work while optimizing the design and user experience of the frontend. These changes will allow us to offer many new features to Empressr that our users have been desiring. Please check back with us in early 2007!” Let us see how things work with them as this application is promising.

Nozbe is like a project management tool and it has more, specifically through the addition of “Contexts” where each task or project has a particular context assigned, such as Work, Home etc. Another thing that Nozbe adds to the mix is “Next Action”. “You will be able to assign a to-do as “next action” to have a sortable list of only “next actions” in front of you during the day. You don’t want to look at long to-do lists of your every project throughout the day… clear your head and focus only on your next actions to do today!”

Nozbe still is in beta and has some annoyances and needs to be developed. Printing support and ability to assign actions to a project are the major changes that I hope will be incorporated during development. Having said that I think the developers of Nozbe have started on the right foot because it is strongly built on GTD principles of David Allen.

Billster is a totally free online application which helps you organise and trackyour personal and shared expenses. The interface of the application is designed to have multiple tabs which are home, connections, bills and tags.

The Connections tab  heps you to track of who you’ve had transactions with. Helpfully (pun intended), Billster will send invite emails to your friends if you include their address when you add them.

Under the Bills tab, you can add personal expenses, group expenses, what’s owed you, and what you owe. You can also tag your bills. Unfortunately you cannot import data from your bank directly. To reduce the burden of adding expenses manually you can setup recurring expenses so that you do not need to enter them every time. The interface is similar to the one you use when doing e-banking (making single/recurring payments, etc.).

Shared Bills: If you share a house with other students or professionals, or perhaps you’re organising a holiday with a few people, Billster can take the stress out of sorting out who owes what and when - you can even record standing orders and direct debits so it is possible to let the system keep itself up-to-date with bills that are paid at the same time every day, week, month or year.

Personal Bills: By making use of the bill tagging system, you can create categories and group your bills quickly and easily, helping you keep track of where your money is going. When used along side the date selector, it is possible to work out how much money you spend on everyday items, day by day, or perhaps on a year by year basis. You can do the following with Billster
Record and report on your personal and group expenses

• Save reoccurring expenses, even those with direct debits or standing orders setup
• Send reminders, either automatically or fired off by you, whenever you want to remind people who owe you money or to remind yourself about a payment
• Automatically email you with a summary of the expenses you’ve put through Billster

The most helpful screen is the Dashboard where you can visualize the flow of cash in and out of your account. If you use tags carefully, you can also get a sense of the relative proportions of your spending. Do you spend a lot on haircuts? How much of your income goes to rent? There’s also a half-baked six degrees-ish graphic that shows how many connections you have, how many your friends have, and so on. Maybe more social features will be added soon, and this feature will have added significance.

Finance oriented sites space is showing signs of maturing with new applications being introduced on the web on a regular basis. One would see a lot of applications appearing in this vertical in the next one to two years.

Fauxto, a browser-based design program reminiscent of early versions of Adobe Photoshop. Fauxto has the usual drawing tools: a pencil, a pen, a paintbrush, and an eraser. Users can create their own drawings or perform rudimentary photo enhancements, but essentially it’s a doodling tool that proves these kinds of programs can work in Flash.

Once you have completed the task you can share it with the world in three ways though the URL returned does not work in Firefox.There are some annoying limitations with Fauxto, most significantly the ability to undo and redo. I stand corrected as I was made aware by the Fauxto team that one can undo and redo upto 5 steps which is great news and it also means the developers are listening to the users and updating the service accordingly. There’s also a canvas-size limitation of 1000×1000 pixels, which limits most of your projects to casual doodling.

One the whole a good service and when it is developed fully it will be used by a lot of industries.