AfterTheDotNet

Do not throw away old stuff – trade it online with commuto

Commuto, a Canada based start up, allows its member to smart swap things they have for free. It provides a unique secure and safe way to to exchange stuff  or barter online with other members locally. It is aimed at college or university students though anyone can join. The way it works is

• create an account
• create communities and list what things you have to share
• when you see an item on the website which you would like click on the “I want this” link next to it.
• Based on what you want to share or what you want the system at Commuto will notify you when someone is looking something you have to share or someone has a “I want this” item.

Read about how to use commuto and about the online trading industry

Now movies staring you, your family and friends

Listening the NATN (Net@Nite) on the TWIT (This Week In Tech) I discovered a website called JibJab whose creators, Evan and Gregg, were interviewed on NATN.

Though the website is an old one I thought it was worthy of a mention as they were doing something futuristic. JibJab is a service that allows you to send customized greeting videos and images. The fact that you can star in the videos or images, even if you are not a ‘techie’, makes the service interesting and fun.

All the animations are done in flash. Initially JibJab started with political satires as themes for their videos and then added a sendable section in 2007 where they have animated greetings. The fact that you can customize the video makes the service interesting. Sendables are of two types – premium sendables which are available to those customers who sign up by paying a small fee (ranging from $0.50 and $3 depending upon the greeting card you choose) and general sendables which are available to anyone who signup for the free service.

There are some JibJab exclusive videos which feature rich people and the most famous one is the George Bush and Al Gore rap battle which was their earliest production. The best thing about the service is that it is easy to customize the videos.

The 35 member team is doing a commendable job and is one of the few companies that have lived through the dotcom crash. The sendable service is called JokeBox and can be accessed from the main JibJab website as well.

Strengths: easy to use, fun, creative and free

Weakness: If bandwidth is a constraint then the service will test your patience.

Find some great deals on event tickets at TicketStumbler

TicketStumbler is a search engine for tickets and also helps you compare the prices of tickets available at different sources. The ‘cool’ factor of TicketStumbler is that it searches hundreds of brokers and ticket exchanges and presents the results in a readable format and easy comparison.

Some of the websites which TicketStumbler has partnered with are

• Stubhub
• Razorgator
• Ticket Network
• Ticket City

They currently have 1.5 million listings representing 7 million total tickets. The results are pulled at a good speed and you have a slider interface for quantity and the price range of the tickets you are looking for. You can filter the results by the providers as well.

The secondary ticket market is a huge one and TicketStumbler might surprise a few people but they would have to be ahead of competition from the likes of Tickex.

Get yourself bookmarked with Socialmatic

There are a plethora of social bookmarking services available and anyone who has experience would tell you that these services are a good source of traffic to your website or blog if you have one. The second question is how to get bookmarked? There are a lot of services which allow you to bookmark yourself through one click on multiple social bookmark services. Some of the services that I find interesting are

1. Onlywire
2. Social marker
3. Social Poster
4. Get Bookmarked

Another service that has been launched by and online marketer Alvin Phang is called Socialmatic. The service is new and therefore is in Beta. One has to register before one can start using the service. There are a lot of features available which make the service interesting. Some of the interesting features are

• Automatic screen shot of the website bookmarked.
• Recently bookmarked websites on the front page of the Socialmatic website.
• A history log of the websites submitted. The logs also allow you to see if the website submission was successful or not.
• Integration with Firefox.
• Bookmarks are sent randomly to the bookmarking websites making websites less suspicious.

Personally I have not had a great amount of success with automatic social bookmarking and would like to know the  experience others have had. I will be using socialmatic and would provide updates on my experience.

Search for free MP3’s on the Internet

Music listening is something that is used by most of the computer users because it transcends preference of OS, size or the power of the computer that you one uses. MP3 is the most used format for listening to music. MP3 playback is now supported by most home audio players and listening to MP3 on a handheld and mobile phones has also increased the usage of MP3.

MP3s are available on the Internet though some of them are illegal. Users with limited exposure to the Internet have a challenge in finding MP3 music on the Internet. The music industry has been trying hard to clamp down usage of unauthorized music and therefore for in some countries (I pity them) users cannot buy or download MP3’s from illegal servers like Pirate Bay or unauthorized Torrent servers and that has not made things any easier. However there are some MP3 search engines which are creditable. Some of the ones I recommend are

Seeqpod

Seeqpod is a MP3 search service that has been developed using complex search algorithms which help in finding MP3 songs on the Internet. You can find specific artists and listen to them play as you surf, share music with friends, even embed the tunes in your Web site or blog. Using the ‘discover’ button you can find music that has been discovered recently by users of Seeqpod. Now Seeqpod is Iphone compatible making it very easy to search music using Seeqpod and other services like Songza have developed applications that with the help of Seeqpod.

Beemp3

Beemp3 is an mp3 search engine which has 800 000 mp3 files in their search database and approximately 10 000 files are added daily.

MP3Realm

Mp3Realm is an evolving search engine focused distinctively on audio in Mp3 format. Mp3Realm also index’s lyrics, so you can sing along to your favorite songs.The speed of the download’s you find, will vary. This is because the files you download are not hosted by Mp3Realm servers, they are gathered from crawling the web. Mp3Realm hosts no mp3 files.

SkreemR

SkreemR is a search engine for locating audio files on the web. SkreemR crawls the Internet for audio tracks and then provides the information for you to listen, download, or find out more about audio that you are interested in.

One neat SkreemR feature is the built-in music player that lets you preview a song before downloading it. It’s also interesting that you can rate search results. This might come in handy for filtering out junk audio files. . SkreemR wants to launch you into the Internet music community.

These search engines would help you find a MP3 file if it exists on the Internet. Be warned though that since these search engine don not host the files they do not take responsibility of the genuine of the MP3’s which you find and download using them. Therefore ensure that the MP3 you are downloading is legal.

There are some other services which people use to listen to music like Pandora or Last.fm. Some geeks have tutorials on how to search for MP3 using a Google as well. In the end you need to insure that you are not doing something illegal and once you assure that then it is happy listening to you.

Mobile social networking with Juicecaster

JuiceCaster is a social broadcasting utility for cell phones. Juicecaster has been developed by Juice Wireless allows you to post pictures and video instantly from your camera phone to hundreds of popular social networking sites, including Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, and Blogger. Juicecaster is an embedded player which you can add to most of the social network websites. The content you upload can be flagged as private or public. The mobile application is available in the US for about $2.99 and the developers plan to launch a Java application next year. Unfortunately at the moment JuiceCaster requires a US mobile number to register. JuiceCaster can be run from your PC as well.

JuiceCaster has been around for about 2 years and most of the observers felt that the service lacked focus and a clear future. JuiceCaster has managed to make some inroads where Ojeez.com the leading business oriented social community for entrepreneurs, has teamed with has tied up with JuiceCaster so that JuiceCaster is available for free to the members of Ojeez.com.

Inspite of this JuiceCaster has been able to get a second round of funding to the extent of $6 million. The funding has been lead by 21Ventures. This comes at a time when Youtube is also gearing for the mobile market by allowing users to upload videos to their service. JuiceCaster has tough competition like Pickle and the only viable option for them seems to be to sell them to another big company.

Note taking made easy

One of the toughest things to do consistently is note taking. The first challenge is how to take notes. While some people prefer contemporary method of using pen and paper. This method has its own advantage but the challenge is maintaining speed. More and more students are using a computer to do their daily tasks they are not able to develop good speed in writing and that leads to frustrations because of not being able to maintain speed while taking notes. For those who are comfortable this is a great way to make notes. If you want to use preformatted pages for taking notes then the application at pocketmod is a great tool to print sheets to take notes.

The second option is to use take notes using a software. There are a lot of shareware and freeware softwares available. If you have too much money then you can buy the shareware listed at download.com and if you are like me who hates to spend on purchasing software go through the reviews of note taking freeware for windows below and decide which one is best for you.

Scribbleit

Scibbleit is a windows based software and has been developed by JMK software and is easy to use program to manage your ideas and thoughts. Each note can contain a title, a message, time, date and an URL. Other features available are browsing through your messages, mailing a message, setting an alarm for every message, sorting your messages and more.

SimBust Note Manager

SimBust Note Manager is a simple yet robust application that allows you to easily edit, view, and organize various types of information — notes, memos, thoughts, code snippets, logs, etc. All the files can be password protected. You can also export to and import from text files. The interface is very similar to windows explorer and has three panes.Its stealthy folder key scheme, in addition to the typical file password, is especially suited for keeping confidential data, such as diaries or passwords.  Another features is that you can run this application from a thumb drive if you do not want to mess up the registries.

Essential PIM

EssentialPIM Free is the award-winning, personal information freeware which is supported by a large community of users, EPIM has been widely acknowledged as the best personal information management system on any desktop or USB flash. Since the interface is very easy EssentialPIM is regarded as a world leader in visual appointment and information systems area. Some of the features of Essential PIM are

• Tools to satisfy your calendar, contact management, to do list and notes needs.
• Synchronization with Outlook, Windows Mobile devices, Palm, iPOD, Google Calendar.
• Simple printout of any or all modules and quick export of your data into the most useful formats.
• Strong data protection using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm.
• Intuitive interface in many languages.

Debrief Notes

Debrief® is PC software by Idealign® to assist you in making quick notes. If you are one of those who cannot get around to making notes then Debrief is for you as you can have shortcuts for typing and have notes at one place. With mouse clicks you can make general daily notes, meetings, to-dos, assignments, issues, changes, risks, decisions, research, contacts, and more.

There are three editions

1. Basic Edition: Basic notes, subject folders, daily notepad. The Basic Edition is no charge.
2. Standard Edition: More robust note features, debriefs, views, reports, export formats, categories.
3. Professional Edition: Additional contexts for tasks, cases, contact management, library, index, outlines, note decks. Plus reminders, privacy passwords, accounts, deadlines. And more.

The features of the advance version are great but the price is a discouragement.

Treepad

TreePad™ is an Personal Information Manager, Organizer, Database, and Word Processor. It is easy and intuitive to use  and saves you time allowing you to keep your notes, documents, hyperlinks and images at the brief distance of a click. TreePad™ allows you to enjoy better access, organization and control over all your data, notes, bills, projects, clients, addresses, letters, speeches, research, collections, classroom notes, Web pages, links, bibliographic listings, and whatever else your creativity enables you to entrust TreePad™ with, for good organization, easy access, and safe storage.

Treepad can be run from a external disk (such as: USB disk, pen drive, thumb drive, flash drive, memory stick, etc.) without installing it on your hard drive.

Keynote

Though support and development of Keynote has been suspended but even today it is hand solution for note taking. This freeware has the following features

1. Store many separate notes within one file
2. Tree type notes which can be arranged
3. Ability to create user-defined styles
4. Convenient keyboard shortcuts
5. Configurable activation hotkey
6. Integration with WordWeb,
7. You can protect your data files with secure encryption

Keynote is my personal favorite and would recommend it to those who do not take notes but want to start doing that. Please share what method you use to make and notes on a computer or the good old pen and paper fashion.

How to comment on the pages on the Internet

Wibiki is a fun social community that lets you post links and comments on web pages everywhere!

The way wibiki works is that it lets you block advertisements and lets you replace ads with a mini link-sharing board that’s been created by you and your friends. There are two options for getting wibiki to block ads: change your DNS server settings manually, or install the auto-configuring software from wibiki’s site. I would recommend the second option for those those who are not initiated but if you are adventurous go for the first option.

From there, advertisements which the server is able to identify are blocked. The blank space that is generated because of the blocking of the advertisement can be used to place your notes and thoughts. The format of these boxes are very similar to a Google text ad, with a header link in large and bold font, and smaller text for a description, and the user that has submitted the link. Clicking on the link will take you to a wibiki page where the information is simply enlarged. Click on the header from this main page, and you’ll be directed to the original source page. Click on the username and you’ll see their profile, listing all of the links they’ve submitted.

The notes that you put in on the Wibiki’s can be made public or private, and other users can submit to a wibiki directly from the page you’ve placed it on. Private wibiki boards in this manner allow for the formation of groups, and are called buddy boards. There seem to be other things you can do with wibiki boards, and the company has even created a board that pulls the community public timeline from Twitter.

Wibiki should be ready to defend themselves as they will attract a lot of flak as popular pop-up blockers are having a hard time to defend themselves. The argument has been that advertisements are a prime source of income for web site owners and have been supporting the Internet indirectly. There are a lot of false positives as well where good content is blocked because it is recognized as advertisements an example of this are the forums which have popups with information of the posts.

According to the Wibiki "Wibiki is developed by the people who believe in web ubiquity and freedom. Wibiki is working to make connectivity between users fun,dynamic and resourceful. In fact, the Internet is underutilized and needs to grow at the "edge". Wibiki is researching new ways to make the Internet easy to use and develop community awareness. We believe "Users Rule" and are developing software to nurture your rights on the Internet!"

I would suggest trying the application and see if it works for you because in the end it can be very valuable if Wibiki fits in your work process.