PlanHQ is a web based business plan tool that wants to help small and medium businesses to more effectively manage their teams, financials, and, most importantly, their projects. While it has obvious similarities to the popular project management tool Basecamp, PlanHQ's approach is quite distinct from Basecamp's and invites its users to keep an eye on the bigger picture goals.
Social bookmarking: the awkward genius hopes you'll take its ideas to parties for it.
Ma.gnolia, one of the most popular second tier social bookmarking services on the web, announced today at the Gnomedex conference in Seattle that the company has thrown itself to the mercy of the development community and is going to make its code available in open source.
Ma.gnolia is tiny compared to Yahoo's Delicious, but in every way other than network effects, it's more interesting. Unfortunately, that's all pretty academic. When interesting competes with the powerful network effects that come from the huge number of Delicious users - Delicious wins. Today's announcement may help grow Ma.gnolia quickly; at the very least it's a daring move.
Google today announced a Geolocation API for Windows Mobile phones running Google Gears. The Geolocation API will allow developers to get location data based on the cell-ID of nearby cell towers or from built-in GPS systems. Soon, Google will also integrate data from nearby WiFi connections. For now, Gears only works with Firefox, IE, and IE Mobile and only on select Windows Mobile phones. There is no information available about when (or if) it will become available on other platforms, though Google's Android will probably implement it as well.
If you're a Google Reader user, no doubt you've taken a look at your Google Reader trends. The trends feature of Reader is an invaluable service that shows you which feeds you read, share, star, and email. It also provides stats on your subscriptions themselves, showing which ones are frequently updated, inactive, or the most obscure. Bar charts show items read by day, time of day, and time of week, and a tag cloud lets you find items by keyword. With all this data within easy reach, Google Reader Trends provides insight into your feed reading habits which you can then use help you to improve your feeding reading activities as well as the way you categorize your feeds and more.
But Google Reader isn't the only web app that could use a feature like this. If we could pick any other Google service to provide an analysis of our habits, it would certainly be Gmail. But could it be that Trends for Gmail is already underway?
According to Forrester Research, we're in the initial phases of a new 16-year cycle of technology innovation and growth called "IT Everywhere." This shift comes on the heels of the previous cycle which brought us networked computing technologies for our enterprise applications and the Internet. During this transitional period, CIOs need to be aware of which trends from the older cycle are still important and which of the new trends they should also be paying attention to. Forrester has summed up their findings in a recent report which focuses on these emerging trends.
Screen cast videos are one of the most powerful ways to show off anything on the web. They are also quite difficult to do well. That sounds like a pretty sweet spot for specialization and sure enough, a new class of freelancers is emerging to fill the demand.
In this post we look at the work of four of our favorite screen casting freelancers. We think you'll enjoy their work and we hope that you can point us to some still undiscovered people making this kind of magic.
Mozilla just wrapped up its Extend Firefox 3 contest and, after reviewing over 100 entries, its team of judges has announced the winners for Best Add-ons, Best Updated Add-on, and Best Music Add-on. In the Best New Add-on category, the winners were Pencil by Dương Thành An, Tagmarks by Felipe Tassario Gomes, and HandyTag by Rémi Szymkowiak, while the Best Music Add-on category was won by Fire.fm from Jorge Villalobos and Jose Enrique Bolaños.
The contest was meant to showcase extensions that made use of the new capabilities Mozilla introduced in Firefox 3 and managed to combine this with excellent usability and the use of open standards.
Google has long been offering iPhone-optimized sites for most of its services, as well as a dedicated search application for the iPhone. Yahoo, however, had mostly been lagging behind with respect to dedicated iPhone offerings. Now, Yahoo has unveiled a dedicated iPhone version of its search service, which, among other things, integrates results from SearchMonkey modules and also does a good job at displaying Flickr photos or movie showtimes in the results.
Yahoo's photosharing service Flickr is one of the more wonderful things on the web and today the company made a small release that a lot of people should enjoy quite a bit. There's never been a really easy way to embed a nice slide show of your photos off site, until now.
The new Flickr slide show (example below) is available for the photos on any page you're looking at, meaning you should be able to display your friends' photos, photos with a particular tag etc. We are happy. Thanks to the fabulous photographer Scott Beale for pointing to the new feature release.
