Although the dining selections for this service are currently limited, the convenience and flow of this site is phenomenal. In addition to the group ordering feature, DiningIn offers users online catering, a la carte orders and a meal concierge dial-in service for corporate customers. While companies like GrubHub and Foodler offer similar delivery services, only DiningIn allows users to avoid the order-by-committee scenario. To test the service visit Diningin.com.

1. What He's Having: There are moments in life when the stars align and you find yourself in Thailand during a full moon festival, Italy during an olive harvest, or Fiji for the biggest surf waves of the year. You could take your chances, or you could consult Joobili. Joobili is an event-based travel recommendation system where users enter their desired travel dates, country of travel and interests. From here the Joobili community suggests a variety of events with a map view of the results. Rather than planning your trip blindly, you can hit (or miss) every major festival, sporting event or concert tour on your travel route. TripSay and I Want to Go There also offer crowd sourced tips on favorite travel spots. Meanwhile, NextStop members entice your inner-adventurer using pictures and short 140-character descriptions.

2. The Whole Fam Damily: Are you traveling with a large group? Triporama lets users plan by committee. Similar to Evite, hosts create a group home page and invite friends and family members to contribute. Members can store and share travel research, assign tasks, conduct polls, build itineraries and integrate maps. While this is an extremely useful tool, be warned that if you ask for someone's opinion, you'll probably get it. TravelMob is another great tool offering similar group planning functionality.

3. A Clean Bed: With hostels, it's a crap shoot as to whether or not you're going to end up in a room with a drunk couple or a mentally unstable ex-pat. And if you're traveling on a budget, hotels can be expensive. Air BnB offers fantastic deals on nightly rooms, sublets or vacation rentals. Site members rent out their fully-furnished rooms, apartments and homes. For the price of a horrible hotel in New York, you can often get a luxury apartment with kitchen facilities. iStopOver is a similar service, but users can also rent out office space. This way you can extend your stay, finish some work and still have time to enjoy the sights.

4. Map Happy Directions: Whenever you see a travel brochure with the phrase, "The city's best kept secret" on it, you know this is an outright lie. Real secrets travel by word-of-mouth and are far from the noise of the tour buses and gift shops. AMap.to allows users to add links, videos, images, directions and comments to a map. This is a great way to share your favorite restaurants and parks and help others find them. The service offers the option to upload a shortened URL to Twitter, Facebook and Digg. Be choosy with what you upload, after all, it's only a matter of time before the cult of Lonely Planet travelers flock to online communities for new suggestions. If you're looking for spots in the US, TripCart offers travel mapping for drivers. Users can share and plan their routes and rest stops on the way to major and not-so-major attractions. Now you can get lost in that maize maze you've always wanted to visit.

5. Posse Up: Sometimes you've been on the road so long that you just want to see a familiar face. Dopplr lets frequent travelers share their location and travel plans with friends. Similar to TripIt, the service lets us upload itineraries and share them to schedule a rendezvous. While not specific to travel, Whrrl, Loopt and RWW's most promising company of 2008, Brightkite, are also great geo-based friend tracking tools.

6. Home is Where the Heart Is: Steven Tyler sings, "life's a journey, not a destination." But honestly, after 20 hours of connecting flights and airport food, sometimes the destination looks like a lifesaver. For five dollars FlightTrack ensures that we find our airport gates, catch our connections and make our way home. The premium version costs $10 and allows users to sync with their TripIt itineraries. NextFlight also tracks departures for more than 1,100 airlines. Meanwhile Flight Status tracks arrivals, departures and your baggage. And for those of us lacking a good sense of direction, Gate Maps helps us navigate confusing airport layouts and make it from gate to food court to gate.

Freshly launched this week, the four person company has a little bit of usability work it could do on its product and the possibilities for additional user interfaces (Blackberry, IM, etc) are many - but the service already looks quite useful.

Account holders create proposals, enter email addresses to send requests for approvals and manage open and closed proposals in an interface that looks like email itself. Recipients get HTML emails with simple buttons to click to say "approve," or "deny." It's quite simple.

The end result is faster, more accountable decision making. It's simple but it looks like it could be quite effective and it certainly addresses a major pain point.

The four person company is self funded and only offers free accounts right now. In time there are a number of options for enterprise subscriptions or premium features.

Future Possibilities

We'd love to be able to respond to requests for approval by IM. A mobile interface would certainly be good. There are no RSS feeds on the site right now, a fairly serious shortcoming that the company says will be resolved soon. We'd also like to see the admin page made a little cleaner and simpler.

Raven Zachery, open source industry analyst, told us he'd love to be able to forward ordinary email requests for approval to a Zapproved email account and have the sender receive an automatic invite to the Zapproved system.

The possibilities are nearly endless for this simple little system. Allowing people to interact with it in as many was as possible will lead to a higher degree of adoption. Company founder Monica Enand tells us an API is on the way as well, so interface and functionality options will be thrown open to the world's developers.

We can imagine analytics like "this member of your team tends to respond fastest" or "this person has been consistently holding up decisions." There's a whole lot that can be done when you take a data and relational database driven approach, as Zapproved calls itself, to a fundamental human problem.

Using Muxfind is as simple as using any search engine - and you don't need a Muxtape login to access it. Above the search box, you have three options to search by: "Find Artists and Songs," "Discover by Muxtape," and "Discover by Artist."

The first option will simply return results either listing songs by the artist you searched for or the songs matching the song title you entered. Each link actually takes you to the muxtape where the song can be played, so you may need to scroll down in order to find it.

The second option, "Discover by Muxtape," will help you find new Muxtapes to enjoy. To use this option, you enter in the name of a muxtape that you liked, and Muxfind will return muxtapes that are similar to it, in terms of mood or genre, as best we can tell, that is. There is no info on how this matching algorithm works, but it does seem to return results from the same overall "genre" of music. For example, a muxtape by Stefan, which featured Bloc Party, Shins, and The Chemical Brothers, matched up with muxtapes featuring Moby, Depeche Mode, and Morphine.

Search by Artist on Muxfind

The final option also returns similarity-based results, but this time specifically by artist. For example, if you do a search for Radiohead, you'll get a list of results that link to muxtapes where a Radiohead song is included in the playlist. This option doesn't always work as well since some people's muxtapes are quite eclectic and include Radiohead tunes right along with NIN and Public Enemy, whereas others keep theirs more mellow as a whole, combining Radiohead with other mellow artists like The Postal Service or Modest Mouse.

However, that isn't so much of an issue with the Muxfind service itself - it just reflects the varying tastes of the users on Muxtape. If anything, this "problem" could be looked at as a feature instead because a user who strangely pairs Radiohead with NIN may just have a musical taste similar to yours, even if the two songs don't seem to automatically go with each other as being "similar artists." Much like a radio station simply plays artists in the same genre of music, Muxfind, in the same vein, could help you find online streams of artists in the same genre, too.

Conclusion

On A VC, Fred Wilson notes another reason that services like Muxfind and other user-gen search tools have value: they are "a bit of a quality filter." Because it takes time and effort to post something on the web, whether a playlist, a link, a photo, or video, the items that people actually take the time to upload are usually something worthwhile.

Muxfind isn't by any means the first or best music search/discovery service, Grooveshark, Last.fm, Hype Machine, Mixwit, and even iTunes offer ways to search and find new music to love. However, for those that love the muxtape format, Muxfind is worth a look.

The API itself should be done by the time summer arrives in the US, with more significant chunks available to the public within 6 months.

The New York Times has taken a lead in bringing newspapers into the digital landscape over the past year. In 2006, the company launched its specialized RSS reader built on the Microsoft WPF platform, but it was this past fall that things really started to heat up on the digital side of the Times.

The paper put out a Facebook application, which has been a modest success with about 1,500 daily active users. They followed that in October with the controversial decision to put reader comments on the main page of the paper's web site.

In November, the Times took Techmeme full on by launching its own news aggregator powered by the Blogrunner technology it had acquired. Blogrunner "is our answer to Techmeme, integrated with our main site. It is technology we've built ourselves, based on Blogrunner, a company we bought last year," NYT Tech Editor Saul Hansell told us at the time.

Then in January, the company made an investment in Wordpress, the popular blogging engine that powers their own blogs.

Conclusion

An API is a logical next step for newspapers. It will give developers access to their vast amounts of well-researched data, and allows the paper's brand to be spread easily across the web. More access to Times content and the ability to mash it up in new and interesting ways can only be a win for both readers and the paper.

"The web of the near-term future isn't about pages any more," wrote Marshall Kirkpatrick in his massive post on APIs in March. "It's about data, flying around, hopefully under the control of users, and offering a world of possibilities that few of us could have imagined just a few years ago."

The New York Times seems to understand that. Says Aron Pilhofer, the paper's interactive news editor, the goal of an API is to "make the NYT programmable. Everything we produce should be organized data."

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