Open source softwares and technologies are a much comfortable option compared to proprietary ones when it comes to finding descriptive solution and community feedback on the web.

So, here we have an Information major website that’s meant to serve you with some of the rarely found and Free Flash, Flex and Adobe AIR Tutorials tutorials. Take a look at TheTechLabs.com

In their own words

TheTechLabs is a place to contribute the research, information and knowledge of the IT professionals. This site is a gateway of information to educative articles and tutorials focussing on Adobe Air, Flash and Flex.

One notable thing is the ‘Content quality’ that impressed us. The tutorials are decently authored and the fact that the site invites external writers to contribute their knowledge (they’re offering $100 per article), the content written on the site gets a definite boost in terms of variety as well.

So, go ahead with TheTechLabs if you were looking for a knowledge resource like this….

The very recent “Google’s latest favicon” has been a baby of this concept only.Users from all over the world poured in their creative inputs to inspire the next Google favicon.And “Creative Crowdsourcing” has a lot of fantics in every corner of the world.

Springleap,a South African startup implements the very same concept but finishes it with a commercial outcome,T-shirts .It reaches out to many of the creative souls in South Africa and gives them all,a platform to submit their “Creative Designs” to compete in a socially controlled(think of Digg,Stumbleupon…..hope you got it) environment.The unofficial(may be professionals) designer,who wins maximum public votes over a certain period(till the running competition ends),gets to have his creation,printed on T-shirts and sold commercially to users all over the country.

Once you’ve joined the Springleap community, you can create your own profile; upload,vote and list your favourite designs; comment and respond to what others are saying about the latest entries or celebrity duals and update your status – similar to Twitter and Facebook.

Like i mentioned earlier,this same concept(creative crowdsourcing for commercial production) has been replicated in other countries as well and we’ve already profiled another startup called Inkfruit,doing almost everything same for Indians designers and Fashion freaks.

Talking more about Springleap,the overall UI is quite pleasing and fun to get along with.In simple words,great job has been done by the creative folks at Springleap in branding their service in a different and ‘freaky’ way to appropriately suit the theme and concept of the site.

One thing that’s really deserves appreciation is the way the winning designers are rewarded.It’s not just the prize money but a lot more than that(royalty,publicity…anything still left ?).Prize money is kind enough too($750).

Springleap is currently scoring around 250,000 uniques every month,with more than 90% of them belonging to South Africa.They are probably missing out with one important thing at the moment….Affiliate programs.They can really churn out more sales,taking help from their affiliates(website/blog owners).

If you are a young lad and love sporting funky tees then InkFruit may satisfy your soul the most… 

Inkfruit is India’s first online democratic community t-shirt brand till date(and probably the most successful as well)

Inkfruit is an indian portal for awesome t-shirts.It is also a platform for individual designers to submit designs,get acclaim,win prizes and have fun !

In their own words

Inkfruit is a place for people to submit, discover and buy amazing custom t-shirt designs created by artists from around the world. Based around an ongoing t-shirt design contest, all of the designs you see on Inkfruit have been submitted by our community

People submit their earth shattering design ideas for t-shirts.These designs are then voted and commented upon by an online community which collectively decides which designs go for printing. The winning t-shirts are then screen printed and made available for sale.

Almost all the t-shirts featured on Inkfruit for sale cost Rs.349/-(looks reasonable for well designed stuff).Reportedly,designers are paid Rs 20,000 worth prizes every month.Also,the name of designer features on the t-shirt label thus ensuring they get due credit for their creation and hard work. 

The community gets to choose what they want to wear.It also empowers the designer community in India and gives them a place to showcase their talent. 

Inkfruit,founded by Kashyap Dalal and Navneet Rai in December 2006 seems to be a remarkable amalgamation of ‘hardcore fashion industry’ and ‘social web’.So far,they have built a wide following countrywide.

Hence this website serves both the purposes effectively.Anyone who is fond of t-shirts gets to have an awesome t-shirt collection.Anyone who is fond of designing can design and be part of the community.

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Special !

Now comes an important question to the readers out there…

“What innovation/idea related to technology can take Inkfruit to even higher standards ?”

Answer it the way you want in comments section and we will giveaway two popular t-shirts on Inkfruit to two of the most sensible suggestions(obviously FREE).Use a correct email-id while commenting so that you don’t find any problems in getting your designer t-shirt if selected(we will ask the addresses to send the t-shirts).We will announce the two choosen commentors 48 hrs from now,right there on TechPluto.As Inkfruit is still to provide services outside India,we will select commentors residing in India only.

Update : The two commentors have been choosen and notified as well.Check out comments to find out the choosen dudes…

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Disclaimer : The t-shirts to be gifted to the selected commentors are sponsored by Inkfruit.Thanks Priyanka.

Are you fed up of unwanted calls you receive from telemarketers,loan agents,scheme sellers etc and you often call back to confirm if the last missed call you had from an unknown number was urgent or crap…

If you’re the one bearing all this then wouldn’t you want a service to let you know who was the one behind that ‘unknown’ number without dialing the number back ?

If yes then 800Notes can serve as a pain-killer to your problem… 

800Notes maintains the largest online database of unpublished business numbers and is dedicated to doing just that.The web community collects unlisted phone numbers used by businesses and today,800Notes’s users have something to celebrate…

They have identified more than 100,000 UNKNOWN callers.

The majority of the phone numbers used by banks, credit unions, insurance companies,non-profit organizations, telemarketers or collection agencies are not published anywhere.So instead of wondering who is calling and deciding whether you should keep ignoring or return the calls you can go to 800Notes.com,enter the phone number into the search field and read what others have to say about the caller.

If it’s a telemarketer,users often share ways to opt out.If it’s a collection agency, you can find their name and contact information provided by the community. If a caller says “You’ve won a free trip to Las Vegas”,a quick search will prove that’s likely not the case since a couple hundred people have reported the same.

800Notes is a two year old self-funded web service as of now and the users are contributing an average of 200 unknown phone numbers everyday as reported to us by Julia Forte,a founding member at 800Notes.

Their visitors are majorly based out of U.S. and Canada and therefore most of the indexed numbers on 800Notes belong to these two countries.Seeing the massive growth it has achieved in the past two years,it seems the victims to such ‘disturbing’ calls are growing at a rapid rate.

This post has been guest authored by Sudhindra Rao,a Digital Communications Professional who’s also an ardent Social Media freak.He blogs here and tweets here.Click here to know more about him.

According to Twitterfacts,(as on 21 Sept) number of twitter users has crossed a figure of 3 Million.

So, what else can we do besides posting on twitter ? How about doing some more interesting things with twitter. So, here goes the list…

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Tweetscan: Tweet scan is a real-time search engine for Twitter & identi.ca. It indexes the messages and lets you search keywords, people, tweets etc.You can download tweets,conversations and can even author with results via email.

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Twittermail: Once registered, TwitterMail gives you a TwitterMail email address, something like your_name@twittermail.com. Any mail sent to this e-mail address will be posted on your twitter account.

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Twitter Local: Twitterlocal allows you to generate RSS feeds to filter out tweets around a certain area. Just enter the area of interest and it will generate a feed URL and add it to your feed reader.

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Twitarcs: How about some visual treat? Twitarcs creates strange, interesting visual images on the term/keyword entered. It takes the latest 100 tweets for a twitter ID or term of interest and creates a list representation that has arcs connecting messages sent to the same users or that use the same primary term. You can click on the left side to load the tweets for a new user, on the right side to load the tweets for a specific term, and in the middle to visit the actual tweet.

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Twittearth:Twittearth gives you a 3D view of LIVE tweets from all over the world.It’s a great visual treat for your eyes.It’s sort of a Twitter’s analogue of Digg’s Swarm(see Digg Labs).

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Tweetbeep: Want to know who’s speaking about you or your company,blog or product on Twitter ! Tweetbeeps are like Google alerts which alerts you by sending an email when any twitter post contains a link or content relating to you or your blog/company.

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Twitter Grader: Twitter Grader evaluates your public twitter value. The Twitter Grader measures the relative power of a Twitter user. It is calculated as a percentile score.The service is provided by Hubspot

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]]> http://www.techpluto.com/twitter-extensions/feed/ 2 http://www.techpluto.com/slideshare-competitor/ http://www.techpluto.com/slideshare-competitor/#comments Sun, 31 Aug 2008 14:33:25 +0000 Prashant Sharma http://www.techpluto.com/slideshare-vs-myplick-smart-pr-vs-sharp-service/ When it comes to sharing your slideshows with your friends,one site that definitely comes in your mind is Slideshare and that’s why it’s growing at such a fast pace.

But,the reason,why it is gaining such a momentum is not only its service but also (rather,majorly) its PR activities.Slideshare had a tough competition earlier in Slide but then it created its own space and smartly projected itself as “Youtube of Slideshows“.

There has been a number of web services ex. Myplick,Sliderocket etc,offering better quality with an extra cluster of features than Slideshare but aren’t able to gain massive traction because of exhaustive PR activities done by Slideshare,which overshadows its competition.

With advisors/investors(rather PR backbone) such as Guy Kawasaki,Dave McClure and few others,they have a definite edge over their competition.

But still,when it comes to features and better service,Slideshare takes a backseat in front of its tiny unhyped competitor,Myplick.

Areas where Myplick outperforms Slideshare

• No login Strategy – I have rarely seen a service being able to implement “No login required” technique in such a fine way.You genuinely don’t require a registration before file upload but still you will have a tendency to get your registered afterwards.Try it yourself…
• Audio Facility – Adding audio to a ppt can make a lot of difference in preserving user interest in the slideshow,which is facilitated by Myplick but Slideshare isn’t able to portrait this feature of their service as effectively as Myplick(elucidated)
  
• Statistics – Myplick lets the users have slideshow’s statistics like viewer’s location,avg. time spent etc..which helps others judge it better before shelling a minute for the slideshow.Slideshow gives it miss as well
• Efficient – We uploaded a similar file to both the slideshow sharing platforms to see how it works out.After getting through both the platforms,it was Myplick which proved “relatively” fast,easy to use and smoother in transition.

Final verdict – A great movie with poor marketing is a sureshot Flop but an avg flick with superb promotion makes it a blockbuster.Same rule applies here.And that’s why marketing a product is as crucial as serving a great technology

It’s an all new service launched by Microsoft that lets its users create 3D experiences through photos.

Photosynth,being for quite sometime in Microsoft Live Labs finally opened its doors for users on Aug 21 but the team behind this service haven’t really promoted this launch even as a ‘Beta Launch’ for Photosynth.

According to the team,there is lot more to come which will enhance the capabilities and results of the service.As there have already been a cluster of services offering some manipulation or the other on images/photos,it’s refreshing to see a service focussing on “2D to 3D transition” where photos serve as the basic input and rest is the job of the photosynth software.

Prior to their launch,they got so overwhelmed that they went down for a while to add up more capacity and restore back(which is rather a good sign) and they got a heavy response from the users on the very first day in terms of user input(more than 7727 synths created carrying 286,689 images).

After testing the service(which requires a setup download),it was a mixed reaction for this service.The 3D world experience was certainly missing but the system is likely to rise upto the expectations that it has created in the time to come.

What it offers…

• A service that transforms 2D images into 3D world
• It lets users input images/pics into a software that outputs with a web address that has a 3D transformation of the input

Why it can be THE NEXT BIG THING !

• Unique – A “2D to 3D transition” with photos as input is something one would definitely like to experience.A clear indication is the heavy response of users on Day 1 of its launch.
• Capable – However,the current status of the service isn’t that accurate(highly dependent upon user input),the future of this service looks certainly bright.They have,for ex. shown some sample synths(that’s what they call the 3D output) which clearly shows up the system capability.
• Efficient – The application runs really smooth.Even from a modest config. PC and below avg. net connection,photosynth offers an efficient browsing of synths.

Why it may prove to be a Web Struggler !

• Poor quality – Majority of users won’t put extra efforts to click a bunch of similar nature pics with different angles and precision to let the service output better 3D experience(more synthy).They would expect the service to do everything by itself.If,the service doesn’t improvise the system further,it may be a one-time affair for the users.
• Copycats – Although,it doesn’t seem to be a big threat to Microsoft’s Photosynth,but it certainly can’t be ignored as well.Photosynth copycats are on their way to gain user traction and may eat up a chunk of users here and there

The likes and dislikes of different people are way apart but generally most of us enjoy music(of some sort or the other) and admire renowned singers/artists and music composers for the music those guys create and help the disco theks rocking.

And then,there are a chunk of people who can broadly be called as “Music Enthusiasts”(bathroom singers to singing aspirants),who love to sing and get appreciated for the passion they carry for music.

Muziboo is actually an online platform for the second set of people(Music enthusiasts).It serves as a solution in many ways to this category.It lets one upload music compositions and karaoke to the platform,share one’s passion to the Muziboo audience and get appreciated(in terms of comments) by other users.

It also helps to serve as a platform to aggregate like-minds and help teaming up music passionates to form Music Bands and similar stuff.

Prateek Dayal,Founder,Muziboo launched this website in July,07 and has improvised the services and user experience to a great level so far.Although,majority of muziboo users are indians only,the website certainly has an international appeal to it.

Few local competitors like Shtyle and Kroomsa are also there together with some international biggies but Muziboo may lead in the long run provided it addresses some critical issues.

What it offers…

• Upload your music(either self-composed,karaoke or whatever) and share it with your audience
• Embed your music on your blog/website
• Get accolades from the online audience

Why it can be THE NEXT BIG THING !

• Simple -In the Web 2.0 generation,simplicity rocks.If a product/service is simple yet effective,it’s likely to get rewarded by the audience.Muziboo does its tasks pretty well
• Smart distribution – As every other guy has a social networking life as well,having a Facebook/Myspace/orkut app of Muziboo is a big boost to the service.They already have a Facebook/Myspace app and in process of launching an orkut app as well so that music spreading will grow multi fold

Why it may prove to be a Web Struggler !

• Money Factor – Any website that involves user contribution in any form today(be it content,video or music) has to offer a strong reason to the user for sourcing his knowledge to get a massive user response.Muziboo simply lacks it.It may compensate this later by adding such a functionality in the future
• Technology limitation – Muziboo doesn’t let its users upload files other than mp3 format.That’s a serious limitation for a music crowdsourcing website.Also,they lack a audio recording system in the website itself(so that users can directly record their song and no upload will be required) which can be an asset for them as a music based website.Update: They have now come up with their On-site audio recorder to get rid of this drawback of their service.