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If you’re not familiar with Ning, it’s an online service that allows people to create their own custom social networking sites.  It’s becoming quite popular and earlier this month, they announced the launch of Ning Apps, which consists of a current slate of 90 new apps that can be embedded into users’ custom Ning networks as widgets.

Ning is on the OpenSocial standard and is the poster child of developers who participate in that open source standard.  Ning launched as a stand-alone and quickly moved to adopt support for the OpenSocial standards and has now more or less become entirely that way.  Up to now, most OpenSocial apps added to a users’ Ning profile could not be added to networks on the site.

This big step means that Ning has changed fundamentally for a lot of users and now Ning Network Creators (users with networks on Ning) can do a lot to customize their network, its functionality, and more.  Some cool app embeds and widgets are definitely going to be a bonus to Ning and its user base.

One is a BlogTalkRadio app for podcasters, a WordPress plugin app to display WordPress blogs directly, and a UStream app for those who use that service for live video feeds and vidlogs.  Other apps included plugins for shopping connections, merchandise linking, catalogue building, new ways to display network members, and a lot more.

The launch of Ning Apps finally puts Ning up there with some of the more prominent social networking sites like Facebook.  Ning has about 33 million registered users, which is nothing to shake a stick at.  Certainly not Twitter or Facebook numbers, but it’s definitely up there.

The broadening of the open development and open source environment around Ning will definitely boost its credibility and functionality over time.  Many of Ning’s users are OpenSocial developers, so that list of 90 apps they launched this with will definitely grow quickly.

Ning has also put into place an approval process for new apps being submitted to the Ning Apps system.  It’s similar to Apple’s process for the iPhone.

Pretty cool news from Ning, for sure.

Remember the TV series Highlander and that cheesy Queen song that went with it?  “Who wants to live forever?” Well, with SwissDNABank.com, it might be possible.  Sort of.

For a one-time fee, the bank will store your digital files and an optional sample of your DNA in a secure vault underneath a mountain in the Swiss Alps.  If you choose to only store digital data, you will be able to do that online through their Life Browser web app.  This stores digital data (documents, photos, etc.) in chronological sequence where you create a date (month/day/year or just month/year or even just a year) as a file folder and upload data to it.

Services at SwissDNABank are paid for with a one-time fee according to the package you prefer.  DNA samples, if you wish this included with your service, are done by DNA “card.”  These are mailed to you, you swab samples from inside your mouth, and send it back.  They are tested for validity (to make sure they’re good samples) and then stored in the vault.

The data you send to the SwissDNABank is encrypted with only you having the key.  This is also stored in the vault under one of the mountains of Switzerland, rather than on an SSD hard drive or similar on your own computer.

Prices start at $299, which gives you a gigabyte of storage and no DNA storage.  They go up to $698 for 4GB of storage and DNA sample storage.  These prices are one-time only with the SwissDNABank using the money in investment to pay for the upkeep perpetually.

For some, this might be just the ticket for saving themselves for posterity.  I envision that the kind of thing usually stored there is probably mostly photos and scans of awards or trophies.  The Hollywood side of me says that there’s probably some secret file with all of the secrets of the Priory of Scion and maybe the true JFK killers’ confessions or something.  If only Dan Brown could gain access!

There is definitely a market for this and SwissDNABank, which launched officially in August, is definitely poised to take it by storm.

If you participate in any kind of sport, whether it be in the game, in a fantasy league, or an online game, you’ve probably been in a tournament of some kind. It’s likely that you’ve considered starting your own tourney or helping some friends set one up so you can all play.

Konkuri.com is all about the tourney. You can set up, organize, and track you own Web-based tournament for your game, favorite fantasy league, etc. Even kids’ teams and business softball leagues can be easily set up using this app.

It’s easy to use and starts with a basic question: round-robin or bracket? It goes from there to easily help you set up your tournament quickly.

It has a lot of simple tools for speeding up the process and saving you a lot of time too. Once you have the league set up, it can randomly create a schedule to pair up competitors or you can manually organize them as you’d like.

Teams can also go to the tournament’s page and see current stats, results, the schedule of games, and so forth. Games being held in specific locations, such as maybe a softball league that uses a variety of fields, can have all of that information included. Virtual information for fantasy leagues can be included as well, of course.

Games that require scores from multiple sets in one match, like tennis, are accommodated or easy final scoring can be input for quick updates on the tourney. Standings are automatically calculated and continually updated as things change in the tournament as well.

Best of all, each match gets a comments page so that teams can talk trash, trade info, make announcements, or talk more trash.

Konkuri is a great site and extremely useful if you’re into sports leagues. It’s made by an Italian group called Koinema and konkuri means “to compete” in Esperanto. It’s free to use and very cool!

Today, we’re doing something a little different from our usual here at Rev2. We usually review websites, talk about new applications, and such, today we’re going to look at a whole development framework and some of the training opportunities available.

If you aren’t familiar with the Grails framework for Web development or the Groovy background, then it’s likely that you aren’t a developer or in a business related to that. If you do know what it is and are interested in how it’s progressing as a platform for development, you’ll want to know about the upcoming conferences for Grails and Groovy.

There’s one on each coast coming up, the first is at the end of this month in San Francisco from September 22 to 24 and the other is in New York on November 3 to 5. Both are all-day events for their duration, 9am to 5pm, and have basically the same outline and agenda.

These three-day workshop covers both Groovy and Grails information and will bring updates to the current and near-future upgrades to be made to their standards. They workshops will introduce the programming language of Groovy and then the Grails web app framework to go with it.

The workshops promise to be intense and will be taught by some of the most well-known names in Groovy and Grails today. The idea is to take students (attendees) from the beginning point of literally installing Groovy compilers on their system to being proficient in its use and applying it to the Grails framework for web apps.

It definitely promises to be a definite event for learning with a lot of information. It looks like attendees can expect to see a lot of information in a very short amount of time. Teachers will include Jeff Brown, Graeme Rocher, and Guillaume Laforge, all founders of the Groovy and Grails systems.

Europeans and Asians won’t be left out either, though the teachers and special guests will be different. In Europe, starting also on September 22, conferences will be held in Sweden, the UK, Norway, Amsterdam, Paris, and Brussels. In Asia, starting in December, conferences will be held in three locations in India: Hyderabad, Chennai, and Bangalore.

This is a great opportunity for people who’re in Web development or interested in broadening their knowledge of it to gain some real-world, useful knowledge on Groovy and Grails.

You can find out more at Grails.org.

There are a lot of image sharing apps on the Web now. From TwitPic to Flickr, there are literally thousands of ways to share photos online. Likewise, there are hundreds of screen capturing apps for every platform imaginable, whether it be your PC or an iPhone. Plus, there are thousands of URL shortening websites out there too, making sharing a web URL easy on any network.

TinyGrab.com takes those concepts and puts them all together. With TinyGrab, you can capture a screen grab and share it with image hosting and then gives you a short URL for easy sharing. It’s one of those “it’s about time someone did that” apps that looks like it’s going to be nothing but popular.

Except that it has two major drawbacks: it’s for Mac OS X only (for now) and the service charges for use.

KeyOne Productions, the people who make TinyGrab, are promising a Windows and Linux version of the app soon, but aren’t giving an expected ETA on that yet. The price is ten pounds, which is roughly $16 in USD for the service. The fee is a one-time fee and users can sign up and try the service for free with ten grabs and shares.

Let’s look at how this all works.

Sign up on the TinyGrab website and the app is offered for download. Once the app is downloaded and installed, which is easy, you’re ready to go. Using the usual screen grab keys, Command-Shift-4, the capture is made and is automatically uploaded to TinyGrab in the background. The app turns green to show you that it’s ready and the short link is automatically copied to your clipboard.

With a paid account, you can augment this by mass-uploading photos or screen captures through FTP.

You can also log into your TinyGrab account and see uploads you’ve made, get the links for them, see the stats of visitors to them. You can delete or change past uploads as well.

Overall, it’s a great app, though it has some room to grow. Eventually, the service, if the PC and Linux versions come out soon, will become quite popular. The one-time price is not bad, so I suspect a lot of people will find it useful enough to be willing to pay that.

TinyGrab is a great app and worth checking out.

The first thing you’ll notice about the Less Conference, which is planned to begin on Saturday, October 17, is the speakers list.  These are some incredible names in the marketing, design, and online business arenas.

Names like Gary Vaynerchuk from WineLibrary.tv who’s hit the Web like a storm with this goofy style and fast-paced, downtown talk about wines.  He’s known online, offline on television, and is a social marketing phenomenon all his own.  Attendees all get a free copy of his new book Crush It!

Or Derek Sivers from CDBaby.com, who is an instantly-recognizable face in every conceivable media form.

Perhaps you’ll recognize Mike McDerment of Freshbooks.com, the crazy Kevin Hale of Wufoo.com, fun loving Des Traynor and Eoghan McCabe of Contrast.ie, or solid businessman David Hauser of Grasshopper.com?

All of them will be in sunny Jacksonville, Florida on October 17th to talk about marketing, design, site code, business, and more.

The schedule is a full day, starting at 8:00 in the morning and goes over twelve hours with breaks and lunch.  The evening ends with socializing and a chance to get to talk to some of the guest speakers and find out more.  With Vaynerchuk there, you can expect there’ll be wine as well.

Think the schedule is too grueling?  Licensed massage therapists will be there to give head and neck massages all day long, to keep you loose and learning.  If you can get to the conference a day or two early, you can work personally with Allan and Steve from LessEverything!

Ticket prices depend on when you register, the sooner the cheaper.  The first hundred people to register get to sit down for lunch with the speaker of thier choice at the event.  How awesome is that?

The conference is put on by LessEverything.com (Alan and Steve) and several sponsors like Storenvy.com, RedStaplerConsulting.net, and others.  We’re looking forward to it!