Rev2.org

Ever wondered why stock one day will be valued at a price and then, suddenly, jump because of a press release or company announcement about a new product or service?  When you try to find out what’s going on, you’re often confronted with a lot of jargon and stock market information that is hard to digest.

Trefis.com simplifies the stock price analysis and shows you how the company’s products/services are directly impacting their stock’s price point.  This makes it easy to understand why Hewlett-Packard’s price might spike with the introduction of a new machine or, conversely, why Ford’s price might not change at all when the new year’s models are announced.

For the investor or business analyst, this kind of information is great.  You can also find a breakdown on Trefis that shows the products that most impact the company’s bottom line (in stock).  The graphical breakdown that Trefis presents is both simple and information-packed.

If you aren’t interested in tech stocks, Trefis may not be for you, however.  Most of the stocks analyzed by their system so far are tech-related, such as Apple or Dell.  Using Trefis, you can find out that the iPhone and it’s related accoutrement are almost half of Apple’s total stock value.

A lot of other interesting data can be found as well.  What if a company lowers the price of their product?  What if they stop producing it altogether?  What about competition introductions?

It’s a great app to use and fiddle with.  Of course, if you aren’t in stocks or have no real need of business analysis, Trefis is just a fun app.  For a lot of people, though, this could be extremely useful as another tool in their stock analysis arsenal.

Not only does this site have a fun name (quick, say it! “Toooooooobla!”), but it’s got a good idea behind it too.  Toobla.com is a collection and sharing portal for all things Internet.  Think of it as Delicious with pictures.

If something is on the Web, you can share it through Toobla.  The difference being that everything presented in your albums on the site is in pictoral form: whether it be screen captures, photos, stills from videos, or whatever.  Instead of just a bare link (ala Delicious), Toobla offers an interactive album of pictures that lead to sites, videos, etc.

Opening for public beta in September, the site is very easy to use.  Each entry is stored and organized into folders you create (called “toobs”, not to be confused with “moobs”).  To look at everything at once, without organization, an auto-generated folder (All) is automatically kept as well.

Each entry or folder can be marked as public or private, so you can easily keep things to yourself or share them with the world.  You can view folders and their contents sans the graphics if you’d like in a simple grid with name, type (tag), and source link.  Alternatively, the grid can be a straight list (links).  This is helpful for those with limited bandwidth or smallish Web phones.

One of the coolest features of Toobla, though, is the ability to automatically index things you create yourself.  So your YouTube, Digg, Delicious, blog, etc. can automatically be entered into a folder when you publish.  This saves you from having to index things manually from your own content.  In fact, you can do this with anything, not just your own sites.

For instance, setting up a folder called “LivFilms” and then added one of my favorite YouTube channels by the same name.  Now, every time LivFilms updates with a new comedy short, it’s automatically in the LivFilms folder on Toobla.  This can be done with virtually any stream: an RSS feed, Digg, and more.

Overall, Toobla is a unique and fun way to gather and stash links and stuff from your Web travels and a nice way to visually share it with your friends.  Best of all, it’s free!

Putting together an event with several groups involved can be a real pain.  When it involves a lot of people traveling in to participate, multiple offices, and more, an event planner can literally start to go nuts with all of the details.  Especially if they don’t have the staff to work the event.

StaffReservations.com combines the needs of the travel director and the event planner so that both can more easily work together to make the event go off without any problems.  This way the event planner can set up the event to meet their schedule and the travel director(s) can work their calendar to pull it off.  Each keeps the other updated through StaffReservations as the planning and work come together.

In a way, the site also works as a job search tool for both event planners and travel directors, since either can post the event on the site without having a collaborator and wait for interested counterparts to come to them.  Networks of those you’ve worked with or are interested in working with can be built to make matching your needs easier.

Mostly geared towards the travel director, the site allows them to create a calendar and block off those dates they’re already booked for.  Event planners can then see the open dates and choose their favorite travel director (who’s free) to work them.  The travel director then accepts, declines, or temporarily blocks the dates pending talking with the event planner.

It allows the travel director to keep a single, real-time calendar easily available for all of his or her clients to see.  For the event planner, StaffReservations also makes it easier to find qualified staff to fill an event’s needs.

StaffReservations is in open beta.  It might be useful for a lot of people, but there are three major problems I found with the site:

1. It’s riddled with typographical and grammatical errors in its text.  Especially in the FAQ page.
2. No information about the ownership of the site or the beta itself is to be found anywhere.
3. The site prominently links to their blog, but it has not seen an update since April, 2009.

This could mean the site’s developers are busy working in code or it could mean a lack of general interest from the site owners overall.

Poised to become the PayPal of the iPhone, Square is a payment service that can process credit cards through it’s app on the phone.  Advisers to the new startup include Alyssa Milano (ya, that one – the girl from Who’s the Boss who grew up to be hot) and Square is co-founded by Jim McKelvey, who got the idea after not being able to sell a piece of his glass art because he didn’t have a merchant account to accept credit cards.

In a first round of venture funding, Square pulled in $40 million, according to TechCrunch.  $10 million of that from Khosla Ventures, thanks in part to former Facebook CFO Gideon Yu, who joined Khosla in August.

Square is able to process VISA, MasterCard, and American Express through its system and works very much like PayPal, except it’s exclusively for the iPhone and Android (think Verizon Droid) platforms.

Currently, Square is in private beta, but their site has launched as of yesterday and was announced, appropriately enough, on Twitter through Dorsey’s account.

Square markets their website plus a small device that attaches to any iPhone or Droid.  Using the device (a credit card reader) and Square’s iPhone app, anyone with a Square account in good standing can swipe a card and process a payment by having the card holder sign the screen receipt.  Receipts from Square users who pay through the system are automatically sent via text message and/or email.

A penny from every transaction is donated to charity and Share customers can choose their charity through their account.  Processing fees similar to PayPal’s are charged to the money receiver on Share.  Other options include tracking customers so that frequent Share payers can be eligible for rewards from the merchant.

Now, it looks like Jim McKelvey can sell his glass art after all.

Up until a few years ago, finalizing contracts or other legal documents online required a lot of overnight FedEx and back-and-forth faxing.  Now, most are sending electronic documents, finalizing terms, then printing and mailing or faxing signed versions.  The next step is obvious and EchoSign.com is working to provide that step.

The site has been around quite a while, debuting back in 2006.  The setup then was simple: finalize your documents together online, upload it to EchoSign, and tell the site who you want it emailed to.  Each person received the document, signed it, and sent it to a fax number for collaboration.

Fast-forward to today and we find EchoSign still going strong, having just reached a million users in September and processed more than $200 million worth of contracts in a month.  The largest change since the beginning has been the addition of electronic signatures, now that most international law accepts those.

EchoSign is based on a freemium model with the basic service being free and extra services and higher-end additions coming at cost.  Prices range anywhere from $14.95 to $300 per month depending on your usage level, options, etc.  Some of those premiums include encrypted PDFs, password protection services, and so forth.

Co-founder and CEO Jason Lemkin says that the huge growth in Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing has taken off.  EchoSign is embedded in many of those business-oriented SaaS platforms like Zoho.

Both DocuSign and Verisign are hot on EchoSign’s heels, but the startup recently pulled in another $8.5 million in funding and, Lemkin says, has been in the black for almost a year, with the new influx of funds going towards new upgrades and expansion.

EchoSign is based in Palo Alto, California.  The site is ridiculously easy to use and straight-forward with accounts ranging from free (1 user, 5 signatures/month) to $299 with 10+ users and unlimited everything.