wePapers started with the laudable goal of making people smarter by allowing shared information on a university level, the site does all that and then some. Students or those interested in expanding their knowledge can log into wePapers and look at class notes, papers ranging from essays to full doctoral theses on every subject imaginable. All for free.
The down side is that these students and faculty who’re using the site could also find themselves victims of plagiarism. That’s a stigma that all sites of this nature must face. Too many will utilize the site to find papers they can put their name on and pass off as their own, in order to ace a class without having to work for it. Sadly, that’s how some people are.
Despite that stigma, this site is a glorious example of what the Web can really be used for. Touting itself as “the world’s biggest study group,” wePapers is that, I’m sure. Name a subject (I picked one of my favorites: history) and delve in. I was on the site to review it for this article, but ended up browsing through it and reading in-depth studies for hours. The only thing that saved me was my inability to read on-screen information for more than a couple of hours without getting eye-aches.
The site is that great. If you have time to spend reading real academic information on your favorite subject, then you’ll probably find yourself engrossed quickly. I guarantee you’ll bookmark it.
Forget Bear and Bull markets. They got nothing on the Simian Market.
Portfolio Monkey is an investments tracking and portfolio management site for self-guided investors. The site focuses not on individual buys and sells, but on management of an overall portfolio that’s healthy and growing. Through analytic tools, an easy interface, and the innovative ability to post your stock tickers online and track adjustments in real-time, the site does have the setup to provide optimal investment strategies.
Of course, this means you’re entire investment portfolio is now posted on a website. It’s secure, of course, but it’s still there and online. From another perspective, this isn’t such a bad thing since most of us who use online investment tools or firms like TDAmeritrade are already online with our investments anyway.
Despite it’s goofy name, which does little to inspire confidence, Portfolio Monkey actually has some great tools that any investor will find useful. Especially if you prefer a “big picture” approach to your investing rather than the one-off “get-rich-quick” style investing many investment sites seem to prefer.
Rather than looking at just your stock in Ford, say, you could include that in a portfolio that has stock in IBM, Sun Microsystems, BP&E, and Conagra Foods. In this way, you can look at your entire portfolio at once to see how it’s performing overall and then look at individuals (or “sectors”–smaller groups of the whole that you define) and see how they’re performing now and how their performance has been in the past.
This allows for much more intuitive and useful investment strategy and planning. All of this is on a great layout and design that isn’t so busy it’s becoming a CNN new screen during the lunch hour. The site is easily navigated and quickly understood by even the most novice investor and the tools can be customized enough that even those who are hard-core Webophiles will find it handy.
Many of us are big Gmail fans and use it as our email service of choice. One complaint many have had, however, is that for all it’s simplicity and customization options, there has been no way to make it look better or unique to you.
Sure, there were plenty of things like plug-ins by Greasemonkey and Firefox addons, but there was only so much that could be done that way. Now Google has decided to give up the completely utilitarian attitude and give us some skin.
Gmail introduced several new themes for customizing your Gmail interface with a variety of neat options and tweaks. Some of the skins, for instance, change with the time of day or the local weather reports. While probably not all that useful, it is pretty cool. Others have modified Gmail logos, much like Google’s season-changing logo to match the holiday or upcoming events.
If you haven’t seen the new “Themes” tab on your Gmail screen, it won’t be long until you do. It’s rolled out to some of us, but in typical Google fashion, caution wins the day, so it’s being slowly introduced across the Gmail servers and accounts.
So the next time you log into Gmail, maybe you too can ogle some skin.
Americans have a lot of junk. Many of us have so much, that we don’t even know we have it. That explains why we make NetFlix requests for movies we already own, or buy three copies of Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat” without realizing it.
We waste money, time and space. Thankfully, Stuffopolis has an answer for all this waste: Sharing.
With Stuffopolis’ application, you can set up a communal network of borrowing with your friends, preferably who live within a quick drive or bike ride. All you need to do is add books, movies and other stuff onto your virtual shelf and have your friends do the same. Then you can share schwag, track your
belongings and hunt down the next title you want to absorb.
Best of all, you never need to worry about which of your deadbeat friends still hasn’t returned your Flaming Lips’ “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” CD. The idea is that you’ll just exchange stuff locally, so you’re not spending $20 to ship a $10 book, but Google Maps integration still provides a virtual low-jack for your goods. That way your Flaming Lips recordings won’t become the next “Red Violin” (And if you haven’t seen that movie, borrow it from a friend.)
Stuffopolis is green-friendly, free and currently offers more than 20,000 unique titles. One cool, no-brainer site feature that elevates Stuffopolis’ potential is the ability to write reviews. So if you haven’t heard of any of your friends Philip Glass CDs, you can check in to see what you’re missing before requesting to borrow them.
However, in the case of Philip Glass, you aren’t missing anything.
Glue, the most recent version of AdaptiveBlue’s browser plug-in, is a type of semantic social search innovation. It connects your browsing tendencies to those of your friends, buy using your viewing of books, movies and other mediums.
Let’s say you were visiting Amazon. Glue will insert links into the pages you are viewing without ever having to leave the site. You will be able to comparison shop on other sites like Barnes & Nobel. Once you visit the site of a specific book, Glue will also show you other users who also showed interest in the book. By clicking on them you can follow their browsing habits anonymously. Users can also leave comments behind to say what they thought of the item.
The catch is that your friends must also have the Glue plug-in added to their browser in order for you to see their interests. Glue only keeps track of the 20 most recent items you visited, so your list is not infinite. But since it intelligently can determine items you like and dislike it can also provide recommendations.
AOL has been gradually rolling out its newly redesigned home page (click here to see it). The final change will be within the next few weeks. Gone are the bland earth tone colors that they copied from other successful sites. They have switched to a blue based theme now by default. You can still change the skins if you want.
AOL has also built in new social features, that allow users to access their Facebook, MySpace, AIM, Bebo and Twitter accounts directly from their page. The ability to use Facebook comes from their new Facebook 
Connect Service, which is used as an extension of their developer API. This should keep its users spending more time on AOL instead of trying to avoid having to use it. The new design also includes a section to add bookmarks on the top left hand portion of the screen, and there is even a feed reader included thanks to their recent acquisition of Sphere.
AOL has stated that this is just the beginning, and that more social types of sites will be added to their lineup in the near future. Earlier this year AOL acquired SocialThing. It will be interesting to see how it fits into their new plan. Should AOL’s users be as reluctant to change as Facebook’s, they even have an option to switch back to the classic view. Who would actually want change and progression anyways.
Although this might come as a shock to many readers….nothing is really private on the internet anymore. With just the click of a mouse, you can pretty much find out anything about anyone. 123people is a site that was currently in private beta, but appears to have opened their flood gates to the rest of the net. They just announced that they have passed through U.S. Border Patrol, and have landed on the shores of the United States. Previously they were only being used in Europe.
123people aggregates all the information it could find about people, by using a plethera of sources. Normally, you would expect that the information you have out about yourself on Flickr, Google, LinkdIn and other highly used public sites are vulnerable to being accessed, but 123people even finds information about people through sites deemed to be a little more private like facebook!
123people also lauched some new features today, my favorite of which is the addition of using crowdsourcing data, which enables users to decide and rate the substance of the information on people, and even add some new info. Just be careful your colleagues enter the information you want. When doing a search it even shows your phone number which is quite creepy.
123people is not the sole site offering out this type of service. Sites like Wink and Spock, also offer similar functionality. Finding Craig Agranoff might be an easy task to do, but if you try to find someone with a more common name like John Jones, it might prove to be a difficult task.
Cooliris was one of those web browser add-ons I discovered last year. It was one of those “OMG this is cool”moments. The makers of Cooliris, which used to be known as PicLens, released an application for the iPhone recently. Like the add-on their app enables users to browse such sites as Google, Flickr, Yahoo, DeviantArt and SmugMug.
This has quickly become my favorite way to view photos on my iPhone. The viewing has turned into a completely immersive experience. Similiar to their add-on (plugin), this new iPhone app from Cooliris allows users to search relevant news and different articles from the web through their “discover” feature. This content is further broken down in to specific categories such as New, Sports, Tech and Business.
As Cooliris says on their blog “The Cooliris iPhone app overcomes the traditional limitations of mobile internet browsing by coupling the breezy, open-ended feel of the 3D Wall with the streamlined hands-on interface of the iPhone touchscreen.”
Cooliris made implementing it on one of my websites a breeze. The feedback we received from adding it to our site was enormous and nothing negative was ever mentioned. Now with the flick of a finger you can get the same 3D media surfing experience as you get with a mouse.
Hopefully, in the very near future Cooliris will enable us to view dozens of other sites in their wall of content, which interactively zooms in and out, in this virtual world type of feeling. Great job Cooliris, and keep up the innovative work.
Today GrooveShark, my favorite music site has announce a new way to upload songs directly from your hard drive into GSlite without downloading a client. Basically, if you have a song on your computer you can now “take it anywhere” that you have internet access and flash. Just when you thought it couldn’t get more easier then their previous release of TinySong, they stay ahead of the curve again.
GrooveShark also improved the methods of sharing. User can now share entire playlists as well as individual songs. You can also share a list of your “favorite” songs.
They have also released a Widget, that now enables you to take any of their songs and create an embeddable widget for your blog etc . . . They don’t have streaming limits like the Rhapsody based widgets, and the entire thing is free and currently ad free for users. So now you have unlimited streaming of your favorite songs with a playlist.
The big thrust of this release is so they can take down the old BETA while they work on something big to replace it, and want Grooveshark Lite to be the one stop shop for your musical needs.
So they’ve rolled in a lot of the social features (sharing, friends) and they have made it a lot easier for you to get your music into the system. They also added the widget so that once your music is there, you can start packaging it up and sharing it with people who don’t happen to use Grooveshark.
BillShrink, a company we previously covered here, has just closed a Series B funding round to the tune of 8 million. This latest round of financing brings their total amount raised to $9 million, after previously raising $1 million in a Series A round this previous year.
The new Series B round was led by Trinity Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners. Gus Tai from Trinity will join the Board of Directors, which also includes Matt Coffin. Some of us might know Matt as the founder of LowerMyBills. The money will be used for expansion into new arenas, to help their customers in their quest for “billshrinkage”.
In a time where every penny counts, BillShrink couldn’t find better timing to launch new features to help people save money. Despite the recent market fallout, BillShrink manages to prove that Venture Capitalists will invest money into a promising idea, regardless of economic conditions.
