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.
Mapquest has decided to step up its one dominant presence today. Both Yelp Reviews and Sports News will now be included on the site.
Last month MapQuest launched a new feature called MapQuest Local, which brought all of your local information into a simplified dashboard. They launched this feature to give you some “what” and “when” to go with your “where”. Since then, they also launched a classified widget and Used Car Listings from AOL 
Autos.
As we all probably know by now, Yelp gives reviews from its members to help other readers discover rated places. You can find restaurants, gyms, car washes, spas and dozen of other categories. Usually their members are locals explaining to others where to go based upon their insight. Now when searching on MapQuest, you can easily see the best of what Yelp members liked nearby your location.
The Sports news will be provided by Topix. Based upon where you are looking on the map, you will be provided with sports news from all arenas. This new widget is MapQuest’s first widget that can be customized beyond your local city or town. This way if you are a Miami Dolphins fan living in Texas you can still stay informed on their news.
All these welcommed features show MapQuest isn’t going to sit idle while Google Maps takes over the space. Although these are innovative additions, will it be enough to make people switch from just using their google pages they are probably on already? I for one will not switch just based on these features alone.
How nice of Ebay. The company has announced it plans to lay off approximately 1000 employees, which equates to 10% of its workforce. Ebay will also remove hundreds of temp positions from the payroll as well.
This comes on the heel of announcing that they have acquired DBA and bilbasen out of Denmark for approximately $380 million and BillMeLater, an amazon funded company for $820 million. The deals were made in cash and over $100 million in outstanding options. The layoffs will give Ebay a restructuring charge of around $75 million dollars, so I can see why they felt the need to spend over a billion to buy these other two companies.
Ebay’s president and CEO John Donahoe, says the purchase of billmelater is complementary to PayPal, he states “Together, PayPal and Bill Me Later will make online payments safer, easier and more convenient than ever.” The acquisition of DBA, Denmark’s leading online classifieds site is obviously to take over a regional big boy.
This year, Ebay’s stock is down almost 50 percent in value. Obviously the investors haven’t been too keen on previous acquisitions. Buying these new companies might give Ebay a quick lift in the short term, but with all the red tape they have, it will lead to trouble in the future. Good luck with these new purchases Ebay, you will need all the luck you can get.
Apple just announced on the front page of the iPhone development site, that they have decided to discontinue the NDA (non-disclosure agreement) that has prevented developers from speaking openly about programming on the iPhone.
Apple says “the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software.”
Apple will issue a new agreement to any developers who previously released software that will not contain any NDA clauses. This will help the piles of books that are waiting to get published, on the best and most proper way for aspiring developers to program applications on the iPhone. You should expect to see plenty of new and innovative applications coming out in the future now that there is open collaboration.
This is a major step for apple and one that I commend them on. Guess all that nagging actually worked guys! Wonder if it had anything to do with the gPhone having no NDA!
belongings and hunt down the next title you want to absorb.
