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Everyone’s on a budget these days and ZingSale hopes to harness that need and create a budget-minded shopping portal. It’s not a store or even an affiliate-link, but rather a sort of RSS feeder for online shopping. Basically, users put in what they’re looking for (say “Gucci Wallet”) and the site alerts them whenever that product is on sale or at a discount somewhere.

Sounds great, except that everything is “on sale” or “at a discount” somewhere. The definition of these is ambiguous and I found no way to define them on the site. As a search tool for products without the alerts, however, ZingSale is still a good solution for finding lower-cost items. The results appear to be unbiased and the site loads quickly with an easy interface.

Browsing through categories makes things even easier, especially if you can’t remember the name of a specific product. A search for “Sony” in TV, for instance, can quickly be narrowed to plasma-only and then you’re likely to find the model you were after.

The site has little information on ownership and an over-simplified privacy policy that leaves a little to be desired. Their promise to never sell, rent, etc. your information is straight forward, but finding out how to contact them isn’t easy. An email link is provided as well as a PO box in Encinitas, California. That’s about it. No ownership or corporate information is available.

I personally get worried when sites don’t list this kind of information, though I know that smaller startups are probably dubious about throwing all their info out there right off the bat. It’s a best practice, however, to build user trust by showing them all the information about you that you’re expecting them to give to you about themselves.

At any rate, to search products and prices, you don’t need a login, so this can be done without giving up anything personal. As a shopping portal for discount items, it’s a good spot and one that you’ll probably find useful.

Editor’s note: this post is 100% biased. Please take it for what it is.

Hello folks! I haven’t moved to Mars. Or at least, yet. I’ve just been busy, as I’m sure you’re used to hearing by now. So before I inform you about my latest launch, Memiary, I guess I should give you a quick lowdown of what’s been happening with Nincha: we are close to completion, really excited about the economic downturn, and have lots and lots of bug/beta testing to do (passionate testers welcome) — we will be likely launching publicly at the end end of this year, or maybe start of next.

So with that, it’s time to talk about my latest launch, Memiary (pronounced ‘memory.’) What is it? As the homepage explains: “Don’t you wish you could remember five interesting things you did last Friday? Meet Memiary. Record up to five memories of your day and make them memorable forever. Memiary is the weightless pocket diary.”

I guess I could review it, but I think what you are looking for in these biased situations are insights, not opinions, so I’ll cover the problem, the story, the idea, and then tell you about what I’ve learned in the process. But before I do that, feel free to go to it, sign up, and try it out. (Biased: Easiest. Sign up. Process. Ever. Believe me, I’ve been through a thousand.) If you’ve tried it out and want to skip directly to what I’ve learned, click here.

The Problem
So here’s my problem: I have a bad memory. A really bad one. If you asked me what happened five hours ago, I couldn’t tell you to save my wallet, let alone day, week, month, year. I forget fast, and the pictures I take on occasional trips and my daily tweets are not enough for me to catalog my life. I can feel the ten-year-later Sid hating himself for not preserving the events, moments, and actions which surrounded his life in 2008.

The Story
Last weekend on a really really rainy Saturday night, I was sipping a cup of hot chocolate and staring at the latest copy of Fast Company magazine. And then I had this idea. But it didn’t just come to me in an instant — it was the result of constant subconcious pondering of the problem I stated in the above paragraph. I really had been thinking about this for months. I just didn’t know it.

As soon as I got the idea, I sent out a e-mail to a couple close friends of mine and asked for feedback. In this time, I got the chance to put it on ‘paper’ for the first time, and boy did it look promising. After getting some quick feedback, I started to work on it, spent all of Sunday drinking Coke Zero and writing code, and I had a pretty simple product built within 25 hours of conceiving the idea. On Monday, I launched it, let my friends and family know, gained a ton of feedback, have been perfecting it for the last week, and I am finally getting the chance to talk about it to the world here at Rev2. In other words: I became an entrepreneur over the weekend. And what was supposed to be a weekend project ended up occupying my whole week.

The Idea
Before I get to the idea, and before you tell me how bad it is, let me just debunk all the alternative solutions to my problem I mentioned above. I will lift this with great pride from the Memiary about page:

• Diaries are for 10 year-old girls and those with ample time and commitment.
• Twitter is too broad, current, and you can’t sort through timeframes or jump to a date.
• Text documents are too messy, insecure, and lack usefulness.
• Todo lists and calendars are there to plan your future, not remember your past.
• Blogging has evolved into journalism, demands commitment, and doesn’t feel personal.

So now with that settled, here’s my attempt to sum it up without copying the homepage pitch and trying to sound stylishly terse:

A minimal/simple/easy/quick way to catolog/remember/preserve/record five interesting/important/notable/memorable moments/thoughts/events/experiences that take place in your day-to-date life. Like a diary, but much, much better.

How it works: you enter an e-mail, choose a password, and list up to five interesting moments of your day that you would like to remember forever. You’re answering this question: What did you do today?. Your canvas: a 1 – 5 list with textboxes. These are saved, and you can come back and edit/delete them anytime today. But chances are, you are doing this at 11am, so you probably won’t need to. Tomorrow, you’ll have a fresh blank list, and you can do the same to things which happened to you or you did tomorrow. And the day after, and the day after. These will take two minutes to do each day, and a year later when you look back, you’ll be glad you did.

What I’ve Learned
Typically, like last year, I would be writing about a tool like Memiary. But this time, I created it. And it’s been out for about a week, in which time I have tried to get every family member/friend/colleague of mine to try it out (as I said, I am talking about it for the first time to the public.) So obviously, there are things I’ve learned.

First Lesson: You Are Your Bestest User.
I created Memiary for me. Only for me. I wanted this to exist, and since it didn’t, I made it happen. I believe a lot of entrepreneurs work this way, and for the ‘quick and scrappy’ kind of a project it was, it only seems appropriate that I did it just for myself. I don’t think this is selfish, I think it’s natural. Who else would you be able to better judge the wants, needs, desires of than yourself?

In your life, the only person you get to know best is yourself, and if you want something, chances are, so do many others in the world. But if they don’t, that’s more than okay. You spent a weekend creating something you want. What could be more productive than that?

Second Lesson: Quick + Scrappy != Year’s Work + Perfect
The process of building Memiary was extremely different, and in many ways opposite, of the way we have been working at Nincha. Nincha is something I have been working on for the past year and a half, and other than my co-founder and myself, nobody in the world has seen it yet. We purposely chose to work this way as we’ve believed from the start that our duty is to deploy to the world a perfect product, not something half-baked. Having written about 1,000 startups at Rev2, I have seen a lot of half-baked products fail, and my goal with Nincha from the start has been not to make it one of those.

I still believe in the philosophy I have been following with Nincha, but Memiary was different. Unlike Nincha, it is not a grande idea, it is a personal tool; a weekend project, and I intentially kept it as simple as possible. So in this case, I wanted to be a weekend entrepreneur, and this is the only way I could have best done it. And I did it. And I can tell you, no one way I described is better than the other. Infact, they don’t even compete. It all depends on the scale of the idea and the amount of time you are willing to spend on it. If it’s big, you want to do it right, if it’s personal or something you thought of over the weekend, you might as well deploy it to the world, start collecting feedback, and reiterate like crazy over the following weekends.

Third Lesson: Define Success
For Nincha, I am not going to lie and tell you that my definition of success is to be a bootique service used by mother. My definition of success for it is high, and probably higher than what is humanly achievable. But for Memiary, I have no shame in telling you that my definition of success was strictly restricted, from the start, to two things: make a service that I use everyday and love, love, love, and make a service that my mother uses everyday without me having to remind her about it.

And I am delighted to say this: I have succeeded. I love the service, have used it for the past six days, and so has my mother. What happens to it from this point on is purely unintentional and beyond my wildest imagination. My only focus is for me and my mother to keep using it for the next ten months, and I have no benchmark to reach on Alexa or Google Analytics. By seeing even 10 pageviews per day, I have surpassed it. Bottom-line: different ideas, different scales, different amounts of effort, different definitions of success.

Conclusion
I recommend each and every developer to become a weekend entrepreneur. If you’re not one, learn PHP or Ruby on Rails and become one! It will teach you most things entrepreneurs spend their lives discovering, and it will do so in a week. Additionally, you will have intellectual property that you yourself created, own, and are extremely proud of, and something to tell and show your friends, family, and anyone you meet with great pride. When you wake up in the mornings, you will get a tingly feeling as you check your Google Analytics account and see whether anyone new has signed up to try it out, or if a blogger has covered it. It will make your life better in ways unimaginable, and more importantly, lives of people you never intended to ever affect. And your mom will be proud. Go for it.

Having been down for the better part of a month, Muxtape’s creator, Justin Ouellette, has announced that the service is springing back to life, albeit with an entirely new direction.

In his post, Ouellette chronicles his experience dealing with ambivalent record labels that simultaneously sought to shut him down and broker a business deal, as well as the suspension of his account by Amazon Web Services after receiving a complaint lodged by the RIAA, seemingly operating autonomously of the labels he was in talks with.

As a result of all this drama, Ouellette has elected to cut ties with the labels altogether for the moment and is poised to reposition Muxtape as a distribution platform for bands, with the altruistic goal of, “offering an extremely powerful platform with unheard-of simplicity for artists to thrive on the internet.” Good luck.

Full disclosure: TapSmack is joining Rev2 as a new sponsor, but since we haven’t covered them before, we figured even our sponsors needed to hear what we think. My attempt is to be as un-biased as possible, so take it for what it is.

Artist-centric communities have been around for quite some time in Internet space. Years before things like Flickr existed, I remember mindlessly browsing around deviantART and sharing a couple creations of my own. But while these communities encourage creators creating and sharing, something they don’t encourage is collaborating. And as we know, the best things in life are done by more than one person. That’s where TapSmack comes in, introducing a concept of ‘co-creation.’

With TapSmack, artists, designers, Photoshoppers, illustrators and the like don’t just create and share their work, they co-create with each other, building upon one and another, to achieve a specific vision, idea or goal in mind. For example, user banzaibear posted a idea on August 14th, with the request “I’d like Micheal Phelps T-shirt as the Aquaman Superhero.” Since then, users have added their own submissions, which others have rated and commented upon. And as a viewer or idea-submitter, you can go ahead and buy prints, create t-shirts, mugs, and sticks and a lot more with the ones you like.

Collaboration in art and design has worked in the past only in small groups (i.e. a company or a department or a bunch of friends) and most of the web-based applications have been really geared towards that. TapSmack opens this out to the world, and lets everyone participate in the creation process. But by far what I love about TapSmack is that not everyone has to be an artist. You can have just an idea and submitted (as with the example above), and some of the best artists can contribute. Or you can be an artist without ideas and just work on some of the neat ones you come across.

I think there’s a lot of untapped potential in the community-creation space — only the hints of which is indicated by deviantART, which is among the Alexa 100. Here’s the thing about artists — they’re passionate people, and they’re willing to work together without any kind of monetary, financial, market incentive. And the sites that target these types of audiences can really use this to the core of their concept and work, unlike a lot of attempts where sites fail to garner a passionate userbase.

As someone who lives in the Path of Hurricane Harm, I tend to spend most of the storm season with my eyes glued to the television, and weather websites. Up until recently, I frequented NOAA every 2 hours looking for updates in tracks. Then I would go to the sun-setinel looking at the computer models. That was before I found Stormpulse.

Back in 2004 Matthew Wensing, and Brad Wiemerslage (currently web developers at the Palm Beach Post, creating a geospatial site), met in Chicago. As a native Floridian, while Matt was attending the University of Chicago, he was extremely concerned for the saftey of his family back home. It was during this year that Hurricane Gene and Hurricane Francis were pounding Floirda, and Matt couldn’t move himself from the information being disseminated across the web. While looking at sites like NOAA and weather.com, Matt realized there has to be a better way to provide information to the world in a more interactive format. He remembers saying to himself “I can do better then this.” Welcome Stormpulse!

Stormpulse is creating a destination on the web, where concerned people can find all information pertinent to a Hurricane. There is no reason to go to other sites. Matt has a philosophy about eating your own dog food. “if I have to go to other places on the web to get my information, then it doesn’t seem like my own site is working as well as it should”. Based upon recent feedback, it appears an increasing number of visitors to Stormpulse, no longer visit NOAA and weather.com. From their data, originally most users came as referrals from other sites. Lately all visits have been unique, which would suggest most of their visits are returning users coming direct.

Stormpulse, in 2004 was initially a php script that ran to download an xml off the NOAA site, and then redisplayed that information on their website. It would then parse it up and display it in a database. Ultimately they redisplayed it as their own custom beta structure. Matt and Brad switched to python and pylons soon after because he was learning python, and back then he had heard it was a better language. Matt says everyone has their program language preference, but after trying it out and realizing how powerful Python was. Soon after the jumped over to turbo gears, which is a frame work that merged with pylons. Now they are one framework, if you don’t use jango you probably use them. Turbogears was originally used for flash remoting so the map could talk to the server directly. You can call functions on the server like a web service. It is kind of like a natural way to interface with the database but in flash, so the flash objects call something on the server directly. Ultimately he realized he didn’t need to do that, and turbogears was abandoned, and used pylons instead. Stormpulse no longer use flash remoting, they made the switch to JSON now. The benefit was simplicity of getting it to work and ease of setup. It is the less advanced way but it works. At that point all they really wanted to do was get storm data into the map. Currently the site is hosted in the coulds at Amazon s3. They run 2 slaves, 1 master and a gateway.

This is their first action script project. They used to make little flash intros, but this is their official first. The first time they ran it and the map put the storm name on the flash part of it they were ecstatic. They were just so excited to see data coming back on the map. That was the electric moment. Now all storm data could be brought into flash and they could manipulate as they saw fit. The map is still flash, but no more remoting, just JSON.

Stormpulse has 100 different cron jobs that run on a timed basis and those different jobs do many different things. One goes to NOAA and checks their xml feed and sees if it has new data. It thenmatches it up with advisories and figures out there is a new storm. It runs every 30 minutes, since you never know when a storm pops up.

A really unique feature is the clouds feature. The ability to show the historical positioning of clouds comes from a guy that used to go to Cal Tech. He has a mosiac of all clouds on the planet and stitches them up to show. They have every 6 hour increments of clouds from 2002- 2006. Stormpulse received this data and they matched it with their own historical data. On an ongoing basis it grabs that file, piles it then breaks it down and then relates it to the storm data. Another great feature on the site, is the ability to see the probability of wind speeds for your area, even if the storm isn’t projected to affect where you live.

Since gaining traction, Matt and Brad spend very little time on a day to day basis updating storms, most of the time is spent fixing bugs and developing new features. Over the weekend they released computer models on the site. They go the data from the South Florida Water District. They get that information regularly, which consists of 10-13 models for each storm. This came in extremely handy as you can see by the above image for Gustav.

The forecast that NOAA sends out to the world is based on one person! They have years of experience, but it is kind of scary it is only one. They look at all the available data and see what they are saying, and then the forecast is put out based on one persons opinion. Neither brad or Matt are weather professionals or experts. They created the site cause they are fascinated in weather.

Their ultimate goal is to live their life, and realize that their jobs are not their ultimate calling. They just want to work and have fun and be remembered for creating great things. Matt simplified the process of automatic updates to avoid having to work 80 hours a week programming. Watching his kids grow is more important that sitting in front of a computer all day and night.

Matt and Brad started this for themselves and it has quickly turned into a “go to” site for news agencies around the world. After recently making their API key available to the public, they have already given out 145 keys. This is quite impressive for a site that is so niche, and so local. Thanks for raising the bar when it comes to covering Hurricanes guys!

Following up to the inaugral post of my new focus for Rev2 — the entrepreneur — I received a great suggestion from Gonzalo Arzuago of KillerStartups: the entrepreneur and the deadline/time/launch date. Yes, any entrepreneur who is reading this knows what I am talking about, and if you haven’t worked on your own company yet, chances are that you’ve experienced this problem in at least some form of your life.

The Deal
So, here’s the deal: you have a huge idea — the company, the product, the business. There are some key components to this idea — the features, the legalities, the human resources, etc. — and thousands of little tasks or ‘ideas’ within them. Initially, you, as the entrepreuner, are responsible and accountable for every task — big or small — and every decision. The problem: you have a launch date. You have to complete something sooner or later, and you have to ship or launch something tangible for the world to see.

Value vs. Time
Now, the dilemma: you can launch with the sucky product in 5 weeks. Or you can launch with a super fantastic perfect product in 5 years. Or you can take an approach between, and try and launch at a point where your product is good enough, the time is soon enough (so the market doesn’t deteriorate and a competitor doesn’t beat you to it), and where the feedback loop of your users/customers can act to your advantage to better your product in the time after launch and give you a growing sense of what they want vs. what YOU think they want and what YOU are willing and able to give to them.

So, as any rational entrepreneur would figure, the third option would be ideal. Here, if you’re able to master the balancing act, you’ll have the best product in the shortest and most appropriate time (for the market) and a feedback loop is going to kick in that is going to keep you going and innovating forwards.

But unfortunately, this is where most entrepreneurs lose touch. You can’t launch a crappy product in 5 weeks, because you passed on that decision, and you can’t launch a fantastic product in 5 years, because you gave up that too. So, when do you launch? This becomes yours — and the team’s — problem. But assuming you are able to agree on a deadline — whatever that is — the real trouble comes when you have to follow up on it.

The Due Date
A Problem of the Universe: you can’t predict how long it will take for you to take an action, or complete a task. It is impossible. Unfortunately, god overlooked this little “feature” when he was building the world, and left it to us humans to deal with it. And as entrepreneurs, deal we have to. A “side” feature can hold you back for months and make you skip and reschedule 10 deadlines, where as that monster of a product-killer can be completed over a Coke Zero-fueled weekend.

If there parts of your product you complete in less time than you expected, that’s great, but where you have to plan for — and look towards — is when that thing you and your team have been intending to complete for sometime gets pushed and even pushed. This is tougher for the smaller startups — some with even fewer than 3 members (like ours has been) — where we have no solution other than completing something ourselves — within launch date or beyond it.

Living in Disneyland
As entrepreneurs, the problem in the way we predict when we intend to have something complete is that we live in Disneyland. The Disneyland is our product — the potential outcome, opportunity, result, suffice to say a “place where dreams come true.” That Disneyland, while based in real time and space, unfortunately doesn’t seem to follow the traditional laws of rules and rationality. Since we live there, we’re delved so deeply into our ideas and what’s beyond the horizon, that we simply can’t compute realistic time-frames and things the market needs at a particular time vs. how soon we can provide it to them.

In Disneyland, we see the world like it should be, not what it is. This is our perfect world, and whether that correlates to the real world or not is something we don’t care about — after all, we are, as entrepreneurs, here to create the future — that perfect world — not live in state and ideals of today. And that, suffice to say, hinders our ability to predict and to deliver immensely.

The Cure
As I said in my inaugural post, I intend to pose questions rather than offer definite advice in my thought pieces. My idea is to get you thinking — not for you to copy my one-time-proven advice, or anyone whose I may have copied. Personally, I think the cure is to spend your days in Disneyland but your nights in the world outside. Of course, I mean this is an analogy — I think by staying focused on your product when you should be, and examining and analyzing the world when you should be, you can strike a good balance of innovating vs. creating real market solutions at the time they are needed and having them, over time, turn into that vision you had in Disneyland. The key is to have a good grasp on the state of market, and on your own abilities, skills, and resources.

But of course, that’s just what I think. A lot of entrepreneurs I know live in Disneyland and are happy there — they can churn out the best stuff and take all the time they can to do it. They’re not worried about being “on time” or entering the market before it’s seemingly too late. And that’s a fine approach. It can work for many. On the other hand, the Google guys launched the crappiest product they could ASAP and improved it over the years, and look where they’ve come to. They cared about the market so deeply that their “Disneyland” would only appear in their dreams once every fortnight. They spent their days working out something the market needs right now, not the world-changing, patent-pending search technology they could potentially provide in 10 years. And 10 years later, we have the Google we know right now, and it’s been active and making billions every quarter for the last few years. This approach has also worked for Apple, Microsoft, YouTube, Digg, and others in their early days.

As the famous Steve Jobs quote goes: “great artists ship.”