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Have you ever wondered what it would be like to build a timeline, a sort of online diary of your life from beginning to present?  To record all of your hopes, dreams, accomplishments, failures, etc. in one place?  Many people have their “secret diary,” photo albums, or even memoirs.  Others are a little more…digital.

LIFEmee.com aims for that latter group.  The ones who want to build an online life history depot for the connected.  It includes everything from daily updates and journal entries to a summarized past history and even a spot to put things you don’t want released until your death, such as a Will or other things.

LIFEmee takes all of this information about you and creates a timeline to “visualize” it, that is to visualize your life, beginning to end.  You can keep this information private or share it with friends or the whole world–anyone who wants to look.

Of course, some obvious caveats and problems are immediately obvious when you hear that part, but since it’s your data, it’s your choice what you do with it.

Based in Tokyo, LIFEmee is a startup hoping to attract a huge audience of users who’re willing to use their app to record their lives.  The app is currently in alpha release and boasts several thousand users already.

Those who have a profile can compare it to other public profiles to see and compare assets, incomes, and goal setting/completion.  Sort of a Web 2.0 version of competing with the Jones’ I guess.  In fact, through that MyAssets system, you can register and share everything from your latest cell phone and gadget to your house and car.

While the idea is pretty basic and comparing themselves to others will probably be a big attraction for some people, I really don’t see this site as anything more than a fantasyland playground.  Or a place for identity thieves and marketing trolls to hunt for new material.

I can also see a lot of self-important types making a short-lived attempt at doing a diary of their lives on LIFEmee and losing interest once they find out they don’t get any feedback.

Basically, I can see a few people using this site seriously.  Most will probably play around with it,  put in a few diary entries or wishful-thinking assets and then forget LIFEmee exists.  Those who want to leave their history for posterity will probably choose more traditional venues for doing so.

Well, you’ve no doubt heard of Software as a Service (SaaS) as a platform for software delivery.  Now, a new startup called CrowdFlower.com is offering Labor as a Service (LaaS) on the same model.  Rather than purchasing software rights on a by-use or calendar-use model, you can now purchase temporary labor on the same model.

Think of it as a temporary employment agency that’s online.

The initial angel investment round for the startup got some interesting backing from groups like K9 Ventures, Founder’s Fund, and others into the LaaS idea.  So there must be something going on with this idea.  Personally, I kind of like it.

CrowdFlower taps into the employment pools of several agencies around the world (over 80 countries in all), gaining access to over 100,000 available temps-for-hire.  This is a sort of “human platform for cloud computing,” as the CrowdFlower site itself dubs it.

This scalable workforce is billed by the amount of effort per unit of work, similar to cloud computing, and the payment and channel for the work are set.  Once the work is complete, CrowdFlower does a QA on it, gives a report card to the performer(s) of the task, which boosts their ratings on the site, and all is complete.

For virtual labor, this is a great idea.  Say you have 100 pages of scanned documents you need input into a WordPress page, but the quality of the scan is too poor to give a good OCR result.  So you’ll need a transcriber instead.  But you need it done by the weekend.  So you’ll need a couple of dozen transcribers working on a couple of pages each.  Well, it could be LaaS to the rescue.

The sits is fairly easy to use and CrowdFlower has a large pool of workers with various skills and talents and, browsing through the virtual resume’s, they have some nice history with the site as well.

Created by Dolores Labs, CrowdFlower underwent some interesting crowd labor experiments (featured on the DoloresLabs.com site).  These involved graphics and feedback surveys.  Dolores Labs is headquartered in San Francisco, California and specializes in statistical quality control technology.  CrowdFlower is their latest extension of that tech.

Amanda Bonnen didn’t mean to tweet her way to anything. In fact, she wasn’t even really a Twitter user, compared to many of us who tweet daily and RT hourly. When she sent the tweet that landed her in a cesspool of litigation, in fact, she had only 20 followers, was following 29 herself, and barely tweeted even once a day.

That didn’t matter to Horizon Realty, however. When Bonnen sent her ill-fated ill-fated tweet to her 20 followers on May 12th, she had no idea that each of those people was worth $2,500 in damages to Horizon. Not long after she’d sent that tweet, she was hit with a $50,000 lawsuit for it.

Given those numbers, I’m potentially worth millions…

Amanda’s tweet in question?

To a friend: “You should just come anyway. Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay.”

According to the news item in the Chicago Sun-Times, the realty company filed the $50,000 lawsuit for libel and damages at the Cook County Circuit Court. The now-defunct @abonnen user name was listed as an “alias” for Amanda Bonnen in the suit.

The apartment in question, in case you want to avoid it, is in Chicago. I suspect that by now, it’s the focus of a shrine to Bonnen’s potential losses.  Perhaps it should also be a shrine to the new loss of freedom on Twitter that this could mean. Personally if I didn’t want people to know about the alleged issues in the apartment, I would have avoided a public lawsuit that disclosed the exact location of the apartment in question.  All they did is enable millions around the world to become aware of issues with their properties instead of the few people this tenant told.  They should sue themselves for the billions it probably relates to, in regards to the amount of eyes that have now come to see the address.  Sometimes I wonder if people think things through.  Not only will people avoid the building now, but they will avoid this real estate company, based upon their reactions.

Think about that.  If this company wins the lawsuit, how will that affect how you or I tweet?  Will we be as likely to say things openly?  Could this destroy Twitter as we know it?  Something to think about, anyway.

The whole thing  is summed up in Mr. Michael’s sentiment to the Sun-Times:

“We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization.”

Indeed.

Jon Kolbe of Boca Raton, Florida is a father of two and has been without a job for seven months.  He’s applied for hundreds of jobs and the only good lead he found was… from someone on Twitter.

Kolbe (@jonkolbe) is an architectural project manager and was laid off from his job in December.  He’s gotten desperate enough to find work that he’s offering a prize: find Jon Kolbe a job and he’ll give you a brand new, high-def camcorder.   What Jon has found is that the atmosphere on Twitter and other social networks is more neighborly than the bland, empty job boards and people are more willing to talk and help.

In his quest, Kolbe saw a tweet from another Boca resident, Toby Srebnik (@fsutoby) (who incidentally did not offer me a free Dunkin Donuts card to insert his name) who’d mentioned he’d seen some old Chamber friends at the Boca Beach Club.  Jon sent him a response and asked if he knew anyone he could talk to directly at the Chamber, as he’d just applied there.

Turns out, Srebnik knew someone and referred Kolbe, who scored an interview.  Only his second interview since December.

While he doesn’t know if he got the job yet, Kolbe admits that he’s one of thousands of people (mostly in tech fields) now who’re using social networks like Twitter to promote themselves for a new job.  Srebnik says that often the community created by Twitter users can mean you’re helping people you don’t even know and others are helping you and don’t even know who you are.

New tools like TwitterJobSearch.com have popped up to sort through the tags and information to sort through job search and availability tweets.  Companies are beginning to catch on to this, with Best Buy suggesting at least 250 Twitter followers be a requirement for their new social media job.  Some freelance sites are requiring the same sort of thing (Facebook, Twitter, etc. friends and followers as part of the job requirements) for job applicants.

Some have really taken the social media idea to heart and, like Kolbe, are becoming marketing gurus in their own right.  Starting with simple sites like Facebook, LinedIn and Twitter, he created profiles of himself specifically to job search.  Then, digging through Monster, CareerBuilder and others, he build resumes on each job search site.

Those did little and as time went on, Kolbe realized that he was just doing what everyone else was doing.  In the mean time, he’d created JonKolbe.com and gotten a new email address: hireme@jonkolbe.com.  He throws in $2 Dunkin Donuts gift cards with resumes, hoping to entice recruiters to give them just a little extra attention.

“I think the longest I’ve ever been out of a job is two weeks,” he said.  After a couple of months of the extras weren’t paying off, he began to get a little worried.  While those early moves were somewhat innovative, they weren’t as effective as he’d hoped.

In March, he began the contest: Help Jon Kolbe Find a Job.  The winner gets a Flip Mino HD camera.

It may be paying off, as interest level in his job search skyrocketed after the announcement.  In my mind, at the very least, Jon is being creative and innovative in his use of new technology.  That alone should put him above most others who apply for any job Jon Kolbe has put in for.

Source information from Mami-Herald and Bridget Carey.

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.