The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘makes-it-easy’

Gateway announced their new desktop models today. They added five new systems, including a touchscreen, and two high end gaming machines. We managed to get our hands on their new basic system, the SX2840, and you can read our review here

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Gateway announces new product line up for 2010

Since mid 2007, Weebly has offered an intuitive and powerful drag-and-drop website building tool that makes it easy to build rich sites websites with no technical know-how required. Up until now, the company has marketed its product directly to consumers, generating revenue by offering some premium features and services. Today, the startup is bringing its technology to a new market: web hosting customers. The company is announcing that it has been integrated with Endurance International Group, a company that owns a number of hosting providers, including BizLand, FatCow, IPOWER, and Globat. Endurance has over 700,000 paid customers across all of its properties, and all of them will get Weebly integration.

Weebly has provided Endurance with a dedicated set of servers that will be running the service. By keeping the Weebly machines on site, Endurance will be able to keep access speeds high to its customers, and can better control reliability and data storage. But while Weebly won’t be directly in control of the servers, they’ll still be pushing regular updates as Weebly proper gets updated.

Weebly CEO David Rusenko says he can’t disclose details of the deal, but that Weebly will make money through a revenue sharing agreement. Endurance customers will be offered Weebly’s premium features, with pricing tiers set by Endurance. Customers will pay through their Endurance accounts, and Weebly will take a portion of the proceeds. The tool itself will look identical to Weebly.com, but will be accessed through an option in the hosting provider’s control panel.

This is a win for both Weebly and Endurance users. Anyone who has recently used a web hosting provider knows that the page building options almost always leave a lot to be desired — sure, you may be able to install WordPress using an automated script, but for building a custom website your options are extremely limited. These integrataed tools typically leave you with something that looks like it was designed in 1999. Weebly is a big step up from these outdated tools, allowing users to build custom sites that can include everything from blogs and rich media to Ecommerce.

Rusenko says Weebly is in talks with other hosting providers to launch similar integrations, so it’s likely we’ll be hearing related news in the near future. He also notes that Weebly recently passed 3 million users.

No matter what anyone says, one of the most fundamentally appealing qualities of social sites like Twitter and Facebook is the notion that people actually care what you’re doing or sharing. When someone ‘Likes’ your photo album on Facebook, it makes you feel good. Formspring.me is a new service that takes this feeling to a new level. It lets you invite anyone on the web to ask you questions, and gives you a platform to answer them. It’s your own personal interview. And it looks like the site is quickly taking off: a quick search on Twitter for ‘formspring.me’ yields dozens of results in the last minute alone.

The site’s core functionality is incredibly simple. You invite people to ask you any question they want (they can opt either to leave the question anonymously or leave their user info). Then, the next time you log into the site, you’re shown a list of pending questions in your inbox. You select which questions you want to answer and delete the ones you don’t. Your answers can be a word long, or you can write a few paragraphs if you want to.

The result is a stream of questions and answers that let your friends and fans learn about you — think of it as an ongoing interview, where you get to act as both the interview’s subject and moderator. The site makes it easy to connect your Formspring.me account to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Blogger, allowing you to immediately publish your answers as you write them.
The site offers a handful of widgets that you can use to easily embed a question submission form in your blog or website (you can ask me a question using the widget below). You can also use Twitter and Facebook to invite your friends to ask you more questions. And if you don’t have a particularly strong social media following, the site can serve up some random questions for you to answer.

http://www.formspring.me/jasonkincaid

Of course, given the fact that you get to choose exactly which questions you want to answer, you can tailor this ongoing interview to be totally self-serving. Given that many of the questions are likely to be submitted anonymously, you could even ask yourself questions that you really want to answer (”Why yes, I do regularly contribute to charity and promote world peace”). That said, it will be pretty easy to spot people who do this, and the most interesting (and popular) users will likely be the ones who are most willing to leave their comfort zone.

Popular users are likely to draw a lot of spam and negative questions. You’ll have some control over this —  you can require people to log in before they submit a question (though their question will still be anonymous if they wish). But most people with a significant following can probably expect some hateful or meaningless questions. Of course, people can @reply you on Twitter with whatever they want, so this isn’t a new problem, and you’re not obligated to answer any of these questions.

There have been similar applications available for both blogs and Facebook before, but what Formspring.me lacks in originality it makes up for in execution. The site is clean and easy to navigate, and makes it easy to connect with multiple social networks and blogs. It’s currently throwing some DB Errors, but I suspect that might be because the site is quickly gaining steam. And it’s not hard to see why people are calling the site extremely addictive.

Formspring.me was created by Formspring, a company that provides tools for building web forms.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

You like music, right? How about CDs?

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Giveaway: Olive No 4 Hi-Fi Digital Stereo

You better act quick. This deal ends today

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CrunchDeals: HP MediaSmart LX195 for $199

Perhaps the top reason to use Bit.ly (beyond obviously shortening links) is for its analytics. The service makes it easy to see all sorts of data about your short URL links going out to services like Twitter. But sometimes looking at the bigger picture is more interesting than individual data. Now you can see that too.

Today, the service has unveiled its new Bit.ly Click Summary. This is a new page on the site that allows you to see aggregate data for all your Bit.ly links over a set period of time. Currently, this only works for the past 7 days, but Bit.ly says that monthly views will be added soon as well.

Along the top of this new page, you’ll see a bar graph showing your aggregate clicks over each of the last seven days. Next to that, you’ll find pie charts showing Top Referrers and Locations for your link data. Finally, below that is a huge list of referrer and country data for the set time period (again, in this case, a week).

The referrer list is particularly interesting because it gives you a good sense of which Twitter clients are most popular among the people that click on your links.

As Twitter’s default URL shortener, Bit.ly has been gathering a ton of valuable link data for quite some time now. We’re still waiting for them to launch Bit.ly Now, a service expected to take on popular link sites like Digg.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Dropbox, the impressive file sharing service which makes it easy to sync your files across multiple computers and the web, has announced that it has reached two million registered users, just four months after reaching one million users. Of those, Dropbox has almost one million users that are active.

Just earlier this month, Dropbox rolled out a brand new redesign of its web interface, and new search as well as many other features. Dropbox has been very secretive about numbers, especially financials, but these figures indicate that it is definitely gaining traction.

Dropbox submitted its iPhone application in the middle of August. It still has not been approved. According to CEO Drew Houston, Apple rejected the application two weeks after submitting to the App Store, but since then they have fixed all the bugs, and re-submitted the app.

Dropbox was one of the finalists for TechCrunch50 one year ago. The company is based in San Francisco and has raised $1.5 million from Sequoia Capital.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Each year we see hundreds of impressive applications to TechCrunch50 — unfortunately, we always have a number of great companies that deserve attention but don’t quite make the cut as finalists. That’s why we have our TC50 DemoPit, where we invite a few dozen other strong startups to demonstrate their wares in the conference building’s main hall. Each conference attendee is given two TechCrunch50 tokens — one for each day — which they use to vote on their favorite startups in the bunch. We then tally up the votes and give the top two companies the chance to present on stage.

The first winner for today is oDesk, which is today launching a new iPhone application that allows project administrators to monitor the work stream of their team members while they’re on the go. The stream features photos of your team’s workplace, keystroke events, and lets you know when your workers are checking in and out. Alongside the launch of the iPhone oDesk will also be bringing the new stream functionality to the desktop with a desktop app.

oDesk has been around for a while, offering a “marketplace for talent” that makes it easy to hire workers remotely. The company currently has over 340,000 providers, with 12,200+ jobs that are open.

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Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

I will continue to preach the benefits of Windows Home Server until everyone is using it. I promise.

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13 reasons why you should have a Windows Home Server

Well how about that? Here’s a wheel of a deal on the Rock Band Special Edition Bundle, which includes the original Rock Band game, guitar, microphone, and drum kit, plus Rock Band 2 for $79 direct from the company. Free shipping, too.

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CrunchDeals: Full Rock Band kit plus Rock Band 2 for $79