Nouveau by Zaw Thet - Interesting New Stuff

A new miracle material...better than spam

I thought this was pretty cool:

Aerogel, one of the world’s lightest solids, can withstand a direct blast of 1kg of dynamite and protect against heat from a blowtorch at more than 1,300C.

BTW, not sure if the "silica" gel this originates from is the same as that for breast implants...but that would make it even funnnier. More here.

Digg killer? coRank

Read on VentureBeat about a new Digg killer/competitor called coRank that launched today. The idea here is that it's hard to game the system since your front page is built from news stories that your friends or trusted stories rank and comment on. I like the UI, takes a minute to get used to, but the white space is very friendly.

The problem is that I'm not sure my friends are really pro-active enough to post stories that I'm interested in. So will this work?? Digg works (I think) because it has a small yet dedicated group of users that do a lot of tagging/commenting that everyone benefits from. This coming on the news that Digg now has 1M registered users. Smaller than we all thought, right?

UPDATE:  More on social media from this week
- GigaOm: Is Social News the New Trend
- Mashable: MySpace News: The Digg Killer?

Blackberry 8800 is like gold...

Just traded in my Nokia E62 (which looked like a TI-82 graphing calculator) for the new 8800. I haven't had a Blackberry in 3 years, but I have to say the new software and email interface is great! Not as good as GOOD on my old Treo 650, but still damn good. For all you luddites out there, here's a link to this snazzy new phone / life device.

Ethanol on the rise..

Great CNN story on super ethanol: http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/21/news/economy/cellulose_ethanol/index.htm?cnn=yes

Did you know that over 14 million cars on the road are already capable on running on this kind of gas? Even better, it requires just one small change to the assembly line to make a car able to do this!

Cracking the Local Search Dilemma: MerchantCircle

My good friend and former Spoke leader, Ben Smith, launched his newest company last week. MerchantCircle is a new twist on local search. It doesn't aim to be a consumer destination site (at least that was the original goal), but I can see more and more MerchantCircle pages popping up when I do local directory searches on the web. In it's first week the company has already drawn high praise from industry pundits like John Battelle and Matt Marshall.

Ben and I first started talking about the idea behind MerchantCircle in 2004. It's a big idea. The end goal is to create a viral network of local businesses that support each other to acquire customers and drive folks into stores via newsletters and coupons. When we started 4INFO we did some informal focus groups with local stores to see if they would have any interest advertising on our mobile search service. What we found is the problem that MerchantCircle solves, the only real advertising local merchants do is in the yellow pages or newspapers. Trying to do advertising on the Internet is complicated because it requires them to have a web page that a customer can link on. Well presto, Merchant Circle has already created a web page with them, complete with blog, newsletter sign-up, coupons and more. That's value in anyone's book.

The question remains whether enough customers will find information on stores via Merchant Circle and request coupons or bring the MerchantCircle page into the local merchant to prompt them to sign-up for the service. Otherwise, the company will be dependent on other local businesses to walk around and recruit fellow merchants to join their newsletter groups. Hey, if it works it's going to redefine local search as we know it. I think the team is on the right track and this is the best solution I've seen. Kudos to Ben and the team for having the balls to try this.

The offical launch post is here.

1000tags.com - Stupid or Brilliant?

I was doing my daily blog read yesterday and came across an interesting post on TechCrunch. The website is called 1000tags.com and it is an interesting varation on the Million Dollar homepage. For those of you who don't follow this thing, the million dollar homepage was a website that sold a pixel of advertising space for $1.00, with 1M pixels on the screen.

1000tags is a different approach. It is based on the idea of tagging that is all the latest rage on the web today and with web2.0 companies. Companies sign up for either shared or exclusive tags and pay a flat rate to be included. When I was on the site yesterday there were 5 tags...today here is a screenshot (I count at least 100):

This is like Google allowing people to search AdWords keywords, but putting them all on one page. Half the time I have to look at the sponsored links anyways to get through the clutter of spam websites when I search for something like "search engine optimization." Why not just allow me to find those companies that are willing to pay for me right away? It's also an interesting social/advertising experiment. Speaking of experiments, I purchased one of the tags (not my own name) on 1000tags.com. Can you guess which one?

To my faithful readers I ask you: stupid or brilliant? Comment away.

Advertising web2.0 TechCrunch nouveau

Update: Riya

A little bird passed along the invite for Riya (see previous post below). I had a chance to play with it using a limited set of photos (17). I have mixed reviews. It was great at picking out faces against solid backgrounds, but didn't seem to be able to find faces automatically when from afar or with muddled backgrounds. For the example below I manually added most of these. Still, very cool concept that I am sure will improve with time.

Technorati tags: riyarocks riya photosearch

Tag Your Photos Automatically: Riya

I heard the gossip that Riya just got picked up by Google for a cool $40M (not bad for an alpha stage start-up). I went over to check out their site and was impressed. Another great idea that seems so simple once you stumble across it...and those are always the best ones.

Here's the concept: tagging your photos to make them easily searchable is a real pain in the ass. When you transfer files from your camera to your computer they usually come in some undistringuishable format like DSC10003332.jpeg. If you ever want to search your pictures for a person or text, there is no way to do that. I would use Flickr a lot more if I didn't have to manually tag all my pictures. Riya helps you avoid that problem by using face and text-recognition technology. You tell it what you look like and it will comb your pictures and apply your name as a tag wherever your face exists. Genius! This sort of technology has been around for a while, but this is the first good CONSUMER application that I've seen.

I don't have an account with Riya yet. Folks from Riya, help me out. A screenshot from their public search is below:

Technorati Tag: Riya

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IM on the road?

Just got introduced to one of the founders of a cool new project/company today called meebo. They have put together a great way to access your Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, or ICQ instant messenger accounts from the road without the need to download anything to a computer.

It's simple, all you do is go to the website and login to your preferred IM account. Then you can use IM inside of a browser window. I spent about 15 minutes playing with it, so not a deep dirt dive.

Seems to be getting some pretty heavy usage and great blog coverage (1, 2, 3, 4)  as well.

Technorati Tags: IM, Meebo, Instant Messaging