Monthly Archives: February 2011

Thinkery – Extend Your Brain Organizing Your Thoughts & Stuff Online

Thinkery logoThinkery is an online self-organization tool that lets you organize your thoughts, tasks and resources you find online. It helps you focus on important things as well as add things you want to read or review later. When you put your thought on Thinkery, it extracts additional information relevant to your input giving you more opportunity to extend your brain. The entire graphical interface is well designed and lightweight.

Thinkery is more than just a thoughts or tasks management tool, it lets you dump all your thoughts, things, tasks and URLs. If you add link to a YouTube video, it understand your input and displays the YouTube player and save it under the tag “video”. If you add a product link from amazon, it display the product information with picture, price and customer reviews if available. Not only YouTube or Amazon, it can also understand 100 other online services like Soundcloud, Flickr, CNN, Twitpic, Twitter etc.

Thinkery lets you include your own hash tags on your thoughts or things. These hash tags automatically categorize your thoughts into lists so that if you add a thought with #todo hash tag, you will find the thought under the “todo” tag list. You can easily edit, share, archive or even delete any though from the list if it is no longer necessary for you.

Thinkery provides several tools to ease with inputting your thought on Thinkery, you can use generic bookmarklet or install Google Chrome extension. They also have a Chrome App to help you adding your thoughts quickly. It is a web-based application which means you can use it from any browser where you have access to internet, there is no need to download or install any additional software. Mobile version of this cool application is also coming soon.

Thinkery is a great tool and if used properly it can really extend your brain. Please give it a try, who knows you might love it.

Timely – Schedule Your Tweets For Maximum Impact

timely-logoTimely is a free twitter service that lets you auto schedule your tweets for maximum impact. It’s a web based service, with a stunning simple graphical interface, designed to get maximum response, re-tweets and followers from your tweets. Timely allows you to schedule tweets for multiple twitter accounts from one Timely account which might be suitable for small to medium businesses.

Timely schedules your tweets automatically just like magic. What Timely does is, it first pull your last 199 tweets and analyzes them for re-tweets. It then figures out the best time slots for your tweets and use this info to auto-schedule your tweets. It doesn’t stop here, instead learn as your tweets and followers grow.

Timely provides you analytical information for all of your tweets sent from Timely account. You can view native and classic re-tweets, along with clicks and the reach for each individual tweets. This information helps you better understand the impact of your tweets and optimize your social presence.

To make your life simple Timely provides a bookmark-let which you can drag and drop to your bookmark bar and while visiting a website you can add any link quickly to your Timely queue clicking on Create a Timely button.

Scorio – A Platform To Write, Share And Find Sheet Music Online

scorio-logoScorio is a platform for anyone who wants to write, share and find sheet music online. This Web 2.0 tool is designed for writing notes (Note Editor) and finding musical works on the web (Music Search). Since, Scorio is a web based service, it can be used from anywhere from any browser across the operating systems and hardwares. Scorio aims to bring composers and other musicians together and provides a framework for the greatest possible diversity of music-writing styles.

Scorio provides an intuitive note editor allowing users to create and edit notes in any web browser, be it a simple melody or a multi-voice score with numerous instruments. You can intuitively use mouse and an intentionally designed virtual keyboard to input your note. New notes and chord tones can be easily inserted with a click of the mouse. The position or tone pitch can be changed by moving the notes with the mouse in drag and drop fasion. This way, you can easily create and save your music notes online and access from anywhere no matter whether you are on roads or in a vacation as long as you have access to the Internet.

If you want, you can publish your music and share it with friends. When publishing your music, you must expressly give your approval for publication and decide to put it under a license to enable others to use your music. Once your music is published, it will be listed in Scorio search engine so that it can be found by others. Same way, you can also search for published music and load it to your note editor to adapt the music to meet your own needs.

Scorio uses LilyPond as sheet music generator which is regarded by experts as being one of the finest sheet music generators available today. You can save and print your music whenever you like as a high-quality PDF document. The aesthetically balanced arrangement of notes among multiple systems takes place automatically.

Another important feature of Scorio is its support for MusicXML file format for music notation. You can import and export compositions in MusicXML format, which gives you the freedom to use other tools apart from Scorio to edit and create your own musical.

MyWebCareer – Discover, Evaluate & Monitor Your Professional Online Brand

MyWebCareer logoMyWebCareer is a free analytical tool which lets you discover, evaluate and monitor your Professional Online Brand. We all left some online footprints(s) when we are using internet, connecting ourselves to social and professional networks. These online footprints can include references to you on corporate websites, blog posts, press releases, and social or business network profiles.

All these data specifically those are related to your career make up your Professional Online Brand. It is now common among employers to search Google, Facebook and LinkedIn to get more information about a new recruit.  To gain additional insight about you, employers, colleagues, friends or just acquaintances are increasingly using ever more sophisticated Internet search engines to research your Professional Online Brand.

MyWebCareer provides you with insight into your professional online brand and offers tools to make these data accessible, manageable and actionable. It provides sophisticated link analysis, visualization and semantics technologies to enable you to quickly evaluate and explore data that may relate to you. MyWebCareer also provides you a career score to easily assess your Professional Online Brand and lets you monitor any changes to your score through their monthly monitoring service.

We can summarize the key benefits of MyWebCareer as follows:

  • Get Your Career Score Find out the strength of your professional online brand
  • Uncover Your Online Footprint Discover and evaluate online references to your career
  • Explore Your Network Explore your connections with people, companies, and themes
  • Monitor Your Professional Brand Get notified when your online footprint or career score changes

Finally, MyWebCareer might be a useful tool to monitor your online presence and increase your career prospect by monitoring and utilizing your footprints.

CallByText – Make Skype Cellular Calls Anywhere Without Internet Connection

CallByText-logoCallByText is a free telephony service that lets you make cellular calls from any country in the world using your Skype account and save on international calls. There is no internet connection needed, wondering how? The process is quite simple, you just need to send SMS (text message) to your Skype account with the number you wish to talk to and you are done. You will immediately receive a call with your requested phone number on the line from Skype.

CallByText lets you call any telephone or mobile phone number located anywhere in the world from any device capable of sending SMS to their UK number. Though, CallByText is a free service, you will be charged by Skype at your normal Skype rate which is much lower than direct international call. In addition, you will also be charged for SMS by your phone operator.

The core benefits of using CallByText are provided below:

  • Call anyone anywhere from your Skype account and avoid hi roaming prices and International call cost
  • No internet connection needed, compatible with any device that can send text messages.
  • No hardware or software need.
  • Simply send an SMS and start talking.
  • You can pre-plan your SMS on your mobile device and instantly send the SMS when you need.

iPhone user can use CallByText‘s iPhone application and save the SMS cost by enabling “Use Data Services instead of Text Messaging (SMS)” under the “Settings” tab. Android version of CallByText‘s application is coming soon, so android user can also save SMS cost when the application is out.

iRadeo – Create Your Own Free Online Radio Station

iradeo-logoiRadeo is a simple yet powerful platform for online radio station. It allows anyone to create their own online radio station in just few minutes. iRadeo can be called as an all-in-one solution for radio stations, prod-casters, musicians, music fans, promoters, school & college bands and music labels.

Using iRadeo is very simple and straight forward, first create your iRadeo user account providing your name and email. Then, create your station, customize the look and feel of the player and upload audio files (currently only MP3 file format is supported) using it’s multi-file up-loader and you are done. You can also upload audio ads if you want. You can now embed the player in your website and share with friends.

iRadeo provides unlimited streams with the ability to support unlimited listeners with its absolutely free plan. While, paid plans provide more players, full player customizations, unlimited stations and more storage space.

iRadeo allows programmatic access to their platform through their API. You can save your time and effort by programming your station to perform repetitive tasks utilizing the API.

PosterMyWall – Create Great Custom Posters And Collages

poster-my-wall-logoPosterMyWall is an online poster and collage maker service. It specializes in allowing users to create and print artistic custom posters in minutes. It comes with a wide range of backgrounds, variety of photo effects, font effects and text effects along with tools to remove background from the photo.

PosterMyWall provides a powerful browser based poster maker allowing user choose from a variety of professionally crafted poster backgrounds or use their own custom background and apply beautiful graphical effects to their photos and captions. In PosterMyWall, a user has the freedom to show creativity by putting their photos and captions anywhere in the layout. User can upload photos directly form their computer or load photos from their existing Facebook and Flickr photo album using its integrated tools to the layout. Posters up to 3 feet tall can be created with super high resolution images while maintaining detail of each photo crisp and clear.

PosterMyWall has InstaCollage Wizard that allows users to create beautiful collages from their photos on Facebook in just a few clicks. Users can customize their collages in the poster maker and add highlight photos and captions. By preserving the original photo detail, PosterMyWall can render intricate collages at very large sizes while maintaining excellent image quality. All custom posters are printed on thick, durable photo paper, packaged and home delivered nationwide all at an affordable price.

Creating posters on PosterMyWall is completely free and you can start creating your very own poster without even registration. If you want to print your poster, they provide high quality photo printing at affordable price.

SmarterU.com – The eLearing Marketplace For Better Online Education

Smarteru-logoSmarterU.com is an online learning portal with the aim to facilitate better online education utilizing the power of the Internet. It allows full multi-media courses with audio, video, animation and its trademarked SmarterGames™- interactive learning tools that are customizable by the course instructor to boost comprehension and make learning more enjoyable.

SmarterU.com can be called as one-stop shop for both learners and instructors. It provides a perfect online learning platform for individuals, businesses, not-profit associations, institutions or anyone who has course material to share with a virtual classroom of interested students. SmarterU.com makes it easy to create accessible, easy to use training programs for any industry, on any range of subject materials. You can create your first training course with just few mouse clicks.

SmarterU.com makes it easy to add content to your online course. With the knowledge of modern computer word processor program, you can add as much course content as you need your students to see. It allows you to create as many chapters and tasks as you need to make sure your students get the most out of every course. For instructors it also lets you do following:

  • Style your content just like a web page
  • Add footer graphics to your course, for consistent branding
  • Add images, to create some visual interest
  • Add audio, to make the course accessible, or to provide examples
  • Add video for clear instruction, interviews, or introductions
  • Ensuring your students benefit from the training you offer is key to a successful training program. SmarterU.com features a powerful quiz and exam creation system which can help you check your students’ comprehension.

Students can browse the marketplace for public courses and complete courses that matches their interests. A student can also take private courses on their team network. When a course is complete, student can proudly display their achievement with customized course completion certificates from SmarterU.com.

LessMeeting – Effectively Plan, Execute And Follow-Up Your Meetings

LessMeeting logoLessMeeting is a web based platform to help you make your meeting more efficient and productive. “Our employees are spending more time on meeting” is a common complain among organizations. LessMeeting like meeting management software are coming with the goal to make your meeting more effective.

LessMeeting with the slogan of “Less meeting, more productivity“, provides functionality to derive more value from your meeting by improving meeting effectiveness throughout the entire meeting life cycle. In LessMeeting, you can easily create agendas, goals and search tags. LessMeeting also seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Outlook to rapidly create meetings in a familiar format.

LessMeeting creates a private meeting space for each meeting. From there attendees can take collaborative notes, follow the agenda, and view meeting progress in real time. It lets you assign action items to specific individuals with specific due dates, right from within the meeting space. These keeps meetings on track and gets rid of wasted meeting time. It incorporates best practices like objective-oriented meetings, rapid note taking, attendee tracking, meeting time tracking etc.

Once the meeting ends, LessMeeting sends the meeting minutes out to all of the meeting invitees both attendees and non attendees. Attendees can anonymously rate and provide feedback for the meetings they attend what gives you valuable insights about how to improve meetings within your organization.

LessMeeting provides Personalized Meeting Analytics, Action Item Tracking, Team accountability and Organizational Reporting on some key matrices which as a whole let you measure your meeting progresses, effectiveness and give you the opportunity to improve poorly run meeting to successful one.