This is certainly good news for many entrepreneurs. Considering that there will always be competition from various angles, it is best that as an entrepreneur you find a way in which you can stay ahead of your competition by applying all that you need to and at the same time avoiding the mistakes that your competitors made. So how does mixrank.com work to show you what measures your competitors took up and the results that they had? Mixrank.com is actually a spy tool for contextual and display ads. This means that with the help of mixrank.com you can see exactly where your competitors are buying traffic and which ad copy is performing best for them across over 93000 Google AdSense sites. When it comes to getting the right market for your products it is important that you take up the right measures that will be sure to propel your business to a whole new level.

When you get to know what your competitor is doing to get traffic, you can go ahead and employ the same measures or even take up a new strategy for you to get the traffic that you so much need for your business. You and your business are at a point of authority when you can actually see what your competitor did and what results he got. You can then go ahead and choose which measures you will employ to thrust you and your business to higher heights.

Founded by IIya Lichtenstein, mixrank.com offers to change the growth of businesses. With what mixrank.com offers, you can always look at what your competitors are doing and you can then go ahead and align yourself in the right path so that you can get the results that you want.

As for my personal opinion on what the future holds for mixrank.com, we can be sure that we will see a lot of businesses using it so as to keep ahead of the competition in the field that they are in. Mixrank.com acts like a tool that a business can use to stay ahead of its competition by simply looking at what other businesses are doing. The one thing that I hope businesses can do with this tool is to fully utilise it and we can be sure that we will see a lot of growth not only in the quality of goods and services that consumers get but also in the effectiveness of the products. With mixrank.com I am looking forward to a time where the goods and services that I get will be quality products which are very efficient in nature.

In conclusion, we can only hope that businesses will adopt mixrank.com and all that it offers and then go ahead and use it to better their output and by what they get from mixrank.com, they can go ahead and get more traffic and stay ahead of the competition. From the above, it is clear to see that with the help of mixrank.com, we will see better services and goods for the consumers.

When it comes to events, the organiser has to do a lot for him or her to appeal to the attendees. This means that he or she needs to know of the likes and the dislikes of the attendees. The next thing that the organiser needs to do is to make sure that he or she schedules more time for what the attendees like and minimise on what they do not like. This sounds huge! You are probably thinking that it is almost impossible to please everyone. You are right on one thing, it is hard to please everyone, but you can try to please most people. The one thing that any organiser will be willing to tell you is that he or she wants the same attendee of a previous event to show up for the other event that he or she will organise. It is this state of events that have lead organizers to develop their own software applications for each and every event that they organise and hold, so as to create the best atmosphere for the attendees to benefit.

Let’s take a look at what you, the attendee, would like to have in the event that you are attending. The one thing that will get you going to such events is the need to network. You would really love to meet up with a person who holds the same interests as you and maybe a person you can work with to discover new business opportunities. Every business person understands how important this is. In whatever event they attend, they will be out to make sure that they have effectively interacted with other attendees.

From the above it is clear to see that there is a need that needs to be met if events are to be more successful both to the organiser and to the attendee. This is where bizzabo.com comes in. you are probably thinking of it as genius at this stage, but wait till you hear the rest of the story. It is indeed genius and brings a lot of relief to event organisers and gives smiles to attendees.

Bizzabo.com places itself in the middle of the equation and serves both the organizer and the attendee. It is a free location based mobile application for networking at business events. With this application you, the attendee, can discover new business opportunities and meet ups. It also serves the event organiser in that he or she will engage more effectively through the application.  Bizzabo.com, is an Israeli start-up company Founded by Eran Ben- Shushan, Alon Alroy and Boaz Katz, all alumni of the San Zell Entrepreneurship programme, bizzabo.com promises to be a must have for any event organizer. It is funded by private investors and advised by professionals in the business events category. This is one reason that it is so good.

How does it work? It helps you search for other event attendees. This is usually based on the title, company, industry and other favourable criteria. The application also presents you with a suggestion list that matches you to other attendees based on your profile and interests. For event organisers, they are able to keep track of attendees from previous events. The organiser can also upload events to bizzabo.com’s directory and edit the information about the event at any time, may it be during the event or before the event.

One advantage that the application has is that the event organiser can brand the page with his or her event logo, colour themes and even the up to date agenda. This is one idea that the world is embracing with arms wide open. Another valuable feature that bizzabo.com has to offer is that it allows the organisers and attendees to post special offers on their products or services. From this, it’s easy to conclude that with bizzabo.com at your event, you will generate some significant revenue.

As for my personal opinion on the potential that bizzabo.com has to offer, I must admit that I am in love with the idea. With bizzabo.com the organizer and the attendees stand to gain a lot. This is real- time event networking at its best. Bizzabo.com is certainly pacing the way in giving the attendees what they really need from an event that they attend.

In conclusion, we are sure to see a lot of exploration in event networking. The one thing that we can be sure of is that you, the attendee, will stand to gain a lot.

Related articles

• Bizzabo is the new event-based social networking tool for professionals (thenextweb.com)
• Live Business Networking App Bizzabo Wins Aug 2011 TechAviv Peer Award (techaviv.com)
• Bizzabo:New Business Networking Application (techmadly.com)

What is Topguest.com? This is the question that’s on a lot of people’s minds. This is because the idea behind it is quite radical and appeals to a large group of people. Topguest.com is a social media loyalty programme. With this programme all that you need to do is synchronise your various social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Loopt and even Google Latitude. Now based on where you check in, you are awarded with points towards discounts on future hotel stays and other travel perks. This gets you thinking about the spa treatment that you have always wanted.

Founded by Geoff Lewis, who says that Topguest.com was all inspired by, the love of travel and of course, the ever dynamic technology; the ultimate combination which brought about Topguest.com. Just recently, location based social networking services have become very popular. Now with Topguest.com hotels have a great way of staying ahead of the social curve. When you go to a participating place and you check in to your social media accounts, Topguest.com credits you with points. If you are wondering how they actually ensure that you are indeed in participating areas, then you do not have a clue of what geological check in software is all about. It is with the help of this geological check in software that they are able to track your exact location and get to credit you with points.

So how do you get it to work for you? The one thing that you will need is a smart phone and everything will be so easy. I almost forgot to state that it is a member’s only mobile application, which means, you will need to know someone who is already a member for you to register and start earning points. After you are registered as a member and have downloaded the application, you will get real hotel points, air mile and even elite travel perks automatically for your visits to your favourite social networks only in participating areas.

Yes, there are other providers of similar services. Among them are Jetsetter.com and Vacationist.com. What sets Topguest.com apart from other competitors, is that, only with Topguest.com will you find that you are not actually being sold discounted luxury vacation packages. You are actually earning very valuable points that will get you discounts on future hotel stays and more travel perks. Another advantage that Topguest.com has over its competitors is the ease with which one is able to sign up, but of course, you will need to have an insider for you to join the club. This is one thing that not so many people are happy about. It bluntly means that if you don’t have anyone who is already using Topguest.com then you will just have to do without the benefits and all the perks that Topguest.com has to offer.

As for my personal opinion on the potential that Topguest.com has, I must first of all say that I was really excited to join the member’s club. I really love massages and a whole load of other Spa treatments. For me, there is no better way to relax than by having a massage, somehow the daily stresses seem to disappear. With me being a twitter addict, I surely stand to gain a lot from my numerous visits to various places in New York. I also heard that as a member you can choose to earn currency from priority club rewards, viceroy rewards or standard rewards. This has gone a long way in making sure that I visit my favourite hotel for all my dining needs. I’m just waiting for my points to accumulate so that I can order several rounds of drinks the next time I’m out with my pack of friends.

In conclusion, Topguest.com embraces both the old and new in that it takes up the traditional concept of loyalty rewards program and fuses it with geological check in software to award you points every time you visit your favourite hotel restaurant. The future for Topguest.com seems to be very bright. With the right improvements, we will be sure to see a lot of Topguest.com not only being used in hotels but also being used in other fields of the economy. We can only wait and see what the next move for Topguest.com will be.

Related articles

• Topguest Hooks IHG, All-Star Investors [Video] (techcrunch.com)
• Loyalty Goes Virtual: Driving Behavior with Gamified Rewards and Location (gamification.co)
• Paul Frank and Element Tap Loopt for Location-Based Incentive Programs (mashable.com)
• Location-based social network BuzzMob launches. We’re not sure if it’s awesome, yet. (venturebeat.com)
• Tripbirds – check out the teaser page (tedvalentin.com)

One of the biggest headaches organizations face today is the ability to attract the best human resource. Placing a job ad in the mainstream media may result in tens, hundreds or even thousands of applications. Despite such overwhelming response and the tedious screening process, it is very probable that the vast pool of applicants will still not result in the right candidate.

This is why networking is one of the best ways to get a good job since the best jobs are rarely advertised. Now Socialreferral.com seeks to somewhat automate the job networking for the benefit of both the job seekers and the employers.

As a platform developed for businesses seeking to fill staffing positions, Socialreferral.com rides on the social network of a business’ existing employees. For it to work effectively, the first step is for the business to encourage staff to link their online social profiles to Socialreferral.com. Whenever there is a vacancy, employers need only upload the details of the jobs onto Socialreferral.com.

The platform will scan through the social networks of each participating employee to identify social connections that are a close match. Each employee with at least one near-fit social connection is then presented with the list of potential candidates within their own online social circle.

No employee will see the matches from another employee’s circle of online friends unless the two share a connection with the same person. The employee assesses the matches within their online social circle and identifies the candidate(s) that are, in their view, the best fit for the job before they proceed to invite the person(s) to apply for the position.

Socialreferral.com goes beyond conventional networking and actively converts each participating employee into a head hunter. Through Socialreferral.com, businesses can have a smaller pool of applicants to choose the new hire from yet have nearly all applicants being persons with skills that are fairly close to what the job demands. Compare that with a public job ad where persons with closely matching skills are often in the minority and recruiters have to sift through piles of enthusiastic but unqualified candidates.

Does Socialreferral.com have weaknesses? Yes. First, Socialreferral.com is only as effective as the number of participating employees and the size of online social networks. Fewer employees and smaller social circles mean a smaller pool to choose from. The second is employee bias. Since it is the employee who notifies their friend(s) to apply, they may skip an otherwise qualified candidate in favor of a closer friend who they would prefer gets the job.

Related articles

• Rypple – Socialize & Gamify Your Workplace To Drive Performance & Collaboration (smartideabox.com)
• Get Hired With Help From Your Social Network Friends (mashable.com)
• Google blocks ex-employee’s “Social Circles” book over Google+ launch (slashgear.com)
• Unusual business ideas: Social network recruiting (1000ideas-en.blogspot.com)

Ever been caught in a dilemma and wished a friend or relative was close by so they could give you advice on which is the best decision? Now, in certain circumstances, you would need only call them up and explain what the issue is and they will understand well enough to give you the appropriate pointers. But at other times, this is just not practically possible.

A good case in point is when you are out shopping and cannot decide between two floor tile designs. At such times, you cannot comprehensively describe each option to them over the phone in a way that they will fully understand.

Introducing Swatable.com – the new online platform for remotely roping in your friends and family to help you make an informed decision when choosing between two options. The process is relatively straightforward. You identify the two items you need help in making a decision on. Next, use your iPhone to take a photo of the two objects which you would then upload to Swayable with a description of each. Alternatively you can search for images of the two objects online.

The link to the ‘Swayable’ is then distributed to your circle of friends and relatives on Facebook, Twitter or on email. Each person would vote on either one of the two items depending on the one they prefer. Real time percentages on the Swayable app representing the proportion of your social connections that voted for each alternative will be available.

You can then choose to either go with the majority vote or make a contrary decision knowing full well that it might not necessarily have the approval of most of your friends and family. Either way, you will be certain that you got advice that was based on an accurate description of your options thanks to the images.

Swayable.com is a fun and practical tool. But it is not the first online tool to employ group opinion and decision making. Some earlier sites though targeting different niches from Swayable include AmIHot.com, RateMyFace and probably the most famous, HotOrNot. That the Swayable iPhone app is free is a positive and removes one major impediment from the application’s future growth.

There is currently an app for the iPhone. But whereas the iPhone still commands a substantial share in the smart phone market, Android phones are projected to be the most dominant smart phone operating system by the end of 2011. A version for Android phones would be a great way to tap into that fast growing segment.

Related articles

• How to Make a Decision with Swayable (lockergnome.com)
• A new kind of “Hot or Not:” Swayable (businessinsider.com)
• A new kind of “Hot or Not:” Swayable (scobleizer.com)
• Need A Quick Opinion From Your Friends? Try Swayable (readwriteweb.com)
• Swayable: Social Decision Making With Your Friends Help (blogherald.com)

All new entrants into the location based social networking space have two people to hank – smart phone manufacturers and Foursquare. The number of location based apps entering the market is growing at a phenomenal pace as more players seek to benefit from the momentum Foursquare has created while carving a niche for themselves that will differentiate them from Foursquare. Like SCVNGR.

Think about FourSquare but with a stronger gaming element. That is SCVNGR for you. That being said, SCVNGR consider themselves to be the reverse of this i.e. a gaming platform but with strong social networking functionality. Either way, there are certain elements of SCVNGR that are not too different from the capability found in location based social networks like Foursquare.

Users check in to a location, use Twitter or Facebook to indicate their arrival and then have the option of creating and/or attempting a couple of challenges in order to earn points. SCVNGRs discover new places, share from the experiences of persons that have been to the same location all while they carry out short fun activities on the platform for real or virtual rewards.

The fact that the challenges can be tied to a location has made SCVNGR attractive not just to individuals but for businesses as well. So far, more than 650 institutions have signed onto the service. SCVNGR runs on two of the largest smart phone operating systems – iOS and Android – and so has a large potential target audience.

In today’s business environment where competition is quite intense, the institutions a startup is associated with can sometimes make or break its reception in the market. On this front, SCVNGR has fared well with Google Ventures in its corner as one of its major financiers. Funding has also been provided by DreamIT and Bantam Group.

SCVNGR is an original idea in many respects. But the platform will find it difficult to run away from constant comparison with Foursquare. SCVNGR also has to contend with one of the biggest problems for budding social networking sites – numbers. Whereas Foursquare can sometimes have as many as a hundred people checked into one location at the same time, not so with SCVNGR.

The large user numbers on Foursquare is what makes contests such as battles for ‘Mayor’ attract intense interest and competition. Unless SCVNGR can find a way of rapidly attracting users in their hundreds and thousands, the allure of competing for points, badges and rewards will not be strong enough to draw and retain interest inthe platform.

Related articles

• HOW TO: Start Marketing on SCVNGR (mashable.com)
• How SCVNGR’s First National Brand Partnership Scored Big During March Madness (mashable.com)
• SCVNGR Looks To Make ‘Checking In’ Less Antisocial, More Physical (techcrunch.com)
• “We Have Only Made Two Mistakes…Our Most Notable Was SCVNGR” (businessinsider.com)
• Finalists for Best Use of Gamification at MITX Awards (gamification.co)

Every once in a while, there comes innovative technology that has the potential to revolutionize howhealthcare is administered. Intelligent skin patches are quickly proving to be just that with GENTAG becoming one of the leaders in this niche industry.
The skin patch is a low cost, passive and customizable technology that does not require battery power tofunction. The skin patches are in fact a combination of an adhesive patch with an embedded RFID chip.

Initially, the skin patches found application as tools for identification. For instance, hospitals could usethe skin patches to reduce potentially life threatening errors involving surgery-patient mismatches,mother-child mismatches after child birth and patient-medication confusion.
The skin patches have also found application in amusement parks and similarly crowded locations wherethe possibility of children getting lost after being separated from their parents is high.
But now GENTAG is moving the application of skin patch technology a step further – RFID diagnosticskin patches. The diagnostic skin patches are simply ID skin patches but now with sensors based onGENTAG’s proprietary RFID chip technology.

These new skin patches facilitate the real time diagnosis, geo-location and health condition monitoring via smart phones, PDAs, laptops and PCs that can read RFID chips. Using these readers, the data can bequickly transferred from or to authorized persons whether it is a doctor or a close relative.
So far, patents have been filed for the diagnostic skin patch’s glucose level sensing, fever monitoring, UVexposure checks and temperature/pressure sensing. The adhesive used on the diagnostic skin patch isFDA approved and can last for up to 2 weeks depending on the wearer’s skin type.
Once the patch is removed, it cannot be re-used. Since the chip contains some sensitive information including a link to one’s medical records and a picture, this un-reusability is meant to reduce thelikelihood of the details of the previous wearer being used to execute fraud. That being said, the RFIDchip can be protected with a pass code just in case.

The GENTAG skin patch is shower proof, flood proof and does not trigger any allergies. Consistent with ISO standards, each RFID chip has a unique ID.
As a tool that makes health care more efficient than before, GENTAG is likely going places if it cancontinue to grow the number of health conditions that the patch can be used to diagnose. Theorganization is currently developing diagnostic skin patches for new conditions in conjunction with anumber of corporate partners.
Overall, the fact that the technology can be customized to diagnose a wide array of medical condition simplies that the opportunities for this product are vast.

Related articles

• What’s next for RFID? (thinkup.waldenu.edu)
• Treating ADHD With a Skin Patch (everydayhealth.com)
• Edible RFID Tags Describe Your Food [Republished] (gizmodo.com)
• How a Carmaker Let Consumers Like It on Facebook – Without a PC or Phone [VIDEO] (mashable.com)
• Ortho-Tag Uses RFID To Identify Your Implants [Science] (gizmodo.com)

Paper.li is a Swiss startup based in Lausanne. Todays world in full of information that we have a hard time to digest, News Feeds, Social Media feeds, links or videos fly around the web. We are somewhat overwhelmed by the volume of information we have access to. We try to classify it through bookmarking site or rss feeds, but we also seem to classify the information we are interested in by connect with people of the same background or similar interests.

Paper.li decided to take the challenge of digesting information with tools from the social end. What else than the two biggest networks at the moment, Facebook & twitter, could be as relevant. The goal is to use real people to filter the information that really matters to you or that you want to publish.

The process to generate your own daily or weekly newspaper is as simple as login on twitter. Login with your twitter or facebook credentials then choose the streams you want to include in your paper.li and click generate. After a few seconds paper.li generates a beautiful newspaper witha perfect layout based on those feeds. You can then easily share your paper and people can follow your paper.

Twitter has become so rich in information it’s impossible to take value out of it without the specific tools. Everyone uses tools like tweetdeck of hootsuite in order to manage their twitter feeds but it is still very difficult to get a global overview of the activity. Furthermore if you’re someone who , like most of us, doesn’t have time to be online 24/7 then you miss 99% of the relevant information. Paper.li give every on a chance to quickly recap the most important events that occurred in their social networks.

watch this video of Guy Kawasaki who is an adviser to Paper.li:

Some kind of competitors are in the same field such as Flipboard or Zite for iPad or Twitter Tim.es. We can say that Paper.li differenciates itself by encouraging publishing and not necessarily personal use. This enable them to target companies or even publishers on top of individual users.

At the moment over 12 million articles are curated daily by Paper.li publishers, creating highly personalized and contextually relevant content collections. The company’s enhanced search now provides the Paper.li community easy access to this filtered information, for an unprecedented content discovery experience. ANd recently on the 20th of April paper.li partnered with HBO to deliver a daily, branded newspaper to fans of the network’s new series, Game of Thrones (http://paper.li/GameOfThrones), based on George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy books.

“As the volume of social media content on the internet grows, curation tools such as Paper.li offer an immense value to consumers” said Sabrina Caluori, director of Social Media & Marketing, HBO. “We are excited to use this innovative platform to deliver a branded, highly relevant, daily Twitter newspaper to Game of Thrones fans.”

Now considered as one of leading social news publication application Paper.li raised  $2.1 million in financing, from Highland Capital Partners, SoftBank Capital and Endeavour Vision, to improve their service. In the future the “publishing company” aims to revolutionize the publishing industry explains their COO and CEO:

“Paper.li is shaping the modern state of publishing, by matching context and content from diverse streams of social media information and packaging it in an easy to consume manner,” said Iskander Pols, COO and Co-Founder of Paper.li. “We’re thrilled that Eric has chosen to help us shape the next wave of publishing and curation, and we thank our millions of readers and publishers for helping us advance our application to where it is today,” added Edouard Lambelet, CEO and Co-Founder of Paper.li.

As of my personal opinion on the service I was pretty exited. I love Flip board or Feedly to go through my favorite rss feeds, it helps me have all the information I care about in one place. I wanted to see if with my twitter feed I could achieve the same result, Well I guess I can and its quite nicely presented. On the downside though is that you can only see an excerpt of the articles which is really a bugger… you have to leave the site to reas the news! I don’t understand why they don’t want to keep users on their site like feedly!!! It’s the same with the mobile app it’s not very user friendly and to be honest if you leave the site for every article you don0t get the risk of landing on site not optimized for mobile. But overall their site was beautiful and easy to use and i’m sure there is potential to innovate and gain more users.

Related articles

• What’s new at Paper.li (paper.li)
• Paper.li upgrades social news curation platform, adds Eric Hippeau as an advisor (eu.techcrunch.com)
• 3 Social Publishing Apps That Empower Human Curators (mashable.com)
• Golf Tweet Gets Employee Fired: What You Can Learn From Their Mistake (socialtimes.com)
• Former HuffPo CEO Eric Hippeau Joins Up With Twitter Startup Paper.li (AOL) (businessinsider.com)

Why do you go to the internet to look for information? Chances are it is because you expect a near instant response to whatever query you key in on a search engine. But while the web is indeed a treasure of easily accessible information, such data is not always arranged the way we would want it to be.

Probably nowhere is this constraint more apparent than when you want to look for and compare the information of two similar entities or products. Ordinarily you would have to separately look for information on each, populate the data on a spreadsheet or document offline, then manually compare the products all the while taking care to compare apples to apples.

One website seeks to change all that and remove the time wastage and frustration that comes from trying to perform the comparison on your own using the manual method outlined above. Enter Getcomparisons.com (previously Mokabla.com) where one can compare virtually anything head to head. If Wikipedia is the de facto fact and trivia leader on the internet, Getcomparisons.com aims to be the one stop shop for any kind of comparison.

You can either search for an existing comparison or, if you are a member, create one yourself. Each comparison must end with a score that indicates which of the two comes out on top. A predefined template helps the comparison to be staggered across several factors so readers can see how the final score for each has been arrived at.

The two items being compared either win, tie or lose on each of these factors and this is the basis for the final score of each. Thus, the probability of wild guesstimates and non-objective final ratings is substantially reduced.

The approach is collaborative allowing other users to rate the quality of each comparison. That way, bogus comparisons (for instance, a product vendor creating a comparison so they can rank their product higher than the competition) are nipped in the bud and effectively sanitized by site members themselves.

Getcomparisons.com’s responds to a real market need. However, Getcomparisons.com’s biggest headache is something that crowd-sourced websites always have to contend with at their onset. That is, since Getcomparisons.com depends a great deal on user participation to grow the database of comparisons on the site, the current database of comparisons is still small.

In other words, for Getcomparisons.comto attain a certain critical amount of data that will in turn attract even more visitors to the site and thus more comparisons, the site owner’s must find alternative ways of attracting participation in these early days of the site. Once that hurdle is cleared, the sky can be the limit.

Related articles

• UK price comparison site uSwitch.com acquires mobile and broadband comparer Top10.com (thenextweb.com)
• How Comparison Shopping Engines Work (organicseoconsultant.com)
• Get the most out of comparison sites (telegraph.co.uk)
• Google Advisor Wants To Be Your One-Stop Shop For Financial Comparisons (techcrunch.com)

When making the decision to go out most of the time you don’t really know wich bar to choose from. Usually you walkabout try a few places and then settle for the one that is the most lively or maybe the one with the most girls. No days more and more people use Geolocalizing apps to check-in to different places, this give the opportunity to take this data and make estimations on the bar’s atmosphere.

SceneTap take advantage of this trend to bring us an app that can make going out a different adventure. First of all, You can check the surrounding bars and see how many people are there or even check out the male to female ratio. This will help you make your decision and maybe discover cool places that are maybe more lively than the ones you know.

The application doesn’t stop there! it also creates chat rooms for each bar where people can discuss and maybe meet. Imagine you see this amazing girl at the other hand of the bar, you see her on the chat and text her “A Glass of champagne is waiting for you 10 meters on your right!”. Great! well I guess it’s a bit lame but you never know it might come in handy.

SceneTap also takes advantage of the couponing trend and integrated the options for bars to include special deals through the app! this is a marketing opportunity. Imagine you getting a notification from the bar next door (which is pissed off about the fact that the are empty) that tells you there is an sudden happy hour and all drinks are half price! that would be great! ( maybe not for you liver but you know:)).

On top of that the application give the possibility for bar manager to check the clientele they tap into. That a amazing tool to get information on what type of costumers do you attract and what events make your bar more popular. With todays flow of real time information it can also give you real time data on how the bars around you are doing for exemple.

If this application could be connected to the Tabbedout app that could be great! especially if you can integrate the fact that you could send a drink to someone from your phone!

Well to conclude this concept is interesting but it needs a lot of data to make it relevant. And where I leave nobody really checks into bars so there will be no value in such an app. A strategy must be created to push smartphone users to use this technology, maybe through deals and promotions on drinks. On other side of things is that it might take out all the fun of going out in town not knowing where you go! I love that feeling of unexpected experiences!!!

Related articles

• Time to Tap In: Foursquare Testing NFC At Google Conference (mashable.com)
• Coming To A Bar Near You: Facial Recognition & Real-Time Data (empressoftheglobaluniverse.wordpress.com)
• SceneTap: On-site cameras find happening bars (news.cnet.com)
• Mojomapp.com – A Geolocalisation Dating Application Shows You Which Bar To Go To (smartideabox.com)
• Tabbedout raises $3.7M to simplify bar and restaurant payments (venturebeat.com)

The workplace is the environment where we spend most of our active adult life in. We spend more time at work than we do at home. Therefore, employers must do all they can do to to make sure their staff are comfortable and do find ways to enjoy what they are paid to do on a daily basis.

Regardless of age or position, employees want to feel appreciated and this in turn motivates them into delivering ever better results. Successful corporations are driven not just by great managers but even more by motivated, productive teams. Staff motivation is at the heart of a recent startup, Rypple.com.

Rypple.com acts like an in-house social networking site. It makes it possible for team leaders keep track of goals, obtain feedback and track performance. Employees can spur each other on and rally behind departmental goals.

Team leaders can use Rypple to encourage their teams to forge ahead. They can also commend team members for a job well done. Mangers can give recognition, set goals and notify team members of any relevant changes soon as they occur.

Any difficulties & issues are quickly identified and nipped in the bud. Rypple can be used to relay even simple words of encouragement all of which go a long way in keeping staff happy and motivated.

Through this web based application, workplaces suddenly become fun places to be in. Rypple is not strictly all-work. By socializing via Rypple, work colleagues can bond informally even as they keep abreast of each other’s performance. Note that both managers and peers have rights to award a recognition badge to a Rypple user in their organization.

Thanks to Rypple, the traditional, archaic ways of conducting performance reviews can be abandoned for methods that are more in touch with modern times. Employees need not wait for a quarterly, semi-annual or annual performance appraisal. After all, by that time, an employee’s inefficiency may have caused substantial tangible and intangible loss to the organization.

Managers can promptly commend or correct staff via Rypple. Rypple is a particularly useful tool for coaching new recruits. In addition, not all communication via Rypple is necessarily public. In true social networking fashion, team members can privately seek guidance from managers or peers on how best to carry out a specific task.

Rypple.com brings a social networking platform and a gaming environment together in the context of a professional work environment. Today’s employee is already heavily involved in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter – why can’t employers reap this craze and put it to productive use in the workplace?

That being said, employers must tread the fine line of ensuring Rypple.com does not end up so popular that it becomes a distracting addiction just like the conventional social networking sites employers are battling so hard to keep their staff away from during office hours.

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• Rypple Gamifies the Workplace (gamification.co)
• Entrepreneur Corner: Board control and talent retention (venturebeat.com)
• Why joining a fitness social network can actually get you to the gym (thenextweb.com)
• Kaizen through Rypple… (zdnet.com)
• The future of “Social Talent Management” is Rypple? (gautamblogs.com)

It is safe to say that email has replaced postal mail both at home and the office. Email saves on paper use and one does not have to wait for days or even weeks for mail to arrive. It can take a matter of milliseconds to move from one end of the planet to the other. Though these advantages are welcome, email can also be a persistent distraction to actual productivity. The answer to such distraction lies in a new service – Emailga.me (or the Email Game).

The Email Game imports your mail from other sources and places it all in one central inbox. The interface is structured in a way that enables you to pay attention to just one mail at a time regardless of how many unread mails you have. You don’t get to see the whole of your inbox at a glance as you do in conventional email apps. This ensures you are not distracted by any other mails before you act on that one mail.

The single email window is just one aspect of Emailga.me that makes reading email efficient but also fun. There as an icon that shows you just how unread emails you have to go. There is also a timer that will let you know when you are spending too much time on just one mail. The goal is to trigger quick decisions so you can move on. This action may be delete, reply, archive etc.

For instance, if you choose to reply to an email, a default 3 minutes countdown is automatically launched. Within this time, you are expected to draft a suitable response and be done with it. Of course not every email response can be adequately done in 3 minutes. Thus, Emailga.me allows you to change this limit to suit your requirements.

Emailga.me is one of those applications that come along and you wonder where they have been all along. Research on employee efficiency has consistently shown email to be one of the single biggest distractions to employees. Past solutions have been impractical e.g. turning off email alerts or completely closing the email application throughout the day except in the morning, noon and evening.

Emailga.me does not wish away email since a business can seldom operate without at least some employees being able to continuously their email. Instead, this new app allows users to access their email but breaks down emails into bite sized chunks. That way, email recipients can take quick and decisive action before moving onto other productive activities.

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• The Email Game: Have Fun & Earn Points Emptying Your Inbox For Real! (makeuseof.com)
• Avalanche of Emails? Try the Email Game (gamification.co)
• 11 Awesome Web Apps to Boost Your Gmail Usage Experience (maketecheasier.com)
• How I used to handle 500+ emails a day (thenextweb.com)
• Awayfind tries to solve the ‘email sucks’ problem with relevant alerts (thenextweb.com)

Dating can be and should be fun. But conditions are not always conducive to help us meet the right person at the right place at the right time. And many singles still squirm at the thought of registering on a singles website so they can be matched with someone they like.

Such fears are well founded since just because two people claim to like travelling does not mean they both necessarily like the same thing.

How about a faster and more real way to catch a date with someone whom you can indeed tell that you share the same interests? Think if it as speed dating but with none of the pressure and pre-arranged meetings. That in a sense is Mojomapp.com for you.

Launched in San Francisco, Mojomapp.com is a smart phone app that simply shows users exactly where to locate singles in different recreational places in the city. Mojomapp.com even shows the concentration of each gender at that location.

Unlike dating sites that ask for so much information that it often feels intrusive, Mojomapp.com keeps things simple and discreet. Each user need only indicate their gender upon logging in before they proceed to choose their gender of interest.

It is this sum total of ‘anonymous’ logins that allow the app to calculate and show the gender distribution of single people in a given area. Simple colored icons are used to distinguish between male and female singles.

Since gender alone may not be pointer to each person’s sexual orientation, Mojomapp.com uses the information that each user provides to indicate the orientation of each person in a given site. This reduces the likelihood of awkward moments where one is approached by someone who is not compatible with their sexual orientation.

Armed with this wealth of real time information, all you would then need to do is walk into a place frequented by the singles you prefer. Then, find ways of breaking the ice knowing full well that you have a higher chance of meeting someone with whom you share some common interests.

Users of Mojomapp.com can use the app to chat anonymously with an interesting date before they move on to a face to face conversation.

To attract more users, Mojomapp.com is currently free but it is likely to start levying a fee once it has sufficiently caught on in the market. Dating is meant to be fun and it is not improbable for Mojomapp.com to create a buzz in the singles crowd.

What might give some cold feet is just how much anonymity can Mojomapp.com give you if you are say, in a restaurant where your fiddling with your phone might quickly give your (at least facial) identity away.

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• Big Buy: IAC’s Match.com Wants To Acquire European Online Dating Site Meetic (techcrunch.com)
• Six Reasons To Rethink Your Online Dating Site (businessinsider.com)
• Meet Hitchie: speed dating for business contacts [Video Interview] #TNW2011 (thenextweb.com)
• Get Daily Dates Instead of Daily Deals With InboxCupid (mashable.com)

When you are running a business, your eye is on not only increasing sales but also on reducing your expenses. A business must continuously look for ways in which scarce resources can be utilized to increase profitability. Technology has already demonstrated that many of the things that we considered part and parcel of business overheads are not always necessary. A new service, Sococo.com is pushing the concept of the virtual office to a new level.

In a normal office setup, staff in the same department ordinarily have to be physically present in the same office. With Sococo, staff do not have to be in the same location as their colleagues – rather, everyone is interconnected by a virtual network that mimics a real office environment. That way, employees could be working from the office, home or overseas and still interact with their colleagues as though they are seated next to them.

This ‘proximity’ is achieved not just by chat or voice that is characteristic of technologies such as Skype, but it also uses an interactive graphical user interface that portrays the setup of the virtual office. That way, businesses no longer need to pay for any office space since staff can work from virtually anywhere.

With Sococo’s Team Space product, the users in the same Team Space can share experiences and communicate with one another just like they would face to face. Through the GUI, users can ‘see’ each other, listen to voice messages, get into one on one or group chats, attend virtual meetings and share ideas in real time.

Sococo employs the use of intelligent avatars. The avatar changes in tandem with what the end user is doing at any given time. The avatar covers the basics i.e. you can tell which members are online and those that are not. But it goes further to show you what the person is engaged in at that time e.g. are they typing, chatting, reading or listening to music. Most important for managers is that Sococo.com can identify and show idleness (nil activity).

The virtual conference room is a particularly powerful feature. You can instantly who is gathered in the meeting and even confirm what time they ‘came in’. When in the conference, only participants can hear and contribute to the meeting. Through the Sococo.com GUI, staff can easily tell when a colleague is in a meeting and thus wait for them to ‘exit’ before engaging them on any matter.

Sococo.com recognizes Skype as one of its key competitors for market share. While Sococo.com does present several aspects that are not on Skype, the fact that one has to pay to use it (Skype is free) is likely to be a hurdle for businesses that might consider using it.

“From Google to Social Bookmarking”

The worldwide web is the richest and most complete source of data ever built by human kind. Anyone can research, learn or sell almost anything but that is the case if they can actually find what they are looking for. At first, the answer came from a small start up called Google, which grew to be amongst the largest tech firms in the world. If you knew exactly what you were looking for then Google was the perfect solution, in the matter of seconds you could reach your content.

The web grew to become even larger; Along with Google which became even more efficient with better algorithms, localized search, Maps and so on. But there is one thing that Google didn’t manage or try to achieve: “Recommendations”. Some might argue that Google’s Adwords is somewhat links to the recommendation business, but at the end there it isn’t a breakthrough technology. Companies out there all know the value of online recommendations especially when focusing on online businesses, we saw Amazon & Netflix spend millions to develop their in-house recommendation systems.

Those recommendation systems are doing the job but they are very limited. Limited by the fact that they were designed for a specific domain and are mostly based on simple algorithms or on other user’s behaviors. In recent years, the importance of social networks became a major part of the web , with this phenomenon social recommendations emerged. Users have now access to perfect tools to communicate therefore they are able to share content with their peers easily.

This is when everyone realized the potential of social bookmarking. Forms of social bookmarking existed since 1996 but it’s only around 2003 with Del.icio.us that it took of. People used it to bookmark their personal interests while surfing on the web. But is only 4 years later that users actually started sharing content, with the appearance of Digg.com and the Facebook share feature (2005 ).

This phenomenon became huge and other major player like Stumblupon.com, Reddit or even twitter took part in this craze. What is revolutionary about this is that real users are actually indexing content that they feel has value. Thus Opening new doors on how to find precious content amongst the “junk”.
History of Hunch: “The Decision Making Engine”

Hunch emerged from an initial idea from a Women entrepreneur Caterina Fake. She was previously known for being the Co-creator of Flickr.com along with Stewart Butterfield in 2004, which was later sold to Yahoo in 2005 for 35 million dollars . She is one of the first to use the notion of “user generated content” publicly, she is passionate by the fact the individuals can create amazing content when put into a community.

The idea of Hunch came on the basis that decision-making is difficult. Sometimes the simplest questions are hard to answer. Here are examples of questions than Hunch aims to answer for you: “What should I be for Halloween? Do I need a Porsche? Does my hipster facial hair make me look stupid? Is Phoenix a good place to retire? Whom should I vote for? What cologne should I buy?” . Before Hunch other antic techniques were used for this matter like Coin-flipping, Rock-Paper-Scissors or maybe asking your girlfriend.

Hunch aims be the best ever decision making tool customized specially for each user. Of course it’s not going to tell how to run your business or other very complex questions. But everyday questions that might not be bothered to think about or maybe decisions we don’t attached to much importance too.

At this point the whole Hunch was trying to map users taste based on series of random questions in order to create a “Taste Profile”. Those questions are called “THAYs” which translates to “tell hunch about you”. Here is a sample of these “THAYs” :

• Where do you live?
• Would you setup a new home theater on your own?
• Which fries would you prefer to munch?
• Alien abductions are they real or fake?
• Are you a mac person or a pc person?
• Do you generally prefer your sandwiches to be cut vertically or diagonally?
• Which lettuce would you usually prefer on a salad?
• Do you like to dance?

By analyzing all those answers, linking them together and comparing them to other users hunch is able to link tastes and personalities that no one ever thought about before. The second “Layer” used by hunch where simple ratings on different type of objects, actions, thoughts enabling yet another range or correlation and associations.

For example when looking and political ideologies and food preferences: “Conservatives like meat, comfort foods, cheeseburgers, deep dish pizza, and wooden, country-style kitchens. Liberals are vegetarian brie-lovers who enjoy wine, international food, and sleek, stainless steel-style kitchens.”

Hunch Now: “From Social Bookmarking to Indexing You”

The current online trends provide the perfect environment to study people’s interests and personalities. With the growing capacity of channels to rate and share media Hunch is able to add more “layer” to its recommendation system.

Towards the end of 2010 Hunch had to take a different direction. It had to move away from being a simple decision engine to focus on providing personalized content recommendations powered by behavioral data. This change of strategy is logical as companies targeting behavioral data start make real sense for big businesses , as they seen to become a very valuable tool to increase sales.

The Hunch Taste Graph

Hunch incredible knowledge on users taste already used the opportunity to merge this date with “Public Social Data”. This data can be found in forms such as the Facebook like or share or shared links on twitter. So much data is available in the social cloud and hunch is capable of giving it some structure. A localized layer can also be added with the emergence of Geo-localized data from “check-ins”.

Check-ins are basically people notifying where they are and what they are doing there. Platforms like Gowalla or Foursquare, which is set to reach 10 millions users in the coming months , are growing in popularity. This trend is highlighted with the recent launch of the “Facebook Places” feature .

Monetization:

Hunch’s Taste graph has great value but it has to find ways to monetize this rich data. Businesses need to able to the added value of using such a service. The Business Model can be separated in two; revenues from the actual Hunch.com website and the revenue linked to the API.

The website is the primary distribution channels with an average of unique 30’000 visitors per day . Some of the content on hunch are products such as dvds, books or restaurants. Using affiliate programs with Amazon or Barnes & Noble is the first and most logical way of generating benefits. The better Hunch gets in those fields the higher the probability of users shopping through those links.

Furthermore, with the introduction of company profiles hunch encourages users to rate and recommend products also making it easier for companies to publish on the platform. Those companies are considered as individuals and will be pictured on the same level as a individual user in Taste Graph. Engaging companies to participate will be key for hunch in the near future.

The other possible revenue channel for hunch is though its API to enable developers to benefit from those recommendations in their applications. Would benefit large or independent online stores, they could increase average checks by recommending better content. Hunch can either sign large deals with heavy users or find a system to charge a percentage for each recommendation converted into a sale.
Funding and Value:

Today it difficult to estimate Hunch.com’s real value if we look at their funding history we can see that the change of direction has help them raise another 12 million in March 2010 in Series B funding (CrunchBase). We can conclude that this illustrates renewed confidence that Hunch will manage to use its Taste Graph to generate revenues. It is difficult to estimate the real value of the company, Google was rumored to have made acquisition offer of 60 million in 2010 but it doesn’t mean much.

Business Model

Opportunities & Threats

Hunch is it’s 4th year and has made significant progress in those years, becoming a very abstract service to something that can add real value. The partnerships and the way they treat their users will be key for the future.

We have seen companies like digg.com completely loose user loyalty due to sudden design changes . Hunch has made decision to remove feature like that made them a fun decision making engine, users have been disappointed. The user experience needs to create engagement otherwise hunch might just become a new social bookmarking site or a twitter for content. They need to carefully manage their content in order to maintain consistency and avoid content pollution like on twitter. Treating their users with care is key as they are the real value of the service like most web 2.0 communities.

In order to attract companies, which of course are more skeptic than individuals, solutions need to be found to prove that recommendation really are of high quality. Data is needed to prove this, as it cannot only rely on users appreciations.

Hunch has a great potential; mapping people’s taste and personalities is extremely valuable raw data. The main threats for the company it the company itself, as it must remain focus on key objective. With such a product it would be easy to loose track and jump onto every opportunities.

References:

Alexa. (n.d.). Hunch.com. Retrieved May 16, 2011, from Alexa: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/hunch.com#

Barbierri, C. (2010, August 5). A new Hunch points to the money with behavioral targeting. Retrieved May 15, 2011, from Venturebeat: http://venturebeat.com/2010/08/05/hunch-web-personalization/

Carlson, N. (2009, October 25). Not For Sale: Hunch Has Turned Down Three Offers, Including One From Google Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/not-for-sale-hunch-has-turned-down-three-offers-including-one-from-google-2010-10#ixzz1MWJzLm7z. Retrieved May 16,

2011, from Business Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/not-for-sale-hunch-has-turned-down-three-offers-including-one-from-google-2010-10

Carr, A. (2010, September 23). Digg Redesigns, Loses More Than a Quarter of Audience. Retrieved May 16, 2011, from Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com/1690829/traffic-plummets-26-after-digg-redesign

Facebook. (n.d.). Company Timeline. Retrieved May 14, 2011, from Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?timeline

Fake, C. (2009, Mars 27). Hunch. Retrieved May 14, 2011, from Catrina Fake’s Blog: http://caterina.net/archive/001169.html

Netflix Prize. (2009, 9 29). Retrieved 2011, from Netflix: http://www.netflixprize.com/sg=AFQjCNE4osxOTLm7WzZnXnD0qsZwBJcrNA

MERAJI, S. M. (2010, October 10). Hunch.com Might Know Your Personal Tastes Better Than You Do. Retrieved May 15, 2011, from NPR:org: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2010/10/04/130327569/hunch-dot-com

SCHWARTZ, A. (2009, November 12). Hunch Confirms that Liberals Enjoy Vegetables, Conservatives Like Fried Chicken. Retrieved May 15, 2011, from Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/ariel-schwartz/sustainability/hunch-confirms-liberals-enjoy-vegetables-conservatives-fried-chic

The Next Web. (Saturday, May 14). Correction: Foursquare currently at 9.3 Million users. To cross 10 million “soon”. Retrieved May 16, Monday, from The Next Web: http://thenextweb.com/industry/2011/05/14/milestone-foursquare-hits-10-million-users/

The Nielsen Company. (2009, 2009). Global Faces and Networked Places. Retrieved from Nielsen Wire: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/nielsen_globalfaces_mar09.pdf

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We Know the popularity of Yelp, Google or TripAdvisor maps when it comes to choosing restaurants on the fly. They are amazing tools and everyone uses them to get a insight on which place they should go try out. The concept is dead simple “get reviews from real people that are always up to date”.

But there is one issue, one of the biggest issues when going to a restaurant is actually knowing what you should eat. With current rating websites you might get a review saying “you should try the roast duck with red wine sauce!!! amazing 5 stars” but this is very rarely the case.

FoodSpotting aims to change the process of rating the restaurant industry by strictly focus on rating food items or dishes. Mening that the focus is not on the restaurant but on what the restaurant offers. This is a radical change because when choosing a restaurant usually we have a small idea of what we want to eat. No days or thinking is pretty simple I want Mexican, pizza or a steak for exemple but when you only have an abstract idea of what you want to eat its not that simple.

Because of how Foodspotting is structured is enables you to browse dishes and snacks just like if you where window shopping in a bakery. This is a radical change in the way those online recommandation work. Further when we look at “real” life when a friends tell you about a place he often tells you about what he ate there that you should try. This means its very natural to recommend specific dishes.

The process of sharing has been made as easy as possible: take you iphone snap a picture of the food and rate it, you Geo-localisation will detect where you are and you’re done!
Business like Zagat in New-York have themselves added pictures of foods you can buy for other people to rate. When I think about Zagat I realize how useful it could when you walk in a store where there are too many things to choose from. Or simply when walking in a restaurant with a 4 page menu.

We all know how Yelp struggled to launch at the beginning by going global, then they had refocus and San Francisco to great a buzz and improve quality of the content, then we all know the story. Will FoodSpotting be able to find a spot in this market or will it be a new hype that will slowly die. They need to make a huge marketing effort and focus on user engagement to make sure the community grows. THe quality of their recommandations will also be crucial ( why not implement the hunch API into this application?).

Happy FoodSpotting and don’t Forget to Spot Ideas Too!

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For students preparing to join college and that have received their admission letters, the initial excitement is usually tinged with a fear of the unknown. Having already established a circle of friends in high school, they will in many respects have to make new acquaintances in college.

The discovery process will be a mixture of successes and disappointments before they eventually find people they can relate to. What if students could start to connect with each other way before they join the institution?

Thanks to the internet, that is not just a possibility but a reality. Inigral’s Schools Facebook App enables educational institutions to have a private network that facilitates the development of acquaintances and interaction between students.

For a student, joining School Apps starts after they receive confirmation on their admission. They will get an email from School Apps to join the college’s private and branded network. This invitation is strictly limited to admitted students. Since many people will not always act on the first such email, School Apps will send regular reminders to ensure as many students join the network as possible.

Students that join the network are required to complete a number of basic steps providing some information about themselves that will assist them better fit into the community and attract like-minded members. Of the information they provide, none is more important than their interests as this is what will attract people that like what they like.

Schools App – The Student Perspective from Inigral Inc. on Vimeo.

What do schools and colleges stand to gain from School Apps? First, colleges that use School Apps have shown a much higher percentage (as much as 94%) of transitions from admission to actual enrolment than the average. Second, colleges that use School Apps have on average seen 3 times more members than their own Facebook Groups or Fan pages.

Even though the Schools App primarily targets future students (i.e. have been admitted but are waiting for the opening date) there is no restriction on current students continuing to use the app to interact and make new friends. With 3 of the 5 major reasons students drop out of school being social, School Apps can keep existing students continuously engaged and still be the focal point for the establishment of new friendships on large college campuses.

Any internet business that runs for 3 years can in many ways be considered successful. School Apps celebrates its 3rd year in August 2011. Already, School Apps has graduated into Facebook’s exclusive 50-strong club of app developers known as the Preferred Developer Program. Members of the Preferred Developer Program have privileged access to Facebook’s management and engineering teams and so have an inside view of upcoming changes.

While School Apps definitely presents something more than Facebook Groups and Fan pages, Inigral’s greatest challenge will continue to be convincing more schools of this unique value proposition.

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Credit cards are a convenient way to pay for goods or services on the internet. Unfortunately, the use of credit cards online presents a number of risks. First, not everyone on the internet has good intentions. There are spoof sites that masquerade as well known legitimate brands but whose main intention is to harvest credit card information from unsuspecting users.

Second is the risk from hackers who penetrate the defences of ecommerce sites and steal customer credit card information. Once your credit card or bank information is in the wrong hands, you have no alternative but to cancel your card or close your account and order a new card or open a new account.

Mobino is a new online payment system that removes the need for buyers to provide their credit card information when making a purchase. Buyers need only register on Mobino.com once. During registration, the buyer provides their bank details to Mobino as well as their mobile phone number. Mobino.com does not release this information to merchants.

So if Mobino.com does not give merchants this information, how then does the system then work? Transactions are hinged upon a unique token number that is assigned to the merchant’s product. To pay for the product the buyer uses their phone to make a voice call to Mobino. During the IVR (Interactive Voice Response) call, the first prompt will require the buyer to key in the token number as indicated on the merchant’s website.

If the token number provided is correct, the IVR confirms the amount the buyer will be paying for if they choose to proceed. The next prompt is for the buyer to key in their secret PIN code. Once the PIN code is authenticated, the transaction is confirmed and the payment executed. From start to finish, the entire transaction can be completed in a matter of seconds

Mobino’s strength does not only lie in the removal from the equation of buyer credit card information disclosure. There’s more. For instance, because it uses IVR, one does not need to have a smart phone to use it. This aspect in particular creates an opportunity for Mobino to get a foothold in the fast growing emerging economies where smart phones are still out of reach for most of the population but where ordinary phones are widely used.

That said, this is not the first ecommerce payment system that seeks to eliminate the need for exchanging credit card information between buyer and seller. PayPal is probably the best known online payment system that hides a user’s banking information during a transaction. In fact, apart from paying via credit card, PayPal is in many ways considered the de facto online payment standard.

Even though Mobino uses an IVR system as opposed to a completely web based technology like PayPal, Mobino will at some level inevitably have to compete with the well-oiled PayPal juggernaut – a tough proposition.

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The keyboard has been around virtually as long as personal computers have. Initially, the keyboard was the only input accessory for the command based systems of old. Then came Graphical User Interfaces such as Microsoft Windows and the mouse and touch pads became key input devices. Even then, the role of the keyboard as the primary input device for most computing devices remained largely unchallenged.

The real threat to the continued use of the keyboard though has not come from new systems but from the popularity of ever smaller computing devices –smart phones and tablets computers. Using an onscreen virtual keyboard on these new devices does not provide the amount of space and comfort for typing that one would enjoy on the much larger keyboard used on a personal computer. 8Pen, an Android app, is a radical solution to the size problem.

8Pen moves away from the miniature virtual keyboard concept that has caught on in smart phones and tablet computers. 8pen turns the entire rationale for the keyboard on its head. 8pen does this by using a four quadrant box with every quadrant containing a specific set of letters from the alphabet. The four quadrants surround a centre circle that serves as a space bar as well as the trigger for the start and end of a ‘character loop’. Each of the 4 quadrants contains 8 characters with 4 along each edge arranged from the centre circle.

A user of 8pen must not lift their finger from the touch screen until they complete a word. Lifting the finger off the screen will automatically be interpreted as a space. Like learning a new language, a first time user may find the application complicated. However, mastery following a few days of use will bring out the convenience the 8pen app provides. 8pen app includes text prediction and access to special characters via long holds.

As opposed to typing away, 8pen makes data input a tad bit easier for smart phone users by allowing them to key in the characters using rotational gestures on the screen. This is one of 8pen’s key strengths in the sense that the gestures closely mimic the hand actions that one would use when writing.

If nothing else, the attempt by 8pen to break the singular focus on the keyboard as the default input interface on computing devices, is commendable. The greatest impediment to 8pen making a major impact is likely to be resistance to change. With the keyboard having been such an intrinsic part of computing devices, it will take substantial effort to wean majority of smart phone users to this new approach to data entry.

This is more so because even though more and more people are using smart phones and tablet PCs, they still have their desktop PCs and laptops where the keyboard remains king. The developers of 8pen can only hope that the widespread use of smart phones and tablet PCs will generate sufficient dissatisfaction that will trigger a gradual move to 8pen and other similar ‘new age data input’ technologies.

Available on Android 1.6 and up

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Location based content services are fast becoming the point of focus of new web technologies.

FourSquare is probably the most recognisable such service and can in fact be credited with opening
up the market to several other niche local services. To a large extent, the phenomenal growth in
smart phone sales has also provided impetus for individuals and businesses intent on developing
internet-powered location-based services.

Hunch.com and its Hunch local iPhone app is one of the new entrants that is making a significant
mark. Established by Chris Dixon and Caterina Fake, a co-founder of Flickr, the Hunch local app
allows users to make recommendations and discover locations that are consistent with their stated
tastes. You can find everything from museums and spas to grocery stores and restaurants.

To place the practical use of the Hunch local app in context, think about sitting in an office and
craving a cup of coffee or an afternoon cocktail. If you are a travelling businessperson that is new
in that part of town or you are a local who simply wants to explore a different restaurant or bar, all
you need to do is go to the Hunch local app on your iphone and you will get suggestions on the most
popular coffee shops and bars in your area.

The suggestions are not just listings of places or products. Rather users can leave a review of a venue
that other users can read in order to get better informed on what they can expect to experience
when they do go there. Hunch local also uses an intelligent iterative algorithm where a user’s
recommendations and responses to random questions are used to tweak the user’s future search
results of the same keyword(s).

Users of Hunch local can sign onto the service directly or through Twitter or Facebook. Given that
Facebook boasts more than 650 million users and Twitter having a substantial user base as well,
this ‘single sign on’ functionality adds to the convenience of the site. Naturally, the quality of data on
Hunch local depends on the number of users that participate. For this reason, the service is currently
most accurate and informative when in urban areas. As the number of users grows, so will the
quantity and quality of recommended locations in rural and remote locations.

Where does Hunch local stand now and where is it likely to go? The service is currently limited to
the US and major non-US towns. The Hunch service initially did not require one to log in to access
the data. When Hunch enforced the log in requirement in May 2010 the number of unique users fell
from 750,000 in May to 250,000 in June. However, Hunch substantially recovered with unique users
bouncing back to 350,000 by July 2010 and has been on a growth trajectory since then.

One of the key things that the developers of Hunch local might consider incorporating is the ability
to see one’s followers that are currently in the suggested restaurant a la FourSquare. Hunch.com has
already stated its intent for deeper cooperation with FourSquare so this functionality might not be
long in coming.