It’s a simple concept. What would you be willing to do for $5? Taking a bit of Craigslist, and a bit of Ebay, Fiverr is a community that allows people to advertise things that they would be willing to for a fixed price of $5. Current listings range from the funny (“I will record a 30 second voicemail message for you in the style of an English butler for $5″), to the helpful (“I will answer all your web development questions (php/js/html/css/mysql) for $5″) to the bizarre (“I will mail you a random object from my house (US residents only) for $5″). It looks to be super fun, and for $5 (of which Fiverr keeps $1 as a service fee), it’s cheap fun. (Found on TechCrunch)
Thank you Microsoft, for making one of the first pieces of programs that I am actually excited to use. Download and check out Microsoft Pivot. I can’t wait to try this out and see how powerful this program is. From the demos in the video, the program looks like it can smoothly handle huge volumes of images in large resolutions. I really like the smooth job it does rendering the datasets.
Cocoon Innovations has created what seems like very simple organizer to deal with our complex worlds. Using a series of layered elastic straps, the GRID-IT allows you to easily secure various objects, such as USB cords, cameras, iPods, phones, journals, pens, markers and keycards/creditcards to name a few. It seems very useful, and comes in a bunch of different sizes, and even implemented in tote bags, messenger bags, and laptop bags if you are looking for that. The above is a 8″ x 12″ and retails for $20, which I think is quite reasonable for what it is offering. Check out this short video taken in Union Square of people organizing their bags using a GRID-IT organizer:
If you’ve been forced to run Vista at work, or if you are running Vista out of choice, you will love this alternative to the default task switcher. VistaSwitcher is a great bit of code that makes it easy to see what windows you’ve got open, and then even select multiple windows and cascade, tile vertically, or tile horizontally. You can close windows, or even minimize windows, all right through the task switcher. One other great feature is the ability to alternate just between windows from the same application (similar to the Alt + ` feature in the Mac). (Found on Lifehacker)
Most of us are familiar with Mint, some of us are even familiar with Buxfer and Tripit, and now welcome Xpenser. While the site has been around for a bit they’ve rolled out some great new features. Xpenser is your personal expense tracking website, allowing you to easily track how much you are spending, when and where. Xpenser makes it easy to add expenses while you are on the go: you can email it, SMS it, IM it, tweet it, and now even call in your expenses and Xpenser will parse your voice into an expense note and auto-categorize it. You can even email a photo of the actual photo to Xpenser, and it can attach it to an expense while adding it to your report. Lastly you can import your credit card statements and then export to Quicken, Freshbooks, or even Excel if you would like. (Found on TechCrunch)
Windows users can finally rejoice and find lost photos of friends and family in their massive photo collection now that Google’s Picasa has updated to 3.5 and gone ahead and added facial recognition to it. Early reports are that it can take a while to sort through gigabytes of photos, but that’s honestly expected. In addition to searching for people, Picasa now also has a People sidebar, from where you can easily find the photo you are looking for. About time Google. Get Picasa today if you haven’t already. (Found on Lifehacker)
You need a mover, or you need someone to fix that dent in your car, but you don’t know who to book, nor do you want to deal with the hassle of calling people up, find the prices, and then see if they have a opening for a time that’s convenient for you. That’s so 90s (or even 00s). Now you have Redbeacon. Coming of as the winner at TechCrunch 50 2009, Redbeacon sets out to do for every other service what OpenTable has done for restaurant reservations, Redbeacon allows you to put up requests for services (similar to Craigslist), and Redbeacon notifies qualified and reviewed vendors of the request. They then quote their price, which is emailed to you in a summary of all vendors in about 4 hours, at which point you can select the vendor and schedule the job all online. No phone calls. Less hassle. And hopefully a simpler way to getting things done.
Flightcaster is a newly launched Y-Combinator company that is going to help you while you travel. It is going to predicate how likely it is your flight is going to be delayed, and by how much. But airlines already tell you if a flight is going to be delayed? Really? Clearly you don’t travel enough. I can’t even keep track of the number of times flights have report to be on time, right up to the expected time of departure before being delayed, and delayed again, and then sometimes canceled. This is where Flightcaster comes into play. It looks at a lot of different data sources, incoming flight status, weather at the arrival and departure airports, and even general FAA airport delays, and then calculates a percentage of how likely your flight’s going to be delayed and by how much. They have an application up for the iPhone and Blackberry retailing temporarily at a 50% discount at just $5. (Found on TechCrunch)
Center’d, a Yelp competitor, has released a free iPhone app, that makes it easier for people to decide what they want to do. They categorize data into two parts; first they break down things into attractions, events, restaurants, and shopping, and then they categorize them as Kid Friendly, Romantic, Groups, Recession Buster, Outdoors and Popular. An intersting concept further expanded by city guides for a lot of the major cities. (Found on TechCrunch)
I love finding new and amazing movies. But it’s really hard to do so. I started going through the list of Top 100 movies on IMDB and found a couple through there, but some while great movies, I just don’t find interesting. Likewise, I would get recommendations from friends, but fall into a similar situation. That’s why I think Criticker is so great. It learns what movies I like based on my rating (which annoyingly is on a scale of 1-100 instead of something simpler), and then can recommend movies to me based on that. The site’s running a bit slow right now, but hopefully it smoothens out in a couple days. (Found on Lifehacker)
