noisylime

New York based Drop.io launched a dead simple “drop box” for files last November. The service is online storage on the back end, with a very simple/clean user interface and upload features on the front end.

It is similar to box.net and a number of other startups. Users can upload files via a Flash tool or by simply emailing files to a designated address. Files an also be uploaded via a widget (see example here in the right sidebar). The page itself (example) can be open or password protected. The pages can be anonymous, and each one, called a “drop,” has 100 MB of free storage (you can upgrade to 1 GB for $10/year). There are also RSS feeds and email alerts for drops, although they do not contain enclosures. You have to link through to get to the actual file.

All in all, it’s a fairly generic service with a better-than-average but hardly revolutionary interface.

Today, though, they added a very nice niche feature called, simply, Voice. Every drop page has a phone number and extension associated with it. Call the number, dial the extension and record an unlimited length voice message (subject only to the overall 100 MB file size limitation). The file will appear momentarily as a MP3 file on the drop page.

This is an easy way to record a voice note, or even a simple podcast message. For now you can only have one person on the line, so conference calls aren’t a built in feature. Of course, you can always simply three-way dial the drop.io number as well as another person and record a call, or add drop.io to Skype to record a conference call there.

This reminds me of Dave Winer’s TwitterGram project that he created with BlogTalkRadio last year. There are also basic web-based recording functions that turn your voice into a MP3 (see Daft Doggy), although those do not tie into an actual phone number.

I like the service because it’s very, very easy to use and has no real restrictions. It would be perfect if they simply added the file as an enclosure to an email or RSS feed as well, but for now that isn’t an option.

drop.io

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Box.net

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

[via TechCrunch]

Today, Coghead is introducing the 2.0 version of its DIY, Web-based, enterprise-application devlopment service. The site boasts a new user interface (screen shots below) based on Adobe Flex, with 50 new features and performance that is three times faster than the previous version. Basically, this amounts to a massive upgrade of its Website, but calling it Coghead 2.0 lets the company make a big deal about it. Some of the new features include a redesigned authoring environment, new drag and drop widgets, and support for Open ID.

Coghead is also now hosted on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Web service. “Amazon knows a lot more about running data centers than we do,” CEO Paul McNamara says of the move to Amazon. The way he sees it, he is now offering an easy on-ramp for anyone who wants to create an Amazon-hosted application simply by using Coghead.

The move to Adobe Flex is what gives the site its performance boost. On Flex versus Ajax, McNamara says:

A lot of people are talking about Ajax, but we see a world that goes beyond Ajax.

What attracted him to Flex was the cross-platform, cross-browser interoperability and the prospect of creating offline apps with Adobe AIR. He expects to offer offline capabilities to Coghead users by the middle of 2008. Coghead has attracted 25,000 registered users since launching last April, but its ambition, says McNamara, is to go after the “50 million businesses that don’t have a server.” It still has a long way to go, but this upgrade should help it attract its next set of users.

Coghead

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

[via TechCrunch]

Mephisto is a kick ass web publishing system. It’s a blog engine with some simple CMS-ish concepts (sections, pages), a very flexible templating system, and an aggressive caching scheme that takes advantage of your web server’s best traits.

ProjectPier.org is a fork of the open source activeCollab project, which can be found at www.activecollab.com. Kudos to Ilija Studen for producing such a wonderful masterpiece!

The goal of the ProjectPier.org project is to create a new project fork, picking up the code after activeCollab 0.7.1. The code will remain open source under the Honest Public License. Ilija has indicated on his website that activeCollab is being rewritten and the new version 1.0, while it may remain open source, will only be developed by his new company. ProjectPier.org should not detract in any way from what Ilija is doing and I sincerely hope Ilija succeeds in creating a successful commercial version of activeCollab.

This project is not about Ilija’s decision to go commercial and I do not wish to debate that issue here. We simply wish to create a new project based on the open source activeCollab 0.7.1. The immediate goal is to provide users new features and bug fixes without changing the underlying database structure so that when activeCollab 1.0 is released, users can upgrade to that commerical product if they wish, when Ilija releases it.

We hope that by supporting the user base in this way, we can take the pressure off of Ilija and he can take as much time as he needs to make activeCollab 1.0 as wonderful as possible.

White label video host Fliqz launched a toolbar (IE only) that lets you easily upload and embed video content anywhere embed code is accepted. It doesn’t require a registration and hosts the videos on Fliqz servers for free. It’s a sort of distributed YouTube.

Getting a video up is simple. Just select the content from your computer and press upload. Once uploaded the toolbar will spit back some embed code so you can embed the video in a Fliqz player like below. Fliqz also remembers your upload history in case you want to embed them on multiple sites. There also appears to be no limit to how much you can upload and no easy way to discover who’s responsible for posting copyrighted content.

Flock has a similar video management functionality for YouTube built into their browser, minus the hosting.

[via TechCrunch]

Google may finally be preparing to re-launch wiki service Jotspot, nearly a year after it acquired the company. Jotspot has not allowed new customer registrations since the acquisition was announced, although existing customers retained access to their accounts.

Google Operating System noted that the Jotspot discussion board and help desk have moved over to Google. More telling, Google Blogoscoped discovered that “jotspot” is now a Google Apps service code name. Attempts to log in to the service are shown a page with a (somewhat fuzzy) Google Wiki logo.

Google previously announced that Jotspot would be integrated into Google Apps and part of the suite of online office applications Google is developing or acquiring.

We now have two fairly high profile Google product launches to anticipate in the near future. Google announced in April that an online presentation application would be launching soon as well.

[via TechCrunch]

Texty is a dead simple but useful new internet service that you can use to quickly create and edit content on a web page with zero HTML or programming skills.

Go to the site, start typing text in a WYSIWYG editor, format it and add images. Click a button and get an embed code. Your text will appear in whatever website you add the code to. And if you want to make changes, go back to Texty and edit it. The changes will flow to whatever sites you’ve embedded it on. You can also add comment functionality to a piece of text, and create a RSS feed.

There are lots of great and easy to use content management systems on the web already. Blogging software is just one example. But if someone is working on a web page outside of something like a blog and wants to add a bit of text and graphics, this is a good solution. See our coverage of JS-Kit which has similar tools. I was surprised at how many people are looking for something exactly like this.

I’ve embedded a bit of text and an image below. Everything below this paragraph, including the image, is actually embedded from Texty.

[via TechCrunch]

ThumbStrips is a Firefox plugin that records a filmstrip of screenshots.

The plugin comes from Intuit’s Innovation Lab, an Intuit R&D unit headed by former General Manager of Quicken Roy Rosin.

ThumbStrips records a filmstrip of a users browsing session to make it easy to return to and share pages a user has visited. The plugin was developed after observing people struggling with the back button and history lists. A sharing component supports collaborative search or people doing research projects, trying to share with each other where they’ve been and what they found there.

The fairly new plugin has been downloaded 20,000 times so far.

The issue of remembering a site you’ve visited hours ago, since closed, and then is needed again is fairly regular occurrence, at least for me. ThumbStrips is a clever idea that provides an easy way of accessing a browser’s history.

[via TechCrunch]

Enter your url and let this tool check css validation, google backlinking, url history, network status, etc.

LINK

Online ecommerce was over $100 billion last year. That consists of everything from Amazon.com to the knick knacks people sell on eBay. Last year, PayPal processed about 6% of all online payments worldwide ($11.36 billion). 40% of those sales originated outside of eBay properties, which often requires some kind of online shopping cart to manage the transactions.

PayPal has 133 million account holders and Google Checkout handles one transaction for every 70 that PayPal does, according to Hitwise. EJunkie has a simple free cut and paste solution to this problem for small sellers called FatFreeCart. It lets anyone easily put a shopping cart on their site. PayPal has their own cart creator, but FatFreeCart gives users more choice: both PayPal and Google Checkout can be used.

To install the cart on your site, you just need to cut and paste this code to your page and change the text in red, filling in details like merchant id, product description, and taxes. Customers can add and subtract items from their carts and commit to a final checkout by being taken to a prefilled order form on either of the services. When the order is completed, the merchant is notified of the purchase via email and can fulfill the order.

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