PrettyGraph is a catchy name for a tool that lets you create graphs for a variety of applications, from blog posts to marketing and scientific research illustrations. The home page shows some of the graph styles available, and they would add visually to a website or to a report or presentation. The designers describe PrettyGraph as looking better than Excel to help you beat your competitors. The graphic quality would also look professional in brochures.
Graphs really help get the message across to show the traffic on your website or blog, or to make sales projections and map trends and market shares. Graphs aren’t just used to add attractive illustrations: charting your website traffic can help bring in advertisers. For students they add impressive meaningful illustrations to projects. The variety of types of graph means they can also be used for more technical and scientific presentations. I could see this tool being used for such a wide range of purposes that it should gain interest.
RefrigeratorArtist gives parents the chance to share their children’s artwork online, making it possible to keep a permanent record of all the favourite pictures produced by the family. These can go into an individual gallery with the name of each child, and you can select pictures to go into the voting to try to win $400 in US savings bonds each month. Vote for your favourites from the children on Refrigeratorartist to help select the winner.
Keeping a digital record will help a lot of parents because the actual pictures really do stack up over the years and families can only keep a few. The site also has products available to purchase with the children’s artwork featured, including t-shirts and mugs. I can’t help thinking there will be plenty of competitive voting going on, with friends and relatives nagged to vote for children, and more nagging will come from the children to get the t-shirts and mugs. So it should be a financial success for the designers while still being a lot of fun and a useful resource for families wanting to keep an archive of their children’s artwork.
Warren Buffett is worth just short of $37 billion, he started his company from scratch. In another of our videos highlighting some of the world’s most successful startup founders philosophies and paths to success, here’s Warren Buffet talking about his extremely canny investment and subsequent exit, in PetroChina.
This is an irresistible website if you enjoy playing musical instruments – whether or not you have any real ability. Virtual Piano presents you with a keyboard on screen which you can play in two ways. Either you can click on the keys with your mouse or you can use your keyboard where the letters correspond to the white keys and Shift lets you play the black keys. You soon get used to finding the keys on the keyboard as they go in sequence, but it won’t help you actually learn to play a real piano keyboard.
The site is still being developed and at the moment it can be used for fun, or to play tunes and have them recorded for you. Future developments include the ability to print out music, which would be useful. Virtual Piano also has some music available using the alphabet so you can type the tune into your keyboard – so you can play even if you have no training at all! There’s a Virtual Piano Facebook group for more information and so that you can hear what other users have created using this quirky technique.
An interview with one of Europe’s wealthiest entrepreneurs, Felix Dennis founder of Dennis Publishing.
Dennis started his working life as a grave digger, moving into publishing with the ill fated Oz magazine, which landed him a stint in jail. Whilst this interview is not exactly the best piece of journalism I’ve seen, Felix Dennis himself is a very unique entrepreneur and gives some excellent startup advice. Buy his book to read some really frank and very honest advice about what it takes to make hundreds of millions of dollars from nothing.
The exciting thing about Trivlike is that it quizzes you with a tight time limit on each question and you have to make your choice of answer rapidly. There’s just about time to read the question and the multiple choices before you have to click, and the time slider is going down quickly. To start you need to sign up with your Facebook account and then it asks a few more questions – for example you can choose a different screen name – and then you can try your first set of 20 daily questions.
The questions are tricky, especially as there’s an American focus to them. Once you start taking the quizzes you can move on to a second feature of the site, and this is where I would have liked it to be slightly different. Before logging on I hadn’t realised the quizzes would also be used to help find good matches with like-minded people for dating and friendship. This is a fairly standard option on other social networks, if you want to use it, but I would have preferred a more clear option for those of us who would only want the site for the trivia quizzes and perhaps to chat to others who enjoy them.
This could be achieved by tweaks to the design, which at the moment seems to hint more towards it being a dating site. It could be both, and a quiz and friendship site with a dating option might be the better way round to go – I wouldn’t have logged in if I had thought it was a site with questions to help find a partner. Some people would like it as a dating site so it all needs to be made more clear and easy for people to opt for dating or just quizzes with or without chat.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see how much fun and how revealing this site could be. GoaQoo lets you ask questions secretly so long as you know the email address of the person who you want an answer from. They won’t be passed your identity or your email address, and if they answer GoaQoo will send their reply back to you.
It may not be a serious business idea but it’s such an intriguing site that it’s sure to be used. No doubt teenagers will love it for asking those embarrassing questions they really need to know the answers to. Relationship questions are sure to be high on the list, and perhaps some people who never grow beyond teenage will also be using it! It’s hard to know if more mature people would trust this system, especially the ones asked to answer an anonymous question. It’s bound to be a hit with secondary school kids, though, and I must admit I’m going to give it a test run.
BookGlutton is a beautifully designed site with a good selection of free eBooks in a variety of genres to suit all tastes. There are already plenty of sites around that allow the downloading of free eBooks, so BookGlutton takes a different approach. It’s not just an eBook download site, it’s also an eBook reader, like the Kindle or Sony Reader but on your computer, and presents the books in an attractive page-turning format on screen.
This can be used by people who aren’t members, but by registering with BookGlutton you can take advantage of more features. It’s possible to discuss the book you’re reading with other BookGlutton members and you can mark your ideas as you progress in the book so that the comments are relevant at each stage. This is done in various ways, including forums, but also by clicking a chat link on the left of the eBook as you read it.
The eBooks have various features typical of eBook reading gadgets like the Kindle. You can mark the pages, for example. The interactive way you can read the books brings together the benefits of downloading and reading books on screen that a Kindle gives, and the social experience of being in a book discussion community. The designers say they will be adding more with a subscription service, but that there will always be a large amount of free content too.
This is an innovative idea for a website which is both entertaining and could be used by news networks for their research. HubDub encourages users to predict outcomes of real news stories, and to make it more fun this is done by betting virtual dollars. At the moment you can vote on such subjects as whether or not Obama will win the 2012 elections, how far Andy Murray will go in the Australia Open, whether the damaged Picasso painting will be repaired by April 27, and will there be an early spring or a longer winter?
You can choose the news category most of interest to you – and while sports, politics and finance are obvious leaders in having the most predictions, there are also items in science, entertainment, world, technology and general. These can also be sorted into those closing soon, the most active and those with the most predictions. You’ll also find which have recently been settled and which have new comments. With forums for discussion it’s a lively site, and the aggregation of predictions actually leads to a helpful indicator of how some news stories are likely to end. They also provide news networks with helpful data on public opinion, so sponsorship of the site is likely.
I’ve given this site a thorough testing as I’m a bit of a language-learning fanatic. I tried it with Italian, which I speak well, and with German, which I’ve almost forgotten, to see how it would work for beginners and skilled students. It strikes me as an excellent language learning resource for a few reasons. First of all you can try it out for free to see if it’s helpful to you, secondly the rates are incredibly reasonable compared to other language courses, and thirdly it also has a social networking side so you can chat with and friend people in other countries who speak the languages you want to learn.
The actual learning methods are fun. I tested German for beginners and was taken through the opening class, which combined instructions on the basic ways to greet people with simple sentences you would use every day. This was taught using step-by-step fun methods – listening to the words and phrases while looking at pictures, then clicking on the pictures on the next screen to match them to the right phrase. These phrases were then jumbled and I had to put them in order, and also words were provided as anagrams which had to be rearranged by clicking on the letters. Each time the word or phrase was then given in voice. By the end of the lesson I had had fun and the method really put the words and phrases into my memory.
With Italian I tried a slightly higher level and was presented with similar methods but the phrases were more advanced. They were still the types of phrases you would need when travelling or meeting people for business reasons. The more advanced lessons included extra tasks including writing about set subjects although I’m not sure how those would be corrected.
This site would be handy not just for adults but also to help children with languages they’re learning as the voices are all native speakers. Along with the lessons there are sections with a complete vocabulary of the most important words, both basic and advanced, and a section with useful sentences.
Even as a free member you can test one class in each of the languages (German, French, Italian and Spanish are available) and also join the social network side of the website. The community is very friendly with chat going on continually and you can join in with whoever is in the chat room or go into private chat. You can also just watch and mark yourself unavailable. There’s an option to filter the members by age and language so you can find contacts to friend and communicate with to improve your skills, and it does look like a community where good international friendships could be made with people genuinely studying languages and wanting to talk to others to mutually improve. The price is 8.95 Euros per individual month, reducing to 5.95 Euros per month for 3 months membership, or 4.95 Euros per month for 6 months.
