Reviews Archive

We first covered NY-based Lil’Grams back in November 2007 when they launched a private beta of their baby service. Today the so-called baby book for modern parents, Lil’Grams, goes live. Messages posted on the service by parents are called “grams” and are sent to the network that the parents setup. Lil’Grams is one of the nicest looking web services I’ve seen in a long time – this is especially important considering how much time a parent will spend inside the service.

Lil’grams pushes the grams to the network in the way the people in the network wish to receive them. I spoke with co-founder Gregarious Narain who explained that some people might want email notifications, others may want messages on Facebook and (gasp) some might even want Twitter direct messages.

There are a variety of grams including:

• media gram – for a photo or video
• food gram – “hey look little billy kept his cheerios down”
• word gram – “mom check it out billy said his first word – twitter!”
• story gram – “billy went for a walk today in the park and ate a hot dog”

We’ve covered a bunch of baby services including Kidmondo, Baveo, babyZbook and TotSpot. Lil’Grams is offering only paid plans with no free option. Most of the other services offer a free option and monetize with advertising, affiliate revenue or by partnering with other services that charge a fee. As I mentioned to Gregarious, it will be interesting to see if the other baby services follow suit with paid plans. Just like in other industries, someone always has to be first and then the others typically follow along.
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Whether serious or for fun, there are times when you need quick A/B feedback. For example: Do you prefer plain bagels or poppy seed?; Do you use Twitter?; or Is design A or I better for posting scraped content?.

PickFu is a new website that offers a quick way to get A/B feedback. You setup a question (an example of Mac or PC is displayed below) and then the PickFu community replies to the question. You can either make a question public and have the community respond/listing in the question directory or make it private where you must share a link with those people who you want to see the results.

They offer a page with the current demographics of their responders which seems pretty diverse. The only question that’s missing is location – I’d want to know where the responders are when testing an application. The responders answer the questions via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Each question posted on PickFu costs $5 for 50 responses. What would be great is to be able to select the audience that will see the question in cases where you want to test against a specific audience (e.g. people over 60 with no college degree, women under 21 in Australia). Perhaps an extra fee gets you audience targeting.

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Found via the NY Tech mailing list, here’s something I haven’t seen before. It’s called Swaxy (might be considered NSFW)  and they sell tech products. What makes Swaxy different than the other sites selling tech products is that each product comes along with a video of a woman in a bikini “promoting” the item. Swaxy describes their service as. “Beautiful hot girls, great cool gadgets and amazing prices.”

I can only assume the site is real as they have a checkout for purchases. There are five “Swaxy girls” currently and they note that they are looking for more girls who want to win prizes and make money. Swaxy isn’t going to get me away from Amazon or NewEgg for my tech purchases. I honestly don’t know what to make of this so please leave your thoughts in the comments. 

Here’s a video of one of their products for sale (might be considered NSFW):

A new aggregator has launched today named StartupTicker. The idea behind StartupTicker is to aggregate startup news from around the world. It’s a really simple website – just a listing of the latest posts on the startups that they track. I’ve found it to be a great way to find stories to share on CN. 

Founder (and good friend) Darren Stuart tells me that 1,000 startups are currently in the aggregator with more being added everyday. Apps for the iPhone and Android mobile devices are coming soon. You can follow the service on Twitter and Friendfeed as well.

What’s nice about StartupTicker is that all startups are on the same playing field – valley darling status doesn’t mean extra coverage. If you have a startup, you can submit your blog here. I’m not sold this could be a business by itself, but it could be a good way to get people into Darren’s network where he can push other apps in the future.

The founders of new NYC-based Hapnin (pronounced happenin) describe the service as a, “hyper local, real time, things to do platform.” The goal is to help you figure out what to do right now. The service is currently only available in NYC although there are plans to expand. Basically the service is an aggregator of things to do from local papers and a variety of other sources.

The Hapnin team is working with a variety of newspapers and bloggers to place widgets on their sites which will drive traffic to Hapnin and to the content sources. Users can contribute events into the Hapnin system as well.
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Logitech has announced the launch of a new video calling product today named Vid. Here’s how Logitech describes the Vid service, “Logitech dramatically simplifies video calling with Vid by offering a streamlined setup and a simple, intuitive interface dedicated to video calling. In fact, you can set up Vid in fewer than half the steps required by the major instant-messaging programs.”

Basically you install an application and then when you want to video call someone, you send them an email with an invitation to video chat. I guess that means you need to figure out when your friend or family member is around  for the chat. Logitech says they made the application as easy-to-use as possible.

The service is free for Logitech webcam owners; others can use the service for free for 30 days and then they are required to purchase a Logitech webcam.

I guess I am confused – Logitech makes out like it’s hard to make a video call today. I make a number of video calls using Skype and it couldn’t be easier. With Skype I know when my buddies are online and when I start a call with them I can click the “start video” button. That’s it. How does using yet another piece of software and having to send out emails versus just seeing my buddies online make it easier? I am also not forced to use a Logitech webcam – something my newly refurbished Dell laptop does not have.

I’ve been playing with TinyChat over the past couple of weeks and it too looks super easy for video conferencing. With over a dozen people using their webcams, the service was solid and no real lag was seen. Using TinyChat couldn’t be easier – there is a large button that says start conferencing – click it and your video and/or audio starts. That’s it – they don’t ask what type of webcam you are using. Mashable’s Pete Cashmore announced earlier this week that they will be using TinyChat for the new Mashable video lounge.

If Logitech wants to get into the video conferencing and calling game, perhaps they should acquire TinyChat.

This morning on Fox Business, the CEO of BetterWorldBooks discussed their business model and current financial status. I had never heard of BetterWorldBooks but the idea sounds very interesting. Basically BetterWorldBooks takes old books and sells them online. When they sell a book they donate the proceeds to literacy groups on four continents. The call the business a “social enterprise”.

On their FAQ page they outline how they get the books they sell, “Books collected by Better World Books come from two primary sources: the over 1800 college and university campuses on which we run textbook drives and nearly 1400 libraries and thrift stores that send us discarded and donated books.”

The CEO noted that up until now they mostly sold the books on eBay and Amazon. They are investing this year in building the BetterWorldBooks.com site and are hoping to sell the books directly to the public. You can also purchase a carbon offset for your book shipping.

The company expects to see revenues of $31 million in 2009.