Review the Market

This post is about the lengths that certain sites will go to in order to get attention and traffic. However, in this case, it is also a fun (if not useful) tool. It’s called The Bubblenator. What does it do? Well, it adds text bubbles to your images. It doesn’t actually add the text bubble though; it simply gives you a script which allows you to embed the bubblified image in your blog/website.

Visit The Bubblenator to take a swing at this tool. (Remember what I said about sites doing all kinds of things to get attention). The way it works is that you pick an image from the Internet and run it through their online tool. Add some text (which you would like to see in that speech bubble) and then copy paste the code it generates into your webpage and you are done. It is that simple. Of course, be sure to respect any copyright or trademark in the pictures.

Of course, it does allow a little more than that. It allows you to change the shape of the bubble and also position the bubble wherever you like. In addition to that you can also add more than one bubble and change the size of the bubbles. I guess it can get a lot of fun once you get going. I can certainly think of many fun things to do with this.

Spock.com is a search engine for finding people. Not just people that you know, but also people that anyone has ever known in the history of mankind. You can do these searches by name or by other keywords. These keywords can be anything that describes the person you are looking for, for example ‘president’. Once you have found your result, you can go and look at the main page for that result. Take a look at the page for George Washington, for example, which is arrived at clicking on the first result when you search for George Washington. On the other hand you could search for your friends or people you knew in the past.

One very interesting feature is the ability to embed widgets containing a particular search on Spock on your website. So for example, related to our example here’s a widget for US Presidents:

Spock allows you to tag search results (resulting in the ability to search by keywords rather than by name). Not only can you add tags to your own identity. You can add tags on other people as well, and vote on tags that already exist. And also, although they claim not to be a social network, they do allow you to add trust links between people you know; this allows your search results to be ranked by trust (where you will see your trusted people before you see non-trusted ones for a particular search).

Signing up is fairly quick and easy and as shown below, Spock allows you to pull in contacts from other networks you may be part of:

Step 3 allows you tell Spock a little bit about yourself and you are done. I have added myself to Spock already, and am going to recommend my friends to add themselves as well.

If you hate going to YouTube because of all the junk that is also there amongst the good stuff; if you like to watch music videos and are overall a music junkie; if you are all of the above, then this website review is for you.

Muvibee.com is a new service which is a music video search and aggregation tool. The service doesn’t host these music videos, but pulls them from other sources for your viewing pleasure.

What we enjoyed the most and the first is the functional user interface. As soon as you land on their homepage, you immediately see the top 10 videos from US, UK, and Germany. Most people just want to do that. In any case, we wanted to search for a particular video, so we added the song name to the search box and Voila! it came back VERY QUICKLY with a list of videos for our song. We never knew there were so many videos for our song.

Anyway, once inside the search results, you can quickly preview a snapshot from a video by hovering your mouse over it and start viewing it by clicking on the play button next to it. Once a video starts, for some reason it streams very quickly. Now, we know that they don’t host the videos, so we can’t explain how they get such a decent speed. But we are not complaining.

All this is good enough for this site to be highly recommended, however, this is only the beginning. You can create play lists, search for other top 10 charts, search in other lists, or search by genre (rock, pop, or dance). And you can do all this without even creating a login. There are supposed to be some more extended features once you login, but we were in a hurry to introduce this site to our readers, so we didn’t even bother to create that login.

Do let us know in comments what extra features are available if you create a login.

Smorty.com is one of the many paid blogging websites out there. While paid blogging has always been a controversial topic, there are still a lot of bloggers out there who are taking on these jobs. Well, not everyone can make it big blogging and so this is a good venue to supplement this income.

Well, getting back to Smorty.com. They call themselves a blog advertising company. But we are going to review this company from the blogger’s perspective. Here are some of the things that are different from other such paid blogging companies out there:

• Very quick payment cycle. After a post, you usually get a payment within a week. We don’t know any other site which does this.
• Easy to use and fast interface.
• Minimum payment per post is $6 which is a whole dollar higher than most blog for money services out there.

Like everything there is also a little bit of bad in there. The bad for Smorty is:

• Less number of assignments available for blogging.

For us the best feature is the quick payments for assignments and that puts Smorty ahead from most of its competition.

Here’s a review which is different from the usual theme of this website. This is a website which sells rugs; it’s called Superior Rugs. Superior Rugs is a website which claims to sell you good quality rugs at a good price (which means, a price which is not very expensive). They have warranties for 30 days and 60 days after that for manufacturing defects. Here are some of the good points we noticed with this online service:

• Free Shipping: they have free shipping for all their orders.
• How To Section: they have a detailed howto section which tells you about how to buy a rug, how to care for one, what are the different material that rugs are made of and what are the properties of each of these materials, etc.
• Help Desk: they also have a help desk area with a decent set of most common questions answered in detail.
• Search: there are many ways through which you can search for rugs: search by recommendations, search by shape, search by size, search by color, or search by catalog number (if you know it). This of course allows easy and quick navigation into the site and narrows down your search quickly.
• Variety: they offer a large variety of rugs. This ranges from Oriental to Modern; and from Wool to Silk; and a whole lot more in between.

And if you are really looking for a bargain then you can pick up some neat ones from their Clearance sales. Superior Rugs offers discounts up to 80% in these sales (so imagine buying a $1000 rug for just $200). And did I forgot to mention that once you have narrowed down your search to a particular area (say round area rugs), you can sort the results in the gallery by recommendations, quality, price, and value. So, if you are looking to decorate your house a little, you might want to pay them a visit.

Here’s something that you don’t see everyday. if you are a PDA user able to run applications on your phone, then this is the perfect mobile app for you. Fring is a FREE application that allows you to hook into all your VoIP networks: Gtalk, Skype, ICQ, SIP, etc. It lets you call your contacts on any of these networks from your phone using either your EDGE/3G connection, or through a Wifi connection (if one is available).

The nice thing about Fring is that it allows you to make a call directly from your phone. It doesn’t involve any callbacks like many popular Skype mobile versions do. You can use your SkypeOut credits directly from the phone just as you would from your PC.

It is available for a large range of phones and operating systems. To get a look at the complete range of features, visit this link.

THE ONLY DRAWBACK: There is no fring for BlackBerry. I use one and so its a big drawback, and I will be looking back again and again to see if they come out with a BlackBerry version.

Today, we look at a Lead Management Software, that potentially gives even SalesForce.com a run for it’s money. It’s called AIM Promote. Here’s a list of some of the differentiating features that this fully loaded software offers:

• Low Pricing ($33 per user) and No Setup Cost
• Lead Attention Meter - track how much time a lead is receiving from (or not receiving).
• Customizable Lead List Display - allows you to choose which information is important for you to view while looking at the leads.
• Lead Reselling - you can resell leads that you don’t want to handle to others. This allows you to harvest the hard work that you put into lead development only to realize that this lead is not in your sweet spot.
• Reports - a large number of reports which are either not available in competing offerings at all, or cost extra money to generate: Campaign Performance, ROI, Profit, Call Center Performance, Campaign Cost, etc.
• Website Integration and Internet Marketing - a set of features such as web analytics, visitor tracking, etc. allow you to integrate AIM to your website allowing you to integrate data gathered there with your sales force data.

Customer Relationship Management is what this software helps you do. There are many other features which are worth looking at. Overall, it is a very feature-rich software, and yet easier to use then most other such software (as claimed by the authors).