Jack, John and Mack are three very close friends. Jack is new to writing and has just started a blog on “Adventure Places”, John on the other hand is a Business Analyst who spends a large portion of his work writing documents and Mack is into IT consulting. All three of them meet at their regular coffee shop.

Jack poses an interesting question to John and Mack. He asked them as to how he could improve the quality of postings he was doing and make sure that his posts are grammatically very correct and that he was using the proper adjectives and words? John suggested him to keep a dictionary and thesaurus handy all the time as that is what he does. Mack on the other hand suggested Jack and John to try out a very neat tool from WhiteSmoke. He asked them to try out the free version which was available as a Google gadget here.

I was of course sitting next to them on a smaller table and having my cup of regular coffee (2 milk and 3 sugar). I could not help but try the tool. 

The tool nicely sits on your Google home page and provides a text box in which you can cut and paste the content you have written (or you can even write it up there) and hit the “Go” button to get the text analyzed. 

It extensive feature library allows you to:

• Achieve perfect English grammar in your writing with English grammar check, English grammar corrector, and English grammar lessons.
• Instantly enrich your writing with relevant adjectives, adverbs, and phrases.
• Enhance plain sentences with precise, smart synonyms from extensive synonyms dictionary.
• Check and correct spelling with vast dictionaries and spell checker.

The tool comes up with recommendations in the same window and you can choose to apply them or not (refer to figures below)

The commercial version of the software which can be obtained from here, has much more elaborate features like:

Read more »

Popularity: 6% [?]

Widgipedia is out on their mission to create world’s #1 resource for widgets and gadgets. It was born out of the need to have a collaborative platform for developers to develop and enhance their widget creation skills and provide a repository of widgets supporting every possible platform.

Let us define few terms before our discussion.

What is a Web Widget?
Web Widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are akin to plugins or extensions in desktop applications. Other terms used to describe a Web Widget include Gadget, Badge, Module, Capsule, Snippet, Mini and Flake. Web Widgets often but not always use Adobe Flash or JavaScript programming languages.

What is a Desktop Widget?
Desktop widgets are small specialized applications that are designed to do simple tasks, such as clocks, calendars, RSS notifiers or search tools. They can run on desktop (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.). Desktop widgets are also called gadgets.

Why are widgets so popular?
One can utilize Web Widgets to enhance a number of web-based hosts, or drop targets. Categories of drop targets include social networks, blogs, personal homepages, and operating system desktops. Although end users primarily use Web Widgets to enhance their personal web experiences, or the web experiences of visitors to their personal sites, corporations can potentially use Web Widgets to improve their web sites using syndicated content and functionality from third party providers.

Widgipedia’s offerings include Web widgets (can be used at MySpace, personal blogs, eBay etc.) and Desktop widgets (can be used on Windows, Mac etc.). Currently they support the following platforms of desktop widgets:

• Yahoo! Widgets (Windows);
• Yahoo! Widgets (Mac);
• Dashboard (Mac);
• Standalone Widgets (Windows);
• Standalone Widgets (Mac);
• Microsoft Vista Sidebar (Windows);
• Opera (Windows, Mac, Linux);
• DesktopX (Windows);
• Kapsules (Windows);
• Samurize (Windows);
• KlipFolio (Windows);
• AveDesk (Windows);

The widgets are available for free from their web site. They allow you to customize the size and look and feel of the widgets.

A snapshot of Widgipedia site (Click on image to enlarge it)

Developers can use Widgipedia to upload their creations, to collaborate with others, to learn or teach through tutorials, code samples, libraries and more. The collaboration is limited to knowledge share and questions through forum topics. I wish they had a social networking component to it, to foster an environment of greater collaboration. I skimmed through some of the tutorials and they were pretty basic in nature. They mention in their FAQs that they are working on providing advanced tutorials soon.

Here are some cool widgets which I tried:

I would have liked them to have some more web widgets but for now they had only around 12 of them. Their site uses AJAX extensively. They seem to be using AjaxRequest library, Prototype JavaScript library and moo.fx library from mad4milk. There were some navigation issues which I would definitely want them to rectify (e.g. I clicked “Most Popular” and then I clicked “Widgets Gallery” but the site does not tell me where I am, some kind of breadcrumb control or “where you are” would be a great help). I liked the overall look and feel of the site.

But for a person like me who is very much into web stuff, this site does not offer much as of now. I definitely would prefer WidgetBox over Widgipedia.

Interested in reading reviews about widgets, try WidgetLabs.com.

Technorati Tags: widgets, gadgets, web widgets, desktop gadgets, desktop widgets, Widgipedia, Widgetbox, WidgetLabs, MySpace Widgets

Popularity: 5% [?]

I always had issues with how to share the videos of my son I shot and also how to watch a TV station which is not shown in U.S. P2P and Internet TV seem to be the answer.

Recently one of my friends pointed out a P2P software called Sopcast. It shows you free TV over the Internet and right now you can watch BBC World News, HBO Movies, ESPN Sports, Star Sports and many other channels.

SopCast is a simple, free way to broadcast video and audio or watch the video and listen to radio on the Internet. Adopting P2P(Peer-to-Peer) technology, It is very efficient and easy to use. Let anyone become a broadcaster without the costs of a powerful server and vast bandwidth. You can build your own TV stations comparable with large commercial sites with minimal resources. Using SopCast, you can serve 10,000 online users with a personal computer and a home broadband connection.

I downloaded it and played around a bit. I liked the nice easy interface and the quality of the transmission. The neat thing is that I can start streaming my videos on a channel and give that channel to my family in India and they can (using Sopcast) watch our videos. This saved me tons of hassle of how to send such huge video files.

The software has been developed it seems in China, where it is very popular (one can guess from the amount of public channels that are Chinese) but is supposedly picking up in Europe. The tool uses a its own proprietary protocol called sop.

I personally think it is a great tool but it has to grow its reach among the English speaking countries more and it has to increase the number of English channels.

Here is a snapshot of the tool: (click to enlarge)

Popularity: 3% [?]

FareCast, which uses data-mining algorithms to search for patterns, in the accumulated airfare data to tell you whether you should buy an airlines ticket now or wait for few more days, has come out with a product called Fare Guard. I used to use this site a lot when I had a traveling job and found the fare history graph to be a neat tool (Kayak.com has a similar graph).

Fare Guard allows you to protect today’s lowest fare and avoid getting burned by price increases. It gives you peace of mind when you decide to buy later, whether you’re waiting for fares to drop or firming up travel plans.

To learn more, go to How Fare Guard Works. You can also check out a sample Fare Guard or visit Farecast.com to start your own search.

Fare Guard Step by Step

Guard
Purchase a Fare Guard to protect today’s lowest fare for one week.

Track
Track fares daily via email to help you find a lower fare.

Book
Book your tickets within the week to redeem your Fare Guard. You can book tickets from any airline at any price.

Redeem
Redeem the difference between your Guarded Price and the lowest fare on the day you booked (regardless of which flights you booked). Farecast will send you a check for the difference.

Redemption Example:

Popularity: 3% [?]

proto.in is a premier event to showcase new products, technologies and companies to a selected gathering.

First proto.in event was held from Jan 20th to Jan 21st of 2007 within the premises of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, India.

The event featured 27 companies across various domains, some with finished products while some with pre-launch previews. The event was first of its kind in India and was a major success.

Swaroop has covered all the companies that were in attendance in his blog entry over here.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Is Schmedley just another startup page/portal like netvibes, pageflakes etc? We believe otherwise. No doubt they have similar product but the difference is in the way they present the data in terms of schmidgets. The user experience is something which is very different over here.

What Schmedley has done is organized schmidgets into pockets/pages of functionality and provided a common interface for users to access them. For example, if you are traveling, you can go to the airfare section of schemedley and search across three major (expedia, travelocity, orbitz) sites with one search click and see results from all three sites together on one page. The site allows you to navigate results for each site individually.

The one I liked the most was their movies page. You enter a zip, it lists you all the theaters on the extreme left. Click on one theater and it lists the movies playing there and the address of the theater. Further select a movie playing in that theater and it gives you the show timings, brief description and a short movie preview. All this on one page really makes it easy to use.

Some other categories/pages are:

• search
• images
• weather
• SMS
• stocks
• RSS
• airfare
• amazon
• IM

Please give it a try, you may find it useful.

Popularity: 2% [?]

There have been numerous occassions while working on any project that I have had to refer to example code for how to use an API or a function. I used to use google search but had to wade through lot of stuff before finding anything useful.

Codefetch solves this problem by providing a search engine for searching through the programming books for any matches. I liked the ability to choose the language and search for code only in that language.

Codefetch has a huge collection of books and returned quality results for few queries I tried.

They also have a popular page where they show details on what people are searching. At the time I saw it, searches for terms in Java were the most popular ones.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Geni is a website that allows families to collaboratively build their family tree. Family members can then use the tree to learn more about each other, share knowledge about common ancestors and relatives, and stay in touch with each other.

Geni has been founded by former executives and early employees of PayPal, Yahoo! Groups, Ebay, and Tribe.

I like the idea of building a tree and then connecting the leaves/branches with your family members to grow the tree bigger and bigger. It is social networking with a nice twist and I firmly believe this will pick up in times to come.

The way to create your profile is easy:

1. To start your family tree just enter your name, email address, and choose your gender.
2. Add family members to your tree by clicking on the arrows.
3. Enter your relative’s name; email address is optional.
4. Your relative is added to your tree. Click on more arrows to keep building your tree.

Build your trees people!

Popularity: 2% [?]