iSawToday – The Coolest Thing I Saw Today on the Web

My new company GroupHigh is holding it’s first webinar focused on building blog lists in several weeks.  Earlier today i was sending out email invitations in which I wanted to include a very quick and easy way for people to tweet about my event.  The result is  a great url string that looks like the following:

http://twitter.com/home?status=I’m%20attending%20the%20Building%20A%20Killer%20List%20of%20Blogs%20for%20Outreach%20Webinar http://bit.ly/k3dMNv

This string pre-populates the click-er’s status box with my message, and a link to signup for the webinar.

Here’s how I framed this in my email:

Let People Know… (you will be able to customize your message before sending)
Tweet that you’re attending this event!

Cheers!

Popularity: 6% [?]

Over the past month I’ve spent hours tinkering my my Nook Color, trying to turn it into the best Android tablet.  I had the original iPad back in July but ended up selling it because a) it cost too much and b) it couldn’t do all that much at the time.

But now back to android:

I’ve tried almost every rom I could find but never had a full feature set common problems with Nook Color roms included:

• WIFI not resuming in wake /sleep situations
• Flash not working
• youTube not working
• Extremely poor battery life
• and multiple app compatibility problems

Then one day I tried Phiremod v 5.1, and all of my troubles went away.  Wifi which was my latest hassle worked flawlessly and flash video’s played at a quality equal to that of my HTC Evo.  Everything just worked!

So until Honeycomb get’s perfected on the Nook, using the Phiremod roms is my choice for the best rom for your Nook Color.

Popularity: 45% [?]

Over at Recipebridge.com we’ve had webservices available to the public since our early days but I’ll be the first one to admit I’ve largely neglected them.  Sure I threw up the token documentation and the ‘request an api key’ form but we’re not real good about getting users signed up.  Fast forward to last summer(2010)  we had a large client approach us wanting to use our webservices in their new startup.  Jumping at the chance to earn revenue from something other than advertising I signed the deal and charged the client a lump-sum for access on an annual basis.

I’ve often lamented that pricing webservices seems troublesome, after all how valuable is your data?

Some example pricing plans for API’s and webservices that I’ve found:

• WHOIS API
• yolink api pricing
• A great wiki on api pricing strategy

Monitoring and api management platforms.

• 3scale
• apigee

I’ve used both Apigee and 3scale.  3scale is much more powerful in that they handle all the authentication and metering of your api for you.  IE Create a plan and allow the user to run x hits per day/month/etc…

Apigee is closer to a google analytics for your api/giving you basis monitoring and stats.

In all, I’m about to open up API access to everyone who requests it at recipebridge.com and a pricing model similar to the WHOIS api (link above) fits quite nicely for now.

Popularity: 18% [?]

While some of you might think my lack of writing is due to mourning the demise of LOST, it’s not.  It’s been a busy summer transitioning to a new role as the COO of an online sports game company and landing some big, new deals for RecipeBridge.

Aside from that mtn. biking, lots of tennis, and sailing on Lake Michigan consume most of my time.  One of my good friends sent me a link that was just too awesome not to write about so here I am.

Snow.com has created not only one of the most beautiful homepages I’ve seen recently but one that displays a video detailing how social, mobile, and web technologies can be combined to do something just flat-out awesome.

1. Identify a niche that has existing, natural community and apply technologies to compliment (not replace) typical mountain communication.  Have you ever been on the mountain and wondered where everyone else was?

2. Engage those a degree away from the primary community, lodgers, parents, and children. Businesses including mine, have so much going on we can barely engage one community let alone reach secondary networks.  This video shows how well-thought-out technology can make this a snap.  This video shows not only the skiers and boarders engaged but friends back in the lodge can locate and communicate with friends.  Parents can monitor their children on a dedicated children’s version of the site and on and on.

Check it out:

http://www.snow.com/epicmix/home.aspx

Popularity: 7% [?]

Anticipating the LOST season finale this weekend I want to whip up some Dharma branded goods to take with me.  I found this great site full of Dharma labels.

http://maxpictures.com/weblog/2007/04/10/lost-labels-for-your-dharma-initiative-needs/

Popularity: 16% [?]

You all know from my previous posts that I admire the Dr. Horrible Sing Along Blog project.  Apparently no where near as much as the guy that made this AWESOME take on Dr. Horrible in the style of the NES!  Just awesome.

Popularity: 17% [?]

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo

Popularity: 20% [?]

The coolest shoes ever!

Since acquiring my Five Fingers several months ago I keep hearing how ugly and strange they are.  While I can’t say the attention bothers me I thought I’d post up a great article I came across today about the benefits and concept behind these ’shoes’:

Barefoot Running and Sports – Why it’s better

And here’s why they rock:

1. Running in them feels fantastic, I feel like a weight was lifted.

2. They keep my feet just as warm as slippers but I don’t have to take them off to run to the store.

3. They are a great conversation starter or “third object”

Cheers!

Popularity: 20% [?]

Being an entrepreneur, one of the most challenging/time-consuming/energy-usurping tasks is finding a suitable name/domain for a company.   While the process starts out being fun frustration quickly sets in as you realize every domain name under the sun is taken.

A good friend of mine named Dan has a solution of this. He looks up relevant words in another language, hoping to find a pronounceable word with meaning and available domain.

This morning I turned to a similar approach for a new company.  Rather than run tens of queries at Google Translate I found this awesomely handy tool which looks up words in multiple languages: http://www.nicetranslator.com/ .

Combine that with the fastest domain lookup tool I’ve ever used at https://domize.com/ and finding foreign company names becomes much-less painful…. although I’m still searching.

How do you find company names and domains?

Popularity: 13% [?]

Here’s a great interview with another Midwest startup success. Andrew Mason gives a great interview to Silicon Prairie News about the success and funding of GroupOn.com

Popularity: 13% [?]