iSawToday – The Coolest Thing I Saw Today on the Web

Last night while having an entrepreneurial drink with a good friend I met a very attractive woman who works as a color chemist. After several minutes of rousing discussion on topics such as:

• “If I get Blue #2 in my blond hair will my hair turn green”?
• “Which Peruvian beetle makes the best natural red coloring for M&M’s? (for the British only)

I decided to investigate what other exciting contributions color chemists are responsible for and the answer: bubbles. Or more accurately Zubbles; colored bubbles. It looks like this small company out of MN has been trying to bring this product to market for almost 3 years now and can’t seem to make it. Is there a conspiracy among the bubble industry to keep this mum? Surely the arrival of a mainstream colored bubble would spell an end for your average bubble toys.

Popularity: 3% [?]

As the title implies I was doing some database cleansing this morning and was trying to craft a cleaver regular expression to remove junk works and characters from my mysql database.  I ended up writing a quick PHP script to do the cleanup for me.  The actual regex I use removes line feeds, line breaks, and tabs from the database field.

The point is that I found this really handy online regular expression(regex) tool which let’s you test the expression quickly and easily.

here’s that database php code if anyones interested.

for ($i=0; $i<$row_count; $i++)
{
$row = mysql_fetch_row($result);
$row[0] = trim(StripSlashes($row[0]));
$res = preg_replace(”/[[\r\n\t]]/”, “”, $row[0]);
$query2 = “UPDATE `search` SET `text`=\”".AddSlashes($res).”\” WHERE `text`=\”".AddSlashes($row[0]).”\”;”;
$result2 = mysql_query($query2);
}

Popularity: 2% [?]

I remember coming across this site earlier in the year but had so much fun putting phrases from a contract I am currently writing into it this morning I thought I would post it.

Aye, if ye accept dem terms, sign and return a copy o’ this agreement t’ me at the address at the bottom o’ this agreement. Aye.

Try It Here

Popularity: 3% [?]

I was looking for cool ajax interfaces for a new website this morning and found myself created attack ads for John McCain.
http://attackadgenerator.com/a/editor

Popularity: 1% [?]

Definition: Intel’s next mobile platform which is said to promote ultra-thin, touchscreen, wireless, devices with extensive battery life.

Popularity: 1% [?]

I just found these great new demonstrations of Google’s Andriod OS. Some of the functionality looks great and although not earth-shattering more productive than the IPhone. Still no examples yet of how Android might accept user input which IMO is what will determine how this fairs in the market. Will the OS support tactile feedback? Will it function with and w/o the Blackberry-ish keyboard?

Popularity: 2% [?]

Although this is NOT the coolest thing I saw today, I wrote up a summarization of CRM’s for a friend and thought I would post it for everyone’s benefit.

I use Highrise in both of my startups companies and have found it to be a great way to communicate sales and biz dev progress to my 10 person teams. Simple, quick, and relatively painless. I do use Salesforce when I need to create multi-step email campaigns or am selling products with a $5k-10k price tag. In an organization where you have more than 30-40 transactions a month you will probably NEED something like a SF for invoice and product reporting.

And that brings us to Sugar, a product that I implemented back in ‘04 at a 20 person software company. In fact, I know several of the Sugar team members and had several products featured in their product exchange. I probably wouldn’t recommend Sugar these days because the price point between SF and Sugar has shrunk quite a bit and the manpower to maintain the open-source version is very costly.

Pricing (last I checked):
Highrise: $50/mo <=15 users
Salesforce: $100/mo <=5 users
Sugar: Free -> $40/mo/user

Popularity: 2% [?]

I’ve been using http://kuler.adobe.com/ to create website color schemes for months now. It’s a simple, free, easy-to-use tool that finds analogous, monochromatic, triad, complementary, and compound colors that look great together. Give it a try

Popularity: 9% [?]

KIVA is a social networking site dedicated to connecting lenders willing to contribute a few hundred dollars to entrepreneurs in under-developed countries. For example you can help Rosa Josefa Marquez De Limachi further her shoe sales business, or Lucila Malagon in Ecuador grow her pharmacy.

Through a network of partners Kiva screens loan recipients and provides a transparent view of the loan status to all of the parties involved.

Kiva very clearly lays out the risks involved with lending in this manner even though the amounts are relatively small; under $5,000. In most cases the average lender only contributes one-two hundred dollars and can monitor the progress of the investment via a personal online portfolio.

Furthermore, the folks at Kiva have done an excellent job of keeping the site design simple and accessible to many different audiences. If you’re thinking of giving to a charitable cause I HIGHLY recommend Kiva.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Just like MTV stole much of the thunder from the Grammy’s and the American Music Awards years ago, here comes YouTube. Here’s a great way to spend an hour if you’re caught in a spring snowstorm like I am today.

Snowstorm = Milwaukee, WI

Videos = http://www.youtube.com/ytawards07

Have a safe and happy Easter.

P.s. It had been 3months, 10 days, and 3 hours since I last saw Chocolate Rain. Phew!

Popularity: 1% [?]