I ran across this cool little tool over at nathanexposed.com. It scans your blog and comes up with a tag cloud of the most commonly used words. My cloud is actually quite boring. I pretty much talk about photography, some boring tech stuff along with a little Anna Nicole Smith sprinkled in.
You can generate your own tag cloud over at http://www.snapshirts.com/custom.php.
I’m sure everyone has already been bombarded with this news, but it’s just too cool to not write about. Today at Macworld 2007, Apple announced the much anticipated iPhone. The first looks are amazing. This thing is going to break the mobile phone market wide open. It’s not very often that a device is released with so many features all in one release. Usually the phone manufacturers are one or two generations behind and there is always that one little something missing that keeps people from switching over. The iPhone appears to have everything… and even better, looks to be coming through Cingular. The price appears to be $499 with a contract.
At first glance:
Here’s a few pics:
Read more about the announcement at Macworld at Engadget.com
engadget.com - Apple iPhone/
Live from Macworld 2007 - Steve Jobs keynote - Engadget
A new service called SoonR has been launced that lets you connect to your desktop PC via your mobile phone. SoonR connects your mobile phone to your Skype account, Outlook, and remote PCs. There’s no software to install on your phone but you must have a data plan. Once you install the small desktop component, you can access files, photos & documents stored on your computer remotely… even when your PC is off (for an extra charge). The basic account is free right now.
Learn more at www.soonr.com
Technorati Tags: soonr, remote+access, mobile+PC, Skype, Outlook, remote+desktop
I hadn’t heard of this service yet before today’s news but it seems pretty cool. Google announced today that they have acquired Writely.com, a web based word processing service. It’s essentially like Word only instead of composing your document on your local computer, you do it through a web browser and the document is stored remotely at the host. This allows you to compose, edit and retrieve the document anywhere you have web access as well as share the document and collaborate on it with other people. It’s pretty cool and definitely a great idea for people who exchange information online a lot. I can see it being helpful if you travel a lot and need access to important documents or proposals or maybe even used as a place to store your resume so it can be printed on the fly at any location.
Check out the beta version at www.writely.com.
Here’s a funny and cool little tool I ran across on another blog. The site is called myHeritage.com and uses face recognition technology to match your face to a database of people. The online demo is free and currently only matches you to celebrity faces but eventually they say their technology will be able to match personal photos with family history. So maybe you can find that long lost relative that looks just like you.
What would be cool though, I think, is if you could eventually upload a group photo of say your friends and it would tell you the degrees of separation among them. Like if your best friend is actually the son or daughter of a son of your grandfather’s cousin…. something like that.
You can register and try out their demo for free at http://www.myheritage.com
I ran the test and my top match was Anthony Hopkins. Of course I didn’t really use the best quality picture of myself, but I wanted to see what it would do. The 5 matching runners-up are in the screen capture below. What’s the deal with the Margaret Thatcher match? lol
Another great way to waste some time on a Friday afternoon 
I ran across a new service that anybody who sells anything on eBay should be interested in. Mpire.com has launched a new research tool to help create the best possible listing. Mpire offers several different listing services that you can subscribe to but this new research tool is free. You enter a keyword or phrase and it collects data on all of the completed listings in the past month for that keyword and provides a set of statistics such as best keywords, best time of day to end the listing, best length of listing, best ending price etc. It really is a cool tool if you’re doing any selling on eBay. The free account allows up to 100 initial searches and then 10 more free each month. There really is a science to selling on eBay and it pays to do a little research on the items you are selling before wasting money on a listing.
For example, I did a test search on GeForce Video Cards and it told me that 78% of all listings for those keywords successfully sell. That the best duration is a 3 day auction and that the best day to end a listing is Friday between 8pm and 9pm Pacific time. The rationale is that the most bidding occurs during the final hour or few minutes of an auction so you don’t want to end your auction while people are at work or commuting in their car. You want the greatest possible audience for your auction close, so 8PM PST (11PM EST) on a Friday night gives you the best window for internet surfers looking for a deal. This is information that I had already taken into account for my listing but it’s good to see the statistics.
You can click here to sign up for your own free Mpire Research account.
You can click on the graphic below for a quick screen shot of my search.
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