Quick innovation

Brain Reactions is a small web tool but does amazing things in a very simple way. Yesterday I become aware I missed to look more closely into it.

It creates, enhance and impoves quality of user inputed ideas. Brainstorming sessions, you know.

Shortly, create an idea in 3 seconds, invite people to come and add their 2 cents to it ( or they'll come from aggregated page ) , later rank those ideas and you get nice idea pool generated by users and the best ideas on top.

Nice way to get ideas, advice and answers , but there's need to be network effect ( critical mass of users when offered as web service ) to make it really useful.

Otherwise, If you do it on the intranet, it could work without these effects and be great way for product evolution.

User interface and navigation is very simple and straightforward. Ideas could be very easly organized into categories and labels ( or even tags ).
Many other add-ons are possible and could be created on top of basic functionality like user's statistics etc.

BETA web services from The Museum

The world of permanent beta services on the web aggregated and called The Museum of Modern Betas. Nice try :)

''About'' page says

The MoMB is a site dedicated to listing web-based applications on a beta trip.

Interesting article wrote Dario about the Web. Congrats Dario, you really nice summed up what's going on.



Check this betas when you'll got time. Some of them could be inspiring for small modules on our project.

Podzinger looks promising audio search

Podzinger is the first search engine with right approach to finding audio/podcasts files via keywords, IMHO. Powered by BBS ( company made first router ever, pioneered VOIP etc.) speech-to-text technology and you can either listen to the full podcast/audio file, or click on the time indicator to fast-forward to just the piece containing your keyword.



That's cool. Up to the point you want listen. That's users control and brings value to this type of search engine.

Take radio shows and other content for example.

With every keyword and little help of RSS you can make your playlist of spoken words and phrases and track it. Just like with Techorati you can do the same for audio, at least in theory.

I see many other services are possible for data retrieval with this approach of mining audio data on the web.



It could really make an easy way for marketers to find ''niche'' audience with Long tail approach.

Podzinger has obviouse intentions with sponsored search in the future. It's still in beta.



Web audio production could have instant benefit , and search engines will be your FM or AM at the end of day ;)) Remember promise of on-demand content ?

Croatian VIDI Web Awards

Sad day for croatian Web. The ceremony of VIDI web Awards is fiasco. I just checked who are this year's winners and I couldn't disagree more ( ...with some of them, but selection in general is poor, or is it choice ? ).



Is it just me or...No wonder, the jurry was consisted of journalist that are not so much web savvy and follow the recent trends.

Oh my, have they failed to select winners in news category, to mentioned only one gig.



My friend from Zagreb told me, some people in the today's ceremony expressed deep dissapointment over these awards and organisers are telling this is the last time for VIDI Croatian Web Awards. Namely, they are too costly.

Or I would add, not representative !

Amazon inovates search engine industry

I am amazed by the innovativeness of Amazon's subsidiary Alexa. They released Alexa Web Crawl which enables ordinary people or startups to build their own powerfull search engines for very little money.

Wired and BBC got the story fast.



Something BIG is coming to search industry. It could have far-reaching effects for many businesses on the web.



Alexa claims that developers, students and startups will be given inexpensive access to an industrial-scale web crawler -- the same technology used by industry giants like Yahoo (Yahoo Slurp) and Google (Googlebot).



Amazon is doing very innovative stuff, indeed. Last month they opened beta version of Mechanical Turk which could bring some other implication for the web with ''webshoring''.



Who would expect Amazon will go into all this ?

Case study for Alexa Web Crawl is Musipedia, an interesting search engine where you can search melodies whisperin or playing short samles of music.

MSN Search to pay users

Bill Gates makes bold statement , according to Wall Street Journal ( Via Netzeitung ).

He said that they will earnings from search engines ads share with users. No details are given.



Finally, my source is german web news site. My resolution for new year will be to get back closer to german language and read it everyday.

My first foreign langugage is german, not english.

Speed of light in the city

Nice to see how's the feeling of traveling with the speed of light. Impossible, but still simulated in the lab.
Look at this tour through the streets of german city Tubingen.