Archive | August, 2006

Gmail This!

I spend a lot of time each day reading about new web applications and innovations. Very seldomly do I come across anything useful. In a nice deviation from the standard routine I came across this bookmarklet a couple days ago:

From the Hall: GmailThis!

GmailThis! <– just drag this to your browser’s bookmark toolbar.

The Gmail This bookmarklet rocks, and Its worked its way into my daily routine much faster than any new application. For some reason I want to compare this to the social bookmarking apps, and I definitely picked this up faster than those, and its doing a better job of getting my links and articles to the people I think should read them.

Feature Request:
I’d love to see this integrated with delicious or onlywire! Combining gmail and delicious could allow you to track interesting conversations about articles. Diigo takes a stab at this, but the actual commenting doesn’t work in closed groups. It all goes back to the BLAG concept, that I continue to seek out a solution for.

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Why Life in Lists? Part 1

The idea behind my Life in Lists, is that from the point that I decided I was going to have to be more organized to ever get anything done, I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to cram bits and pieces of the real world into a variety of lists. The lists took the form of anything from day planners, to palms, to laptops and everything in between. Vast time an effort was wasted, and I was still exceptionally good at not being able to track anything.

On the professional front, I felt the similarly pressing need to cram bits of the real world into a variety of lists. Complicating the matter was that there are even more “solutions” for the professional world than there are for the personal life, and I would venture to say that some of these are even worse than their “non-professional” counter parts. Databases, CRM systems, outlook, wikis, issue tracking systems, etc, etc. Its hard enough to keep up with what tools are available much less which ones would be applicable to my situations.

At some point I had to stop fiddling around with all these different solutions, and actually get some work done, so I’ve tried to make sure that practicality and effectiveness play a roll in what I’m doing. With a little creative thinking, I can usually come up with some user-side best practices that make a system suit my needs. En the end though, the problem is, even the most successful solutions still make me feel like I’m cramming a square peg in a round hole.

Enter, Life in Lists, a place where I can rant and rave about these issues, and maybe even at some point come up with some solutions. The concept of lists themselves can spread far and wide, though they tend to stick within the digital realm. I’m interested in everything from simple lists, to databases, to complex web apps, full desktop solutions, and even different operating systems. After all, they are just ways to manage our data, our real world data. And I want something that actually makes mine easier, something thats .

In the meantime, its all just a work in progress. Cheers.

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A very practical application for student note taking

http://stu.dicio.us/

This is one of the best apps I've seen in a long time. The UI is very intuitive, and is quite different from what we have been offered so far in the way of notetaking (backpack, zoho planner). I really like how it provides a simple and quick way to create heirarchical notes. Formatting using any variety of syntax's takes entirely too long to make a good use of traditional text entry.

I'd love to see this style text entry applied to other apps, so that I don't have to go back to college just to take advantage of this one.

I also agree with the Solution Watch review that with it's target market being students, and not just technical students, that there should be some sort of explanation for the site and how it works. I'm a huge fan of role based demos, so it would be great to see a couple "real world use cases" or examples of how a student could use this app.

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Private Equity Deals Through Ebay?

I thought this was a very interesting way to get rid of a company, and I wonder if we're not going to see a lot more of these. Theres probably a million different social bookmarking apps out there, and I woulnt be surprised if you'll be able to buy a few of those for under 50k

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Kiko Flatlines
Online calendering company Kiko.com has decided to call it quits and put the site up for auction on eBay. They are also offering to export or delete user accounts. It looks like the Deadpool may gain another member.

I've been learning a lot about private equity, angel investing, and VC lately, and this sounds like a fairly interesting way to go about things. Maybe its just the easiest way to liquidate assets when you really need to get out. Does anyone know how people traditionally close up shop? What happened to all those startups the first time around?

Follow-up: It looks like it was sold for 250,000

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