Parentsconnect - Parents Social Network

By Vivek Puri | August 26th, 2006 at 07:03 am ET         

Mainstream media companies have been looking to join the social networking bandwagon, which already is a crowded market and now MTV Networks Kids & Family Division has introduced a new social networking site for Parents- Parentsconnect.
Just as in any other social networking site, you can blog, discuss, make friends, upload photos, and search.
Blog entries can also be created by members which can than be related to any of the parentsconnect’s blog categories. There doesn’t seem to be a facility to publish the blog to member’s personal blog. RSS feeds are available for each member�s blog, but didn�t bring up the content when I tried adding it to Feeddemon. Members can also add other members to their favorite list through the member�s area. I didn�t see a way to detect for which all users I am a favorite. User�s can add photos to their personal photo gallery but only 1 photo at a time can be uploaded. While viewing thumbnails on the members profile page seem to loose their aspect ratio.
Site also provides a Local Guide (powered by gocitykids.com) where you can search for local events, which than brings up Neighborhood events, after school activities, Day Camps, etc for you area. As of now there are no RSS feeds for the Local Events, so you need to keep checking for updates. Parentsconnect doesn’t support member’s adding events to the Local Guide. Site also has discussion forums with predefined categories and quite a few discussions, which seem too much for a month old site. Rest they have the regular features like Featured parent, Features discussion, Poll, tell a friend, newsletter.
Overall the site has good design, which works best Internet Explorer. Site definitely has issues with Firefox as observed by Pete Cashmore in his blog. Parentsconnect has been looking for people to join their team. One of their job posting is at paidcontent.

Links:
Parentsconnect
FAQ’s

Zimbio - Community Research Portals

By Vivek Puri | August 25th, 2006 at 05:32 pm ET         

New form of social and community based network is taking shape at Zimbio which provides collaborative platform where people can learn from others. Zimbio is placing it’s bets on people helping each other in finding information which is interesting, relevant, and worthwhile. At Zimbio any user can view portals to quickly get down the learning curve on any topic of interest by seeing what other people are reading, saying, and recommending about the topic. If the portal doesn’t exist you can create one with the community working on filling up the space.

Public Portals are interactive, dynamic websites that offer a range of features including group blogging, member photos, links to favorite websites, RSS headlines, tracking of search results, and discussion forums.

For adding blog entries people can use the Zimbio’s wysiwyg too or can pull blog entries from their personal blogs right into Zimbio. As expected Group blogging has rating and comments enabled. User can also subscribe to RSS feeds for Recent Contributions, Group Blog, and Forum entries for any of the portals. Besides this, OPML feeds are available for each portal using which you can pull in everything related to a Portal. Zimbio also provides browser button (or “bookmarklet”) to help you quickly save and organize content (links, feeds, photos) about any topic as you surf the web(downside: need to add button for each portal you want to save to). Members can also upload and rate their favorite related pictures, which are grouped into public photo albums. Each portal has feature called Tracker that allows members to scan headlines and search results based on submitted keywords. Members can also use Notepad for creating shared notes in a Portal, which can than be edited any member.

The site is well designed with ajaxy features where required. One part Zimbio can build upon is user rating system for each blog entry, which can help people identify authoritative users and their posts easily and also reduce spam posts(although they don’t seem to have any as of now). Just to add site seems bit slow as of now. Site is free of advertisements which makes me think about Zimbio’s business plan as far monetizing from the huge and growing content store. Off course it also means no revenue for the content contributors which will make it a difficult sell.

Overall it seems Zimbio is trying to create space for itself between authoritative and dependable wikipedia or squidoo’s lens structure or kaboodle’s user pages. Although the idea seems interesting, there are challenging times ahead for Zimbio.

Links:
Zimbio
Company Portal
Guruguide
FAQ

Editgrid Releases new API

By Vivek Puri | August 24th, 2006 at 07:20 pm ET     4 Comments »    

Web-based spreadsheets competition is touching new levels with Editgrid.com releasing it new version (Public Beta 10) containing exciting new enhancements including EditGrid API, Editgrid sync, Grid2Calendar, Grid2Map, Search2Grid, Grid Translate and XML Export. Besides these Edigrid already boasts of 500+ functions, Real-time Update, Remote Data Update, Full Keyboard controls, Dataformats, Import/Export, i18n support, API and much more. It seems that Editgrid is all set to dominate the web-based spreadsheet area.

Editgrid sync can schedule backup of users data at a designated time through a downloadable desktop application. EditGrid Sync would also allow users to upload/download spreadsheets right to their Desktops without opening a browser. As of now Editgrid Sync Supports Microsoft Excel and Gnumeric file formats. I downloaded and installed the application, put in the application key, and got quite a few bugs while trying to sync files on my xp machine. But as we know it’s only 0.1 release, so hope things will work better next time

Another interesting enhancement is the Grid2Calendar using which calendar data can be fed from Editgrid spreadsheet into your favorite calendar application supporting ical format. Below is a screenshot of me trying to export a spreadsheet into calendar format xml.

Editgrid also introduced Grid2Map where users can mashup google maps and post it to their blog. Just put in multiple Title, Decription and Addresses into a spreadsheet and Editgrid maps them using Google API. The addon also provides script, which you can use to post maps on to your blog.

Results Plotted onto google map-

Another feature Search2Grid will allow users to search keyword performance in Google, Yahoo and msn. Below is screenshot for the search box in Editgrid addons. The resulting query brought up search results from yahoo and msn but nothing for Google.

Results:

Editgrid now also supports export of spreadsheets in XML format. Previously Editgrid supported export to Microsoft Excel, HTML, CSV, Gnumeric, TeX source.

Another new feature Grid Translate can now help you easily translate and read spreadsheets using the Google Translate’s homepage translation function. Off course the translation will be as good as Google Translate can throw out, but definitely will be useful.

Overall lots of great new enhancements, but Editgrid definately need to work on making all them sync better. As part of their future plans Editgrid plans to Enterprise version with Team support, Live Data feeds, Support more browsers.

Links:
Editgrid.com home page
Editgrid Labs
Editgrid Blog
Editgrid Forum
Editgrid change log

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) beta released

By Vivek Puri | August 24th, 2006 at 06:45 am ET     2 Comments »    

Amazon just released a new web service - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). which will allow users to obtain and configure computing capacity onDemand, with complete control of your computing resources and lets users run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change.

Pricing is great, as expected from Amazon:
Pricing-
* Pay only for what you use.
* $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed).
* $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet traffic).
* $0.15 per GB-Month of Amazon S3 storage used for your images (charged by Amazon S3).

As of now EC2 provides command line tools and Java libraries but you may also directly access EC2’s SOAP-based API. Support for other programming languages, including Perl, Python and Ruby, will be provided in future(Hope they get to PHP quicker)

Service Highlights
� Elastic
Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously.
� Completely Controlled
You have complete control of your instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact with them as you would any machine. Each instance predictably provides the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth.
� Designed for use with Amazon S3
Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to provide a combined solution for computing and storage across a wide range of applications.
� Reliable
Amazon EC2 offers a highly reliable environment where replacement instances can be rapidly and reliably commissioned. The service runs within Amazon’s proven network infrastructure and datacenters.
� Secure
Amazon EC2 provides web service interfaces to control network security. You define groups of instances and their desired accessibility.
� Inexpensive
Amazon EC2 passes on to you the financial benefits of Amazon’s scale. You pay a very low rate for the compute capacity you actually consume. Compare this with the significant up-front expenditures traditionally required to purchase and maintain hardware, either in-house or hosted.

Overall I think this should be a big hit with small to medium sized companies who need to ramp up their computing capacity on the fly.

Links:
Amazon EC2 Home Page
Resource Center
FAQs
Developer Forums