I was perusing the interwebs the other day and decided to search for the best ways to cut an onion. A quick Google search and I came across this video — And it works! I was able to cut an onion, from start to finish without crying. I can’t believe no one has ever shown me this before but I have used it three times since yesterday and I’m not even a big fan of onions.
Cut An Onion Without Crying - The most popular videos are here
StatShorts.com - Keep the community informed
I think we’ve all learned over the past couple of weeks, with Twitter being down, the importance of notifying the customers with what’s going on. This idea stemmed from a few things, GetSatisfaction (with their communication to the end-user and the need for status pages (like status.twitter.com). Simply put, status pages that are both replicated and hosted around the globe. Take a server in the US, one in Europe and on in APAC and replicate the sites and databases and allow companies and/or organizations to get sub-domains off of the main site.
These “company status pages” would take their information from a multitude of sources. During setup, the company could choose accounts to follow on Twitter, Friendfeed and any other information source (even SMS based). These accounts could be owners, evangelists or employees of the company. Anytime the company status page needs to be updated, it can be done from anywhere on the world wide web or beyond. Say Twitter is having issues? Alex Payne can text to 47783 (ISSUE) with an update to the world.
Because these status pages are both replicated and hosted around the world, there is very little chance of the users being unable to access these very important status pages. Twitter can have twitter.statshorts.com reserved just for them. 
I seem to come up with ideas left and right and I think it would only be fair to put them out there for the community to mull over and possibly implement. I am opening these up to anything you would like to do with them. You owe me nothing (although if you’d like me involved I’d be more than happy to help) if you use them and I wish you the best of luck — in fact, if you roll it out, I’ll probably review and write about them on one of the many blogs I currently write for. So please, this new category on my blog will be for simply putting the information out there and starting a conversation.
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Text 2 Drink - You want that drink and you want it now.
So, during a late night drinking trip at National Mechanics with Bart (and later had Alex’s input as well), I came up with this interesting concept. There have been similar tries with regards to SMS based advertising and coupons but this takes a little bit different approach.
The idea is that bars would get a system installed. This would be a small computer (think Eee PC) and a receipt printer. When someone sits down at a table, the waiter (or waitress) would take a credit card to open a tab, would then click a button on the computer and it would print a slip with instructions and a generated serial number. The table would get this slip and the waiter would be off to the next table.
Whenever a drink was needed by the table, anyone there could simply send a text message to 37465 (DRINK) with their special ID and the type of drink they desire. This information would pop up on the special computer behind the bar, the bartender would see it, make the drink, set it up for the waiter with information about which table it goes to. This not only saves time but also allows the waiter to reduce the number of trips to each table and allows the drinker to get their next beverage that much faster.
On top of this idea could be built in a sponsorship mode. Instead of drinkers being able to order any drink, they send a text to 37465 with their special ID only and the “drink of the night” is brought to them. Think of Coors, Bud, Philadelphia Brewing Company or any others sponsoring their beer of the night. The bar gets a discount on beers and the drinkers get the savings passed on.
This service could be setup for trial with simply an iPhone at the bar and system setup with TextMarks and a simply API being built. So go ahead, what do you think? Doable or not? If so, do it.
Check out this incredible music video… It teaches an important lesson, has incredible dance moves and brings two nerds to the forefront of the music industry.
I get very excited when I see new companies in the tech industry growing up (especially when I use them and they’re in the Philadelphia area). ReadBurner is no exception. In the past few days, they’ve rolled out some great new features — categorized popular this week, paging on certain pages, integrated comments and the latest is a partnership with NetVibes. This last one is exciting. From the ReadBurner blog, Adam writes:
This announcement gives you a bit of a taste of what we’re up to – analyzing what people are sharing across the Web on all sorts of different services. As such, our tagline has now changed to “what’s shared on the Web.”
While some may not understand why this is a big accomplishment, I feel that it is. They have a goal to let every user (that one’s for Drew) know what’s hot on the internet without regard to who says it’s hot. This differs from Digg.com and the other content rating sites like Technorati by a large margin. Digg uses a system where people can vote something up but they don’t even have to have viewed the site to do it and Technorati uses an authority system. This means that certain users and blogs have a higher likelihood of hitting the front page simply because of who or what they are. ReadBurner takes the guesswork out of this. No weights, no preference, simply sharing.
In addition of providing the top articles in different categories, they also allow you to quickly hop to both Google Reader and NetVibes to share more items right at the top of the screen.
While they have a long way to go before they are fully accepted, I think they’re heading in the right direction. They have made an active choice to keep from moderating the information or removing articles that they don’t like (see, lolcatz can make it up there each and every day). Keep an eye on these guys because they have some great stuff on the way.
