Creating a compelling and social way for professors and students to communicate outside the classroom has been Blackboard’s service for many years, and it rakes in $400 million per year doing so. Coursekit is offering a software that is a similar “learning management system” but leverages attaining a large audience of students and teachers, instead of relying on wholesale acceptance by large organizations.
Spotmeup is a new tool to help bands and artists get their own music onto Spotify. This free service makes it possible for anyone serious about music to get distribution on Spotify’s large network for downloading. The application is built with only one goal in mind: To be super easy to use. And by also enabling Dropbox support, musicians can get their music uploaded twice as fast by simply sharing a music folder with Spotmeup.
Zopeo is a new web service that is providing people that is free, easy and in a single place to find people you may have lost contact with. Acting as a Global White Pages, Zopeo is a people search app that enables anyone to search for their family and friends by simply entering their name and where they think they may be located.
Recently we talked about a new business idea that used the Instagram API to make your iPhone case come to life with your social photos taken and posted through the popular photo sharing app. Printstagram takes it a step further, the new service lets you produce tangible printed products – Posters, Miniprints, Instagram Stickers, Minibooks, and Tinybooks – A Social Print Studio.
Until now there hasn’t been a keyboard that was as slick, light-weight and useful as the iPad itself. The TouchFire keyboard brings the brilliance of using the iPad as a writing application to life without the additional bulk that accompanies other iPad keyboards on the market today.
Rebuild Your Community is a social platform that allows communities to connect and voice their opinions to their local councilors. The website allows people to post pictures, videos and start threads with those in their community. But what makes the site different then any other forum based website is that once an issue is posted, Rebuild Your Community locates the councilor in charge and starts a timer until the issue is resolved – holding politicians accountable.
What should you get your favourite neighbourhood branding / creative agency or friend this Christmas? How about a game with brands as the focus? Brand Memory Game is a new game from the BIS memory games series by Hendrik-Jan Grievink that challenges individuals to figure out what clear and identifiable brand mark characteristics belong to which company.
Going paperless is our current expectation for businesses, and services like Square are helping community store-fronts implement technologies that make the payment process quicker, easier and eco-friendly. Proximiant has just launched a new service that is similar to Square but uses NFC technology. The service will allow consumers to receive a digital receipt of their purchase that is beamed directly to compliant smartphone’s without having to give personal information to the seller. Proximiant provides a free low-cost hardware platform that uses NFC (near field communication) to pass a receipt from a register to new mobile phones.
Taggie is a concept application that helps children research where foods in the supermarket come from. Designed by Niels van Hoof, a Dutch design student, the application was created for a graduation project at the Design Academy in Eindhoven, but now could serve as a great education resource for children in the future.
Ever dream of taking your favorite first person shooter video game into real-world settings? We don’t mean actually picking up a gun and shooting, but rather putting a game onto a mobile device that you can then use to interact within your own real-world environment and play with friends. Uwar is a first person shooter that uses augmented reality, a smartphone and a printed Uwar t-shirt to let you play a revolutionary real-life multiplayer first person shooter in any city.