photo by shoothead 

One of the fun things about the internet are all of the unusual (and sometimes clever) names that companies have developed for their products.  Some are fairly obvious (like YouTube or LinkedIn), some just sound interesting (like Squidoo or Gumshoo).  Somewhere in the middle is Delicious (originally Del.icio.us) a Social Bookmarking application that I’ve found to be a great tool.

Delicious solves several problems:

1. Bookmark a website and be able to find that bookmark from any computer.
2. Easily find your book marked site by using your own descriptive tags.
3. Find relevant and popular data submitted by millions of other users.

Delicious solves all of the above and more.  Save interesting sites to your Delicious account with tags that are meaningful to you.  Share those sites with co-workers or friends (and check out the sites they shared with you).  Need to find a site later – just log into your account from any computer and search by keyword or tag.  Doing research on something?  Do a search overall on Delicious and find the most recent pages, the most popular pages or just what people are saving the most of right now.

Delicious – You’ll wonder how you managed with out it.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

  photo by Blue.Steel 

Over this past weekend, Facebook launched the capability to claim your name as a vanity extension (i.e. www.facebook.com/yourname).   To give you an idea of what this means – Facebook had 200,000 names registered…in the first 10 minutes (launching at midnight).  Within an hour, over 1 Million names had been claimed and over the course of the weekend, more than 3 Million names were claimed.  Facebook has over 200 Million profiles, so they have a long way to go, but it’s still a big number!

Here are a lot more Facebook details from Mashable on how big this was from Facebook’s point of view (they were concerned the system might crash).

Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter also allow you to claim your name – the questions I’ve had from a few folks are “So – What’s the big deal?” and “How do I do this?” 

I’ll try to answer both of those here.

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  photo by jurvetson 

The American way is the creative and entrepreneurial spirit that remains strong even in the face of a terrible economy, bad news and a lot of reasons for people to be depressed.

I was fortunate enough to participate in the Kansas City Startup Weekend this past weekend and I came away with a new level of respect for innovation, creativity and  the ability for inspired, committed people to get stuff done.  A big thanks to Dan Melton at nptLabs for organizing the event!

If you don’t know, Startup Weekend is a celebration of the startup process – but the coolest part is that the attendees aren’t guests, but active participants that are on their own to make things happen.

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Do you have a desktop computer at your house and a laptop for work (or multiple work or home computers)?

Do you ever have a situation where you need to transfers files from one computer to another?

How about sharing files with other people that you’re working with, or making files available for a download to a group?

Have you ever worried about losing your files because of  a hard drive failure or a corrupt file of some sort?

Then you need to check out Dropbox!  Dropbox is a new online App that acts as storage for files, easy transfer between computers, backup and even saves revisions of working files for you.

There are lots of other ways to do what Dropbox does – network sharing, flash drives, emailing files, even other internet applications can duplicate some of what Dropbox does, but I haven’t seen anything that’s as easy to use and works this cleanly and quickly.

The application is free for less than 2 Gigabytes of storage so there’s really no reason not to check it out.

In fact, if you use this link Dropbox Signup, then both of us will qualify for extra space.

Check it out and let me know what you think in the comments below!

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

Photo from apple.com 

I don’t care what anyone else says – we are living in absolutely amazing and fascinating times!  I totally believe that innovation is going to continue to drive us to fantastic heights (it may take a while and be painful in the interim, but there’s a lot to look forward to).

I know the doom and gloom police are going to come after me, but there are things happening right now…actual physical products and breakthroughs…that make me feel like I used to feel when I was a kid reading Science Fiction books and thinking "wouldn’t that be cool…!".

This started because of a discussion I had this afternoon talking about my Christmas present this year.  I got an Ipod Touch.  I’ve had an ‘old school’ Ipod for about 4 years and always really enjoyed it, but it never really struck me as a ‘wow’ type of thing.  It had great functionality, it could do what it did really well and was very intuitive, but it wasn’t really something you would show off.

The Ipod Touch does all the stuff my original Ipod did and a huge amount more.  Music, movies and there are thousands of applications that you can download via the wifi capability.  If it was just eye candy, then it wouldn’t be a big deal, but there’s a lot of cool things you can do with it, some of the even practical.  I’m sure you’ve seen the commercials, but you need to check one of these out (or an iPhone). 

But the really cool thing is that as great as the Ipod Touch is – there are lots of other amazing innovations out there (most of them with a bigger long term scope).  Check out a few recent ones that I thought were really cool!

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