Monthly Archives: July 2008

by Brian Solis

Congrats to the Scrabulous team for complying with Hasbro’s request to take down the Facebook app only to redesign it and relaunch it as the bigger, better Wordscraper.

Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, the founders of Scrabulous, pulled the game off of Facebook in the US and Canada on Tuesday following legal threats from Hasbro. Two days later, the brothers debuted Wordscraper, basically Scrabulous with a redesigned game board, few new rules and points options.

Hat tip to Adam Ostrow for picking up the news and Caroline McCarthy for providing relevant and interesting legal analysis.

Connect with me on Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pownce, Plaxo, FriendFeed, or Facebook

By Alex Ho

Cate Corbitt, Morgan Sherwood, and  Kara Murphy

Gathering people together for an event on Facebook is obviously not very hard. Last night, Mister Bill, Chad Scott, and Tim Van Loan packed the house at Shine in San Francisco to celebrate the Fail whale and other failures. I am stilll not really sure what the point of the event was but I guess they were successful because they achieved an event to gather people together for an excuse to party with basically no theme or point! Interestingly, the event attracted not just techies, but gay and gay porn company employees, numerous photographers, and people on vacation from Ireland. All in all, it was a good Tuesday night out I guess.

Chad Scott and Tim Van Loan

Kate Rushton, Gene X Hwang, Megan Pearlman

Larry Chiang, Oksana, and Alan.

Thanks Larry btw for the TechCrunch August Capital afterparty at Four Seasons!

Nick Starr, Bernadette Balla, and Alex Ho


Kurt Collins with a two for one special? 

 Lara Long, Maryann Faricy, and Linda Chan

See the whole set at my Flickr.

by Michelle Lentz

I found Lyricsfly.com recently, when I had a song trapped in my head but I had no idea what song it was. Now, this is by no means a serious webware app, but it definitely falls into the fun category.

Lyricsfly offers you several different ways to search, depending on the knowledge you already have. You can search by artist, song, album, and lyrics. What I really like about Lyricsfly is that for all intensive purposes, it’s a wiki. If you come across incorrect information, you can fix it. Doesn’t that seem wiki-like to you? Of course, it calls into question the validity of the lyrics, but I guess we have to trust in the wisdom of the crowds. It’s not like lyrics are a life and death situation. You can also submit new songs and lyrics via the Submit button. This is less wiki-like, as all submissions are checked before appearing on the site.

Not by your computer? How about if you’re in your car – Lyricsfly isn’t going to do you much good. That’s okay, because there’s a new iPhone application that can help you out. It’s amazing, actually, and it’s called Shazam. Now, the name brings to mind a cheesy ’70s superhero show I once watched, but I see where they’re going.

Shazam is a free download from the iTunes App Store. Once you’ve installed Shazam, you’re good to go. There isn’t a setup or registration required. Now, when a song comes on the radio and you really want to know what it is, open up Shazam and hold it up to your speaker. Seriously. It identifies the song rather rapidly and then saves the information for you.

I just tried it, albeit on a radio at home and not in my car, and I was amazed. It identified a song in the first few beats, before any identifying lyrics or voices were heard. If the song is available on iTunes, it also provides a link to wirelessly buy it from the iTunes Store.

We now have no excuse for not knowing everything possible about our music.

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Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.

By Alex Ho

Here is a video I made using Animoto from my pictures of the Techcrunch August Capital party. Animoto is a web application that turns your images into a video slideshow. I was quite impressed with the tool. Check out my review of Animoto at www.Startupordown.com.

The images in the video slideshow can be seen here.

by Michelle Lentz

I saw Apprise mentioned on TechCrunch yesterday and I had to try it. It’s another Adobe Air application. As usual, this is free and cross-platform.

Apprise is a standard RSS reader, with a lot of bells and whistles. The stand-out feature, however, is the ability to instantly send a URL to Twitter or AIM without having to cut and paste or leave the reader. Apprise also automatically converts your URLs to TinyURLs.

My favorite feature thought was the ability to see the RSS feed or click the Site tab and view the original post. I read a lot of truncated posts, so this was really helpful. You can add folders, view by author, view by category, and search your RSS feeds. It’s sort of a desktop Google reader, with some bonuses thrown in for fun.

While I really like Apprise, I’m also attached to working almost entirely within my browser (with the exception of Twhirl). Using Apprise will require changing my work habits. However, I like it enough, I’ll try it for a bit and see if I can make a go of it.

Apprise is 100% open-source so you programmer types can modify the code.

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Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.