Filed under: Fun, Blogging, Productivity

Do you type a lot of SMS or Twitter messages? Watching your character count closely? Maybe you should check out the Thsrs, a new thesaurus from Ironic Sans. Put in the grandiloquent word you were planning to use, and it will give you a shorter synonym to help you save characters while still making sense.

What inspired Thsrs? Well, David at Ironic Sans thought people needed a little help composing understandable messages “w/o needing 2 use hideous abbrev’s.” Seems like a fine idea to us! There might still be a few kinks to work out — one commenter noted that ‘awesome’ humorously returned ‘awful’ as a synonym — but Thsrs worked pretty well when we tested it. Try it yourself, and let your messages be understood!

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Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Productivity, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Sometimes the ideal web services are the simplest ones. Drivepricing lets you calculate the cost of gas for your road trip.

With gas prices so high its nice to be able to know how much to put in the piggy bank to save up for the trips you have coming up this summer.

So when you’re going to visit grandma in Albany from Philly, you can drop your gas mileage in there and get an estimated cost of what you’re going to have to beg her for so you can get home.

Even if you don’t know your gas mileage they have a link to FuelEconomy.gov for you. Drop your zipcode in there, begin address, end address, the type of gas you use (which is a great feature) and whether its a round trip or not.

After a few seconds of loading, booya there you’ve it. Price per gallon and cost for trip.

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Filed under: Utilities, Productivity

Foxmarks is a Firefox plugin that syncing bookmarks between different computers. This is really handy if you’re looking for a way to make sure you have the same set of bookmarks at home, at work and on the road. But what if you don’t want all of your bookmarks everywhere you go? They’ve got that covered, too, with a new profile feature.

With profiles, you can pick and choose which bookmarks you want, and where you want them. That way, you can keep those — ahem — private bookmarks at home. Syncing still works like normal, so your bookmarks aren’t going anywhere, and you can add them or delete them from profiles at any time. You can also keep a mobile profile, so the mobile-optimized sites you use are close at hand on my.foxmarks.com.

[via Cybernet]

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Filed under: Products and services, Marketing and advertising, Ideal Purchase (BBY)

When Best Buy, Inc. (NYSE: BBY) decided to pick up the ZAGG (OTC: ZAGG) invisibleSHIELD product, gadget fans everywhere need to have cheered. After all, the ZAGG product, which I’ve used, is an invisible shield made of military-grade film that covers all exposed surfaces of thousands of portable electronics, saving them from harm, scratches and nicks. What’s not to love? Instead of those bulky and hard to handle leather and rubber cases, just cover your beloved iPhone, BlackBerry or digital camera with some clear film and drop it all you want. Well, hopefully not.

Best Buy has a unique marketing opportunity here that it might not recognize yet. Portable electronics are where it is at. We all want to have our email, voice-mail, digital camera capability, text messaging and maybe even portable World wide web access anywhere we go, at any time. This means portable gadgets. While most of them are designed to look and feel extremely nice, the rigors of abuse in the real world don’t generally agree. That’s where ZAGG’s product comes in.

Best Buy needs to land a major web and possibly TV marketing campaign to show just how easily this product can protect their sensitive and loved personal portable electronics. Get customers into stores to buy or special order one and make sure they leave with a few peripheral buys. Accessories generally don’t get the general public excited, but this is one that should. Some retailer needs to take advantage of it.

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Filed under: Products and services, Consumer experience, Google (GOOG), Marketing and advertising, Viacom (VIA)

From the people I talk to who purchase on the web advertising it looks like Google (NASDAQ: GOOG)’s YouTube has been a bust: the video ads are pricey and the results are iffy. Such things are the opposite of what Google is ideal known for (isn’t it about brutally scientific performance?)

Well, in today’s Wall Street Journal, there’s an excellent piece on the topic. Although the video site may attract one billion views per day, the monetization has been lackluster — it looks like annual revenues will be about $200 million or so.

There are a variety of reasons for all this. First of all, major advertisers want to protect their brands from being associated with racy content. Also, Google must deal with a copyright infringement suit from Viacom (NYSE: VIA) and so it is focusing on approved content, which in turn limits the number of advertising opportunities.

In addition, the video revolution is in the early stages. Remember, when internet ads started to emerge during the 1990s, the main buyers were upstart — not traditional — companies.

Then, there are also technical and execution problems. Google’s ad system is quirky and somewhat of a hodgepodge — not surprising given Google’s quick growth and entrance into many new markets.

Still, despite all the problems, it’s critical that Google demonstrates success with YouTube. By and large, the company has had a tough time going beyond its highly successful text-based advertising platform. However, in order to continue the growth, Google needs to show its prowess in other critical areas, such as radio, Television, display ads and … video.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar On the web Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates MergerBook.com.

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Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Productivity, Web services, web 2.0

PCIncubator aims to help you find the right parts at the right prices to build your dream PC.

We’ve all built a Computer at some point. It’s fun, isn’t it? Pick our your case, the mother board, memory, GI Joe Stickers.

What?

The pain in the neck part of the process is finding the right parts that you need and not paying too much for them…or buying really crappy parts as a default because you don’t want to break the bank.

The parts are all out there, the internet is vast, but PCIncubator keeps tabs on the stuff that you need, the prices that are right, and does so very nicely if we may say.

They use NewEgg which is the geek chic place to shop for parts. They also keep a price history of all items so you can wait for prices to go back down if they go up. It’s kind of like shopping for airline tickets. It also gives you that Dell and Apple builder feel

Once you’ve picked your perfect Personal computer parts, you can toss them all into a NewEgg cart and away you go!

Too bad that you can’t get Windows XP anymore

Please let us know in the comments if you’ve found this site helpful.

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