Raphael Mudge the founder of Dashnine Media contacted us about his latest venture, Feedbackarmy.com

Usability testing, user reviews and focus groups are recommended to ensure the success of your projects, and will enable the identification of problems and issues early on. Unfortunately usability testing can be expensive, and finding the right user sample, organising user surveys, can be time consuming and over the budget of many smaller startups (and many large companies!).

Feedback Army takes usability testing to the next level, and enables you to submit a website, survey questions, and get up to 50 responses within days - Not weeks.

Feedback Army taps into crowdsourcing through the Amazon Mechanical Turk webservice, which enables it to leverage an on-demand and scalable workforce which is paid per HIT (or task). This is a great way to get access to a huge workforce, which can execute tasks within minutes for a few $$$.

Feedback Army sent us an invitation to try out their service, and within two minutes we had submitted our survey. We checked again a day later, and we had 10 responses waiting full of interesting feedback from users - Not bad!

The service starts at $7 for 10 up to $33 for 50 responses - This is really affordable, and you will find that this is a great way of getting real world feedback at short notice - Ideal for testing anything from offers, landing pages, websites, the possibilities area endless.

One element I would suggest to be added to the service would be an option to segment responses by demographic - answers from 10 random users has value, but feedback from targeted users is ultimately more powerful.

So don’t delay, check out the service at feedbackarmy.com and use it to improve your products, services, and websites.

I stumbled onto Entrip.com a while ago, but checked it out again recently as I’m planning my winter trips to Cuba and Thailand. I must say, the site looks much nicer aesthetically, and I see the guys behind it have been busy improving the functionality.

For those of you which have not tried EnTrip yet, its an online app where you can arrange your trip, and map it out using an easy map-based interface. You can then add photos, videos, and blogs to each location to document your trip for family and friends.

What I really like about the site is that you can add notes to pictures and videos, which you might have later lost track of. Plus its great to check out other peoples trips, as you can frequently get some awesome tips and ideas you wouldn’t find in a travel guide.

Whichever experience days or trips get you excited, you are sure to find travellers like you to help you plan your next trip, or give you some ideas to get you started.

Check out EnTrip.com today.

As internet users become more and more cautious of where they spend their cash in light of the economic downturn, the bigger the impact of website and product review websites in the purchase process. Who will you trust Dell, or some smaller firm selling desktop PC’s online?

Well we’ve had a look at Trustpilot, and this decision might become a whole lot easier. This innovative UK startup have launched a reputation monitoring service based on user comments and reviews, which are then presented to users through their website and their browser app which overlays a trust rating on top of Google results.

Checking out user reviews for a website becomes as easy as reading the colour of an icon that changes from red to green will give you an indication of how trustworthy a given company is, and by placing your pointer over that icon where additional information is displayed.

The information provided includes the percentage of approval the company has, the actual number of reviews as well as a “TrustScore”

Check it out at Trustpilot.co.uk.

We all have moments in our life that we forget, but a new service called Memiary let’s you easily store those memories – every day. Sid Yadav a fellow indie-developer launched Memiary a few weeks ago, with the need to solve a very relevant problem; his bad memory. The site let’s you store five things per day, and will keep them a lifetime.

The concept of the site is very interesting, which comes along with a simplistic interface. Register a user name, make a password, and start remembering! It should be interesting to see how this site pan’s out down the road, we’ve sure pulled up a chair!

Fellow blogger and developer Jon Wheatly, recently let wild a quirky little tool called Intersquash. The neat little app let’s you convert the rss feed of any website into an iPhone/iTouch site instantly. After you enter the feed, and upload a 57×57 pixel thumbnail of your homepage you’re presented with a complete working iPhone version of your website.

Jon explains the simple four step process in the video below:

intersquash demo from jon on Vimeo.