WorkoutBox is a vibrant fitness community featuring professional personal trainers, and a whole system of workouts and training aids. Although there are similar sites online such as Traineo, Gyminee, and Sparkpeople I got to meet Simon Turner – one of the founders of Workout Box at a recent entrepreneur meetup.

After quitting his full time job a year and a half ago, Simon has built WorkoutBox along with some professional personal trainers to offer a different approach to the online fitness space.

WorkoutBox features a large range of workouts, which have been designed by expert personal trainers and provide registered users with a step by step plan to achieve their fitness goals efficiently.

There is also a thriving community of fitness enthusiasts and the in house personal trainers are there to provide help and support to members.

You can also follow your progress with the training logs and discuss with the personal trainers to overcome any stumbling blocks.

If you are into your gym / fitness I recommend you check them out at www.workoutbox.com

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.

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!

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

intersquash demo from jon on Vimeo.

For a more detailed description of the websites features you can take a look at the tour page.

I caught up with Andrew, one of the founders and he told me a bit more about the idea and how he came up with it.

We were sitting around one day trying to work out who owed who money after about three months of bills and expenses had been accumulated. We had each paid for loads of shared stuff, and owed money for many different bills. In the middle of trying to work it all out for the tenth time we thought, why don’t we just make an app that does it all for you?

I also asked him about his marketing strategy and his reply was so great I’m going to post it here as I’m sure it will benefit a lot of people.

I think this is a very interesting question because you are in a tough position to start with because you don’t have the budget to engineer a mass media promotion, nor do you have the public profile to engineer some free promotion off the back of who you are (see twitter).

The trick is to use your wit and skill to create a 3rd approach that makes use of the emerging social media landscape of bloggers, the social grap(h)evine and making contact with a few niche publications who have ownership of the social/business area that your app will attempt to make its home.

I did find the following blog posts to contain some pretty good practical advice, that is relevant to anyone launching a web app or business:

* http://blog.adaptiveblue.com/?p=689

* http://www.ryanblock.com/2007/10/pr-people-youre-not-blocked-but-do-your-homework/

* http://marshallk.com/thoughts-on-product-launch-promotion

* http://mashable.com/2008/04/18/bad-pr-pitches/

Thanks for the great information Andrew! This application definitely solves a problem that I’m sure most of the readers of this blog have experienced. Go and give it some love.

What I find most impressive is how much Calum has achieved in such a short space of time. Starting pplparty when he was just 15 he now heads up a 10 man team in his London office.

At 17 I went to work for Doug Richard (one of BBC2’s Dragons from Dragons Den) and his team for mobile texting company Trutap. I was working alongside world-class people with backgrounds ranging in companies such as Yahoo, Ebay and T-mobile.

When I first started the business I was working from my bedroom at my parents house whilst doing my GCSEs, then I had our whole team working from my front room until just a few months ago when we moved into office space.

In the time since the pplparty launch in 2005 the site has gained a fair bit of traction currently boasting over 400,000 members. Whilst it still has a fair way to go to make a dent in some of the big boys it seems to have a thriving community and should continue to grow with the recent sexy rebrand.

It’s a simple concept that isn’t completely ground breaking but I really like the way they’ve stripped down all the unnecessary features and kept everything simple and to the point. I managed to setup an account and start chatting in under a minute.

Here’s me testing the site with Mike from WPcandy.

I dropped the sites owner an email and he was more than happy to give me a bit more information on where the idea for the site came from.

There is one very important thing to keep in mind. The future of human development, as electronics, computers and machines take more and more jobs that humans did in the past, is – simplicity of use and not complexity! More simple the devices, software and hardware will be, while focusing on core functionality, more things you will be able to do. When I was studying engineering I remember when we went to visit an underground coal mine, and conditions for both workers and engineers were awful. So, I thought to myself, why are all these people here? Through simple global collaboration of individual technicians and engineers where they can quickly exchange 3D data and talk live a consortium could be set up and massive robotic mining systems could be manufactured to replace at least half of those people under ground, while they could be sent to surface to control those robots through network channels. Each worker could thus dig more ore and do less work.

I really like this site and service. I’ll be using it for sure.

Qbox has found a way to utilize this massive collection of music.

Our player essentially works like a remote control that lets you take control of all the social network music available for streaming.

There is also a desktop application that I unfortunately couldn’t test (I’m on a mac and currently it’s windows only) but this video outlines some of the features of the software.