23Jun

Awesome Highlighter!

Have you ever wanted to share an article with someone but give emphasis on a certain sentence or paragraph? AwesomeHighligher is a newly launched service that lets you do just that.

Along with just entering the URL you want to highlight you also have the option of installing the awesome highlighter firefox extension. If you register for an account all of your highlighted pages are stored in your account for future reference.

I made a very short demo of the system.

After talking to the sites founders I got some insight into where the idea for the website came from.

We were working in a shipping yard and there was an accident. A box of
bricks fell, nearly crushing us…but a highlighter swooped in to save us.
From that day forward, we swore to promote the idea of highlighting and
sharing text to the world.

Pretty crazy.

It’s a really simple idea that’s been executed really well. It’s definitely a service I will be using often.

23Jun

Twitabit.com - Letting you tweet when twitter is down.

Twitter has a wonderfully loyal and dedicated userbase so when twitter inevitability goes down people get rather annoyed. It’s also no secret that twitter has been having some recent scaling issues so twitter has been going down noticeably often. So often in fact that it prompted someone to make a handy “is twitter down?” website.

When twitter goes down, twitabit steps up. It lets you que up tweets that will then be submitted the second twitter comes back online.

I’m haven’t tested this out yet (twitter is currently up!) but it looks like it’s a handy little app for twitter addicts. Stick it in your bookmarks then next time twitter goes down you’re covered.

30May

Rifflet.com - A home for unfinished music.

Rifflet is an interesting project that lets musicians share unfinished parts of songs in the hope that other musicians can collaborate and combine musical ideas to form new ones.

Rifflet was produced for $0, in roughly two weeks, from idea to launch. It’s a great example of a solid idea executed very well for very little cash.

I heard from the sites founders, Jon and Kelly. They we’re more than helpful with helping me source this post.

It’s amazing how fast the Riffflet community is growing, and every day we hear from people about how much they love the site. We just had one member produce the first song built out of pieces on the site, so we’ve actually help something get created, which is really exciting.

I love little startups like this. They noticed a gap and they produced something quality for very little money to fill it. If more people were doing this the Internet would be a much better place.

There is already some good stuff going on over there. If you’re a musician check them out.

29May

Muxtape & Muxfind are an awesome combination.

If you haven’t heard about muxtape yet you’re in for a treat. It’s a wonderfully simple website that lets you create “mix tapes” and share them with your friends. Launched in April they’ve already got some great traction and currently boast over 100,000 users.

The way the site is setup means it’s a great way of discovering new music you might not have otherwise listened to. Unfortunately up until now there has been no way of searching for songs within mix tapes that people have made so while it’s a great way of discovering new music it’s quite hard to find songs that you actually want to listen to.

Cue muxfind. A project by Jan Oberst that lets you search for songs on muxtape. You enter a song name and it’ll search the content of muxtape and bring back a list of mix tapes that include the song you specified. What’s great about this is that 9 times out of 10 the other songs that are in the same mix will be similar in style to the song you searched for and generally, you’ll like them.

That’s all wonderful, but the songs are still streaming from the internet. Although there is a way of downloading the songs to your computer so you can transfer them to your iPod and listen to them whenever you like. See the video tutorial below.

28May

We have… mobile!

By Julian in Uncategorized with 1 Comment

Thanks to a wonderful service some know of as WireNode, you’re now able to access IndieStartups on your phone faster than you can… well, I’ll leave the imagination to you. Check it out on your mobile @http://is.wirenode.mobi