1. Weallhatequickbooks.com
A company by the name of Less Accounting set out to create a “Quickbooks beater.” Then they created a interactive billboard of sorts by taking a one page landing page titled and URL’d “We All Hate Quickbooks” and then piped every mention of Quickbooks (usually negative) from Twitter into the page. Not the nicest thing to look at, but I think it works really hard as a pithy and valuable landing page full of tips, collective consciousness and commentary.

2. Coroflot Job Feed
RSS on steroids. That’s pretty much how I’d sum this up. It is only been up a week and is already nearing 100 followers.

]]>JetSuite: aye, believe I can fly?http://www.madewithcomputers.com/home/2008/4/28/jetsuite-aye-believe-i-can-fly.htmlMeat2008-04-28T10:31:54Zinnovation product design

What if you were friggin’ loaded? Well then, the creators of JetBlue (my favorite way to travel) might have yet another refreshing air travel idea for you. It is an interesting alternative to small chartered flying. JetSuite is assembling a fleet of 100 Embraer Phenom 100 jets, with the twist being that the company is lobbying private buyers to buy the jets. Did you catch that? You own the jets. Then, when you don’t need your aircraft, JetSuite charters it to someone who does. The new idea? Unlike the private time-share competition, no matter how much (or how little) your plane is flown, you’re guaranteed a monthly revenue stream.

How? JetSuite will pay the owners $25,000 per month in exchange for allowing JetSuite to use and maintain the jets during their down times. (You know, when you’re not frolicking from coastal golf course to strip club on the weekends. Sure, you’ll have to drop $3,000,000 but that $25,000/month could pay for your fuel costs to Cabo.*

Full disclosure: I have spent much of my career creating marketing programs, interactive ideas, brand launches and web redesigns for brands like JetSuite in the Travel and Hospitality industry. It is by far my biggest corporate passion. Couldn’t be happier to see a new idea like this in the wild.

*No it won’t ]]>learn to type 42 nerds per minutehttp://www.madewithcomputers.com/home/2008/4/21/learn-to-type-42-nerds-per-minute.htmlMeat2008-04-21T12:14:58Zinnovation
Currently the Orkut directory includes only a limited number of applications but one thing that Orkut has is the ability to congregate people into interactive sessions (like a physical chatroom of sorts - think network gaming).

One such app that I stumbled upon today is called TypeRacer - a typing game that lets you race your Orkut friends, in real-time, using your hard-earned keyboard skills and compare your typing speed with other Orkut friends in real-time. The faster you type, the sooner your car will hit the finish line. I’ll be honest - at first I thought this was a terrible idea. Until I used it. It’s fun and kinda addictive! What’s more, it kinda teaches you to type a helluva lot better than that Mavis Beacon crap back in the day. My own speed went up in the 5 minutes I was messing with it.

You start with a little car on the left side of the screen, and you type the given text to make your car move all the way to the right as quickly as possible. Your score will be saved, and your Orkut profile will show how you rank among all of your friends. You know, so they can know how fast you type I guess.

It seems you can add a maximum of 25 apps to your profile. Unlike Facebook, where you can clutter your own profile page beyond recognition with “It’s Brittany Bitch!” iconography. :)

Oh yeah, and if you’re like the rest of North America and not on Orkut, just head to typeracer.com to play for yourself.

]]>best ad everhttp://www.madewithcomputers.com/home/2008/4/8/best-ad-ever.htmlMeat2008-04-08T16:00:00ZWTFThis ad reminds me of ad I once thought of for the National Librarians Association. No copy. Just a button labeled “Learn More” :) ]]>radiohead of the classhttp://www.madewithcomputers.com/home/2008/4/6/radiohead-of-the-class.htmlMeat2008-04-06T01:34:42Zinnovation media and entertainment

I Love this radical move: Radiohead’s new single “Nude” can be remixed in GarageBand. (Full disclosure: I still haven’t bought the album.) I know…I know.

The separate sections (bass, voice, guitar, strings/fx and drums) are available for purchase iTunes in the same way that you purchase any other song.

Remix galore.

Finished tracks can then be uploaded to the Radiohead site where Radiohead faithful can vote for their favs.

Lather, rise, repeat. Cool!

]]>high fidelity part deuxhttp://www.madewithcomputers.com/home/2008/3/27/high-fidelity-part-deux.htmlMeat2008-03-27T13:39:45Zinnovation media and entertainment

I couldn’t be more of a High Fidelity-esque music geek. I love to make top-five lists and my music library seems more like a generational patchwork quilt than 31 year old’s typical music collection. Music surrounds my life..from friends bands to going to shows to playing guitar hero. It fits my moods, it makes my moods and in many ways defines the emo dork I am. I mean, who among us hasn’t turned to music when we’ve felt sad(or happy), or wished that Bruce Springsteen or Thom Yorke would talk to us directly like they speak to us through their music?

Growing up with music in my life was a huge deal for me and the mix-tape (and most recently “play-lists” always captured all of that and more. Recently I discovered Muxtape. I love anything that’s dead simple and useful. And you can’t get anymore simple than Muxtape. The online service does one thing — let you create and share mixtape-like MP3 playlists with friends. The signup is quick and the value is deep. Music geeks like me should definitely give it a spin.

One of my favorite actors is John Cusack. He sums Mix-tapes up wonderfully for me.

“To me, making a tape is like writing a letter. There’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with “Got to Get You Off My Mind,” but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can’t have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can’t have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you’ve done the whole thing in pairs and…oh, there are loads of rules.”

Mix-taping is an evolved form of messenging. So. What are your mix-tapes? Do you have rules? Does any of this make sense? Go whip something up at Muxtape. My username is Meat99. Rok.

]]>finally the day has comehttp://www.madewithcomputers.com/home/2008/3/24/finally-the-day-has-come.htmlMeat2008-03-24T10:27:52Zmedia and entertainmentWell, the TV Networks, Entertainment networks, Cable Networks and Silly, closed-minded online networks agree. It’s happening. All around you.

Kick Ass.Viacom is STARTING to catch on to Rich Thinking. They’re going open.  They’re engaging their audiences like active participants instead boobing us like mindless sheep.  They’re giving us what we’ve been waiting for. Viacom and SouthParkStudios delivered on the promise they gave last year, and gave us all South Park episodes ever created for free. You can find them all at Southparkstudios.com.

Finally, the day has come…sorta.  :)

You can’t embed the entire episodes (only the 3000 available clips), but it’s a step in the right direction. 

The site is up ready to go for auto-show season. So guys, head over and give this baby it’s rightful name :)

“EL CAMINO.”

See more photos of the car here. ]]>the harder you look, the better the traxhttp://www.madewithcomputers.com/home/2008/3/10/the-harder-you-look-the-better-the-trax.htmlMeat2008-03-10T12:00:00Zmedia and entertainmentThis article talks about the video-game-as-forum-for-debut as though it is the only new move/trend in music. Funny, it seems to me this phenomenon is almost mainstream at this point. Music today has boundaries that stretch far beyond what gets on the radio or in the music store (wherever that is). We all know this. Or do we?

If you want really obscure stuff, it’s out there but you’ll probably have to look further than even video games. If you prefer ambient/electronic music with few or no words, a lot of artists have cropped up in this genre thanks to the bit-torrents, filepilez and gnutellas of the world. Electronic music took advantage of (arguably created!) this distribution mechanism as the genre’s relatively niche´ sound has proven to be difficult to effectively promote outside of its small fan base.

Just because things like iTunes exist, doesn’t mean you’re still getting access to obscure, different or incredibly “indie” music. Like anything else, for the real gems, you’ve gotta dig deeper.

If you’re up for some digging, here’s some I’ve discovered and liked: Mylo, Kavinsky, Digitalism, 65daysofstatic, Four Tet, Explosions in the Sky, Boards of Canada, oh and how could I forget: Aphex Twin.

who’s in?

]]>commuters unite!http://www.madewithcomputers.com/home/2008/2/27/commuters-unite.htmlMeat2008-02-27T13:47:29Zinnovation techy techyHmm. Here’s another Twitter app. IMHO, (sorry Foamee, which i kinda dig) this is a much better use of what Twitter has to offer. And frankly (did I just say “frankly?”) it really speaks to me seeing as I spend somewhere between 8 and 20 hours week held hostage by some sort of train or car.

Hokay soh, you’ve heard of navigation systems now with updated traffic info, yeah? Cool.

but what if they crowd-sourced that data?

For those of you in NYC - heres the feed for our area. Nothing much up there yet - but as it goes with crowd-sourced data the machine relys on user input. Let’s see how this one goes…

]]>