Thats Interesting

The review team at odinjobs.com showcases up and coming companies and their products. Who knows one of them may be the next Google.

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Want A Website? Get A SiteKreator!

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Want a web site, but don’t know any designers? Afraid of the cost? Wondering who’ll host it? Site-kreator.com is all set to change that. With an internet connection and web browser, get ready to make your presence felt online.

As Marketwatch sums it up:

"Small businesses need to compete online, but often they don't have the resources or capital to build attractive and effective sites," says Chris Shipley, executive producer of DEMOfall. "SiteKreator helps businesses instantly design, manage, and host elegant, fully-branded, and interactive Web sites - quickly and painlessly. Best of all, businesses don't have to know the first thing about Web design. They still get the 'look and feel' of a professional website.�

It’s not skin deep either. Sitekreator.com is a complete web solution. The user selects the template, adds features like blog, photo gallery, web forms, and even a mailing list. As the pages are being created, they are automatically search engine optimized, with search engine friendly URLs. Businesses can set search keywords, descriptions and integrate Google sitemaps. Fully-functional sites can be ready in…hold your breath…about 30 minutes!

The back end of the business is supported by a high performance hosting service and once online, the site even lets customers track traffic. The pricing is cool too. Apart from the 14 day trial version, there are packages to suit all pockets, with varying storage options.

Competitors vary from Wiki offerings to similar sites such as Irun.com, Moonfruit.com, MS office live and Google page creator.

Sitekreator.com is privately funded and based in Santa Clara, California. A brainchild of Netclime, its CEO is Ivaylo Lenkov.

Sitekreator Speaks

Who are your ideal customers?

SMBs/entrepreneurs who want to have full control over their web sites, without learning complex technologies.

Specifically, how much has web design or the use of HTML changed in the last ten years?

Web design started a little bit more than ten years ago, so for the last 10 years it changed from fetus to grown-up individual (a lot).

How do you use your blog to communicate with the world?
We post all product announcements and we get feedback from our users.

Is your product available on Firefox?
Yes.

What type of site or businesses would be great partners for Site Kreator?
Designers, ISPs, Hosting providers

What are your expansion plans as far as number of employees?
It depends very much on achieving our financial goals. :)

Far Sighted? Our Take On Site Kreator.

Easy to use, need based, affordable, Site Kreator scores on all these points. The only hitch, is that competition is everywhere, not just from similar sites, but from e-lancers, design shops…the list is long. The task is to keep the features list updated, the back-end strong, and as always, make sure there’s someone to reassure the customers. Especially the technophobes!

Posted by Sally Richardsson       Posted at 05:51AM Jul 24, 2007 by Sally Richardsson   


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Kill That Bill At InvoicePlace

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An Australia based website, InvoicePlace.com is a sure boon for contractors, freelancers, home-based, and small businesses. It does the most boring part of work – sending off and following up on the bills. Users can create and print professional invoices, quotes and receipts in PDF or MS Word formats. The site helps keep track of current and expired quotes, due and overdue payments, and record partial payments.

As killerstartups observes

“If you are a freelancer or consultant, you might like InvoicePlace, a site that organizes and keeps track of your invoices and even lets you make and receive payments through the site. For the busy business person, it’s not going to burn a whole in your pocket and it’s probably going to make payments easier.�

A free trial lets you sign up and manage up to three customers. Once you’re convinced, a monthly subscription of $14 (AUD) is all it takes. InvoicePlace works in over 19 countries including Australia, United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Small hitch, the currency still speaks Australian, so users need to keep converting. The bright side, an RSS feed keeps you updated on your account.

The site has a really neat demo, which explains it all.

An older web 2.0 company, InvoicePlace was created by Scott Carpenter in 2003, and is a product of Growthbase Pty Ltd, an Australian Technology consulting company based in Brisbane. It is funded privately.

Competition is mainly from Blinksale.com, though our team found InvoicePlace far easier to use.

Voice Over From Invoice Place

1. What programming is Invoice Place built on?

The site has been developed using Java and PHP.

2. Who are your ideal prospects & customers?

People who have a small business, or work as consultants, contractors and freelancers will mostly benefit from Invoiceplace.

3. When Invoice Place expands, what type of tech skills will you look for in potential employees?

Solid programming skills and experience are a must, but also important are strong problem solving skills. The ability to think independently but know when to ask for help is a great benefit.

4. How do you use your blog to market Invoice Place & communicate to your customers?

The blog provides a communication tool to inform customers of new updates and features.

5. Your demo is pretty cool and clearly shows how easy your product is to use. What have others said about it?

I have received similar feedback - the demo is extremely popular because it provides the fastest way for people to see what Invoiceplace does and how easy it is to use. People visiting the site ultimately have two important initial questions - what does this product do, and will it help me? A demo shows them very quickly just what Invoiceplace does and how fast and easy it is use.

6. Does your product interact with your customers' accounting software or bank account?

Not currently, but as I receive more feedback and feature requests from the people using Invoiceplace from all over the world this is a feature under consideration.

7. How can bookkeepers & accountants make use of Invoice Place?

Bookkeepers and accountants can use Invoiceplace as a means to provide their customers with a professional and easy use quoting and invoicing service that is available from any computer connected to the internet.

InvoicePlace – Top Billing From Us!

Looks like there’s no better time to run a small business. From software (NearTime, Zoho) to billing, there is no dearth of companies waiting to make life easier. InvoicePlace scores extra because it really takes on one of the most thankless jobs around. The challenge, as always, is keep the interface as friendly as possible and make sure that there’s enough support. Personally, I am registering as soon as I can and getting those *%### bills out of my life!

Posted by Sally Richardsson       Posted at 04:24AM Jul 20, 2007 by Sally Richardsson    Comments[1]


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If You Heard It On TV, It’s Heardontv Too!

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One of the scenes I will never forget is from a German comedy show, where a whole street stops to try and figure out a tune. But now with Heardontv.com, those days are well in the past. Register on the site, track your TV show, song and artist, and link to that episode and season. For the die-hard music fan, the site also has links to search on iTunes, Rhapsody, or Amazon. To spread the word, you can ‘digg’ it or submit a song or leave comments. You can buy the tune and if it’s free, the good folks actually provide a link from where you can download it.

You can follow your specific shows through the feed formula, better still, you can pick the brains of fellow members, by uploading sound clips and asking for help in identifying them. It’s all about the music. The submission side is equally interesting. Contributors can go to TV episodes to submit songs. The more songs you submit, you and your show race to the top of the charts.

Techmambo’s short and sweet summary:

heardontv.com gets its content from its users, users submit songs heard in their favorite tv shows, submissions get moderated and appear on the site.

And killerstartups tells us why it could be a killer:

People are constantly looking for the music they heard on TV, and this makes it a lot easier to find out that information and get direct links as to where you can download it to enjoy it again. A lot of people are helping to contribute songs to the site so that the list of what’s being played on TV is actually accurate and informative.

What We Heard From Them – A Chat

What is the inspiration behind Heard On TV?

It started after watching one episode of “Lost� back in October. Somewhere during the first 5 minutes, a song hit my ears. I went online after the show, looked at the Lost forum and found the song title and artist, Downtown by Petula Clark.

I was not the only one looking for that tune this day, and not only for Lost, looking at other tv show forums, you find questions like "what was that song?", "I know this song", and very often you find the answers, some people are very good when it comes to recognizing a particular song they heard on tv :)

heardontv.com was born some days after; a place where tv show fans can share their finding on the songs they hear in their favorite shows, and a place for the casual viewer to browse the large amount of music tunes used by the networks in their shows.

What type of programming is Heard On TV built on?

Heardontv is built on Ruby On Rails. RoR made it possible to have a working site very quickly, it took us no more than 3 weeks to have the site ready to roll. I'd like to thank the folks at hostingrails.com for the (very) reliable and affordable hosting.

Grey’s Anatomy seems to be very popular source of songs. What are some other shows that generate traffic to your site?

Grey's Anatomy is a very prolific source for songs. Nip/Tuck, the CSI series (and Alias at its time), Veronica Mars are good providers. Ugly Betty has been a winner too this year.

Where do you see web 2.0 sites going in the next two to three years?

Web 2.0 is all about user generated content, about aggregation, mashups and so. We already see the future happening, web 2.0 startups are being acquired every week, with a huge deal every other month, the big players - google, yahoo, microsoft - are buying the user generated content, for the greater good, no I don't think so, to place more advertisement instead. Web 2.0 mobile should be one of the next big thing, unlimited data plans are coming from the mobile operators, phones are getting (really) smarter and more accessible. Web 2.0 has to move out of the PC.

One thing I'd like to see in all these web 2.0 sites is single-sign-on. Lot of web 2.0 websites emerge every day, some are very cool but they always require you to register before you can use them. Come on, this has to stop! I have a Yahoo account, a Google account, an AIM account, an OpenID, and they all offer some authentication API, just integrate with them so I can log in without the need to go through your registration page - I don't give you my real name anyway...

How do you use your blog to market Heard On TV?

On the blog we feature one artist whose songs have been featured in a tv episode recently (or will be soon). We look for videos on YouTube, for iTunes links and we put everything together in "the focus". This week we introduced guest blogging, PJ Olsson is the first artist we have invited on our blog, others will follow. The blog also holds development tips about the site.

I am a big TV fan in general. How important are the users to your site?

There are users :) I won't disclose any numbers but there are regular and casual users. One feature which we wanted to have was the anonymous contribution feature. If you just happen to hit the website after a google search and just want to leave a comment to ask a question or to submit a song, well you don't to register. This makes it a bit harder to count the active users but it gives a lot of freedom to contributors. No need to register to participate. However registering grants access to additional features like rating, bookmarking, uploading song clips, using a widget on your blog, submitting related links. We have plans to give back to the contributors in the upcoming weeks.

Do you find that activity and traffic are seasonal along with the tv shows (ie sweeps & season finales)?

Traffic is almost constant during the year. It is more important between October-November to May than during the rest of the year, mainly because of the Summer break but there are still some Summer tv shows around or repeats to maintain a good load on the site :) What is very exciting is when people are battling to find the title of a song and no one is figuring it out until there is one who finds it right. Sometimes it gets crazy - it happens several times this year, among others with Unkle Bob in Grey's Anatomy (http://heardontv.com/tvshow/Grey%27s+Anatomy/Season+3/Some+Kind+of+Miracle) and with Jonathan Czerwik in Bones (http://heardontv.com/tvshow/Bones/Season+2/The+Man+in+the+Mansion).

What are users looking for or sharing more of songs within a TV episode or theme songs?

Songs within a TV episode definitely. The theme song for a tv show gets filled very quickly when a tv show is added to the site. Then it's all about the episodes. People also comment on the site, either to ask about a song or also to share their findings on when a song can be (legally) downloaded or heard.

Let’s Hear It For Heardontv!

Despite music sites being a dime a dozen, Heardontv scores simply by identifying a need and addressing it very, very well. The possibilities of marketing to both the music and the tv industry are huge. It’s the perfect platform to create that life giving ‘buzz’ to both TV shows and upcoming artists. We are quite sure we’ll be hearing a lot more from this site.

Posted by Sally Richardsson       Posted at 01:35AM Jul 10, 2007 by Sally Richardsson   


Create a Profile or Upload Your Resume and Get Your Perfect Job.

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