URL shorteners

One of the innovations on the Internet that people aren’t sure of whether it is helpful or just awful is URL shorteners. These short URLs look awful no doubt but use them the right way and you can get a lot of meaningful data on your URL usage once you share these shortened URLs and maybe even make some money.

Things to do locally

You want to search for things to do locally in your area this weekend. Search Google and the search results, both relevant and irrelevant, are too many –you might spend the weekend going through the results!

Services like Bizzy and Skyara want to help you with this need.

Bizzy.com is like a local search engine –in their words a “recommendation engine” which is personalized based on your location zip code. Over time as you and others in your area use Bizzy and recommend local sites, Bizzy gets better at predicting what you are searching for and your likes.

How to Flattr someone!

Micropayments and micropayment solutions are one answer to the question of how to charge for online content. Online payment services like Paypal have been in use for paying online, but these are not suitable for smaller amounts –“micropayments” because the fixed transaction costs are too high and the process is too cumbersome.

This is where micropayment solutions like Flattr come in.

Remember the “Like” buttons at the end of many online articles? The Flattr concept is similar to that except that you can actually send money to the article writer.

Internet radio stations

Streaming music sites are very popular and internet radio stations have found a way to bring the charm of radio stations with the popularity of streaming music to the Internet.

The biggest Internet radio station is Pandora radio. An interesting competitor is Jango.


Pandora is built upon the "Music Genome Project”  which is an effort to "capture the essence of music at the fundamental level" using almost 400 attributes to describe songs and a complex mathematical algorithm to organize them .