Cool Products & Hot Companies

Check Out Jaxtr

There's a very interesting new service in beta from a company called Jaxtr. It allows you to link your phone to pages in your social networks, your email signature, your blog etc. so that anyone worldwide can call you with just a click of the mouse. Your phone number is kept private, and you don't need to download or install any client software.

This gives you the ability to have a "virtual" phone number that you can link to your existing phone numbers or future phone numbers when they change. Should be quite interesting if they can pull it off and provide an excellent user experience.

Evernote

Here's a very cool new application for taking and organizing notes. Good search features, fast launch and pretty easy to figure out how to use it. And best of all the basic version is FREE.

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2

A few months ago I started having problems with IE 6. It would crash, was slow and gave me major problems. After reading Microsoft's recommendation that I should completely reinstall Windows XP since there is no easy uninstall and resinstall of IE by itself I started using Firefox. 

Firefox is a pretty cool browser - RSS feeds, tabbed browsing (which I don't think is that useful) and a few other features (along with the fact that it wasn't crashing on me) made it my browser of choice. There were a few problems: websites didn't always render correctly, I couldn't view MSNBC video content (Microsoft requires IE to view their content), but for the most part it worked well.

Don't get me wrong - I'm no fan of Microsoft and I understand why people support Firefox. That said, I use the best solution I can find, and I'm glad that the Firefox guys are forcing Microsoft to get their act together.

This week I got brave and decided to install Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 to see if it would solve my IE crashing problems. I'm happy to say that it was an easy install and did solve the crashing. And along with that it turns out I really like what it has to offer.

What I've found so far:

• Performance seems very snappy
• HTML rendering has worked correctly on all the pages I have checked
• The new mechanism for managing RSS feeds and favorites is very cool - simple and fast to use
• The interface is streamlined and VERY simple (this is NOT what I expected from Microsoft) :-)
• Integrated search with your choice of search engines is nice - I can now get rid of the Google toolbar. Microsoft even kept Google as my default for me.
• Correct printing of Internet pages is quite nice
• I like being able to zoom in and out on pages
• Built-in support for anti-phishing and managing IE add-ons is useful
• The research toolbar is very useful - search Encarta, dictionaries, company profiles, etc (though you will never find the toolbar because it isn't obvious at all)

The two things I don't like:

• It is harder to immediately see the status of pages being loaded
• The refresh page button is in the upper right corner - if it were in the upper left corner by the forward and back button it would be more intuitive

Competition is a GOOD thing, I can't wait to see what the Firefox guys do to one-up Microsoft!

Google's Sketchup

I've never been much of an artist, let alone had the ability to draw anything in 3D. That is, until I downloaded Google's new free Sketchup tool.

Sketchup is designed to let mere mortals create 3D designs. It has a very interesting interface (an Instructor window teaches you each tool as you go) that I found was easy to learn on the fly (though there are online tutorials as well).

Sketchup automatically connects the ends of lines and midpoints when you are drawing (something I wish I could do in PowerPoint.) Adding 3D effects is easy, and you can rotate your picture around to change the perspective, add textures and patterns, break apart walls and do all kinds of things with it.

One of the most interesting aspects of Sketchup is the interaction with the web. You can save your drawings online for others to see and use, and you can pull down drawings to use as a starting point. Imagine having a huge free  library of 3D images that you can open and transform into anything you want.

And of course, the price is right: FREE

Wetpaint joins the WIKI wars

Wetpaint announced their new WIKI product this week. I've been a fan of JotSpot and Socialtext since they first came out. Wetpaints appears to have two differentiators: ease of content creation for users and (according to their home page) it is free. Should be interesting to see how this market sorts itself out.

Peer to Peer Meets the Cellphone

Have a lot of pictures on your phone? What if you could allow all of your friends to access them on their phones, and vice versa in a simple and intuitive way?

Radar, from Tiny Pictures, Inc.. does just that. Think of it as peer to peer photo sharing between cell phones. Create a group for your family, take pictures of your kids, and they automatically appear on the grandparents phones for them to view. No need to send them via email, post them to a blog (or make them public by doing so), etc.