These Moo notecards are an example of the kinds of products being sold by companies whose users do all the creation and design of the things they buy.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)AUSTIN, Texas--Why invent the wheel by yourself if you can turn instead to a group of peers and solve it together?
That was the premise of a gathering here of executives from most of the leading companies in what might be called the "people-powered" industry.
These are companies like CafePress, Moo, Etsy, and 8020 Publishing whose business is manufacturing physical products designed by customers. CafePress, for example, makes T-shirts, coffee mugs, hats, and many other products emblazoned with logos and designs uploaded by users. Moo makes business and greeting cards adorned with users' own photos and images, and 8020 publishes photo and travel magazines full of readers' work.
But each of these outfits has until now had to solve a set of problems unique to this nascent industry--legal issues, community management processes, and even questions of nomenclature.
So as many of the people behind these companies prepared to go to Austin for this year's South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival, Moo CEO Richard Moross decided that maybe this would be a good time and place to get everyone together and discuss whether a cooperative investigation and search for solutions to common problems would be a good thing for everyone involved.
After all, there's strength in numbers, right?
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AUSTIN, Texas--The South by Southwest Interactive Festival's 11th Annual Web Awards, which honors online innovations that saw their official launches in the previous year, kind of flew under the radar. Sure, an awards ceremony was held on Sunday night, but it unfortunately had to compete with a number of parties, dinner get-togethers among old friends, and a Twitter-organized bowling outing. And when it came to press, the Web Awards were largely eclipsed by reports surrounding the Mark Zuckerberg interview earlier that day.
But the Web Awards did indeed happen. Accolades were given out in 21 categories, ranging from "games" to "film/TV" to a people's choice winner. Some of the notable sites awarded were "social browser" Flock, which won the "community" category; funky video mixer Animoto in the film/TV category; and the Wired News site in the "classic" category. Wired bloggers Michael Calore and Megan McCarthy (no relation, we think--23andMe, where are you?) were spotted posing for photos with their Web Award at a Gawker Media party later on Sunday night.
The growing popularity of casual gaming was evident with the selection of Launchball as "best of show" as well as winner of the "games" category, and Kongregate as the "people's choice" winner.
But not every Web Awards winner was a piece of technology, per se. The "blog" category, which two-time SXSWi phenomenon Twitter won last year, went this year to Passive-Aggressive Notes. Hey, maybe it'll be the next I Can Has Cheezburger--although one of the lessons I think we've all learned at SXSWi 2008 is that saying "is the next" is so 2007.
The folks who chose the winners for the Web Awards at this year's SXSW Interactive are on a roll. One of the winners named Viscosity has sucked away any semblance of productivity I had going for me today. The tool lets you create wonderfully colorful (or colorless if you so choose) pieces of abstract art without any skill, and you get great looking results.
Each creation gets a maximum of 10 colors that can be chosen either by using color presets or one at a time. To start out, all you need to do is chose your color scheme and use one of the four brushes to simply smear the colored lines around. More advanced users can go in and tweak every single part of the design by the dot, which will feel a little familiar to anyone who's worked in Adobe Illustrator, or other vector graphics applications.
When you're finished creating your abstract masterpiece, you can share it with others and download it in your monitor's native resolution to use as a desktop background. It's also automatically put up with everyone else's works which can be saved as a favorite and browsed in reverse chronological order. There's a top ten list of users' favorites, as well as a ridiculously cool option called "watch" that plays each piece like a slide show, except that the background and shapes change dynamically akin to the Master Control Program from Tron.
The application was created by developer Jeff Weir. You can check out some of his other projects here.
Create fantastic looking abstract art quickly and easily with Viscosity.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Collaborative whiteboarding applications can be handy tools for small groups looking to do some brainstorming despite geographical displacement. Meet Twiddla, a free tool that lets you mark up media and live Web sites, or simply organize ideas together on a virtual whiteboard. It also tacks on live communication with text chat and free VoIP conference calling that doesn't require additional plug-ins or software.
The application won an award for technical achievement at last night's SXSW Interactive Web Awards. While technologically fantastic, in my testing I ran up against some noticeable speed and local resource problems. At times I found the application to be nearly unusable despite its simple interface and snappy menus. At other times it was incredibly responsive.
In any case, Twiddla's packing a lot of features that might attract users of premium paid collaborative services such as ConceptShare and Octopz who are seeking a very simple way to get feedback on Web design or photography. It could also easily replace WebEx for a large number of people who use the tool simply for its text chat and shared work space.
One of Twiddla's killer applications is the built-in screenshot tool. It will snap the current iteration of the whiteboard and save it into both your saved media folder and the meeting's history archive. For photo or Web design consulting, this gives you the option of coming back to a work space and editing content asynchronously.
I'm holding off on giving Twiddla a thumbs up for the time being. It simply didn't perform as well as I think it should to make me ditch some of the alternatives. However, I'm happy to see some little guys come up and show WebEx and others like the recently Google-acquired Marratech what can be done on the user interface side to make these tools simple and attractive.
Read Web pages at the same time with others, and make live markups to a site on the fly. You can also chat live with others either via text or VoIP conference calling.
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