One of our earliest team members, who left to start his own company, sent us an email recently. I’ll paraphrase here, but the gist of it was that despite his being one of the first people to join the team at Ampush, nothing could have prepared him for starting his own company from the ground up. I’m not…
You’re busy. We get it. The fast pace and crazy work hours of startup life make it impossible to keep up with all the latest startup news, trends, and tips – and worrying that you’ve missed out is no way to begin the weekend. That’s why we’ve rounded up this week’s hottest startup stories from KillerStartups…
What startup is going to be the next big hit? Everyone wants to know the answer to this question – investors, potential co-founders, bloggers, job seekers and more. Hundreds of startups enter private beta each month. This is far too many to keep up with for anyone. Each week I choose a startup that’s new…
Most people associate startups with youth, entrepreneurial gumption, and the potential for big profits. On top of these fun word collocations, startups also have developed a bit of a rep for solving so-called “first-world problems” with apps that do things like locate the closest burrito joint or allow you…
You’ve launched your own startup and you’re ready to take the business world by storm – or so you think. Rein in your excitement a bit and take a hard look at the odds you’re up against after starting your own company. You may be surprised to learn that a large number of new businesses fail before they even…
A service that’s mainly aimed at those who use Twitter professionally, BioIsChanged lets you know when any of your contacts has changed his bio or his profile picture. You’ll know as much by way of an email that will be send to you the minute the person has changed anything. The idea is to let those who use Twitter to market products and promote services always know where these contacts they’re developing a relationship with can be found.
Of course, you’ll also know when they’ve got a new job, or when they’ve moved into a new city. All the kind of information that a person submits to his Twitter profile can be monitored using this service.
Alternatively, instead of receiving an instant notification you can receive an email at the frequency you see fit. You can get either a daily or a weekly summary listing all the people who have changed their bios and/or pictures.
It goes without saying that BioIsChanged is a free service, and that in order to use it you have to sign in with your Twitter identity.
Read more on BioIsChanged.com – Know When Twitter Bios Change…
The ones who claim that IOUs are great for settling debts among friends are the ones that have never used them. The truth is that IOUs can more often damage a friendship than help preserve it. They make friends start giving each other the slip, they make people find the most ridicule of excuses not to see each other. And that ends up breeding contempt. I know many a friendship that’s got ruined over IOUs. So, alternatives for splitting costs with your friends are greatly welcome. And all the more so when they are as well-executed as Splitable.
As its name suggests, this web tool lets you split the cost of items with your friends. A new laptop computer, a car, a trip abroad, a fanciful dinner… you can split the cost of mostly anything. All you must do is to name what you’d like to split, upload a pic and provide its price for a team to be created. The members of the team are invited from your email contacts, and messages and confirmations are also sent using email. It’s only when everybody has submitted his payment confirmation (and the total price has been reached) that the team will be charged. The price will be paid, the money will be sent directly to the merchant, and you’ll all get your item.
And in addition to being a web service that people like you and I can use to share our expenses, Splitable has an API that merchants can use to give customers a better chance to pay for items.
At the end of the day, in recession times like these the only way in which people can make certain purchases is by sharing the cost with others. And Splitable turns that into the easiest thing in the world.
No idea is a great idea until you have shared it with the world, and learned what others have got to say about it. And that’s what this new platform is here to let you do. On YourChangeManifesto.com, you can present ideas to lots of people at once, and learn what they think about them. If they think you’re a genius, you’ll know it. If they think your schemes are green and foolish, you’ll know it. You’ll get to know everything using this service, and you’ll do it before your ideas have taken root for good.
And that’s where the true value of this service lies. It’s incredibly hard to turn back when ideas have become consolidated. YourChangeManifesto.com will let you keep things from ever going that far.
Registration to Your Change Manifesto costs nothing, and you get your own personalized URL for everything you want to post. And the service can also be used without having to pay anything. You are able to share as many ideas with the world as you could ever feel like sharing, and get their feedback right before you start taking things for granted.
A great way to stay on top of these sites you are going up against, Daily Screenshot will let you have a good idea of how they are evolving in visual terms. As its name implies, what this service can do is to take daily screenshots of any site, and then having them delivered them to you. The idea is to let you track which changes your competitors are implementing day by day, and take all the necessary steps in order not to lose ground (or even face)
And something like this can also be used to track your very own site. By storing daily screenshots like this over a long period of time, you’ll have an increased awareness of how your website has been changing over time. The sequential order in which screenshots are displayed will let you contextualize all the changes you have ever made so much better.
Four different plans are provided, with the cheapest (Bronze) costing $4.99, and the most expensive (Platinum) being billed $39.99. You can tell one plan from the other based on how many pages each one lets you have tracked in a month, the quality of the screenshots that are submitted, and how long these are actually stored on the company’s servers.
Read more on DailyScreenshot.com – Daily Screenshots Of Sites…
Updater is nothing more and nothing less than an online service for handling offline mail. Users of this platform can deal with two big concerns: the change of physical mail addresses, and the filtering of junk mail. The former is made easy by filing an online USPS change of address form that can simultaneously update professional and personal contacts, and the latter is accomplished by giving users complete control over who is accessing their paper mail addresses. That is, by using a privacy address feature that creates a do-not-mail list people can bar marketers from contacting them with their “unrepeatable” offers.
This specific service comes at a cost – if you want to use Updater to block marketers from getting your address, you will have to pay $14.99. That fee will let you opt out of all the major marketing lists currently available, and also to implement a spam filter for your physical mail address for three full years.
Of course, a service like this one is really good for the environment. That’s an obvious consequence of reducing the amount of actual mail that is sent. And by minimizing paper communications, Updater can also reduce the running expenses of just any company. It’s a win-win scenario.
I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if this is a service that LinkedIn itself begins providing in the near future. JobChangeNotifier.com does exactly what its name suggests: it lets you know when any person who is part of your professional network has got a new job. This information is delivered in the shape of a timely email, letting you know exactly where and when the person has been hired.
This is a useful service bar none. It simplifies knowing when people who could help you in your professional career have been promoted, and (consequently) are in a position where they will be able to pull some rank and aid you in your search for a better job. It can also let those who are keen on working at any specific company but who refrain from sending their resumes in for consideration because an antagonist works there. Well, a service like JobChangeNotifier is going to let you know that the time to approach that company has come.
And JobChangeNotifier.com lets you do all that for free. As long as you have a LinkedIn profile (and some contacts to go with it, of course) you will be able to use it as intended.
Read more on JobChangeNotifier.com – Learn When People Change Jobs…
Do you think that anything is possible if enough people ask for it? You know, I am inclined to think like that myself. You can say that is too idealistic, or even a bit naive. But a site like this one can certainly be used to make a case. Just check it out. It is named Ask For It, and the idea is to let people who are aiming to make any goal come true get enough supporters so as to make a difference.
Commendable goals abound here – from people who want to start healthy organic drive-thru chains to individuals that want F words to be banned from PG-13 movies, this is a platform with the potential to lead to truly worthwhile changes in society.
And when a cause gets enough supporters, then the company will act as an advocate that will represent the ones championing it in front of those who have the power to make things happen. The more supporters that a cause picks (and the faster they are amassed), then the more then company is getting involved in making them come true.
With its ability to let users try out as many different color schemes as they want in a lightning-fast way and download them, Webcolorizer is sure to make the job of designers so much easier and fruitful.
Using Webcolorizer, the designer can adjust the hue, saturation, contrast, brightness and the RGB level of just any site, and to all intents and purposes reskin any piece that he is working on.
Additionally, a service such as this one can be used to preview a design in greyscale, and evaluate its actual interface without being distracted by the actual color palette that has been used.
In all cases, we are talking about an application that can be used for free. All you have to do is furnish the URL whose colors you want to have tweaked, adjust everything using the provided sliders, and then download the results to your computer. You will be able to show them to your clients, and have them discussed and commented as much as it is needed.
Read more on Webcolorizer.com – Try Different Color Schemes…
If you are a designer, then this is a platform that you will certainly find worth your while. DesignSvn makes for automating the process in which drafts are presented to clients, and feedback is provided back to you until you all agree on the definitive design.
Moreover, DesignSvn allows all the different people in the same team to collaborate among themselves. Images can be commented and explained, and all annotations are visually tagged on full-sized previews.
More than anything, DesignSvn is a true version control system for the creative types. Using DesignSvn, it is very easy to track all the revisions that are done to any piece, and map out its progress from the first draft to the finished design. And that is interesting because even when there are many version control systems for developers around such as Git, Subversion and Mercurial, designers never had that many options.
Four plans are currently available: Personal, Freelance, Studio and Agency. Pricing ranges from $ 15 to $ 95, and a two-week trial can be started whenever you want.
Diphur is a really practical application that makes checking your favorite sites regularly to see if they have been updated a thing of the past. You see, Diphur can keep a watch on these sites for you, and notify you when new content has been posted.
Diphur is a free application, and all you have to do in order to begin using it is logging in with your Facebook credentials and individualize the site that you want to have monitored.
Once that has been done, Diphur will start checking these sites for changes every 30 minutes. Whenever any change is perceived, you will be instantly notified about such a fact so that you can head straight to the site and see exactly what has been added/modified.
And a private version of Diphur is also available for business users. These will be able to monitor the sites of all their competitors, and stay industry-aware with a minimum of effort. A contact form is provided on the site, letting you specify the exact needs of your company. You can also send Diphur an email detailing that very same information. Either way, they will get back to you with a suitable solution.
Read more on Diphur.com – Be Notified When Sites Are Updated…
This is the one site you must check if you fear that the job you hold is actually hampering your personal and professional progress. Escape The City will let you see which chances are there for you to take, and move closer to having the one job that could positively change your life.
On this community site, corporate professionals who want to do something more interesting with their careers can come across startups and companies that are hiring.
Additionally, Escape The City doubles as a social networking site in which these individuals can tell each other about their dreams and aspirations, and give each other all the moral support they can.
Escape The City actually features a list of escapees – IE, users who have managed to change their lives and land that job they were actively looking for through the site. It also has a corner devoted to individuals who are starting their own companies and launching their own ventures. So, the chances of you failing to get motivated on this site are pretty scant if you ask me.
Diffmon is a web monitoring tool you can use in case you need to be informed when your own website has any problem and is going down. The monitoring service provided by Diffmon.com gives you the chance to be alerted when your website has any database error or mistake.
Would you like to be informed about your favorite webpage changes? Are you interested in a website offering a server monitoring tool? If that is so, Diffmon.com might be a good option to keep in mind. Many users stop by this site to use this tool and get email alerts and SMS alerts in case you own a website or even if you want to be updated with your favorite webpage changes.
Therefore, if you want to find check webpage services, this could be the right site for you to visit. Remember Diffmon.com next time you want to use a server monitoring tool.
The Internet changes by the second. That makes things hard to track, but it is also the reason why the WWW is so compelling – each and every day you will have a new pile of content to go through and discover.
But however much we enjoy that process, we all are aware of business people with schedules so tight they can’t even launch a game of Tetris to kill some time – they just have no time to kill at all. And neither for browsing endlessly for information that could be retrieved in another ways. And Femtoo stands exactly as that – it is another way in which information can be procured.
In principle, Femtoo is a tool that will let you be notified automatically whenever new content is published in any site that you are keen on. This is an automatic process – you simply have to submitt he sites you intend to follow once and that is it.
And if you are a webmaster and you wish to give visitors the chance to keep an eye on your site 24/7, you can add a button to it and let them be notified automatically whenever new content surfaces.
Read more on Femtoo.com – Track The Way Web Content Changes…
The planet is dirty and polluted and that is a reality we cannot deny. If you are trying to learn about a service that provides users with environmentally friendly moving boxes, this is the right blog for you to stop by.
EcoBox is an attractive blog that was shaped and developed to help users when it comes to finding a great assortment of useful tips and instructions. In this way they will have the chance to learn how to be green in their moving behavior. In case you are interested in these topics and you want to change your moving behavior for good, you just need to stop by this blog and learn about it.
iPeace is an interesting online resource that gives you the chance to get in touch with other people like you that want to make the world a better place. This blog helps you to learn more about how to stop war and poverty in addition to religious disputes and other related topics.
If you are attracted to this blog, feel free to give it a visit and you will also have the chance to make new ones to share your ideals of a better world.
This blog was created based on the belief that people united can truly change the world in a positive way. If you are attracted to this cause, give the blog a visit and you will not regret it. 
