Ash K. Gilpin

Condé Nast can’t really be called a pure magazine publishing company any longer. They acquired Digg-clone Reddit last year, adding a user generated news site to their stable of offline and online magazines. And today they launched a social networking site aimed at teen girls called Flip.

The majority of Flip is content created by users, called Flipbooks. It consists of customizable, rich media blog/journals and include text, photos, music and videos. Users can also customize their Flipbooks with stickers, templates and other decorations available on the site. Flip also has four content channels: My Life; Entertainment; Style; and The World. Each channel highlights user content and also has professional editorial, presumably grabbed from other Condé Nast publications.

One thing Flip doesn’t seem particularly concerned with at this time is security of its users. Unlike Piczo, which also caters to a young teen audience, Flip profiles are freely browsable and searchable. This allows the site to create more networks and generates extra page views, but it also allows predators to browse profiles of young teenage girls. Given that Piczo has seen tremendous growth even with these precautions in place, I’m surprised Flip didn’t copy them.

Source: TechCrunch

After spending over a year in development, Cuts.com is just about ready to launch to a small group of beta users, and expand from there.

Like Jumpcut (acquired by Yahoo) and Motionbox, Cuts aims to help users edit video online using the latest Flash tools.

Cuts lets you pull in and cut apart videos from sites like YouTube and Myspace, with wider support upon launch. To edit a video, you just need the URL of your favorite video or click a bookmarklet to cut the video on your current page. Cuts imports the video and takes you to their editing suite. As of the private beta, Cuts will let you add captions, add a group of sound effects, loop sections of video, and trim out parts of the video. Each of these functions runs on a separate track you use to sync the effect to a time frame in the video. 

Not only will you be able to cut up a video once, but each video made with Cuts will also be able to be cut up again, and again. It’s sort of like the video version of music remixing sites JamGlue and SpliceMusic. Cuts will add a few more bells and whistles after their public launch. Check out some screen shots of the service below, or sign up for the beta on their site.

Source: TechCrunch

Today, the reputation network Rapleaf is releasing a new service called UpScoop, which joins a number of startups trying to add a meta layer above social networks. There are a lot of these networks, and a lot of people belong to more than one. Keeping track of your own networks, and those of your friends, is complicated.

Upscoop is designed to help you figure out which networks your friends belong to, based on their email address. You give Upscoop your email credentials (including the password) for your AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo email account. Upscoop grabs your contact list, and then searches across a number of social networks and tries to find profile pages of people that you know among the 10 million profiles they’ve indexed across the major social networks. The process of searching is not instantaneous - it actually takes a few hours.

Clicking on any result will (sometimes) bring you to the profile page for that person. You can then add them as a friend or otherwise interact with them.

Asking people to give Upscoop their full email credentials to complete the search is going to be a tough sell. But this is a lot easier than searching for friends one-by-one on Wink. For people serious about connecting with friends, Upscoop may be for them.

Source: TechCrunch

iJigg is a new, easy-on-the-eyes music site that launched a couple of days ago.Think Digg for music, plus lots of Flash functionality. Songs are presented on the home page and can be “jigged” by members. Songs can also be embedded into web pages (I’ve done so with one of the popular songs below), commented on, etc. Songs are tagged for easy browsing, and there are most popular and recently posted areas as well.

As a music discovery service, it’s compelling. And the Digg way of having massive numbers of people vote on stuff to make the cream rise is a good way to sort stuff. Others are giving glowing reviews.

Source: TechCrunch

Valentine’s Day is just over a month away but according to new research from Yahoo! Personals, the most visited online dating service, Cupid is charting a tricky course for the next few weeks.The study shows we are now in National Break-Up Season, the period between the December holidays and Valentine’s Day when people are more than twice as likely to think about breaking up than at any other time of the year.

January, with all its focus on resolutions to be healthier, richer, and happier, naturally leads couples to take stock of their relationships and think about whether they are with the right person.

“‘Find a new love’ is up there with ‘lose weight’ and ’save more money’ as a New Year’s resolution,” said Anna Zornosa, vice president and general manager, Yahoo! Personals. “People tend to ‘put up’ with current relationships in order to have a partner for holiday gatherings, but once the festivities are over it’s time to decide whether to fish or cut bait.”

Are you currently in the market for meeting a new special someone?  HRDating.com is a small and growing online dating service.  Another site you might have heard about is PlentyOfFish.com.  Love could be just a click away.  Enjoy and good luck!

At the International Consumer Electronics Show, Sharp Electronics Corp. took the crown for introducing the world’s largest, a behemoth 108-inch liquid-crystal display that most people probably couldn’t fit through their front door.

Sharp and its rivals also announced technological improvements to how LCDs render high-speed movement, cutting down on the staccato image trails that have so far made LCDs less smooth than plasma models.

“LCD TVs have become larger and are now competing aggressively in screen-size segments that were formerly the exclusive domain of plasma and rear-projection televisions,” Sharp chief executive Toshihiko Fujimoto said. “There’s no question that LCD TV is fast becoming the dominant flat-panel technology.”

Last year, South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co. unveiled what was then the world’s largest flat TV, a 102-inch plasma model.

Sharp and several rival brands such as Samsung, LG Electronics Inc., Toshiba Corp., Royal Philips Electronics NV, Sony Corp. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.’s Panasonic said they doubled the frame rate per second on LCD screens from 60 to 120, which makes fast movement seem to go by more smoothly.

Toshiba and Sharp explained this was done by calculating what should go between two frames.

Sales of flat panel TVs in the United States are expected to total 13.5 million in 2006, with three-quarters made up of LCD TVs and the rest plasma, the group said. Total sales are expected to reach nearly 20 million this year and more than 25 million next year, with LCDs continuing to dominate.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs, in his keynote at MacWorld in San Francisco, announced the new iPhone cell phone.  The iPhone is an impressive, and expensive, device. It comes in 4 GB and 8 GB models and costs $499 and $599, respectively. It includes a 3.5 inch touchscreen with a virtual keyboard, a 2 megapixel camera, is Wi-Fi enabled and runs OSX. Cingular is the carrier. The desktop-like interface and user experience looks to be a killer. This might actually take the mobile email revolution another full step forward from what Blackberry has done. Standard web sites can be viewed via the Safari browser (and soon, I’m sure, Firefox). And there are a number of nice touches as well, including a motion sensor that rotates photos when you turn the phone, and voicemails displayed visually that you can click on and listen to. As we all expect from Apple, this is a seriously buttoned up device.

Adobe Systems Incorporated announced that the next version of Adobe Production Studio, the integrated video and audio post-production tool set that is part of the Creative Suite family, will be available for both the Macintosh and Windows platforms. Film, video and web professionals currently using Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator on the Mac will soon be able to harness the power of completely new Macintosh releases of Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Encore DVD and Adobe Soundbooth — all key components of an upcoming milestone revision to Adobe Production Studio. The software will have its first public demonstration during the Macworld 2007 Conference and Exhibition at The Moscone Center in San Francisco, January 9 - 12 (Booth 901). The next release of Adobe Production Studio is expected to ship in mid-2007.

Yahoo! Inc. announced a new contest entitled “The Intern” in conjunction with the 6th season premiere of “The Apprentice” on Sunday, January 7th. “The Intern” contest is a free weekly game that will allow fans to show off their “Apprentice” knowledge by predicting what will happen next on the show. “The Intern” winner will be awarded the opportunity to shadow the winner of “The Apprentice” for two weeks at the Trump Organization.Yahoo!’s “Apprentice” site is the premiere destination for fans, and serves as a prime example of how Yahoo! creates essential experiences for users with partner content, original content and user-generated content. The site offers one place to find out everything there is to know about the show, including exclusive weekly “webisodes” of unaired footage as well as information on the contestants, juicy gossip, cool photos, and videos.

In addition to the exclusive behind-the-scenes action, the new Yahoo! “Apprentice” site also features compelling content with the incorporation of several Yahoo! services including Games, News, Flickr, Del.icio.us/My Web, blogs and videos. Each of these programs engages users with the show with contributions, including “The Intern” game, photos of the contestants and much more. It also gives fans the chance to get to know the younger generation of Trumps, with exclusive access to Ivanka and Donald Jr.’s blogs, which highlight their personal experiences throughout the show.

This is a follow-up to my first post on Bodog. Well, it’s been a little over a week now since first signing up with Bodog. Overall, I have to say that I am impressed. The system is quite easy to use and odds of winning and payouts are much greater than that of stocks. Well, payouts at least. Winning is more 50/50 whereas stock prices can fluctuate by numerous variables.

Personally, I haven’t had much success. It’s been more of a rollercoaster ride for me. I generally do pretty well at picking the teams I believe are going to win; however, I find myself getting greedy and choosing other options in parlay bets to further my riches. Unfortunately, the greater the chance of reward - the more risk. Too often I have seen one bet on my parlay screw it up for all of my other bets.

I believe the trick with online sports betting is to bet on the “sure” thing. Naturally, there’s no such thing as a “sure” thing in gambling, but I mean to choose the team that you have absolute minimal chance of losing on - then do a Moneyline bet instead of a Point Spread. Now repeat this strategy on about 3-4 other teams and tally them up in a parlay bet. This is where you can find your best payouts. If you are new to it all, try betting small - like $5. There are numerous parlays in which I have been where the payout on $5 risk is more than $200. Where else can you get a return on your investment like that?

If you’re interested in getting started, you can sign up here. Good luck everyone!