Filed under: Audio, Internet, Web services

We’ve never been particularly impressed with text to speech applications. Sure, the underlying technology is pretty cool, and if you’re visually impaired, these applications are probably extraordinarily useful. But seriously, It’s almost 2008. You’d think that someone could come up with a text to speech application that doesn’t sound like a drunken robot with a 1st grade education.

Still, some text to speech engines seem to be better than others. A few days ago we told you about SpokenText, a service that converts HTML, TXT, DOC, and other files to MP3s. The service gives you a choice of several voices, all of which sound at times like rough approximations of a person. We wish we could state the same about the computerized translator at Pediaphon, because we love the idea of this site.

Pediaphon lets you listen to Wikipedia pages. All you have to do is enter a search term, and Pediaphon will find the corresponding Wikipedia page and begin reading you a bedtime story in a voice that sounds a bit like nails on a chalk boar. Not literally, but it gives us sort of the same feeling. You can either listen to your article on the web or download it as an MP3.

Pediaphon comes in English, German, and French flavors.

[via makeuseof]

Read

Share This

Share This

Filed under: E-mail, Web services, AOL

While most web-based email services have file attachment size limits, there are plenty of ways around those limitations. MailBigFile, YouSendIt, Driveway, and other services all let you “park” large files temporarily online and send an email to your friend or colleague letting them know the file is available for download. But sometimes you want to send a message directly from your email client and still attach a large file.

This blog’s parent company AOL is launching a new service that attempts to let you do just that. And we want to like it, we really do. But right now it just doesn’t work as well as we’d hope yet.

Here’s how it works. AOL has a whole slew of web services, including a web-based email client and a web-based storage service called Xdrive, which gives you 5GB of on the internet storage for free. So combining the two was kind of a no brainer. All you’ve to do is sign up for XDrive and then click the “attach file” button when composing an email message, and check the “Upload to my Xdrive” to send big attachments via Xdrive. Any file that’s more massive than 16MB will automatically be sent via XDrive.

For some media types, this works great. Your recipient gets an email with clickable links that let them view pictures or watch/listen to multimedia files on the internet. But for other file types, things are a bit trickier. While the recipient will see a link with the name of the file you uploaded, when they click the download button they’ll get a file with an arbitrary string of characters for a file name. That wouldn’t be so bad if Xdrive didn’t also strip the file type from the name. That means if you send a Word document, for example, the recipient will have to add “.doc” to the end of the file before their personal will know which program to use to open the file.

We’re glad to see AOL taking steps to allow users to send massive messages via email. The concept is brilliant because it lets you get around file size limits whether you’re the sender or receiver. But the execution still needs some work.

Read

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Design, Internet, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm, Web services, Google, Mobile Minute, iPhone

If you’ve ever used a mobile phone or PDA to surf the web, you’ve probably noticed that some sites render better than others on a small screen. That’s because some web developers design special mobile versions of their pages. But there are also several web-based services that “mobilize” web sites by stripping some data and presenting you with a stripped down version of a web page.

Probably the most popular web-site mobilizing services are Google Mobile and Skweezer. Mowser is a less popular service, but it might be the best of the bunch. We first checked out Mowser earlier this year, but a current article from Mowser creator Russel Beattie made us take another look.

Continue reading Why select Mowser for mobile transcoding over Google?

Read

Share This

Share This

Filed under: World wide web, Web services, Google, Yahoo!, Search, web 2.0

All of us love to stroke our own ego and what superior way to do that than to egosurf?
You know, the obsessive need to follow your own web stats on a daily, or even hourly basis?

PopURI, a slick looking web-service which serves the ego surfing set, in a easy and straightforward manner.

PopURI is similar to Xinu, Feedburner or Mint but, unlike the previous three, PopURI has most of the geek-stuff truncated. What’s left is pure, ego-boasting, web-site ranks served fresh by a service with a wacky domain name.

Continue reading PopURI lets you ego surf in style, and a few scoops more

Read

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Business, Design, Developer, Internet, Text, Productivity, Web services, P2P, Social Software, Search, web 2.0

Springnote is a powerful browser based note taking system. You can forget about the standard text only inputs that many on the web note tools offer, this application has the ability to drop in images, attach files and organize layout at will. Its wiki style note taking system grants pages of content like todo’s, monthly calendars and plans to be created with Word like functionality and tools with tags, change history, folder hierarchy and page bookmarks for more important content. Springnote’s can also be shared between friends for reading or collaboration.

Perhaps the most important feature of Springnote is the ability to import and export notes. Downloading options include HTML, XHTML and Send to a Blog or use anywhere else. Importing can be done using MS-word docs, .txt, HTML or OpenDocument .odt formats. Springnote has an open API and unlimited storage of text files with 2GB file storage available. There are tons of Springnote mashups that you can utilize to expand the functionality of your account, including IM, Flickr, and Firefox toolbar integration.

Read

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Pic, Web services, Imaging Tips

If you’re an iPhoto user and want an easy way to upload your pictures from iPhoto to Picasa Web Albums (Google Photos), then check out Google’s Picasa Web Albums Exporter iPhoto plug-in. The plug-in is available as part of a package from Google’s Mac tools site (if you don’t use iPhoto, you can use the standalone Web Albums Uploader program to upload your photos to your Picasa albums). Once installed, open iPhoto and either select an album or specific photos you want to upload. Then click File -> Export and select the “Picasa Web” tab. The plug-in lets you upload the selected photos to a new album, which it will then create for you with a title and description that you can specify, or to one of your existing albums.

The plug-in makes short work of sharing your iPhoto pictures via your Google account. It even grants you to choose how to scale your photos during the upload (better quality, faster upload, actual size) which is helpful if you’re on a slow World wide web connection. The plug-in will also add any keywords or descriptions you’ve added in iPhoto to your Picasa Web Album!

Read

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Features, Web services, web 2.0

Stitcher
This iPhone or personal based website serves personal audio content. Stitcher, stitches together audio that you like, whether it’s podcasts, weather, headline news or sporting events. Think of it as the Netvibes of audio, with a lot of small shows put together instead of one long audio show. To get started, visit the Stitcher site on your iPhone or click to listen to pre-made stations on your personal. Stitcher is still building out the personalized stations.

Continue reading Weekend Web 2.0 roundup for December 23rd

Read

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Mozilla

Mozilla has just announced a new initiative that on its face sounds a lot like Google Browser Sync. The project aim’s to give Firefox users increased “user control over personal information.” In other words, you’ll be able to store your browser data including bookmarks, history, and customizations on a Mozilla Server. That way you can synchronize your preferences across the browsers on your work and home Personal computers and any others you’ve lying around. You know, exactly the way you can with Google Browser Sync.

It sounds like there’s a chance the project (known for now as “Mozilla Weave”) will do more than let you synchronize your data though. Mozilla mentions that another goal is to grant “developers to build innovative on the internet experiences.” It’s not yet clear exactly what kind of experiences Mozilla is talking about. But once your personal data is stored on the web, there could be all sorts of ways to interact with it. Like maybe a Mozilla-backed on the internet office suite. Oh right, Google’s got that covered. How about email? Oh right.

Mozilla Weave is still in its infancy over at Mozilla Labs, so it’ll be interesting to see how the concept evolves. At the very least, it’d be nice to have a browser sync feature built by the folks who designed the browser in the first place.

[via Mozilla Links]

Read

Share This

Share This

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Web services

There have often been times, while travelling for long, boring hours, that we’ve wished we had the means of downloading and watching popular videos on youtube right in our mobile screen. Most people own largely 3gp enabled phones and the only way to watch videos on the fly is if the videos are pre-converted and transferred to the mobile beforehand. With a poor unlimited GPRS packages, it isn’t quite as possible to stream from the Youtube Mobile site either. Then one day we came across ByWifi. This web-based video transcoding/conversion service has a strangely misleading name, but their service is without a doubt one of the most useful ones we’ve encounter.

Continue reading ByWiFi: Convert and watch videos on your mobile

Read

Share This

Share This

Filed under: World wide web, Photo, Web services, Social Software

Myspace, which acquired photo-sharing powerhouse Photobucket back in May, now allows users to easily insert their Photobucket pictures into Myspace comments. To take advantage of this feature, just login to Myspace and attempt to comment on another user’s profile. When the comment box appears, enter your witty, extremely original comment, then click the “Add image from Photobucket” link. You’ll be prompted to login to Photobucket and select a picture to post with the comment.

If you don’t think your own photos are exciting enough, you can also use Photobucket’s “Find Stuff” search feature from within Myspace’s comment editor. This grants you to find absolutely cool animated icons, funny (while relevant) seasonal photos, or pictures from other users’ albums.

As Mashable points out, for some reason Myspace doesn’t automatically log you in to Photobucket. At least the second login is inline and doesn’t require a new tab or window to go hunting for a picture URL.

Read

Share This

Share This