Today, I learned about Microsoft’s new technology for street-level mapping called Street Slide.

With Google Maps and other street level mapping sites, you zoom in to street level, and then you can zoom in more (while losing picture quality), or move forward or back to the next “bubble” panorama if you want to look further down the street. Street Slide is much more fluid, allowing you to slide the street back and forth to view more store fronts, etc. a lot faster. Because it leaves some space above and below the street images, they added in building numbers, street names, navigational controls and links and information about places of interest. I can’t explain it as well as the video, so take a look:

I still love Google Maps, but I think I’ll be stepping out on that relationship for my street view needs and will definitely have the iPhone version as soon as it’s available. Good job, Microsoft. Now it’s Google’s turn to catch up.

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I’m sure that by now, most people are familiar with the concept of “checking in” to let your friends know where you are. For those who aren’t, it’s pretty simple. You’re out to lunch at Outback Steakhouse and you whip out your phone and check in using a service like FourSquare to let your friends know you’re there. Maybe one of them will drop in and have a drink with you or just notice that you go there a lot and try the place themselves. Checking in is only becoming more popular every day, but now you can get paid for doing it!

Get Paid To Check In

WeReward.com pays you for check ins and tasks you complete in the real world. It integrates with Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, so you can still get your badges and share the way you always have, which is pretty cool because I can now just use this one app for all three. Of course I checked out the video below and then promptly downloaded the app to my iPhone.

It’s one of those things I wish I’d thought of first and had to happen eventually. I’ve been checking in all the time on FourSquare and now I can get points for each check in that convert to cash. You bet I’m in.

Trying It First Hand

I haven’t been out yet, but I wanted to give this thing a shot. After downloading the app, I set up all three network connections to Facebook, Twitter, and FourSquare. I always do this first in new apps so I don’t have to go back and do it later in the middle of some activity or while I’m on the road. Before I could do this, the app took a little longer to load than I had expected, but I suspect that’s because it is grabbing all the nearby businesses and the reward details. It also crashed the first time I opened it. I can’t say if that’s the app’s fault as I’m jailbroken, but it’s in open beta, so who knows. Regardless, once the app is loaded it’s fast and it hasn’t crashed again. So far, so good. I should also point out that I’m using a non-default font on my iPhone, so text in apps sometimes gets cut off as seen in my screen caps.

When you first open the application, you get a listing of businesses in the area where you can check in and earn reward points as seen in the image on the left above. For these, it seems I have to take a picture of the establishment if I want my points, but it’s not like that’s hard to do. When I hit “Check In”, it loads up the camera, I snap the photo and submit it for review. Another option lets me find things nearby with a search. To give it a test run, I typed in “pizza” and off it went searching for me. A second later, I had a listing that included a bunch of places near me that were either pizza joints or at least serve or sell pizza. Oddly, the list also included Long John Silvers. I don’t think they sell pizza, but other than that, it was pretty accurate. Before you check in, you can also click a little arrow at the bottom to expand a CityGrid listing for the business which includes a bit of helpful information as well as a review count and overall rating.

The image on the right above shows the Tasks view. This is the sweet spot where you can cure a little boredom and earn a lot of points quickly. Points convert at one cent each, so the Taco Bell task will earn you a cool $5 while other tasks are generally pretty simple and get you decent point amounts as well. As a test (and to earn an easy breezy 50 points), I tapped on the WeReward task which asked me to write “www.wereward.com” on my body with a marker and submit a photo of it. I wrote on my hand, snapped a photo, added a little note for Twitter (optional) and submitted it. I now have my first 50 points pending.

You can check the status and history of all your rewards in the rewards page of the app. This shows Pending, Approved, Declined, and Referrals. This page is also where you can see your point total and its dollar equivalent and cash out if you’re over 5,000 points.

Earn With Referrals

If I’m already going to use a service and tell my friends about it, I look for the referral program if it exists, and it wasn’t hard to find here. Not only does it exist, but it’s on a percentage scale. When I refer someone, I get 10% of all their verified check in points, which can add up pretty quick. I know some serious FourSquarers who check in all the time.

Conclusions

Now this is where you iPhone owners should Download the App. WeReward is a welcomed addition to my iPhone. Not only will I use it daily, but it works well and is very well thought out. I’m already excited to try it out for the first time checking in somewhere for dinner! Download and let me know what you think.

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I don’t move much, but when I do, one of the important things I look at is what broadband solutions will be available to me. I need my high speed access. Just last weekend, my mom, who has lived in the same house for years, got new broadband internet access. She called me for help with figuring out what all this stuff meant and which provider to use, but what if I didn’t know?

This is where a site like Broadband Genie comes in. They offer comparisons of broadband (and other) services along with guides, news, tools, etc. Here’s what they have to say about why you might want to use their site:

* Save time and money. We spend loads of time gathering and checking all the price and package data from all the top providers, so you don’t have to.
* Be a sheep, make your life easy. If you don’t want to trawl through the comparison tables looking for that special deal, see what our experienced editors and users recommend.
* Get an education. If you want to learn all about broadband internet, how it works and how to compare it, then let us translate it all into plain-English for you. We’ve got help guides, blogs, daily news, and loads of places you can ask questions or just have a good moan.

For those in the U.S., the site won’t be much help in regards to comparing services. Non-UK readers still have plenty of reasons to visit, though, so keep reading.

Compare Broadband Providers

In the interest of the review, I pretended I was in Staffordshire and used Google to find an address where I could pretend to live. This yielded much better results from Broadband Genie, which returned a list of broadband providers in order of suggested use. The list displayed the initial setup cost, monthly cost, contract length, speed, and download caps as seen below.

I was able to sort by any of the columns I mentioned above and more information was a click away, taking me to a page loaded with information specific to the provider. The provider page included service highlights, an overview of different packages, a “road test” widget showing overall user ratings, and customer reviews. This page proved to be a pretty good snapshot of what the provider has to offer.

Compare Mobile Services and More

This site goes beyond just home/office broadband to also compare mobile phone services, pay as you go mobile broadband, and even deals that give you a laptop (with a contract for the mobile broadband). These work in the same way, providing a sortable ordered list and detail pages.

Tools and Guides

Before buying any services, it’s helpful to get educated. Broadband Genie starts with a broadband guide right on the home page to answer questions like “What is broadband?” and “What are modems, routers & dongles?”. Additional guides help you determine compatibility, understand broadband speeds, and even help guide you through setting it all up. Along with the guides, the newsletter, frequently updated News section, forums, and “Ask the Genie” form seem to make sure you’ll find the answers you’re looking for.

Once you’ve learned all about broadband speeds, you can test your own to get an idea of what your needs might be. The first time I ran the speed test, it actually crashed Firefox. When I loaded it up again, it worked great, so I can’t say if that’s a bug or my browser was just having one of its fits. I’ve since tried on another computer in Firefox, and Chrome with no crashing problems, but I’m not sure the results are reliable. They seemed much lower than I had expected, so I headed to another site that returned vastly different numbers which were very close to my expectations.

Conclusions

The speed test didn’t impress me at all, but it was a small bump in a very smooth and freshly paved road to broadband knowledge. Broadband Genie had what I expected. Then it had more and more and even more. I still feel like I left some stones unturned on this site and can only imagine other features I’ve missed. It really only needs two things to be perfect, a U.S. sister site and maybe a better speed test (assuming it’s actually inaccurate).

Also, for those in Australia, Broadband Genie has an Australian site too, which also compares mobile broadband and broadband deals.

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What is Quirky?

In short, Quirky (which I mentioned last year) is a site that brings together thinkers to take a good idea from just that to a product on the shelf. People like Jim spend $99 to submit an idea for consideration. Phase one starts with people voting on ideas, which helps the company select a winner. Subsequent phases such as naming, industrial design and logo design and selection all earn people “influence” for helping guide the product’s creation. In the end, those who helped all have influence (which translates to a percentage of sales) in the final product, the original idea submitter earning the highest. Involvement can be as little as filling out a survey or voting in the winning logo or it can be more involved like creating the winning logo. The more you contribute, the more you earn on every sale of the final product. When a product is designed and ready to go, it experiences a presale period with a threshold of sales to meet before actually hitting the production line. This final hurdle completed, a product sells on the Quirky site as well as through any vendors that pick it up.

How Jim Made All That Money

My first instinct is to say that he didn’t have to do a lot of work for the money, but truth be told, Jim already had some man hours into this before becoming a part of the Quirky community. He had owned several pocket knives over the years, but he never felt any of them really got it right. He wanted to build the perfect pocket knife. Realizing that “perfect” meant different things to different people, the idea of a modular pocket knife was born.

After a few prototypes, Jim’s idea materialized as a product idea submission for Quirky. With $99 on the line, the idea had little more than a decent description and high hopes. After voting and discussion, the then unnamed product was chosen for production and began to work its way through the development phases, getting a name, logo, design, and even a tag line from other Quirky community members (or “quirks”) along the way. Last week, Quirky announced Switch, the modular pocket knife kit.

In pre-sale, Switch had a decent start and was moving along at an average pace. After seeing some great press from top tech blogs, it caught the eye of major online retailer, Think Geek, who committed to a large purchase and helped the sales total for the day reach 1,170 units. At $8.90 per unit sold, Jim earned over $10,000 in just one day for his cut. That doesn’t count the almost 300 units sold in previous days and the countless sales to come.

What about the other contributors? They’re not doing too bad either. The second highest contributor, Kelly Saglibene, has earned $1,311 in the 5 days Switch has been up for sale for the logo she created and Julie Kowal is taking home over $1,000 so far just for submitting the winning name. Sadly, I was busy during the Switch product development process and did not contribute.

My Q & A With Jim

I had some questions I just had to ask Jim. I’m sure he’s busy, so I kept it brief.

How did you first come across Quirky?
Through a prior investor that knew them.

Why and when did you decide to submit your idea for production on Quirky?
When I first met Ben we talked about various products. I had been tinkering with pocket knives for years trying to modify them. He thought it was a natural idea for Quirky. As a test of their site, I submitted it.

How did you feel when your idea won the selection phase?
I was a bit surprised – it had not won the first time through. I thought perhaps it was too complicated a product for Quirky. Evidently not!

How about when you saw all those sales?
Beats a stick in the eye!

Do you have any plans for all the money Switch is making you?
My guess? Charity. But who knows, maybe a boat J

Will you be submitting more ideas to Quirky after such a success?
Definitely. I have always been a tinkerer and have several ideas. Just hard to find the time; you can’t just submit on a whim. The community expects (and rightly so) a well-thought out concept, complete with pictures, or video, or schematics and whatnot.

Jim ended with a very good point. If you’re going to pitch a product idea or business model to anyone, it needs to be a well thought out idea and it’s the same for Quirky. Don’t let that scare you though. If you have a great idea, figure out the details, draw up some artwork (or get help) and submit it to Quirky. You may just have the next hot product.

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If I win, I’ll give two $50 Apple gift cards out to random winners. Your “Like” or share of this page on Facebook will enter you to win. Just be sure to post a link to your Facebook profile in the comments below so I can see it. Thanks to all the people who have supported me already on Twitter and Facebook. Contest aside, I feel like I’ve already won.

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Search with Leapfish

Searching with Leapfish is pretty cool. It has the most popular from many segments of the web on the homepage, like video, Digg items, deals, and various types of news. When you search, you get results in video, images, news, deals, etc and then you also get standard results from Google, Yahoo, and Bing. It’s like an all-in-one search and I’m really liking it. In fact, I even added it on my sidebar over on the right. Try it out by typing something in the little search box and clicking the button.

Win with Leapfish and JoeTech.com

Leapfish has a pretty cool contest, and I want to win, but I need your help. To enter, you earn points and those points are like raffle tickets. The more you earn, the better your odds, but those who earn fastest get the cool prizes. I get points if I refer some people to Leapfish, so everyone who emails me asking to be invited and then signs up click here to sign up and you will be entered to win on of the following (your choice):

Vuzix iWear AV310 Wide Screen Head Mounted Display	Warpia Wireless USB PC To TV Adapter

All you have to do is email for an invitation and then sign up when you get your invitation. You can also get extra entries in my contest by posting a link to this post on Twitter or Facebook. Just comment below with the URL to your tweet or facebook update. Each tweet or update gets you an entry. The contest ends either when I win one of the prizes or on May 15th, whichever comes first, so hurry and participate. Of course, Leapfish has even bigger prizes, but why not win mine as well. Oh… and if I win anything from Leapfish in their contest, my winner gets BOTH prizes above.

UPDATE: It looks like I may have nabbed one of the LeapFish prizes which will mean one of you who helped me will win both items above. Now I’m shooting for TWO prizes from LeapFish and if I get two, I’ll find something else cool to give away to you guys for helping!

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What Is Glydo?

Glydo is a plugin for Firefox that takes a look at the web page you are currently viewing and suggests related content. By default, the Glydo panel sits in the status bar of your browser, so it stays out of the way, mostly. At times, it will find a video that it thinks is relevant to the content you’re viewing, so that’s about as in-the-way as it gets. Even when it pops nothing up, it displays a ticker of related items. In addition, you can get to these items by clicking on their media type icons in the Glydo panel. The related media types available are Related Stories, Tweets, Videos, Related Info, and Web Sites. In addition, there’s an icon for Top News, one to access lots of sharing options and one for the Glydo controls for access to settings, etc.

Related stories displays the site the story is on, when it was published, the title and a summary as well as a quick link to sharing options. Other sections show similar imformation for each item. The Tweets are accompanied by the Twitter user’s name (linked, of course), and their twitter icon but don’t show the sharing options. Videos come with their rating (in stars) from YouTube, the run time, and the view count. The Sharing button provides quick access to several options for sharing items via many popular social networks and bookmarking sites. The settings area is about what you’d expect, but provides the basics like some display options and preference for where to display the Glydo panel. Additionally, you can specify a preference for ticker speed, pop-up frequency and text size. I’ve created a video below to show how it all works.

Does It Work?

In a word, yes. In two words, very nicely. I don’t generally use these plugins, but I spent a few weeks with Glydo to give it a chance and I was pleasantly surprised. Not only does it do what it promised, but it does it well and without any bugs, issues, or annoyances. It’s a free piece of software, and that often comes with some compromise, but such a compromise has eluded my attention so far. Everything is pretty seamless and fast. Does it work on IE/Chrome/Safari/etc.? No. At least, not that I’ve been able to find.

Conclusions

I always try to find the bad along with the good when I do a review. I’m having a hard time with that here. It’s just good software with no noticeable bugs and well thought out features and usability. That said, I tend to ignore things if they’re not in my face, so the only thing that might make this not perfect is my forgetting it’s there. Even with that, it will pop things up and I can in crease the frequency a little to suit me needs (and likely will). They also released two updates in the time since I downloaded, so you know they’re working hard on it. Glydo is a great little plugin for Firefox whose only down side is that users of other browsers can’t have it.

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This weekend, I was asked to review a file search engine called General Search. It’s a site where you can search through a few of the biggest file sharing web sites on the Internet.

How Does It Work

It’s pretty much just what it looks like. You head to the site and initiate a search for whatever files you’re looking for. If you need a Windows XP driver for a Sony DSCP110 camera, just type in the camera model and “driver” and hit search. The site brings back results and shows some helpful information such as a short description, file name, size, and hosting site. When you click on the link, you’re taken to the site to download the file. Bandwidth costs money, so most hosts have a (sometimes slower) free version or you can pay for membership to the host site for faster downloading.

General Search lets you pick which file host to search through if you want to narrow it down and if you register for one of their free accounts it will keep track of your past downloads so you don’t have to search again if you lose a file.

Why Would I Use This?

To answer this question, you should first ask why you would need to look through the file hosting sites this site searches. The biggest reason is to find obscure or otherwise hard to find files. A great example is if you wanted to track down an older driver that worked better for you but the manufacturer’s web site only has the latest driver. In such a case one of those file hosting sites might have the older driver and this file sharing search site might help you track down that file. So it’s good to have a site like General Search bookmarked for circumstances like these.

Additionally, it’s sometimes fun to take a look at the top or recent searches and see what people are looking for. You never know if you’ll discover some new song or funny video.

Content Quality

To be quite honest, I’m not as familiar with Uploading.com, but RapidShare seems to attract a lot of porn and pirated files. It seems like they do a pretty good job of removing anything copyrighted or illegal, but don’t be surprised if you see some adult themes in the recent and top searches. I suppose this could be a good thing if you’re looking for that stuff. If not, just type in what you’re looking for and the other spectrum of content shouldn’t get in the way of your search too much.

One of the things that I saw that I was unhappy with was a search result directing me to a site other than one of the actual file sharing sites. This alternate site pretends to try and connect to get your file and then tells you that this particular file needs you to create an account. It’s not illegal and I don’t know if it even tries to get money from you, but it’s a little sneaky and doesn’t seem very nice. I always ignore those and head back to the search results. I don’t know if I’m being directed to that site by General Search or by the file host.

Conclusions

Although I didn’t like the fake download registration option I came across, General Search, itself was fast and yielded some good file results. As a test, I was able to find and download a Samsung camera driver pretty quickly, which beats looking through forums for a while. I’ve bookmarked this site for my future file needs.

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I’ve sold a number of cell phones on eBay and elsewhere over the years. I like to upgrade to the newest phone that suits all (or most) of my needs, so I often find myself with a phone to sell. I was asked, this week, to review SellMyMobile.com, a site dedicated you helping you sell mobile phone and get the most out of your used cell phone.

What SellMyMobile Does

In short, SellMyMobile.com is a site that helps people sell mobile phones for more money by showing the seller the current buying prices for used cell phones from (at the time of this writing) 21 different used phone buying sites. So how does it work? I registered for an account, but if you just want to find a the best price for your used phone, you don’t need to register. Just head to the site and search phones. As you type in your phone model, the search box brings back live suggestions and tries to anticipate your phone model to save you time.

I love anything that saves me time. I also love that the search suggestion includes the best sale price. So before I was even done searching, I had a good idea of what I can sell this phone for. I clicked the iPhone 3G S 16GB that I have and it took only about a second to come back with a full list of prices.

It’s important to note that although most people will go right to the top price, there was at least one option for my phone that included “up to £300 in vouchers”. Depending on your specific needs, an option like this could be much better than the top cash offer, so when you use SellMyMobile.com to find a buyer, make sure to look through the whole list. In my case, I clicked the button to sell it for the highest cash amount, which was about $415 US, and it dropped me right out to the buyer’s site to complete the process of selling and shipping out my phone.

The whole thing was pretty easy and took about a minute to get that far. The buyer I ended up with, (phonerecyclebank.com) seemed to have a pretty streamlined process for completing the sale, too. One thing I thing I thought was missing here is the currency conversion. Being from the United States, I’d like to see a US dollar amount, but couldn’t find that option in my settings. A quick visit to Google with a search for “260 pounds to dollars” got me the number I needed, though. Additionally, I hear those of us in the U.S. may have a site with U.S. currency some time soon.

Broken Phone? No Problem

Here’s something I hadn’t considered. Someone wants to buy my broken cell phone. When I went to my buyer in the example above, I found that they buy broken phones, too and would offer almost half as much for a broken iPhone. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to make the results include prices for my broken phone, so for now, I’d probably just go with the highest non-broken offer. This is another feature I’m told is in the pipeline.

Why register?

To be honest, I registered out of habit. Looking back, I may not have save for one reason:

Would you like to be alerted when you mobile phone contract is due for renewal?, Please set when you would like to recieve an alert from SellMyMobile.com

That’s a great idea. My contract is really the thing that might prevent me from upgrading again, so it would be nice to get a reminder. Of course, I might want more than that as a reason to register, but it is a nice feature.

Conclusions

I’m not even sure I have to say it at this point. The site is great and I highly recommend it to anyone looking to part with a used mobile phone. A couple small features would make this site perfect, but even without them, I’m definitely bookmarking it for my next cell phone sale and so should you.

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I was greeted with a video from Anssi Vanjoki (Markets) who announced that Nokia will now provide their OVI maps for free… forever. How’s that for a nice bold statement. That’s a great thing for you Nokia users, but what about me? OVI Maps is a product for the desktop, too.

The picture above shows OVI Maps in it’s 3D view displaying the Eiffel Tour, which I thought was pretty cool, but there’s a lot more to the maps than some 3D tricks. At first glance, it seems they’ve really set out to compete with Bing and Google in the map and mobile navigation space. Now I just need another Nokia phone to play with so I can really give it a spin.

I’d love to hear opinions from any of you Nokia users.

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