Blufr is a trivia website created by the masterminds of Answers.com. You know how some people say that knowledge is power? This is a way to attain knowledge in a fun way!

On the homepage of blufr.com, you are poised with certain questions and the point is not to get bluf’d so you can earn points and become the über-bluf master. To start the game, start answering away at the questions. When you feel you are done, click on “Claim My Score” and then enter your initials and personal website. Your score has the potential to be in the top 20 scores, top blufs, and random blufs that are placed on the homepage. Users can also submit a bluf thus building the database of questions offered on the website.

“NO WAY!” “WAY!” These are the options that you can choose which are the equivalent of True and False. For the questions that you get wrong, you will not be awarded a point in your score tally. Also, if you get it wrong, then don’t feel bad because blufr also calculates the percentage of other people that got the question wrong.

Another amusing feature blufr has is “blufr face.” Right on the homepage, a random picture of a user with a funny face is loaded next to the blufr logo. Any user can take a picture and submit it to blufrfaces@answers.com. There are also options to embed your blufr score to your personal blogs or MySpace profiles as well. You can also embed blufr questions on your website or e-mail signatures.

Blufr is currently open to anyone. Registration is not required to play. Blufr’s openness and addictiveness will undoubtedly facilitate its viral growth. It’s a simple concept that works well to keep users engaged. Plus you learn something new each time you visit the site.

I was recently contacted by Adam Oliver, a founder of Flixya.com and this opened up my eyes to the world of his online video sharing website. The differentiation factor between Flixya.com and YouTube.com seems to be that Flixya offers reward incentives and ad revenue sharing to its users. This is the first time I’ve heard of this concept and I think it is an amazing idea. Ultimately it is the users that are coming up with the original material and/or taking the time to upload them so this automatically answers the question that a user may ask: “What is in it for us if I join Flixya?”

There are two ways to benefit from Flixya’s ideas. The first is Revenue Sharing. To participate, you must have a Google AdSense account and be registered with Flixya. It is simple to set this up as well. Here’s a [link] to the simple steps it takes to setup a Revenue Sharing account with Flixya. Another requirement is that your videos must also be uploaded on Revver.com, Youtube.com, Video.Google.com, or any other video sharing websites where Flixya can embed the videos. The money made by the Google Ads on the page which are displaying your videos are shared between you and Flixya at 50-50. Where else can you find an Ad Sharing program that offers that much? I have not yet heard of any others.

The second way to benefit from Flixya.com is by its Rewards Program. Geeks like me would drool over something like this. For every comment post that you write, you earn 3 points. For every video you share, you earn 10 points. And for every user you refer, you earn 15 points. Here’s a [link] to some of the prizes that you can earn with certain points. I’m going for the XBox 360!!

If you’re not sold on using Flixya.com yet, maybe you should glance at their Charity Program. Users can also choose an option to share the money they earn from the Revenue Sharing program with charities of their choice including the Lance Armstrong Foundation, Doctors Without Borders, the Red Cross, and World Vision. It is programs like these that make the world a better place. In the news you hear about Bill Gates stepping down from his daily activities with Microsoft to concentrate on his charity foundation and Warren Buffett giving away his wealth to charity and now I look at the Flixya.com founders’ philanthropic efforts as no different than the #1 and #2 most richest men in the world.

I have also done a little bit of reading on Flixya’s blog and it appears that founders Ivan Wong and Adam Oliver are making solid partnerships to keep the business growing. On top of that, they are truly standing by their Charity Program initiative. Adam Oliver stated “All revenue collected for the month of August is being donated to charity. We embrace the opportunity to give back to the community. This is our commitment to contributing to worthwhile causes.”

Flixya.com was founded in July 2006 and their Beta service was started in August 2006. Within one month, Flixya services were featured on CNET Japan, many domestic based tech blogs, Digg.com, and were labeled “YouTube With a Heart – Newcomer to Online Video Flixya.com Offers a 50% Revenue Share For Members or Charitable Causes” by PRWeb. Keep up the great work Adam and Ivan, your entrepreneurial and philanthropic spirit won’t be overlooked by the VCs.

oDesk Inc. stated that on Wednesday, September 27 that Benchmark Capital plugged in a 2nd round of funding with an amount of $8 million for the Menlo Park, CA based company. Kevin Harvey, a general partner of Benchmark Capital will be joining the oDesk Board of Directors. Benchmark is known for investing in other technology companies such as eBay, Juniper Networks, and Red Hat Software.

Kevin Harvey stated that “oDesk provides businesses instant access to talented developers all over the world, while making it seem like they’re working just a cubicle away.” Harvey was impressed with the fact that oDesk’s idea has been tested and validated by its marketplace. What is oDesk’s marketplace?

oDesk.com services enables small-to-large sized businesses to review credentials of potential employees worldwide. oDesk stands by a 3-step process behind their web services:
Hire Process – Is when an opening is created and candidates apply to these jobs. Managers are able to review candidate profiles and interview the potentials.

Manage Process – Allows managers to monitor their team and review their work along with assigning and discussing tasks

Pay Process – Employees pay on an hourly basis after reviewing timelogs of the hours worked.

The type of jobs in oDesk’s network revolves around typical ‘geek jobs’ as their niche and includes candidates available in over 50 countries including Russia, India, and USA. Some of the latest jobs posted by Buyers include Design/Flash (12 week project), ASP New Social Networking Website (1 week), PHP/MySQL: SMF Forum Intergration (1 week)

Hiring managers can dig up and filter candidate profiles using search criteria such as hourly rate demanded, technical skills, amount of positive score feedback, how many tests were passed by candidates, geography, and previous work history. “oDesk has a unique approach; they are the only marketplace that offers a rich set of tools to manage remote teams. And fortunately, the time is right. Nearly all of our portfolio companies are building remote teams, and facing the challenges of trust, time zones, and collaboration — exactly the problems that oDesk solves” said Kevin Harvey.

Amit’s Thoughts:
I could definetely appreciate the concept behind oDesk, but there are still the possibilities of fraud cases. Fortunately from what I’ve read about oDesk is that they have feedback scores which I’m assuming is similar to the feedback scores behind eBay sellers. The worse feedback someone has, the less likely you would want to buy items from them which is no different from technical contractors.

Focusing on a niche segment for jobs in the ‘geeky segment’ is definetely a good idea and and the fact that it is an open global arena definetely breaks down some of the previous barriers for finding technical talent on a large scale. I have a friend that had contracted some work to a small Indian firm in Bangalore and the problem was that he was not able to monitor the prototypes closely nor did he know whether this was a quality company because all you could really go by is their website. This could be a great problem solver for such issues.

The CEO of Sonific, Gerd Leonhard has brought to my attention that a new feature has been introduced with Sonific’s product, SongSpots(TM). Users of SongSpots(TM) can now kick up the level of entertainment a notch in their eBay product listings by embedding SongSpots(TM) supported music.

How you ask? For a detailed explanation, I’ll refer to Leonhard’s blog:

1) Register with Sonific (yes, it’s free, easy, and instant)
2) Pick any song from our approx 40,000 artists and click on ‘USE’ (yes… we are adding new ones all the time). Use our Find SongSpots search to get to the cool stuff quickly (try the Featured Artists which are listed in each genre).
3) On the next page, name your songspot, provide the EXACT location where the songspot will be (you may have to come back and re-do this later since ebay generates that URL only after you post your auction), and pick EBAY from the drop down menu. Then hit the ‘activate’ button.
4) Copy the code on the bottom of the page (one click does it), and drop it into the Item Description box of your auction post (see below) Note that the Sonific SongSpot code must be unaltered and needs to go exactly in this box (not somewhere else).

5) Preview your auction — it should look something like this

6) Submit – and voila, your sonified auction!

Other features of Sonific’s products include the ability to purchase music in “just a few clicks” which was enhanced by a partnership between Sonific and UK-based music download site, Wippit.

Scoopvid.com, a website that enables you to search for hyperlinks to videos that is imported from YouTube, Grouper, MSN Video, AOL Games, OurMedia, ROOTV, BBC News, IFILM, Yahoo! Music, and several other video enabled websites is now in public Beta. ScoopVid was created by utilizing AOL’s Video Search API technology with a few modifications to it.

The sample of the features that are included with the AOL Video API is available at Searchvideo.com where you can sort videos by Most Recent, Relevant, Highest Rated, or the ability to select a Random Video. You can also sort by quality, video format, length, and cost of viewing the video. Users can enable and disable family filters so that obscene videos do not appear in the results.

You can also select how many links to videos that you would like to appear per page with the maximum number being 50. And looking at how many pages are available when viewing 50 video links at a time, this means that there are over 250 million archived hyperlinks to videos available on ScoopVid.

I could easily see the traffic rankings of ScoopVid and SearchVideo together growing rapidly at roughly the same pace as they run on the same technology. This could also be ScoopVid’s weak point since it is dependent on AOL technology and recreating a similar ScoopVid website using these APIs should not be difficult for most Developers.

Alexa Street is now in Open Beta. The concept behind the site is that it is a multiplayer game based on the buying and selling of web site shares based on a website’s Alexa rankings.

Every player starts with $10,000 (play money) to plug into web sites that you think you may profit from. For every friend that you recommend to this website, you gain an extra $1500 (play money) to invest into websites. The Recent Activities, Top Broker Movers (shown the most improvement), the Top 25 and Top Mover Brokers along with the Top 25 and Top Mover Stocks are featured on the homepage.

Amit’s Thoughts:
I would definetely give Alexa Street 2 thumbs up as it makes good practice for analyzing potential investments. And even if you get your hands on some inside information, I highly doubt the SEC will come after you since this is play money anyway.

Invest in Pulse 2! We jumped over 4,000,000 in 2-3 weeks! And we don’t see a chance of slowing down anytime soon!

Facebook has done it. Facebook has just removed its restrictions for creating an account.

Now you don’t have to belong to the original exclusive networks that Facebook was known for such as colleges/graduate schools, companies, and high school. There is now a “None of the Above” selection in the registration section. New privacy features were implemented for current users to help in dealing with such a major transition (including not allowing random people to “poke” you). This should be interesting.

I’ll write more posts on how Facebook has accommodated the non-network users as they join. [Previous Facebook posts]

There are so many of these debt sharing web applications popping up from the Web 2.0 sphere that it is hard to choose just one or not choose any of them and create your own invoices for frugal friends by using Excel or Word. MoochSpot and SpicyDigits are only a couple of examples that are out there. One of the newest to enter the market is BillMonk. BillMonk was founded by Seattle-based company, Code Monks, LLC.

Perhaps the reason that BillMonk is late to market is because of its SMS capabilities which is an expensive feature to add to any website. There is an SMS guide on the website that tells you how to enter a new shared bill, add a new IOU to your account with the amount that you owe, receive your balance, and calculate tips for a bill. Currently this feature is supported with any carrier that supports sending/receiving SMS messages as e-mail domestically and internationally. More information is in their BillMonk SMS page.

Like MoochSpot, BillMonk is accessible via Facebook API as well. Anyone with a valid e-mail address may join and can add friends to share debt accounts with by invitation of e-mail and Facebook accounts.

Below is a screenshot of what BillMonk looks like after creating an account. On the homepage, it displays how much you owe or are owed.

In the Friends tab, it would display which friends owe you money or what group debts need to be resolved. The money tab is the Transaction history page, and the Library page helps you keep tabs on what are the other items that you borrow from a friend or that a friend borrows from you such as books, CDs, movies, video games, clothes, or other miscellaneous items. These items can be added via searching Amazon’s item database and books can be added by inputting ISBN numbers.

Amit’s Thoughts:
Earlier in this post I mentioned that it is hard to choose just one debt sharing web app. If you were to choose just one, I would select this one because of its SMS advancements, clean layout, and lending options as well. Not everything that you give to friends to borrow is just money-related. I’m sure that many of the readers here want to get their books back from friends.

The only problem with this is that if you invite a friend to BillMonk who has borrowed your book, it feels as if you’re saying “Join this site so that you’ll actually remember what you owe me, punk! Now give me my Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus book back!”

Mountain View based company, RingCube Technologies Inc. created MojoPac, a software currently in Beta that proved itself worthy of $4 million in Series A Funding by New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Krishna “Kittu” Kolluri, general partner at NEA stated that “RingCube has developed the first and most compelling ‘PC on a drive’ product the market has seen to date.”

Shan Appajodu, CEO and Co-Founder of RingCube Technologies Inc. envisioned MojoPac’s purpose based on the experience of not having a laptop to take his work home with him. This meant he had to spent more time at the office, a place where most men would agree that on their deathbed, they would never say, “I wish I spent more time at the office.” Because of being tired at the office, Appajodu gathered RingCube co-founders Mike Larkin, CTO, and Kiran Kamity, VP of Engineering, to develop software that could turn any computer into their own PC. MojoPac boasts that their software can turn any portable device including iPods and USB flash drives into PCs.

Amit’s Thoughts:
I was doing a little bit of homework on MojoPac’s website to see what you requirements are needed to benefit from the software to make any computer into “your PC.” You need a storage device that is big enough to hold the software applications that you want to carry around with you. For example, if you wanted to carry the iTunes+Quicktime combination (roughly 110MB) with you, then your USB device better be greater than 110MB, otherwise MojoPac won’t do you any good.

But let’s say that you are one of the lucky ones that has the 1GB-80GB iPods and you wanted to take your software applications with you where ever you go, then this is for you. If you have a 512MB or less than that, then expect to only carry around low-end software applications with you such as MS Paint instead of your copy of Adobe Photoshop.

ComVu Media Inc., announced on September 12 that they have launched a location-based service (LBS) solution that automates video geotagging. Consumers can automatically have their videos tagged with the location of its filming. ComVu is the first to enter the automatic geotagging market.

ComVu’s software is called PocketCaster. PocketCaster can embed the position of mobile phones in each frame of a video. People that would like to see these videos can follow the path of the mobile phone indicated by several dots on a satellite map. Check out the screenshot below:

As you may be able to tell by the screenshot, there will be personal website and social networking revolved around these geotagged videos. For example, users from New Orleans would be able to click on Times Square New York tags and see what life is like in the Big Apple and see how different it is from the Big Easy.

This technology is enabled by a phone’s internal GPS (global positioning systems) function. If a phone does not have an internal GPS system, consumers can purchase a blue-tooth GPS receiver to take advantage of ComVu Media technology.

“It’s not time efficient to manually tag videos with a location when you already have a camera phone with GPS available,” explains William Mutual, CEO of ComVu. “With mobile workers like first responders, law enforcement officers, and insurance adjusters relying on immediate and accurate locations for dispatching crews or for legal documentation, there is a definite demand for a reliable and efficient geotagging solution.”

The “Automated Geotagging” solution should be fully deployed by the end of December. The Management team of ComVu includes two of the founders of POPCast, a web application that enables anyone to broadcast their videos via various channels and then share them using P2P software. POPcast Communications technology secured licensing agreements with Microsoft, Apple, Compaq, Sharp, and JVC.

Approver is a document collaboration application launched by Jeffrey McManus, a former Yahoo developer. It lets you create or upload documents and request feedback on them. It’s a rather simple but useful application.

The sign up process is short. Once you verify your email and login, you are taken to a simple “My Documents” page. From this page, you can create or upload a new document.

Once you create a document, Approver requests you to list the email addresses of friends or colleagues you would like to share the document with as shown below. You can either have a friend or colleague review a document or approve it. Approver also lets you choose whether to allow the friend or colleague to edit the document.

Approver then gives you the option to set a deadline for the document. You can also add comments to the document. Once you save the document, the collaborators are sent an email alert. If you request a review of a document, all the reviewer can do is look over the document and comment on it. If you request an approval of a document, the approver can simply select “approve document” once they approve of it. If you give a reviewer or approver editing capabilities, they can make changes to your document.

I did catch a few bugs in the system. Unfortunately, I was not able to review all the collaborative mechanics of Approver because of a database error. I would have really liked to see how one approves and edits a document.

To create more then one document, you must become a paid member. A premium account is $5.95 a month or $39.95 a year. With a premium account, you can create and share up to 50 documents at one time and invite up to 50 people at a time to review your documents.

All in all, I like Approver. I do think its pay model may be problematic. Writely is a more evolved document collaboration platform that’s completely free. But the collaborative features on Approver do stand out. Its ease of use also stands out. I’ll be sure to keep my eyes Approver.

Here is a failure warning list for the good of Web 2.0 entrepreneurs everywhere. It’s inevitable that most startups will in fact fail. But as long as you create a website people find useful, you should be okay. Just stop creating those damn MySpace widgets.
Your startup may be failing if:

1. You saw how much Kiko sold for on eBay and are considering following in their footsteps.

2. You have 100 users after 3 months of launch and most of them are your friends who were asked to join by force.

3. VCs are not getting back to your emails and phone calls. In my experience, VCs are generally willing to look at a business plan and respond to emails and phone calls but only if they see value in your startup. If every VC you contact ignores you, there is definitely something wrong.

4. No one has blogged about your startup. Bloggers are a powerful source of information on Web 2.0. If they do not see any use for your website, they will not write about it. And if no one writes about it, no one hears about it.

5. You are considering using MySpace as a marketing medium to get your startup noticed. If your beautiful AJAX super social website is not getting noticed at all, MySpace is not going to help. It actually makes you look bad.

6. You constantly worry about your website’s useless Alexa rank and think up creative ways to drive it up.

7. When a similar competing startup launches, you lose sleep over it.

8. You start calling your startup a “project” instead of a company.

9. You do not have a business strategy beyond getting tons of users.

10. You realize that maybe you should have stayed in school instead of dropping out to create the next Facebook / MySpace / YouTube!

If you can think of some more warning signs, add them to your comments below so we can create the web’s biggest Web 2.0 startup failure warning signs list!

Yahoo! Hack Day is an event where any developer can participate in a 24 hour event that begins on September 29, 2006. There is room for 500 hackers and 100 total projects. People attending Hack Day can camp out at the Yahoo! headquarters.

The coding ends at 2:30PM on Saturday, September 30. Every team then pitches their demos to the judge panel. There will be a musical performance by a special unannounced guest as well.

There will be speakers with a strong background on web applications as well such as Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP), Andy Baio and Gordon Luk (co-founders of Upcoming.org), Cal Henderson (engineering manager of Flickr.com), and a keynote by Bradley Horowitz (head of product strategy of Yahoo!)

SEraja Technologies Pvt. Ltd. is a company that focuses on the aspects of the event management capabilities of the Web. SEraja addresses the new challenge of the web which is finding ways on how to manage the library of information that is available on the Internet. “The company was founded on the idea of setting up a revolutionary, experience-based site with events as the pivotal theme.” [company.seraja.com]

With the technical-arm of SEraja based in Bangalore and a part of the management team based in California, SEraja is a microcosm of what the United States as a whole is doing to utilize the low-cost/high technology strength in India. The features of SEraja includes the ability to upload and host media into user-created events, comment and tagging events, bookmarking, and setting alerts for upcoming events. Profiles can be linked to each other by similar interests as well.

In order to keep up with a wireless world, SEraja launched their mobile features of their service which allows users to access event information in searchable cities. Just point your phone browser to m.seraja.com and start browsing.

SEraja’s management team includes:
Ramesh Jain – Chairman – Currently a professor at the Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Ramesh Jain is formely a professor at the visual information systems labs at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and the University of california, San Diego. Ramesh jain has also founded the companies PRAJA Inc, Virage, and ImageWare, Inc.

Rajesh Jain – Vice-Chairman – Also servers as the Managing Director of Mumbai-based Netcore Solutions, Pvt Ltd. Rajesh also launched IndiaWorld, which was a collection of Indian-centric websites, (Khel.com, Khoj.com, etc) which sold to Satyam Infoway as one of Asia’s biggest Internet acquisitions.

Arun Katiyar – CEO – Worked as a Journalist and Editor with the India Today Group and was the founder and COO of India Today Group’s online venture. Arun has also worked on various projects with Indya.com, Radio City India, and Microland Limited

TheSpringBox is a product which are widgets that you can download to your desktop and even “dock” it to the side while it retrieves your RSS feeds, NFL GameTrax, works as a clock and weather reporter. You can embed these into websites as well.

Once you download the feeder to your desktop, you can click on several of the sample feeds on TheSpringBox homepage to test it out. Here are a couple of websites that have “widgetized” TheSpringBox product:

http://cleaningupmylife.blogspot.com/
http://foulpudding.multiply.com/

Also here is a sample of what TheSpringBox would look like on your desktop:

[edit: After looking a little bit more into this product, I discovered a post on Mashable saying that this product is being developed by Fox Interactive Media, which is a child company of News Corp., the company that also owns MySpace]