Aside from signing contracts, Tractis also provides a database of contract templates which anyone can save to their account and use for free. Right now you’ll find non-disclosure agreements, design service agreements, and contracts for the selling of goods. (Goodbye lawyers!) But where do these contacts come from? The answer is other Tractis users. In your account, you can create contract templates and make them publicly available for others to use. This is a great idea and I definitely see the value in it, however, I can’t help but feel uneasy knowing they are from users that are likely not lawyers. (Lawyers, come back!) On the plus side, templates are open for all to edit, rate, and comment on. Also, Tractis plans to roll out a reputation system in the next few months that would allow users to rank other Tractis users, according to Business 2.0 Magazine.

Additionally, Tractis is a collaborative environment for your contracts. Invite your whole team and the people you are sending contacts to. Start a contract from scratch or from a template, make changes, revert to older versions, and add comments. When you’re done preparing the contract, invite your client to review and digitally sign. If the client isn’t in agreement, you can discuss and edit the contract right then and there with them. One thing to keep in mind is the person signing the contract will need a Tractis account. This is said to be for identity protection reasons, but I’d personally prefer sending a contract to anyone, whether they have an account or not. Also, as of now, each digital signature will cost you 1 Euro, so be sure to increase your balance before sending off a contract to a client.

What’s more important, are contracts sent using Tractis legally binding? Even now I have clients questioning the legality of signing a document over EchoSign, even though E-Signatures were legalized in the year 2000 (see, E-Signature Act). I will admit the concept does seem questionable, but Tractis does guarantee that contracts are not only legally binding, but valid worldwide. At the same time, it’s hard to trust a guarantee when pages like contact, about, and terms of use are missing from the website. (I believe the content did exist during the private beta, but seem to have disappeared at public launch – oops!) Let’s hope they get that fixed quick! (Update: I’ve spoken with David Blanco, founder of Tractis, and have been told that they are working on new content and translated versions for the website.)

Working with Tractis is much like typing a document in a web-based word processor, or a contract focused Writeboard with basic contact management. You create and edit contracts in a WYSIWYG editor, invite users to collaborate, and eventually save for signing. And this works great, except my biggest complaint is that you cannot upload existing contracts that you might have, something that EchoSign does very well. Tractis also lets you create groups of people, find new people on Tractis, download vCards, and add people to your team. And what would a collaborative application be without being able to customize your interface to match your company? Nothing too fancy – you can change colors and replace the Tractis logo with your company logo.

As I brought up earlier, Tractis also allows you to create templates which can be used to start off new contracts. You can browse the public database of templates, edit as needed, and add them to your account for easy access. Very helpful, but they are no more than basic documents of legal agreement containing filler spaces and strings like “(Your Company Name).” They work fairly well, but one slight annoyance is having to replace thirty or so “(Your Company Name)” tags in a template by hand. The templates would be much more useful if there was a way to somehow mass replace a string with a new value, or perhaps create a custom markup or generate a form that fills in the information for you. Either way, the templates do save a lot of time, not to mention possible lawyer fees.

Signing a contract with Tractis is a bit more involved than using a service like EchoSign, but Tractis has decided to take extra measures to verify the identity of a signer. When signing a contract with Tractis, you are to provide a digital certificate. Now, to be honest, I don’t expect the average person to have a digital certificate, let alone know what one is. So, for those of you who don’t know what a digital certificate is, it’s an electronic document issued by a certificate authority that basically contains some data proving you are who you say you are. As of now, Tractis is only accepting digital certificates issued by a group of pre-selected Spanish certificate authorities, but plan to connect with more authorities wordwide as they go. (Current accepted authorities – translated by Google) Because of these measures, Tractis can confirm the identity of you and the signer and offer their planned services of micro-insurance and dispute resolution. (Certainly a huge task) Once you’ve got a certificate, you’re set to continue to the next hurdle of having Java 1.6 installed on your machine which allows Tractis to upload and verify your certificate. Sorry Mac users, you can’t sign because Mac’s latest Java version is 1.42 – unfortunate, I know.

Once you get passed having a digital certificate and Java 1.6 on your machine, you can finally sign a contract. It’s all simple from here on and you just have to check the box stating that you agree and click sign. It verifies the form and submits your signature and lets contract participants know. I feel the whole process of signing a contract may be a bit much for the average person, but it certainly does add a sense of trust and security to the signing, which is exactly what Tractis was aiming to do in making e-commerce more safe. Although, I’m not sure I’d want a client of mine to go through all of that. Fortunately, I’ve been told that there are plans for additional methods of authentication and signing, including “Accept/Clickwrap” agreements, but will strongly recommend the use of digital certificates.

Even though Tractis is out of private beta and officially launched for Spain today, they still have a ton of work ahead of them. I expect it will be a while until Tractis is available for U.S. users, but I definitely look forward to using Tractis when it becomes available. What I like most is the public database of templates and the ability to collaboratively edit a contract before making an agreement, features Tractis’ competitors do not have. I don’t necessarily trust the public templates just yet, but they are nice to have around as reference and to act as a starting point. I also found the signing process to be a bit much for my line of work (creative services), although my opinion on that would change if “Accept/Clickwrap” agreements are implemented. I just wouldn’t want to have my clients create an account on Tractis just to sign a contract and then have to deal with providing a digital certificate. I do, however, see the value in requiring digital certificates when handling large transactions, such as buying a car from a random user on eBay. In all, I feel Tractis is building an impressive service and I hope to use it when it’s ready worldwide. Until then, I’ll stick with EchoSign and the old-fashioned way of signing contracts (pen and paper).

Getting started with MyMileMarker is as simple as creating an account (OpenID support) and listing each vehicle that want to track. MyMileMarker then creates individual pages for each vehicle where you can log your mileage and view your history. You are also able to record your mileage on a mobile phone using MyMileMarkers mobile friendly website or Twitter, enabling you to access your account from any location. Adding a record with the mobile interface works much like the browser-based version, but if you are a Twitter user, you can very quickly log your mileage by sending a one-line Twitter message. Just add the official MyMileMarker Twitter user as a friend and send a direct message in the format, “D mymm [miles] [gallons] [price]“, and MyMileMarker will handle the rest – even make a guess at which car you filled up based on the mileage you entered.

When adding an entry, MyMileMarker requires that you fill in your vehicles current mileage, the amount of fuel you filled it up with, and the cost of fuel per gallon. There are also a few optional questions that MyMileMarker asks so it knows when you last changed your oil and filled your tank. Furthermore, MyMileMarker is location based, so when filling in your information, it will either ask for either miles and gallons or kilometers and liters depending on where you’re from. You can pick your location in the account settings area. Lastly, be sure the information you enter is correct the first time because you can only remove the latest record from your history. In other words, if you make a mistake three records back, you will have to remove the last three records and add them back again just to correct the one entry. (Feature request: edit past entries!)

After logging your mileage a few times, MyMileMarker will begin to show graphs and make projections based on the mileage and fuel costs that you have entered. It will try and project the amount of miles your car will have and how much you may spend by the end of the year (or any set date). It will also show line graphs plotting your miles per gallon (MPG) and total vehicle miles helping you learn about your fuel economy. Additionally, MyMileMarker estimates your vehicles overall MPG and allows you to view your entire vehicle history. Sadly, I could not find any method of exporting my vehicles history.

MyMileMarker is off to a good start. What I like most is that you only record your mileage after filling up your vehicle, unlike many services which have you record your mileage every time you drive. It’s also nice being able to log your mileage from anywhere using a mobile phone. Additionally, I found MyMileMarker’s projections of year end costs and mileage to be useful and a real eye-opener. There are a few things that I don’t like though. For starters, there’s no way of importing or exporting your vehicles history. It would save a lot of time if you could import a spreadsheet or some kind of CSV (comma separated values) file. Also, you can’t edit past entries and fixing a mistake involves deleting old records and adding them over again. Otherwise, I like MyMileMarker for its simplicity and accessibility and plan to continue using it.

The first, and probably most in depth section is the Friend’s Manager. This area allows you to talk with friends in the form of “Gabs”. You can assign Gabs to your friends and enable whether or not you wish to allow them to invite others to the Gab. It’s more or less of a simple flash messaging system. There’s also a “Email Alerts” option which will automatically inform you by email if: you get a new friend request, someone accepts your friend invitation, you’re included in a Gab, or if someone replies to an existing Gab. You get your usual User Profile to edit; name, birthday, picture, hobbies, location, etc. Additionally, they have added a section called “Exchange” which categorizes all types of hobbies and interests: Auto, Finance, Books, Games, Jobs and many others. In these categories, you can create mini threads so that you can share all your favorites interests with your friends. A five star rating system has been implemented so that you and your friends can vote on what things are cool, and what things are not. You can sort them by name, date, friend or rating, as well as add “Opinions”, which are just comments on your Exchange items. If you want to, they’ve also added a print feature for the User Opinions. It reminded me of Delicious Library, a simple application for Mac users to categorize their interests in their own libraries.

SnapPages also includes a Photo Manager application allowing you to organize your screen shots and miscellaneous pictures. To start, you can create an “Album” to import your photos and other pictures. Each album can be set to public, private, secure, or friend-only. Secure requires for you to input a password to access it, the others have permission according to their name. You can add tags to the photos to help organize them for later use. While in your albums area, you can enlarge your photos by using the slider found in the upper right corner. They have included a mild photo editing section in the Photo Manager where you can rotate, crop, and/or adjust brightness. They have a few others setting to revise the lighting and other effects, but there isn’t many option currently right now. If you’re looking for some more in-depth online flash photo editing, head over to Picnik. You able to share your photo galleries with friends by selecting the particular album that you want to share and adding recipients along with an optional message. Lastly, there’s the download feature that simply let’s you download any of the photos you have in any of your albums.

The last section of SnapPages is the Calendar Manager. Each calendar that you create acts identical to the Photo Manager’s Albums in regards to their property settings: private, public, secure, and friends-only. You can color coordinate new calendars when you create them as well as changing their format from the normal month calendar, to a weekly or daily calendar format. You can add events to your calendars which will require you to specify a time, a place, and any further details you need for the events. They also give you the option to input a URL to an online map if you find it necessary for the event. You also can define whether your event is a repeating affair. If so, you can input the time span it repeats: day, week, month, or year. You can also add notifications to each event, which sends you a reminder prior to the actual event. They also give you the ability to add tasks to your calendars and set exact due dates for each project. Like I mentioned, they have the Share option just like the Photo Manager if you desire to collaborate or share certain calendars with friends. They’ve included a nice RSS feature which allows you to subscribe to your friend’s calendars and see their past and upcoming events. Overall, the Calendar Manager is a nice simple way of helping to keep yourself on track for things you need to get done. It’s not nearly as in-depth as something like Google’s Calendar, however for the average person, it’ll suffice just fine.

To be honest, I liked SnapPages. Though it didn’t bring anything incredibly new to the table, it laid out all the old stuff neatly and thoroughly. Since it was created in Flash, the animation helped give it a nice touch of fluency. Give it a try, it was fun to play around in it. They plan on continuously adding new features to SnapPages, so we can only hope for the best.

If you’re looking for a financial application with all the usual Web 2.0 design elements, BudgetPulse may be the service for you. You’ve got your gradients and reflections, Ajax calls with every action, and of course, neat JavaScript slider effects. I can’t say I’m a fan of applications that over do it with Ajax, but enough about that and let’s get started. Logging in to BudgetPulse will direct you to the Dashboard showing a brief overview of your financial situation. You can see each of your accounts and their balances on the left as well as upcoming expenses and expense categories that are close to going over budget in the middle. BudgetPulse also aggregates financial news from top financial news sources like Google and Yahoo! which can help you plan your spending and budgets accordingly. You can also search through all of your transactions using the search form on the right column.

To get an account up and running, head over to the accounts area in the tracking section. You can add an account and set its opening balance, then start adding expenses, sources of income, and recurring payments like bills. BudgetPulse also allows you to make a money transfer from one account to another like real banking. Additionally, you can categorize each transaction you add to an account so BudgetPulse can later group the transactions and base them against your budget goals. Expect to type out the category every time you add a transaction though as BudgetPulse does not pre-populate your list of your categories for you.

As you’ve probably guessed, BudgetPulse helps you create and track budgets on the expenses your make. It groups up each expense by the categories you create and allows you to set a specific budget amount to an expense category. So, for example, if I were to add a couple transactions with the category, “entertainment”, BudgetPulse will show that category in the budgets area and allow me to set a budget amount to it. It will then display a simple bar that compares how much I have actually spent on entertainment and what I have budgeted. At default, it bases the data on a months time, but you can set a date range at the top.

After getting some data into BudgetPulse, you can view charts and summaries on your financial activity. The charts are especially useful because just seeing your expenses visually can be a real eye-opener and help you better plan for the future. There are three different charts: Expense allocation (pie chart), monthly expenses shown by day (line graph), and monthly expenses shown by month (bar graph). The BudgetPulse summary section allows you to view each transaction category and narrow down into each category showing totals of the last four months and the overall difference of your income and expenses.

With many other personal finance services out there, where does BudgetPulse stand? BudgetPulse offers a nice set of features, though I found the interface a bit clunky and ran into some small bugs here and there (mostly when submitting a form with invalid information or nothing at all). However, I did like the ability to quickly search through all of my transactions. I also liked the summary overview and the budgets area where you can assign budget amounts to specific categories of transactions. On the down side, you cannot export or import data, but that’s said to be in development for BudgetPulse’s public beta, along with other features like a calendar, mobile access, and SSL encryption. As it stands, I’m going to continue using my favorite money manager for the mac, Cha-Ching, but I am interested in seeing the public beta release of BudgetPulse. I have noticed some changes to BudgetPulse since I first started testing too, which is always a good sign.

In related news: check out Expensr, a social expense tracking application reviewed by Webware. Also keep an eye out for Mint, a personal finance service that’s been generating some buzz lately.

Cashboard has four main areas: Estimates, Projects, Timesheets, and Accounting. Let’s start things off in the estimates area. This is where you go when you need to send an estimate to a potential client for a project. Cashboard allows you to list each task for a project estimate, set with a hourly rate or flat fee, and send the estimate to your potential client. What’s also nice is the ability to add a best and worst case estimate for each task so the client has an idea of possible overhead. Cashboard then allows you to either have your client login to Cashboard’s client area and accept the agreement or let you print out the estimate and send it to your client.

(Note: figures in the screenshots are just test numbers)

The projects area is the main area of Cashboard and is where you will spend most of your time. Like the Estimates page, you can add and remove tasks and reorder as needed. You and your employees can also log time for a specific task in the task overview. Cashboard also made it very easy for you to keep on top of costs as you add time to tasks. A row will appear stating the billable hours and amount compared to the original estimates or planned hours, which is very helpful for service-oriented businesses. It’s also important to note that when you create your company, you fill in a default hourly rate, but the hourly rate for each employee can be changed on a per project basis in the details area of a project. Cashboard will spot the difference and show your clients the totals based on the company hourly rate while you can view totals based on the company rate and employee rate.

You and your employees can also log their time in the Timesheets area. I’ve tested many time tracking products and I must say Cashboard has done a pretty good job with it. What I like is that it doesn’t force you to track your time a certain way. You can submit time on a daily basis adding the hours you worked for the day manually or using their stopwatch counter. Or you can go into the weekly tab and fill in the amount of hours you worked each day of the week at the end of the week. You can also submit as you go in the “All-time” tab. Whichever way works best for your team, you can do. The only problem I have with the Timesheets page is that the stopwatch counter cuts off when you close the window (maybe adding a simple session when the counter starts would solve this).

The project page also allows you to create invoices from your company’s logged time. Just click, “Create Invoice,” and it will automatically grab the amount of hours each employee has worked and fill in the information for the invoice. You can also add your own items to the invoice manually so anything that wasn’t in the original task list can get invoiced. Cashboard also lets you change the invoice id, sales tax, date range, and add a small note to your invoice. When your invoice is good and ready, send it to your client with Cashboard, which will give your client a login to review it, or print it out to mail to your client. Once you receive the payment from your client, head to the invoice, click “Add Payment” and fill in the amount the client paid up. To close an invoice, just mark the invoice as “paid in full” when adding a payment.

Ok. You’ve created estimates, projects, and invoices. Now you’re ready to view the Accounting area. It’s no QuickBooks, but it covers recent invoices, recent payments, and provides helpful information about client balances and net profits. Perhaps my favorite section of the invoicing page is “Company Cash Stats” which shows totals each employee of your team has made and how much you received from invoices with the end net profit. The cash stats can also be found in an individual project page letting you see how much profit your company actually took in after paying your employees for time on a project. Another helpful section is “Account Balances” which lists each client with collected information on invoices and payments giving you a quick glance at who’s on top of payments and who’s not. My only complaint about the accounting section is that there doesn’t appear to be a way to export the data or print it out.

In all, Cashboard seems to be a helpful product for service-oriented businesses. It’s a well thought out product that was obviously created by people in the design and development industry. You can create estimates, manage projects, manage timesheets from company employees and subcontractors, send off invoices to clients, review company payments and more. I was a bit overwhelmed at first and had some confusion when invoicing clients and splitting employee earnings (figured this out after adding employee hourly rates), but the rest came without problem. It’s also worth mentioning that Cashboard has a Mac Dashboard widget for submitting time and that Basecamp users can sync tasks and use projects from Basecamp.

Cashboard is currently in its alpha stage and offers plans ranging from free to $40 per month. However, and take note, the pricing page states prices are at half price during it’s alpha stage and that pre-launch users will get a promotion code for two free months once the alpha stage has completed.

BillQ works much like your average task reminder service. The main difference being that rather then receiving notifications of tasks, you receive notifications for your un-paid bills. You simply add your bills with the payee name, amount to be paid, and repeat date (if any). The bill will then be added to your account and will show up when the payment due date is near as well as email you or send an SMS to your phone so you won’t miss any deadlines. Your only task is to pay the bill and mark the bill as paid in your BillQ account.

BillQ is also helpful for managing bills involving multiple people. To get started, head to the Groups section and create new groups of people that are to take part in specific bills. Then, when adding bills to your account, select a group and you will be able to assign a payment amount for each person of the group. Each person in the group will then receive their own accounts letting them login and check off that they have paid their part of the bill.

Overall, I like BillQ because it’s a service that many people actually need. I’ll admit, there have been times that I’ve forgotten about a bill up to the last minute and hopefully by using BillQ, I will never have that problem again.

Solution Watch has been accepted to BlogBurst not too long ago and I have been anticipating it’s launch ever since. The time has finally come and it was time to wait to see results. A few days later, and after I wrote a couple posts here at Solution Watch, I logged into the BlogBurst Workbench and was pleased to see some statistics beginning to appear. Nothing major yet, but I felt I should share some of my statistics with you, along with describing how BlogBurst works for bloggers.

BlogBurst is a content syndication service and if your blog has been accepted, you will find your blog and your posts in the Workbench area. Your blog is then categorized and your posts are grabbed from your supplied feed and indexed so anyone can easily search and view your content – this means BlogBurst members and mainstream publishers. As a member, you may also upload a logo and description for your blog, as well as additional information that you feel is worth mentioning, possibly for a publisher to see. Now, take a look at the above screenshot. This is an example of one of my posts in the workbench area. My blogs basic information is provided at the top and an article preview right below it containing my post in the format that it would be seen on a publishers site. As you can see, my blogs logo and description is placed above the actual post and there is also a permanent link to my post at the bottom.

(BlogBurst Preview – Directs to External Document)

Publishers are given editorial management tools to help them filter content according to their needs. If they find content, they can then select it and append it to certain areas of their website using simple Javascript or SOAP or XML API’s, in turn providing their readers with more content. Above is an example of what you may see on a publishers site. This is only an example provided by BlogBurst, but I’m sure you can get a grasp of how it works. Some more examples: BlogBurst Content Preview, SF Gate Travel (middle column), and Houston Chronicle’s Technology (bottom right).

Now that you have a basic idea on how BlogBurst works, lets take a look at some statistics. As of now, BlogBurst does not provide the richest of details but only the basics. You can view graphs on headline impressions, post views, and unique visitors as well as view what posts have been selected by a publisher and statistics for each. The first screenshot above shows my headline impressions, meaning how many times in a day a post of mine has been viewed. As you can see, the numbers are not all that large with my highest count at 15 impressions for one day, but they are results which I am pleased to see knowing BlogBurst has only recently launched.

You can see some more statistics looking at this next screenshot of the Posts and Publishers section which shows each post that made it to a publisher along with headline views, post views, and unique visits. I still don’t quite understand what they mean by unique visits yet because I can’t find any documentation on it, but I would it assume it is either unique post views/visits or unique visits to your site. I am going to assume unique post views on the publishers site though as I have not found a trace of a publisher in my blogs referral logs yet, although that could just be a mistake on my part. With numbers at that size, I don’t expect to receive any visits to my blog, but I do expect they will come soon as this is only the beginning.

Still looking at the above screenshot of Posts and Publishers, you will notice is says “Coming Soon” in the publishers area and I have read in the BlogBurst Blog that they are collecting the data, but they just need to present it. Now, this is the real area of interest that I have. Sure, the other details are nice, but what I really want to see is where my posts are being published. Personally, it isn’t really the statistics that gets to me with BlogBurst. It’s knowing that something I wrote can be seen on a mainstream media site and I would just love to see it myself. I want to be able to see each publisher that has listed my posts, what posts they used, where I can see them (the link to the actual article on the publisher site), and how many views they have received from the publishers site. Of course, the more statistics the merrier, but those are the main ones that I would like and hopefully the BlogBurst team is developing something along those lines.

Overall, I am pretty excited about BlogBurst and like what I am seeing. I expect to see an increase in headline views as the service grows and hopefully it will bring some traffic to my blog as well. I will stick with the service and see how things go. But enough about me, what is your say? Do you like the idea of BlogBurst providing your content to publishers? Why or why not? I personally see mostly positive traits, although there are some low points that I have seen brought up, which some I can agree with while others just don’t concern me. Good traits: BlogBurst gives my voice more exposure; Credit is clearly given with my logo, description, and link back to my blog which can send traffic to my blog; It has been said there will be some kind of compensation in the future for bloggers; It’s just great knowing something I have written has been seen on a major online publisher site. Negative traits for some: You cannot embed ads in your posts (although I’d assume you can provide a different feed without the ads); Mainstream Publishers may hinder search engine rankings for your posts because their sites may have higher PR (page rank); Others feel that BlogBurst may rip them off by not paying bloggers (biggest concern for most because publishers pay a fee for content and some feel exposure is not enough in turn for providing the content). Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments if you have any other concerns as I am interested in hearing your thoughts.

View BlogBurst Blog Syndication Network.

(Directs you to results for “XBox 360″)

Why should you use Gumshoo? I personally don’t shop on eBay a lot, but after making a few searches, I immediately found the service very helpful, easy, and informative. It was also comforting to read that one of the guys behind Gumshoo used to work for eBay as well. Gumshoo has a very clean interface for searching and viewing of results. Just enter a few keywords and Gumshoo will filter out junk and find possible misspelled results. The results are layed out in a nicely organized page and in my opinion, it is easier to look through then eBay. You will also notice that when you make a search, it detects possible misspelled items. What is nice is that these items aren’t going to get mixed within the other results, but they will be split into its own area on the bottom of the page making it easy for you to view. So, I’m happy with the results. Everything is nice and clear and the results are accurate on my search term. But, how do I know these items are safe? This is where the Gumshoo listing analyzer and alerts kicks in.

(Opens a larger image of the above)

When you view an item from Gumshoo’s results, it will notify you of any alerts using their listing analyzer. You view an item just like you would eBay, but this time it will show a bar at the top of the page. When first opening the page, it will say that it is analyzing the data. Once it finishes, it will show four icons and inform you of any potential troubles. Clicking on the alert area will slide down the bar showing you more details, like you see in the above screenshot. This is where things got really interesting, and of course, helpful. It will give you alerts about seller’s having more then average negative feedback, shipping charges more then average for the item, warnings of keywords that are common in scams that appear in the item you are looking at, location alerts on items being in foreign countries, and more. For example, I was looking at an iPod and it brought up an alert saying that the keywords, “western union,” were found in the item description and said that the keywords are often found in fraudulent or misleading listings. Now, tips such as these don’t mean to immediately skip the item and look for another one. It alerts you of possible problems and just means that you should take a good look and make sure of everything before making an order.

Gumshoo also has some other helpful features. As I said, it filters out junk listing. But what exactly are these junk listings? Gumshoo says that junk listings are the results from ebay that are “Work at home scams, ‘FREE iPods’, information only listings, and others.” They simply look for the most common one and hide them so you don’t have to look through them. Another filter that I found interesting was the accessory filter. This is quite helpful and simply, when checking the box to exclude accessories, it will ignore items that come up as accessories for your search. For example, if you are to search for an iPod, you will not see iPod car chargers with the hiding of accessories, just the iPod’s themselves. You will also notice that Gumshoo saves your search terms, accessible on the main page and when you search, so you can easily refer back to them at a later date.

Overall, I find Gumshoo to be very helpful and I will, without doubt, be using this service for shopping on eBay. You may also be wondering how they profit from the service. Gumshoo is a registered eBay affiliate, meaning that they get paid when someone is to make a bid from Gumshoo. So, really it is a win-win. Gumshoo helps you find items and you help them by using their service. Also, as many services do these days, they use Google Advertisements around the site. There were some minor issues here and there, but for the most part, everything worked great. I did notice that the service doesn’t work in Safari when viewing an item, which definitely is a concern and I would hope that they will get it working for Safari. Something else that I thought would be great to see is if an alert comes up for possible fraud phrases, that Gumshoo highlight the phrases in the lower frame, if possible. I would imagine some javascript trickery would pull it off. But other than that, I am really happy with what they have to offer. Give Gumshoo a try and let me know what you think.

View Gumshoo – eBay shopping made safer.

The main Shoposphere page shows the most recently created and most popular Pick Lists. But what is a Pick List? Pick Lists are like social shopping carts, if you will. You can add products to a list and share your opinions about each product. You can keep track of your experience with every product, email your Pick Lists to friends and family, and also view other member Pick Lists. To get started, simply login to your Yahoo! account, go to the shopping page, find a product, and select, “Save to My Lists.” Then select “Create a New List” and start adding products to your new list. If you have a great list, like Mike’s Web 2.0 Gadgets list (hah, right), you may be lucky to get your Pick List into the most popular listing.

What I liked was that you can add a product from any location in Yahoo! Shopping. As you pull up a listing of products, you will see a little link that says, “Save to My Lists.” When you click on this, it will drop down a menu of your lists and then you simply select the list you want to add the product to. I do like this, but I do not like how it will direct you to the list page itself and then have you navigate back to the previous page again. This is where Ajax would have really worked out nicely.

Is that all? Where is the tagging? Since we create lists, do we get any revenue share from it? According to TechCrunch, these features are on there way! You will soon be able to tag your own Pick Lists and then users can tag them as well. It is also said that Yahoo does expect to gather some traffic from Pick Lists and is planning to share some of their revenue streams with Pick List publishers. This will definitely help in getting people to create their own Pick Lists and also bring in some focus to products at Yahoo! Shopping. I personally feel this is a great move by Yahoo and especially with Christmas near. This will definitely help with my Christmas List this year!

View Yahoo! Shoposphere.

Podcasters can signup to the service for free, add your podcast to the podcast directory, and then simply change your feed to point to your new Fruitcast RSS feed. Fruitcast will then stick a small 10 to 15 second long advertisement message that is simple and unobtrusive to the beginning or end of your podcast (possibly both). When your podcast gets listened to, you will then earn money from an advertiser that has been accepted to place an ad on your podcast. The amount that you will get is determined by the advertisers bidding on your podcast with a starting bid of $0.10 cents. So far, I have seen ranges from $0.10 cents to $0.25 cents per download, which is an excellent range considering that if you have nice amount of listeners, you can generate a steady cashflow. Fruitcast gives the following as an example, “$0.25 per episode × 500 listeners × 10 episodes per month × 12 months in a year = $15,000 annually.” That is an excellent amount and it is even better knowing that you earn it from your podcasts.

Advertisers: Podcasting is growing fast and is full of daily listeners. Imagine knowing that when someone plays a podcast, the first thing they are to hear is a 15 second message about your company. Not only knowing that it is on a podcast, but with Fruitcasts targeted advertising, you will know that your company is being heard by a podcast that relates to your company. You have the ability to actually find a podcast and bid for your ad placement on the price per download. The way it works, and from what I got from James, is that advertisers will be placed in an advertising queue for each podcast. When you create an advertisement, you will be asked for your maximum daily budget for that ad. When you make a bid on a podcast and you are the highest bidder, you will be the first advertisement to run until your maximum daily budget is reached. Once the budget is reached, the next advertiser (the lower bidder) will then get its turn for their ad to run, and so on.

When you signup as a podcaster, your podcast will get added to the Fruitcast podcast directory. You will see the podcast categories listed on the left and on the right you will see the most popular (most download) podcasts. You are able to choose what category your podcast gets placed in when you add your podcast and you will be listed using the title and description (about the size of a small paragraph) that you provided. When your name is clicked, it will then direct the user to your details page.

Your details page is where things start to get interesting. You will see basic information about the podcast and a url to the Podcasts RSS feed, provided by Fruitcast. You will also see a listing of the episodes that the podcaster has published along with information for the size, the date it was published, and how many downloads each episode has received. But even more interestingly is that if you are signed up to Fruitcast and you are an advertiser, it will tell you if you have an advertisement that is approved to play on the podcast. If your advertisements is approved to advertise on the podcast, then you will be able to place a bid on it in the amount of price per download. As mentioned earlier, there can be multiple bidders and the advertiser with the highest bid will get placed on the top of the advertisement queue.

Now that you have a basic understanding of Fruitcast works, signup and start podcasting or advertising! Fruitcast makes it extremely simple. When you login and go to the manage page, it will ask if you want to add a podcast or add an advertisement. Adding your podcast is as simple as filling in a form with the title, category, description, and your RSS feed to the podcast itself. Fruitcast will then use your RSS feed and turn it into its own and provide you with the new RSS feed that you use to earn money. If you have signed up to Fruitcast to advertise, you will fill out a form asking for your ad’s name, audio file, description, and the maximum daily budget. What else is great is that if you do not have an audio file for your podcast, you can contact Fruitcast and they will get you intouch with a voice over artist that will produce a professionally recorded advertisement. Once you submit, you just wait for your ad to get approved and your ready to get bidding.

Fruitcast looks great for both podcasters and advertisers. It makes it extremely easy for anyone to get started and even provides tips on how to start podcasting. It is about time that there is a good service that podcasters can go to for making some cash out of what they love to do.

If you were wondering, the beautiful design for Fruitcast was designed by Joseph Wain of Pen & Think. And don’t forget about they company behind Fruitcast, Forty Media, who has done an excellent job.

View Fruitcast: Making podcasting even sweeter.