Kevin Rose’s new company, Megatechtronium, launched Pownce yesterday. It was rumored to be a new instant messaging client, but I’m not too sure if that’s a good term for it. I see it more as a combination of Twitter and Tumblr. Pownce allows you to communicate with friends much like you would with Twitter, but it also allows you to send special messages in the form of links, files, and events. There’s also strong group messaging features which enables you to send messages to a single friend, a group of friends, or all Pownce users.

Pownce comes in two flavors: Web and Adobe AIR application. We’ll take a look at both, but you’re free to use whichever one you’d like. The web interface has a similar structure to Twitter. You will find a list of all your friends on the left, a form in the middle for posting messages, and past messages right below the form. There’s also a list of filtering options on the right so you can narrow down on message type, messages in reply to you, and messages that you have sent. You can also find a settings area in which users can customize their profile with a custom blurb, a profile photo, and theme. (Four preset themes to choose from)

The stream of messages on your main profile page consists of public messages, private messages, and replies. Each message is formatted differently depending on its message type and shows additional information like how many replies have been made and who else can see the message. You can also navigate into an individual message to create a reply, rate the message, and view other replies from other Pownce users. You will also find a handy forwarding feature that lets you pass any message you come across to your own friends. And don’t forget about advertisements. Pownce offers a pro plan for $20/year which disables advertisements, but if you’re not pro, expect to find advertisements appear in the form of specially styled messages. To be honest, I wonder why Twitter hasn’t done the same because they really aren’t all that obtrusive.

Sending a message is very simple and can be done in either the web interface or Pownce application. As of now, users can send messages in the form of text, links, files, and events. Clicking on a message type that you want to send will dynamically change the form with the appropriate fields. For example, sending a link will let you fill in an address with a description; file lets you choose a file and write a description (also has a nice progress bar show as you upload); and when adding an event, you can fill in the what, when and where with a message. Unfortunately, you can only upload one file at a time (unless you make your own zip file) and you are limited to 10MB if you don’t have a pro account (pro can upload 100MB files).

Now let’s take a look at Pownce’s Adobe AIR based application. As mentioned earlier, Pownce lets you use either the web interface or Pownce AIR app, but you only get a small fraction of the features in the AIR app. You can add messages and view messages and that’s about it. The only real benefit of using the AIR app at this point is that it’s easier to keep open than a browser and you can quickly keep track of messages and add messages. Another thing I like is how each message is displayed in a collapsed format only to show the full message when you click it. This makes it easier to look through your list of messages and removes clutter. Otherwise, I found the application to be a little buggy at times (explains the alpha status). For instance, when using the scroll wheel, it would sometimes scroll in the opposite direction I would tell it. Also, when you add a friend, you have to quit the application and open it again for the drop down list of friends to update. Lastly, you see a flicker every time the list of most recent messages refreshes, which can be a bit distracting, but not a major issue.

To be honest, my first impression of Pownce was not good. During the first 30 minutes of testing, I thought to myself, “Did they really just hype up yet another twitter clone?” I was wrong. Pownce does feel like Twitter in many ways, but it’s much more structured and feature rich. Perhaps my favorite feature of Pownce is the ability to add replies to specific messages and then viewing all the replies in a threaded discussion. This becomes much more useful as you start having multiple private discussions and public discussions at the same time. I also found that messaging on Pownce just doesn’t feel the same as Twitter, which isn’t a bad thing. Twitter feels much more free-form where I can just say whatever is on my mind. But with Pownce, I feel I have to refrain from submitting multiple messages in a row and say something actually worth sharing.

Even though I’ve only had an account with Pownce since last night, I’m already finding it to be a great way to communicate with friends. It’s not too far off from your basic instant messenger, but the format in which messages are displayed and group messaging features makes it much more appealing. I can’t say I’d pay $20/year for it, but I must admit the pro badges look awfully nice. Unfortunately, Pownce is only accepting invitation-only registration at this time and I do not have any invites to hand out. You can find me on Pownce with the username, bbenzinger. Lastly, I owe thanks to Rafe Needleman for an invitation to Pownce. You can find his review of Pownce on Webware.

L8r is a new service that lets users create an email and have it delivered at a specific time in the future. It’s similar to the popular site FutureMe where anyone can write a simple letter to themselves or a friend and have that letter sent by email sometime in the future, for you know, fun. But what L8r has done is combined this idea of sending an email at a later date with email reminders and a focus on Getting Things Done. (Well, if I put it that way, it sounds more like a basic reminder service) L8r suggests using the service for things like sending out birthday emails, reminding yourself to buy flowers on your anniversary, setting personal goals, and impressing your boss by “sending” an email late at night.

Signing up with L8r will allow you to have three pending emails at any time for free, but if you need to send any more than that, it will cost you. You can purchase 10 emails for $1.99, 200 emails for $9.99, and 1,000 emails for $24.99. When you run out, you’ll be switched back to the free plan. Now, you may be wondering, why pay for L8r when you can send emails in the future with a service like FutureMe for free? Paid users of L8r get more features like file attachments, the ability to send HTML email, unlimited pending emails, and SSL security. L8r will also get rid of that annoying “sent later with l8r” message at the bottom of your messages.

What I like about L8r is that you can create email drafts and view pending and sent email in the messages area just like you would a normal email client. The benefit of this is that you can keep record of sent mail and fix any mistakes you have made in a pending email before it gets sent out. L8r will also send you an email when a message cannot be delivered and put it in the “undelivered” tab. This way, if you sent a message to an email address that doesn’t exist or if someone’s mail server is down, you can find out what email didn’t make it and send again. Another feature is the ability to send an email to more than one person. You just separate multiple email addresses with a comma in the “to” field and L8r will send to each recipient.

Even though L8r isn’t anything all that new when compared to email reminders (except that it sends up to five years in the future), I think it’s a pretty neat service. I can see it being helpful for people that use reminders in their daily workflow and need more than basic text messages. You can have three pending emails at any time for free and get extras like HTML mail, attachments, and SSL when you pay for more. Something L8r may also want to consider is allowing users to send recurring messages to themselves for repeating tasks and personal goals. I also ran into a couple minor problems. First, when editing an email, the time did not offset properly from its original set time. Also, when trying to buy more email credits, L8r directed me to a PayPal checkout for Netherlands users and I couldn’t make a purchase. (Maybe not such a minor problem) Otherwise, everything ran well and future emails that I sent out arrived on average 2-3 minutes after my set time.

As a last note, another service similar to L8r and FutureMe is FutureMail which allows you to send email in the future as a note or reminder to yourself. FutureMail also has this neat concept of a “FutureMail Blog” where you get a public stream of your future messages and an RSS feed to share with friends.

OpenTeams offers an interesting service that wants to reinvent the wiki. It’s designed to strengthen team collaboration and innovation while working on group projects, or as OpenTeams puts it, “initiatives”. Its interface is organized much like an email client so non-technical users immediately become familiar with the system and collaborate. But OpenTeams isn’t just limited to your usual wiki-style content. You can create outlines, attach files, discuss projects in message boards, and more.

When you sign up, OpenTeams assigns you to what they call a “space”, which is simply a group of other OpenTeams users. At default you may be assigned to two spaces: one being a “domain space” and another being an “invitation-only space”. When I signed up, OpenTeams created a space for every user that has solutionwatch.com in their email address. This allows me to collaborate with only users associated with Solution Watch. OpenTeams also assigned me to the space, “OpenTeams User Community,” which is an invitation-only space where every OpenTeams user can collaborate and share (or in its current state, test). I can also go ahead and create my own spaces and provide access to only the people I choose to invite.

Once you are in a space, OpenTeams allows you to collaborate with four main types of content: initiatives, cPages, briefings, and profiles. Strange naming, I know. I even ended up using the help section just to learn what each content type is for. As it turns out, they are just as they sound: initiatives are like folders used to keep groups of content related to a specific project together; a cPage is a basic collaborative page, or wiki page; briefings are groups of content similar to initiatives but organized in an outline form; and profiles are just user profiles that can be included in an initiative or outline.

To better understand how these content types come into play, let’s look over the interface. The interface is split into three panes. The first pane on the left is the OpenTeams navigator. The navigator provides a list of all initiatives and associated briefings, colleagues, and content tags. Each area of the navigator also allows you to associate documents to an initiative, colleague, or tag by simply dropping content on the respective area. The “List Viewer”, or middle pane, lists each relative content item and allows you to filter through all content on the site. The last pane, which is the content viewer, is where users can view a document, participate in threaded discussions, manage attachments, set tags, and even view the history of a document. It’s like a wiki, discussion board, and file manager in one.

OpenTeams allows you to add any of the four content types at any time and so getting started really depends on what you are wanting to accomplish. It’s flexible enough where you can just add content and later group the content into initiatives and outlines or the reverse for just about anything you want to share with your team. OpenTeams suggests you can even create internal blogs using initiatives with cPages, then using the List Viewer to sort the cPages by date. To get started, simply select a content type in the “fish-eye” menu at the top and create a new page. The content viewer will then minimize and a new window will appear that lets you fill in your page content and other metadata. You’ll notice OpenTeams also uses a rich text editor instead of the usual wiki markup making it easier for non-technical users to get in and collaborate.

One of my favorite features of OpenTeams is the briefing outline editor. If you have a group of cPages that you want to organize for your team, you can organize them in outline form with a briefing page making the content easier for everyone to grasp and view. OpenTeams explains that briefing pages can also be good for structuring content like slides in a presentations or listing sections in a table of contents. To use the briefing outline editor, just create a briefing and drag and drop pages into the content view. You can then indent each item you drop into the outline as needed. The editor also allows you to insert a “placeholder” item if you just want to add a simple one-liner. When the page is done, you can also drag it in an initiative folder and it will appear in the “Quick Nav Favorites” on the navigator pane.

Another great thing about OpenTeams is that every page you create gets its own discussion area, file manager, history overview, and tag cloud. What’s nice about this is that it lets you continue collaborating with users in a specific page without having to edit the original content of a page like you would a normal wiki. It also saves you from having to send emails to your team by instead using the discussion area. You can even add images and other files in a pages file manager keeping all information related to a page together.

The last thing I want to talk about is OpenTeams unique billing model. First off, OpenTeams is not free, but they do give you $42 dollars in credit to start out with. The way it works is simple, and at first it may sound pricey, but it really isn’t. OpenTeams charges 99 cents per user-login a day. So, if you were to login ten times in a given month, it would cost less than $10 dollars for that month. This way, you only get charged when you actually use the service. OpenTeams also caps the cost to $16/person a month. Additionally, if you were to stop paying for the service, you are still allowed to access your spaces, but you cannot add or edit the content.

OpenTeams is an impressive service, but is it better than a normal wiki? Yes and no. It really depends on what you need. OpenTeams’ high point is adding structure to a wiki. If you need to organize pages into folders, create outlines, track files, and work with a group of users, OpenTeams is definitely worth checking out. Otherwise, if you all you are looking for is a simple way to work collaboratively on documents, I’d say stick with a free service like Wikispaces or Google Docs.

BudgetPulse is a new financial management service in closed beta that aims to simplify the way you manage your money and track budgets. It allows you to manage multiple accounts and track income, expenses, assets, bills, and more. Additionally, BudgetPulse lets you set goals which assists you in tracking and recording how much money you spend over certain durations of time. (weeks, months, years, etc.)

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.

Looking for a writeboard on steroids? Coventi is that candidate. Coventi is a writing application for the web that offers a wide variety of the features people have come to know and love. Coventi’s main focus is on group collaboration for writing documents, and it executes this quite well. To begin, you’re able to upload documents from your computer or start with a clean slate. Their main writing area is a WYSIWYG, making it incredibly easy to format and compose your thoughts exactly how you’d like them to be. They have an address book that you’re able to add contacts, and then categorize into groups. Options such as downloading drafts, sharing your pages for collaboration, convenient review options, and target-based commenting through the form of highlighting phrases, makes Coventi a great choice for writers of all sorts.

Coventi also offers Page Roles, which consists of three ranks. First, there is the owner of a page, who obviously has all privileges and rights within the page. Next there are the authors, who are capable of commenting and revising the actual page document. Last are the reviewers, who can only comment on the document and not change any of the contents of the page. Once you have invited people to collaborate and share on a page you’ll see the “People” tab appears in the interface. The People tab tells you who has and who hasn’t read your page(s). Additionally, you also can view and change the rank of your users in this section. You’ll also notice that when you start sharing your pages, a count of revisions done to that pertaining document will appear. You’re able to compare revisions via drop down menus, making it easy to look back and/or find lost information.

Authors and Reviewers are able to comments on certain sections of a page by simply highlighting the desired word, phrase, even paragraph and selecting “Create Comment” from the pop-up menu that will appear once something has been highlighted. The user can then type out their comment in the panel to the right of the interface along with a subject. Each comment that is submitted to the page is logged as a separate “conversation” and becomes its own discussion area where other users can reply to comment that was created. When there are multiple users viewing the same document, this feature can prove very handy for narrowing down areas of the page where you might have had difficulty in, and receiving direct, valuable input from your invited group members. You are also able to filter through conversations to quickly find comments that might be currently in discussion. They also separate the conversation by “open” and “closed” to help organize comments that have be discussed already. Even though it is a group oriented applications, I thought it would’ve been nice to have the ability to highlight and comment on your own page, without inviting people.

You are able to download each of your writing pages as a Word document as well as, adversely, upload Word documents to be used in Coventi. They offer Review Options such as setting a review deadline, or asking for approval on a page. Setting a deadline is as simple as choosing the exact time you’d like your collaborators to have their reviews in by, attached with any necessary comments. Asking for approval of a page works similarly. Once you feel that you’ve finalized your draft, you can send out an approval notification to receive confirmation on your work by fellow collaborators. After getting the notification email, each user will then be able to view the page and then check off whether or not they believe it is ready or if it still needs further revisions. After each user submits their approval, all authors and the owner will be sent an email reporting their confirmation. Owners of a page are able to withdraw an approval request, if necessary. Owners, authors, and reviewers also are given the option to have any page updates email to them to keep them up-to-date with the progress of the page.

I enjoy Coventi and I plan on trying and use it for some of my future writing en devours. It functions very nicely and has some of the features that we all wished our Writeboards would have. The only picky thing I can say about Coventi, being that I’m a designer, is the design of the interface. While there is nothing exceedingly wrong with how it was laid out, I think they could have made the top navigation, main tabs, and button areas less busy. I like how the interface options and selections work, but spacing out some things couldn’t hurt to help clarify things. Nonetheless, this shouldn’t hinder anyone from trying out Coventi and what it has to offer. I’m always looking for new innovating ideas from writing applications and Coventi helped fulfilled some of mine.