Reviews

My own pup is getting on in years and has begun having accidents in the house between his outings.  When I'm home I keep an eye out for signs that he needs to go, but he's been trying the Happy Jack Dog Diaper when I go out.  Here is our review!

I'm all for gadgets that save time in the kitchen.  The Genius Nicer Dicer offers an attractive solution to chopping stuff with a knife: one push and the veggie is diced--with no mess on the counter.  But does it work?

Some would dismiss Mommy Bloggers as light-weight fluff! However, for any one who diggs a little deeper into this blogging niche, you will find some real marketing-savvy heavy-weights. Now said to number over 200,000, Mommy bloggers are represented by groups and web sites and want to dispel any negative connotation associated with what they do, and how they do it. This Top Ten List will give you some insight as to the best of the best.

Google Labs, the experimental division of Google, has made public their developing project Google Squared.  The concept of Google Squared is to take searching into related topics and offer multiple forms of links and related media.

It's always good to find a site that enhances the experience of using the phenomenally popular Wikipedia to create new and useful pages for researchers and casual searchers alike.  That's what Navify is all about.

Fee Fie Foe Fum, I smell wampum in Twitterdom! Twitter is like the goose that laid the golden eggs, allowing the giants of industry to run off with all the spoils! Has Twitter sat in its Ivory Tower too long trying to figure out the "perfect" business model, while the corporate kingpins are in the counting house counting all their returns?

Microsoft has spent considerable time and effort to get attention to its new search engine, the hopeful Google-killer Bing.com.  Let's see how the two sites stack up against each other, after just one day of use.

Did you ever go out to a club and listen to some thumpin' dance beats and think to yourself, "Hey, I could do this?"  If you have a passion for electronic music, or even just a curiosity into how it's done, then this is the site for you.

The generation of the new online game players has motivated consumer brands, websites and charities to use gaming devices to attract attention to their products and services. "Funware" is the application of game-like qualities to non-games. Researchers say that when we play online games, we enter a "flow state" that makes us receptive to the images and information we encounter. While traditional commercials interrupt that state, funware allows for these messages to seep through.

Spark.ly describes itself as the "definitive social and economic ecosystem that empowers people around the world to communicate, engage in commerce and have fun in a culturally aware and profitable virtual environment." With a BETA launch date of June 16, 2009, nobody knows yet whether that description is an illusion, bravado, grand self-promotion or truly the next big shiny thing. To date there are no blogs written, no product announcements, and no press releases to alert the media. One would think with a June 9th launch date, Spark.ly should be 'sparking' a few conversations out there? Or is this part of their master marketing plan to create buzz about their emerging online kingdom?

Avatar Pho.to is a service that focus more on giving you animated avatars that other avatar editing sites.  The genius with it is in it's extreme simplicity.  The site offers you a host of animation options.  Then you upload your picture, choose an effect, and you're done.  The lack of options seems to work well for Avatar Pho.to because everything works just as it should.

In today's jaded age, it's difficult to determine the quality of a product based on the ad campaign.  The Awesome Auger is a great example.  It looks great.  But does the product equal the pitch?

Google has gone anal, and for all those A-Type personalities that like things neat and tidy, have they got a search engine for you. In a recent move by the Big-G, there is now a way to take all that unstructured data you've been searching for, and collating and sorting it into an orderly spreadsheet of labeled boxes. Literally, that is what Google Squared does. It uses the principles of 'semantic' search, gathering information from multiple sources to present you with all the information required to answer your query.  First announced at Google's recent Searchology event, Google Squared is now live and operational in Beta.

Surely you've been in the position where you have to run out to the bathroom in the middle of a movie, but you don't want to miss anything good.  It's so hard to gage when the right time to take a leak is.  And with the price of movie tickets always going up, you sure don't want to ruin your viewing experience just to go to the bathroom.  That's where RunPee comes in.

Remember the novel "1984" and the doom and gloom it portrayed as human existence came under the control of an entity called Big Brother. And then when the year actually came to past, we were somewhat disappointed that our lives were not turned upside down by some super human domination. But then, as fate would have it, in its place, a movie premiered that actually got us laughing about the supernatural...a movie that got our toes a tappin' and everyone singing those crazy lyrics by Ray Parker Jr: "If there's something strange in your neighborhood...if there's something weird and it don't look good...Who ya gonna call?...Ghostbusters!" Well Children of the 80s and older, Ghostbusters is now aiming their proton packs at a fresh new generation when "Ghostbusters: The Video Game" is released June 16, 2009.

Most of you probably know what torrents are and how to use them, but surprisingly there are plenty of people who still have trouble with them.  Not that you could blame them.  The first trick with getting over torrents is that you have to allow all kinds of firewall access and direct port forwarding on your router, which can be a bit tricky for the novice internet user.  Torrent2exe takes all the guess work out of torrents for beginners and makes a simple executable file that allows the user to download their desired torrent.

There are some people out there who love to clean.  I'm not one of them.  When I clean it comes in one large burst of energy that leaves me utterly spent--pretty much because I know I'm just gonna slob the whole place up again.  So when I see a product that has the potential to make cleaning easier, I have to check it out.  As See On TV: The Shark Steam Mop!

When profiling a certain celebrity, there always comes a point where you wind up looking for that perfect picture to accompany your article.  Its easy enough to use Google to search for images, but more often than not you wind up getting images that are unrelated to the search you're on.  

On April 4th, in "Bada Bing... is Microsoft putting a Hit on Local Search?" I blogged that when Bill Gates filed a trademark under the name "Bing" for "web sites to link to geographic data, map images, and trip routing" it was Microsoft's attempt to perfect a better "local search" mousetrap than Google. However skeptics quickly associated it with "Kumo" as another failed attempt by the little "M" to ever become a worthy contender of the big "G". Now in and AdAge article published May 25, Abbey Klaasen suggests Microsoft might be sinking $80 to $100 million in a "Bing" ad campaign to go toe to toe with the search engine giant.