LawHelp Nolo Avvo - Budget Law Help Trio

Pro Bono Net (PBN) is a national nonprofit organization based in New York City that works to increase access to justice for the millions of low income people who face legal problems every year without help from a lawyer. Founded in 1998 with support from the Open Society Institute, PBN has created a broad and powerful network of nonprofit legal aid providers, courts and bar associations across the United States. This network uses two innovative web-based platforms – www.probono.net and www.lawhelp.org, for which Pro Bono Net received a 2007 Webby Award for Best Law Web site – to recruit and manage volunteers to provide direct information and tools for low-income communities and the organizations that serve them. The development of this online tool was underwritten by PBN’s Corporate Sponsors Council, which includes ALM, Case Central, Epiq Systems, Ibis Consulting and Interwoven.

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Nolo, formerly known as Nolo Press, is a pioneering publisher in Berkeley, California that produces do it yourself legal books and software that reduce the need for people to hire lawyers for simple legal matters such as making wills or writing business partnership contracts.

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Avvo - rating lawyers -- read more in this blog

Shopping Deals - Dealnews from people at dealmac

5 Stars

Our first site was deal-mac.com, started in 1997 by Daniel de Grandpre and Richard Moss, friends since middle school. deal-mac.com’s mission was to collect the various Apple Macintosh bargains on the web into one central source. Dan managed the content while Richard managed the programming behind the web site. By creating convenience for Mac bargain hunters, the site became an instant hit. dealmac dropped the hyphen in 1998. In 1999, dealnews.com was born to list deals on PC hardware and software, DVD movies, TVs, and anything else that our core audience (techie geeks) would want. While we’ve since added more sites — her.dealnews, dealcoupon, dealram, dealcam, and dealink — we’ve stayed true to our original mission: listing only the best offers from reputable merchants.

Avvo - Rating Lawyers

The Avvo Rating is our assessment of how well a lawyer could handle your legal issue. It is based on data we have collected about hundreds of thousands of lawyers - including their number of years in practice, disciplinary sanctions, and professional achievements. The data comes from multiple sources, including state bar associations, court records, lawyer websites, and information lawyers provide to Avvo. We have created a mathematical model that considers this information and calculates a score on a ten-point scale. The result is called the Avvo Rating.

3D Web Browser - SpaceTime

SpaceTime has innovated its proprietary 3D technology to make surfing the Web a multidimensional and visually rich experience. The SpaceTime application allows anyone to navigate the Web in a 3D environment as they browse, search and shop using Google, Yahoo!, Flickr, eBay and more. SpaceTime, Inc. is based in New York, New York.

SpaceTime revolutionizes the process of Web searching with three key functionalities: 3D Search, 3D eBay Search, and 3D Tabbed Browsing.

Review Shop the tech trio

The Tech Trio
tomshardware.com

anandtech.com

Find great schools - How your local school doing

In April 2007, I stumbled upon this neat web 2.0 site Greatschool.net. And in June 2007 it won the peoples choice webby award. Yahoo education website and Yahoo Real Estate website use greatschool to power their search



A subscription based website - neighborhoodscout helps you find homes in good public school district.

SchoolMatters gives policymakers, educators, and parents the tools they need to make better-informed decisions that improve student performance. SchoolMatters will educate, empower, and engage education stakeholders. Read more

Find School, Libraries & College from - The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), located within the U.S. Department of Education and the Institute of Education Sciences, is the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education.

The Speech Accent Archive

The speech accent archive is established to uniformly exhibit a large set of speech accents from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English all read the same English paragraph and are carefully recorded.¹ The archive is constructed as a teaching tool and as a research tool. It is meant to be used by linguists as well as other people who simply wish to listen to and compare the accents of different English speakers.

This website allows users to compare the demographic and linguistic backgrounds of the speakers in order to determine which variables are key predictors of each accent. The speech accent archive demonstrates that accents are systematic rather than merely mistaken speech.

NPR weekend edition interviewed Lynn Neary about his Speech Accent Archive. To listen click here NPR

Greenhouse Intro - Click on the Image to watch the video

To view rest of the Blog (Click here)

Learn how to Juggle 3 balls

Coca Cola - water to coke ratio

For one liter of Coke, it takes 250 liters of water to produce that sugar that goes into that Coke.

Hear/read more at Marketplace.org

Interested in learning more "Did you know that" facts click here

Microsoft Surface

The software giant announced today at the D5 conference that it’s built a new touchscreen computer—a coffee table that will change the world. Go inside its top-secret development with PopularMechanics.com, then forget the keyboard and mouse: The next generation of computer interfaces will be hands-on.

Interactive Guide to Climate from NPR & National Geographic

Click on the Picture for interactive Guide to climate or here to view the link

Click on the banner below here if you want read more about climate on NPR

Final Assembly Begins on First Boeing 787 Dreamliner

EVERETT, Wash., May 21, 2007 -- Final assembly of the all-new Boeing [NYSE: BA] 787 Dreamliner began today with a ceremony in Everett, Wash.

"Today we begin assembling the first airplane of a new generation," said Scott Strode, 787 vice president of Airplane Definition and Production. "The 787 not only will revolutionize air travel, it represents a new way of building airplanes."

With 568 firm orders from 44 airlines, the 787 is the fastest-selling new airplane in aviation history. The 787 production system was designed using Lean manufacturing techniques in a simplified final assembly process.

"The 787 production system is the culmination of the lessons we've learned building previous airplanes," said Steve Westby, 787 vice president of Manufacturing and Quality. "Using composites on the 787 airframe has a number of manufacturing advantages. We are able to build huge structure in just one piece, which means we essentially have six major end items coming together in final assembly -- the forward, center and aft fuselage sections, the wings, the horizontal stabilizer and the vertical fin. "

Since the 787 is assembled from these large assemblies rather than many smaller pieces, traditional monument assembly tools are not necessary. Portable tools, designed with ergonomics in mind, move the assemblies into place. No overhead cranes are used to move airplane structure.

"A composite airframe also means less waste in production and fewer hazardous materials used during the assembly process," Westby said. "This is good news for the environment and for our team of manufacturing technicians building the airplane."

Although the first airplane will take about seven weeks to assemble, the 787 team looks to continuously improve flow time as production ramps up. Ultimately, a 787 will roll out of the factory every three days.

The first 787 will roll out of the factory on July 8, 2007.

Learn Counting backwards from the movies

Pretty cool

Splenda not natural and settles lawsuit

Merisant lawyer Gregg LoCascio said in his closing argument Thursday that Splenda's makers chose not to use the phrase “does not contain sugar” on packaging, because “it was good for business.” He says Equal unfairly lost millions in sales and profits...read more

More from AP--

Settlement talks began after jurors asked the judge for a calculator and expert reports from both sides on how to determine damages. Lawyers rushed to the judge's office to try to delay the jury's announcement and then huddled in a courthouse meeting room.

McNeil's own consultants said its slogan confused potential customers, some of whom thought that Splenda was sugar without the calories, Merisant's attorneys said. McNeil rejected a plan to add the phrase "does not contain sugar" to the front of Splenda's yellow box, which might have cleared up the confusion, Merisant said.

Text-to-speech application on the web

2010 update on text-to-speech read more here

There aren't may text-to-speech application available online. It would be great if it could read you the complete webpage. NPR does it by allowing your to stream content of each page one after another (but then they are a radio station). So why not have website that will read you all the article in the page without having to buy any software.



Bluegrind and new web 2.0 website in beta stage (serious beta stage!) will read you a news article, blog and they claim its like having a personal news anchor reading the news to you every day. It doesn't just stop at your computer, you can take it with you wherever you go.




What are the other Text-to-Speech (TTS) web application out there? Not many but we have found some cool research sites that let you read text. The best of them all AT&T research website. Yes AT&T. This application will read in 15 voices/language, there is a 300 character limit to the text you can input a a given time.

IBM's Research into TTS
This page demonstrates some of IBM's work in unconstrained text-to-speech research. IBM's system generation process is automatic and can be built for any custom voice. From each voice recording, small segments of speech are extracted and stored in there speech database. During synthesis, these speech segments are assembled using specially crafted algorithms to generate any word in the language. Type in your text  and check it out.


Oddcast demo website uses sitepal to create a TTS application check it out

Investments Book - John C. Bogle - Common Sense Investing

The Little Book of Common Sense Investing as your guide, you’ll discover how to make investing a winner’s game:

• Why business reality—dividend yields and earnings growth—is more important than market expectations
• How to overcome the powerful impact of investment costs, taxes, and inflation
• How the magic of compounding returns is overwhelmed by the tyranny of compounding costs
• What expert investors and brilliant academics—from Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham to Paul Samuelson and Burton Malkiel—have to say about index investing

More Links
Search at ugenie for the lowest price (ISBN: 0470102101). Read more about it at Amazon. Read more about it at other blogs - ValueBlogReview & SeekingAlpha. Also listen to or read the transcript to John Bogle's interview at marketplace money.

New Comparison Shopping website Ugenie and more

Searching for the best deal on books especially textbooks? Well there are quite a few sites that you can go to search for books. Recently an new website ugenie (still in BETA) claims that it not only finds the best price on a single product, but on groups of products which it calls a 'bundle'.To do so ugenie has developed an algorithm that searches about 40 web sites for information about prices of books, movies, music, and games to come up with the cheapest bundles that consumers can buy from these shopping sites. To search for textbook on Ugenie click here.

Other Books search website


The book search engine that allows you to comparison shop
more than 40 online bookstores including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Borders.
You can expect the most complete book search and the best price Internet-wide when you use AddAl



CampusBooks searches dozens of bookstores, thousands of sellers, and millions of new and used textbooks to find you the lowest textbook prices on the Internet. Compare prices on your textbooks now using the search box, or find textbooks at your campus using your school booklist below.




Search for text books at Half.com



AbeBooks, the world’s largest online marketplace for books, lists over 100 million new, used, rare, and out-of-print books from more than 13,500 booksellers. This great selection delivers value for all: readers find bestsellers, collectors find rare books, students find textbooks, and treasure hunters find books they’ve been seeking forever.

Caltech Students Strike Oil - Olive Oil

Heard on NPR ...

California Institute of Technology sophomore Dvin Adalian and junior Ricky Jones, about their successful olive oil production, from olives collected from the campus's trees.hear more...

From LA Times

...In October, the ripening crop snagged the attention of students Ricky Jones and Dvin Adalian. They began an exercise that might date to Socrates' pupils in ancient Greece: whacking olive trees with a stick (in this case, a plastic pipe) and collecting what falls....

Heard on Campus

...Caltech students and grounds maintenance crews got a lesson in olive cultivation recently, when Craig Makela, the president of the Santa Barbara Olive Company, came to campus. His visit was part of the Institute's new sustainability venture to turn dozens of its ornamental olive trees into a cash crop of fruit-bearing olive trees. The Institute plans to hold an olive harvest festival in the fall, which the Caltech community will be invited to participate in. After the olives are picked, they will be crated and trucked to Santa Barbara, where they will be turned into olive oil. The oil will then be bottled and returned to the Institute for distribution. If all goes as planned, Caltech will have about 300 gallons of extra virgin olive oil to sell, Makela said. The enterprise developed after two undergraduates, Dvin Adalian and Ricky Jones, spent a day picking olives last fall and then made a batch of oil, some of which they presented to Caltech president Jean-Lou Chameau and his wife, Carol Carmichael, senior counselor for external relations and faculty associate in Engineering and Applied Science. In return, the students and some of their friends were treated to dinner at the president's house.

When Bad Ideas find VC's money - Shopping website & WhatTheHell Award

Here I am going to list few shopping website that don't make sense at any level other than being well packaged and meeting some VC's (Venture Capitalist - as my good friend would call it poor S@#K$r) checklist for a Shopping web 2.0 site. Have we reached a web 2.0 bubble? These website would validate it - excess supply of money chasing few good ideas and irrational exuberance (anything social networking gets money).

Here is my WhatTheHell list

1) Stylefeeder



2) This Next



3) Yub



4) Crowd Storm (Winner of WhatTheHell Award)

Building Boeing 787 - Interactive guide

Pandora & Finetune - Internet Radio

Pandora is a site for music lover. You enter songs 0r artists that you like and it streams out similar songs to you. Is a great way to find new music for free

Also read about the bill to save Internet Radio. Pandora is for US listening due to the licensing restriction. If you are outside use you could use finetune. Finetune is similar to Pandora which allows you to create your own playlist and share it too.

Buyer Beware -- Price Optimization

Price optimization software now making it possible to price product based on customers behavior, sales history, competitors' price, product mix and the fact that people are hard-wired to love sales - when we see good deal (mark down), a different part of the brain lights up than with a loss (price rise)

Read more about it in this AP article - Software helps some stores decide when the price is right

Some results of price-optimization software:
Like many national companies, one electronics retailer priced batteries the same all over — until SAP's Khimetrics software showed that consumers in Dallas were generally willing to pay more for batteries than people in Boston. The data revealed another twist: The battery that had the highest "price sensitivity" in Dallas had the lowest price sensitivity in Boston. In other words, while Texans would buy this particular battery only within a narrow price range, Bostonians were far less picky. The store altered its prices accordingly, sold more batteries and made more money.

A grocer charged high prices for ice cream but frequently offered deep discounts. Consumers largely bought ice cream only during the promotions. Khimetrics advised reducing the regular price of ice cream and running fewer sales. Eventually revenue and profits rose.

At a store that offered an array of paintbrushes, the best-seller was its cheapest one, at $1. DemandTec suggested the store stop selling the item. The software showed that doing so would help the store sell more higher-priced (and more profitable) paintbrushes because the key factor in paintbrush sales was whether a customer was buying paint, not the price of a brush.

How was pricing done in the past or still done?
According to survey conducted at the Pricing Institute’s 18th Annual PriceX Conference held in Chicago, Illinois in June, found that:

1. 61 percent of companies use a spreadsheet to determine price not a specialized pricing application or vendor
2. 56 percent of companies have some sort of pricing strategy in place
3. 44 percent of companies have a dedicated pricing person or department responsible for pricing
4. 35 percent of companies consider pricing a top priority.

Reuters reports another survey, this one of members of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE), found that 38 percent of respondents reported higher prices during the second quarter. Additionally, 43 percent of respondents anticipated raising prices during the next three months.

Companies that have price optimization products (click on the image):

Netvibes - About having the web the way you want it

Whats different about Netvibes? How does it stack up against say a rss reader or my.msn.com or my.yahoo.com? For one Netvibes users will two (2) pages for every account: a private page, where you subscribe to all the content for your personal, everyday use, and a public page, where you can allow others to access your favorite content -- everything that you love on the web.

Here is one more thing you will like about it if you have a widescreen monitor it will fill it up end to end plus no annoying google ad or flashy ads.

Netvibes is about having web the way you want it. Exactly the way you want it. Delivered to you.

So check out it out for yourself: Netvibes Also check out Moby's Netvibe page.

To read more about guy behind Netvibes read it article in business 2.0 "Web users feel the 'Vibes'

List of similar web services
Pageflakes
Protopage
Google Homepage
Start
My Yahoo
My MSN

New Shopping Comparison Website -- Shopwiki

Will shopwiki give shopzilla a run for it money? Swiki's got some neat features like buying and gift guides - to help through the research stage of shopping. As it is a wiki everyone can update it, you can also post videos of products. Also check out the stated web crawling technology (click here)

Another shopping website trying to break into a niche - stylehive. Stylehive is a collection of all the best products, brands, designers and stores discovered and tagged by the Hive community.

Also heard at Techcrunch

Stylehive ... a social bookmarking site that is focused on shopping... believe that there is promise in this space, which includes the just funded Kaboodle, as well as Wists and the upcoming Plum. Why? Because 80% of online shopping is “research” and only 20% is actually “buying”. Stylehive addresses the 80% piece of the market.

Find Owner of a Brand

Want to know who owns a particular Brand? Find Owner Search allows you to:

• Find the owner of a brand name
• Find all the brands owned by an individual or company
• Find brands in a given area/category.

To start your brand search Click here . Find Owner Search can be very helpful for:

• Advertising agencies to track companies, their brands and competing brands for purposes of gaining new business and/or naming new products and services.
  
• Marketing and Media companies to track all the companies and/or Brands in one category.
  
• Consumers for quickly learning the address and other brands owned by any company for purposes of buying new products and services, complaining to senior management, or seeking a job at a particular company.

Global Brand Survey & Apple Q2 Result

Apple 2Q Profits up by 88%

Apple Inc. blew past Wall Street expectations Wednesday, posting quarterly profits that jumped 88 percent, fueled by strong sales of its iPod players and Macintosh computers....(more)

Global Brands Survey/Ranking

Google rises to the Top of the BRANDZ™ 2007 Ranking of the world's most powerful brands with a brand value of $66,434 Million. To read the complete article click here (pdf)

Compare it with 2006 BRANDZ 2006 ranking click here

Global Brand Survey 2007 -- Click here to hear the podcast

Compare it with BusinessWeek brand Scorecard 2006/5--

• 2006 Click here
• 2005 Click here

Customer service Survey

MSN Money-Zogby customer-service survey. Read more about it click on the article below

The Customer Service Hall of Shame
How companies were ranked

Here's a look at our full results:

	"Poor"	"Fair"	"Good"	"Excellent"
Bottom 10
Sprint Nextel	40%	28%	25%	7%
Bank of America	30%	25%	32%	13%
Comcast	30%	33%	28%	10%
Time Warner Cable	29%	35%	28%	8%
AT&T	26%	36%	31%	7%
Citibank	24%	34%	35%	8%
Wal-Mart	23%	32%	32%	13%
Verizon	22%	31%	36%	11%
Wells Fargo	21%	27%	38%	14%
DirecTV	20%	29%	33%	17%
Dishonorable mentions
Dell	19%	26%	40%	15%
Circuit City	19%	35%	39%	8%
Best Buy	14%	31%	42%	13%
Home Depot	13%	29%	43%	14%
Sears	12%	33%	45%	10%
Macy's	10%	30%	47%	13%

Google Map Mashups

World Time by moving your cursor over it
Website : QClock

Locate the cellphone towers Click on the picture


Locate the area covered by a zipcode area of your county and more. check out this mashup
website usnaviguide