Publish your own media creations on BitTorrent

BitTorrent logoBitTorrent has just made it even easier to publish your own media creations with the launch of an exciting new self-publishing platform. The project, which is currently invitation only, assigns genres, tags, a Creative Commons license, and other details to any original content that you upload. There’s even the chance to hit the bigtime – editors will review submitted work for listing alongside major motion pictures and studio releases. Networks and labels already involved include MTV, Sub Pop Records and 20th Century Fox.

According to BitTorrent, uploaders will have exposure to an audience of around 150 million BitTorrent users and be given a hefty limit of 3 GB per upload. You can upload virtually any type of content including videos, audio and even software via a simple drag & drop publishing interface. If you’re new to media publishing, this is a highly recommended way of getting started – just submit your e-mail and details on the BitTorrent website and cross your fingers you are one of the lucky winners.

Top restaurant management games

Best restaurant management gamesFollowing our run of peculiar games, after odd jobs and tycoons we’ve decided to cover restaurant management games. Satisfying customers and growing your restaurant’s popularity is the name of the game here and you’ll often have to do a balancing act between serving food on time and cooking the right meals. Most of these games make for perfect little timewasters.

  • The Restaurant Game – This MIT experiment allows you to play the role of either waitress or customer. How you are treated will depend on how you act.
  • Turbo Pizza – A frantic game where you’ll have to serve the right pizzas to the right customers on time. Make sure the pizzas are well cooked too.
  • Snowy: Lunch Rush – Make your restaurant the best in town by earning money and improving your services and installations. To keep customers coming you’ll have to keep offering more, like a VIP area or live concerts.
  • Diner Dash – The classic restaurant management game. Defeat Mr. Big by helping four small restaurants survive.
  • Mickey DeeDees – Manage your own drive-through, adjusting prices and quantity of burgers depending on the customers’ demands.
  • Sushi Frenzy – Prepare fresh sushi and swat away the annoying flies.

Super-fast contact manager for phones

StarContactSo you’ve got ten seconds to locate a contact on your phone. No that’s too long. The train’s leaving in two seconds and your friend is still buying cigarettes. No, scrap that, it’s too long. You have one second, half a second, to call your wife because you’ve left the gas on and she’s on her way home. What I’m trying to say is you need to phone someone really fast. Really, really fast. And to do that you need StarContact. Phew,we got to the point! StarContact helps you find any one of the contacts on your mobile in record time.

Top 5 e-book reading utilities

ebook logoIf you’re a big fan of e-books, then you probably spend a lot of time in front of your monitor. The problem is that this can be very bad for you in all sorts of way – your back, your eyes and your general posture. Other problems involved with e-books regard the size of the files, the formatting of images and whether or not you can transfer them from your PC for reading on a portable device. Fortunately, there are a number of applications out there designed to help avoid these problems by making reading books – or any kind of lengthy texts online – safer and easier. Here’s a selection of the best:

  • DNL Reader – Reduce e-book file sizes and amplify text
  • uBook – Reads e-books on Windows and Pocket PCs
  • yBook – Authentically flicks through the pages of your book
  • GonVisor – Especially designed for comics and magazines
  • CoolRead – Read and edit e-books with this all-in-one powerful reader

Maximum compression with WinRAR

WinRARWinRAR is considered as an industry standard in compression. In any case, it’s certainly one of the most popular and reliable applications to manage compressed archives, with support for many formats and a great compression rate. WinRAR 3.71 is its latest version, featuring changes to error logs and a better password management in encrypted files, among others.

Top 5 Firefox extensions for web developers

Extensions for web designersCreating a website is certainly not an easy task. There are many things you must take into account, such as choosing a design that’s simple, yet attractive enough for our visitors, organizing information in an appropriate, easy-to-browse structure or making sure the website is properly viewed on every platform with different web browsers.

Talking about browsers, if you use Firefox for your daily work, you’ll be glad to know there are several extensions that can be very helpful in website design and development. Have a look at the following list and see for yourself:

  • Firebug – edit, debug and monitor CSS or HTML on any webpage
  • ColorZilla – add a color picker, a ruler and a zoom tool to your browser
  • Web Developer – probably the most complete set of development tools for Firefox
  • IE Tab – see how your work looks in Internet Explorer without leaving Firefox
  • Screengrab – take a screenshot of a complete webpage from top to bottom

Is today your lucky day?

Lucky Days logoI’m not a betting man but I am occasionally superstitious so if I do have a flutter, I try to pick the right time when the cosmos is lined-up in my favour for the 3.50pm at Chepstow. Now, there’s no knowing when that time is usually – often if things are going in my favour I’ll strike while the iron is hot. However, the developers of Lucky Days claim they have an all together more scientific way of predicting when is the optimum time for you to place your bets.

They claim that a 29-year study of gambling and astrology revealed that certain peak moments occur when the planets are aligned in your favour. This program was made famous through the British BBC TV2 show, ‘Dave Gorman’s Important Astrological Experiment‘, where Dave would act on the advice of several astrologers, while his twin brother (20 minutes younger) would not. During that time Dave took sports bets on two of the lucky days suggested by the program and won a total of UK 1050 Sterling (about $1600). His twin brother meanwhile, made no extra money during this time.

Convinced yet? If not, you’ve got nothing to lose by giving it a whirl. Just enter your birth date and a few personal details and let us know if you hit the jackpot with it.

LiveMocha: a social networking language learner

LiveMocha lesson (not our picture, a screenshot from the developer's website)It’s been a few days now since I told you about Mango, a great online resource for learning a new language, so I hope you’ve at least tried out a few phrases in a foreign tongue. However, no sooner have I given you the best new way of speaking to people with funny accents than I’ve discovered another. And this one’s got a social networking aspect to it.

LiveMocha offers over 20 language courses including Chinese, Japanese, Hindu, Arabic, Ukrainian as well as the favourites like English and Spanish. Each lesson comes with four stages of learning – learn, read, listen and magnet (which is where you drag and drop correct words into spaces) – and each course has four levels of difficulty from nouns to complex sentence structure and conversations. All words andLiveMocha old lady phrases are delivered by a clear speaker and the pictures are great, if not a bit bizarre. There are also very useful quick tips available at each step.

However, LiveMocha’s unique selling point is its social networking aspect. As a user of the site you are able to see who else is on your course and, so long as you have a microphone you can speak to each other. You can communicate by typing but if you want to practise a new language then you should be speaking. This is an exciting Web 2.0 aspect which appears to have great potential. If I’m learning Spanish I can say ‘Hola’ to Pablo in Madrid and he can say ‘Good day, fine fellow’ to me. I just hope the people at LiveMocha don’t overlook the teaching side of the site in pursuit of social networking geld, dinero, soldi or simple cash.

Musestorm preview new widget platform at DEMOfall 07

MusestormAt this year’s DEMOfall 07 conference, Musestorm will demonstrate their newly released Content Engagement Platform, which will simplify how authors “develop and control intelligent multimedia widgets with integrated advanced functionality, including user interactivity.” Musestorm is known for its pioneering work on widgets, catering to publishers, marketers and developers by becoming the place where widgets are created, shared and distributed. The new Content Engagement Platform aims to be even more ambitious by taking care of everything, “from widget and application creation, to distribution and analytics as well as monetization.”

If you can’t wait for the DEMOfall 07 presentation here is a rough idea of what to expect from Musestorm’s new platform. Publishers will discover the new Widget Studio, with more customization options, a “PowerPoint presentation” production process, and the ability to clone widgets into other formats. If you’re looking to disrtibute your widgets than you’ll notice that Musestorm have added access to more social networks, the least of them being Facebook. Their network and data center have also been significantly upgraded to provide more security. Marketers looking to capitalize on widgets now have access to the Musestorm Capitalize Module, to measure, display and trigger all sorts of advertisement such as banners, videos or simple text. I was quite impressed with Musestorm’s project when I talked to them earlier in the year, but it really looks like they’ve upped the ante once more with these improvements.