TradeVibes, co-founded by four (4) ex-PayPaler, is a leading contender in the user-generated startup directory. On the landing page, one can find all the interesting new startups that were submitted by users. If you’re looking for the basic information about a startup, particularly from the emerging technologies field, TradeVibes is the right place for you.

TradeVibes’ Web-based startup information primarily were submitted, edited by its own users. Upon an user is sign-up to the service, she can straight away updating startup information or posting news and discussions. Likewise, an user can add a new startup information to the TradeVibes database, such as add the description of the new startup that has not yet be appeared on TradeVibes (1,000 characters maximum), etc.

TradeVines is up against a less fierceful competition, CrunchBase is the one that currently offer the free technology startup database, and the other one, is the KillerStartups, a blog-like startup review directory. However, I like the way TradeVibes offered to the public, which I can easily find the key people behind the startup, the funding history a particular startup received, and the related companies in the same categories.

Even though there is no de facto standard for the tech startup database, TradeVibes is continually develop features that help to retain its existing users. Now TradeVibes has the Startup Battle, a prize, i.e. Wii to be given to the users every week (check out the contests listed in the sidebar), Top Bullish Movers and Top Bearish Movers, widget that can be embedded on one’s own blog or Website, and etc. just to name a few. In addition, to encourage users in participate to the TradeVibes, whenever one submitted a new startup, a one (1) TrV Points will be awarded to the user, and she can use it to exchange for the items from TradeVibes.

Media Wombat is a Flash search engine. It crawled and indexed all the Flash and multimedia content on the Web into its database and you can find the Flash content you want by placing the keyword into its search bar. Although the Flash loading is known to be slowed, as we all know, however Flash’s potential in the multimedia space is still tremendous. There are many ActionScript developers who delivered well in their projects to their clients. Also, I believed the commitment of Adobe in this space, with their accomplished development work called Flash Lite focused on the use in mobile.

On Media Wombat, you can search the Flash content you want, with the filtering system of each result provided by Media Wombat. You can go for a Flash preview of a particular result, images or embedded on the Flash, as well as rate the Flash content or go directly to the result page through the link available. For the Flash or Flex developers, they can see the ActionScript on a particular Flash result simply by clicking the “View ActionScript” button.

Media Wombat is a project developed by Steve Webb and Troy Yohn.

atomkeep is a new Web application that tend to fulfill users’ demand of sync (synchronize) their multiple social networking profiles. If you’ve more than five (5) social network accounts, the features of atomkeep surely will interested you. To start sync your multiple social network profiles into one that to be appeared on atomkeep, you simply required to register with the site, and atomkeep is free and public available at this moment.

Currently, atomkeep rolled out support for LinkedIn, Facebook, Monster, Flickr, etc. altogether fifteen (15) social networking sites, at the time of my writing. You can start sync your accounts simply by link and add all of your social network profiles to atomkeep, and atomkeep will thus help you to import all the data from these accounts to the one you opened on atomkeep. In the process of synchronization, it is mighty hard to ignore the beauty of flexibility, users on atomkeep will always have the choices of adding additional data that they feel is necessary to be added into their profiles.

Like other social network profiles, atomkeep profile comprised of the column of your personal data, such as Name & Location, Contact, Relationships, Political & Religious Views, Education and Work background, Professional Summary, Career Info as well as Resume. Also, you can edit the data through the editor available, and you’re given options to either hide or make your profile publicize in the eyes of your prospective employers, etc. Once you finished filling up all the necessary fields found in each columns, you can start sync it back with all of the target social networks with a single click.

Apparently, with the help of this atomkeep, you’ll realize you’ll have the only one type of data that to be represented your own inner self, your identity eventually. If you found that there’s a big disparity on some data, put an example, “Summarize your professional experience and goals,” underneath the Professional Summary column, don’t be surprised. A lot of people still don’t know what they’re doing, and where they want to go from here, this might include me or you, sad to say this.

Searchme is a visual search engine and currently in the public beta phase. Searchme reminds me a lot of another visual search engine called oSkope, however these two are totally different in terms of user experience. I like Searchme very much. It allowed me to search the stuff that I want and save it on my desktop, within a finger click, i.e. drag and drop the search results (in the format of page by page) to the stack I created. As told by Searchme, all the pages saved in the stacks are stored in your desktop computer, and if you deleted your Flash Player cache, the pages you saved will be gone.

There are other features in Searchme, you can delete the stack you created, or add a public URL to it. Don’t be afraid the pages you saved will be exposed to the public, good pages should be shared to others as this is an act of demonstrate trust and cultivate the knowledge management culture.

To know more, I embedded two videos of Searchme, watch and enjoy.

1) Introduction to Searchme

2) How To Create a Stack

Socialmedian is a new social news service that connect you with the personalized news and information. It is still in private alpha mode, received some favorably response as the founder of this site Jason Goldberg who is also the founder of Jobster. For the inquisitive, they may request an alpha access to it before this site goes fully launch in later stage.

At fist glance, I see it as a startup like Twine, which utilize collaborative filtering to help users with similar interests discover what to read in their leisure time. For this type of social news service, users are gratefully submitted some interesting news or URL links that might interested other users in the community, and often the payoff has been substantial; users created a news network with the most unique news will thus attracted the most users. As an alpha user, I like that concept of delivering the daily news from the popular news network to my designated email. In this way, I know what is happening on Socialmedian as well as remain the connection with the news network there.

Upon you granted an alpha account, you’re prompted to change the photo of your profile. On Socialmedian, you can search for the most popular or the recent news network, or join the network. You can also search the topic you’re interested with, or users in Socialmedian (currently they only enable you to search the recently active users). Besides, they also built a feature that is very popular among all the Web applications, which is “Snip,” stands for snippet, allowing you to post your latest update.

In a social news service like Socialmedian, whose users are freely to create news network, it make me realize that everything is compete with everything for the eyeballs. There are a total number of 3,231 users that have created 760 news network. But reading the news network that shortlisted as popular are often with the popular and generic name such as Web 2.0, Tech news, social media watch, twitter, etc. It is important to recognize for a news network to succeed, having a good name is not enough, it need to understand the virtues of speed. I noticed one of the popular news network called Tech News, this news network has a huge number, i.e. 377 stories submitted in the past 24 hours, at the time of my writing.

In overall, I quite satisfied with their service, but satisfaction alone don’t make me feel loyal to the service especially I found that most of the submitted stories to some news network are not very difficult to find on the Web.

A favorite music service in the US, Pandora is launching a desktop version. It is available in Windows and Mac version and being delivered to the end-users as an Adobe AIR application. As expected, it works the same as the browser version, create channel, access to your stations in your account, see all stations available, or change channels, etc.

The only downside for this Pandora desktop version when compare to other desktop version of applications is that it occupies a large space in your desktop screen, with many pixels of advertisements shown. As reported in their blog, advertisement is their main source of revenue income, and deliver this sort of advertisements to the desktop version is their business model.

For those who can’t access to this Pandora due to the licensing constraints will come across a “Restricted Page.” For this reason, I still recommend Haoting to the music lover friends that I know.

There are far too many applications in the private beta phase are worth to be profiled in this blog, including this one, i.e. SmallWorlds. I’ll briefly explain its specific features, but I think you’ll be realized the full features of SmallWorlds when it opens its public access in June 2 next month.

SmallWorlds was developed by an Adobe partner based in New Zealand called Outsmart. They have several projects in their labs, and all of them are focus efforts on creating Flash or Flex related applications that can be leveraged in a Web-based technology. SmallWorlds considered as a grand vision for Outsmart, carried a motto which is “build your own world.” Since its unveiling, SmallWorlds has been full of surprise, including the praise of a Rich Internet Application Evangelist from Adobe, in an article entitled, “Smallworld: The coolest Flex application I’ve ever seen.”

Since SmallWorlds venture into the field of 3-D, it is inevitably be compared with another strong player Second Life or HiPiHi. Although there are no mature standards to determine what’s a 3-D player should act or behave in, but SmallWorlds has emerged itself as a strong contender in this field, particularly in view of its differentiation strategy, in terms of usefulness, and in the form of convenient.

1) SmallWorlds is available in any Web browser. In other word, an user will not need to download and install a SmallWorlds software to run it.

2) With a distinct URL address of a 3-D space, you can instantly share your discovery on SmallWorlds with your friends.

3) You can customize the avatar you created, and this should be critical for a 3-D lover.

4) You should expect the 3-D virtual space to evolve rapidly as the interaction of 3-D users evolve, and SmallWorlds set to capitalize on this direction. As SmallWorlds said, “Users can share experiences like playing games, watching YouTube videos, listening to their favorite band, browsing through photo galleries, and a whole lot more.”

5) The availability of full 3-D chat environment. A standard 2D Flex User Interface components projected into a 3D world, as mentioned in a 2007 post.

6) SmallWorlds is going to open its platform for the third-part application developers. This approach is proven popular, as more casual games are being rendered in this 3-D platform.

To know more about SmallWorlds, check out their latest post entitled, “A virtual world for the masses.” Stay tuned.

Google Doctype, Google’s newly launched Website is like a Wikipedia for Web developers. In a brief introduction of this Website, Google said this Website, all of its content will be written by Web developers, for Web developers. Whether or not you’re in the middle dabbling in HTML, JavaScript, or CSS, or really dives into these open Web tools, this one is definitely for you.

Similarly to Wikipedia or Citizendium, it remains true to its commitment to user-generated content. In other word, those who own a Google account can edit any of the content. In this case, it might follow the hidden risk of what Wikipedia gone through, i.e. allowing anonymity, and hence some users who created fake accounts could submit some wrong materials to this Website. I’ve to admit this is a premature scenario, as most of the Web developers are all willingly to foster a healthy and long-term community and help promoting open Web standards.

Currently, this Google Doctype is available in English and Spanish. I particularly excited about this when I found out that there will be a new JavaScript library, in which 8,000 lines of code which originally developed and tested internally at Google will be available in Google Doctype.

To learn more about Google Doctype, there is a video which embedded in the below.

via [Google Operating System Blog]