If you ever encounter a slow-loading website, it can be frustrating trying to work out what’s caused the problem. Stella is a great tool for testing out a site’s health – either as a one-off checkup or for ongoing monitoring – and it manages to throw a rather stylish look into the mix too.
Simply enter any URL into Stella’s checkup tool and it will run a speed test to check exactly where any bottlenecks might be. The service measures response time, the amount of time it takes to make a connection with the server, how long the website takes to respond and the total download time. All this information is then rolled into one easy to understand graphic along with a ranking defining it as “The Best!” for fast sites, down to more slightly more scowling verdicts like “Not Great”.
Stella also offers a bookmarklet which you can add to your browser’s bookmark bar, meaning that every time you come across a slow site, or if you’re just curious, you can run a test there and then.
If you’re a website owner, Stella offers ongoing testing at four pricepoints ranging between free and $42 per month. These offer 60 days’ worth of access data for the site you’re keeping track of, viewable on a graph, with details of any downtime suffered. Email (and SMS on paid plans) alerts can be set up to notify you of any issues.
While Stella is far from the only service offering website monitoring (Pingdom is a good alternative), this is presented in a stylish, accessible, easy to use format and with a sense of humour too. Just look at the news page which comes straight out of the 1890s (although that does make it a little impractical to tell exactly when the news did get published) and the Twitter accounts of its fictional ‘Business owner‘ and ‘Technician‘. In actual fact, Canada’s Delano Mandelbaum is behind the site, a man who appears to be very much from the 21st Century.
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Quick Pitch: Lanyrd helps you get more out of conferences.
Genius Idea: Via Twitter, track event sessions and keep up with favorite speakers — at all stages in the conference lifecycle.
Some newlywed couples work to produce an offspring on their honeymoon. Most don’t labor towards birthing a startup. But that’s exactly what British entrepreneurs Natalie Downe and Simon Willison did on their post-nuptial adventure. After traveling in Europe and Africa, the couple caught ill in Casablanca and extended their stay and booked an apartment to recover.
The pair have a shared love for building projects in their spare time — which is why, with all that extra time in a bedroom, they managed to create and release an early build of Lanyrd. Within two hours of its launch, Downe and Willison saw the site generate more than 14,000 visits.
After finding immediate success with social media denizens, the couple applied to Y Combinator’s accelerator program. Lanyrd was accepted and has since relocated to Mountain View, California to complete it. The site remains a largely bootstrapped effort, though the couple did accept the $150,000 in convertible debt offered up by Start Fund.
Willison calls Lanyrd “the IMDb of conferences” — except that its content is crowdsourced. The site asks its users to do the heavy lifting for them by filling in the blanks on each conference: sessions, speakers and content. The incentive? The same as at any conference: self-aggrandizement. Organizers will go to any lengths to promote their events. Speakers want to flesh out their profiles by adding past, present and future engagements. And everyone wants to see useful conference content.
“Conferences are traditionally insufficient for transferring knowledge,” says Willinson. “Longer term, this is about capturing the value of what’s shared.”
Lanyrd’s tie-in with Twitter is ingenious — and almost spooky. Sign in with your Twitter handle, and you’ll automatically be greeted with a smorgasbord of contacts and upcoming conferences, drawn from your Twitter relationships. You may see that Lanyrd knows you spoke at a trade show last month, or that you’re on a panel this fall. The site already lists 6,000 crowdsourced conferences and 30,000 user profiles.
Downe and Willison opted to use Twitter’s social graph — rather than Facebook’s, say — because they believe the “follow” has more aspirational value than the “friend.” You likely already follow the people you’d like to know, the speakers you’d like to see talk. According to Lanyrd, you’ve already composed a list of the thought leaders you’d like to bump into at an upcoming conference. So Lanyard is well positioned to find the sessions of social relevance to you.
Since users are encouraged to add speakers and their Twitter names to sessions, the speaker need not be a Lanyrd user to have a Lanyrd presence. On signing up, you may notice your conference history has already been charted for you by your Twitter followers, organizers or fellow attendees.
Next up, Lanyrd has its sights set on South by Southwest, held in Austin next month. The startup launched its unofficial guide to the show Tuesday to help users find which sessions their Twitter friends are attending, and stay current on slides, videos and notes.
The SXSW tool marks Lanyrd’s first real test at a major conference. At worst, the event will provide a trove of data and real-world experiences that Downe and Willison can use to better determine how to serve users while they’re attending conferences.
Downe and Willison describe the chain of events following their June 2010 nuptials to their present day found status as an unexpected, whirlwind affair. Their story, and their startup, are still in their nascent stages. The couple will graduate from the Y Combinator program in March, and may be forced to return to the UK when their visas expire. But location may matter little to a startup that has successfully leveraged the power of an international hit like Twitter.
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.
The increase in usage of digital cameras combined with social networks becoming a primary method of storing photos has reduced the tangible ownership of our photos.
Since I discovered GRID by the people from VVall, that sense of ownership feels like it may return. It’s not the same as having chronicles of printed photo albums but the way it presents the photos makes it a little more organised. It’s also a great way to get a quick hit and fast overview of your memories.
GRID pulls in all your photos from Facebook, Twitpic, Picplz and Dailybooth. You just give the site access to your accounts and it collates the photos together in a timeline. Photos can also be viewed in the days of the week they were taken. Clicking on the thumbnail of the image takes you to the original file. Fetching images belonging to another persons account is also possible if their photo setting is public.
When I added my Facebook account to GRID it brought together 439 photos from 994 days, dating all the way back to 2008 when I first began using Facebook. I was really hoping it was going to bring together photos that I was tagged in but did not own, just to make the experience more complete, but that was not the case.
Also the site doesn’t merge photos together from different sources, like Facebook and Twitpic which would have been handy. You need to reload each account to view the images.
As we store and share our photos on different websites there is a real need to have a central place to collate and view them.
I have been using Greplin recently and that organises search from all facets of my online life, now there needs to be something that does that for photo viewing and storage and GRID has highlighted this need.Piccsy, HN
Oh the times they are a-changin’. There was a point when a good Merit Badge was a hard thing to come by. You had to help little old ladies cross the streets, build fire out of rocks and wet grass or maybe you had to cook your own hotdog. Whatever the task, it was arguably more admirable than falling victim to an Internet meme or connecting via dial-up.
But, as times have changed, so too has the recognition for our feats. Internet Merit Badges is a site that lets you “reward your inner geek” by purchasing real, embroidered merit badges for the things that have happened in your online life.
While the selection isn’t huge, just yet, it seems to be growing. Creator Alex Brown is dedicated to his geek status, and that seems to be a driving force in making sure that you can get the badges that you want. For now, you have a choice of 5:
Banhammer’d – Banned from an online forum
Rickroll’d – Victim of a Rickrolling
Dial-Up Veteran – Connected to the Internet via a standard POTS modem
Pirate – “Borrowed” software or media online
Goatse’d – Yeah…we’re not even going there.
You can choose to buy your badges individually, or a pack of all 5 for a slight discount. While you might not want to sew on the Goatse badge to your hoodie, the rest are pretty impressive. Drop by the site and give them a look.
PhotoSync aims to provide the easiest solution for wirelessly transferring photos and videos between computers and iOS devices.
This app eliminates the need to plug-in your iOS device in order to sync media, and it has no limitations on how many files can be sent at once. PhotoSync also works in unison with companion desktop applications available for both Mac and PC.
Transferring Between iOS Devices
Media (photos, video) can be sent between mobile devices (iPad, iPhone, iPod touch) or straight to or from your Mac/PC. And, this is all done for the price of $1.99. The desktop apps are free and the mobile version of PhotoSync can be installed across multiple iOS devices for the one time charge.
As long as the devices have Bluetooth enabled or are on the same WiFi network, when you attempt to transfer a file from the PhotoSync iOS app, it will provide a list of devices sitting on your network.
iOS Devices to Mac or PC
Within the PhotoSync settings of the desktop version, users can tweak the settings to import photos to any destination folder on the system, including the option to import directly to iPhoto and Aperture. This brings a nice level of organization to the photo import process.
Mac to iOS Devices
Using Mac, to send a photo to the iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, an image can be dragged onto the PhotoSync icon in the dock, prompting a dialog box that asks you to select the correct mobile device. It’s a handy way to send pics, however there was a bit of wait time involved. The results seemed to vary but overall the process, at times, took up to 2 minutes to recognize the iPhone. It could be an isolated issue with this network but we couldn’t tell you why.
Quick Uploading to Flickr
Images can be uploaded directly to Flickr within the iOS app and nicely, it offers multiple settings to pick the Flickr destination folder, image size and privacy level; private, friends, everyone, etc. Especially when you’re dealing with things such as images, privacy control is a fantastic feature but it’s missing something.. the option to add a title and description.
Web Server
By enabling PhotoSync’s web server feature, the iOS app will throw you a web address for your photo galleries that will allow you to see the photos/videos on a larger screen through a web browser. Basically it turns your device into a server so even if you’re not at home, if you have access to WiFi, you can view or download videos and photos on other computers.
PhotoSync User Interface
The UI is pretty and comes with multiple choices for syncing. Users can choose to transfer only the images selected, the entire camera roll or mark the folder as done. It keeps track of which of the files haven’t been imported as well, another option within the syncing screen (sync only new files).
The iOS version of PhotoSync displays all of the device’s pictures within a camera roll and, similar to the native iOS photo gallery, while viewing an image, it can be copied or sent to email aside from syncing.
The Bottom Line
PhotoSync does offer a quick way to transfer media wirelessly but it also has its drawbacks. Transferring files from the devices to Mac was peachy but as we’d mentioned, the Mac version of PhotoSync had major issues recognizing the iOS devices. And while the Flickr integration is great, without the option to input the description, title and tags, it’s just creating more work for you down the line. But, it does work quite well for transferring media from device to device and from iOS to Mac.
All in all, if you’re constantly plugging in your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch to sync media you might find this app handy, and the web server feature is a cool option to have when you’re at a friend’s place.
If you ever encounter a slow-loading website, it can be frustrating trying to work out what’s caused the problem. Stella is a great tool for testing out a site’s health – either as a one-off checkup or for ongoing monitoring – and it manages to throw a rather stylish look into the mix too.
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PhotoSync
