Interaction design firm ZURB unveiled its newest web app, Chop, at RailsConf 2011. Chop is a code review app created to allow designers or developers share snippets of code, along with annotations.
Users can paste in bits of code, choose their language, and then get a well-formatted bit of code (with syntax-highlighting depending on the language chosen) that can then be annotated. Simply select a line or lines from the document and then add your note.
Once users share the URL with someone else, that user can see the code, the annotation and add their own comment or reply to the code. In a world that already has Pastie, Pastebin and dozens of other code pasting sites, one might wonder if another is really necessary.
In the case of Chop, the annotations add some flare to the experience, which can be especially useful when instant messaging tools or email can’t adequately point out why a certain line of code needs to be adjusted.
Chop was built using Backbone.js, a framework that “supplies structure to JavaScript-heavy applications.” The net result is that pages load faster, especially when it comes to annotating parts of the tool.
ZURB used Backbone.js when it relaunched its popular web app Notable earlier this year. On the ZURB blog, engineer Matt Kelly discusses how using Backbone.js was able to speed up interactions within Notable significantly.
Have you used Backbone.js in any of your projects? Let us know in the comments.
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: Thinglink changes how people interact with photos by transforming them into a navigational surface for search, commerce, and social connection.
Genius Idea: Turning photos into interactive stories.
“Every image has a story,” says Ulla-Maaria Engeström. Engeström is the design blogger-turned-entrepreneur behind Thinglink, a Helsinki-based startup that makes image interaction tools. These tools help bloggers, photographers, bands, creatives and companies tell stories by tagging photos with music, people, places and products.
Thinglink’s image-tagging tool can be enabled on WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Drupal and Typepad sites. Users add a small snippet of code to their websites to enable Thinglink tagging. Then, they’ll be able to revisit photos to tag content with links, music tracks, Amazon products and even Twitter users.
The music piece is part of a recently inked partnership with SoundCloud. Users need only copy SoundCloud track URLs and paste them in the appropriate field to add music to their photos.
“Images and sounds make a natural and powerful combination. Both online and offline, they create inspiration and context for consumption,” Engeström writes on the SoundCloud integration. “We make decisions about what to buy, where to go and who to see, based on images. Music inspires fashion designers to create collections, and visual stories inspire those who make music.”
Thinglink for personal use, especially if for Tumblr or WordPress users, is an interesting experiment in image storytelling. Adding the required code is a simple exercise of copy-and-paste, and adding tags is merely a point-click-and-type process.
In testing, I tagged an image with a SoundCloud track and tagged my friends with their Twitter handles. In both cases, I simply pasted URLs into the “Link URL” field (as seen above). The original image simply showed two friends signing karaoke. The Thinglink tagged-photo became akin to an interactive story complete with music and context.
Professionals, retailers and publishers might find more business opportunities than storytelling in the image-tagging practice. Thinglink promises to help convert image viewers into product buyers. Atlantic Records, Paper Garden Records and Elle Magazine have each experimented with the startup’s image-tagging technology.
Thinglink has raised $1 million in funding from Nordic investors Inventure and Lifeline Ventures. The startup competes with companies such as Pixazza, GumGum, Stipple and Thingd in an ever-expanding image-tagging space that’s been slowly evolving for the past few years. These technologies have not yet become widely adopted by consumers or companies, although venture capitalists continue to make investments in the space.
Thinglink serves more than 30 million image views monthly for its clients.
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
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.
If life is comprised of moments defined by people, places and time, then startup Conga is a matchmaker, weaving together these elements to help users turn missed connections into shared experiences.
Conga, launching in public beta in New York and San Francisco Wednesday, defines itself as a proximity-based social network. It’s designed to connect individuals from different social spheres who have or will gather at the same place at the same time.
“It started with a simple idea,” explains co-founder Ryan Kennedy, “What if it was possible to go back in time, to nearly any moment in life, and reconnect with people around any of the places we’d ever been?”
Kennedy tells me that part of the motivation for starting Conga came from a personal desire to uncover missed romantic connections — he was, of course, single at the time. Now happily off the market (but not thanks to Conga), Kennedy still believes that there’s something magical about making missed connections not so missed.
“We go through life and interact with all these people, but how do we tap into relationships with people sitting right next to us?,” he says. “We’re looking to fill that gap.”
Conga is structured around the notion of the moment, tapping into the user’s location history via Foursquare and Twitter to build out a replete record of where he’s been and who else has been. The user can manually enter moments as well.
Each moment has its own page and serves as a point of rendezvous. The site manufacturers a layer of collaboration over these moments to introduce users who have crossed paths and give them a means to communicate and share information.
The startup’s most intriguing feature is its ability to list the people the user “congas” with (ie. crosses paths with) under the People tab. Here, Conga unravels the mystery of the unknown and presents the user with his most frequent missed connections. I can, for instance, see that I’ve crossed paths with Noah, someone I do not know, at least 13 times. Clearly, Noah and I have more in common than we may realize. Conga has merely surfaced these commonalities to subtly suggest that we should connect.
But Conga’s purpose extends beyond these person-to-person connections. The founders speak of Conga as a place to reconnect with people you’ve interacted with in the real world. Weddings, conferences, reunions and other group gatherings are all Conga-worthy because users can come together around a specific place and time to share things that happened at that moment.
The service has a few drawbacks. At launch, it’s limited to users in New York and San Francisco, the site is a bit difficult to navigate and overlapping activity will be minimal until more users sign on. Still, there’s certainly something to the notion of using location data to fill in the blanks.
Conga is self-funded by co-founders Ryan Kennedy and Todd Fast. The startup is in the midst of raising an angel round to finance operations.
Quora‘s beautifully designed, elegantly executed Q&A might be burning up the blogs, but how is the site performing in the real world?
Web analytics firm KISSmetrics has just published an infographic about “The Wonderful World of Quora.” The charts show some interesting details, such as the growth of Quora’s userbase as well as the upward trend of monthly uniques. KISSmetrics also points out the myriad ways to use Quora beyond just asking and answering questions.
The infographic was created with help from Semil Shah, an active Quora user and fan.
What do you think of Quora’s chances of long-term success? Do you use the platform, yourself? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section.
If you’ve ever had to get a signed document from Point A to a distant Point B, you know the frustration and expense of that soul-sucking task. If you’d like to accomplish it without so much as printing a page, let alone running a dozen errands or trying to email an enormous PDF, HelloFax is your killer app.
Sending documents to fax numbers isn’t a big challenge these days — and that’s not HelloFax’s focus. There are dozens of that let you send faxes online, such as eFax and Fax.com.
But there’s one major sticking point when it comes to contracts, NDAs, permission slips and similar documents: your signature. How does the average Joe or Jane manage to actually sign the digital documents before sending them?
Enter HelloFax, which digitizes the signing process. This removes the need to print out, sign, scan-in and send.
HelloFax, a web-based app, works this way. You go to the site with your document of choice. This could be a PDF, a text file, a Word document, or an image file of just about any kind.
Enter the fax number or email address where the document should go. If you need a cover sheet, you can quickly create one in a pop-up lightbox.
Upload your document, then edit and sign the document as needed. The editing tools are pretty basic; you can add check boxes or text.
The signing options are quite varied. First, you can choose to create your digital signature with a mouse. If you’re as hand-eye coordinated as I am, this will look something like the efforts of a sugar-high 3-year-old. You can also upload an image file of your signature, if you have one.
But there’s a much better option: you can grab a pen, scrawl your John Hancock on a piece of blank paper, and take a picture of that with your smartphone.
HelloFax will let you email that image to them. The site digitizes the image for use in your document as soon as the email is received.
Once you’ve created your signature, you can save it for use on future faxes.
When you’ve finished editing, signing and saving the document, you click to send the fax or email. Once the document is sent, it’s saved in your HelloFax account, just in case you need to download a copy or resend it to another party.
You can send documents to any U.S. fax number. Support for international number is in the works, as is sending the same fax to multiple recipients at the same time.
Best of all, you can fax up to 20 pages free of charge every month, and you can send unlimited signed documents via email. If you deal with a lot of signed and faxed documents — as many entrepreneurs and freelancers do — you can pay a reasonable subscription fee (after a 30-day free trial, of course) to HelloFax your way to a paperless office.
You can fax 50 pages a month for $5; this plan also offers you your own local fax number. Other plans include the $10 per month option (500 pages per month and a toll-free or local number) and a $40 monthly subscription for the heaviest of power users (2,000 fax pages per month and a toll-free or local fax number). Subscription plans can be canceled at any time.
HelloFax is a Y Combinator company. Its founders are Neal O’Mara, formerly a TripIt engineer, and Joseph Walla, who has extensive experience in public service in the U.S. and abroad.
“We built something we needed,” O’Mara and Walla wrote of HelloFax. “Every document was a hassle to sign. It involved a trip to [FedEx Office], printing, scanning, faxing and then being overcharged. An hour later, our document was signed. Not a good use of time.”
The next time you need to sign and send a document, give HelloFax a try, and report back with your experiences. Does this strike you as a useful app for the average person? Let us know in the comments.
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