The weekend has brought us some truly cool startups - with some original concepts, too!

The pick of the bunch has to be Expensify - an incredible idea that actually imports your credit card transactions from your account and compiles them together as a complete IRS-friendly expense report. And before you start screaming “YOU’RE GOING INTO MY CREDIT CARD ACCOUNT? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!”, this is a PCI compliant app (that’s bank level financial compliance if you didn’t know).

We’ve also got some solid, if not mind bendingly original applications from TeemingPod and InstantCal, allowing you to add interactive components to your website: polls and calendars respectively.

KiiRaa is great looking and has definite allusions of being the ‘next big thing’ by aggregating the best sites on the net (as recommended by its users). You can also win an iPod. (remember, you heard it hear first).

The last app I wanted to throw a shout out to is Balsamiq, a very cool software mockup tool for all of you developers out there. They’ve managed to frakenstein together a very functional package with a hand-drawn cartoon-like UI that just shouts “play with me! Play with me!”

Check out the screenshots, with links below.

Almost Meet - Fully save time, money and the earth
KiiRaa - Suggest, recommend and view the best websites on the Net
Balsamiq - Create software mockups in minutes
Expensify - Import your receipt deets.
Feedmingle - mingle all your feeds into one
Instant Cal - Embed an interactive calendar on your website.
Screentweet - ScreenTweet shares videos, pictures, screen shots, and images on Twitter
Teemingpod - Add powerful social applications directly to your website.
MultiURL - Your one stop resource to file sharing.

Today’s startups are a bit of a mixed bag (as always), but there’s some great developments that have just hit the dub-dub-dub. Standing out today was the beautiful looking - and quite overwhelming - almost.at which is a constantly updating stream of content parsed from Twitter, blogs, websites, Flickr and Youtube (and more) relating to a particular event: today’s events included Obama’s speech in Cairo, the anniversary of Tianenmen Square… you get the idea.

From today’s obligatory new Twitter applications we are given Twubs which aggregates hashtag tweets together and Twaitter, allowing you to schedule a tweet to happen in the future. More than the actual development, I pity the unenviable job that Twitter app creative minds have in naming their application. Surely every possible word in the english dictionary starting with T&W has already been used up.

Entering into the search engine foray is the slick DeeperWeb.com which does a great job taking the Google search platform and adding to it tag clouds, entries from Wikipedia, blog entries and the like. A standard Firefox addon will make it easier to remember to use DeeperWeb once the new greatest-search-engine-ever graces our screens (due next Monday, Thursday and two new releases scheduled for a week from Sunday).

As always, click any thumbnail to launch the gallery (and find the URLs below)…

Paystr - Friends pay friends online.
Safe.mn - Security and Transparency.
Deeper Web - Search the deeper web.
Almost At - It’s almost like being there.
Paxonta - Surveys for businesses.
Twubs - #Hashtags made useful.
Superminder - (Remember to) get things done.
Adwhirl - Free your ads.
Twaitter - The Twitter client and scheduling Platform.

RightSignature heralds the annihaltion of the lowly pen as you no longer need to physically sign contracts and other legal documents thanks to this clever solution.

Many businesses needs to sign contracts on a very regular basis. Ever more, contracts are delivered by email in order to bypass the inefficient and slow postal system. With that logic in mind, what better possible solution could there be to complete digital distribution of contracts than to be able to sign and send documents completely digitally?

This is a solution that we’ve all been waiting for - ever since the first contract was PDF’d and sent by email. A simple process and a useful interface sets the grounds for a killer solution.

The biggest problem that I see with RightSignature is that for it to really work, you need to get both parties on board - great if you’re an early adopter, but what if y the other party is a stalwart for the fountain pen?

There are things in society that have held on into the 21st century despite no longer really making much sense at all. Shaking hands used to mean that you weren’t holding a weapon. Not too many of us are walking down the streets with an unconcealed broadsword hanging off our belts like these days, but we still can’t help ourselves saying hello with a nice, sweaty handshake. Signatures are in a similar vein. In a world of fingerprints, retinal scanning and 256-bit encryption, we still use a indeciphrable scribble to stamp our legal and binding commitment to buy a house, get married, start a business, file for bankruptcy and get divorced (often in that order).

Of course, signatures in a digital world are a big hassle. Picture yourself, if you will, sitting in your office receiving that new urgent contract by email. Of course you need to sign it first. So, of course you print it out, find a working pen, sign the document and decide whether you’re going to scan the whole thing back and send it by email or send it off by fax (and risk paper-work procrastination on the receiving end). Of course, none of this is particularly secure, so you decide to send the contract by registered courier. Despite costing you an arm and a leg, it still takes a day to arrive in the recipients hands… only for them to sign the contract and repeat the whole process to get the documents back to you.

When you consider the inefficiency of signing and transporting contracts between parties, the biggest wonder is why RightSignature took so long to get here.

RightSignature is a online subscription based solution that allows you to upload documents and sign for them digitally using either your mouse, an iphone or as a faxed appendage to the document. Even though your signature may look like its been written by a child (don’t you remember how difficult it is to draw using your mouse and MS Paint?), RightSignature assures us that the signature is legally binding. For increased authenticity, you can also upload an image of yourself, proving that indeed, it is you signing the document and not some spotty-faced hacker on the other side of the world.

Once you have signed the document, you can simply add the email address of the recipient to send the document back to them, ready to be signed on their end - they don’t even need a RightSignature account to sign and return the document to you. If you’re working on several contracts at the same time, RightSignature has a tidy dashboard interface that allows you to monitor what is waiting to be signed, what needs to be returned and so on.

There is little doubt that this is a well considered solution with a huge market appeal. RightSignature has created a simple to use product with smart managment tools that doesn’t leave you wanting for features. Their backend technology is robust with secure socket layers and 256-bit encryption with data held on the enviable Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers. Although the overall design of the site is a little flaky, once you start reading the documentation, you’re left satisfied that this is a legal, robust and secure solution.

RightSignature only have a couple of bugs to iron out before this is becomes a dynamite application. Firstly, the iphone signing service did not function as advertised and rudely informned me that the address was invalid. Also, as I mentioned before, the overall design of the solution didn’t ring my bells. The cutesy cartoon icons didn’t really inspire me with confidence (remember that this is primarily a business tool), and the site doesn’t yell “Trust Me!!!” (as it needs to do) with a minimalist white/pastel/web 2.0 color pallette.  As a final addition, an Outlook plugin that allows you to send a document to be signed through the RightSignature API via Outlook would be the cherry on top of the cake.

The bigger problem that RightSignature may face, however, is the heavy task of convincing two parties to use their service. Sure, you can get early adopters to buy in, but then for the solution to work as it shopuld, you have to convince the other party (who may well wear a grey suit and has done business in the same way for 40 years) to put down his Mont Blanc and pick up a mouse. For some, that will be a quantum shift in doing business… Until they build some serious business kudos, this may be a difficult hurdle for RightSignature to overcome.

Right Signature is supported by subsription fees, starting at $0 for a limited volume, one person plan, right up to a $99 per month, multiple user, unlimited documents plan for the medium-large Enterprise environment

It may take some while before RightSignature is a permanent fixture in offices around the globe, but for users that send multiple contracts between the same parties and want to streamline the whole process will love this service. RightSignature offers a well rounded, easy to use and effective solution.

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Channel your inner Bourne Identity with this secure document transfer system that even Matt Damon would be proud of.

Well, spies, of course. But also any business that wants to keep its intellectual property in the right hands only.

Keeping documents secure in an increasingly shared environment is a real worry for businesses. This is a near-flawless package that executes what it sets out to do to a very high level.

Simple MS Office documents documents work great, but sending a large Excel file went about as smoothly as a wheelbarrow ride down nine miles of gravel road. Hopefully this is a beta bug yet to be squashed.

If you watch the movies, apparently all it takes to keep state secrets of Roswell proportions secret is to whack it in a manilla envelope and put a “For Your Eyes Only” stamp across the front. Obviously the CIA has never heard of social bookmarking or has ever heard those dread words: “It’s gone viral…” as a million people simultaneously read documents confirming that Hillary Clinton is indeed, a Lizard person from the centre of the earth.

Of course, keeping documents secure is a real challenge for businesses the world over. Sensitive documents need to be sent internally and externally with stakeholders and clients all day, every day. Sure, we already have tools like .pdf extensions and read receipts to keep some sort of document integrity, but it’s not exactly the most secure way of sending the Colonel’s secret recipe out into the world. All it takes is a less than scrupulous employee to forward the attachment to a personal email address, take a sneaky screen-grab or just send the document on over to the shared printer.

Is this a problem? Darn tootin’ it is.

Now enter WatchDox: an ultra-secure way of sending documents to anyone with an email address. The service works by uploading documents to the WatchDox SSL encryted server and selecting an email address to send the document through to. Once the mail has been sent, the recipinent receives a link where they can view the document online. Sounds like you’re just opening a PDF document? Oh contrare, mon frere.

Firstly, the document is blurred out and can only be viewed by holding down the enter key for a few seconds - a great little feature to ensure that unauthorized prying eyes are not watching your screen as you open the file containing the nuclear launch codes. It’s once you open the document is where WatchDox gets really clever. As a viewer, you can only do what the sender allows you to do. In its most secure form, viewers are unable to forward, print, copy or select any part of the document. Now, I hear you already: “I’d just take a screen-grab”. Uh-uh, no you won’t. As soon as the ‘PrtScn’ key is touched, the document is automatically blurred and rendered unreadable (this also works for Snagit captures).

Even though WatchDox is only in early Beta, this is an exceptionally rendered and well considered solution to a very real problem. The account set up and verification proces is simple enough, but if you were sending dozens of document per day, would get pretty tired pretty quick. Is this a flaw? Not at all - WatchDox also provides a Outlook plugin available for download which allows you to automatically send a document via WatchDox without having to go through the whole upload process. Once the document is received, the recipient has some nice basic tools to navigate the document, find text and zoom in-and-out. Is it as sophisticated as Adobe’s Acrobat reader? No. But then again, I think that’s more by design than omission. The strength of this solution lies in it’s bullet-proof simplicity.

The only problems that I ran into while using WatchDox was when I tried to upload a large, complicated .xlsx (Excel) file. In short, WatchDox pooped itself and got caught in a never-ending “processing’ circle. Hopefully, future beta releases will address any niggly issues like this. Bugs aside, as a concept it is difficult to find faults with WatchDox. I could nit-pick and critique the overall design and say that it needs to inject a bit more ‘business’ into the website (the orange dominated color scheme doesn’t really inspire trust), and I would like to see a bit more information on accepted file types and the such, but as I say - now I’m really digging to find cracks in the package.

While WatchDox is currently in public beta it is providing their service free of charge. There’s no word on expected pricing structures as yet, but I would expect that any price under “first born child” would see security-conscious business customers flock to the service.

If you are concerned about documents falling into the wrong hands, then you should definitely sign up and start sending by WatchDox. If you’re a spy for the IMF, then sorry - self-destructing messages have officially been made redundant.

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Tweetmic is a new iPhone app that allows you to upload audio to Twitter. I guess you’d call it ‘Tweetcasting’?

Slowed down by all that time consuming typing and spell checking (it is a whole 140 characters, after all)? This app combines two things loved by almost everyone: Twitter and the sound of their own voice.

At a mere buck for the app and unlimited unrestricted uploads, Tweetmic could be on every iPhone and iPod touch very soon.

Twitter is text. Podcasts are audio. Twitter and the people that love it are flexible, but will Tweetmic bend the relationship just too far?

You may have noticed that iPhone apps generally aren’t featured here at goodBETAbest, and for good reason too. In much the same way as you wouldn’t go to your local butcher to buy two litres of Castrol for your Mustang, it just isn’t what we do here. There are a million other sites that love iPhone apps much more than I do - and power to them all. This is why I was relcutant to review Tweetmic, which is - you guessed it - a new iPhone app. However, I recanted and decided to shell out a buck to download the app to my phone and pen this review.

“Why,” I hear you ask? Because this app is poised to revolutionise the way that we use Twitter by bringing together two of our favourite things: real time updates and the sweet dulcet tones of our own voices.

Tweetmic sets out to do one thing only, but it’s a biggie: this app allows you to record audio tweets and publish them to your Twitter account. This has the potential to make podcasting accessible to everyone with an iPhone without the need for mixing decks, microphones, hosting accounts and RSS feeds. Also, the spoken word has something that text will never have. Let’s face it: you can’t always get across your message in 140 characters. Text is already limited by not being particularly good at conveying emotion, let alone resticting it down to the length of a standard SMS. With Tweetmic you have emotion at your disposal. Got cut off in traffic? Turn a “Just got cut off in traffic! Grrrr! ” tweet into 45 seconds of pure unadulterated audio fury. Want to tell the world about what a great night out you’re having? Instead of fat-fingering your keyboard, gush out a slurred message and take your followers on your special Tequila soaked journey through the power of the sound of your own voice.

The application itself, true to iPhone form is simple, intuitive and looks like a million dollars on screen. Likewise, the actual process of uploading audio is a breeze: a very quick setup process links the application to your Twitter account and uploading your recording is as easy as typing out a quick intro and hitting the ‘Publish’ button.

Once inside your Twitter account, Tweetmic uploads are displayed as a regular post with a link to listen to the recording, openinig in a new window. The audio quality is first rate and the playback controls are minimalist and do exactly what you expect them to do. Particularly impressive is Tweetmic’s complete unrestricted server use and upload amount. Want to dictate the complete works of Charles Dickens? Sure thing, friend. Sit back, hit the record button and start with “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

The application itself is hard to fault. The only thing I would want to see is a drop down box of often-used Tweetmic descriptions. Currently every recording needs to be introduced by a desciption that is manually tapped out each time you want to publish audio. That’s great if every recording is completely unrelated, but what if you upload the same themed recording daily? I would like to be able to select from a previously typed description instead of having to bash out the same description every time I want to post a similar recording.

The real question though is whether Twitter and its users are adaptable enough to accommodate this very different type of tweeting. Will it be a matter of “Tweets are Tweets and Podcasts are Podcasts and never the twain shall meet?” Perhaps. But if we have learnt anything from the plethora of Twitter mods, extensions, variations and applications out there, it is that Twitter is as flexible as an ex-Soviet bloc gymnast and does much more than just host 140 characters of you-this-second.

Tweetmic’s business model is supported by application downloads from the iTunes app store.

I don’t often gush, but Tweetmic is set to be my favourite app on my iPhone. If you love Twitter and want to take your relationship to the next level, then this app is a dollar very well spent.

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Meetsee is a virtual office that allows you to do office stuff with your remote workmates. You might even do some work while you are there.

Home based workers, downsizing companies and distributed workforces may be interested in this cutesy but useful solution.

There is no doubt that offices are out and home-based workers are in - will Meetsee breach the gap?

While developers, small teams and individuals may flock to Meetsee, will this solution just be too much too soon for the corporate world?

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Sit back and relax while I tell you a story. This story is set in the future - but not too far away. We’re going to take a walk through the central business district of your nearest city. As we walk, notice how quiet it is - a few cars drive past, but in this city notice how few people there are walking past. The signs out the front of all of the office buildings advertise bargain basement lease opportunities, but there are no buyers here.

Scared yet? Is this the post-apocolyptic remnants of the global financial crisis? Nope. People will still be working, they just won’t be doing it at Main Street.

There is little doubt that the future of the workplace will be that there will be no workplace at all. It’s already happening, infact. Thousands of customer service operators are answering customer phone calls not from call centres but from their home office while wearing their pyjamas. With increasing broadband speeds, telephony solutions and dazzling new technologies, the ‘at home’ worker is now realizable, efficient, and above all, cheap for the employer.

So the question needs to be asked: if this is such a cheap, easy and realistic way of staffing your company, why isn’t everybody doing it?

The answer is two-fold. Firstly and most simply, it takes a while for companies to catch on. The virtual workplace is very much early-adopter stuff at this moment in time. The other reason is more interesting. Work, of course, is not just work. The office is a key part of our social network and provides human contact on a daily basis. We chat to our neighbour. We have a giggle at a joke sent through by email. We meet with our manager and chat about the month. It seems that it is proving very difficult for many company’s HR departments to be convinced that virtual workers won’t turn into raving degenerates in two days flat without human contact.

And here’s where Meetsee comes into the story. Meetsee is your office on your computer screen. As one of the new virtu-workers of the world, you can interact with your globally distributed colleagues by chatting with them, stew over a whiteboard session, look at files together and then once the virtual work day is done, you can leave the virtual office and meet your virtual workmates at the virtual pub for a virtual beer.

I have to admit that my initial thoughts about Meetsee was that it was, frankly, ridiculous. We don’t have a solution for a workplace here - we have a computer game for tweens once they graduate from Zwinky and World of Warcraft. But even as I was planning my panning, I started to realize that this is a well executed replication of an office. You really can do much of what you actually need to do in an office using Meetsee. Want to leave a note for someone? No problems - head over to the corkboard. Need to actually talk with someone? Sure - walk over to them and start a chat, phone call or bring up a webcam of them. Want to share the new website wireframes that you’re designing? Head over to the filing cabinet and share files with your supervisor.

The Sims-like environment is not perfect, however. Load times were long, inviting other people to the office space was tedious and hopping between popup and web-browser grows old quickly. Personally I’m not a fan of the general design of the offices - the cartoony elements will not appeal to everybody (especially corporate HR departments!) and I would like to see a slicker design focus. It’s great that everything is customisable, but instead of drag and drop functionality, chairs, clocks and tables are rearranged using a clunky menu interface. Meetsee invites you to play around with your environment, but it’s not a particularly pleasurable experience to do so.

The real potential for integrating Meetsee and the workplace will be as the aforementioned tweens leave school and move into the workforce. Suddenly the idea of a virtual office is not so far-fetched: afterall, these people have been living in virtual worlds since they were knee-high to a grasshopper.

Meetsee’s business model is supported by user subscription, with plans starting at $16.99 a month for individuals and $69.95 for small teams. Enterprise plans are available on application. All plans are currently free while Meetsee is in beta release.

While the application itself is not perfect, it’s not the technology that will prevent users taking up Meetsee. This startup is bravely trying to change societal attitudes to the workplace  - which will come… but will it come while Meetsee still has investor funds in the bank?

You can visit Meetsee and sign up for an account here.

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Good.ly is an intriguing and unusual URL shorterner with a charitable difference.

Social network junkies that have a Mother-Tereasa-like bent may be very interested in this service.

Good.ly has several things going for it, namely a sustainable business model, a diverse affiliate network and, importantly, the warm fuzzy feeling that you get from giving.

URL shorteners are the soup-du-jour at the moment, and good.ly’s kryptonite will undoubtedly be competition and user choice. We also need to ask: is good.ly doing a good enough job of establishing an easily understood identity and message for itself?

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You’re going to have to bear with me here, because this is not really one review - its actually a review of two different services, bound together by the miracles of computer science. Good.ly offers kind hearted folks the opportunity to make money for charities simply by shortening a URL and getting their twitter followers or facebook friends to click on their good.ly shortened link. Sounds simple? Okay - hang on tight: here’s where it gets a bit confusing.

Before we get to good.ly, we need to take a look at a website called Skimlinks (www.skimlinks.com). If you aren’t familiar with skimlinks, they’re an affiliate network that automatically creates commission-payable links based on whatever it is you may want to sell on your site, blog or twitter acccount with a huge range of merchants including the big guns like Amazon, Dell and eBay. Someone clicks your link, buys whatever it is you were promoting and voila! Juicy commission checks headed your way.

Okay, with me so far? Great.

Now, let’s introduce good.ly with an example. Joe, a hard working internaut from Woolongong, Australia is really into comic books. One day Joe finds a super-rare Spiderman vs. Archie mint condition comic on eBay. He’s excited and wants to tweet the world and tell everyone about his new purchase. Joe heads over to the eBay seller’s URL and shortens the URL with good.ly (he’s already installed the bookmarklet in his browser, by the way). After tweeting the good.ly link, four of Joe’s friends follow the link and one buys another comic of the eBay seller.

Here’s the cool bit:

As soon as Joe shortened the URL with good.ly, Skimlinks (remember them?) automatically creates an affiliate link for the shortened URL that provides a commission if anything is purchased from the eBay seller. Since Joe has donated his link, charities pick up the bulk of the commission, with the rest going back to good.ly.

Even though it took me a few minutes to get my head around what was actually going on with this service, there is no doubt that good.ly is an interesting startup. Firstly, let’s get real: no one really cares what service shortens their URL, be it bit.ly, tinyURL or one of the other dozen guys doing effectively the same thing. People just want a URL that isn’t going to kill their tweet characters. Since the other URL shorteners don’t provide any other benefit apart from a short URL, the user isn’t losing anything by migrating to good.ly, with the added benefit of doing “their little bit” for a random charity. Of course, good.ly still provides a shortened URL even if the original link isn’t part of the Skimlinks affiliate network. In that case, no money is made for anybody.

The interesting thing that I noticed about good.ly is that this is not a non-profit startup! Not to take anything away from the charitable side of the service, good.ly is also laughing all the way to the bank by taking a whopping 45% of the commissions earned. While they are upfront about this, the fact remains: the commissions earned - if this thing takes off - will certainly cover much more than server maintenance, marketing and beer money. Now before you cry “Scrooge!” on me, this is actually a good thing: the more viable a business model good.ly has, the longer it will be able to pass donations back to a variety of needy charities.

The major challenge for good.ly is to get their message out in a clearer way. In this world of the five-second attention span, users simply won’t invest the effort to figure the out what the service is doing past the basic URL shortening feature..I’d certainly like to see a guage showing “how much we made for charity” on the front page  to accompany the social aspect “What’s good.ly today” to raise a bit more awareness and buzz with users.

People love buying stuff. People love telling other people about their stuff that they’ve bought. People also have good - if often unrealized - intentions of supporting charity. People love short URLs. Put all that together? A promising recipe for success.

You can visit good.ly and start raising money for charity (and good.ly and skimlinks ;)) by clicking here.

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byTagg.com is the latest RSS-reader-come-Twitter-tracker-come-web-crawler to hit the market. Keep track of your trackables in one central place.

Blogs, tweets and news, Oh My! With so much content that we follow daily, it makes sense to manage it all from one simple platform. Also, blog owners will be interested in byTagg’s alluring affiliate program on offer.

Although byTagg has definite room for improvement, it ticks all the right boxes with an simple RSS reader, (some) Twitter following capability and - overall - a fairly user friendly interface.

In the world of cloud computing, it’s an interesting choice for byTagg’s services to be provided by a downloaded application. With a non-browser based interface and ad-supported delivery, will byTagg offer enough to the user to keep coming back?

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Only a short few years ago, the Internet much like a calm, smooth and peaceful ocean. Much like sailing the ocean, you’d simply set a navigation course for your intended destination and you would find yourself peacefully transported (excepting the accompanying 56.6Kbps modem shriek)  to your desired port, be it  ‘The sea of AOL’, ‘Hotmail Bay’ or the nefarious ‘Pornography Harbour’. The internet was - if not safe - predictable. Now a tidal wave brews daily. A massive tsunami of information constantly bears down on us all, with an estimated 125,000 tweets per hour and a never-ending stream of blog entries and news stories. We all love the ‘nowness’ of the Internet, but come on… how can you possibly keep track of it all?

byTagg.com gives a good try at tackling this problem. A small application is loaded onto your desktop and from it you can add Twitter accounts, RSS feeds and tagged keywords. Once set up, byTagg dutifully checks each feed, account or keyword and automatically updates you with the ability to view new content titles as well as previewing the said content in an inbuilt web browser.

byTagg.com is not a unique concept — there are plenty of content aggregators out there already — but byTagg is one of the few startups brave enough to do it in a non-browser based environment. The service works in much the way that you would expect, with a fairly intuitive interface and a clean, bold display. Adding RSS feeds is easy and byTagg features some nice additions such as keyword filtering and some options to customize your view and theme. The set up process was painless enough - I was using the application in under five minutes.

With that said, there’s something half-baked about the whole package. I don’t want to rain too much on their parade, especially while byTagg is in beta release, but byTagg doesn’t hit all the right notes. In a similar way as listening to me butcher out Paint it Black on the guitar, you can tell what is being played, but the simple fact remains: it ain’t no Keith Richards. The preview window is glitchy and most previewed pages require you to scroll around as the image is condensed into a smaller frame. When you do follow a link, byTagg hosts the page under a framed google adwords display (see screenshots below) which is at best bold, at worst obtrusive. In addition, you can preview tweets, but cannot click through to links or preview the Twitter interface. Whether or not this is a beta bug that needs to be squashed, I was left thinking “what’s the point?” as I ended up loading Twitter anyway to find the link that I had just previewed on byTagg.

I was left feeling underwhelmed by byTagg, despite an interesting execution. I also wonder if byTagg is setting itself up to be a legacy product as RSS begins its inevitable slide to sleep in Davy Jones’s locker as the all powerful Twitter titan continues its all encompassing monopoly of ‘now’. What is great to see is a startup with a way of monetizing its services from the outset. While the delivery of the adsense advertisements needs to be finnessed, there is no doubt that byTagg affiliates will be intrigued at least by an attractive revenue-sharing proposal.

The solution offered by byTagg still needs to be massaged vigourosly, but the concept remains sound. While some will be put off by the non-browser based application and the subtle-as-a-jackhammer advertising support, many will love the fact that a very complex world of information is being made much more simple, centralized and accessible.

You can visit the site here, or you can download byTagg here:

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Pipejump.com offers a web based service that manages the lifecycle of a sales opportunity from drunken pitch you delivered at the pub into a closed deal.

Pipejump’s service will appeal to any small business or sales person that is managing several sales opportunities at any one time — Particularly the ones that suffer from chronic disorganisation. Also, sales managers that want to keep tabs on their team will be pricking up their ears.

Sales managers will undoubtedly be interested in the sophisticated reporting interface that Pipejump offers. Coupled with an attractive ROI proposition, it’s not a far stretch to imagine Pipejump.com as a regular addition to any sales office.

Like anything, the quality of the reports that Pipejump.com spits out is only as good as the data entered in. Will sales people busy wining and dining be able to stay on top of the administrative components of the service? Or will this be a case of gargbage in -> garbage out?

Whatever mental image comes to mind when you think ’sales’, there’s no doubt that sales people are also, in a way, accomplished street performers. Whether it’s a mostachioed-and-plaid-sportscoat-clad-”only-used-by-a-grandmother-to-get-her-groceries-twice-a-month” car salesman or the uber-slick super deal closer, there’s a lot more to sales than charm and a cheque. These pros are juggling more phone calls, deals and appointments than your most dextrous street-juggler and all of his balls, clubs and flaming chainsaws.

Pipejump.com is offering an ever-so-simple solution to an age old problem - with all of these sales prospects going on at any one time, how can you keep track of the comings, goings and closings in an easy and efficient way? This web-based solution allows users to create sales leads and funnel them through the sales pipe to end at a closed deal. Notes, reminders and contact details can also be added, making pipejump an attractive sales-diary-cum-CRM system.

The interface is intuitive and well designed with drag-and-drop functionality that works in much the way that you would hope it would. There’s also plenty of help along the way as well as some cutesy - if a little gimmicky - fortune-cookie sales advice tips like “Always follow up! Keep yourself on your prospect’s mind and show a sincere interest in that deal.” that are also delivered daily by Twitter. The main strength of pipejump’s service has to be the reporting functionality that gives account administrators a birdseye view of all user’s sales and pipelines. The reports are quick, cool and useful.

Pipejump is a well rounded and carefully considered project only let down by a couple of small oversights. The appointment function is basic to the extreme, only allowing you to set a reminder for morning/noon/afternoon/evening and there is no sms notification option as yet. The reminder function comes across as an afterthought and slightly sours the overall tight package. I’d also like to see a quick-search function included allowing users to find clients, deals and appointments without having to flick through all of the tabs individually. Also, since sales people are often mobile, some sort of application for blackberry/iPhone would be an ideal bed fellow for the web based app.

Pipejump is funded by user subscriptions that start at a slightly-steep $24 per month for individuals right up to a bargain-of-the-century $59 per month for a ’super’ account with unlimited users and unlimited deals. Really? No Enterprise subscription? I’ve just got this horrible feeling that Cisco and AT&T are going to roll pipejump over all 10,000 people in their sales force and pipejump will be kicking themselves from ‘unqualified’ to ‘closure’.

If you’re a small business or a sales person that is constantly battling with the cantakerous twins Procrastination and Disorganisation, then Pipejump is an attractive solution. If you are a sales manager or you run a business that wants to keep on top of what sales are being lost and won, who is pulling their weight and who is just enjoying the perks of the company Amex, then you should be writing a business case to bring on Pipejump as soon as you’ve finised with this review. Check out Pipejump here.

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Task.fm is a notification service that - impressively - talks the same language as you and converts common phrases into reminders.

Considering the site design and branding, as well as the service itself this is an app designed for industrious young executives busy with Blackberries andd cafe lattes.

The engine that translates your phrasing into a reminder is impressive - recognising even the most vague “A-week-from-yesterday-at-the-morrow” type phrases.

I have a deep bond with my phone’s calendar application. It’s a safe relationship. Can this flashy tart break my monogamy?

At the outset, it looks like Task.fm (not to be confused with www.task.com: “Largest provider of point-of-sale merchandise in North America’) is doing everything right. They’ve identified a problem: computers don’t speak like us. And they’ve found a market: people that need to be reminded about stuff. Add some very clever back-end coding and voila! You’ve created a slick little app that sets out to do one thing and do it well.

Once you’ve registered wwith task.fm you are presented with a simple - dare I say “twitteresque” - text field allowing you to set a SMS, phone call (at a small cost) or an email reminder by typing in the same way as you would speak to a person. For example, task.fm correctly translated the phrases: “Remind me in five minutes time”, “Remind me in two weeks from Friday at midday” and “remind me four days from tomorrow at 3 in the afternoon”. A simple exterior belies a sophisticated engine. Impressive stuff.

As I say, you can’t really fault task.fm for what it does, largely becuase it does it very well. My only problem with the service is that the way that I speak to people is not the way that I speak with my computer. I am proudly bilingual. My computer has taught me very well that dates are picked by clicking a square on a calendar and times are selected from a drop-down box. Is my computer allowing me the creative expression to talk to it in the same manner as I would Hal from A Space Odyssey 2001? Well, No. However, depsite this communication hurdle, we still have a functional and trusted relationship with one another. Task.fm has a formidable task to try and convert calendar users into semantic speakers.

While this app would be beautiful in a talk-to-text application where you could dictate your reminder through a phone or microphone, I’m not sure that I believe that there are enough people out there that would rather ‘talk’ to their computer than to select dates and times from traditional means to see task.fm emerge an overnight success. Because peeople aren’t tied to their computers, I would also love to know whether task.fm are developing a mobile application to allow busy and important executives to set reminders from on the road.

Task.fm is currently in public beta. The business model is supported by users purchasing call and sms credits.

If you and your computer are ready to move to the next level in your relationship and really communicate with one another - and you need to be reminded of your marriage counselling session with your wife (she just doesn’t understand what we’ve got, my darling Macbook), then task.fm may be for you.