Tweako.com (New York) is a user generated social networking site that provides a one stop collaborative platform and knowledge base for technology and computing related topics. The users of the site can submit their personally created content or content from other websites as well. The content can be in the form of guides, service reviews, new software, programming, tutorials, general information, how-to’s and pretty much any thing that is related to computing and technology. The process of submitting content is straightforward. First, the moderator receives the user’s content and reviews it for possible acceptance. Once accepted, the content is placed in a waiting queue to be placed on the site for everyone to see.

I recently conversed with Mike Stefanello, the 19 year old owner developer and designer of Tweako.com and this is what he had to say: 

What is your mission for the site?

“The project was designed to give people interested in these areas a place to pool their knowledge and learn from one another. The site welcomes anyone, at any technical proficiency, and makes the learning process much more fun and enjoyable. In the end, I hope to create a massive repository of computing information, where anyone can come to and quickly learn anything.”

How do you feel about being compared to Digg as the “Digg for Tutorials”?

“It was truly remarkable to go from reading about a great site like Digg everyday, to reading headlines with my site next to theirs. With that, though, came the many negative opinions of it being a clone. I wasn’t claiming this to be a ground breaking innovation, just simply what I thought to be a great site with a great purpose. And although Digg did an amazing job innovating the concept of user involvement and voting; the voting process has been around forever. It can make every site that much better and that is why it has become so popular. They should be extremely proud of what they’ve accomplished. With the way the web has evolved, the potential for anyone to create something amazing will always be there. I only hope this story can influence others to try as well.”

The amount of registered users the site commanded within a short period after launching on March 29, 2007 is quite impressive. Also, the fact that this is a privately owned and funded website is definitely inspiring to small startups that often don’t have the financial support of larger and better funded sites. On a personal note, I found the site to be very well organized and easy to comprehend. The site also has resourceful features such as being able to vote and comment on submitted content. Furthermore, users have the opportunity to freely chat and collaborate with one another and customize their personal profile and news feed page.  In addition, they can build a list of buddies and access assistance in a forum. Most impressive is that users can now receive 30% of the sites Adsense revenue generated from their personal content. Now, I really hope that this sets a trend for other social networking sites to follow suit and provide appreciation and incentives to the users that ultimately generate the content.

Click here to visit Tweako.com

MyMindshare.com is a platform where consumers possessing mindshare and acting as buyers; interact with advertisers as sellers to reach their respective goals in the advertising market.  Advertisers go through so much hassle trying to gain the attention of consumers and they try even harder to get consumers to click on their advertisements in the hope that it will lead to a sale or conversion. Consumers, on the other hand are very much interested in brand awareness or learning about products and services available to them that is specific to their needs. MyMindshare is such a place that offers a platform for them to interact without third party mediators such as television, internet advertisements, newspapers and billboards. We have all experienced intrusive, inappropriate and irrelevant advertisements and can definitely welcome the need for MyMindshare to act as an alternative to the traditional forms of advertising. This site is different in that consumers who do not stand to gain in the advertisement market in terms of receiving monetary value for their services can take advantage of MyMindshare. A buyer can directly interact with advertisers who cater to their specific needs which is a more direct and relevant approach.

I had a chance to talk to Jim Bursch about his innovative concept and this is what he had to say: 

What is MyMindshare and why should people use it?

“MyMindshare is a place where people go to buy, sell and trade mindshare. It is a unique blend of Digg, Adwords and Craigslist with a dash of eBay. Anyone who has a web site they would like to expose to other people can use MyMindshare, and anyone who values their own mindshare would like to use MyMindshare. To put it crassly, at MyMindshare you will receive payment to look at a web site.”

How did you come up with the concept of MyMindshare?

“Back in December 2004, I posted on my personal blog that I was fed up with the intrusiveness and waste of advertising and I decided to do something about it. MyMindshare has been evolving ever since then.”

What is your future plan with MyMindshare?

“My dream is to grow MyMindshare as organically as possible, the way Craigslist grew. It’s hard to say right now how that will happen.”

The site is quite easy to navigate through and the blog that accompanies the site is quite precise in illustrating the many ideas of mindshare. The homepage has a list of advertisers with the amount that they are willing to bid on consumers for spending 20 seconds of their time. Once you click on a link, you will go to a page where you can rate the page and accept payment for your services. I agree with Jim that consumers should receive payment for their mindshare as apposed to the advertisers who interrupt popular media to gain a few seconds of our attention. Mindshare in essence, is the time spent thinking about something and that is definitely something that all consumers possess. It is truly remarkable how we do not realize how much control we have in the advertising market. I look forward to seeing the people at MyMindshare gather more advertisers and consumers in a bid to revolutionize the advertising industry.

Click here to visit MyMindShare.com.

AuctionCapture is a trendsetting site for bidders who need analytical tools to successfully place a realistic bid on a particular product and win. AuctionCapture is a completely free site that provides one platform for users to search for items listed on eBay, Yahoo, Amazon and many other sites.  The site is another welcome addition from the person who launched SportsCollectors.net, a successful autograph collecting site.

I recently talked to Jay Grossman of AuctionCapture about his analytical website tool for bidders and this is what he had to say:

What motivated you to create AuctionCapture?

“AuctionCapture was a concept I came up with in 2002. I was frustrated that I did not know the price points for bidding on auction items and I wanted a better idea of values of items. Two years later (2004), I created a desktop application and database that allowed me to track values of closing auctions for items that interested me. I found I could better predict outcomes and I would get better deals. In the early fall of 2006, I decided that it would be cool to offer this kind of information to more folks. I figured the more people who regularly use it, the better information I would have to analyze and understand trends. AuctionCapture was live and ready for shoppers to use by November 2006.”

What do people stand to benefit in using this site?

“People can determine the market value of any search item. When you search, the site will display the market value for the combination of the supplied keywords and excluded words. People can save their detailed searches all in one place. For those of us who tend to search for the same kinds of items repeatedly, it is such a time saver. We analyze what you like - the items you view, bid on, watch, and win. Then we take that information make personalized suggestions. That alone would be great (since no one does it well), but we also look at other members with similar interests and show you items they were also interested in. Also, you can access powerful RSS feeds of any EBay search.”

What are your next steps?

“We plan to continue growing the community and add more features that members would find useful. We are always looking for suggestions you’d like to see to make the auction shopping and selling experience faster, easier and more enjoyable.”

Overall, I found the site to be quite user friendly and many of the features that they offer are very useful such as the refining search feature where one can set the minimum and maximum price for search items. The watchlist feature is also very good for those who want to keep an eye on items as well as their closing bids to make more wise decisions. The people at AuctionCapture will definitely go places with their focus on user satisfaction. The satisfaction of the user is always paramount in expanding a site to offer greater features, more versatility and relevance.

Start your bid at AuctionCapture.com.

iMiners (CA, USA) is a noteworthy free website for investors, public relations personnel and the general public interested in learning about the specifics of all publicly traded companies. The specifics of publicly traded companies are laid out in an organized manner by category, date, eChart and eSearch. Their mission is to organize all corporate information so that it is accessible and profitable for global investors. They currently have 208,848 indexed releases available on their site since April 1st, 2006.  In addition, the experts at iMiners’s Global Distribution Data Analysis Centers continue to index every press release issued daily by about 7,000+ US public companies trading on NASDAQ, NYSE, and AMEX.  The press releases are then filtered into 12 categories and further into 87 subcategories and stored into their database for quick retrieval.

I recently talked to Jnyaneshwar Prabhu, President and CEO of iMiners Inc. and this is what he had to say about his tool:

What motivated you to create iMiners and what do you wish to achieve with this site?

“Information is Power, yet a lot of time is spent searching and analyzing the price movements on a stock chart rather than profiting from it! Our vision is to help eliminate information overload and turn the most relevant, meaningful, and contextual information into useful knowledge and wisdom. Our mission is to deliver Simple, Intuitive, and Visual investor tools that will enable informed decisions quickly!”

What is your business model?

Our business model is to provide “customized Pressrooms” productized as “PR Interactive” to be placed in Investor Relations websites of public companies, on a subscription basis. We launched “PR Interactive” in December 2006 and have two customers: Sigma Designs, Inc. and Nvidia Corporation. We are in active discussions with many companies and hope to go live on their sites soon.

What other initiatives have you been working on since you have launched?

We are currently working on a proprietary algorithm to determine the actual “Market Adjusted Impact” of each event on its stock price. In the future, we plan to deliver tools to our users that will help them correlate and predict effect of events on stock price! We also provide a host of Admin and Analytics tools namely PR Comps and PR Analytics that help the Investment Relations teams measure their effectiveness.

IMiners definitely has a lot to offer in the realm of relative content on publicly traded companies.  The way that they have organized this information is well thought out. I really liked their eChart, a graph illustrating the stock prices in U.S. dollars over a time period. Also, the category feature is quite useful with a wide array of categories: awards and recognition, conference calls & meetings, corporate, customer and partnerships, products and services, SEC filing, management changes, legal, financial and industry events, analyst action and M&A. I would like to see iMiners expand their tools to include more functionality for investment conscious users to make informed investment decisions. Overall, this site has a lot of potential in terms of revolutionizing how we research and obtain company information online for a variety of purposes such as investment or company knowledge.

You can visit www.iminers.com and enter any stock symbol.