RuffPC.com (California, US) - a virtual PC sales site that caters to buyers who are interested in durability and quality engineering in their portable computers. In that regard, RuffPC.com offers a product line consisting of ruggedized, semi-rugged, and fully rugged brands to emphasize their nicheness. RuffPC.com and the associated product lines are a welcome addition to the market, where unique portable computers are literally non-existent. The ruggedized laptops will definitely gel well with the market gap with such unique offerings: water-proof, sunlight readable display, capability to withstand against shock, dust, and even mud. 

For those still weary of such a brand, take note that the brand has even gained popularity among notable enterprises: Boeing, SCE, NASA, U.S. Navy, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Geological Survey, Mississippi University, Rutgers University, J.L. French, Rocky Flat, Stealth Engineering, GEO Systems U.K., RACAL Defense Electronics, Lynch and Sons, Herzog Electric, U.S.R.D., and Kansas Department of Health & Environment.

In addition, research composed by the International Data Corporation (IDC) reported that among the most common causes for notebook damage are drops at 64%, followed by spills at 38% and the component most cited for damage is the HDD and LCD display. The brands focus on durability brings to mind Volvo’s focus on safety. Anyhow, a unique approach to building portable PCs or any product for that matter is the right way to go especially considering the economic costs associated with poorly crafted computers. Surprising, however, is the fact that it took so long for someone to change focus from the conventional perception that the next slim laptop is all that matters to actual quality workmanship, safety and durability.

Click here for reasons to go ruff with portable computers and here for a listing of their product line, and here for features that set ruff apart from the conventional brands.

SharedWeddings.com – an innovative and free wedding site, founded and launched in early 2007, with a host of features for couples planning their auspicious wedding day. Included in SharedWeddings.com are important elements such as fully featured wedding websites, various website templates to choose from, an easy to use wedding website design interface, guests can RSVP online, create multiple photo albums, create a wedding poll and quiz, and receive automatic emails when a visitor to the site leaves a message, comment, or RSVPs.

For those interested in spreading the wedding buzz; SharedWeddings.com helps connect friends and family. The site is quite interactive and the features as mentioned is often on the top of the list of brides and grooms. Also, the fact that family and friends can take part in the buzz long before the days leading to the wedding is priceless. In addition, the site has a Wedding Budget Planner. With this tool, you can categorize all of your wedding planning spending, record deposits paid, assign a due date, and make notes about each individual item. Furthermore, new templates are being planned and added to the lot of templates available. Overall, its a welcome addition to have this site as a form of relief aid for those planning their weddings, which can often be exhiliarating and at the same time be quite exhausting.

Click here to view a actual wedding website, and here for the feature list, and here for a list of sample templates

TeamEffect.com (New Zealand) – a visual drag and drop style project management tool is definitely a pleasant diversion from the complexity and lack of usability of the traditional online project management tools. System developers, management and IT teams would find the tool effective in the following critical areas: project scheduling, forecasting team requirements,  maintaining a tally on task progress, and in sharing and assigning task responsibility. In addition, the management tool has essential project categories such as analysis, design, development and testing to reap the benefits of a planned undertaking. 

I had a chance to talk to the creator of the site, Joel Macfarlane, and this is what he had to say:

Why did we build such a thing? What could be the business model?

Until nine months ago I owned a successful software company providing Project and Portfolio Management software to large companies like Tecos. We made a pretty good living selling software locally and charging big money to install and maintain it. It was never a particularly easy business living from one big sale to the next. Meanwhile we observed the industry trend of moving away from large expensive applications to smaller cheaper SAS product. Watching other companies like BaseCamp and FogBugz sell millions of copies online for a small per month cost just make sense. I exited the company and spent the next nine months creating TeamEffect from scratch with the goal of being in the same market as these projects but with something completely visual and super easy to use.

We finished this month and have gone into Beta with the goal of giving the software away till it’s perfect. Check out the project video on our web site for a quick demonstration.

Why is your site different than your competitors?

The currently market leaders are very clunky as the web has not traditionally leant itself to good client side interactivity. Typically these apps give you text boxes and calendar pickers rather than a good old fashion start to end bars. I used to draw staff schedules up against projects on a white board where I could draw lines and rub things out with a finger rather than stumble my way through these lists. TeamEffect gives you the same features and more but presents them on a visual calendar with all of the interface smarts we all expect from Web 2.0 applications.

How are you planning to market it?

With experience selling this sort of software in person we are going to apply the same sales techniques online. We will be running a social forum based campaign over the next month to gather a few eyeballs. Then when we can hone our message and drive our conversion rates up we will start a formal branding PR campaign on some of the large Project Management sites.
 
Project Managers and Team Managers are busy people and generally hate scheduling and forecasting software since it adds workload, the campaign we have planned plays on this.

Any other information that you believe is relevant to your startup?

We are inviting 100 people to sign up this month for free to start our advisory community. We need all the feedback and help we can get to make this software really stand out. So get on board and give us a hand.

It’s a pleasant surprise that TeamEffect.com is offering these services for free until the site is perfected - a great approach to building loyalty and user acceptance. The site, built using a fair bit of client side code and ofcourse, Ajax technology for user interaction, can be said to be usabilitiy and technology driven. Overall, it is great to see a real world tool to aid management in planning the initial and subsequent stages of the project development process. 

Click here to visit TeamEffect.com and check out the demo videos.

Facebook today celebrated their one year anniversary of their platform with a release of fbOpen, an open source platform for social network.

This release includes the API infrastructure, the FQL parser, the FBML parser, and FBJS, as well as implementations of many common methods and tags. We’ve included samples and some dummy data to help you get started fast.

Facebook Open Platform also has extensibility points built in so you can add your own functionality, such as your own FBML tags, API methods, etc.

This certainly is a response to OpenSocial, as Facebook continue their catch up with other social networks such as MySpace, which is considered the largest social network.

The goal of this release is to help you as developers better understand Facebook Platform as a whole and more easily build applications, whether it’s by running your own test servers, building tools, or optimizing your applications on this technology. We’ve built in extensibility points, so you can add functionality to Facebook Open Platform like your own tags and API methods. We’re also hoping you use Facebook Open Platform in ways we’ve never thought of – just as you showed off your creativity with Facebook Platform, we hope this lets you be creative with the foundation of the platform itself.

It is licenced under CPAL. The FBML parcer is licensed under MPL.

Certainly more details will be released in the next few days.

This will leave door open to many new startup facebook applications.