While some follow football, some follow cricket and some Rachel Ray, I like to follow web startups, just because some of these applications are cool, anything creative gives me a kick like a bloody mary! These startups are created by 20 somethings, one by a 6th grader - {{{ bells }}} - another start of bubble!! No, I don’t think so, not so much volatile as last time because VCs have learnt from their mistakes but you never know… here is a video that got famous (over million views) last December before it was taken down because of a copyright infringement - it is now back online without the law breaking unsharable photograph (according to the photographer and her lawyer) used before!

Bring out your thinking hats fellas and take the Intel Software Network’s Threading Challenge.

The contest consists of 12 problems/puzzles in all and you have to submit code for each of them, mostly C/C++. To make it a little easy, the kind folks at Intel are providing you a template to start with. If you still find yourselves stuck, just ask other developers/contestants on the online forum. Collaboration is encouraged but there’ll only be one winner.

Good luck y’all!

Note: Do drop in a line if you find the ‘tabs’ plug-in way too cool! Yours truly put very little effort to get that effect (courtesy: Ajax, jQuery).

When we were busy orkutting, myspacing, facebooking with friends - Geni.com comes up with a social networking site for family members.

It’s a website where you can create your family tree. Its simple, clean and fast. Took me 15 minutes to add 62 family members (and thats not even half my family). You can browse through the tree added further by others on your tree, invite family members, keep track of birthdays and anniversaries, send a group message - invite your family members to your wedding, if they are all technologically web based junkies - basically socialize online with your family.

While creating my family tree, I realized I know more about my friends than my own family members, its time I knew what they are upto :)

This is another wonders of Ajax, makes me really really want to learn this scripting language.

One-click search is the name of the game on Yahoo! Alpha.

The slick Ajax-ian UI returns search results from multiple sources (Flickr, Wikipedia, Y! Answers, YouTube…) with *no* browser reloads. The Sponsored Results tab can be conveniently left untouched, thus avoiding any distractions (and reducing the number of accidental clicks).

Needless to say, the Y! Alpha results are identical to those on Yahoo! Search (doh!!). Try it out..the folks from Down Under should have worked really hard on this release.

The name suggests it all - well it actually does not, so what is ‘Picnik’?

Its a wonder of Ajax and Flash implemented together; its an online picture editing software, requires no download, no previous knowledge of any photo editing software - all it needs is a picture, internet connection and some creativity.

Move the mouse over the image to see ‘Before’ and ‘After’

Few sliders helps you get the effect above - for the picture above I used tools like

Edit
• Resize

Creative Tools
• Black & White
• Boast
• Local Contrast
• Vignetting and Border

Save & Share
• Save to Computer - uploaded it to web

It integrates well with Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, from your computer, from a search engine - you name it, it gets the picture and lets you edit and save to pretty much where ever you want to.

Disclaimer : I am not associated with ‘Picnik’, I am only a user of the software. This post merely represents my opinion.