Subzero Blue

Mezed, A Tunisian Auction Site

Mezed is a new Tunisian auction site that recently surfaced into the arena of online startups in Tunisia.

A number of Tunisian startups/websites have already been launched to try and push through the idea of online auctions in Tunisia, get it popular, and attempt to make some money out of it. Examples off the top of my head are sites like: MoncefBay and EchriBay.
A lot of these services hang on for a while before fading away into Tunisian internet history now. The auction model just hasn’t taken off and worked up to now, for one reason or another.

Websites that approach the whole buying/selling thing through small classified ads seem to be doing a little better maybe, but nothing we can be proud of and call e-commerce yet, I guess.

Anyway, back to Mezed, the website takes on a new and different approach to the whole auctions system, re-inventing the wheel, and generating a lot of buzz along the way.

Mezed’s system revolves solely around buyers; people can’t sell their stuff on the website, they can only buy stuff that Mezed is selling, products it gets at cheap prices from its partners.

Continue reading Mezed, A Tunisian Auction Site

Brijit: Good Content Boiled Down To 100 Words

Brijit is a pretty interesting new service that takes long-form content and boils it down to 100 words or less, giving users abstracts that attempt to summarize, review and rate the original content, passing along the basic necessary information to the user and making it easier for them to choose what to dive deeper into by going back to the original content.

The abstracts are written by freelancers, with the possibility for anyone to join in, and these freelancers get paid $5 for every published abstract. It’s also possible for others to leave comments/other takes on an abstract.

The abstracts come with a rating system, from zero dots (not a priority read) to three dots (a must-read.)

There are RSS feeds you can subscribe to all over the site, per source, per subject, Brijit’s recommended reads, most popular reads, …etc.
Plus, you can save your favourite reads on the site.

The site’s design is really neat, nice and usable; pretty well organized and straight to the point.

Personally, I think this is quite an interesting service and approach, very useful for people who quickly want to browse news and content in search of things they might find interesting and that they could delve deeper into later on, by reading them online, buying a magazine or watching them on TV.

Arabic Domain Names Coming Soon

ICANN, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers have launched an evaluation of Internationalized Domain Names this week that allows Internet users to test top-level domains in 11 languages.

This evaluation represents ICANN

30 Year Continuous Power Laptop Battery

Now this would be really cool and efficient…

Your next laptop could have a continuous power battery that lasts for 30 years without a single recharge thanks to work being funded by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. The breakthrough betavoltaic power cells are constructed from semiconductors and use radioisotopes as the energy source. As the radioactive material decays it emits beta particles that transform into electric power capable of fueling an electrical device like a laptop for years.

Although betavoltaic batteries sound Nuclear they

BrainReactions.net: Online Brainstorming

Brainstorming is an essential element in any creative process, it allows the flow of different ideas between all team members without the limits of a tightly structured meeting, only using general guidelines and a common goal as a framework for the exchange.

BrainReactions.net is a new service that allows you to take your brainstorming sessions online, keep track of them and even tap into the intelligence of the crowds.

Using their tool, you can create your own private Brainstorming rooms, in which you set your question/topic and invite your team members or the people you want to work with in to start submitting their ideas.

If you want to tap into the community’s ideas, you can setup a public brainstorm where all the site’s users can submit their thoughts. In a similar Digg-style, the topics with the most submitted ideas are listed sequentially.

This service is also interesting for people who would like to get involved, share their ideas and build their profile as innovative thinkers. The tool allows you to keep track and claim ownership of all the ideas you contributed in different topics.

It’s also possible to keep track of your favorite topics via RSS, a nice option for anyone who likes to keep all of their incoming news in the same place.

I think BrainReactions.net is a really interesting way to conduct brainstorms, and collect a high quantity of ideas and input from your own team or from a group of motivated and innovative people, all through a simple straight-forward interface.

[Site: BrainReactions.net]

Mango : Free Language Learning Courses Online

mango Mango is a newly launched online web service that provides free enterprise level language learning courses.

It initially provides a choice of 11 language courses, each course made up of 100 lessons, and each lesson including between 70 and 150 slides.

The 11 languages covered are: Spanish, Russian, French, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, German, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Greek, English for Spanish speakers, and English for Polish speakers.

Like other language learning software, Mango shows and plays conversations between two people in a number of social setups and situations. Then it goes into detail in the following slides, dissecting and recombining the conversation line by line and word by word until you become more familiar with the phrases. Every level goes on to build on skills captured from the one before.

I think it’s a very interesting language learning solution that is worth checking out. I’m thinking of giving a couple of the languages on it a go. Should be fun.

[Site: Mango]

Operating Systems: Proprietary vs. Free

With proprietary operating systems increasingly designed to restrict and control the user, with digital ‘restrictions’ management, their users are subjugated even more now than before. If you don’t want chains on your hand and foot, your only escape is to switch to a free operating system.

— Richard Stallman

10 Things Every Programmer Should Know For Their First Job

I just came across a great list of things every new programmer should know for their first job on Apple Matters, and I thought I’d share it with you guys here. I personally confirm all the ten points in the list from my own experience.

The list goes as follows:

1. Being liked is easy
2. Being respected is hard
3. Everything you learned in college is useless
4. Never stop learning
5. You live or die by your text editor, so choose wisely
6. No one really cares what college you went to
7. Silence never goes out of style
8. You will meet odd, strange and unpleasant people, deal with it
9. Make friends with IT
10. You will never escape office politics

Read the full post: 10 Things Every Programmer Should Know For Their First Job

Google Introduces Presentations To Its Online Office Suite

After a long time coming (long in terms of our internet era time) Google has finally launched the third piece in their online office suite: Google Presentations (or Presently as some people are calling it), a presentation product that targets the needs of the audience using Microsoft’s PowerPoint.

Presentations can be imported from existing files or created using the new slide editor. They can be edited, shared, and published using the familiar Google Docs interface, with several collaborators working on a slide deck simultaneously, in real time.

When presenting the slides, participants can simply click a link to follow along as the presenter takes the audience through the slideshow. Participants are also connected through Google Talk and can chat about the presentation as they’re watching, which I found to be a really cool feature.

Personally, I really like its simplicity. It is a stripped down version of a presentations product with only the essential features needed to put together a number of slides, organize your content and then present it; and that’s exactly what I need for my presentations.
All the additional bells and whistles that PowerPoint has, I rarely ever use.

Will this take the place of Microsoft PowerPoint? I don’t know really, maybe not right now, and maybe never for power users, but for people who are connected most of the time they’re at a computer and who need simple basic essential features, I think this is a great option.

Check it out at Google Docs.