Scrapblog goes beyond sharing photos and video online, but empowering you to create your online scrapbook. I had a chance to see the product in action at Demo Fall 2006 and it’s really quite impressive what is possible inside this application. Scrapblog allows you to create world of your pictures.

Photos can be sourced from Flickr, Photobucket, or your desktop. In addition, you can also include videos from YouTube and other services. A collection of “stickers” enable you to customize things further. There are some very nice looking themes that will allow you to get a jump start. Unlike other themes, these are fully editable.

You can ultimately publish your ScrapBlog to the web and choose the level of security you want to have. From there, you can quickly embed the ScrapBlog into your blog or MySpace profile. In addition, Wordpress and Typepad integration is supported. If you’re a Flickr user, you can even export the ScrapBlog as a photo set.

Further Reading:

Scrapblog blog
Coverage at downloadsquad blog

Wallop empowers you create your distinct online personality by empowering you to mesh your online and offline personas. What struck me the most about Wallop was the interface (co-designed by the Frog Design team). There really is no metaphor that nicely describes the site. Movement throughout the application is very organic. The most “forced feature” if there is any, is the method of creating conversations around things.One of the most interesting features is the Radar. This is the visual map of your network. They are abandoning the friend of a friend model. The system uses an affinity model that brings people closer to you based on your level of interaction with the individual - either direct or indirect (through your network).

Some controversy seems to have dusted up over the Mods. These are small flash movies that can be created by the 2M+ flash developers in the world. Wallop is literally a marketplace for flash applets. They take a 30% commission for the sale and all pricing is dictated by the creator. I give it a thumbs up.

Further Reading:

Pronet Advertising has very good write up on Wallop
Read about Wallop on Mashable

Widgetbox has the goal of widgetizing the web. Today’s world is using widgets to enable content, communities and E-commerce. Widgetbox provides you with hundred ready made of widgets that you can add to your own pages. They are trying to make it easier for you to create your own widgets. They have a Money Maker’s category that lists widgets that will actually earn you some cold, hard cash for the real estate they take up on your site.

The application enables you to customize the presentation of the widget - effectively normalizing widget configuration. WidgetBox has tag awareness - “Widgets tune in to the content of the page and they do so automatically.”

Further Reading:
Coverage of Widgetbox at Mashable
Widgetbox on Will Price’s blog

Qipit is an online mobile service that allows you to capture and share information that is around you with a camera phone. Now pictures taken from that cheap camera phone can be shared and put to more productive uses.

Here it how it goes. Take a piture of any document, simply with your camera phone, the image is ready to be faxed, emailed and to be published. There are number of things you can do with this picture now - like you can e-mail to yourself, to your blog, email it to your friends etc. Or you can fax that important PO to your HQ or simply take the pciture of the whiteboard in presales call and store it safely so you can share it with the rest of the team back home. Qipit allows you to mail or fax from the web interface.

As seen in the demo at Demo Fall 2006, the quality of the pictures seems clear - apparently qipit provides some assistance to optimize the images and does some noise and dust removal. It also readjusts the images.

Qipit competes with Soonr, a company offering a more rounded feature set of mobile applications. But in mobile imaging space, Qipit is ahead of the pack with clear advantage in converting images to scan-quality documents including correcting the document orientation and perspective.

Update: Qipit just added the capability to rotate the pictures.

Further Reading:
Text photos to PDF from your camera phone

Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet founded Grand Central with the vision to change the way the phone systems works and to provide rich telephony experience. Their product demo at Demo Fall 2006 was awesome. I had a chance earlier today to talk with the folks at Grand Central. This service serves as a centralized personal calling center. Some of the key features I noted were:

• Automatic call forwarding to 3-6 phones
• Personalized greetings and voicemail based on caller
• Call recording for 1-10 hours
• Per call note taking and forwarding
• Spam blocking for phone numbers
• RingShare - allows you to provide a MP3 for your phone number

The basic service is free. For a small monthly fee (under $15), you can get quite a bit more. I asked some questions about other forms of integration and it seems there could eventually be an offering catering to small businesses. To me, a tie in with SalesForce or other CRM systems would be ideal.

This is defniitely something that I recommend taking a closer look at. It’s really pretty awesome. The only difficulty, of course, is that you have to start using a new number. This is not a problem for me as I am moving, but it certainly could be a hurdle for others.