What is it?

They’re a bakery in New York

What makes them special?

Their product. Sure they’re just selling “cup cakes”, but they’ve managed to take a simple product and give it a new and interesting twist and that’s what caught my attention

The graphical style and other elements on the site all reenforce the concept they’re driving – making cupcakes more appealing to boys .. more macho basically

I love it!

Go play with their site

No. It is not a beautiful website, but boy is it functional.

VideoETA’s only purpose is to give you, the viewer, information on DVD and BluRay release dates.

While the dates it uses are US only it’s still incredibly useful.

With more and more titles being released at almost the same time on both sides of the Atlantic and a growing number of studios offering “region free” BluRay discs, this sort of service is useful.

Personally I’m an addict!

So, for example, if you loved Avatar and want to know when it’s going to be available to own, then VideoETA will be able to tell you that it is currently scheduled for a June release.

Their blog is also a pretty good source of film news, though it may not be on a par with some of the big movie news sites.

So a few people came up with the idea of “outvesting“, which they describe as:

“The act of committing money to a business while expecting to get nothing in return, other than the satisfaction of giving a leg up to Irish entrepreneurs.”

The idea is pretty simple – pledging €50 each towards startups. €50 isn’t much, but when you multiply it by 40, 50 or 100 it becomes a “nice chunk of cash”.

Further details on the site

One that has been around for several years is iBOOD (Internet’s Best Online Offer Daily).

Every day they have a different offer on a single product.

What kind of products do they offer?

They all seem to be electronics of some kind and vary from digital cameras to 40″ LCD tvs with huge discounts (most seem to be 50% off or more)

While I haven’t bought anything from them as yet, anyone who has was happy with the delivery times etc., so it seems to work well

They sell electronics, such as Sony Playstation 3, at a fraction of their normal retail price. How? By making it into an auction.

When the clock stops whoever has the bid wins.

Not that complicated really.

You can get more details on how the process works on their site.

While obviously winning isn’t that easy I’d view it as a good chance to get a high value item for a fraction of its retail price PLUS it’s saner option than a normal betting site…

So when I came across Dublin en Español I was very impressed! This is the kind of service that we should see more of. Spanish is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world and providing services to Spanish speakers in their native tongue makes sense.

The company offers a variety of tours of Dublin city in Spanish (thence the name!)

More details on their site

Image via Wikipedia

Successive Irish governments have talked about “initiatives” to encourage “egovernment”. Some of the work they’ve done has been pretty good, but a lot of it wasn’t exactly stellar.

So it’s great to see that a totally independent, citizen volunteer project like Kildare Street has not only managed to give us, the people, access to Dail (parliament) transcripts, but also allows to pass comments, get alerts and so much more.

Kildare Street is the brainchild of John Handelaar and is based on similar project in the UK.

John’s announcement explains it all:

Since 20th January 2004, the Dáil has been in session for 493 days (including today).

Up until this morning TDs made 249,489 speeches, and asked 160,503 questions which received written responses.

On average, TDs are producing 507 speeches and 326 written answers per sitting day.

And Handelaar’s site has now made all of that content accessible and searchable.

Now that is cool!

The idea behind it isn’t terribly original, but the presentation and execution is simple and stylish, which should make it a “winner” in many respects.

Basically the site editors trawl online shops for new, exciting and quirky goods and then recommend them to readers based on gender, age, price etc.,

One little detail impressed me – they clearly state whether an item is available for delivery to Ireland or not – that alone saves time!

What the guys at MacHeist have managed to do, however, is to combine software package deals with a philanthropy to make for a winning combination.

MacHeist run an offer a couple of times a year where you can get several hundred dollars worth of software for less than $50 (the latest bundle is $39).

What makes the deal even more interesting is that 25% of all sales revenue goes to a number of charities

The latest “heist” has so far sold over 43 thousand bundles and raised over $403 thousand for charity!

If you’re a Mac user or know someone who is then this makes for a wonderful gift

Language is constantly evolving, with words being added all the time, while other words “fade” into obscurity.

The “save the words” site highlights and promotes words that are falling out of use

Is it going to improve your life? Probably not.

Is it fun? Definitely