Think Startups

xoxo – Simple Online Multiplayer Noughts and Crosses

The Hodge — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 14:11:55 +0000

xoxo.cm is a nice a simple tic tac toe game, you go to the homepage and get given a shareable url to give out, when someone else visits the URL they are put into a game with you (you can give out the URL to more than one person, the developer wanted no registration, no game setup, as few steps as possible to actually start playing and it really does work.

Next up could be a decent ‘random’ opponent finder as my Noughts and Crosses skills are slightly… lacking and would be good to get some anonymous practice

skinnyo – working together to lose weight

The Hodge — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 23:11:28 +0000

It’s the perfect time to be weight loss based startup and skinnyo seems to have a good idea – get your mates involved and make it a challenge :)

Tom and Hannah are the cofounders and they sent me an email with a few details, although well known for my fine physique I decided to sign up and give it a go (I’m typing this whilst on an exercise bike at the moment which makes interesting typing).

I’ve signed up and started filling in my details (although to be honest I just guessed my height) I would post a link to the profile but I can’t seem to find a URL to give you and the profile link 404′s.

Adding your weight is as simple as pressing a button and adding some numbers (with an optional comment like – WENT FOR MCDONALDS WOOPS!) and like any good web 2.0 startup… you can earn BADGES!! Woot!

A great app and hopefully I’ll keep using it.. if I don’t then somebody comment and tell me off

Site is available at http://skinnyo.com/

idonethis – GTD Via Email

The Hodge — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 12:37:51 +0000

The Simplicity of idonethis is the lack of interface, at the end of each day you get an email asking you What have you done today? you simply reply back and it will be added to your calendar.I’m going to be giving this a go for the next few weeks. I’ve tried lots of project managers, list tools and GTD services but none have stuck so far..

7books – Playlists for Book Lovers has a christmas recode

The Hodge — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 12:25:27 +0000

I’ve been wanting to cover 7books for a while, Tom Critchlow built this website as a project to learn Python and that’s certainly something we want to push on this blog, so what is it? Playlists for book lovers, sign in and create a playlist of books you think work well together as a collection or series – sounds good!

But not content with eating Turkey and pulling crackers Tom decided to do a groundup rewrite of the site bringing it up to scratch with the rest of the Web 2.0 crowd (Facebook + Twitter Login, AJAX!!!!, Embeddable lists) and quite a few changes on the backend.

The site has been growing rapidly since its launch in early November and has a pretty good monetisation plan with Amazon affiliate links. I’d love to be able to click a book and see what lists it is on (I assume once enough data is collected Tom will be playing about with a recommendations engine).

You can visit the site at : http://www.7bks.com/ or follow on twitter at @7books

Buy A F**king Shovel – The Ultimate Reminder Service

The Hodge — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 16:39:08 +0000

Buy A F**king Shovel its just what the Doctor ordered in these times of snow and iceIt’s snowing so what do you do? Nip to B&Q and get a shovel but OH NO! they’ve all sold out, what could be the solution..

BUY A F**KING SHOVEL!

Fill in the email form and they will helpfully remind you in June to… buy a shovel (and/or grit/sledge).

Awesome Idea

Website is at http://buyafuckingshovel.com/

Le Roi De la Garnotte – HTML5 Multiplayer Snowball Fight

The Hodge — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 19:49:47 +0000

Just because a website is in a different language doesn’t mean we won’t cover it, we will just click through the prompts and signup form until we get to something like a working state.. or in this case, until we get to throw snowballs at random internet folk

An In game screenshot

Using all the web 2.0 goodness of HTML5, Canvas, Websockets, NodeJS and CSS3 (Don’t forget Facebook connect) this online snowball fight is both utterly confusing and extremly fun.

Hit your opponents a few times and they fall down… what could be more entertaining (some people were also in the middle hiding in a castle but I had no idea what that was all about)

You can play online now at http://www.leroidelagarnotte.com.

Warning – This game appears to auto post to your wall when you play

Facebook Hacker Cup – Not in the UK?

The Hodge — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 10:42:01 +0000

An interesting thing was brought to the attention of Hacker News this morning by the user jordinl, the Facebook page for the 2011 Hacker Cup appears to be missing old Blighty

The United Kingdom is Missing

I had a quick look for the UK under Great Britain, Britain, England and some of the other names our country could be called but it honestly is missing..

The country field is a standard component so we have to assume that this is intentional? I have emailed Facebook for clarification and will update the post if they respond.

DjangoWeekly – Like Javascript Weekly… but for Django

The Hodge — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 10:00:24 +0000

There certainly appears to be a newletter bandwagon at the moment (not that is a bad thing), announced today is DjangoWeekly, in the same week that we covered Minecraft Weekly.

Issue one is due to be sent on the 1st week in Jan so if your driven to django then sign up now!

365.io – A photo a day for one year

The Hodge — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 18:26:36 +0000

I have quite a few friends doing a project 365 (and one of them doing three) and many of them use flickr / WordPress for the process, 365.io aims to be a nice and simple platform for uploading and displaying photos.

365.io Interface

Rather than struggling with an upload form and messing about with windows, every day a new space is available and you drag your image to the space and BOOM… its done (image upload forms are also available)

The service costs $20 but is on offer for now at $11 and you can view a sample gallery here.

The only thing we thought was missing would be the ability to add a text description for each photo, a lot of photos need context and the senario (why you took it, what you were trying to capture)

shrtn.co – make money by shortening URLS

The Hodge — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 18:00:34 +0000

shrtn.co recently launched as a url shortener with the ability to earn you money, links are converted on the server to turn into affiliate links automatically.We converted a play.com link to http://shrtn.co/1ai and if a person clicks and purchases something, we gain a commission.

It’s a great idea and if they get the traction its sure to be a winner, we would love to be able to use our own domain names with it and whitelabel the product but its a good start and they already have a good amount of merchants already

You can signup online at http://shrtn.co (clicking that link gives us a commission to help us).