Kaplogna.com: 1st Annual Kaplogna Family BBQ and Beer Pong Fest

My friends Brett and Anna are having a summer long Beer Pong tournament in the backyard of their apartment in New York City. They asked for my help making a website for the tournament. I figured this would be a great way to get more experience developing with AJAX so I've been busy plugging away at Kaplogna.com in my spare time. I set up a MySQL database to store all of the tournament data. I'm using PHP to query the database and return XML data to the sites' pages. Currently you can view all of the brackets using the drop down box on the Kaplogna.com home page. In the next few days I'd like to allow teams to enter the tournament by typing their names into a desired bracket slot. I'm not sure exactly how this will work but I'm hoping to use the onChange javascript event handler to trigger an AJAX function which will update the database table which maintains the bracket match ups. AJAX rules!

Yahoo Pipe: Search Engine News Aggregator

My second experiment with Yahoo Pipes is a Search Engine News Aggregator. I frequently visit news sites to read the latest articles and blogs about Google, Yahoo Ask.com etc...A lot of times this will lead me on a hyperlink journey where I read about rumors of upcoming applications and such. This pipe should make it a little easier to go to one centralized place for all of the articles I'd like to read in a given day. I'm going to expand the Search Engine News Aggregator soon to include more Search companies in addition like Quigo or LookSmart besides and search more news sites once Yahoo Pipes isn't so horribly slow!

My First Yahoo Pipe: Dunkin Donuts Locator

Yahoo Pipes is awesome! I started playing around with it the the other day and was immediately impressed with its ease of use and simplicity. It's parsing and aggregating data feeds made easy.

As a quick experiment I set up a pipe called Dunkin Donuts Locator which returns a list of Dunkin Donuts within 20 miles of a location using Yahoo Search. I have ideas for some cool pipes...check back soon.

I'd really like to set up a pipe that aggregates news and other sources to look at impacts on stock prices. Then we can see just how smart Jim Kramer is...

JessesGadgets.com is profitable!

I'd like to take this opportunity to announce that JessesGadgets.com is profitable. After a few sales recently I've covered all of the overhead of this operation. By overhead I mean web hosting fees. Everything else for the rest of 2007 is pure profit.
How did this happen in under three months? I'd like to thank Froogle and Google Base for listing my items and Google AdWords for generating impressions of my products to customers in Colorado, Arkansas and beyond. Revenue targets for the summer are pretty high but I'm confident JessesGadgets will exceed them given the extremely high demand and limited supply of Yankees tickets.
What does this prove? Well...it proves a few things. Most importantly it proves that the market for selling used products online is FAR from saturated thanks to Web 2.0 products like Google Base and Froogle. Why would anyone pay to list their items on Ebay when Froogle offers so many different ways to list them for free? Now that Google Checkout is catching on with Froogle customers and merchants I would be very worried if I were Ebay!

Proposal for new Google Product: Chowgle

Are you like me? Have you ever been frustrated with MenuPages.com or CitySearch? I don't think many people would disagree that there isn't a single food directory repository on the Internet that is unbiased, reliable and anywhere close to comprehensive. I'd like to propose "Chowgle" as a solution to people like me who love to visit new places solely for the purpose of trying the best local fare. I'd like to be able to enter the search term "Boston's Best Burrito" and see "Anna's Tacqueria" as the top result or "Fair Lawn pizza" and see "John's Pizza" as the top result. Kudos to the braniancs who purchased other domain names I would have chosen including Foodgle and Chewgle.
Chowgle will be sort of a hybrid of three existing Google products; Google local search, Google News and Froogle. It will thrive off user submitted content and have an intelligent contextual search tool.

There are three main principles which Chowgle should follow:
1. Chowgle will accept restaurant menus as XML feeds and spreadsheet uploads directly from restaurants (similar to the methodology used to upload product listings to Froogle.) This task will be fairly easy for restaurants, especially ones with websites that show their menus already. In addition to restaurant submitted menus it would be interesting to see if some kind of restaurant website crawler could accurately compile menus.

2. Chowgle will use a ranking algorithm, "FoodRank", to rank search results. Similar to Google the public won't be privy to the details of how FoodRank works but some kind of combination of user submitted reviews, food blog reviews (e.g. Burrito Blog), Zagat ratings etc...

3. Chowgle will of course will use contextual search and suggestions (Ajax) like Google search.

I proposed this idea to Google as a business venture last week. As of March 13th I haven't heard back. I'm guessing I'll hear back any day now!

Innovation Updates

It's been a while since my last post. What have I been up to the past few weeks? I took a week off and instead of working on MyVoteforPrez.com like I hoped to I decided to be lazy. I've been working on a few small projects though. One of them is ZlataPR.com. This is a domain I bought for Zlata a few months ago. She'd eventually like to have a site like TMZ or Perez Hilton which act as sources for entertainment news and gossip. I decided to use the Google AJAX Search API to display recent news articles and videos for Zlata's Hot Topics. For now the site only displays links to other sites and news sources. The search APIs are really easy to use and can be configured without too much knowledge of JavaScript or AJAX which is nice for beginners. I downloaded the Google Web Toolkit today and played around a little bit. I'd love to develop some cool widgets with it when I have some time...need to refresh my Java skills now!

New Idea: Travel Guide Portal (to be named later)

It seems that whenever I have some free time coming up and I want to spend time working on one of my “projects” (in this case MyVoteforPrez.com) I get another idea that consumes me for a few months until the next great idea pops into my head. This scenario played out big time when I took some time off around New Years. I put The People’s Ticket on the shelf to create JessesGadgets.com. I’m taking off next week from work and I still plan on making MyVoteforPrez.com usable. The big thing will be setting up the voting tracking and displaying the results on a map.
However I had another idea today that I'd love to develop and hopefully will in the near future. I'd like to create a website where users can select and display information such as news, events, driving directions etc.. for different cities and places they plan on visiting in a portal-type layout . I thought of this idea while travelling to Philadelphia for work last year. I thought it would be great to have a one-stop shop website for everything related to my travel to and within Philadelphia. For example, my Amtrak train information, my car rental information, my hotel address and directions, my work address and directions with a stop along the way to pick up Dunkin Donuts coffee and general Philadelphia local news and upcoming events. I would like the layout to look similar to Google Personalized Homepage for each city/trip.
I think a site like this could also be monetized because contextual regional ads would show up in each city/trip personalized page. Maybe this will follow in the footsteps of one of the coolest sites I've ever seen, SeatGuru.com, and get big enough to warrant full time employees.
I'm still thinking of a name for the website. Recommendations are welcome.

JessesGadgets.com Updates

I have two updates for JessesGadgets.com today.

Yesterday JessesGadgets.com announced an apparel affiliation with Burntees which is a CafePress t-shirt store that sells funny t-shirts relating to a variety of designs including "Dirty Jersey", "Graphic Tees", "Custom Shirts" and more. One of Burntees' founders, Matt Reiffe, is a childhood friend of mine; we grew up around the corner from each other in Fair Lawn, so we decided to team up. Initially JessesGadgets.com will choose a "shirt of the week" to list for sale. All Burntees purchases will be processed through the Burtnees website for the time being. In the future I hope to allow JessesGadgets.com customers to order shirts directly from our site. This will require Burntees to store an inventory on hand rather than use the CafePress order fulfillment system which prints and ships shirts directly to customers.

In addition JessesGadgets.com is now listed as a Top NJ site. This site ranks New Jersey sites by popularity and user-submitted reviews. Feel free to visit the ranking site and add your reviews. You can view our rank on the bottom right side of the JessesGadgets.com web page.

Update: MyVoteforPrez.com

One feature I'd like MyVoteforPrez.com to show off is a bio page for each 2008 Presidential candidate with a dynamic listing of current news articles about the candidate. I've been experimenting with the Google AJAX Search API to provide these recent news clippings. Yesterday I was able to get the AJAX Search API working the way I want it to. Basically when the bio page is loaded an Google News Search is executed for the candidate whose bio page is loaded. This is done by configuring a Google Search control to query Google News for the candidate and display a list of resulting news stories with links to the full article. Google makes it very easy to configure the AJAX search control by making the search sources and result displays configurable with simple JavaScript. In order to hide the search control I added a CSS rule and added a DOM element to show the Google branding "Powered by Google" image. Check out the finished AJAX Search control on Joe Biden's Bio Page.

New Invention Idea: Next Generation Public Transportation SmartCards

I have a lot of ideas for new inventions. Some are good, some are silly and some are designed backwards with the idea of trying to retrofit a solution to an existing "cool" technology. This idea, however, is money and one-ups a lot of RD-ID smart card solutions that already exist. I thought of this idea this morning when considering what time I need to leave work today to catch the 4:43 NJ Transit train from Penn Station to Radburn. The proposed invention combines some three concepts I've seen in practice:

1. Smart cards like the Washington DC Metro system-these cards allow you to have an online account to track your balance and add funds. Nothing new here, this is in practice in a number of cities globally.
2. Text Message bank system- a system that receives text messages and performs a business operation. GoMobo.com, a New York City based company uses this technology to allow customers to order food on the go from participating restaurants. I use this pretty often to get my morning coffee from Dunkin Donuts or lunch from Subway. I'm very intrigued by this concept and I've joined the GoMobo Advisory Council which acts as a sounding board and suggestion forum for the company since its still a relatively new concept.
3. Driver License bar code scanners-most of us have seen these in use by bouncers at bars. A few weeks ago I visited a friend in Chicago and I saw an interesting use of the bar code scanners at a gym. My friend's gym scans his license to read his identity into the check-in system. This works better than forcing everyone to carry a FOB or key chain card or something since you generally take your drivers license with you whenever you leave your home.

I think it would be great if public transportation systems can use a combination of all three concepts to provide better service. If each customer could create an online account to add funds and track balances it would be very helpful. If a customer could send a text message while running close or late to a train like "1 ticket from Penn Station to Radburn" it would be even better. The train conductors could then use a barcode reader to scan in a customer's driver license. The only thing I haven't really worked out in my head is how a customer's account can be verified and charged wirelessly from a moving train. Maybe WiMax is the answer? Maybe the train conductor can even act as a point of sale and we won't even need the text message system. Any comments?

General Updates JessesGadgets.com and MyVoteforPrez.com...

This week I haven't had the chance to do too much development. I've been real busy with work and haven't been that motivated after work to work on my side projects. Here's some brief updates to a few projects I'm currently working on:

MyVoteforPrez.com: Currently there isn't a whole lot to look at. I've listed all of the candidates who have either declared they will run or officially filed papers to run for President in the 2008 elections. My next steps are:
1. Post detailed information about each candidate and create a candidate bio page. In the bio page I would like to use the Google AJAX Search API to show a list of recent news articles for each candidate. I'm excited to learn another Google API and use some AJAX on the site! Check out my progress here.

2. Start tracking votes. I need to set up some PHP/HTML forms to submit votes to a MySQL database back-end

3. Display the results on a Google Map.

JessesGadgets.com: Unfortunately I've had to put the "KissNet" gadget (detailed here) on hold for now to work on MyVoteForPrez.com which is more exciting to me right now. The functionality on JessesGadgets.com is all set so now it's just a matter of running/maintaining the site. Yesterday one of my friends gave me some inspiration to sell my extra Yankees tickets on JessesGadgets.com. I checked and ticket sales are allowed on Froogle so I think I will post all of my extra tickets on JessesGadgets and see what happens. Since I can email-forward my tickets the whole process will be very smooth. If anyone wants to sell sporting events/concert tickets on JessesGadgets let me know. I will not charge any listing fees.

New Project: MyVoteforPrez.com

Earlier today I purchased the domain name MyVoteforPrez.com. I plan to use this site to allow visitors to cast their votes for the 2008 Presidential election. Similar to Digg.com the site will "rank" the candidates based on the tallied votes. I plan to show voting trends available in several different demographic views (geography, age, income etc...) using Google Maps. At the very least I'd like this site to be a good indication of who the computer/tech savvy audience favors.

JessesGadgets.com First Sale!

Yesterday was a huge day for JessesGadgets.com. Someone purchased my old XM satellite radio which is officially the first sale to a person who doesn't know me or Jesse! I'm not 100% sure but I would guess the buyer found the radio by searching Froogle. Thank you Google!

Rent Calculator Gadget is live!

I finished the web version of the my Rent Calculator program (see previous post for description). It's live on JessesGadgets.com. Click here to use it. I didn't build as much error handling and input validation as I would have originally liked but the application works and correctly handles all of the math to calculate adjusted rent payments. It was slightly complex to make this a generic application that can handle any number of roommates and bills. I programmed all of the logic using PHP and stored all user input using HTML forms and session variables. I'm excited to get my hands dirty in the Facebook developer APIs and build my "KissNet" application.

Rent Calculator Gadget (Web Application) Update

I've been a little busy the past few days so I haven't been able to make too much time outside of my real work responsibilities and errands for my "side" projects. I did make a little progress on the Rent Calculator Gadget I'm developing for JessesGadgets.com.
A little bit of history about the Rent Calculator...when my two roommates and I moved into our apartment in Hoboken a little over a year ago we split up the rent, parking spot and bills. My roommate Mike took the parking spot and the master bedroom so he has the highest base rent payment (static cost). He also took over the Utility bill (variable cost). I took the reins on the Cable/Internet/Phone bill (variable cost) and Jesse had only his base rent payment to worry about every month. The first month it took the three of us very intelligent human beings wayyyyyyy too much time to figure out how to deduct the variable costs from each of our base rent payments so we could even things out with our montly rent check. That day I sat down and programmed a simple MS Access Form with some Visual Basic logic to figure out each of our payments based on the amonts of the variable costs. We have trusted the rent calculator to calculate our monthly payments ever since.
I decided to make a web based version of the Rent Calculator for all to use and enjoy. It's not 100% done yet, I still have to work on calculating the final rent payment figures dynamically but you can check out the progress at the following link. As of now I developed everything using PHP and HTML forms to allow users to enter the # of roommates and bills and select which roommate is responsible for paying each bill.

New Idea for Facebook Product (Developer APIs)

I'm still working on a few tweaks for JessesGadgets.com including an online version of my "Rent Calculator" program which will figure out adjusted rent payments after bills are paid seperately. For example if you live with 2 other people and one person pays the cable bill, another pays the electricity bill...you'll be able to plug in those values and find out how much you each should pay in rent at the end of the month to balance out the other bill payments.
Another project I'll be starting soon (this week hopefully) is a new custom Facebook "gadget" which I will work into the JessesGadgets site. Facebook makes some developer APIs available and there is a library of some nice products that developers have created. There are even some PHP client libraries available which should make development fairly easy.

I saw a really cool Facebook application called MoochSpot which keeps track of debts and shared expenses among Facebook friends in a consolidated fashion. MoochSpot gave me the idea for an application I'm initally calling "KissNet." The idea is you can indicate which of your Facebook friends you have kissed. Then you can view who you have "kissed" indirectly through your kisses. It's kind of like six degrees of seperation but for kissing. I'm still working on the details of whether I should publish how users have indirectly kissed each other and how many levels of seperation to show and whether to use some kind of recursion to create the kissing links. Is creating an application like "KissNet" like playing with fire? Probably...let the games begin.

JessesGadgets.com update: More items posted...Froogle listing etc...

Now that the functionality of JessesGadgets.com is done my focus has shifted to listing gadgets on the site and on Froogle. Since JessesGadgets sold an item with Google Checkout it's now listed as a "Google Checkout Store" on Froogle which will give the site a little credibility. JessesGadgets is also indexed by Google so our search rankings are improving daily which is great!

I added a few more items into the gadget database this weekend. Hopefully I'll have a bunch more up there soon. Jesse started to write blogs on the JessesGadgets blog site. Things are progressing very nicely. Look out for some "homegrown" web gadgets, like my Rent Calculator program, which will be posted on the site in the coming weeks.

JessesGadgets.com update: Listings searchable in Froogle and Google Base

Last night I switched over from Google Checkout sandbox and went live with JessesGadgets.com. I also listed my items on Froogle and Google Base. Check out the JessesGadgets store listings:

Froogle

Google Base

JessesGadgets.com is live!

On January 17, 2007 JessesGadgets.com made history by going live. All of the test items have been removed and I put up the "Production" Google Checkout form. As of right now there's only one item for sale (my old portable MyFI XM radio.) I'm going to post a bunch of items this weekend. Once we make our first sale we'll be listed as a Google Checkout store in Froogle!

Google Checkout: $10 for signing up

Google is giving Google Checkout users $10 to spend by March 31, 2007. Sign up at the link below:
http://www.google.com/checkout/signupbonus_google.html.

Actually wait a few days until JessesGadgets.com is live and use the credit towards a"JessesGadget."