Signing Off, And What Does A TechCrunch Writer Actually Use?
This is my last post at TechCrunch as a full time writer (I may yet do the occasional guest post). It’s exactly 12 months to the day since I started writing here and the date seemed like a good time to go. I won’t bore you with a self indulgent retrospective; if you are interested in my reasons and thoughts I did a podcast with my old site The Blog Herald yesterday - listen to here.
We cover some amazing startups here at TechCrunch, and for every service we cover there’s probably a dozen we miss as well, given the hyper-inflated nature of the second great web boom. You can appreciate a service without ever actually going on to use it, but the better ones can change the way you interact with the web or run your working day. I thought as this is my last major post here that I’d share some of the services that I actually use. I started using most of them based on posts at TechCrunch, so if you like these turned out to be my practical standouts in the sea of noise.
Evernote has completely changed the way I deal with paper (yes, old fashioned paper). Its been described as everything from a scrap collection through to a bookmarking service, but at its core its a database service with industrial strength OCR capabilities. To use, you can clip data or a link, type a note, add a photo (with support for webcams) or scan info in. Everything added can be tagged and indexed, and is searchable via the text within each document, for example a wine label with no other information becomes searchable by every word on the label itself. I scan every paper bill or letter I receive, allowing me to shred/ dispose of them cutting down on the need to file things manually. More importantly it cuts out the need to have to go through my filing cabinet searching for the bill later. The service has a desktop client and web interface, so you have the security of knowing that your scanned documents always have a local copy, but if you’re at another computer or on the go, you can easily access the same data.
See Erick’s review here.
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Make Your Own Comics With Comiqs
Singapore based Comiqs gives users the ability to create their own comics with a rich web based editing suite.
Sites and services that provide comic generation aren’t new. Comic Life from Plasq (makers of Skitch) would be the best known in the field, and comes installed on new Macs. There’s also no shortage of “add speech bubble” style web editors available as well. Comiqs offers a similar feature set to Comic Life, but online and totally free.
Users can use Comiqs with photos uploaded from their computer or from a photo-sharing website like Flickr to create a comic. Tools include speech bubbles of different kinds and shapes, frames and fonts. The interface is drag and drop so the learning curve is next to zero. Comics can also be embedded on other sites in a custom viewer for multi-page productions.
Comiqs is currently securing investors to take the service to the next level, where they intend to “work closely with cartoon artists in a revenue sharing arrangement that open up new revenue streams for talented artists and position our site as a place to find talented cartoon artists.”
The demo video below shows one frame editing, but it should be noted that the tool can be used for traditional style (frame by frame) comics. You can also play with the service directly without the need to set up an account.
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