AskPoodle is a new human powered yellow pages like site, that provides listings for shops and establishments around the place you stay. An interesting feature of AskPoodle is that, you are able to let establishments around the area know what you are searching for. Using this information, they are able to get back to you with details. This would give you an opportunity to explore multiple possibilities for your query and settle with or decide on the best possible option

Features:

There are quite a few important features of AskPoodle.com that are useful to consumers and businesses alike

Social Postings

Using the Social Postings while submitting your query, you can seek recommendations about attractions, restaurants, and local businesses from people in your community. You may not get an immediate reply but you won’t be contacted by any local establishments either.

Consumer Postings

Consumer postings can be used to alert local businesses and merchants of your local search request needs. By doing this, they may contact you to explain more about their products or solutions. Of course, the response would be quicker in this case. These postings expire after 7 days.

Local Phone Match™

LocalPhoneMatch is an innovative feature of AskPoodle that matches local search requests with phone numbers. If a person searches for a term matching the line of business of an establishment, then they would be contacted and informed about the interest expressed by the customer. You can opt out of this program any time as well. Currently a free trial is being offered by the company.

This works well for U.S. Pincodes only for the present, so people from other countries may have to wait for sometime. However, this is a step in the right direction, so more companies may take a leaf out of AskPoodle’s book.

URLSplit is a service that provides you with the facility to create a single link and direct it to several locations at random. Basically, it works like this. You can enter a number of different sites or pages to which you want to link to and create the link with URLSplit. Now, you are provided with a single link from the service. However, each time the link is clicked it will lead to one of the different sites or pages you had used to create the link earlier.

This can be useful in several cases. You could use one link to bring traffic to different sites that you own or different pages in your own site. By using a single anchor text for the link, you can have it linking it to multiple pages. Thus you can distribute traffic evenly to all the sites. To use this service, you will need to register with the site. Also, you can add upto seven different sites for a single link.

You can also track the number of hits each link receives and you can create unlimited no. of links. You can check out this sample link that I created. The link that is created is of the following form:

http://www.urlsplit.com/jUaWKcKT

Do tell me if you would be using this somewhere! Thanks for reading!

Sketchcast is an innovative way to express yourself. Using this web service, you are able to create your own little presentation for anything. Let me explain further. For example, if you want to create a tutorial to draw mickey mouse, then you would need to show how the drawing is done step-by-step and also explain to the end user if anything is to be kept in mind while doing this.

Sketchcast provides an easy way to express yourself with your hands and your mouth. That is, you can create drawings or text and at the same time use your voice as a background for the drawing. It could be instructions for doing something, an explanation, a tutorial, a simple thank you and much more.

The amazing thing about Sketchcast is that it is very quick to set up, create and publish. You don’t need anything more than a minute to get started with the service. Also, you can publish presentations without the voice as well. Once you register, you can start off at once by going to the “create” area. You are provided with a screen as below

You are able to select a category for the Sketchcast and also a title. You can enable voice if you want to. Using the 3 buttons in the bottom right corner, you can change the font, font color and alternate between the pen or eraser. You can change the font color by simply by pressing the space bar key as well. Using the big button, you can start, stop or pause the recording.

Once you are done recording, you can publish the recording and make it public so that everyone else can see it. Also, you are provided with the code to embed the Sketchcast in your site or blog. You also have an exclusive channel for people to get your Sketchcasts and also an RSS feed for the channel to be informed of updates. You have the option to restart a particular Sketchcast if you feel it has not worked out well but you cannot edit one after creating it. That seems to be a disadvantage to this service.

 In my opinion, this service is simple and a fast way to get your idea across and the voice feature only makes it better. Also the fact that it is completely free should say something about the service. Do tell me how you feel about this service.. Thanks for reading!