There is always a need to speed up every little process one has to go through and platforms, companies; programs try to make things quicker and less complicated. We have online platforms that help in table reservations for lunch or dinner to having online booking in hotels. Based on a pretty simple concept and targeted at making things faster, Tripeedo comes off as a faster and easier way to find out fare rates for your air travel.

The services unlike the many already present, Tripeedo rids users from drop-down lists, calendars etc when it comes to planning for a trip. What it does instead it uses a search bar.

What it requires the user to do is simply hit the details of the trip one plans for, one doesn’t need to be bothered about knowing airport codes and merely enter the city’s name. The user can is not confined to sticking with a particular date format either as Tripeedo accepts them in any format; plus it prefers what you prefer and lets you enter more details like airline of your preference to even the class you want for your seat.

An interesting aspect that’s worth mention here is that it provides a live preview as you hit in your search. Then it has association with various travel assistants like Expedia, Kayak and Orbitz with more associations to be made as the service expands.

For the crunch, Tripeedo simply provides users with single point access to the information one requires with travel; including airfare, schedule and destinations etc. it doesn’t really appear to serve a purpose on its own instead acts more like a broker. Nonetheless its always easier and helpful to have the tiring tasks performed with a few clicks and Tripeedo appears to be helpful (a bit, I will keep a few hopes out incase the bubble bursts for them).

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With the recent growth of Friendster and the change of CEO, comes the announcement of Friendster’s support for OpenSocial Apps. It now joins the likes of Netlog, Yiqi, Orkut and others who support the OpenSocial platform. This means that like Facebook, Friendster will also have the functionality of apps to its disposal which can be both a good thing as well as a bad thing as we’ve seen lots of spam being generated in social networks ( such as Facebook ) due to these apps. Friendster had launched its developer platform last October but this move now means that all OpenSocial apps will be available for Friendster instead of like before, when apps specially made for Friendster were allowed.

The Friendster and OpenSocial apps will co exist, without any apparent differences to the end user . The application directory will be open to users and submissions for apps by developers are open now.

A little background on OpenSocial from Tech Crunch:

Google’s OpenSocial platform allows developers to create a a single application that will work across multiple social newtorks that support the platform’s API. Along with Friendster, other major sites that have pledged support to the platform include MySpace, Bebo, and Six Apart.

Facebook uses it’s own closed platform and hasn’t allowed access to Google Friend Connect as well so far. This makes it the only major network which stands apart in the developer platforms for social networks. Friendster’s move to OpenSocial marks another victory for the platform and Facebook will have to adopt to an open standard to keep developers from moving to OpenSocial as that would mean a single app would run on multiple huge networks instead of one closed platform network like Facebook.

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Listening to MP3s of robotic voices reading stories from the Web is a good way to prepare for the eventual downfall of mankind at the hands of our robotic overlords. If you're into that kind of thing, Hearwho will do all the heavy lifting for you by converting any text you feed it into a downloadable MP3 file.

If you've spent hours amusing yourself playing with AT&T's text-to-speech demo, you'll be glad to know that Hearwho does away with the somewhat annoying 300-character limit. I dumped an entire 800-word story into the text box and had a playable MP3 file in around 15 minutes.

To speed up the process, you can either use less text or dial down the quality. There are four compression settings to crunch a file down to a proper size. You can also toggle between male and female speakers, and whether you want it spoken in English or Spanish.

One thing to note is that if you're doing this with blog posts, the blog you're grabbing the feed from might already have an audio-RSS feed that you can simply subscribe to. A good directory of these feeds can be found at Stitcher, which also has a really neat iPhone Web app.

Note: Hearwho's servers are pretty slammed right now. Your text might take a half hour or longer to get converted--which is abnormal.

[via Lifehacker and Techie Portal]

Also not terrible: The performance of MHP's B-to-B group, where revenues were up 7.8% y/y. What was driving that? Not BusinessWeek, where ad pages were down 11%. Instead, MHP says, it's doing particularly well with its Platts group.

What's Platts? It's of no interest to anyone who isn't in the energy business, or investing in the energy business. But those who are are very interested -- and willing to pay up for the group's various trade publications. A subscription to North American Crude Wire, for instance, will set you back $995 a year -- or about 250 gallons of unleaded.

Frankly del.icio.us was one of the founding Web 2.0 services, along with Wikipedia, Amazon and Ebay. It’s the most popular social bookmarking service, even though the social aspects are ignored by many of the users.

For better or for worse it also popularized the web 2.0 URL… full stops are no harder to type then forwards slashes, but it sure feels like it.

Anyway it looks like the new Delicious service will be launching VERY soon. That’s right, del.ico.us has now officially become Delicious, although they’ve had the URL for years now.

Tech Crunch posted some screenshots a while ago which showed the new service to be pretty impressive, a complete code re-write, a cool new theme and interface and a stack of new features.

Apparently scalability was an issue which has held up the release for a year now. Ironically it was also the initial reason for the complete re-write.

Anyway, with the official blog providing assurance that “After months of work, the new Delicious is almost ready to come out of the oven” it may very well be true this time.

When it launches you’ll be automatically logged out of your account. I hope you guys will be able to handle this…

Personally, while an update will be nice, I never use del.icio.us through the web interface. I use it purely as a way to store my bookmarks online, no friend sharing, no visiting the homepage nothing. Flock 2.0 has awesome integration with del.cio.us and that’s how I use it.

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In the past few weeks Plurk has released a number of updates in preparation for its upcoming API launch. Improvements include, a new customizable sidebar widget, new starter verbs such as “wonders” and “needs,” a cleaner “All Plurks,” and “My Plurks” navigation, along with a custom search feature. Plurk has even enhanced their competitive ranking system, also known as “Karma” to make the algorithm more fair and balanced.

Another feature that Plurk recently implemented that reminds me of the unofficial Twitter extended backgrounds is the ability to customize everything on your profile via CSS if your Karma is over 25. Customizing your profile background is something that some Twitter users, myself included, have wanted to see, but after seeing a few backgrounds and profiles in Plurk, I’m not so sure. Take a look below:

Plurk fail whale:

Animated gator background:

I’m not saying they’re bad - I’ll let you be the judge of that. But customizing backgrounds should be an enhancement and not a distraction to users, especially since many Plurk users are waiting for desktop integration such as Plurker, a Windows WPF desktop application or twhirl.

For those of us who Plurk on a regular basis I would say that we’re satisfied with the service’s development and features — and just this week Plurk was added to the list of supported sites on FriendFeed. However, Plurk’s community and conversations still remain a question. Currently from the twitter/tech/blog community, Darren Rowse of Problogger and Majo of Live Crunch are making headway up the interesting plurkers karma list. But still, without an API, no desktop application, and some of the most popular topics on Plurk being “good morning,” “good night,” “hi,” “sex” and “coffee,” it will be interesting to see what audience Plurk continues to build.

Is Plurk the MySpace or Facebook of micro-blogging? Only time will tell.

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Asked what he likes most about Audition 3, Justin said, “I like using Adobe Audition to edit individual multitracks before mixing them all down to a pre-master. The mixer interface is perfect for this! I love the ability to effect each track in real-time. I also utilized all of the effects and the new virtual instrument features as well as editing tools, which Audition is famous for! This software is killer amazing and super fast!”

“For this project, I found Audition to be extremely useful when I needed to edit, mix-down and tweak hundreds of individual master tracks from all the band's songs (which were being shipped to me from all over the world during production and in various audio formats). It was fast, reliable and lifesaving. The delays, reverbs, distortion and compression suites all came in handy when I needed to crunch some of the performances to match the vibe of the film, as well as finding obscure yet accessible sound design for each individual remix. The combinations of all those textures worked their dark charms into my work beautifully.”

Thanks to Justin for giving us an inside look at how he uses Audition to create killer movie soundtracks. To check out more of his work, go to his official website at http://www.empireofmodernthought.com or his blog at http://www.justinlassen.com

Louise

The idea is to share moments of your life: sunsets, deep thoughts, funny faces. Or just broadcast your current status. You can upload the videos via a Webcam or your mobile phone, follow video updates from your friends, and even import contacts from Twitter. You can even link your 12seconds account to your Twitter account and it will automatically send a Tweet with a link your videos every time you put up anew one.

Is all of this pointless? Maybe, but no more than Twitter. Although, as a communications platform, text will always be more immediate and accessible than video.

The startup was founded by David Beach and Sol Lipman six months ago. They are bootsratpping it with 10 employees working for burritos. Besides Seesmic, 12seconds.tv also competes with the UK’s Phreadz. Here are a couple sample videos.

Why 12? on 12seconds.tv

New Glasses on 12seconds.tv

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.