Swoopo is an online discount auction (a.k.a. penny auction) where individuals purchase bids to place towards an item that’s up for sale. The cost of the bids are usually $0.75 and once placed they raise the price of the item by either $0.15 or $0.01 depending on the product. A 20-second countdown timer is reset by each time a new bid is placed and when the timer reaches zero, the last bidder wins. The winning bidder pays the final price of the auction which is usually at a great discount of the manufacturer’s retail price (MRP) for the item. Read more »

Today’s list of cool new web stuff:

Contenture – “Contenture is a new way to monetize your web site using a revolutionary patent-pending micropayment system that fixes all of the complexity of traditional micropayment systems.”

Ovi Store – Nokia’s new mobile applications store Read more »

After reading Mashable’s recent coverage of Meg Pickard’s post of a popular logo collage from past internet startups that launched between ~2005 and ~2007, I was inspired to further research these Web 2.0 startup businesses. On Meg’s blog, she describes her task of tracking down each web startup company’s site to see if it still exists. This was not an easy job given that the collage contains nearly 200 company logos. Read more »

It seems like nearly everyone in the tech world is sick of hearing about Twitter so I thought it would be nice to checkup on some of the other microblogging and micromessaging services that are available. When Twitter launched in 2006 and began receiving some decent attention, copycats came out of the woodwork. Fortunately for Twitter, no direct competitors really had the staying power to launch any kind of real threat to the little birdie. Compete’s latest stats show that Twitter’s monthly unique visitors is up by 39% yet many of its direct competitors are dead or barely breathing. Read more »

Lately I’ve been seriously considering a professional logo for my own website. With so many professional logo designers to choose from however, the decision has become quite difficult. Since I am going to be researching these already I thought that it only makes sense to share my findings with everyone. If you have used any of these logo design companies in the past please leave a comment Read more »