Week 12 Questions

1. Grooveshark: http://listen.grooveshark.com/

Grooveshark is a free online jukebox service. Users can search for tracks and listen to them right inside of a Web-based player. Similar to software jukebox applications, users of Grooveshark can control music tracks as if they were playing them right off a hard drive. It also lets you save and create playlists, and mark songs as favorites.

Grooveshark has two companion applications, a widget creator for sticking the GrooveShark player on blogs and social networking profiles, and a link shortening service for use on microblogging services like Twitter (Webware, 2009).

This application could be useful in music industry.

2. Etsy: http://www.etsy.com/

Etsy ia commercal website.

Etsy is an online marketplace for buying and selling handmade goods. Users can create their own virtual shopfronts to sell almost anything they'd want. Etsy has an integrated search tool that lets anyone search the site for goods and services out of a centralized directory. Users can also get into the nitty-gritty and design the specific look and feel of their own shops.

The site is a wonderful place to find the kind of crafts or goods you'd find at a local market--items that are often overlooked or simply diluted in the avalanche of consumer products that make their way onto other classified and auction sites such as eBay. It's also a great place for people to sell their stuff without having to buy a special domain, write code, hire someone to build a Web site, and pay for the hosting.

3. Woot: http://www.woot.com/

Woot.com is an online store and community that focuses on selling cool stuff cheap. It started as an employee-store slash market-testing type of place for an electronics distributor, but it's taken on a life of its own. We anticipate profitability by 2043 – by then we should be retired; someone smarter might take over and jack up the prices. Until then, we're still the lovable scamps we've always been.

Woot is an online retailer of goods. Most of the items sold are electronics, although you never know what will be next. The site sells a new product every night at midnight Central time and will keep it available until the next night or until it sells out.

Unsold goods are then later sold (usually at a discount) in what's called a Woot-off, where the retailer continues to sell new or previously listed goods until it runs out of stock, replacing it with other items. Woot-offs are well known for ending with the notorious "bag of crap," which contains a random grouping of items that are undisclosed to the buyer until it arrives in the mail. Bags of crap have been known to randomly contain high value items such as big-screen TVs and popular electronics.

Besides its standard store, Woot has three other variants that use the same, or a similar sales model. Wine.woot.com sells a new selection of wine or alcoholic items each week, while Shirt.woot.com sells a new user-created T-shirt every day. Woot's other site, Sellout.woot.com, is a partnership with Yahoo's Shopping site, and usually sells the second string items from Woot.com.

4. Xmarks: http://www.xmarks.com/

Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) is a free password- and bookmark-syncing tool. Users who want to share the same set of bookmarks and site passwords can install this browser plug-in and it will keep information the same across multiple machines. Users can also retrieve all their information from the cloud if their machines suffer a major data disaster.

In 2009 Xmarks hopped into site discovery by taking all of the bookmarking information from its users and turning it into a public database of sites. It created a site discovery tool that shows you what sites are like the one you're on by seeing what other users have bookmarked.

5. DropBox: https://www.getdropbox.com/

Dropbox is a file storage service that syncs up files between multiple machines. Once installed, you gain access to a virtual folder that will stay synced up and pass along any new additions, deletions, or changes. All the while, the service keeps snapshots of every version of a file that's been changed, which means you can go back and retrieve older iterations.
Dropbox also lets users create shared versions of these folders, so multiple users can contribute or make changes to a collection of group files and make sure everyone is using the most up-to-date versions.

Dropbox has both a Web and desktop component. The desktop software lets you forget worries about re-uploading while you make changes, and feels just like a native folder on Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs. And Dropbox's site lets you get at all your files, no matter where you are.