Dropbox is a great way to sync your files across devices. What about adding some collaboration features to that? So far, no news that Dropbox is doing that soon enough; but that never stopped us from wanting, has it? Well as long as new developers are around, ideas have better chances to come to reality. In this case, CanvasDropr uses rich media in form of visual collaboration with files on cloud. Drag and drop files on to a digital canvas and work on them with others. Dead simple but with visible brilliance.

Sign up for a free account with CanvasDropr. Get in and create a canvas. Add files to the canvas by simple drag and drop method and you can perform basic operations on them like resizing, commenting, rotating, scratching notes or captions etc. You can then share the canvas with others with editing or viewing permission. Your team can then work on the canvas or offer a presentation to others having viewing permissions. All the changes and operations are reflected in real time across all the screens(devices) on which the canvas is opened. iPad, tablets and smartphones can also access the web portal which is optimized for mobile platforms.

The service is in beta and hence there are certain flaws which includes a slow interface and a server that kept throwing 503 HTTP ERRORs many a time. Notwithstanding, the service offers a brilliant collaborating platform for any team. Remember the working sessions before a college art exhibition or a protest march? All the photographs, data sheets, newspaper, cuttings, markers and whatnot scattered over the surface while every other person in the room is busy sorting, commenting or brainstorming ideas on them? The experience is similar with CanvasDropr. However fine, the idea of visual collaboration has already been tried and near perfected by DropMark which is an exact similar app with one or two minor differences. In fact, organizing content is much easier on the latter. DropMark offers free(250MB) plans and paid($48/yr for 25GB) plans whereas no such plans were found on CanvasDropr, which is free to sign up and use for now. So, if you haven’t tried out visual collaboration yet(RIP Google Wave), it’s time to get your hands dirty.

In an effort to show the world that he is still too legit to quit, MC Hammer introduced his newest endeavor – WireDoo! The announcement was made at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco yesterday. News.com.au reports that the rapper-turned-internet-pioneer’s company slogan is “Search once, see what relates”.

MC Hammer admitted that the world didn’t need another search engine but that WireDoo is “about relationships beyond just the keywords”. Apparently, this new service will strive to find content surrounding the key words entered. It will use “deep search” and “relationship search” technologies to get better results. At this time, the details are vague. As you can see from the picture below, WireDoo is not yet available. You can sign up for their beta test and they will notify you when they are ready.

MC Hammer is currently CEO of Alchemist Management, a mixed martial arts management and marketing company. The “About” section of their website describes him best, saying, “Legendary music icon and master of reinvention MC Hammer is CEO of Alchemist Management. Most recently, Hammer became one of the most influential personalities on the social media platform Twitter with over 1.8 million followers.” Wow, who would have ever thought that. I guess that rebel spirit of his is the secret of his success.

Whether it be food, movies, music or travel, what people look for most are lists. List of top…, List of best…Data explained with the help of lists is easy to understand and analyze. List Gorilla is a new startup – founded by two fine folks from down under, Australia – which lets you create lists of anything you care about, and have people contribute to it.

The website itself is in early stages of development, and was opened to public use only in November last year. Users can login using their IDs from either Google, Twitter or Facebook. Once in, you can create new lists, comment on those already created, and best of all, vote on list items. The voting determines what place an item gets in a list. Since lists are structured on the basis of votes, it makes sense to use a list even for feature request threads! This functionality, although similar to the one provided by UserVoice.com, can come in handy while collecting suggestions and ideas on anything, in a crowd sourced manner.

Lists can be tagged with relevant keywords. Each item in a list includes a title, an optional description and an optional image. Whoever creates a list must add at least five items to it. Other users can later curate and sort the list by voting and adding more items.

List Gorilla can come in handy for people who are looking to curate a list of things made with the input of real people. I can see this being used a lot for creating localized lists, such as for restaurants and hotels. Even though almost anyone with a Facebook, Twitter or Google account can add to a list, the chance of spam entering the list is low because only the best voted items make it to the top of the list. So even if spam finds its way, it will get voted down.

Check out List Gorilla and let them know what you think. Appreciation doesn’t hurt when a passion project does good ;)

Last year, we had featured Criticker -a movie recommendation engine. BeeTV is something similar, but for television shows, movies, sports and news. The Milan based beeTV was founded in 2006, but was launched in the 2008 DEMO conference.

Like most similar services, beeTV asks you to rate a few familiar TV shows and movies upon signing up. Based upon your initial ratings, it then prepares a recommendation stream (called your “Personal Content Channel” or PPC).

BeeTV’s interface is spectacular. But, that’s not all it has going for itself. The organization is pretty neat. Enter your Zip code and it will churn out recommendation that includes content from your television provider. BeeTV can even help you find shows to watch on your computer, on your mobile phone and on your iPad. What’s more, with beeTV, you can easily filter out the freebies hidden amongst the crowd of premium offerings.

BeeTV released it’s iPhone app earlier today and an iPad app is in the works. It is also working with set-top box manufacturers to bring personalized recommendations directly to your television. BeeTV is currently talking with multiple system operators (MSOs) to integrate their on-demand titles and to connect their set-top-boxes to enable recording and reminders notifications. BeeTV will be hooking up with your cable’s API to allow you to control your set-top-box remotely. In the future, you will be able to record your favorite shows with the push of a button from your iPhone or BeeTV’s web interface.

Techie Buzz Verdict

There is a definite need for services like beeTV. Thanks to the abundance of TV channels and TV shows it is almost impossible to manually keep track of what’s new and what’s hot. BeeTV enables you to stop wasting time, by quickly finding content that you will like. It’s a pity that this service is currently limited to the US. I am sure everyone would love to have a localized version of beeTV for themselves.

Techie Buzz Rating: 4/5 (Excellent)

Invites: Currently beeTV is in closed beta. However, we have 100 invites to give away. Just head over to bee.tv and use the invitation code bee.techiebuzz.

Today YouTube is celebrating its fifth birthday. Exactly five years ago, a 19-second clip called Me at the Zoo’ was uploaded by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, after a visit to the San Diego Zoo. Back then, Mr. Karim was employed at PayPal. Here’s the historic video:

This video is also a throwback to YouTube’s humble beginnings. Although YouTube is now big enough to attract movie premiers and live events, for me the biggest draw of YouTube remains its odd amateur videos. It has spawned innumerable viral sensations including the JK wedding entrance dance, the Numa Numa kid, David after dentist and the keyboard cat. And, I am sure we will see more in the years to come. Happy Birthday YouTube!

Seesmic is considered by many to be the most powerful and efficient Twitter client. However, in the past Seesmic has made it clear that it doesn’t wish to restrict itself to Twitter. And rightly so. Although Twitter and Facebook dominates the social networking landscape, there are plenty of other major players. As a logical progression towards their aim of becoming the definitive social networking client, Seesmic has announced that it is acquiring Ping.fm.

Ping.fm is a simple service which can push status updates to several dozen social networks. One of the biggest strengths of Ping.fm is that it allows you to update your status message on the go using SMS, MMS, Instant Message or even e-mail. Seesmic has promised to integrate Ping.fm with all its services. It will also be maintaining and developing the Ping.fm API, which is used by close to hundred applications.

Although the financial details of the deal were not disclosed, Ping.fm co-founders – Adam Duffy and Sean McCullough, will be joining the Seesmic team. The duo will also become shareholders and a part of the Seesmic management.

Ping.fm publishes 200,000 updates every day and has 500,000 registered users. This acquisition will undoubtedly give Seesmic an edge and help Loic Le Meur achieve his target of 1 million updates a day. It will be interesting to observe how competitors like TweetDeck will respond. Since, the Ping.fm API will be maintained; other clients will also have the option of offering Ping.fm integration in the future.

No, Zoho is not releasing a desktop version of its applications. But, the folks at ManageEngine – a Zoho Corp division, have developed a pretty desktop-like user interface for Zoho products.

In many ways My Zoho PC (MyZPC) is a natural extension of the Zoho Office Suite. Most of the tasks performed by Zoho apps are tasks which have been traditionally performed by desktop application. MyZPC mimics your desktop and provides an experience similar to that offered by offline Office Suites.

Besides the cool factor, the biggest advantage of My Zoho PC is that it makes working with multiple apps more intuitive. Not only are you able to access apps faster, but you can work with different apps within the same browser tab. Until now switching between multiple apps within a single browser tab was possible only with a Zoho Business account.

Techie Buzz Verdict

Zoho is undoubtedly one of the most powerful and complete web-based office suites available. Thanks to the sheer quality of their products, Zoho has managed to stay competitive in a niche which is populated by offerings from both Google and Microsoft. My Zoho PC may be an unofficial product, but it does a pretty good job at extending and improving the Zoho experience. Not everyone will find this useful; MyZPC is especially pointless if you use only one or two Zoho services. But, even then you will probably want try it at least once, simply because it is nifty.

Techie Buzz Rating: 3/5 (Good)

[ Visit My Zoho PC ]

Do you love StumbleUpon? Do you love Digg? If the answer to both the questions is yes, then you will probably enjoy Jogstr. Jogstr is a web-service which takes the data from Digg and serves it through a StumbleUpon like interface.

Using Jogstr is simple. Just select the categories you are interested in and click on the Jogstr button. Jogstr will randomely select a recently popular item from Digg and display it. If you are only interested in a specific niche, you can also filter stories based on their sub-category. Although Jogstr displays the most popular stories by default, it is possible to configure it to stumble through the Upcoming section instead. Sharing pages is quick and painless thanks to inbuilt support for Twitter, Facebook and pretty much every social bookmarking service you have heard about.

Techie Buzz Verdict

One of the best things about StumbleUpon is the element of surprise. Once you have selected your areas of interest, it works on its own. Jogstr brings the same experience to Digg. It works really well for the Entertainment as well as Offbeat section. However for the rest of the categories, you may find the traditional Digg interface to be more useful. Jogstr is an interesting idea which has been executed nicely. Give it a try and let us know what you think about it.

Techie Buzz Rating: 3/5 (Good)

[ Visit Jogstr ]

Creating collages of favorite photos is great fun! It’s also a nice way of collecting some of your memorable photos. To help you with this collage creating, here is an online tool, Shape Collage.

Shape Collage is an excellent and simple online tool that helps you to create collages of your favorite photos across the web. All you need to do is, enter the URL of the photos out of which you want to create a collage and click on "Create" button. You will get your collage prepared from the photos the provided link had.

This tool has some pre-defined shapes out of which you can choose your collage. You can see that in the picture below. If you don’t want to use those shapes, you have an option to use letters. For example, if you want a set of photos to be shown in the form of a letter, say "H",  then you need to type the same letter in the "Text box".

Apart from the online tool, there is also a desktop software. You can find out more about this here: Create Photo Collages With Shape Collage

Here are few examples of what these collages look like:

http://www.shapecollage.com/online/?cid=mf04oxvk

http://www.shapecollage.com/online/?cid=c1a8rs0h

Techie-Buzz Verdict

This is an awesome and simple tool. It’s fast too! Just set the shape, insert the URL click "Create". Your job is done! It also provides you an option to post to Facebook and share the collage with your friends. So, no fuss of opening another window for that. Overall, a really handy tool.

Techie-Buzz Rating: 4/5 (Cool!)

Most of us loath having to call the customer service department of large companies. And phone menus are in no small way responsible for this loathing. Most large companies have multi-level automated phone menus. Navigating through them is not only time consuming but also extremely annoying. If you live in US or Canada the good news is that a smart little start-up called Fonolo is trying to make things better.

Fonolo is building a database of customer service numbers for all the companies which employ phone menus. It has already mapped out the phone menus for many large companies like Dell, T-Mobile and Apple. Fonolo allows you to deep dial directly to the department you want. This means that you don’t have to listen to instructions like “Press 1 for Sales Support, Press 2 for Enterprise Sales Support and Press 3 for Financial Services”.

All you need to do is enter the name of the company, select the appropriate department and enter your phone number. Fonolo will dial the selected phone number, navigate to the desired menu and then call you. When you pick up your phone, you will be directly connected to your destination. Fonolo doesn’t stop here. As an added bonus, it allows registered users to record all customer service calls. It also keeps a detailed record of all the companies you have called and allows you to note particulars like the name of the customer service representative you spoke with and the details of the conversation. So, if you ever intend to lodge a complaint in the consumer court for shabby customer service, you will have all the proof you need.

Techie Buzz Verdict

Fonolo is a really cool service. The concept as well as execution is outstanding. The service is completely web based and doesn’t require installation of any additional software. The user interface is simple but efficient. The objective of this service is to make things simpler for you and it succeeds with flying colors. If you are looking to call customer care, do it the Fonolo way.

Techie Buzz Rating: 5/5 (Excellent)