DemoGirl

Edison is an application for Windows that allows you to control the amount of energy your PC is using during specific hours of the day.

It requires a download (28MB) and then you can choose how much energy you want to save and set a schedule of when this should occur.  You can enter in the hours during the day you’re normally working on your computer and the hours when you’re not.  Then just set the energy saving levels for each schedule.  You can adjust the settings for how long to wait before turning off your display, choose to power down the hard drive after a specified amount of time, and have Edison suspend, not turn off, your computer after a period of inactivity.

Edison will also show you an estimated annual savings on money, energy, and carbon dioxide.  To see what Edison does before you download it, watch the screencast below:

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[via Download Squad]

Bandsintown is a really cool site that shows you when your favorite band is going to be playing at a venue in or around your city.  It also recommends artists it thinks you’ll like and allows you to connect with other people in your city that are going to the same show.

When you sign up for Bandsintown, you’ll have to tell it some of your favorite artists and where you’re located.  From that information, it will create a “recommendation cloud” filled with your favorite artists along with ones it thinks you’ll like.  All of the artists that appear in your cloud are playing in or around your city in the near future.  You can add shows you’ll be attending to your calendar and see what other Bandsintown members are going.  There’s also a widget that you can put on your blog or website that displays the shows you’ll be attending, the shows your favorite artist is performing at, or the upcoming shows at a specific venue.

Thanks to Marshall for putting Bandsintown back under my radar!  To see how it works, watch the screencast below:

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I have a confession to make:  I sleep with my laptop.  Well, not literally (OK, sometimes) but it rests right next to me and is the last thing I see before I go to sleep and the first thing I see when I open my eyes in the morning.  Morning, noon, and night I am staring at my computer screen.  No, I don’t think I have an Internet addiction, although I can name a few people who I think could use some help.  It’s my job to be in front of my computer and frankly, I enjoy it.  I usually remember to get up and walk around every couple of hours, but that’s to prevent my back from aching.  What I tend to neglect are two things that I would be very much lost without – My eyeballs.  EyeDefender is here to remind you to stop abusing something that you use every single day.

EyeDefender will nudge you, in various ways, every hour or so to give your eyes a break.  After you install EyeDefender, you’ll be able to set up how often you want to rest and for how long.  I chose 2 minutes every 60 minutes.  You can choose different images to look at for your break period and you can always stop your break by hitting the Esc key.

EyeDefender is supposed to help treat CVS, or computer vision syndrome, which affects people who look at computer screens for hours on end.  If you don’t want to install EyeDefender, setting a simple reminder for yourself to take a break every hour, and blinking frequently for about 2 or 3 minutes should also help alleviate symptoms.  To see what EyeDefender will look like after you install it, watch the screencast below:

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[via Lifehacker]

Dabbleboard is an online whiteboard that allows you to draw messy circles, rectangles, triangles, etc, but immediately corrects your freehand into a smooth shape.

Besides basic shapes, you can also insert images, add text anywhere, and draw freehand.  You can select and store different shapes into your library for future use as well as entire projects.  Dabbleboard also allows real-time collaboration.  It’s a pretty handy tool, especially if you use whiteboards often.  To see it in action, watch the screencast below:

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[via WebWorkerDaily]

When I was in my early twenties, I did a lot of random traveling/moving with a good friend of mine.  First it was Mammoth Lakes, CA, from there it was Maui, then Massachusetts, and so on.  Each time we moved to one of these places, we had no place to live and stayed in hotels or with friends until we could find a place to rent.  The same took place when I moved to San Francisco last September – I had to stay with a friend in a very tiny apartment until I could find my own place.  Staying in hotels is costly and some places we traveled to didn’t have a lot of hostels to choose from.  We were all about meeting new people and learning about the places we were living in, so something like AirBed & Breakfast is a service that would have saved us a lot of time and money.

Basically, AirBed & Breakfast allows you to post a spare couch, room, or futon and set a price of how much per night someone must pay in order to stay with you.  You can also include breakfast, which is sort of like a bed and breakfast – hence the name.    Travelers will be able to view your profile, which includes the basic info, but you can also add a link to your LinkedIn profile.  You can also choose to turn your listing on or off at any time.  If someone decides to book your place, they’ll pay AirBed & Breakfast your fees plus a 12% booking fee, which is how I’m guessing AirBed & Breakfast is going to monetize the site.  You’ll receive your payment via PayPal or check after your guest leaves.

I know that some people may seem skeptical about using something like AirBed & Breakfast.  That’s fine.  I don’t think they’re targeting skeptics.  They’re targeting people like me (or my former, younger self) who love meeting people, travel, and know how to be cautious when staying in a unfamiliar place.  It’s really not that much different than staying in a hostel somewhere in a room full of strangers, except for the fact that you can read comments from other people who have stayed with someone on AirBed & Breakfast.  I’m looking to go to Europe sometime in the very distant future, and if I’m on a tight budget, I’ll definitely be coming back to AirBed & Breakfast.  To learn more, check out the screencast below:

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Last week, I had the pleasure of briefly chatting with Scott Beale from Laughing Squid.  He showed me a new application on his phone that he saw demoed at The Start Conference, called Fuelly.  As the name implies, Fuelly is about your car and the fuel it uses.

After you sign up for Fuelly, you just need to enter in basic information about your car.  You have the option of tracking your MPG with trip mileage or your odometer reading.  You can also select English or Metric units.  You can also name your car, give it a description, and add a photo.  Think of it as your cars MySpace profile page, but obviously much cleaner and more useful.  After that, all you really need to do is remember to tell Fuelly when you put gas in your car.  Yes, there is a mobile version as well.

The more you use Fuelly, the more data will become available in your Fuelly account.  You’ll see information like the average MPG you’re getting each time you fill up, average price you’re spending on gas, and the total amount of money you’ve spent for the year.  It will also tell you how your car stacks up against EPA standards for your make and model.  Mine was not good.

Last, but not least, there is a social networking side to Fuelly allowing you to view other members data to compare with your own.  To see Fuelly in action, watch the screencast below:

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[via Laughing Squid]

While planning to do a screencast for one specific Twitter application, I stumbled upon two others that I found to be pretty handy.  If you’re not a Twitter user, then maybe you should watch my previous screencasts explaining how and why you should use Twitter.  If you are a Twitter user, then first, you should follow me here, and second, check out these three applications:

Monitter allows you to do a real time Twitter search for 3 terms all at the same time.  I know that Twitter search, previously known as Summize, allows you to conduct a pretty accurate search but it doesn’t allow you to search for multiple terms.  It also doesn’t look nearly as cool:

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My Tweeple does something that is so simple, but useful.  It allows you to view all of your Twitter friends and see just exactly who is following who.  This probably isn’t going to be useful to people that have a lot of followers (you know who you are!) because most likely you don’t have the time to follow the 50,000 people who adore you.  But, if you have a relatively normal group of followers and you want to see just who’s stopped following you or who has reciprocated your friendship, then My Tweeple is a neat little tool.  It also does a few other things but you have to watch the screencast if you want to find out what those things are:

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Twitzu allows you to plan events with your Twitter friends.  All you need to do is enter in your Twitter credentials and add some information about the type of event you want to plan.  This could be for happy hour, a trip to the movies, or even a Twitter meetup.  After your event is created, a tweet will be sent out with a link to your event page where guests can RSVP and see who else is going.  Watch the screencast to see Twitzu in action:

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[via KillerStartups]

Ididwork allows you to create a microblog to record all of the things you accomplish throughout your work day.  You can share this information with other co-workers and your boss.  You can also keep it private as a way to track how you’re spending your time.  However, if you look at the screenshot under “Your recent work” you’ll see that I’m not just using ididwork for actual job related work.  I’m also using it as a microblog for all of my daily activities.

When you visit the homepage, you’ll see that it specifies “Keep a history of your work, and share it with your team”.  You can share your work with your team by entering in the email address your co-workers use for their ididwork account and after they approve you, you’ll have a feed showing all of your, and their, daily work accomplishments.  You can also share this information with your boss and choose to have a report sent to them weekly or monthly.  This is all great if you have a small team of people and want to see what projects each person has been working on.  You can also tag all of your activities so you can see what areas you’ve been spending the most time on.  There are also graphs that break down your daily activity according to your tags.  I think it can be much more useful though, as a way to keep track of everything you’re accomplishing throughout the day.

Right now there aren’t too many features on ididwork.  I would like to see the ability to log activities from your mobile phone, and a way to share certain activities with certain people.  For example, if I’m planning a party with “Judy”, I could create the tag “party” and every time one of us completes a task and tags it “party” it will show up in our shared feed and we’ll know what to move onto next.  I know this makes it sound like ididwork is a task manager, but that’s not where I’m going with this.  I think of it as a microblog of what I’m getting done paired with the ability to see what people I’m involved with are getting done as well.  To see what I mean, watch the screencast below:

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[via TechCrunch]

Delicious recently relaunched with not only a much needed visual overhaul, but also adding some features that have been missing for far too long.

First of all, I have to be truthful – I was never a big delicious user to begin with.  I couldn’t get past the way it looked and not really being all that into “social bookmarking”, probably didn’t help either.  I wanted to do a screencast tour of all of the new features, but I wasn’t really sure what was new and what just looked new.  Fortunately, just as I was about to pull my hair out trying to decide what features to cover, I received a message from a fellow blogger known around the blogosphere as “Paisano” telling me about a guest post he wrote on Sarah Lacy’s blog.  I asked if he minded if I used it as a guide for my screencast and he was kind enough to say yes.  So, thank you, Paisano, for the great post!  It’s definitely worth a read as it points out the good and the bad.  (I’ve also been told that Paisano is now a regular featured columnist on Mashable, so check out his writing there too.) If you want to see the new features of Delicious 2.0, then watch the screencast below:

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Resnooze is a reminder service that sends you nudges about things you need to get done on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Knowing that there are a lot, and I mean a lot, of reminder/to-do applications out there, I was a little hesitant to give Resnooze a try.  I’m really glad I did because this is one that I may actually begin using.  To start using Resnooze, you just need to enter in your email address and then type what you need to be reminded of.  This can be anything from reminding yourself about a weekly conference call to setting up a reminder to go to the gym every day.  Resnooze will send you a little note about what you need to get done and you can choose to change how often you’re reminded or ignore it, which is essentially like hitting the snooze button.  If you’re a blogger, you can also put a “Resnooze This” button on your site and when your visitors click it, they’ll be able to set up a reminder to come back to your site.  You can also send reminders to your friends as well, but they’ll need to approve the Resnooze email first, before they see your initial reminder.  If you want to see Resnooze in action, then watch the screencast below:

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[via Go2Web20 Blog]