Alpha Five

Alpha Software has launched the latest iteration of its Alpha Five software used by over 1 million developers and tens of millions of users, Alpha Five V10.  It is the first programming tool that enables software developers to visually build rich Internet database applications powered by Ajax without having to write one line of code. Even better, they perform like desktop apps and run entirely in the cloud. These apps support every major SQL database, including Microsoft SQL Azure databases that reside in the Microsoft cloud. Those developers who find that getting their hands dirty makes life meaningful have the option of crafting custom code using popular SQL dialects, JavaScript, REST Services and Xbasic.

Features:

• Rich JavaScript framework
• Robust desktop capabilities
• More power for xBasic coding
• Great new Xdialog controls
• Updated Alpha Five Application ZServer

The company has created an extensive library of videos showing Alpha Five features in action.

AppMakr

You’ve got a website and you’re already publishing content to the web via RSS and Atom feeds, Twitter, iTunes podcasts, Flickr streams and more. Now you want to promote your site by creating an iPhone/iPod Touch app. That process can take months and involve hefty development fees. AppMakr, a new system from PointAbove, lets you create a mobile application in 30 seconds or less from your existing assets at a fraction of the cost of a dedicated developer.  All you need to create an app with your own branding is an RSS or Atom news feed from your web site/blog, graphics for your header and landing page and an icon for the iTunes App Store.

Features:

• Uses your website’s RSS or Atom feed
• Supports playback of MP4 video within the app
• Can create multiple tabs for multiple feeds from your site
• Two pricing options. With AppMakr as the publisher, the fee is $199 (a small AppMakr logo will appear on the splash screen). If you want to publish under your own brand, the AppMakr fee is $499
• Can embed ads from services such as DoubleClick, Google Adsense and AdMob

Watch a video of an app created with AppMakr.

Cloudkick

The digital counterpart of that old business chestnut that you can’t manage what you can’t measure may be, “You can’t manage what you can’t monitor.”  Nowhere is that more true than when you’re trying to take advantage of cloud services and are using multiple providers. They all have different dashboards, which makes monitoring their performance an onerous chore. Cloudkick, a Y Combinator-incubated startup, has developed a web application that provides a unified view of multiple service providers to help companies monitor performance. It enables users to monitor and manage cloud service providers that include Rackspace Cloud, Amazon EVC2, Linode, GoGrid Slicehost, RimuHosting and VPOS.NET. Cloudkick is available through subscription-based plans and a free developer plan.

Features:

• Load, CPU, bandwidth, and memory monitoring
• Alerts including SMS and Email
• Advance and innovative performance graphs
• Diagnostics performance
• Autosetup
• Multiple users per account
• Change-log tool

Alex Polvi, CEO and founder, introduced Cloudkick last year at the Under the Radar Conference

Collecta

Here’s a great way to enrich your website or blog content: embed a free widget from Collecta that provides streaming, real-time content centered on search terms that are relevant to your audience.  If you’re a developer of apps for the mobile devices, for example, you could customize the widget to search for information about iPhone and Android. What sets Collecta apart from other search offerings like Facebook’s Live Stream Box, is the depth and breadth of its content sources, which include Twitter, WordPress, Flickr, The Associated Press, CNN and Reuters.

Features:

• Free embeddable widget
• 10 million unique content sources
• Results are automatically refreshed
• Customizable search terms
• Customization options include header, control scroll rate and link to external style sheet to integrate widget with website’s existing look and feel.

View this YouTube video of Collecta search in action.

PositionApp

With over 100,000 apps available in the iTunes app store, it’s hard to keep track of who’s on first in terms of popularity. If app-watching ever gets certified as an Olympic event, you might want to spend some time training with yet another iPhone app, PositionApp. This new app from a UK/Sweden digital design studio crawls the App Store on an hourly basis and collects data from the top 300 apps across all categories and geographies. It’s a great tool if you’re consumer looking for the latest and greatest, a developer who wants to see how his latest software baby is faring in the marketplace, or a marketing type who wants to keep tabs on sales in markets across the world. The normal price of the app is $7, but it will be free for the next several months thanks to a sponsorship deal with AdMob.

Features:

• Up to date country-by-country position performance stats on the top 300 apps
• Six months of historic position data
• Browse by country, genre, position change, app name, free or paid, day, week or month
• Track selected favorites on your personal dashboard
• Highlight the biggest climbers in the top 100 and the top 300

SlideShare Branded Channels

In the world of business there’s rarely a case of TMI, unless you happen to be Toyota.  Oversharing is the rule of the road, especially when it comes to PowerPoint presentations, the lingua franca for all who toil in the trenches of commerce. SlideShare,  the world’s largest community for sharing business presentations and documents, has been a faithful business sidekick for business since 2006. You can upload  PowerPoint, Open Office and Keynote presentations  and  Word and Open Office documents. You can share them on your blog or website, or send a URL by email. Transcripts of your files will be indexed by Internet search engines and enhance the search engine ranking of your presentations and documents. Since the site is searchable by then outside world, it’s a great and inexpensive - read free - way to spread the word. Well, a good thing has just gotten better, Slideshare has launched a new Channels service to provide custom-branded micro sites that businesses can use to showcase presentations, whitepapers and webinars to a professionals audience. Some of the early adopters include Adobe, Ogilvy, Microsoft and Razorfish Marketing.

Features:

• Share PowerPoint, Open Office and Keynote presentations as well as Word and Open Office documents
• Can embed your presentation/document in a blog or website
• Has apps to share via Facebook, Linkedin and XING

See how ReadWriteWeb uses Slideshare branded channels.

Next Page »