Fridge

We are pleased to announce that the Fridge team will be joining Google!

It has been an amazing ride developing Fridge, but most importantly we are very thankful to our enthusiastic community of users. We strongly believe in the group social experience and couldn’t think of a better place to realize our vision of bringing the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to the web as part of the Google+ Project.

Fridge is closing up shop — the team will be folded into Google+, where we’ll continue some of our efforts. We heard you loud and clear over the weekend, so we’re expanding the time during which your Fridge data will be available for offloading. While you will no longer be able to post anything new to Fridge, you will still be able to download and save your data until Saturday August 20, 2011 at 6pm ET.  After that, in accordance with our privacy policy, we will delete all user data.

We look forward to continuing the vision of creating fresh and exciting social group experiences for users across the web.

Keep on keeping it fresh from Team Fridge, and see you on Google+.

Fridge is in the process of making some changes over the next few days, and we plan to shut down our product. Before we do this, we want to give our users the opportunity to download all their user information and data. 

To download and save all your photos, media, files, and posts from your Groups just login and click “Export Group data” in each Group you want to save.

If you want to download and save your data you will have until Tuesday, July 19 at 6pm ET. After that, the current version of Fridge will no longer be available, and in accordance with our privacy policy, we will delete all user data at that time.

We thank each and every one of you for your support and contribution to the growing Fridge community. We can’t wait to share what we’re planning and we’ll have more to announce soon. 

This is part of our weekly series of freshness. If you find others out there, share them with us!

Fresh idea: Smartphone app that lets users share which food tastes good and which dishes to avoid

Fresh startup: Nosh.me

Calling themselves the cross between Foursquare and Yelp, Nosh.me allows you to share what you’re eating (and if it’s good) with your friends.  You can take photos, rate your meal and leave tips for future visitors.  Give your friends a hand and let them know if a certain place or dish is worth their time.  

A new mobile app for iPhone and Android hopes to make it easy for people to share what they are eating, while rating what food is good — and what dishes to avoid.

Nosh.me bills itself as a cross between Foursquare and Yelp. The idea behind the app is to allow people to share “what’s good here” at a restaurant they’re visiting. Users can take photos, rate items or dishes, leave additional tips or comments and share their experience with their friends on Facebook or Twitter.

Visually, the app, which is available for Android and iPhone [iTunes link], is similar to Instagram or Path.

You can see a feed of what your friends have shared to the service, including a picture of the dish, its name, a star rating and the name of the restaurant. Tapping on an entry opens up a place to read a caption or review and to see any comments or likes associated with a post.

To share what you are eating, there is a Nosh location button on the app, similar to Foursquare, where users can add in a menu item, photo and review. Nosh already has 150,000 menus, 475,000 restaurants and 10 million menu items in its database.

Nosh.me is the first app from the Google Ventures-backed Firespotter Labs. Led by Craig Walker (former co-founder of GrandCentral, which went on to become Google Voice), Firespotter’s goal is to tackle big industry segments (like the restaurant industry) that have been resistant to modernization. “The restaurant dining experience today is essentially the same as it was 50 years ago,” Walker told me.

Recognizing the power of friend recommendations and reviews, as well as our collective love of food photography, Nosh.me was born.

The idea, while compelling, isn’t unique. Forkly has a similar aim. However, despite some early buzz, that product has failed to launch. Moreover, existing startups like Foodspotting are focused on creating visual experiences for food lovers. In an ironic twist of fate, I actually attempted to purchase the Nosh.me domain name in February, for a food app idea that I had.

Still, there is something compelling about not just looking at photos of food, but commenting on and sharing those photos and the quality of the dish itself. As a way to streamline the discovery process, we think Nosh.me has real potential.

(Source: Mashable)

There’s an experimental Android app that’s been built in Japan that can allegedly measure your brainwaves.  All you have to do is purchase the $100 headband (no, it’s not wireless) and plug it into your Android device.  

Are you ready for this?

After what seems like decades of waiting, Spotify has officially landed on U.S. soil.  With 1 million paying subscribers throughout Europe, Spotify is now the only FREE on-demand service available in the U.S. on mobile and desktop.  

Who’s got an invite?  Have you tried it out?  Do you like it?  I’m playing around with it.

Don’t you still wish you could fly?  Most everyone does, at least for an hour or so.  If you didn’t catch Yves Rossy’s TED Talk about his invention that allows him to fly, you’ll get the gist from the video.  The bottom line is, this guy created wings that allow him to fly.  How cool is that?

In anticipation of the final installment of the Harry Potter series, “Friday,” made famous by Rebecca Black, goes Potter.  Don’t act like you didn’t see this coming.  By the way, who’s going to check out Harry’s last hurrah?

Nothing can stop Keenan Cahill, who is coping well with Maroteaux-Lamy syndrome.  This time Keenan takes to the screen with the cast of Glee.

This is part of our weekly series of freshness. If you find others out there, share them with us!

Fresh idea: Online one stop shop for bands

Fresh startup: Onesheet

If you’re in or involved in an up and coming band, you’re probably aware of the plethora of DIY online management tools that are available.  You’ve probably been inundated with the unofficial rule that you have to be on every single social networking site that exists.  This probably isn’t your main job, so managing and directing traffic to all of these profiles can get overwhelming.  Enter Onesheet, the one stop shop that enables you to develop your band’s online presence from one spot.

Nowadays, bands are expected to be on an increasingly large number of networks — from Twitter to Facebook to Soundcloud to YouTube, you name it. Which means that a musician’s web presence is often scattered all over the place, floating about the web like so many half notes.

The obvious solution is to build a website that centralizes all that info, making it easy for fans to keep up with all your online going-ons. However, if you’re not particularly tech-savvy or you don’t have the funds to hiresomeone particularly tech-savvy, that whole website thing might be an issue.

Onesheet aims to solve that quandary by providing musicians with a way to tie together all of their online outlets in one place: from music to videos to concert dates to online stores to social sites, etc.

The service was founded by Brenden Mulligan, who has been involved in the music industry for five years, doing everything from working at a major label to living on a bus as a band’s road manager. Mulligan is also the founder of ArtistData, which allowed bands to distribute info across all of their web presences at once (that service was acquired by Sonicbids).

“I think a band having their own branded web presence outside of social networks is incredibly important,” Mulligan says. “Bands are told they need their own website, but setting one up and keeping it maintained is sometimes too much effort. So they either need people to help them, or their website becomes stagnant quickly.”

Since Onesheet is plugged into your social networks, it updates constantly as you tweet, Facebook and upload music.

If you’re familiar with Flavors.me or About.me, you’ll be able to figure out Onesheet rather rapidly. The service is still in beta, but bands can sign up to reserve their Onesheet in the coming days. Once you have one locked down, simply log in via Facebook and Twitter, and all of your artist data will be transferred to the page (you can tweak at will).

(Source: Mashable)

Ok animal lovers, this one’s for you.  How would you get a kitten in distress dislodged from a pipe?  A leafblower, duh.  Thanks to these quick thinking firemen, another feline life was saved.