Tim Hussey sent me an email this morning telling me about a project he is working on called Pixifi.

Tim is a part time wedding photographer (as well as being a professional designer/developer) and after getting sick of using a combination of Outlook, Excell and Word to manage his clients he thought something needed to be done. Strangely enough this is how most really useful web applications come about, someone is in need of it, so they make it.

Tim was nice enough to let me have a look around an early version of Pixifi today and I was generally impressed. I could see how it would be a valuable resource for any freelance photographer looking fir an easy way to manage their work load. What impressed me even more was that Tim has designed and developed this entire thing himself. From the ground up. It’s very rare to find someone who can both design and program exceptionally well. So, to date he has spent $0 on the website. Although… (and this is a wonderful quote)

I had to sacrifice time with my wife and friends to start building it…
You can’t put a price on that kind of startup funding… it’s expensive unless you’re
willing to make the sacrifice in the beginning.

Below is a quick look at the app itself.

Simplebucket is a site taking a shot at the image hosting throne. After playing around with the system for a few minutes I can say that i honestly think is stands a very good chance of making some waves within the space.

Along with having all the generic features that we’ve come to expect from image hosts it has a few real “killer” features that are worth checking out. One of the main benefits with this service is the ability to “tag” your pictures facebook / flickr style. While this itself is nothing new, SimpleBucket allows you to embed this tagged picture in blogs and websites.

This will be an incredibility useful feature for any blogger who posts images on a regular basis. I exchanged a few emails with the Khang, the owner today and he told me that soon you will also be able to record voice clips and include them in your embedded image (using the snapvine API).

To date Khang has only spent $180 on this for the domain name and web hosting. However developing and designing the entire thing yourself can help you save a lot of startup capital. 😉

This is definitely one to keep an eye on.

Launched a few hours ago, TwitLinks.com is a nice little resource for hot tech news.

The site pulls all its information and links from twitter using their API. They follow (what they call) “the worlds top tech twitter users”. That full list of people is available to view here.

What’s nice about it is news usually breaks on twitter before anywhere else. If you’re not an overly active twitter user or not a twitter user at all and don’t like the idea of following hundreds of people just for the off chance they might break some news this site is for you.

It’s a wonderfully simple idea and it’s definitely useful. It’s already got a decent amount of coverage. I asked my PHP buddy how much it would cost to develop such a website and he quoted me $250.

Just goes to show, if you have a bit of free cash and an idea, you can make things happen.

As the title suggests, vorolo is a new social networking website currently still in private beta.

Right now, vorolo is a one man band run by Jason Rai. Being a serial designer Jason managed to considerably keep the cost of development down designing the entire website himself. On top of that he spent $700 on the website programming. (According to Jason he would have quoted someone around $1,500 for all of the design work).

Today i was lucky enough to get an early look through the site and system.

The main problem Jason is going to face will be trying to build up the sites userbase. With the social networking market so saturated with large, established players it’ll be interesting to see how quickly this site grows.

I managed to get my hands on 20 beta invites. There is still a bit more work to be done on the site before it’s ready but when it’s good to go i’ll post the invites up here.

Edit: The updates are good to go. Leave a comment if you want one and i’ll send it over.

Software developer Jake Marsh has been working hard on an iPhone version of popular social networking website, MySpace.

The application hasn’t launched yet but from the demos he has posted it looks like it scratches a much needed itch for many myspace users. Jake says that when the app is complete it will have more or less the feature list as its big brother.

Currently heavily based off the popular facebook iPhone application, Jake is currently looking for a designer to help tweak the interface. (If you’re an interested designer his email address is posted on his sites about page).

One of the more exciting features of the app is the way it will handle streamed music on “band pages”. Unfortunately due to the current iPhone flash limitations and the way myspace uses flash to stream files, there needed to be some kind of work around. Jake is currently working on a way of pulling the music file location and including the direct link on the profile page. With it being an iPhone users will then be able to download the .mp3 straight to their music player.

According to Jake, after playing around with the myspace API he decided that it “wasn’t so great” so this app runs completely from scraping the content from myspace. Let’s hope myspace doesn’t mind.

Below is a video that shows the application in action.