What it does

Hate messing with old-school printers and copy machines to figure out how to assemble booklets (which page goes where and which way does it go in the copier)? Try BookletCreator, a free web tool that lets you turn any PDF into a printable booklet. BookletCreator will reorder a PDF’s pages and layout so that it’s printable as a booklet. You don’t have to mess with staples either if you don’t want to. BookletCreator will even send you back an extra copy to keep or print on other devices. Once printed, just follow BookletCreator’s folding instructions to make yourself a booklet or two. If the document is larger than eight pages, there’s an option to split the document into multiple booklets. Or if you just want to print a few pages, you can do that too. It’s free and there’s no registration required.

In their own words

“BookletCreator - is a free online tool that allows to create a booklet from a PDF document. It reorders pages so that after printing and folding the pages you get a small book.”

Why it might be a killer

BookletCreator is a great, free solution if you don’t want deal with copy machines or hard to use software. It’s simplicity and lack of registration is perfect for those who want no fuss.

Some questions

How will BookletCreator generate revenue to allow it to stay afloat? Will users find it easy to use? Or will they want more?

Updates


 » original news

What it does

Hate messing with old-school printers and copy machines to figure out how to assemble booklets (which page goes where and which way does it go in the copier)? Try BookletCreator, a free web tool that lets you turn any PDF into a printable booklet. BookletCreator will reorder a PDF’s pages and layout so that it’s printable as a booklet. You don’t have to mess with staples either if you don’t want to. BookletCreator will even send you back an extra copy to keep or print on other devices. Once printed, just follow BookletCreator’s folding instructions to make yourself a booklet or two. If the document is larger than eight pages, there’s an option to split the document into multiple booklets. Or if you just want to print a few pages, you can do that too. It’s free and there’s no registration required.

In their own words

“BookletCreator - is a free online tool that allows to create a booklet from a PDF document. It reorders pages so that after printing and folding the pages you get a small book.”

Why it might be a killer

BookletCreator is a great, free solution if you don’t want deal with copy machines or hard to use software. It’s simplicity and lack of registration is perfect for those who want no fuss.

Some questions

How will BookletCreator generate revenue to allow it to stay afloat? Will users find it easy to use? Or will they want more?

Updates


 » original news

What it does

Hate messing with old-school printers and copy machines to figure out how to assemble booklets (which page goes where and which way does it go in the copier)? Try BookletCreator, a free web tool that lets you turn any PDF into a printable booklet. BookletCreator will reorder a PDF’s pages and layout so that it’s printable as a booklet. You don’t have to mess with staples either if you don’t want to. BookletCreator will even send you back an extra copy to keep or print on other devices. Once printed, just follow BookletCreator’s folding instructions to make yourself a booklet or two. If the document is larger than eight pages, there’s an option to split the document into multiple booklets. Or if you just want to print a few pages, you can do that too. It’s free and there’s no registration required.

In their own words

“BookletCreator - is a free online tool that allows to create a booklet from a PDF document. It reorders pages so that after printing and folding the pages you get a small book.”

Why it might be a killer

BookletCreator is a great, free solution if you don’t want deal with copy machines or hard to use software. It’s simplicity and lack of registration is perfect for those who want no fuss.

Some questions

How will BookletCreator generate revenue to allow it to stay afloat? Will users find it easy to use? Or will they want more?

Updates


 » original news

We've been discussing how patents can have a serious economic downside (as was recognized by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison as they designed the patent system). It appears that some researchers are trying to quantify just how much damage bad patents are doing to the economy. Against Monopoly points us to a blog post at Technological Innovation and Intellectual Property that discusses the results of a preliminary study (pdf file) that estimates a loss of $22.5 billion due to bad patents. The researchers admit that the findings are preliminary, but it does create an initial framework by which to look at the negative impact of bad patents on the economy. Among other things, the paper lists out the following ways that bad patents harm the economy:

• Cause consumers to absorb monopoly prices over "inventions" that were already effectively common knowledge
• Direct resources away from productive research and instead towards strategic accumulation of patents already filed over innovations already deployed
• Divert resources to "defensive patenting" or securing offensive "blocking patents
• Direct research away from areas of existing patents that should not have been granted
• Direct resources toward acquiring and enforcing substandard patents and collecting royalties rather than other more-productive fields of economic activity.

We've seen all of these in action lately. And, of course, this doesn't even get into how much is thrown away in legal resources to litigate patents and defend infringement claims on patents that should not have been granted. Also, it's worth noting that the TIIP blog post reminds us that the author's own book Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk comes out next month.

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Datel has released Freeloader for the Nintendo Wii (which, incidentally, is a lot more fun when you’ve got a nice buzz going, as I found out last night). The unlicensed disc lets you play Wii games from any region on your console. So, if you’re living in beautiful Leeds and want to play, I don’t know, some U.S. game, now you can. It also functions as a cheat device à la GameShark. That’s what I used in my youth, I don’t know the kiddos use nowadays.

Wii FreeLoader Allows for Region Free Gaming [Next-Gen.biz]

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When Apple released the 1.1.4 firmware to the iPhone and iPod Touch-owning public earlier in the week, there was much excitement over who was going to be the first to jailbreak it. Well, it turns out it was easy enough to tweak the 1.1.3 jailbreaking apps to do the job; Apple didn’t really make any new prohibitions to jailbreaking in the update.

Ziphone has released a new version of its jailbreaking app, and it works easily and quickly with iPhones running 1.1.4.

So far, 1.1.4 is a minor upgrade, but it does grant the iPhone Exchange server access as well as a more stable experience.

A version for the iPod Touch, currently nicknamed Zitouch, is being worked on, but was backburnered when 1.1.4 was unexpectedly released.

Ziphone [Download page, props to JEsTer for the tips]

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If you have photos, videos, music, audio, and blogs scattered across the web, you may not know how many people are viewing and responding to them. Now, with a new service called Traackr, you can organize and manage your content on the web. With Traackr, you can keep track of the popularity of your content, measure your influence, and interact with other content producers, too.

When you sign up for Traackr, you "subscribe" to various content sharing services by entering in your account information on your profile page. At the moment, this list includes YouTube, Flickr, Revver, Dailymotion, MySpace, Vox, and Last.fm.

After subscribing, your videos, photos, songs, etc. will automatically be added to your library via Traackr's auto-discovery service. This process may take up to 24 hours.

Once your content has populated into the Traackr service, you'll be provided with stats like number of views, comments, and ratings, as well as trend graphs which show stats over time. Traackr will also show which of your tags get the most views. Your daily numbers are compared with others on the service and you are given a buzz and popularity rating out of 100, which is added to your profile.

You can also use Traackr's "Campaigns" feature to mix and mash up your content by creating groupings of your media objects. By starting a "campaign," you can compare these groupings to each other to see which ones are the best performers. Using the data the campaigns provide, you can make decisions on what is the best way to market your content in the future.

If you use the Campaigns feature, you will also be put on Traackr's "digerati" map, which is their fancy way of saying that your profile and assets are public and ranked in comparison with others. Using the "Explore" option, you can browse other profiles, or click "find people like me" to connect with others of similar interests.

Traackr's web site still seems a tad rough around the edges. Signing up for services, for example, meant typing in your username, and pressing "enter", but it took trial-and-error to figure that out, as there was no "OK" button present to confirm your entry. The sign-up process also allowed you to enter in all your usernames one after the other, without confirming each selection, only to discover there was no "Save" button at the bottom to save all your entries.

That being said, the service that Traackr provides could be a very useful tool for web artists like song writers, videographers, video bloggers, photographers, poets, and more. With Traackr's statistics, you'll know right away, your social "net worth" on the web.

Filed under: Gaming

 

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It’s been more than a year since the proposed XM-Sirius merger was announced and we’re no closer now to a combined company than we were then. But there’s hope… maybe! Actually, XM and Sirius just extended the deadline by two months for the deal to go through (or not). Now the satellite radio companies have given the Feds till May 1 for the thumbs up or thumbs down.

So only two more months of teasing to go. Unless they extend the deadline again. All this futzing around must please the shareholders.

XM and Sirius extend merger deadline by 2 months [Reuters via Drudge Report]

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It’s becoming almost a non-news item now to talk about yet another day that Twitter is down. It is getting a bit beyond painful for those of us that are great fans of the service, and it’s not going un-noted that they’re coming up on the one year anniversary of their big coming out at last years SXSW. Today, Allen Stern at CenterNetworks notes that they’re barely surviving the Future of Web Apps conference; it would seem that all hope is lost for them to attempt survival of this year’s SXSW.

Even Frederic at Last Podcast noted yesterday that there was a certain irony that “Dave Winer’s post on competing with Twitter just hit TechMeme while Twitter’s API backend seems to be down and out,” though I’m not sure at this point we can call it irony any longer. As much as Twitter is talked about and as often as it’s down, it isn’t coincidence that these two things occur in tandem. It is inevitablity.

There’s been a lot of talk of what the successor to Twitter is going to be. The runaway success of the service, despite it’s many foibles, has shown us that it is here to stay (at least in between the times that the server takes periodic naps). I suppose I’m just venting a bit of frustration here; they promised us with the hiring of their new VP of Operations Lee Mighdoll, that scalability would be priority number one, and we’d soon see an end to the problems. Meanwhile, I’ve been unable to sustain a good connection to Twitter for going on two days here.

I Use Twitter Less These Days

Twitter’s unreliability is what caused me to seek another solution for the liveblogging of the Digg Roundtable. Given the fact that it is Digg we’re talking about (a service that takes down servers with the best looking uptimes at whim), I had no idea what sort of volume to expect. All I knew is that I couldn’t trust Twitter to the task.

Similarly, I’ve found that I’m enjoying FriendFeed a whole lot more to meet new people and learn more about the attentions and interests of online friends of mine than I ever did with Twitter. Certainly, FriendFeed is not the same thing as Twitter, and lacks a lot of the mobile features and portability (as well as a bit of instantaneous ‘chat-like’ feel). None the less, I’m finding that I’m responding to folks Twitters more often in FriendFeed than I do on Twitter itself.

There’s a simple explanation for this. FriendFeed has been down once for about 15 minutes the whole time I’ve used it. Twitter is down constantly. It’s reliable. I know it’ll be there.

What Will Happen and What Can Twitter Do?

What’s going to happen, if Twitter doesn’t get it’s act together, is we’re going to see more and more services come out that pare down the unique abilities and features that Twitter offers, and repackage them and do them better - just like I’ve described. Twitter has created the need for folks to leave, and give more startups the opportunity to succeed in a lot of niches that Twitter currently fills.

It’s Twitter’s game to lose.

I’ve come up with a few solutions, which you can listen to here:

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