The Tangrens

From shared torrents from BitTorrent to many of the major networks making their shows available online, online video has certainly arrived.A collaboration between NBC and Fox was released to the general public earlier this week entitled Hulu. It's interesting to see the shift to on-demand/online video and the different attempts to monetize it. It's also fun to see older content becoming available either for free or nominal charge (ala Virtual Console games on the Wii).

In addition to it being completely free (for now) a few things have impressed me so far about Hulu:

1. They have a fairly robust selection of both TV show AND movies
   
2. It's completely an online solution so no download is required
3. They seem to have embraced bloggers in making it easy to embed all their videos into your blog if you want to share a particular show or movie (see below)

They have both clips and full episodes/movies on there. Here's a few examples of vintage TV shows I've found:

• The A-Team
• The Addam's Family
• Remington Steele
• Airwolf
• Buck Rogers
  
• Battlestar Galactica (Classic)

The selection of movies is less impressive, but they do have a few fun ones:

• Master & Commander
• Ice Age
• Three Amigos
• Dragon - The Bruce Lee Story
• Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie

Anyway, worth checking out. And here's an example of what you can do.....

I haven't posted for a while (crazy busy!), but today I received a check in the mail and thought I should share a fun little website that I found called MissingMoney.com. It checks to see if the government owes you any money and then helps you find the forms you need to fill out to claim your money. Old tax return refunds that you might never have received, long lost uncles having left you money in their will that is in control of the state, etc. I happened across it a couple of months ago and, just for kicks and giggles, decided to see if the government owed me any money.

You put in your name and the state where you live (or have lived) and it searches government public records of unclaimed property. Came to find out that the State of Idaho owed me money from an old tax refund that they never sent me. It typically doesn't disclose the amount (although mine disclosed that it was under $100), and then walks you through getting the state forms to send in to claim your moolah.

So, I sent in the forms and today got my check for $97.31. It was a pleasant surprise! Go check it out an see if the government has any of your money.

As most of you probably know, I've had a cold/respiratory illness now for nearly 2 months now. After three rounds of different medications, (and some powerful cough syrup) I think I'm finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Since I've been neglecting my duties of posting cool websites/tools for a while now. I thought that I would penitently try to catch up and post the My Top 5 Online Tools from 2007....

5. LDS.org Tools

• I'm lumping a few sites under one umbrella, although this could probably be a post in itself (as I'm thinking of this I'm thinking I might have to expand this list and devote an entire post to just tools like this). Here are some of my favorites which you may or may not be familiar with:
• Church Publication in Compressed Audio Format
• Several Church publications in .mp3 format that you can download for free including the Standard Works, General Conference Addresses, the Ensign Teachings of the Presidents of the Church and Jesus the Christ by James E. Talmage. Several individuals have even set up various podcasts to help you study the different materials put out by the church.
• Church Videos
• The Church has recently made several videos available on its website and seems to be updating this on a regular basis with new videos. Some of the videos included are the Book of Mormon Study Guide Videos (including one of my favorites, Boyd K. Packer's the Mediator), Church Growth by Stake, General Conference, the World Report and the last two Worldwide Leadership Training meetings. I hope they continue to add to this especially as video iPods and the like continue to be more prevalent.
• LDS.org Interactive Music Player
• I love to sing hymns, but I have never learned to read music and learn mostly by ear so to pick out the different parts has always been a struggle for me. In the past I've had friends record the base part to certain songs so I could try and learn them. The Church came out with this interactive music player where you can select which part(s) to include and it will play just the notes for that particular part even allowing you to change the key and tempo. It has been really helpful (when I have time to use it) to help me learn the bass and tenor parts of hymns more easily.
  

4. Del.ico.us

• Del.ico.us is a social booking marking site that provides an alternative to managing the myriad of bookmarks while given you the ability to share those bookmarks with your friends and family. I bookmark a lot of sites and it's easy for standard bookmarking to just get big enough that it's impossible to find anything. Deli.ico.us let you organize your bookmarks with tags (similar to blogging tags). Also, there is a Firefox plug-in which nearly seamlessly integrates the bookmarks into your browser. (If you aren't using Firefox, I would strongly recommend it regardless if you decide to use Del.ico.us or not).
  
  

3. Netvibes

• I have beeing using Google/IG as my homepage for a while now and recently happened upon a cool site that I think does a lot better job called Netvibes. You can set up different widgets of things that interest you or to create a one-stop-shopping for things you get on different websites. On my page, I have a widget that shows me my Gmail Account, my Hotmail account, stocks I like to follow, a calendar and some news feeds (to name a few). Currently there are over 100,000 different widgets that you can add.
  

2. Lifehacker

• This is one of my favorite places to read about cool websites or random tips to improve your life. I have found lots of cool websites through it (Netvibes, Animoto, and Mint just to name a few) and it is usually a good read. A lot of it is geared towards tech tips, but might be a good read.
  

1. Mint

• I blogged about Mint a while back and so I wanted to include it again in case you missed the last post. This is seriously the coolest little tool that I have found in a while. It allows you to import financial information into a single location and then helps you create budgets and analyze where all your money is going. If you haven't checked it out, give it a go.

Anyway, there's my list. What cool tools did you come across last year?

So I just happened across a SWEET online tool that I can't help but share. Also, Sunny reminded me that I hadn't posted a cool site of the week for a while, so I thought I better strike while the iron is hot...

The tool is called Mint (www.mint.com). It is an SAAS (Software as a Service) online money management system that is a TON better than anything else out there. I just signed up tonight and have been playing around with it and I'm really impressed. Especially since it is free! They actually have a pretty cool business model that I'll explain a little later on.

So this is how it works. You sign up for an account and then add your various financial institutions and/or credit cards by entering in your account information for each one respectively. They support up to 3,500 different institutions and I was surprised that my local credit union was one of those supported. After adding all of your accounts, you have a one-stop place to view account balances for all your different accounts (useful if you keep your money in several different places like we do).

The real fun begins when you import your transactions. (It must be 1) a sign of old age or 2) the indication of some suppressed accountant tenancies when you start thinking stuff like this is fun....) It automatically recognizes how to categorize different purchases. For example, it automatically identified such transactions as Albertson's as "Groceries", Target as "Shopping" and Carl's Jr. as "Fast Food". Now, it's obviously not perfect, but it has an option so you can easily go through and correct any labels that it didn't get right. But, I was actually amazed at how much it got right.

After your transactions are imported and you have them labeled correctly (took me like 5 minutes top), you can quickly identify how much you are spending where. You can even create a budget and get updates as to where you are at with you budget for each line item. You can easily see how much you are spending on Entertainment, Gas, Shopping, as well as what stores you are spending the most at. You can even set up alerts to be notified when one of your accounts reaches a certain low/high, etc. Maybe it's just the web analytics guru in me, but I think it's totally cool.

Like I said they have a pretty cool business model. They have a "Ways to Save" tab which analyzes your current interest rates for your checking/savings and credit cards. Companies can purchase advertising on that space. Mint will tell you how much more money you could be making/saving in interest if you switch to one of the other offers. Pretty cool inasmuch as it's really a value add for consumers to see what else is out there, especially in this day and age of Internet banking competition.

Certainly well worth your time checking out.

I just found a fun new online slideshow tool (Animoto) that you can use to create little slideshows like this. You put in the pictures and the music music (or they have music you can select from) and it analyzes and puts pictures together with transitions into a slideshow. You can do as many as you want that are 30 seconds for free.