Time for More Free Hosting and a Free Alienware Area 51

By Sia on May 10, 2008 in Featured, Speedy | 0 Comments

Top Hosting Center is proud to announce the release of Iceberg v2.0. To celebrate the launch, Iceberg joined forces with Mashable and Top Hosting Center to reward new users with prizes from a powerful Alienware Area 51 laptop to Xbox 360 Elite and free hosting.

Iceberg, Mashable and THC competition.

Iceberg v2.0 is a powerful web platform that allows anyone to create business class applications in minutes rather than days - without the need for code of any kind. Such an application requires, quite obviously, powerful hosting and… a powerful PC. Alienware Area 51 fits all exigencies and this happens to be the first prize offered by Iceberg for a lucky winner of their competition.

Second prize is an Xbox 360 Elite with a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV to play on it and third prizes (five of them) are free hosting. This is where THC comes into the picture. We support Iceberg’s launch by cosponsoring the launch with 5 Speedy plans, free for one year.

If you don’t know what Speedy is, let us remind you that this is the most complete web hosting solution on its price class on the Web. It includes free dedicated IP, free domain registration, 1TB memory space, 33TB bandwidth and all professional features you need to run any type of web application, from blogs to standard websites, image galleries, ecommerce and so on.

Whether you win a Speedy plan as a result of your participation in the contest, or you simply choose to buy it, the only way to run Iceberg on it is to download it from Iceberg and then upload it on our server via your ftp account.

To be eligible for the competition sign up for the Iceberg hosted version or download the Iceberg application and fill in a short survey that basically answers one question: “What do you want to do with Iceberg?”

The answers are quite simple: from an ERP application for thousands of users to a Twitter type of application, there’s basically nothing that cannot be created with Iceberg’s “drag-and-drop” user-interface. Iceberg does for enterprise applications what MP3 did for music.

Creating powerful business solutions is now a task anyone can accomplish with Iceberg’s “no code needed” solution to virtually any application. The free download and install takes less than 5 minutes and the application can be skinned to the user’s taste too. With Iceberg, users can accomplish in hours what programmers might take months to do. Iceberg also performs better as a platform by automatically adding enterprise features including web services, permissions and workflow.

Iceberg is free for up to 5 users and completely free for non-profit organizations.

Social Aggregation Sites: You Simply Cannot Do Without Them

By mig on May 7, 2008 in Featured | 3 Comments

In a time when we all have content scattered everywhere on the web we all know how difficult it is to save all those usernames and passwords in one place. I remember creating accounts on many social sites, only to forget the passwords. Somehow it is always annoying to recover passwords, annoying to have to open a new browser tab to access another social service, annoying to have to submit bookmarks to 20 different sites that require the same information. Call me lazy if you want, but I honestly don’t like wasting my time.

When I heard of Second|Brain I was really excited. I had no idea that there are sites that aggregate content from various social sites like Digg, Flickr, Twitter, etc. into one place. OK, I always felt the need to see (and use) such a site, but I didn’t look for it on purpose.

Second Brain MacBook Air Contest.Sia wrote about this startup not long ago and a few days after her article, Second|Brain announced the launch of beta 2.0 for the end of May, but most importantly, they announced a contest with extravagant rewards: first prize MacBook Air, second and third xbox 360 and iPod nano, etc. Smooth move I dare say. Second Brain is not only useful, but it also knows how to reward its users.

The idea of “social aggregation” made me curious. I like to keep up with the trends, so the normal question was: is Second Brain the only one or just one of the many?

One of the many would be too much to say, but one of the social aggregation/lifestreaming services available free of charge for the social media enthusiasts is the right definition. I was very confused at first, as Second Brain doesn’t call its type of service “social aggregation” but it defines itself as a “content library”. It was difficult to find other sites like SB, but at the end of the search I found at least two that can easily compete for the “top of the tops” with Second Brain: Profilactic and FriendFeed.

profilactic logo.Profilactic is “kicking” and it’s also the most complete aggregation/lifestreaming service I found after a few hours of search. The name makes me think at medicine, but the design is bearable, although it lacks Second Brain’s elegance. It supports 177 social sites, it even has a Wordpress lifestreaming plugin, it offers a “clippings” feature that allows users to create a “personal scrapbook” and the list of professional pros could go on. I would certainly feel “lost” in my account, so I prefer something simpler…

Friendfeed logo.FriendFeed has probably the ugliest UI possible, but it’s quite popular, probably because “ugliness sells” and because the interface is discoverable and easy to use. I like the “voting system” – it’s a nice catch, at least I know who likes what. This adds to FriendFeed a feature that is somehow missing from Second Brain: the social networking aspect.

All the three services above serve the purpose I started defining at the beginning of this article: they aggregate content from various social sites into one place, creating a “meta profile page.” This is quite complex (a psycho-analyst would have to say a lot about you after studying your “meta profile”) for those who like to keep a low profile on the Web, but active social media enthusiasts such as myself will certainly see the value of at least one account on a social aggregation site.

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