Kidult - Teen site by Pharrell

Kidult is a news site for American teens, fronted by Pharrell Williams.

It's pretty good. It offers a range of different topics from sport to celebrity to actual 'news'. I also really like the 'Cool Job' feature, talking to people with cool jobs about how they got started.

It's a great idea, and one that could well take off, and in that Pharrell's endorsement (& contacts for getting interviews with other notables) is very important.

Read more about it here.

Marmite Election

Excellent new initiative ('campaign' seems the wrong word these days) for Marmite to mirror the imminent UK general election with a campaign to get people to support either The Love Party or The Hate Party, with Facebook groups, and more.

The whole 'Love it or Hate it' idea has been around for over ten years now - well done to them for adapting it to new communication techniques.

More background at The Guardian, here

Fiverr - like Etsy, but for services

Fiverr is a new open marketplace for buyers and sellers of services.

Sellers offer a particular service that they will carry out for $5.

Examples include anything from proof-reading a CV, to creating a simple website, to creating an 'Avatar' style pic from a photo, to help in filling out immigration forms, to burning an effigy of your enemy.

I imagine that if you had a particular skill like photoshopping, and some creativity in selling a specific task you could make a reasonable amount of money. (Last night there were some 'nude photo' type offers, but they seem to have been removed now. The site owners need to police it to keep these sorts of listings off it. Although no doubt an Adult services version would be phenomenally popular)

It's effectively like Etsy, but for services. The idea that everything costs $5 is inspired, because it's a good way to get a taster of whether someone is genuine and does a good job. Once you're in touch with them after the first job, I'm sure more complex projects can be discussed.

It's also a bit like Mechanical Turk, Amazon's crowdsourcing platform, where you can recruit people to tasks like tagging huge numbers of photos, but more fun and interesting.

Update - and here's an 'Andy Warhol' version of a picture of me, made by Shirley for $5.

MGMT stream leaked album

It's one way of dealing with piracy... Since discovering that their new album, due for release in mid-April, was widely available on torrent sites, MGMT have posted it on their site for people to listen to, making it clear that the version for sale have a much higher sound quality.

Listen legally here.

Fourwhere - Foursquare + Google Maps

Fourwhere (by Sysomos) is a mashup of Foursquare and Google Maps. It lets you see all the comments and checkins locally on a map, and in doing so it makes Foursquare about 100x more useful.

Fantastic!

Secret London

One of the companies presenting at last week's Mashup Event was Secret London.

Secret London have got a great story. Starting as a Facebook group in January they now have over 200,000 members. A couple of weeks ago some volunteers recruited through Facebook built this site, for users to share their London tips (blog post on how they built the site here).

So far it's pretty good, if a little free for all (I know, that's the point), and with no search. It's also bound to get confused with this site which is the top search result for 'Secret London'.

So far Secret London looks very much like LondonByLondon, from a few years ago. They clearly have strong ambitions - look at all of the other cities that are in the pipeline. Let's see how it develops.

Buddi - personal GPS tracking

I was at last week's Mashup Event on 'Location', and while it was pretty good I think I probably learnt more from the people in the audience than on the panels.

One company that was mentioned by someone sitting next to me was Buddi, a personal GPS tracker that is aimed at people wanting to track kids, elderly relatives, even companies wanting to track lone workers for safety reasons. It seems like a great idea; they also do one for dogs.

Find out more about it here.