Spigit is a new business community tailored towards entrepreneurs wanting to post their new business and/or product ideas, gather feedback, form a team and running the idea through a market simulation game.

A “launchpad for emerging technologies”, the simulation engine gives the entrepreneurs an opportunity to test their ideas against simulated market forces with a share trading, review and voting system of Spigs (a thumbs up vote) and a Scrap (as it is obviously described).

“Through our proprietary simulation they can build and refine an idea, find the right resources to contribute, create buzz, and calculate a multitude of targeted metrics to provide insight into viability and simulate the likelihood of success. The spigit simulation engine measures and quantifies interactions on social networks. The spigit simulation engine captures dynamic feedback from all participants, tracking hundreds of dynamic events and through a series of algorithms, computes results producing valuable predictions and identifies key social connections to maximize professional and economic gains.”

With the Spigit business simulation, the entrepreneur has to go through 3 distinct stages - The Incubation, Validation and Emergence. The entrepreneur or founder of the business must complete several requirements, criterion and milestones to advance to the second and third stages. The 3rd stage allows the founder to pitch their ideas to believers for its IPO and managing the IPO ensuring maximum return on investment for all its sponsors and investors. The idea that gains the highest peak market capitalization over a quarter wins the game with a Spigit Splash! Award.

This is a useful and invaluable business exercise for the would be business. While creating a less risky scenario for judging public demand, it is a proving ground of sorts for new ideas so that entrepreneurs can decide whether or not an idea has legs before investing real time and money.

The only hesitation I would have in going through this simulation is the fact that ideas that are put out to the public as an imaginary company have the likelihood to be stolen by another person or company. At the moment, Spigit does not offer any special patent protection for the new ideas, therefore one must be careful and extremely comfortable with publicly putting your idea there. You may want to get legal advice on how to protect your idea or individual documents before exposing it on Spigit.

Spigit is co-founded by Paul Pluschkell (CEO) and Padmanabh Dabke (CTO) and is based in Pleasanton, California.

PingMe keeps track of things you need to do by creating a Ping i.e. a set reminder that you can receive by Email or Phone Text Messaging.

Pings can be used to remind you of social events, sales activities, task coordinations, important tasks and more. Being interactive, you can automatically reply to that Ping to reschedule it for another date or time. Logging into your customized PingMe page allows you to see your reminders arranged as interactive Post-it type notes neatly organized and tagged appropriately.

There is also a handy Contact System that allows you to share, send and receive Pings from friends, family and co-workers easily. What is extremely useful is that PingMe can be set to constantly bug you until you finish doing or confirm the task in question - a kind of online interactive alarm clock snooze feature like what Microsoft Outlook has on your desktop and much needed in the mobile world.

Developed by Zetetic LLC, PingMe is a perfect way to “keep intouch with yourself”, stay efficient, organized and to keep up with your busy schedule — a perfect Life Hack. Zetetic LLC makes 2 other software packages to include STRIP (A Secure Tool for Recalling Important Passwords for the Palm) and simAXS (A Single Sign-on simulator)

Me.dium is a cool browser download that shows you the activity behind the web pages you browse and other web pages others are looking at.

Their concept is based on the fact that in the real world, the people and activity around you affect your decisions and behavior, and that “no one has ever been able to benefit from these environmental influences online.” Me.dium allows you to do just that i.e. revealing the hidden and the online world clearly.

When you load up the software, you’ll see a floating iconic map of other pages based on Me.dium’s recommendations, the characteristics of the page you are looking at, or the pages you have recently visited. The other pages that are recommended are tailored to your browsing preferences automatically. Other floating web page icons are based on real time web pages of other Me.dium users currently on the web.

Clicking on the a featured “Talk” tab, allows you to simultaneously chat with the individual users on that particular website and subsequently put him/her on your friends list.

For the security minded guys out there, Me.dium only stores 4 things when you use the software - web-page (URL) visits you choose to share with us, your most recently visited web-pages, your list of friends, and any profile information you choose to share with us.

“Me.dium never captures log-in information when you are visiting a secure (HTTPS) website or accessing authentication information stored in your system’s cookies. For example, if you’re logged into an e-mail program, such as Yahoo! Mail, your e-mail is not visible to users; rather other users see a blank Yahoo! Mail log-in page without any personal identifying information. Similarly, whether you choose to be anonymous or not, Me.dium does not have nor does it give anyone access to your computer or files.”

Me.dium is a twist in usual online social networking and allows you to interactively discover your likes/ dislikes based on online environmental behaviors. A great concept and a great tool!

About Me.dium

Me.dium is a Boulder, Colorado company and is founded by David Mandell, Robert Reich and Peter Newcomb. Currently headed by Kimbal Musk, it officially launched on August 6th and currently supports IE7 and Firefox.

Imo.im is an online service allowing you to log into your instant messaging accounts at the same time. There are 4 instant messaging accounts that you can link to: AIM, MSN, Yahoo and Google Talk.

Useful features include searching buddies, group chats (within multiple IM accounts) and adding buddies. This tool allows you to access your accounts and chat with multiple groups, users and buddies without having to download any software — so you can virtually access you account anywhere in the world on any computer.

It is a good and powerful concept but it remains to be seen how it will differentiate itself from its more established competitors Meebo and eBuddy. Since it is in the Alpha stage, I may have to reserve my major comments until it gets into the later stages… though I would like to see a mobile version and ICQ functionality in addition to the other four.

You may also like to include more on who you are and where you are located in your “About” page, as users often want to know whether you are credible enough to trust with usernames/ passwords. I do like the initial Ajax style interface and so far, the usage of it didn’t give me any problems — a good start (with lots of potential) and look forward to future implementations.

madKast is a simple (yet useful) widget that allows you to share news and blog posts with other people through email, MMS text messaging, Instant Messaging (IM) and social booking sites. In addition storing information across website, it also provides analytical and revenue sharing features.

It is still in its Beta stage, but isn’t everything nowadays. As of writing this, the analytical features and revenue features have yet to be implemented and is something we are very interested to see.

A product of TechStars 2007, madKast is the brainchild of Doug Ludlow, Johann Moonesinghe, and Anthony Restuccia. madKast is currently looking for users to try it out on their blogs with over 35 blogs incorporating it so far. Implementing it is as easy as it gets, copy the single snippet of javascript to your blog code or use the auto install feature (if you use Blogger or Typepad).

madKast is maddeningly great - try it out and let the guys know what you think about it. In fact, we like it so much we have incorporated it in Techzoogle as you can see next to each blog title (i.e. click on the ‘Share’ link to see its features).