Like a large number of North American households with Internet access and elementary age children this holiday season, our home was the scene of many hours logged on both Club Penguin and Webkinz the past couple weeks. After Christmas, we made a momentous purchase for our five year old: A new Webkinz Penguin she’s named “Sparkle,” which has provided her with the virtual keys to experience the online world of Webkinz along with her older brother and sister. It is amazing to watch our kids tea

When the original BeeJive IM for the iPhone won our App vs. App Instant Messenger Showdown, Brian thought it was a killer app with some killer features, just a tad shy of IM perfection. We agreed and named it our 2008 TiPby Editors’ Choice Award winner for best Social Networking/IM app. Now that version 2.0 has landed — and Apple’s Push Notification Service still very much hasn’t — can the old best be the newer better? Read on to find out! What Was Brian’s original BeeJive review summed th

Consulting firm Herman Blackbook is launching a new micro-fund today for application developers who want to build stuff on top of “Twitter, Boxee, AppNexus, Trulia, iPhone, and more” called the New Platforms Fund. The catch? They’ll invest only “$1-3,000″ (I hope that’s $1,000, not $1, but whatever) in exchange for equity and they are only investing in “up to 10 cutting edge ideas.” This capital is supposed to get entrepreneurs to an alpha stage, when they’ll go out and pitch for more money, f

I just got an email from Phil Libin, Evernote’s CEO, detailing their plans for 2009. It is an interesting list, and good to see them overhauling their UI across all platforms. What would you like to see Evernote concentrate on? Personally, I’d like to see a better ink experience in their Windows version, and, ink notes visible on the Mac client. It is about time we see this all too familiar icon replaced with an actual ink note…Unfortunately, I don’t see that on their list…. Here is Evernote’

As the new year approaches fast, it’s time to start (if you haven’t already) considering those new year’s resolutions. One of mine, which has been a new year’s resolution in the past more than once, is to “get better organized.” I’m sure I’m not alone with this feeling: I am so deluged with information from multiple sources every day: email, phone messages, tweets, blog posts, social networking comments, etc, it is easy to feel overwhelmed. I can’t get any more time in my day, so I need to use