Jack Schofield
NETWATCH
Yureka is billed as the Internet’s first “find engine”, which means it reduces searches – which are actually performed by MetaCrawler and well-known search engines like AltaVista – to a manageable number of likely results. It’s not exactly clear what it does, apart from reduce duplication. However, the search box provides a quick way to enter intelligent search strings, so is worth at least a trial visit.
Riffage
Riffage is a new and “hip” music site which is notable because it has been opened by Ken Wirt, who launched the Rio portable MP3 player when he worked for Diamond Multimedia. Riffage is aimed at catering for the burgeoning market for MP3 sound files. It provides a way for consumers to find indie and niche music they won’t find in traditional shops, and offers bands a way to reach an audience in return for 15% of revenues instead of 50% or so. You might also try the somewhat similar .
Translation?
Transparent Language, which sells LanguageNow translation programs for PCs, is offering a free text translation service at . Type in or copy/paste your text into the box supplied and you can, for example, translate English into French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. The new Transcend T technology seems to work fairly well.
Safety PIN
Saflink could be the first company to open a website protected by a “biometric” – a measurable characteristic that uniquely identifies an individual, such a fingerprint, voiceprint, iris scan or whatever. The American company has put up a pretend financial site that uses speech recognition at so anyone can try it. The problem is that by the time they’ve downloaded all the necessary software (and probably restarted their Windows PCs) and registered, most visitors could well have lost interest and gone somewhere else.
Tune up
Throw away that air guitar: Songplayer plans to launch a new version of its music tuition software next week at The downloadable software helps you play along with tracks from your CD collection on guitar or keyboards.
Six of the best: Finding who, what and where
The world’s phone books, .
Who is or was who, .
Street guide to Britain, .
The ultimate word hoard, .
UK and European trains, .
Internet Movie DataBase, .
ENDS
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