uShip is a site which allows you to find someone traveling between you and a place where you need something (or someone) shipped and bid on a shipping fee. A friend of mine has been using this site for several years. Say, for example, you're driving from SLC to Disneyland in your family van. You can post that information on the site and someone in Provo may pay you to deliver a package, dog in a carrying case, or even their son to their grandmother's house in Las Vegas. I think this is a great business concept.

SchoolTipline is a website which allows students to anonymously notify the school administration about problems. If a student sees someone selling illegal drugs, for example, but is afraid to report it because of reprisals, he can report it anonymously on this website and the school administration will be notified. This sounds like a good idea to me. We need to encourage students to report illegal/dangerous activities to make our schools safer. The site was created by BYU student Justin Bergener who won second place in The Business Plan Competition sponsored by the Marriott School of Management.

Here's a free online personal finance tool that syncs up all your bank and investment accounts and has a budgeting tool.  My friend uses it and just loves it.  Haven't tried it myself but it does sound kind of cool.  It's www.mint.com.

The YouTube Subtitler is a Google AppEngine application which allows anyone to add subtitles to any video on YouTube. It's amazingly easy to use if you want to add subtitles for the deaf or translations to other languages. Click here for an example of a video to which I added subtitles.

The SLC Downtown Rising website has a cool flash virtual fly-through of what downtown will look like when the construction is completed in 2012

Amazon.com has a service called Mechanical Turk which allows businesses to outsource computer work to people all over the world. The service is named after a Hungarian nobleman, Wolfgang von Kempelen, who astonished Europe in 1769 by building a mechanical chess-playing automaton that defeated nearly every opponent it faced. With the Amazon service, a job is broken up into HITs or Human Intelligence Tasks. A HIT is a task which requires a person to do, such as reviewing grammar in a document or identifying an object in a picture.

http://jimspages.com/States.htm is a great site to help kids learn where each US state is located. It's also fun for adults to test your knowledge.

http://nexo.com is a new startup offering free ad-supported group websites for families, schools, sports teams, or anything else. It's very easy to configure a new site which you can make public or by-invitation-only. It offers calendars, rosters, discussion forums, group email lists, and many other neat features.

Audience Alliance is a new Major Motion Picture Studio created by Keith Merrill (the director of Mr. Krueger's Christmas and the Testaments movie) dedicated to creating great movies with strong moral values. The company is driven by a set of values and the input of subscribers. I highly recommend joining this good cause.

Click to view (requires Quicktime)

Google Earth is really cool. If you haven't downloaded it and looked at a topview of your house, then you are really missing out. The Register in the UK ran a contest asking readers to find Black Helicopters and interesting military sites on Google Earth. The very interesting results can be found here .

The Yamaha website has a cool assortment of Origami projects which you can download for free. They have a PDF file you can download and print on a color printer for realistic coloring and all the instructions on how to fold the paper. My kids really enjoy this site.