Two smart productivity tools from the TC50 demo pit: Snipd and 2pad
Get things done with two tools that help you clip and view media in the cloud. Snipd lets you grab things from the Web, and 2pad lets you view it later.
Several of the companies from the TechCrunch50 demo pit are brand-new and have some really neat products to show off. For one reason or another they were not chosen to be among those pitching to the crowd--either out of editorial selection or not being able to meet the day-of-the-conference launch requirement.
Two products I wanted to highlight are of interest because they do some handy things that many other start-ups have attempted with the use of software or browser-specific extensions. In both cases the below products (Snipd and 2pad) manage to do just about the same thing without software. Let's break them down:
Snipd is a very simple text and media grabbing tool that works with nothing more than a bookmarklet. You just drag it up to the top of your browser and a single click gives you the option to copy over text to a bucket, hosted in the cloud.
There are a slew of other companies that let you do this (see Yoono, Evernote, Clipmarks, JetEye, and Diigo), but the fact that this works without software is handy in case you want to get some clipping done while using a borrowed or public computer.
Snipd in action from Alex Schliker on Vimeo.
2pad grabs photos and videos floating around the depths of your Web e-mail in-box and various folders. You just plug in your credentials and it spends a few hours culling it together. Like Xoopit, which is currently Gmail-only, you get to view all of this in a really simple file browser. 2pad manages to do this, Windows Live Hotmail, Apple's MobileMe, and AOL mail as well.
The company is planning to make money off of photo prints and printed gift books, which users can create, buy, and order using media it pulls together.
The one weak point is the individual media pages which scale down the image or video to fit your screen with a wide border. This works OK with wide-screen videos, but you'll need to full screen nearly every photo to see it in a reasonable amount of detail. Otherwise, it's very snappy and managed to pull in about 100 photos from my Gmail account in about half an hour.
