With  ScreenToaster everything becomes more simple and available for everyone:

• Connect to the ScreenToaster home page
• Click on the Start Recording button
• Press ALT+S to start recording the screen output
  
• Then, press ALT+S again to stop recording

After visualizing the video draft you can add comments in audio using the microphone or subtitles, and save the screencast in the users’ area by clicking on Publish it. The embedding code to insert the video on your blog will be available. It’s almost immediate.

This way you avoid installing softwares on your PC, generating huge typical screencast session files, editing them and uploading them online.

Quality is what surprises most. In this kind of filming, quality is really essential for the users to visualize important details such as the cursor, the text, the interface elements like the buttons, menu, etc. ScreenToaster, besides making it more simple, guarantees remarkable quality.

Here’s a screencast developed at the time this article was being written, check it out:

This is a project by Iteria SARL, a French start-up capable of this huge step after getting financing from an angel investor in September/08. It had financed the prototype itself before that.

ScreenToaster, a great service!

Compatible Files

You can upload the following types of documents:

• Word (.doc)
• PDF (.pdf)
• text (.txt)
• PowerPoint (.ppt)
• Excel (.xls)
• Postscript (.ps)
• LIT (.lit)

Once your documents are in the shared online library users can:

1. Embed your document into their web pages using a simple HTML code
2. Download the document in PDF, Word, Ascii or MP3 format (if there’s an audio track available)
3. Perform search into shared library using tags and keywords

It’s a kind of…. social sharing

Scribd can be considered a kind of YouTube for Office Automation due to Social Networking features embedded in the system like buzzing and comments. Popular documents are listed into the above-the-fold area on the right.

If you are not interested in files sharing you can anyway use scribd like an online file converter disabling the “share” flag of each file.

Here it are others interesting features;

• Discover related documents to your own with special algorithm
• Upload multiple files at once (Bulk upload)
• Make some money when a user make a hard print copy of your document

Subscription is free and space is unlimited!

Actually I was positively impressed by the automation level Feedburner offers with regard to operations usually made by hand such as signaling updates to pinging services, tools to subscribe to feeds with different kinds of aggregators through the web site, feed circulation monitoring and much more.

The only drawback (if I may say so) is the great number of options and features which might make the tool distractive to non–experts. I will highlight the main features as clearly as possible, granted that, in order to use Feedburner, it is necessary to have one’s own contents at disposal in a RSS feed. Here follows the scheme to integrate Feedburner with your feed

1. Insert you feed in FeedBurner
2. Feedburner uses your feed as a source and generates a new one with its own address (http://www.feedburner/feed_name)
3. All the operations are executed on the generated feed, which will be the new official feed (yours stands as data source). Once it has absorbed your feed to generate its own, you can work on it with the powerful tools at disposal.

Feedburner automates following procedures:

• Subscriptions to the feed via web with various aggregators
• Content updates signaling to pinging services
• Technical compliance of feed to the greatest possible number of aggregators
• Monitoring of bot controls to the feed (engines check to verify any upgrade)

Subscription

Subscription to the service is easy and immediate. You just need to insert the first feed in addition to username, password and e-mail address in order to be operative. In the following form, you’ll find the main interface containing all the features grouped under five labels:
A. Analyze | monitoring on contents diffusion
B. Optimize | various technical settings of your feed
C. Publicize | feed diffusion automation through various tools
D. Monetize | feed integration with AdSense for Feed and Amazon
E. Troubleshootize | support Let’s examine the different tools in utilization order, namely, after inserting the feed, let us follow these steps;

Optimize

The items ‘Your feed’ and ‘XML source’ are used to personalize the source code which generates your feed’s page on Feedburner, whose URL is http://www.feedburner/. Then we find:

1. BrowserFriendly sets graphical themes of the page and custom information as title and description.
2. SmartCast automatically generates a feed podcast, compliant with iTunes
3. SmartFeed transforms your feed in a format compliant with most widespread aggregators
4. FeedFlare integrates in each post a few tools users can interact with, such as Technorati, del.icio.us and other ones.
5. Link Splicer should you have a service for social book-marking, you can insert your links in the feed
6. Photo Splicer the same for pictures
7. Geotag Your Feed input latitude and longitude and you’ll have your feed associated to a point in the globe.
8. Feed Image Burner sets an icon for feeds which is then displayed in various RSS readers.
9. Convert Format Burner here you set your feed page content-type. As default it is the same of your source feed
10. Summary Burner You can also customize your Feedburner page with links to your site

Once set the main options, we can go on to the setting of automatic feed distribution through publicize tab.

Publicize

1. BuzzBoost generates an html code showing last feed posts which can be inserted in any web page
2. Headline Animator same purpose but with a tiny animated graphical block. Headlines are displayed scrolling
3. PingShot setting of automatic notice to RSS web aggregators (technorati, myYahoo, etc) with regard to new contents on your feed
4. Email Subscriptions generates an e-mail notice system to your site users in case of new contents
5. FeedCount small graphical counter displaying your feed’s spread on the net
6. Awareness API gives access to Feedburner data for custom applications in your site
7. Chicklet Chooser generates the code necessary to let users subscribe to the feed directly on your site, and with lots of aggregators.
8. Password Protector should you need to restrict access to your feed
9. Creative Commons includes Creative Commons licenses for your feed

After setting diffusion parameters, you can include in your system affiliation programs

Monetize

Amazon or Adsense too can be included in your site. In order to include Amazon, you just need to input the affiliation code, while for Adsense a brand new system in beta test called “Adsense for Feed “is available. If the readers of your feed are more than 100, you can subscribe as beta tester. The system goes to it on its own, and it is sufficient consulting statistics from time to time to check feed diffusion and make adjustments when needed.

Analyze

1. Feed Circulation shows the number of subscribers to your feed
2. Readership monitoring on web aggregators which took from your feed, subscriptions via web, aggregator type, any subscription made through browser, what engines have checked for updates, etc.
3. Item Stats blog statistics

Feedburner address: http://www.feedburner.com

Image Credit: solarseven

Uploading your own music

After your subscription you can upload yours MP3s to your profile. Dealing with copyright is obviously on you. In few words, you can only upload music from your CDs or mp3 songs regularly purchased online. Once you do this, you can listen to your songs through streaming directly from your account.

Comment  and listen other users’ songs

You can search for the other users’ (DJs) songs in the search field and once you find them, listen to a preview.

To listen to the whole songs or add them to you playlist, you should make comments on them by clicking on blip. After your comment, the song will be uploaded to your blips list on the home page.

At this point you can:

• Listen to the whole song through streaming by clicking on play
• Send an alert to the song’s owner by clicking on the ok hand (called props and used to determine the users’ karma)
• Add a song to your playlist by clicking on the star
• Add the user as one of your favorite DJs

There are two very useful functionalities: the chance to listen to the songs other users are blipping in real time and the chance to follow your Favorite DJs’s blips (and, obviously, be followed).

Social Functionality

Blip activity can be embedded into;

• Twitter
• FriendFeed
• Pownce
• Tumblr
• Live Journal
• Jaiku
• AudioScrobbler

Your blips are automatically shared with the others micropublishing services.

There are other web 2.0 music sharing services, such as last.fm, anywhere.fm, etc, but Blip is much more simple and fun. My username is ikaro, hope to hear from you! : )

UnLtdWorld got the second prize. It’s a social netwotk which enables social entrepreneurs, socially-minded people and socially-driven organisations to share, shape and use social insight to generate greater positive impact in the real world.

iFoods.tv is the 3rd most interesting StartUp of Europe.  It is the new and hip way of interacting with other food lovers worldwide with tons of hi-quality video recipes.

Our Article Marketing Italia reached the 35th position on a total of 187 admitted partecipants. Thanks anyway for your votes! We’ll try again the next year with the english version of the service.

So, the future seems to be…. social

Daniela (who take care about the portoguese version of ikaro) and me also liked Wolpy, a social network for travellers which allows to share experiences of journey worldwide. We had a little talk about Wolpy with the co-founder Miguel Abad and we’ll publish the video interview soon.
TechCrunch UK organized a meetup after the event for those who was not invited to join the official prize giving dinner, but we decided to fight against tons of fresh fish in a nice restaurant  at the BCN olympic port

This is our video streaming that shows a little part of each presentation and the winner announcement.