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Editor’s note: Former VentureBeat intern Sarah Mitroff wrote this post before leaving us for her new gig at Wired.

Five content-saving services have hit the market, but only the fastest and easiest to use will win. My organizational obsession led me to pit my favorite organizational apps, and a few I’ve barely used, against each other to figure out which reigns supreme.

To wrangle years of newspaper clippings, recipe cards, photos, and videos into an organized space, I decided to put Evernote, Springpad, Clipboard, Bitly’s Bitmarks, and Minilogs, a new link-saving service, to the test. I measured how fast and how easy each service saved a news article, a YouTube Video, an image, two recipes, and a bookmark.

Evernote: quick and comprehensive

As I prepared for this post, Evernote was my favorite to win. I use the service daily for notes and web clippings. After comparing it to the other organizational apps, I wasn’t as thrilled with its content-saving capabilities. The web clipper is fast but grabs all the HTML and extraneous formatting on a page. Evernote’s advantage is that you can edit unwanted content out of your saved notes. It’s downside is that it doesn’t effectively save YouTube videos. Evernote is my winner for saving content on the iPad, because its web clipper plays nice with Safari. 

Best for: making notes and saving webpages.

Springpad: content-aware and robust

Springpad and I go back a few years: I started using it to save recipes before its big redesign earlier this year. Its shining feature is that it’s content-aware, so it recognizes the types of material you’re trying to save. This is helpful when saving a recipe, a book, or a product you want to buy. Springpad’s clipper is far from perfect — it doesn’t always understand what you’re trying to save — but it’s the only service I tested that offers this feature.

Best for: saving content with context.

Clipboard: great for videos and links

At first, I wasn’t completely impressed with Clipboard. But the service grew on me. The clipper often makes me feel like I’m chasing a highlight box around the page, so this could use a bit of work. However, Clipboard did an excellent job of saving videos from YouTube and organizes clips in a simple and clean way. Clipboard’s biggest downside is that it basically takes a screenshot of a webpage, which prevents you from editing what you’ve saved.

Best for: videos, images, and links.

Bitly and Minilogs: link-only saving

Bitly’s Bitmarks and the newer Minilogs are two different services that do the same thing: saving links, not content. Minilogs creates a shareable collection of links for friends to use together, while Bitmarks is a more personal link-saving log. Minilogs is missing a clipper, so you must copy and paste links to save them. Bitmark’s clipper is fast and easy to use, even if the theme is cheesy.

Best for: links.

Conclusion: Two winners

It’s hard to choose an outright winner, because each of these services have their merits. Springpad wins for the best way to organize and view your saved content. When it comes to actually saving content, Evernote’s clipper has yet to let me down.

What are your favorite ways to save the stuff you find online? What did I miss? Let us know in the comments.

Paper hoarding image via Flickr user Karl Sinfield

Filed under: VentureBeat

4moms, the small Pittsburgh-based company that’s re-imagining the baby products industry by incorporating robotics, electronics, and innovative engineering into things like strollers, infant seats and playpens, has raised $20 million from Bain Capital Ventures. The firm also has investments in Toys R’ Us (Babies R’ Us) and Gymboree, so there’s the opportunity for some knowledge-sharing and marketing opportunities here, it seems.

As for the 4moms products, in case you haven’t seen them – well, they’re pretty crazy. TechCrunch’s gadgets team has been going hands-on with these things for years, and doling out compliments like “the coolest gadget I have ever seen since the original TiVo…and it’s just a damn stroller.” Seriously, these things almost make you want to pump out babies (or more babies) just to try them out. Well, almost.

What makes the 4moms products so different? For starters, they’re not your typical baby products – they’re basically gadgets. This Origami stroller opens and closes with the tap of a button, for example.

This playpen works with one firm push.

If you don’t have kids, you may not realize exactly how impressive some of this technology is. True story: my husband and I had to google “how to set up a playpen” on our first attempt. We had to watch a YouTube video to figure it out, I’m embarrassed to admit. Another time, we forgot to set it up for the sitters (ahem, grandparents) in advance, and later found out they just let the kid stay up until 1 AM because she had nowhere she could get comfortable sleeping. Let me just tell you, the fallout from her sleep deprivation is not something I’d wish on anyone. Ever. So, yay: someone is working on building better versions of all this stuff, and making products that anyone could use.

That being said, there are some downsides to the 4moms products. The stroller is still a bit hefty, for example. But the bigger concern for some parents will be the price. These products are seriously high-end. A good chunk of the baby-making demographic can’t afford to spend nearly $900 on a stroller. But then again, maybe the grandparents owe us one?

Back in September YouTube launched a major overhaul of their Video Editor, complete with a new look, new tools, effects and more.  This week the YouTube Video Editor has become even better, with an updated interface for video enhancements.
continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Digital magazine service Pulse released a new web app version of its popular mobile news reader today, which takes plenty of design cues from Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 8 software.

“Microsoft gave us some great feedback while building the Pulse web reader,” said Pulse founder Akshay Kothari in an interview with VentureBeat.

Pulse began teasing a big announcement about two weeks ago, which we speculated could have something to do with a new web-based reader or a Windows 8 application. In reality, we’re actually seeing both.

The web app functions basically the same as all of Pulse’s mobile app readers for iOS or Android. Users can create a custom feed to view up-to-date articles from a variety of publications, and organized into their own tabbed categories. It’s previously been available on iOS and Android, and its user interface is optimized to make consuming (and sharing) content from 15 news sites at the same time easily digestible rather than chaotic.

But unlike the mobile app versions, Pulse on the web allows stories from each publication get their own tab, and arranges stories as they get published. The prominence of each story’s thumbnail/headline can appear larger, based on its popularity among other Pulse users. It truly looks like something you’d expect to find on the new Window 8 OS’ tiles user interface.

The web version is basically optimized for use on Windows 8 devices, but will work on anything with a web browsers (Kindle Fire, iPad, Android, etc.). However, Kothari told me that users are still being directed to use the native iPad/iPhone/Android apps for the best experience when using those devices.

Check out a YouTube video of the new web app in action using Internet Explorer 10 below, and let us know what you think in the comment section.

Filed under: media, social, VentureBeat

In a YouTube video released over the weekend, a mobile app services company simulated a real world shopping experience with Passbook, intended to demonstrate the upcoming app’s capabilities.

In a YouTube video released over the weekend, a mobile app services company took Apple’s Passbook into the real world with a simulation intended to demonstrate the upcoming app’s capabilities.

A French t-shirt company has brazenly picked a fight with one of the world’s fiercest hacker groups. Anonymous, known for crippling the world’s most secure websites (including the FBI’s), has vowed revenge against apparel company, Early Flicker, who registered the hacker group’s logo as their own intellectual property.

“Their arrogance and ignorance of what they have done will not go unpunished,” promised Anonymous, in a YouTube video (below). “Anonymous will take down any business they have going on the internet and the ninety nine per cent will not stop until the registration has been revoked and a public apology has been made. The name of Anonymous will not be the whore of the world.”

Even if E-Flicker managed to escape the wrath of hackers, the logo is already registered under a Creative Commons intellectual property license, according to a tweet from an Anonymous account:

To these copyright trolls: About all #Anonymous logos are already licensed under creative commons. So good luck with getting a trademark.

— AnonymousIRC (@AnonymousIRC) August 1, 2012

We doubt Anonymous will wait for a cease and desist notice. Just remember not to blink, fight fans, this knockout could come quicker than a bout between Mike Tyson and Richard Simmons.

PBS has been kicking butt lately with its viral video series (for reference, see this Mr. Rogers clip or the Bob Ross Remix). In a new YouTube vid, PBS gets super meta and tackles the whole concept of memetics and viral videos.

“Whether rooted in comedy, spectacle, schadenfreude, cuteness, politics, performance, or deep meaning, the idea of viral videos, and the huge audiences they generate, have forever changed the values and potential impact of video online,” the video description reads.

The long-ish video features words of wisdom from YouTube trend wizard Kevin Allocca, meme-meister Brad Kim of Know Your Meme, and Casey Neistat, one half of the Neistat Brothers filmmaking duo.

This vid is the latest in Off Book, PBS’s series of web originals about web/nerd life and culture. Other topics include a treatise on the evolution of 8-bit art and a short documentary on the culture (hah!) of Reddit.

Filed under: offBeat

Memolane, a startup that helps users archive and explore their content across social networks, has been working to make it easier to share that content, for example by allowing users to share “lanes” with their Facebook friends. Now, founder Eric Lagier says publishers, brands, and anyone else should have an easy time featuring that content on their own websites, through an improved embed feature and WordPress plugin.

When someone signs up for Memolane, they connect the social network accounts of their choice, then the site creates a single timeline highlighting the content from all of those accounts. (One of the more fun features, though less relevant for this article, is the fact that Memolane sends you emails reminding you what you were doing a few months or a year ago.) You can also create lanes around specific events or topics by filtering based on tags or dates.

That means a lane can be a nice representation of your entire online presence, or of all the content you’ve created around something more specific. Since that’s the case, it’d be nice to showcase that lane on your own site, rather than having to point everyone to Memolane itself.

In fact, Lagier tells me that Memolane has been beta testing an embed feature since August 2011. Based on user feedback, he says the company has created a streamlined embed flow, which should be pretty familiar to anyone who’s embedded content from a site like YouTube — you just hit the “embed” button, adjust any settings that you want, and copy the code. Memolane has also added deep linking, meaning that if you click on, say, a tweet or a YouTube video, the content opens up inside the embedded lane, rather than directing you to another site.

There’s also a new plugin for WordPress users.

As examples of what people are doing with the embed feature, Lagier pointed to a band called Iration, which is using Memolane to showcase all the content from its tour, and to a charity called BuildOn, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary and using Memolane to share its history.

Alle populaire kanalen op YouTube draaien om interactie met de kijker. Hoe kun je interactieve elementen plaatsen in je YouTube-video? Dat leg ik uit in deze video. Vergeet niet deel één in deze serie over YouTube SEO hier te bekijken. Lees meer