What can you use the application for?
Accuweather.com is an international online weather site. The site primarily offers weather forecasts and historical data for the US, but also has sections for international locations. Weather information provided by the site includes localized forecasts, historical data, radar maps, satellite maps and a variety of weather maps containing information such as precipitation, wind, flight delays, etc. Users can enter their location and view a summary page which includes the forecast for the day, an hour by hour forecast of temperature and rain chances, radar and satellite maps and 5 to 15-day forecasts. Accuweather is one of the most comprehensive weather sites on the Internet. The site is extremely large, and contains a huge amount of weather data. Accuweather has been in business since long before the Internet, and provides weather forecasts to companies, TV and radio stations, and newspapers worldwide. Premium services are available from the site, which include personalized weather forecasts and data, storm timer and storm data similar to the storm radar used by TV stations, a weather planner, 15-year historical data and more.

What is the history and popularity of the application?
Accuweather was founded in 1962 by Dr. Joel N. Myers, then a graduate student in meteorology. The company first provided weather forecasts to various companies, then branched out into providing forecasts to newspapers and television stations. The company is now the world’s leading commercial weather service. Accuweather.com was launched in 1996.

What are the differences to other applications?
Competition to Accuweather comes from sites such as Weather.com, Weather Underground (Wunderground.com) and Google Weather. All of these sites provide weather information for free, with Weather.com and Weather Underground also offering premium memberships which provide access to more weather information. Google is entirely free, but does not provide as much information as Accuweather. Weather Underground offers free, advertising supported information, but you must sign up for a premium membership to receive email forecasts and alerts. Accuweather offers free weather information, including email forecasts and alerts, which is ad-supported, and also offers premium memberships.

How does the application look and feel to use?
The Accuweather site is very busy, with many links shown on most pages on the site. Free users of the site must view advertisements, which are somewhat obtrusive. Navigation, however, is intuitive, with a convenient top menu bar shown on all pages of the site. The site is quite responsive, and page loads are fairly quick given the amount of graphical information provided on most pages. The radar and satellite animations are very responsive and load quickly as well.

How does the registration process work?
Registration is not required to view weather information on the Accuweather site. Users can register to receive free email forecasts and alerts. The registration process asks for email address and zip code. Users can optionally provide a username, password and gender for control over their email settings.

What does it cost to use the application?
The Accuweather site also offers Premium and Professional memberships. In addition, they offer premium services such as RadarPlus and Lightning Plus. A Premium membership costs $7.95/month or $79.95/year. The Premium membership removes the advertising and offers many enhanced features. A Professional membership costs $24.95/month or $249.95/year for a personal account or $69.95/month or $699.95/year for a professional (commercial) account. The Professional membership offers even more features and access to a huge amount of forecast models and other data.

Who would you recommend the application to?
The Accuweather site is recommended to anyone requiring accurate weather information. A free account can provide users with accurate weather forecasts and email alerts for severe weather in their area. The Premium membership is recommended to anyone who needs more detailed information and more features, or simply wants to remove the advertisements displayed on the site. The Professional membership is recommended to weather enthusiasts as well as individuals and companies whose business relies on accurate weather data.

What can you use the application for?
Photobucket.com is an online photo, video and graphics sharing site. Users can create albums, slideshows and scrapbooks. The site features an excellent browser-based image editor, and users can create group albums which allow several different people to upload images with a common theme. Photos and videos can easily be shared on MySpace, Facebook, Blogger, LiveJournal or via email. The site also provides a convenient place for hosting photos that are too large to be uploaded to the user’s blog or social networking site, with each image uploaded to the site having a link assigned to it. Users can upload photos easily from their computer hard drive, from web URL, from a mobile phone, via email, or from the Ask toolbar. Prints can be ordered on the site directly from Target or Kodak. Users can also order mugs, T-shirts and playing cards with their photos printed on them. The site also includes a feature called remix, where a user can create a custom presentation that contains photos, videos, and background music. There is also a feature called fotowall, which allows the user to create a collage of different photos.

What is the history and popularity of the application?
Photobucket.com was founded in June 2003 by Alex Welch and Darren Crystal. The Denver, CO-based company was acquired by Fox Interactive Media, parent company of MySpace, in May 2007 for $250 million. The site continues to experience unprecedented growth, and currently serves tens of millions of unique monthly visitors. The site has an Alexa page rank well below 50, making it one of the top destinations on the Internet.

What are the differences to other applications?
Competition to Photobucket comes from sites like ImageShack and Flickr. Both of these sites offer similar features, but neither site has the large userbase enjoyed by Photobucket. ImageShack is a less cluttered, simpler service, while Flickr has a similar look and feel to Photobucket. Both sites, like Photobucket, are advertising-supported with paid premium memberships available.

How does the application look and feel to use?
Photobucket has a somewhat cluttered look, with lots of links on any given page. The site also displays advertising, which is at times quite obtrusive. Navigation is intuitive, with a convenient top menu bar shown on all pages of the site. Given the amount of images displayed on the site and the advertising, page loads can be somewhat slow. Also, file uploads are somewhat slow.

How does the registration process work?
Registration at Photobucket is free, and the registration process asks for username, password, first and last name, email address, gender and date of birth.

What does it cost to use the application?
A free account provides up to 1GB of storage, with file sizes limited to 1MB. In addition, monthly bandwidth is limited to 25GB and image size is limited to 1024x768. Upgrading to a Pro membership costs $3.95/month or $39.95/year. The Pro membership removes the bandwidth restriction, provides up to 10GB of storage, increases file size to 5MB and image resolution to 2240x1680. Payment methods accepted for the Pro membership include Paypal, credit card (Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Amex), and personal check or money order.

Who would you recommend the application to?
Photobucket is recommended to anyone having a need for an online image and video storage and sharing solution. Whether for a blog, or for Ebay listings, or just a place to share images and videos, Photobucket provides a convenient solution. The free account provides quite a bit of capability, and the Pro membership price is reasonable for more demanding users.

What can you use the application for?
Streetadvisor.com is an online real estate social networking site that allows users to find out about a street or area before moving there. The site offers reviews and guidebooks of streets written by people who live, have lived or have visited the actual streets. Users can use the site to write reviews or to research areas they might be interested in moving to. The site also features forums for discussing living in different cities around the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, and is an excellent site to visit when planning a move. Registered users can participate in the forums by browsing or searching for locations, and can upload photos and videos to go along with their reviews. Users have a reputation on the site, and gain points by contributing content. Some users are designated as local experts for a given area. Users can ask local experts about the area they are interested in. Guidebooks for particular areas include reviews, photos, videos, forums and access to local experts.

What is the history and popularity of the application?
Streetadvisor.com was founded in March 2007 by Jason Spencer and Adam Spencer. Jason Spencer is currently CEO of the site. The site continues to add content as more users write reviews. The current content includes reviews for most of the major streets in cities throughout the countries covered by the site.

What are the differences to other applications?
Competition to Streetadvisor comes from sites such as the major search engines as well as more specialized sites such as Walkscore. Searching an address or zip code in the major search engines can turn up a lot of information about a location. Walkscore offers details about businesses and places of interest that are within walking distance of a given area. The Streetadvisor concept is unique, and the site should become more useful as more reviews are added.

How does the application look and feel to use?
The Streetadvisor site has a relatively uncluttered look and feel. Page loads are responsive, and navigation is intuitive. There is a convenient top menu bar shown on all pages of the site. The tabs on the menu bar are Find Places (browse or search for a location), Forums (dedicated to particular areas or streets) and Write a Review (where users can review their own streets). The editing tools for writing a review and uploading photos, videos, etc. work very well. There is no advertising displayed on the site.

How does the registration process work?
Registration at Streetadvisor is not required to view street reviews or to write one. However, registration is required to participate in the forums or to become a local expert. The registration process asks for first and last name, country, email address, password and screen name. Validation of the email address is required.

What does it cost to use the application?
Registration is free, there is no premium membership offered to Streetadvisor.

Who would you recommend the application to?
Streetadvisor is recommended to anyone who is moving and would like to research the areas they are considering. There is a wealth of information about different areas in their database, and the forums can be used to fill in the details. The site needs more time to build up more reviews, however, as non-major streets do not have detailed information. The site is also recommended to users wishing to share their living experience with others or perhaps even to become an expert for a local area.

What can you use the application for?
Conceptshare.com is an online collaboration tool for gathering feedback from clients and team members on visual design projects. Users can upload concepts, comment on them, and perform markups on them, all within a browser-based software application. Each concept has a dedicated workspace that is accessible by all the team members and/or clients involved in the project. The workspace consists of the concept, a comments section, a list of the team members and a chat box where team members can chat with one another in real time. Concepts can be in the form of an image file, a PDF file or a DWG file. The browser-based workspace application provides basic drawing tools for highlighting and commenting on portions of the design. Changes are immediately visible to all of the team members. The Conceptshare site allows team members located anywhere to contribute to a project either synchronously or asynchronously. The software behind the site is Flash-based and quite sophisticated. The workspace application is almost as responsive as a desktop application and performs quite well.

What is the history and popularity of the application?
The Conceptshare.com site was launched in July 2006. The company is based in Sudbury, CA. The site has undergone steady growth since launch, and currently serves thousands of unique monthly visitors. The site has an Alexa pagerank near the 100,000 mark. Conceptshare recently announced a partnership with Corel which allows Corel Draw users to collaborate on projects using Conceptshare. As a result of this partnership, a new website, CorelDrawConceptShare.com was launched.

What are the differences to other applications?
Competition to Conceptshare comes from sites such as Thinkature.com and GE’s Imagination Cubed. Thinkature offers most of the same capability as Conceptshare, but is built entirely in HTML and javascript, whereas Conceptshare is Flash-based. Thinkature is a free service, while Conceptshare is subscription-based. GE’s Imagination Cubed is really more of a web-enabled white board which multiple users can draw on.

How does the application look and feel to use?
The Conceptshare site has a very clean and uncluttered look and feel. Navigation is intuitive and the site is very responsive. The workspace application performs similar to a desktop application despite being browser-based. File uploads were quite responsive as well. There is a convenient top menu bar for navigation, with tabs for My Workspaces, My Profile, People, and Account Settings. There is no advertising displayed on the Conceptshare site.

How does the registration process work?
Registration is required to use the Conceptshare site. A 30-day free trial is offered by the site. The registration process asks for company or group name, an Internet address (this address is where the workspaces are accessed and is a subdomain of the Conceptshare domain), first and last name, email address and password. Validation of the email address is required.

What does it cost to use the application?
The free 30-day trial allows users to have 15 active workspaces and provides 1GB of storage. There are three paid membership options – Solo, Team and Business. A Solo membership costs $24.00 per month and allows for 5 active workspaces and up to 5MB of storage. A Team membership costs $49.00 per month and allows for 15 active workspaces with up to 2GB of storage. A Business membership costs $99.00 per month and allows for 35 active workspaces and up to 5GB of storage. The site accepts Visa, MasterCard and American Express as payment for premium memberships.

Who would you recommend the application to?
The Conceptshare site is recommended to anyone who needs to collaborate on a visual design project. It is ideal for allowing clients to view progress on a project and provide feedback as well. The site has developed some sophisticated software that performs very well.

What can you use the application for?
Wink.com is a search engine designed to find people. Users can search for a person by typing in their name and optionally their location and interests. Wink primarily searches for people on the major social networks, but has built a database of over 200 million profiles of people found on the web. The site also offers an email search, where the user types in an email address and the search returns the profile of the person associated with that email address. There is also a phone number search where the user types in the person’s first and last name and a location or zip code and the site searches white pages listings for the person’s phone number. This feature has only been implemented in the San Francisco Bay area to this point – the site is in the process of expanding the area of coverage for this feature. Registered users can also use Wink as a place to manage their online profile by filling in their details on the Wink site. A person’s Wink profile includes the social networking sites they belong to, contact information, interests, and location. Registered users can claim their profile and control how little or how much of this information is public, and also control the ways in which they can be contacted. Searches on Wink that return multiple results can be refined by a number of factors, including personal, interests, groups, school, career, tags, and distance.

What is the history and popularity of the application?
Mountain View, CA-based Wink.com was founded in 2005 as a social search engine. It changed to being a people search engine and was launched in its present form in 2006. The site was founded by Michael Tanne, who is currently CEO of the site. The site has hundreds of thousands of unique monthly visitors and an Alexa pagerank well below the 25,000 mark. The site merged with Reunion.com in November 2008. Reunion.com has changed its name to MyLife.com, and some of the search results from the Wink site come from MyLife, but Wink is still being maintained as a separate site on the Internet at this point.

What are the differences to other applications?
Competition to Wink comes from people search sites such as Spock, networking sites such as LinkedIn, and reunion sites such as MyLife (formerly Reunion.com). Spock is a dedicated people search engine, but does not have nearly as large a database of names as the Wink site. LinkedIn is a professional networking site designed to allow professionals to locate one another and manage their online profile, much like Wink allows users to do. MyLife is primarily designed to reconnect people who have lost contact with one another.

How does the application look and feel to use?
The Wink site has a clean and uncluttered look and feel. The site is very responsive, with page loads happening quickly and search results being returned in a matter of a few seconds. The site has a convenient people search bar located on the home page, with separate search boxes for the person’s name, location and interests. There are convenient links to the email and phone number searches located on the home page. Navigation is intuitive and obvious. There is advertising displayed on the site, primarily from partners offering to search public records, etc. for a fee, but the advertising is fairly unobtrusive.

How does the registration process work?
Registration is not required to search for a person on Wink, but is required for a user to maintain their own profile or invite their friends to join the site. The registration process asks for first and last name, gender, zip code, username, password and email address. Validation of the email address is required. The user is prompted after registering to complete their profile, add URLs to their social networking sites and invite their friends to join Wink. All of these steps are optional.

What does it cost to use the application?
Wink is free to use, there are no ads.

Who would you recommend the application to?
The Wink site is recommended to anyone who is trying to locate a particular person. The site has the largest database of unique profiles on the Internet, and returns relevant results in most cases. It helps to know something more about a person than just their name in order to find the right person. The site is also recommended to users who would like assistance in managing the information that is available about them online.

What can you use the application for?
Jango.com is an online social music streaming site that allows users to build and maintain their own stations. Users can choose the artists and titles to be played on their stations, and can share their station or listen to other’s stations. The site features social networking aspects such as profiles, friends, and messages. The site features music from mainstream as well as independent artists. Jango charges independent artists for recommending their music alongside that of similar big name artists, and advertising provides revenue to pay the royalties on the mainstream music that users listen to. Using the Jango service is easy. Typing in the name of an artist in the search bar will create a new station featuring that artist along with similar music. Users can then further edit the station to suit their own tastes. Music and stations can be browsed by genre or searched by keyword. The site features a browser-based player that is compatible with all Internet browsers. Links to songs can be shared, but songs cannot be downloaded from the site.

What is the history and popularity of the application?
Jango.com was launched in 2008 by CEO Daniel Kaufman, CTO Chris Dowhan and CPO Matt Stanghed.

What are the differences to other applications?
Competition to Jango comes from the mainstream music sites such as Itunes, and from more direct competitors that offer streaming music as opposed to music downloads. These sites include Pandora and Slacker. Pandora uses a software algorithm based on the Music Genome Project to recommend music to users. Slacker offers a service very similar to Jango, but does not have the social networking aspect.

How does the application look and feel to use?
The Jango site has a slightly cluttered look and feel. There are quite a few links shown on each page, and there is advertising displayed on the site, which can be somewhat obtrusive. The site is very responsive, with page loads happening quickly. Audio streaming is excellent -- the songs start quickly and play without gaps. Navigation is fairly intuitive, with a convenient top menu bar shown on all pages on the site. The tabs on the menu bar are Home (the user’s home page), Music (links to search or browse music and create stations) and People (links to social networking features).

How does the registration process work?
Registration at the Jango site is free, and registered users have access to all of the features of the site. The registration process asks for email address, password, gender and date of birth. Validation of the email address is required to access all of the features on the site. Users can optionally add more information about themselves on their profile page.

What does it cost to use the application?
Registration is free and there is no premium membership offered to the site.

Who would you recommend the application to?
The Jango site is recommended to music lovers looking for free streaming music to listen to. The site offers a pleasing mix of mainstream vs. independent music, and the player and station features work without problems. In addition, the ability to share stations, have friends and messages provides users the ability to center a social network around their taste in music. The site is also recommended to independent artists as a relatively inexpensive venue where their creations can receive playtime. Packages for independent artists start as low as $30 for 1,000 plays.

What can you use the application for?
Vuvox.com is a site that allows users to make multimedia presentations in the form of interactive slide shows. The site provides the production tools for producing rich, interactive presentations from videos, photos, text and music. The resulting productions can be easily shared, for example on Ebay or Facebook. Users can upload content to use in their creations from their PC, from the web, from Flickr, or from Picasa. There are three basic tools available on the Vuvox site for creating presentations – Express, Collage and Studio. Express is a scaled-down version of Studio and is the easiest to use. Collage allows users to create a panoramic slide show with interactive text, photos and videos. Studio allows the most creative control, providing the ability to create a number of different types of presentations. All three of the tools are browser based and very user friendly, featuring a WYSIWYG interface with drag and drop editing. Creation of a presentation is basically a 3-step process – collection of the media, creation of the presentation, and sharing the presentation. Users can choose to make their publications publicly available or to keep them private.

What is the history and popularity of the application?
Redwood City, CA-based Vuvox.com was founded early in 2008. The site was bought by Ebay later in the year, and Ebay currently uses the technology from the site to allow Ebay Motors users to post presentations for car auctions.

What are the differences to other applications?
Competition to Vuvox comes from sites such as Flickr and Picasa, and from desktop applications such as Powerpoint and Adobe Flash. The site combines the ease of use of Flickr and Picasa with the powerful features of Powerpoint and Adobe Flash to allow the creation of visually appealing interactive presentations. The software developed by the Vuvox site is quite sophisticated, yet browser based and very easy to use.

How does the application look and feel to use?
The Vuvox site has a very clean and uncluttered look and feel. Page loads are very responsive, and the browser-based applications load and operate seamlessly. Navigation is intuitive and obvious, with a convenient top menu bar shown on all pages on the site. The top menu bar has tabs for Create (Collage, Express, Studio), MyStuff (Profile, My Collages) and Explore (existing content – Recent, Featured, Collages, Search). There is also a convenient search bar shown on most pages of the site. There is no advertising displayed on the Vuvox site.

How does the registration process work?
Registration at the Vuvox site is not required to view content, but is required to create content. The registration process asks for username, password, email address and name. Validation of the email address is not required.

What does it cost to use the application?
Registration is free and there is no premium membership offered to the Vuvox site.

Who would you recommend the application to?
Vuvox is recommended to anyone who wishes to create an interactive, multimedia presentation. The editing tools provided by the site allow for sophisticated presentations to be created relatively easily. The site is also recommended to users wishing to view presentations created by others, as some are very well done.

What can you use the application for?
Ehow.com is a how-to site with articles and videos explaining how to do almost anything. Users can search for articles or browse for articles via hundreds of categories. Registered users can comment on the how-to articles they read as well as contribute content themselves. The site contains how-to articles on virtually any subject, and forums allow users to request how-to articles on a given topic. There are some social networking aspects to the site, such as profiles, friends and messaging. Users can contribute content to the site in one of two ways. The first method is to simply sign up as a writer and contribute content. The second method is to sign up as a member of the WCP (Writer’s Compensation Program), which allows the user to earn income based on how many times their articles are viewed by other members. Members can also become Experts on the site in their area of knowledge.

What is the history and popularity of the application?
Ehow.com was launched in its present form in January 2003. The site is currently owned by Bellevue, WA-based Demandmedia. The site contains over 500,000 articles and videos containing instructions on how to do things.

What are the differences to other applications?
Competition to Ehow comes from sites such as Instructables, About.com and WikiHow. The Instuctables site is more video-oriented than Ehow, but does not have as large a userbase. The About.com site has a larger userbase, but has more informational subject content than how-to articles. The WikiHow site contains how-tos in the form of Wikis, which are edited by multiple people. The Ehow site contains the largest database of strictly how-to articles on the Internet.

How does the application look and feel to use?
The Ehow site has a clean, uncluttered look. The site is well laid out, and navigation is intuitive and obvious. Page loads are very quick, and the site is quite responsive overall. The site has a convenient top menu bar for navigation which is shown on all pages of the site. The tabs on the top menu bar include Home, How Tos, Videos, Write, Resources, Community, and My Profile. There is also a search bar shown on all pages on the site which allows the database of how to articles to be searched by keyword. Advertising is displayed on the site, but it is relatively unobtrusive.

How does the registration process work?
Registration at the Ehow site is free and is required in order to comment on how-tos, add friends, send messages or contribute content. The registration process asks for screen name, password, first and last name, email address, date of birth and gender. Validation of the email address is not required.

What does it cost to use the application?
Registration is free and there is no premium membership to the Ehow site available.

Who would you recommend the application to?
The Ehow site is recommended to anyone who is searching for a how-to article on a given subject. Over half of the articles on the site are written by professionals in their fields, and there is a how-to article available on the site on almost any subject imaginable. Most of the articles are well written, with clear, concise instructions. The site is also recommended to people who would like to participate in the community via the forums, friends and messaging in order to gain knowledge in a particular area or contribute their own knowledge. Writers who choose to participate in the WCP program can even earn an income from their contributions.

What can you use the application for?
Infobarrel.com is a shared revenue social media community. The site consists of how-to, do it yourself and knowledge media on a wide variety of subjects generated by the site’s users. Users who contribute content share in the ad revenue from the site. The site has a large number of articles and videos, which can be searched by keyword or browsed via well-organized categories. Some of the topics available for browsing include Culture, Geography, Health, History, People, Science, Technology, and Society. There is a browser-based text editor available for creating articles and video articles. There are also templates available for a blank article, a video article, a how-to article and a review article. Users can subscribe to RSS feeds containing a particular author’s content contributions. Users can track their feed subscriptions along with the content they have contributed on their My Infobarrel page. The site hosts various contests from time to time, and there is a Things to Do page where users can help out on the site by editing articles that have bad grammar, spelling, etc. Users have an Achievement Score which is based on how much they have contributed to the site.

What is the history and popularity of the application?
Infobarrel.com was launched early in 2008 by Ryan McKenzie and Kevin Hinton of Hinzie Media, Inc. The site is based in BC, Canada.

What are the differences to other applications?
Competition to Infobarrel comes from sites such as eHow, Bukisa, About.com and WikiHow. All of these sites provide informational content with a varying degree of user-generated content. Bukisa is probably the site most similar to Infobarrel, with all of its content being contributed by users. Ehow consists of content provided by eHow professional authors as well as content contributed by users. About.com consists entirely of professional content, and WikiHow consists entirely of user generated content, but in a wiki format (articles are edited by numerous authors).

How does the application look and feel to use?
The Infobarrel site has a fairly uncluttered look and feel. The site is quite responsive, and page loads happen quickly. The home page has a convenient search bar as well as a listing of the major categories available for browsing. There is a convenient top menu bar shown on all pages of the site. Tabs on the navigation bar include Home, Create, Members, Blog, Contests and Things to Do. Advertising is displayed on the site, some of which is relatively obtrusive.

How does the registration process work?
Registration at the Infobarrel site is free and is not required to view content. Registration is required in order to leave comments, contribute content or subscribe to author feeds. The registration process asks for username, password, full name and email address. Optionally the user is prompted for their Google Adsense ID (this is required to share revenue from contributions), an avatar, gender, date of birth, city and country. There is no premium membership offered to the Infobarrel site.

Who would you recommend the application to?
The InfoBarrel site is recommended to authors who wish to earn an income from sharing their knowledge in a particular subject area. The site has a large number of user contributed how tos, do it yourself and instructional articles and videos. Not all articles are of high quality, a lot of content is written just for the money.

What can you use the application for?
Screencastle.com is a site which offers a Java-based one-click screencasting application for users interested in recording their screen activity into a Flash-based screencast. The resulting screencast can be viewed in any browser. Screencasts are useful for software tutorials, demonstrations, technical support (a user can forward a screencast of a problem they are having) and interactive learning. The site is designed to make recording a screencast as simple as possible. The home page features a large record button icon – clicking on this icon starts the screen recorder application. Java 1.5 or greater is required to use the application – because the application is Java-based it will run on Windows, Mac or Linux operating systems. After the recorder is started, the user is allowed to choose whether to record the full screen or only a portion of it. If a portion is chosen, a convenient box is provided which the user resizes to the area of the screen they wish to record. The user can also choose at this point whether or not to record audio from the PC’s microphone. Next the user is prompted to click on a record icon and the application starts recording screen activity. The user then performs the actions they want to be included in their screencast, and clicks on the stop recording button when finished. The user is then prompted to preview the screencast or save the screencast. Once the screencast is saved, the application returns the following information to the user: A link to watch the screencast, HTML code to embed the screencast in a website, BBCode to embed the screencast in a forum (bulletin board), a direct link to the screencast file, The video ID that was assigned to the file (a large hexadecimal number that is used to uniquely identify the screencast, the address of a large preview image of the screencast and the address of a small preview image of the screencast. The screencast is hosted online for free, and is never deleted unless there has been no activity (the screencast has not been viewed) for some time.

What is the history and popularity of the application?
Screencastle.com, referred to as the Skoffer project by its author, was launched in January 2009. The project is based in Germany, and was created by Stefan Schulze Steinmann.

What are the differences to other applications?
Competition to Screencastle.com comes from a number of desktop applications such as Camtasia Studio and Wink, and online applications such as Screencast-o-matic and Screentoaster. Camtasia, which is paid software, is a full-featured desktop application with some editing and formatting capabilities. Wink has even more features than Camtasia and is free software. Screencast-o-matic and Screentoaster are free applications – they give the user more control over the screencasts they create. The main difference Screencastle brings to the table is its simplicity and the information associated with their screencasts such as link to watch, HTML code, etc. provided to the user automatically.

How does the application look and feel to use?
The Screencastle site is very clean and uncluttered. The site is very responsive, with page loads, screen recording, and viewing of screencasts happening seamlessly. The entire application runs without ever leaving the homepage, so navigation is nil. There is a list of frequently asked questions and an about page which can be conveniently accessed from links on the home page. There is also a section which describes how to use the Skoffer API, and how to build widgets to embed in websites.

How does the registration process work?
The Screencastle site is free to use and there is no registration offered. This means that screencasts created with the application are not associated with a user – users have no control over the screencasts they create other than to provide others with the ability to view them. The unique video code created for each screencast is a very large number that becomes part of the link to the file, so if a user wishes to keep a screencast private they can do so by simply not sharing the link to it. There is also no paid or premium membership offered to the site.

What does it cost to use the application?
ScreenCastle is free to use.

Who would you recommend the application to?
Screencastle is recommended to anyone having a need to quickly and easily create a screencast. The site is very easy to use, and the amount of automatically generated content that the site furnishes makes the screencast available for a variety of uses. The ability to embed the screencast in websites and forums is particularly useful.