sfnewtech15

Deduct your driving expenses with BizMileTracker

I heard the pitch for BizMileTracker at the New Tech Meetup last night. This service collects your car trip data so you can later deduct the expenses from your taxes. It sure beats keeping an odometer log in the car. Just identify your starting and ending points, and the application calculates your mileage.

You can set up repeating trips, which is handy. You can also see how much of a deduction you can claim for each trip, depending on which purpose you assign (business expenses are more deductible than medical trips, for example). The service is especially useful if you … Read more

Zemble won't spam you (yet)

Social networking via cell phones seems to be making a strong push lately. In the last few weeks alone we've covered Joopz, Groovr, PL8Scn, MySpace Mobile, and Gimme20, all services that let you use SMS text messages to communicate with others. Zemble, which launched its public beta version last month, is a free, group-based communication service that lets members send messages en masse to other members.

Similar to Joopz and 3Jam, Zemble lets you create your own group of phone or e-mail contacts and save it as a preset of sorts. Zemble calls these group presets "Zembles." … Read more

Comic Vine is nerdy in a cool way

Comic books are hard to take seriously sometimes. They're even harder for the casual reader to pick up, which is where Comic Vine comes in handy. Like Wikipedia, Comic Vine is a user-created encyclopedia that can make you an instant expert, but just about comic books. The big difference between Comic Vine and a site like Wikipedia is the community and user submission, which is where Comic Vine steps it up in a big--make that super--way.

User profiles on Comic Vine let you become a superhero or villain. Instead of listing the usual social networking details, such as what … Read more

Podaddies: Yet another stab at monetizing Web videos

At the San Francisco New Tech Meetup Wednesday, Podaddies CEO Nate Pagel presented his new company, which puts ads into user-generated videos so that people can make a few bucks from their wacky cats' antics.

The service inserts a call to its ad engine at the end of a video, and displays a streaming QuickTime ad from its library. No matter where the file goes, the ad call goes with it. But not the ad itself; this way, the company gets to serve the ad on demand and can track ad plays and bill the advertiser for them (and cut … Read more