Michael H.

Subpar Web/search/entertainment company - Hemoraging cash, employees, and search-market share to Google. This company has launched a series of radio and TV ads lately to combat the perception that it's not as good as google as they market the fact that they give you drop down suggestions as you type in your search. Of course, it's not at all clear that "search" is the primary function on the page anymore, as it looks more and more like an AOL smorgasbord of semi-relevant stuff to my life. And sure, there's myYahoo, but the iGoogle site is much more user friendly and customizable for my interests. The search though seems to return less relevant results still and continues to suffer with fewer users than Google. They've lost me.

New art site - New beta site up that is, in essence, a social networking site about art. It's for busy professionals, artists and art insiders to allow them to access art content, events and
Information easily. It's seemed like some sort of matching system of art work/artists with interested buyers has needed to exist for some time on the Web to make the market more functional. I'm not sure if this is the step forward, but I think it has high potential.

In one of the co-founder's own words: Artlog is a social web application developed to map and fully support the art ecosystem. Users share artwork, photographs, video and audio
Files and create multimedia slideshows, portfolios, downloadable walking tours and
Podcasts. Users also engage the Artlog community through messaging, blogging, social bookmarking, and reviews.

If you like fudge - This is a *great* place. Makes for great gifts, too! And pretty good prices.

New think tank Innosight Institute - Had to plug my own company's site... This is a start-up non-profit think tank whose mission is to apply HBS Prof. Clay Christensen's theories of disruptive innovation to develop, disseminate, and promote solutions to the most vexing problems in the social sector.
We're starting with education and healthcare and just put up this site in the last couple weeks.

Great politics aggregation site - For those interested in politics, RealClearPolitics is a must. It aggregates all the latest polls and cuts them in various ways so you can really follow what's going on -- and get beyond what the national press seems to think the story is. Additionally, however, it aggregates the big politics news items (video and transcript) from the major publications as well as politico blogs (and it has its own blog, too), so you can follow the national conversation as well and keep up to date on what people are saying. They link to interesting pieces, and it's better than scanning or coming up with your own RSS Feeds on this topic I tend to find.

How to get refunds for travel (on Yapta!) - You can plan trips through Yapta, but even better, you can get refunds for trips where you already bought a ticket. You simply enter the info and the price you paid, and then if the fare drops further, Yapta notifies you and you get a straight up refund for the difference. It's great! I book through Kayak to find the best airline (you could use http :// /www.farecast. Com too I guess to check out their future projected fares off those airlines that look promising) and then enter the info from there and start saving.

Great travel site - Kayak's one of my favorite travel sites. It's very useful for searching for flights, hotels, cars, cruises, deals, and so forth... With flights, for example, it searches all of the airline sites themselves as well as the "discount" sites -- Expedia, Travelocity, Hotwire, Priceline, and Expedia. There are of course some other sites that are good too, but one that's worth checking out in conjunction with kayak is http://www.yapta.com. Book the flights at the best fare with Kayak, and then register your flights with Yapta; if the fare drops even further, they refund you the difference! It's great.