Welcome to the BIG KITTY,
by far the most bad ass cat you’ve met in a long time.

There isn’t anything more boring than sitting around an airport waiting for your flight. The only thing an airport terminal is good for is high-quality people watching. There is no shortage of freaks to gawk at in the airport. While it’s fun to tell your friends about the freaks you see in the airport, how much more entertaining would it be to share your freaks with the world (and see the freaks other people find in other airports)?

FreakJet is your hub for airport freakspotting. It was founded by four guys in a bar complaining about the drudgery of airline travel. FreakJet’s purpose is to give you something to keep you entertained while you wait at your gate for a flight that is probably oversold and delayed. You’ll get to see, vote on, and even upload the freakiest people you can find at airports.

FreakJet went from a concept discussed at a coffee shop to a fully-functional iPhone app and complementary website in just a few weeks.  We were able to give BKL high-level business requirements and design parameters and they came back with a creative way to deliver a great solution.  Another great thing about BKL is you can give them a general idea of what you want to build and they come back to you with all sorts of new, interesting, and creative functions and features you never thought of.  It makes the product more robust and compelling.  These guys are great to work with! – The FreakJet Team

Most of our ideas come from little jobs we’d like to do easier.  CueThat is a great example of a super fast protobake idea, literally baked in 4 days just this past week.

My partner Tushar watches alot of movies on Netflix.  In fact I’d wager that alot of us do that.  I know my wife does.  She’d let me go before letting Netflix out of her life.  Its too good.  Yet there are bit things that could be easier.  For Tushar one of these things that could be easier is just a convenience thing.

The problem? The manual labor in cueing movies in Netflix.  Ok its not a huge problem but… Wouldn’t it be great if we could surf online, read about cool movies and then just add them to our cue, like right there in the browser vs, writing that movie down, then going to netflix, then searching for it, and cueing it there?

The solution? CueThat, a browser based plugin/bookmark that connects to Netflix and gives you a right click context menu allowing you cue any movie you find online in a snap.  Actually faster than a snap.  Like in a second, you’ve done it, you’ve cue’d a movie.

We first experimented with this right click context menu stuff back in the early days of building ParsePlz where we wanted a way to parse a link before ever visiting it.  Like you’d see someone reference a link about a topic in a blog post, and you could right click that link and just parse it, without ever visiting it.  Super fast short cuts.  I love that feature in ParsePlz.

Tushar wanted to bring that super fast ability to the surface for his idea on CueThat, and presto, done.  Very cool.

CueThat in action…

As you can see, CueThat can be used anywhere, any webpage, blog, any place you go online and read about movies.  It works on all 4 of the major browsers- Chrome and Firefox as an extension, allowing you to access CueThat in the right click context menu or on IE and Safari the form of a bookmarklet.  That bookmarklet will work on any browser actually, and we think it’ll work on the iPad as well.

CueThat is just days old, like 4 days.  We’re working on making it smarter and better so stay tuned.  Give us your feedback as we go as well.  Its not perfect by any means, its only as good as what you give it to try and cue and the what Netflix can attempt to find for us.  Stay tuned!

What is it?

This is a browser plugin, which allows you to select a movie title on any webpage and send that movie directly to your Netflix queue.

How to use?

Simply install the plugin, then highlight any movie title on the webpage, right click on it and select “CueThat” context menu. You will be asked to link your Netflix account upon first use.

You can download plugin for Firefox and Chrome.

Bookmarklet is also available for all browsers.

So what are you waiting for, get into CueThat today!

ChumpDump arrived on Windows 7 Phone last week, finally after a ton of tweaking and app store dance juggling.  Honestly, the dev experience there for win7 isn’t really there yet.  Nobody holds a candle to Apple thus far.  Anyways, we’re on win 7, if ya got a win7 phone check us out.  We apologize in advance for the ads in the phone, considering its up there for 99 cents.  The reason for that is because windows isn’t letting “free” apps approve with ease for some reason.  Once ya try and sell your app, your approval process goes much smoother, doesn’t really make sense but whatever, we’re on the device now.

At Startup Weekend Columbus last weekend I presented BAKE REVISITED, another talk on our process of protoabaking here at BKL.  The talk was well received and can be seen on youtube (thanks to @apfriedman for filming that!), and the presentation deck is up on Slideshare here.

Video Part 1

Video Part 2

Video Part 3

BKL’s been on a roll lately.  We’re at max capacity on projects baking a whole ton of stuff lately.  Stay tuned for more goodness as we go!

Today I did a bit radio segment on the Internet Evolution radio show talking about BigKittyLabs and our ChumpDump.  It was actually a really good bit of radio goodness.  Check it out.

http://www.internetevolution.com/radio.asp?doc_id=194596

In other news.. what’s brewing?

Well the big kitty has been hard at work on several client projects.  Its that time of year people, get off your ass and make something and let the kitty help if need be.  More and more folks are realizing hey- I can do this too, and kicking up some dust on their big ideas manifesting them.

BKL has been working with some very talented and driven teams, we love that, the speed of code is intoxicating.  On the side we’re working on a new protobake as well, a pet project I’ve been thinking about for quite some time, simply called HOO.  We’ll get into that later.

The FALL is here and before ya know it’ll be Xmas.  Keep an eye out for us as our scene continues to develop.  We plan to be on Windows 7 Phone experience here shortly as well, lots of excitement, I think Microsoft can pull it off.

Hey folks.. jamming to a few good tunes here and gearing up for the great attack of the to-do list.  Chewing on a fist full of goodness stemming from the great ChumpDump reception we’ve had thus far.  We’re coming up on 30 days in mark and we got a TON of great coverage and users to boot on the concept.  Data coming into the app is exciting, lots of players, lots of whys and lots of understanding as to why people follow who they do, and dump the unworthy of their time.

ChumpDump is quickly turning into a really good concept!!  Learning Android Development was great for us, lots learnings there and we’ve dived into the Windows 7 Phone dev scene as well, we have high hopes for Microsoft to step into the mix.

Props Talk!

We were recently tagged in a excellent blog read from our friends at ThoughtLeadersLLC in How Your Business can Achieve Global Domination! That’s a nice bit piece there and very true, heck ChumpDump alone, like TiXiT is a living, breathing example of execution on concepts and ideas, you must get them OUT people!!  Protobake that action up, you’ll be surprised at results!

ChumpDump and BKL gets a nice video interview action on Harrison Painter’s Social Media show.  Rocky and I conducted a video interview yesterday and bam its already online- very good stuff.  Harrison is spot on in featuring ChumpDump (sure thats a little self serving to our own agenda and all) but he’s a guy on the front of the whole social media scene that sees the real value in the concept, and for that we must give him props.  We feel ChumpDump like other concept SourceCow are much needed in the social media arena.

Mascot Contest!

BigKity is looking for a few talented artists, ya know people who can draw well.. anything.  We’re looking for folks to help us make sexier UI’s, badges, graphics, mascots.. yes mascots!  We’re having fun and need a little help visualizing some of our insanity.  If you’re local in Columbus, doodle often and love making critters on paper and corny things, well hell let’s get together!  Tap me, Dan at jimmydan (at) gmail and let’s get our doodle on!

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BORIS

A better way to analyze transcripts.
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What is ChumpDump?

Using the override has its own issues though.  While most chumps start out with 5 vouchers (the required currency to use the override), players can get more by raising them karma and cashin in their points for more of them.  You can also buy voucher packs (100 at a time) in the game, or pick up the unlimited versions of the game.

Finally a simple way to document your screenshots and photos.

Ugh Bookmarks!

The problem?  We save too much crap. We save too many bookmarks- stumbleupon, delicious, instapaper, evernote, browser favorites..

Today’s links aren’t just resources any more.  It used to be you’d save really specially unique things, handy how-tos, killer bits of inspiration and they popped up every now and then.  That was 2001.  Today they pop up every 6 seconds on twitter and you feel compelled to save, save, SAVE!

ParsePlz was a dual goal project.  We wanted to do two things, 1- solve the bookmark clutter problem by forcing a constraint on users, a reality wake up call, and 2- dabble in content analysis and play some API’s.  Links have lots of information in them, we wanted to pull that out along the way and see what was in there, and learn a bit.

Version 0 was a really simple URL reader.  You’d enter a URL and it’d tell you some things like sentiment, tags, summary etc.

Version .5 was a URL bookmark app, full on, collected bookmark urls, auto tagged them, analyzed for sentiment, and enabled us to push out our big idea, – you have 72 hrs to review your bookmarks, take another pass at what’s important and then they were flushed.

Analysis Became the Richer Story

We wanted to really purge bookmarks, wean ourselves off from saving everything but that was just one idea, the real idea in ParsePlz morphed out of it- the analysis.  Each URL has a story connected to it and ParsePlz is designed to tell you that story.  It analyzes URLs and tells you a wide range of interesting facts you probably didn’t know about that URL you just bookmarked.  Things like who’s all touched that URL and found it interesting, who’s tagged it with meaning and where has that URL been before and more.

But beta testers didn’t want to purge, just know more..

ParsePlz is now a powerful bookmark analysis tool meets reader. You can still use it to mange your bookmarks but it does alot more than just that.

We’ve got some fun features like:

• auto-tagging
• summarization
• pull out related hashtag trends
• see who tweeted it
• see who posted it on delicious
• see who on twitter is linking like you
• get recommendations to new content via your tag preference
• upload your own bookmarks
• export your bookmarks
• squat on a twitter user auto parsing their links they tweet
• watch an RSS feed for links auto parsing links
• iphone mobile safari support
• retweet a link
• post it on a blog
• email to a friend
• yank out the rich media from links, videos, mp3s, slideshare, books

You can get into ParsePlz today, hit it up and join us. Look for ParsePlz on the iPhone, Android and iPad soon too.

SourceCow

How long have we all wondered -why is this person following me on twitter?? In the world of online social networks like twitter this question is asked a gazillion times a day. There are millions of people that want an answer to this simple question- why? SourceCow is an experiment to dig into the very whys behind that question.

Whisker

Sometimes the simplest concept can win in a big way.  Today’s API’s leverage you to just about anything you want. Our partners at Lextant we’re curious one day on how they could create an easy way for participants to interact with a voice enabled survey.  The idea is to let consumers call in and express their opinions on a topic, going thru a guided, promoted experience.  How can this process be automated easily, and at what expense?

“it should be dead simple” one researcher expressed..

What’s simpler than just a phone number?  Nothing.  Phone surveys have existed for a long time but they’re mainly behind expensive walled gardens and paid services that are out of reach for most people. IE, too expensive for the budget at hand.

BKL turned this equation around and with Twilio a PBX API and created a simple but easy to use phone survey tool we call Whisker.

Details…

Whisker powered by Twilio and BKL code goodness is easy.  You simply set up your questions either with text that computer will speak for you, or record your own prompts and then.. well that’s it. You can map the survey to any area code in the USA or go international if you like. Responses are saved in a database and auto-transcribed even.

Whisker was a blast to create. Our team really enjoyed working with the Twilio API and our partners at Lextant we’re impressed with the rapid turn around on a whimsical idea. Lextant has since acquired the Whisker platform and put it in their research tools division.

The best apps you make are ones that solve big issues you yourself face.

Bring on the Text Mafia

Analyzing transcripts is a long painful process. One of the ways you can analyze a script involves the process of scanning through the text looking for specific words, keywords, product words, stimulus and emotional words.  Researchers typically look for frequency patterns.  Our partners at Lextant know the pain of this process far to well. But Lextant does try and use precise methodologies that make their scripts easier to analyze than most- however the labor and time is still there. Imagine yourself reading through a 3 hour transcript and trying to find that needle in a haystack of a word or concept your interested in, its seriously not fun!

Just zooming to find text is easy, training the comptuer to pull the right text for your needs, that sounds like a bit of content analysis, and that’s where Big Kitty Labs comes in.  BORIS not only reads transcripts, its looks for specific markers based on frequency and unique IDS that Lextant embeds in their scripts to help ya extract the big idea faster.

All Your Text ARE Belong to Us

Before BORIS, Lextant previously used another tool to try and analyze large volumes of text.  This tool took a 3 hour transcript and turned it into 1.5 human hours task endurance fest.  This isn’t too bad for one script. Now lets say you had 20 scripts. Now that same human is spending 30 hours or roughly 3+ days to do that same analysis. Ugh, that sucks.

Let’s do this better!

BORIS on the other hand with its sophisticated auto-extraction methods can chew thru 20, 3 hour scripts in a few minutes, auto extracting, formatting and prepping that same information in a way that saves the human TONS of hours.  A researcher isn’t replaced mind you, they’re till running the show, but the endurance time drops from 30 hrs to 3 or so.  Thats a serious saving of time and money.

That’s a significant speed increase, which equals more sanity, better margins on the work and less downtime. Lextant loved it, and has acquired it for their research tools division.  We definitely love making tools like this, transforming big painful jobs into manageable ones.