MuseClouds

Because it’s vacation time for so many people, because I talked about Zicasso travel planning service yesterday and just because there’s a lot of folks out there that like to do things on their own, here’s a service that will definitely help you with some of the extenuous planning tasks that lie ahead: PlanetEye.

Featuring a powerful and easy-to-use planning tool; compelling, geotagged photography; leading edge mapping technology and extensive travel content from a team of in-house writers and a growing number of professional sources, PlanetEye is designed for travelers who want a new and exciting way to explore where to go and what to do.

Here comes the best part:

At the core of PlanetEye’s travel planning service is the Travel Pack that lets travelers “clip” the interesting photographs, attractions, hotels and restaurants discovered on PlanetEye when they are planning a trip or simply putting together travel ideas.

Wow, you gotta give this a look… I really like this website! Definitely one of my new travel planning secret weapons! It’s a shame I have no trip to plan right now…

Have you ever planned a two-week vacation trip spreading across several countries with multiple airport stops, a lot of hotels to sleep in, car rental and great places to visit. If you have, you probably know how difficult it can get, because there are just so many variables involved. The planning can consume days and it always seems there’s something missing. Of course, you learn a lot about the country and travel logistics along the way, but that’s not everyone’s cup of tea. And that’s the major reason behind pre-planned trips success. This way you can rest assured everything will work the way it’s planned (at least it’s supposed to) by the travel agency.

However, sometimes you really want to plan every detail for the trip and you can’t find any agency doing it. You want the trip of your dreams, which includes seeing the midnight sun on Finnish Lapland, taking a ride across Paris on the Bateau Mouche, visiting the Pope on Vatican, watch the Olympics at Beijing and taking a picture with a koala in Sydney. All of this and a lot more that you’ll remember if you’re really planning a dream travel package for just 2 weeks! Now, that’s a lot of work…

Zicasso aims at solving this kind of puzzle for you. I’ve never really used them, I just found them by chance and immediately loved the concept, as it directly solves a problem lots of people have. And not just with dream trips, as even a casual vacation trip around 2 or 3 countries in Europe can take a lot of your time. Zicasso’s premise lies in sending you up to 3 customized trip plans that can be further refined by an expert. And this is the best part: there’s a real person dealing with your request and that has to be better than those crappy automatic planners some online travel agencies provide (you’ll love them until you find you can do much better on your own). This is the subtle most important detail for me: the real person on the other side. My major questions are: How well does the service scale when they have a lot of customer requests? Do they keep the same level of attention to detail? To me this is the real challenge behind not only Zicasso but other companies using the same approach.

Well, I’ll definitely try them because you don’t necessarily need to buy one of their customized plans if you change your mind for any reason, and I’m really curious to see how well they fare against me + Google + all my other secret weapons of travel planning!

Just yesterday, I was talking you about the new social music game Stereofame. After that I went on to see who were the most popular bands. I’m usually quite picky about the overall sound and production quality. Even amateur musicians have come a long way with the democratization of recording gear. However, it’s still quite difficult to achieve that pro-sound without a big budget. Still, the most popular band on Stereofame, as of today, is Temple Scene. From their website they have worked in the recording industry for the likes of Eric Clapton and Korn. They’ve then decided to write some songs, but they haven’t signed for any label. However, one wonders if they really need to. I mean, they probably don’t have all the marketing machine a label can provide, but they do have the music and with sites like Stereofame, blog posts like this and so much more internet marketing possibilities out there, they sure can get their word out. And they can sell their music on iTunes, Amazon, Yahoo! Music and others, using services like TuneCore, retaining a much larger part of the sales.

A couple of years ago, Chris Anderson wrote The Long Tail, where he described how the Internet is allowing us to find things we wouldn’t thought possible if we could only rely on conventional brick & mortar stores with limited space. The power of social networks is bringing people’s tastes together and that is a major leap ahead on the way we find and access new products and content.

Without making a case with my personal tastes on music, I personally found Temple Scene to have that quality edge that can differentiate them from the crowd. I would like to see how these great unsigned artists can fare against the big labels over time. It may still be a dream, but using the power of internet and social networks to override the need for a label that takes out a big part of your commissions as well as your freedom as an artist is something I would like to see in the coming years.

You can hear some great songs from Temple Scene on their Stereofame page.

Stereofame is a new social website aimed primarily at music lovers and music makers. It’s a great way to find new music but also a great new way to make your music heard. Because it’s a game you can win points that you can then exchange and use at the Stereofame auction house that offers multiple rewards for bidding.

If you’re a music listener you can create your own label and browse the site for talent you want to sign up. This works like a real label in which you earn more points if you get to sign the most popular artists earlier. For musicians this is a great way to promote their music, as they are also awarded points for their popularity. The site’s been running for about 2 months and there’s already more music than you want to hear.

A great business idea based on a great concept that is sure to attract a lot of participants. I’m also wondering about the value of the demographics data gathered by Stereofame (country and age). It’s the kind of information real labels would love to have.

So, if you’re about music, be sure to visit Stereofame.

If you’re out of business ideas, this guy certainly isn’t. Stepan Pyrnyak is a local undertaker at Truskavets, Ukraine. The city is an ecologically clean zone and a well known spa resort, remarkable for its mineral waters. The most famous is Naftusya, a curative water with unique medical properties. You can check some research on the subject here, here and here.

Well, the inhabitants of the city must be very healthy because they drink those waters every day. That means “no business” to an undertaker. But what can you do when you’re out of customers and your area of expertise is funerals? This guy came up with a somehow strange idea: build a giant coffin (20 meters long, 6 meters wide, 6 meters tall) using 30 cubic meters of wood. Apart from the obvious effort to get this into the Guinness Book of World Records, he wisely carved a door on one of the coffin’s extremes and decided to install a bar inside it. Its name: “Eternity”!

I’m with Vasili Gutnov, a local resident, when he says “it more resembles Noah’s Ark than a coffin”. But inside, that’s a different story: dark ambiance, floral wreaths, candles, funeral music and black-dressed waitstaff. The youngsters are already adding new features to their vernacular, such as: “I saw you in the coffin yesterday” or “Let’s meet tonight at the coffin”. Older people, however, are not so open-minded. After all a coffin is a coffin and it’s made to bury dead people.

Here are some photos of the place (I got them here, but I didn’t understand a word…):

Finally, here’s a video where you can see there’s life inside after all!