MaximumPC 2007 10

Web Apps

MAXIMUMPC OCTOBER 2007

MUSIC

REMOTE ACCESS VIDEO

SoonR

Get to your PC from any phone or browser

Slacker

Cut your tunes some slack, man

Blinkx

12 million hours of video. No stupid self-

submissions

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Some people love whiling away the hours sifting through

idiotic home-video footage on YouTube. If you don’t, try

Blinkx. Built on a powerful search engine, Blinkx scours the

web for videos, then analyzes and tags them for retrieval. So

when you search for “White Stripes,” you’ll fi nd the band’s

videos, not a bunch of homemade vids of teenyboppers lip-

synching to “Icky Thump.” Blinkx grabs videos from across

the entire web, so it’s got everything YouTube, iFilm, Veoh,

and the rest have, only more organized and with full-motion

thumbnails. It includes a Safe Search control to fi lter out the

dirty stuff—or not—and clicking a video’s title will take you

straight to its source, so you can see it in its original context.

Free, http://www.blinkx.com

When you need remote access to your fi les but don’t want to

lug a laptop along, you need Soonr. This lightweight desktop

utility syncs your fi les and Outlook email to SoonR’s website

while you’re working and then serves them up via a clean web

interface. The mobile-optimized service worked like a charm

on every phone we tried it with, letting us grab and view

images, Word docs, and spreadsheets easily. It also sports

an organizer interface for Outlook calendars and lets you call

your Skype contacts from your cell phone.

Free, http://www.soonr.com

Forget Last.fm. Never mind Pandora.

Don’t even think about iTunes. If you

want the ultimate in fully customizable

Internet radio, get your slackin’ ass

over to Slacker.com. Like Last.fm and

Pandora, Slacker.com makes it mind-

lessly easy to create custom radio sta-

tions by typing in an artist you like and

letting the site automatically compile

a playlist of similar or related artists.

The interface is way slicker than its

competitors’, but that’s just the start

of its draw. Soon Slacker will offer a

portable player that’ll let you take your

stations on the road and a satellite

player for your car.

Free (player hardware to be sold

separately), http://www.slacker.com