Jun 12, 2009 by Veiko HernecloseAuthor: Veiko HerneName: Veiko Herne Email: veikoherne@hotmail.com Site:http://veikoh.wordpress.com About: Veiko Herne is lifetime entrepreneur, currently working as Independent Consultant with over 30 years experience in IT and starting his activities in Internet since 1993. After establishing and managing one of the most successful IT companies in Estonia after the collapse of Soviet Union, he later managed worldwide interest to his analytical financial accounting and HR management software packages from New York until September 11th. He is currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.See Authors Posts (10)E-commerce
LiteCommerce is a compact e-commerce and shopping cart commercial software developed by Qualiteam Software. Their other product lines are X-cart shopping cart software for more comprehensive e-commerce needs, Sales’n Stats and Hacker Proof/Hacker Guardian.
LiteCommerce license for one store costs $109 and there are several optional add-on modules available like Wish List, Affiliate Management, E-Commerce reports, Gift Certificates, Wholesale Trading, Multi Currency, etc for $13-$17 each for your particular store needs.
The difference between LiteCommerce and X-cart is that LiteCommerce have modular design. When purchasing X-cart you will have all the functions included to one license as in LiteCommerce, you will purchase the basic core license, and then will specify your shop needs by purchasing those extra modules for $13 each or download some of those free of charge.
If you want to become an e-commerce application service provider Qualiteam has another package for you: LiteCommerce ASPE
With LiteCommerce ASPE you can take full advantage of Application Service Provider business model. LiteCommerce ASPE is specially designed for:
* Hosting service providers (HSP)
* Companies running multiple shops powered by LiteCommerce
* Companies that provide ecommerce application services
* Companies who need the ability of rapid shops deployment (e.g. shops dedicated to special events to catch up market opportunities)
By registering to the 30 day evaluation version, I got email containing several download links for different operating systems.
As my hosting runs with Debian GNU/Linux, I decided to download the Linux version.
Other Options where Windows 98/NT/2000&2003, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, BSDi, Solaris and Mac OS X.
LiteCommerce is built using the open source PHP/MySQL technology which can run on operating systems above.
Sep 1, 2008 by Veiko HernecloseAuthor: Veiko HerneName: Veiko Herne Email: veikoherne@hotmail.com Site:http://veikoh.wordpress.com About: Veiko Herne is lifetime entrepreneur, currently working as Independent Consultant with over 30 years experience in IT and starting his activities in Internet since 1993. After establishing and managing one of the most successful IT companies in Estonia after the collapse of Soviet Union, he later managed worldwide interest to his analytical financial accounting and HR management software packages from New York until September 11th. He is currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.See Authors Posts (10)E-commerce
Zen Cart (or ZenCart) www.zencart.com has been developed by group of professionals from Newcastle, England, Cleveland, Ohio and Ontario, Canada. It’s not a simple shopping cart module, but truly professional ecommerce store management platform (named also a shopping cart system) with newsletters, coupons, gift certificates, etc more capable to run Amazon type of stores than small websites with thousands of products allowing unlimited category depth and site search.
Installation and store setup
ZenCart shopping cart installation went smoothly, however the system complaint again several PHP setting parameters like register_globals=on (had to create separate php.ini for those), and even I didn’t had secure server protocol purchased to my hosting account, I was able to complete the installation with some simple steps.
There were eight editable pages from the administration module to customize the site layout using pure HTML language or JavaScript based Rich text editor, the side box content can be set on and off and their sort order can be modified. The software which I installed was with “Contemporary Classic Green” and English language but additional templates and languages can be purchased and downloaded.
The administration module is extremely broad and from first look, I was little bit confused where to start.Defining the products should be most reasonable step to start and as those are belonging to categories, those should be defined first. For SEO purposes, you are able to define your own Meta tags (title, keywords and description) for the category and build category tree structure.
May 23, 2008 by Veiko HernecloseAuthor: Veiko HerneName: Veiko Herne Email: veikoherne@hotmail.com Site:http://veikoh.wordpress.com About: Veiko Herne is lifetime entrepreneur, currently working as Independent Consultant with over 30 years experience in IT and starting his activities in Internet since 1993. After establishing and managing one of the most successful IT companies in Estonia after the collapse of Soviet Union, he later managed worldwide interest to his analytical financial accounting and HR management software packages from New York until September 11th. He is currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.See Authors Posts (10)Video sharing
Sharemixerwww.sharemixer.com is a Youtube clone (video sharing solution) developed in Zagreb, Croatia by a company having over ten years of web development expertise and currently moving to media market.
Sharemixer license cost $199 with one year support, $299 with two years support, $499 with lifetime support and there is special $100 offer for Clipshare owners to migrate to Sharemixer. The license can be also purchased as subscription service for $39 per month.
Their additional services pricelist is long so seems that this company would like to make more money selling services rather than from their software licensing.
Installation and Setup
To use Sharemixer, the hosting service should have Linux, BSD or Apache server with MySql 4.1 running, PHP 4.4.3 and up (including PHP 5) and access to CGI-BIN directory. It should also have FFMpeg with Lame, Libbogg and Libvorbis, Mencoder-MPlayer, Rubby on Rails and flvtool2 installed (this extra server-side software is required, to inject meta-data to the converted videos – key-frames, tags, title, etc. FLVTool2 is used for that and it depends on Ruby On Rails to work.). To checkout details of the server requirements please look here.
The MySQL database must be created manually from provided script and the configuration parameters should be configured manually in several files, including assigning proper directory rights so some technical knowledge will be needed to install it.
To migrate from Clipshare you should run a different database script, configure the files and delete some older directories.
May 16, 2008 by Veiko HernecloseAuthor: Veiko HerneName: Veiko Herne Email: veikoherne@hotmail.com Site:http://veikoh.wordpress.com About: Veiko Herne is lifetime entrepreneur, currently working as Independent Consultant with over 30 years experience in IT and starting his activities in Internet since 1993. After establishing and managing one of the most successful IT companies in Estonia after the collapse of Soviet Union, he later managed worldwide interest to his analytical financial accounting and HR management software packages from New York until September 11th. He is currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.See Authors Posts (10)Social Networks
SkaDate is a social networking and online dating software platform supporting videos and photo albums. It can be seen here: www.skadate.com
Ska Date has been developed by Skalfa eCommerce, employing 18 dedicated programmers and support staff. They recently opened their representative EU office in Czech Republic instead usual UK. Besides dating software their other product line is Chuppo rich media applications, which are actually part of SkaDate.
Sites features are customizable from administration module, like Press, Search, Photo, Multimedia, Profile view, Events, Messages, Virtual Kiss, Friends Only Photos, Flash chat, Instant messenger, Photo rate, Profile Rate, Friends Networking, Polls, Ads, Tags, Bookmark, Blocklist, Chuppo Recorder, Forum, Blogs, Password Protected Photos, Profile comments and HTML usage in profiles.
They also offer a hosted version of this software. Check it out here
From administration module was possible to assign cost for each event or leave it as free service. The software supports unlimited membership levels allowing setup events for each level and limiting even the event usage per day or month.
SkaDate supports several payment gateways like PayPal, ccBILL, SecurePay, Authorise.net, SecPay, etc.
The navigation menu was customizable to each member level group so members will see only functions allocated to the membership level.
The administration module allows customization of multimedia and photo parameters, limiting the number of invitations, creating virtual kiss templates, enabling the friends’ network and customizing the profile fields which can be even dependent to each other.
Customizable watermark can be added to photos and videos to protect copyrights.
The product becomes with 18 layout templates and the customer can get additional templates free of charge from their website when those will become available free of charge. I assume that knowing little bit CSS the programmer can write their own templates for the site.
Apr 29, 2008 by Veiko HernecloseAuthor: Veiko HerneName: Veiko Herne Email: veikoherne@hotmail.com Site:http://veikoh.wordpress.com About: Veiko Herne is lifetime entrepreneur, currently working as Independent Consultant with over 30 years experience in IT and starting his activities in Internet since 1993. After establishing and managing one of the most successful IT companies in Estonia after the collapse of Soviet Union, he later managed worldwide interest to his analytical financial accounting and HR management software packages from New York until September 11th. He is currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.See Authors Posts (10)Social Networks
AbleSpace and AbleDating (social network & dating software) has all the professional features that will be enough for you to create sites like YouTube, MySpace or Date.com in one package. I’ll review them a little bit below.
It has been developed by Abk-Soft, US Company with Russian roots and employing dynamic staff of over 30 freelance programmers from Russia managed from US.
Their main product contains lot of interesting modules, like 3D virtual city, Flash technology based profile editor to replace HTML, CSS profile customization, Video Chat, Video Sharing, Friends, Groups, Flash postcards, VoiIP technology based telephone, Flash based chat rooms, Flash games, Romantic virtual 3D chat rooms, Greeting recordings, Classifieds, Photo Gallery, Personal Blogs, Biorhythms, Love Match calculator, Instant Messenger, Mailbox, MP3 Player, favourites, forums, etc.
The administration allows setup the site for various community purposes, allowing three level memberships, affiliate programs, banner rotations, free trial memberships, newsletters, auto approvals, unlimited number of languages, e-mail and phone number automatic filtering, etc. Currently it supports PayPal, WorldPay, GoldPay, 2CO, NetBilling and PaySystems gateways but can be configured to any payment gateway for small fee.
Their templates based architecture allows changing site look and feel instantly using growing number of ready-made templates.
The installation service is free or if you want to do it yourself, its five simple steps following the screen and can be completed in minutes.
The product comes from two versions:
AbleSpace as social networking community platform ($597 for single domain license/ $897 for multiple domains)
AbleDating as dating software platform ($597 for single domain license/$897 for multiple domains)
or a mixer having both of functionalities included ($997 for single domain license)
Existing site owners can also buy their 3D city module to any of site for $400.
Apr 21, 2008 by Veiko HernecloseAuthor: Veiko HerneName: Veiko Herne Email: veikoherne@hotmail.com Site:http://veikoh.wordpress.com About: Veiko Herne is lifetime entrepreneur, currently working as Independent Consultant with over 30 years experience in IT and starting his activities in Internet since 1993. After establishing and managing one of the most successful IT companies in Estonia after the collapse of Soviet Union, he later managed worldwide interest to his analytical financial accounting and HR management software packages from New York until September 11th. He is currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.See Authors Posts (10)Social Networks, Video sharing
osTubewww.ostube.de is a social networking media platform allowing the sharing of music, video, pictures and documents. It has been developed by AUVICA GmbH in Munich, Germany. Their other product lines are MyRadio, Reisepanne, and VIMP.
osTube is available by three product editions: Community, Professional and Enterprise. Community edition is free but you can’t run any ads and social networking communities with it. The Professional edition allows banner and video (priced differently) ads as Enterprise edition is a not priced solution for commercial projects which can include Live Streaming, Mobile payments, etc.
Professional edition costs $149 to manage Google AdSense ads with some extra templates and you should spend $299 when you want to run video ads and have more templates included.
Apr 11, 2008 by Veiko HernecloseAuthor: Veiko HerneName: Veiko Herne Email: veikoherne@hotmail.com Site:http://veikoh.wordpress.com About: Veiko Herne is lifetime entrepreneur, currently working as Independent Consultant with over 30 years experience in IT and starting his activities in Internet since 1993. After establishing and managing one of the most successful IT companies in Estonia after the collapse of Soviet Union, he later managed worldwide interest to his analytical financial accounting and HR management software packages from New York until September 11th. He is currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.See Authors Posts (10)Social Networks, Video sharing
PHPMotion is a truly free open source media social networking platform supporting video and audio social networking.
It’s downloadable from www.phpmotion.com website after you had registered to the software support forum.
Latest stable version was 1.2 but I tested and evaluated version 2 beta which worked without any crashes and with only small inconveniences.
The product installation was quick however you must have lot of open source modules pre-installed to your server, including LAME MP encoder, Libbogg and Libvorbis, Mencoder and MPlayer, FFMpeg-PHP, GD Library 2, etc. which was taking a week of my time to get those running afterwards to find out that my service provider does not support background processes and MP3, MPEG files download.
So you should consider the hosting service where those modules are already installed. PhpMotion website lists four of hosting ready service providers, where the starting price $2.99 was per month.
Mar 6, 2008 by Veiko HernecloseAuthor: Veiko HerneName: Veiko Herne Email: veikoherne@hotmail.com Site:http://veikoh.wordpress.com About: Veiko Herne is lifetime entrepreneur, currently working as Independent Consultant with over 30 years experience in IT and starting his activities in Internet since 1993. After establishing and managing one of the most successful IT companies in Estonia after the collapse of Soviet Union, he later managed worldwide interest to his analytical financial accounting and HR management software packages from New York until September 11th. He is currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.See Authors Posts (10)Social Networks
Starting to evaluate SocialEngine I was positively surprised how technically open and well programmed it was. It’s expandable with plug-ins and uses Smarty to customize its look and feel.
After the trial download I had Groups, Blog and Photo Album plug-ins included and their website says that Events plug-in is currently available which I was able to look from their website. Social Engine was developed by innovative Californian software company Webligo whose business mission is to brainstorm new innovative ideas to be profitable at early stage and sell those to larger companies who can fully realize their potential. Webligo previous project BlogHoster was sold UK based Splashpress media in 2007 and since 2006 they have worked with SocialEngine (www.socialengine.net). Webligo was founded by Alex Benzer and Charlotte Genevier, who met as Pasadena Polytechnic high school in 2000.
Installation
The installation comes as downloadable compressed file which you should decompress to your server. Files will be extracted starting “files” subdirectory which was little bit odd as I would expect to run my program from the virtual root I created for it.
You will get an email which contains your installation key and attached license.txt file. You should copy this file also to your server application files directory before starting files/admin/install.php otherwise it complains and does not start. That was an odd thing to do but I assume that when purchasing you will get just new license file and not an installation key. The license file was encrypted anyway so I assume they will send me a new license.txt file after a purchase.
Feb 20, 2008 by Veiko HernecloseAuthor: Veiko HerneName: Veiko Herne Email: veikoherne@hotmail.com Site:http://veikoh.wordpress.com About: Veiko Herne is lifetime entrepreneur, currently working as Independent Consultant with over 30 years experience in IT and starting his activities in Internet since 1993. After establishing and managing one of the most successful IT companies in Estonia after the collapse of Soviet Union, he later managed worldwide interest to his analytical financial accounting and HR management software packages from New York until September 11th. He is currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.See Authors Posts (10)Video sharing
ClipSharewww.clip-share.com is online community building software for sharing videos similar to YouTube. It runs on Linux and Apache Web server, demands PHP version 4.3 or higher and MySql 4+. It also needs several additional applications like GD Libary 2+, Mplayer and Mencoder, Flv2tools, Libogg and Libvorbis and LAME MP3 encoder to be installed which can be downloaded from other sites free of charge.
The installation should take some hours as besides unpacking the software modules you should create your MySql database and run script manually, parameters in several files and change directory rights. After that you should be able to access Admin module to setup the site video channels, the site subscription and advertising parameters (integrated support for Google Adsense and Yahoo Publishers Network).
I assume that when starting to install all requested modules, the process could take several days. However, the company can provide you the installation service or you can host your site in their server starting $2 per month. For the quote and ordering the installation service you should submit them a ticket having root access server administration username and password ready. So this product is not suitable to install for shared hosting services where you are unable to get access to the system root so maybe their hosting could be better solution to anyone considering their product.
Within a week I didn’t have any answer to my open ticket so I assume that their technical and marketing support wasn’t much online (live support was showing always Offline) however they have Client Area so maybe answers can be found from there. They have published FAQ section of installation problems and they are running online forum. Based on Hot Scripts portal feedbacks their technical support problems seems to be come across recently (2008) with probable expansion as previous comments has been always positive.
Their End User agreement says that ClipShare Product is registered trademark of ScriptXperts however either the EUL or their website didn’t had any company information and their liability maximum is $5.
Feb 17, 2008 by Veiko HernecloseAuthor: Veiko HerneName: Veiko Herne Email: veikoherne@hotmail.com Site:http://veikoh.wordpress.com About: Veiko Herne is lifetime entrepreneur, currently working as Independent Consultant with over 30 years experience in IT and starting his activities in Internet since 1993. After establishing and managing one of the most successful IT companies in Estonia after the collapse of Soviet Union, he later managed worldwide interest to his analytical financial accounting and HR management software packages from New York until September 11th. He is currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland.See Authors Posts (10)Social Networks
WebNetwork is a social networking software platform developed to communicate between fans, filmmakers and musicians. It is developed by Web Scribble www.webscribble.com
The system contains following areas: Profile, Film, Music, Blog, Groups, Events, Videos and Photos.
It has been developed by Web Scribble Solutions, Inc, a 15 employees company based on US, Upstate New York, Albany. Other products of Web Scribble Solution are: Web Date, Web Jobs, Web Store and Web Classifieds.
It’s written in php 4.12, runs in Linux and Apache servers and needs Zend optimizer 2.62 and MySql database to be installed in the server. Web Scribble promises free installation service when purchasing the license but I assume that the installation could not take more than Uncompressing the files and directories and creating the database.
Usability
Registering and creating the profile is simple but you need to decide, do you want to be a filmmaker, a musician or a just a member. Filmmakers and Musician profiles will appear on separate sections from members.
Personal profile will contain following areas: Basic Info (such as name, gender, birth date and address), About Me, Interest and Lifestyle questions. I didn’t find any customization features for those in Administration module so I assume the need for some Database and programming skills to modify the profile fields.
For profile photo you should upload it to your picture gallery and mark it as profile photo from there which was little bit odd as I had need to classify the description and search tags for it assuming that this photo will be also searchable.
Profiles can be set for Auto Approval or system administrators must approve pending profiles. Others where able to comment your profile which was a feature I wasn’t able to set off in the administration module and I wasn’t able to delete or moderate those comments. Anything once spammed will probably stay there forever.
LiteCommerce is a compact e-commerce and shopping cart commercial software developed by Qualiteam Software. Their other product lines are X-cart shopping cart software for more comprehensive e-commerce needs, Sales’n Stats and Hacker Proof/Hacker Guardian.
Get News by RSS feed