John Watson, the man behind the many fun photo-related web applications at BigHugeLabs was feeling a little down last week, and in response he produced yet another web app. But this one is a little different; while his other web apps often provide inspiration as a by-product of other actions, Watson's latest site, dubbed Ideas, is intended as a source of inspiration as a primary focus.

When you visit Ideas, you are presented with a large search box, beside which sits a button that simply states, "inspire me!" Type in a word, and the site will present you with a series of sets of information that is somehow related to the word entered. If you're feeling bereft of ideas for even a word to enter, a few examples are provided such as love, beauty, sorrow, yes, red, winter, home, africa, kiss.

Depending on the word you enter, Ideas may or may not be able to find examples of the following types:

• Famous quote
• Creative Commons licensed photos from Flickr
• Color swatches from COLOURlovers.com
• Songs from Last.fm
• Related words from BigHugeLabs.com
• Videos from YouTube.com
• Listings from Etsy.com
• Bookmarks from Delicious.com
• Article from Wikipedia.com

What a great way for creative people that are looking for a little boost in the inspiration department to start with a specific word and serendipitously follow a trail to something that may well inspire them.

Couldn't make it to Future of Web Apps in Miami? No problem, we've got you covered. Wordpress.com's Matt Mullenweg just left the stage after dropping mad science on what it takes to scale a major league web application.

There's no way we could summarize everything Matt said on the how and why behind scaling Wordpress.com but, here are a few (rough) notes:

• Do the easy things first. For example, before throwing more hardware at your application, try building a proxy wall with Squid.
• Wp-Cache can do quite a bit for mid-scale blogs. (We recommended WP-Cache on The Squadcast in episode 11)
• Really large scale applications can't live without Memcached.

Need to find an image hosting service, online spreadsheet, or task management solution? Simple Spark can help.

Simple Spark aims to be for web applications what Google is for pretty much everything else online. The site has an index of more than 3000 web applications, covering everything from online travel services to accounting and investing web sites.

Each web app includes a brief description, a few screenshots, and reviews when available. It'd be nice if you could sort your search results by popularity. For example, when you search the photos category, Flickr shows up at the bottom of the list, even though a number of other services built around Flickr, such as 123flickr , show up near the top.

If you register for a free account, you can bookmark web applications and save them to a "Simple Sparks My Apps" folder so you can easily find them again later.

[via TechCrunch]

Would you like to get into the minds of some of Google's leading software engineers and creators of some of the applications you use? Developer Day is coming!

Google will hold Google Developer Day around the globe starting May 31. It will consist of workshops, keynotes, and breakout discussions on Google API's and developer tools. The theme of the event will be "Building Blocks for Better Web Applications", and will explore some innovative uses of Google developer products. The sessions will also go over how to create and enhance applications that can be integrated with Google services.

Google Developer Day will take place in Google offices and offsite locations in:

• Mountain View
• Sao Paulo
• Madrid
• London
• Paris
• Hamburg
• Moscow
• Beijing
• Tokyo
• Sydney

To register for the event, visit the Google Developer Day website.

Adobe's just-launched Apollo platform could be the ticket to a whole new world of applications according to TechCrunch's Michael Arrington. He writes of the announcement, "I honestly believe that entirely new classes of companies can be built on this platform, which takes Flash, HTML and javascript completely outside of the browser and interacts with the file system on a PC."

You can pick up your free (as in beer) copy of the Apollo Alpha SDK and follow Arrington's admonishment to "go build something". Adobe's stated target is "allowing web developers to build and deploy web applications to the desktop", which could help define a whole new class of network aware applications. While Apollo promises to be a cross-platform environment, although support for Linux isn't expected until sometime after the full 1.0 release; a real shame given its incredible potential.

We're interested in anything Apollo related, so if you spot the first examples of Apollo applications in the wild, hit our tip box and let us know the skinny, dig?

[via TechCrunch]

In this issue of Googleholic we cover:

• Google Map Search gadget
• Grannies and Google Coupons
• Google Music Trends
• Brazil sues Google
• Google Anniversary
• Writely is open for business
• China.com teams with Google

Welcome to Friday's Googleholic edition...

Zoho offers a complete line of powerful office suite and productivity tools, all through the use of a browser.

The Zoho toolset includes:

• Zoho Show - online presentation
• Zoho Writer - word processor
• Zoho Sheet - spreadsheet application
• Zoho Virtual Office - email, document and calendar
• Zoho CRM - CRM
• Zoho Creator - create web applications
• Zoho Planner - Online organizer
• Zoho Chat - chat

Zoho also has a set of online utilities including website monitoring software, and online poll solutions.

Online applications that run in the browser is part of this whole Web 2.0 social software era, and it looks like Zoho is in the forefront with a great complete application list. They have almost any application you would require to run your business directly from your browser. And Free! Zoho produces pretty much all of their applications with a $0 price tag.

They do give access to demo versions before you decide to signup and try their browser based tools. So check them out, they look really good!

[via TechCrunch]