If your into going away or doing things with your mates you may be interested in this site particularly if all your friends are scattered around the country. A fairly simple concept, Wigadoo lets you propose a “to do idea” and then get your friends to agree on a date and then collect the money. Fairly simple really so here is how we thought about using the site:

• Your the best man and you’ve been asked to organise the stag do
• Your not sure where to go so you put a few suggestions in the system
• You invite everyone to vote on what to do
• Once you know what to do you vote on a date
• Then you get everyone to pay up front directly to the site and the money is then credited to your prepaid payment card
• No more arguments and chasing up payments

The site is fairly simple and easy to use and we quite liked it. They do take a percentage of what is paid into the account but it really is not that much if you want avoid the pain and hassle of chasing people up.

Three stars for Wigadoo.com – a good idea but if they thought up a way to get everyone to pay up on time that would be great.

Wigadoo.com is an online tool for social organisation which enables
users to organise social events easily and manage the group’s money
securely.

Hectic lifestyles and current financial pressures mean that organising
groups of people can be time-consuming, complicated and often costly.
Wigadoo.com makes the process simpler, quicker and safer so that people
end up doing more, with more friends, more often.

Wigadoo.com believes that people should spend as much time with their
friends as possible. Recently, Wigadoo discovered that 37% of people
admit they’re afraid of initiating nights out or weekends away because
of fears their friends would pull out last minute, leaving them out of
pocket. People still want to holiday together but with minimum risk and
loss to their own wallets.

How can Wigadoo.com fix this? The website is an innovative, yet simple
tool which helps you organise and manage your social activities with
your group of friends, without the pain of chasing mates for commitment.
The website also has a distinct feature which collects the money from
the group, by allocating everyone’s money onto an online event account.
Once the booking is confirmed, the online card is issued. Paying for
tickets, flights, hotels, etc has never been this easy.

For more information on what Wigadoo can do for you and your mates,
visit www.wigadoo.com

If you have ever tried to find an electrician or plumber you know that there are a number of cowboys out there willing to take your money but not do the job very well. Up until now I’ve used yell to find a tradesman and to be honest the results have been mixed.

Quotatis is not a new site (originally called EasyquoteUK) but it does seem to offer a solution to a number of problems as follows:

• What do I need doing?
• Where can I find the right person?
• What is it going to cost?
• Can I trust them?

The system is fairly simple, enter your postcode and details of the work you want doing and the leads will be passed to the relevant people in your area. (Up to five). The tradespeople will then contact you to find out more details and hopefully give the right quote. All the tradespeople listed are vetted by quotatis so you don’t have to do the checking if you don’t want to.

As we can’t fully test the site as we don’t require a quote we are giving it a three star rating – if we had known about it last week though when we had a job we would definitely of given it a go.

The only thing the site misses we think is the ability to check your area before you submit an enquiry – after all if your postcode only has one tradesman in it you may be waiting a long time for quotes. I would also be nice to see who your enquiry is going to and the reviews they have had.

Please tell us if you have used the service – the more you let us know how good or bad a site is the better whatsgoodontheweb.co.uk becomes.

Quotatis – a good three star site – to read more details please follow the read more link after the ad.

Info for tradespeople:

As a tradesman the site costs you to join but if you are looking for extra work in your area that Yellow pages doesn’t provide I would suggest giving these guys a go – you only pay per lead (not sure of cost) but it is not a bad way of getting new business. In addition by joining you get a free web site and a few discounts.

From the site

Quotatis (www.quotatis.co.uk) is an online service that connects consumers with tradespeople and service providers in the local area.

Users looking for builders, plumbers, electricians or help with home improvements submit a brief job specification on the website. Quotatis will then pass on the details to up to five businesses that match the request who will then call the customer to discuss the project in greater detail. This allows the consumer to compare quotes, timeframes and levels of service from different companies before deciding which one they would like to employ.

Importantly though, a stringent vetting procedure is also in place to ensure tradesmen using the Quotatis service are of the highest standard and comply with any regulations within their trade. All companies recommended must be a member of a trade organisation or compliance scheme to provide the customer with complete peace of mind. This ensures consumers don’t hire rogue tradesmen or cowboy builders, so their money won’t go to waste at a time when credit crunch fears mean we’re all watching our pennies!

Our editor claims not to have a drink problem but we are slightly suspicious. We recently put out a call to all those PR agencies out there for web sites for us to take a look at and low and behold as soon as Mixxit appeared the editor was straight on the site.

When all is said and done what we all want is a site that is relatively simple to use and can help us empty out those leftovers in the drinks cabinet and we think Mixxit has a great idea.

Simply go to the mixselector section and select the drink of choice using the arrows – in this example we shall use Vodka – select one of those left over mixers (Bols always seems a good idea when you buy it!!) and then select go. Hey presto a few drink suggestions appear – admittedly not always with the ingredients you wanted but it is a great idea.

We used this site at a party last weekend and found it to be a great way to sort out the drinks – no longer where we rooting around in the back of a cupboard for a book that had never been opened.

All in all a good site with some very useful functions. With Mixxit obviously the aim is to get you to buy stuff from the site but even just to visit it is a good idea. We’re giving the site three stars – it’s very good and has some great ideas in it but the choice of drinks is a bit limited. Please take some time to give the other sections a go – you can get top ten suggestion, say what style of drink you want and even save your favourites list.

If you like to travel but not sitting on a beach, going somewhere new can be a problem as you have no real idea what you can do when you get there. A fairly unknown site, Isango, hopes to solve this problem for all the jetsetters out there – it lets you search, and even book things to do whilst you are away.

Just to illustrate a simple example:

If you were travelling to California on holiday what would you do – Universal Studios? Rodeo Drive? Venice Beach? A simple search using the activities search engine throws up a few solutions:

• Disneyworld
• Seaworld
• Shopping
• Nights out

You can then follow the links and book the activity. Obviously Isango is making a profit on you pre booking but it is a really nice way to find out what is going on and actually give advice on what sort of people may like the activities.

The downside -

We’d actually like to see free things listed with the activities – What about a walk on Will Rodgers Beach or a advice on a nice resturant.

Overall we like the idea – a bit less heavy sell and more a place to stop by and I would be really happy to keeep coming back to the site – even better would be personal reviews of the activities and how they were rated – good, bad or indifferent.

I’d say Isango is a good three star site – the concept works for us and with a few more bits added I think this could be the next tripadvisor. If you have used the site please let us know in the comments section.

See the next page to read the Isango’s own description:

Overview
Isango! is an ambitious young company launched in October 2006. We offer both consumers and travel professionals an authoritative source of exciting and colorful experiences. Holiday tours, sightseeing, attractions, activities and best things to do in more than 50 countries across the world…to plan and book ahead. Isango! finds everything you need to make your travel experience unforgettable.

Our Dream
We, like you, are travellers who have come to expect that the online sites ought to offer much more than telling us what the best price is to get from A to B, or giving us a list of hotels in a particular city. There have got to be sites like that… but we think that online travel should move to the next level.

We believe we travel to do things, find out about cultures, people, places and see what the world has to offer. How many times have we come back raving about the great flight we had? Perhaps not that often… because we come back and talk about what we did there, how great the safari was, the fascinating drive through the wineries, or simply the great boat ride that we had. We talk about experiences.That is the purpose of our travel, that is why we board the flight, and endure it all the way, in the first place

This is where we felt online sources were not helping much. First, to tell you all about a destination – the stuff you need to know to ‘understand’ a place, and have a complete view of the experiences you can find over there. Then, to bring those products together under one roof for you to plan and book in the most convenient way

TrustedPlaces, is a local reviews social network that lets you search for, and find pubs, clubs, bars and places to eat whereever you live. Each of the listings has reviews from real people and what really they think of the places.

The only downside of the site is knowing if the reviews are real – there are far too many PR agencies writing reviews on clients not knowing that this could potentially be illegal. We generally liked the site, it was easy to find what you wanted and easy to navigate around particularly as when you want to find places to go you want to find them quickly.

The only downside is that the postcode search does not seem to work – trying to find somewhere in Cheshire it keeps giving us pubs in London !!! A long drive for a night out.

All in all we rate the site three star, it’s not the best and there could be lots more features added, but generally it is well liked – they already have lots of users and it could be the new way to sort out your next bar crawl or romantic dinner.