The once-frustrating process of sharing digital photos and videos has noticeably improved over the past year, thanks to seamless Web-based programs that work like desktop applications. But many of these sites give all the power to whoever created the album, leaving invited guests to simply look at photos or add comments.

Shwup by muvee Technologies gives friends a common album in which to share digital photos and videos.

This week I tested shwup (www.shwup.com), a free Web-based application that’s available starting Wednesday from muvee Technologies and works as described above with only a few pitfalls. The concept is simple: Anyone who signs up for a shwup account can create an album filled with digital photos and videos, and this album can be shared with anyone else via email whether they have a shwup account or not. Recipients of these email invitations can click on an embedded link to view and add content to the album. Or users can completely skip visiting the site and instantly upload content by replying to the email invitation with attached photos and videos.

Muvee Technologies is best known for selling software that automatically creates short movies, or muvees, by blending digital videos and photos with music and transitions. Muvee’s namesake technology is a part of the free shwup site; a few muvees are automatically generated in each of the albums and everyone who is invited to the album can create muvees using its content. But shwup’s main focus is making sharing easier for everyone. It differs from most of the company’s software programs in that it’s free and completely Web-based.

A shwup album takes just a few minutes to set up and even less time to share. It works on Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox 2.0 and 3.0 browsers but won’t work on Apple’s (AAPL) Safari until the fall. Shwup is available Wednesday but is still technically in its beta, or testing, phase, and I ran into a few kinks. I had trouble getting its useful reply-to-email uploading capability to work when two friends and I tried to upload content to my album using attachments in email replies. My friends had to visit the site to upload content. Muvee couldn’t figure out what went wrong when I asked the company about it.

I did, however, add content to someone else’s album using the reply-to-email method, uploading a digital photo in seconds. And in another instance I received a shwup email invitation on my BlackBerry and replied to it with an attached photo, which — in seconds — sent that photo from my BlackBerry to the specified shwup album.

Shwup automatically makes muvees, or short movies with music and transitions, using album content.

A glaring omission from shwup is the ability to view photos in full-screen view, a feature that most photo-sharing programs offer in slideshow mode. A friend of mine said he would use shwup over other photo-sharing Web sites that require user names and passwords if only it had full-screen photos. Muvee recognizes this as one of shwup’s biggest issues and says it will add this feature in August.

I uploaded over 60 high-resolution digital photos into my first shwup album, noting that the only limitation on files is that no individual file can be larger than 100 megabytes. These images can come from your computer, Flickr, Facebook or any Web site. Out of curiosity, I plugged www.cnn.com into the Web site entry box and shwup automatically grabbed images from the site that were available for me to use. I checked two of the images and they were added to my album in seconds.

Shwup automatically made and added three muvees to my album, using my photos put to music it chooses with dramatically timed transitions. These short clips looked really well-done, and were labeled as “sample muvees” so as not to be confused with my content. I followed a few simple steps to create a muvee of my own for the album by dragging photos into a tray, choosing from seven different layout styles and a handful of stock music licensed by shwup.

An option lets you upload your own music to play with your muvee, which I did. Seconds later, my homemade muvee played with transitions that were perfectly timed to the beats of a Fountains of Wayne song. After filling an album with digital photos, videos and muvees that I made, I invited friends to my album using emails generated from shwup.com. Within each album, a clear list of whoever was invited to the album can be seen on the top right side of the page. If someone hasn’t shared content yet, he or she can be “poked” by anyone invited to the album, sending them yet another email invitation.

Everyone invited to an album receives notifications from shwup whenever someone contributed content to the album and everyone can change the layout of the album to one of three settings: Grid, Simple or Mosaic. Moving my cursor over an album’s images showed data about each file including who contributed the photo or video, when it was captured and how many comments it had received in the album. (Comments are readable after clicking on an image to see a bigger version of it.)

Digital videos are labeled with small Play icons to distinguish them from digital still images. But a friend who uploaded a video to my album pointed out that the still image representing his video was a gray square rather than a still of the first scene as it did with the other videos — perhaps because this is where the camera was focused at the start of the video. Without an image to illustrate what the video was, it wasn’t as appealing as the other videos and images. Muvee explained that the ability to select a still image to represent a video was available in its pay software, but not yet in shwup, though the company plans to add this to shwup in the future.

Another hitch: If you invite someone to your album and then add something to the album you’d rather they not see, you can’t un-invite the person. Muvee says it plans to add the ability to un-invite members in July. Individual contributors have the ability to delete or “unshare” the content that they added to an album, while album creators can unshare and delete all pictures or entire albums. Album creators also are given the authority to merge albums.

Along with shwup, muvee also announces a new version of its downloadable pay software Wednesday: muvee Reveal. This $100 software has much more detailed features that specifically tweak your videos to become extra personalized.

When it works, shwup serves as a neat, artistic way to share photos quickly. Friends and family will be relieved that it doesn’t require any forgettable usernames and passwords, and the email-uploading tool will make anyone who knows how to attach something to an email feel like he or she can contribute to a photo-sharing Web site without a second thought. After shwup adds its full-screen photo-viewing option and clears up the glitches of its email-uploading feature, I’ll be using shwup for many group events to come.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

This week I tested SeeToo, a free service that lets you share videos in the same time that it takes to open and watch them on your own computer. Even better, you get to watch the video along with the people with whom you’re sharing it and type comments to each other in real time.

SeeToo works when one user selects a video to share with other people, who get an emailed hyperlink to SeeToo’s Web site, seetoo.com. After opening the link, these people join a SeeToo session during which everyone can watch the same video at the same time.

With SeeToo, you and your “buddy” can watch and chat about a video at the same time.

While the video is playing for the group, each viewer can pause, rewind and fast-forward the video. A space below the playback screen allows friends to send instant messages to one another during the session. There aren’t any limits to the size or type of video file that is shared, and other types of media — including music and photos — can also be shared on SeeToo without size restrictions.

SeeToo sounds too good to be true, and in many of my tests, it was. The service became available to the public in January in its beta, or test, stage. But I’ve used many other products in beta that were in better shape than SeeToo. And there is one major catch: Once a video-sharing session is over, the participants, other than the person sharing, can no longer access the video.

People who are invited to watch videos on the service can do so using any popular Web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari) on Windows (MSFT) computers and Macs (AAPL). But the person actually supplying the video and initiating the sharing session can use only a Windows PC. The initiator also must download a browser plug-in, which seems old-fashioned in the world of Web-based applications. And sharing sessions time out after 15 minutes of inactivity on the initiator’s side, after which point the email link doesn’t work.

I was able to successfully initiate a SeeToo session using Firefox and Internet Explorer on an older Windows XP computer but had trouble with two computers running Windows Vista: Neither worked with SeeToo using Internet Explorer and only one worked using Firefox. SeeToo says this is due in part to Microsoft’s new Service Pack 1 for Vista, and the company claims it will have this problem fixed by today. I also had trouble with the sound.

The concept behind SeeToo is also somewhat limiting. Some people may not be able to watch a video exactly when someone else wants to watch it. Some might rather watch videos alone than with others. And typing out back-and-forth chats while videos are playing could be somewhat of a distraction from watching the video.

I tested SeeToo by sharing video with family and friends and watching video they shared. My sister and I got a kick out of watching video footage from a wedding I attended in October. I shot the video using an inexpensive, low-resolution Flip Video camera and the footage looked pretty good. But SeeToo’s site shares video on a rather small screen, and we both wished it were larger.

We sent instant messages to one another in a small space below the screen, making comments about the guests’ dance moves and the DJ’s choice of music. I used on-screen tools to pause the video when the camera passed by a friend whom I wanted my sister to see. To take a second look, she selected her screen’s Take Control button and rewound the footage to see my friend.

For the first two seconds of a video, users can see a small image in the top right corner of their screen that displays what the other people are seeing. SeeToo explained that this is a way of confirming one person is indeed seeing the same screen as another person.

I originally invited three people to watch the video with me. One friend I invited was at work, where his computer restricts him from watching videos. When he got home that night, the email hyperlink didn’t work — nor did it explain that the session had expired. Instead, it crashed his Firefox browser. I also invited my boss to watch the video with me, but he only saw my invitation two hours later when the session was over.

I didn’t even try to invite my parents to see the video because neither of them sit in front of a computer all day long and they wouldn’t have received my invitation in time to see the video.

In some ways, it was probably better that the other people I invited to watch the video weren’t able to see it, because the instant-message chat screen currently labels everyone as “buddy,” without distinguishing one person from another. SeeToo hopes to change this in future versions of the service by offering users a chance to register, thus receiving a specific nickname for chatting purposes. As of now, no one who uses SeeToo needs to enter any personal information such as a name or email address, which is a plus. SeeToo is also ad-free as of now, but the company plans to monetize parts of the service sometime this summer.

I also shared music and photos with friends using SeeToo, but this feature isn’t obvious; the site is primarily focused on sharing videos. Music playlists can’t currently be shared with friends, nor can photo slideshows be shared. Instead, individual songs or photos must be selected and shared within a session, one at a time.

SeeToo has high hopes of adding many features in the future, probably by June. Those features include a full-size, higher-resolution viewing screen for sharing and watching videos; a fully Web-based, download-free version of SeeToo; photo slideshows; using names to distinguish viewers; and sharing sessions that don’t time out. In addition, it hopes to let Mac users initiate sharing sessions. The site aims to be out of its testing stage by September.

Right now, SeeToo can come in handy if you know someone else is at a computer and ready to watch a video. The invited guest never downloads anything and neither party needs to register to use SeeToo. But its screen is a bit on the small side, and the service needs to become more versatile before it can be seen as a reliable sharing site.

• Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

A query on hotels in Italy might lead you to select a link about Florence, then two links about Michelangelo and four links to Italian Renaissance art. Suddenly, the home page for a carefully researched hotel is forgotten. It’s especially tough to backtrack through research using new sites with rich Web 2.0 features that display extra data directly within a Web page.

Some people try to organize Web research by opening Microsoft Word documents alongside their browsers. They copy and paste data from sites into the documents, but this is usually a messy process that traps users into wasting time fixing formats and deleting ads. Others press Print whenever a helpful site appears, resulting in wasted paper and ink. Savvier users create folders within their Web browsers that hold multiple URLs about a research topic, but these data can’t easily be shared or printed for use away from the PC.

The HP Smart Web Printing Software gathers Web content into one document that can be printed.

There’s a better way, and this week I took it for a spin. I tested the HP Smart Web Printing Software, a free program from Hewlett-Packard Co. that aims to help users compile a virtual clip book of content from Web sites while they’re browsing, within the same window. Using a tool in the browser, users highlight and copy images and text from a Web page and add them to the clip book. These clips can be edited, enhanced, saved as a PDF or printed out, without excess banner ads or sidebars.

I tried a version of this program that will be available for download at the end of next month from www.hp.com/go/smartwebprinting. It improves on the first version of the program (available now using the same URL) in various ways, including allowing you to add your own text to the clip book and crop clip-book items.

HP Smart Web Printing Software isn’t without its quirks: It only works on Windows computers, not Macs, and only with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6.0 and 7.0. Not everything copies over to the clip book perfectly. Also, typed-in text has its limits: changing the font type, size or color of one word changes all words in the text box.

But all in all, I found this smart program to be a real boon. It’s unobtrusive enough to stay hidden until used, and you’ll remember how it works even if you only use the program once in a while. It functions as a printing assistant, helping to send certain sections of a Web site to the printer, and it will also save whatever you’re working on as a PDF — the universal format for sharing with others.

H-P likes to tout its HP Smart Web Printing Software’s environmentally friendly qualities, namely its ability to print just what you want, without wasting ink or paper on extra pages that would otherwise print. But make no mistake about it: This product, while helping users not to print extra items from Web sites, still encourages users to print, thus helping H-P sell more of its high-margin ink and paper.

I used the program to trim content from Web sites, printing more of what I wanted to read in fewer pages. I focused on this program’s clip-book functionality, which works as a bare-bones virtual scrapbook to organize research.

I downloaded and used the newest version of this free program on computers running Windows Vista and XP operating systems. I came across a few items that, when highlighted and moved over to the clip book, didn’t actually move, but most of the text and image clips moved without a problem. H-P explained that some images are rendered on Web sites in such a way so as to not be copied for copyright and protection purposes.

A small HP Smart Select icon appears in the Internet Explorer command bar after this program is downloaded; selecting it toggles its highlighting capability on or off. By default, the clip book is hidden from view, but a quick change in settings opens this on the right edge of the Internet Explorer window.

The HP Smart Web Printing program proved useful for online-shopping research. I’ve been gathering a lot of information from various Web sites to find a special new handbag for work, including which bag is sold where, how much it costs and what it looks like.

When I saw a bag that interested me, I selected it by holding the left mouse button down and moving my cursor over the text or image. Releasing the left mouse button automatically opens a tiny drop-down menu with two simple options: clip (place in the clip book) or print (send directly to the printer). Items that I clipped were moved into the right panel clip book in order of most recently added items at the top.

A helpful checkbox appeared beside each item in the clip book; items without checkmarked boxes weren’t visible when I edited clips. Within the editing screen, I dragged and dropped images around the page, organizing bags in ascending price order. I resized photos to make them smaller or larger and cropped a couple shots such as an image of a black leather bag with an unrelated text description below it.

I filled the equivalent of two clip-book pages with images of bags and brief descriptions of each, copied directly from store sites. I added my own text boxes in to write my impressions. As I worked, opening the edit screen and closing it to return to the browser, I clicked on a simple Save button so my work wouldn’t be lost each time I closed this screen. When finished, I selected one button to save the document as a PDF, which I could email to friends for their feedback on which bag they liked best.

In another test, I assembled a clip book filled with various news blurbs about presidential campaigns from online sites including WSJ.com and CNN.com before printing a single page that included bits and pieces from each in a neat format without ads on the page.

I also tried organizing a few maps in the clip book; these copied from Google Maps and Yahoo Maps without a problem, and in one instance I cropped a map to include just the section of Manhattan where The Wall Street Journal is located.

The more I used this program, the more I wished it offered the ability to work with two clip books at once. For instance, if I was planning a trip and was researching hotels and tourist attractions at the same time, I could clip the hotel data into one book and store the touristy information in the other.

H-P says it will release a version of this program for Mozilla’s Firefox browser sometime in the next six months, and it also hopes to introduce a version that is compatible with Apple’s Safari browser within a year.

The HP Smart Web Printing program is a useful free solution that organizes online research right in your browser. Its ability to modify and preview documents before printing is also a help.

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

(See Corrections & Amplifications item below.)

Most shoppers would admit to, at one time or another, looking for an item based on seeing it worn by a celebrity. No matter that most of us don’t remotely resemble celebrities, nor do we share their shrewd fashion sense or Hollywood budget. We know that the objects seen on camera start trends.

But without the superstar luxury of a personal shopper, most of us don’t know where to begin looking for the necklace we saw Jennifer Aniston wearing at her latest movie premiere.

Starting today, a new Web site called Like.com (www.like.com) hopes to help solve this problem. It displays recent photos of about a thousand celebrities (mostly female), with a focus on their purse, jewelry, shoes or watch — but not their clothing. Beside a close-up of the celebrity item, Like.com shows similar products with different price tags and/or different brands, along with a link to buy the product online.

Like.com, by Riya, is a visual search engine that lets you search for products such as those worn by celebrities.

The idea behind Like.com is simple enough, but the technology that makes it possible is quite complicated. Like.com comes from a visual search engine called Riya, which works by studying one image and finding others that match it. Like.com also lets you pinpoint the specific part of the image that you like, and can search with extra emphasis on color, shape or pattern.

Like.com is a free site that runs on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 and 7 as well as Mozilla Firefox versions 1.5 and 2.0. The company also says it will most likely work on Apple’s Safari browser. It worked well for us on these browsers.

For the past week, we’ve been dodging glances from suspecting co-workers while shopping online using Like.com, testing its ability to find products like those last seen with our favorite luminaries. We like its clean setup, and it makes great use of technology that lets the site act like a software program all its own. We even found watches and handbags that we might buy down the line.

But we did have a few complaints. You can’t click on any picture anywhere on the Web to start your visual search; you have to start with the limited supply of celebrity photos on the Like.com site. The company says it is working on a browser toolbar that will allow you to use any picture on any Web page, and will soon allow you to upload a picture of your choice as a starting point.

Also, the small images of some celebrity products made it hard for us to know whether we liked the watch or jewelry enough to start a search for something like it.

Today, Like.com displays about four million product images. We started in watches and found a photo of Kate Moss wearing a handsome watch with a black leather band and a square, white face. A box drawn around the watch in the photo meant that it was an item we could search for on Like.com. The phrase “Likeness Search” also appeared below each watch, and when selected, this link started a new search for watches similar to that above.

Selecting the box took us to a new Web page, where Kate Moss’s watch was displayed on the left with its price ($150) and brand name (Croton). On the right, watches similar to Kate’s were shown, including a $75 Kenneth Cole, a $750 Gucci and a $2,000 New Longines DolceVita watch. The price and brand were listed below each, along with a link to a Web site where the watch was sold.

We used our cursor to draw a box around the feature in Kate Moss’s watch that we liked — its face. A pop-up window asked if we wanted to focus on the shape, color or shape and color of our boxed image; choosing shape generating 8,721 results for watches with square faces.

The Like.com page contains a lot of data, but is clean and uncluttered. At the top of each page, three sliders can be adjusted to narrow the search’s focus on color, shape or pattern. Along the left side, another slider can adjust price range and a color grid helps you to find products in the right hue. A Show Only section narrows your search to show only certain brands, styles, sizes or sites where the products are sold.

Searches can also be started the old-fashioned way, by typing text into a box. You can also search for items by starting with a specific celebrity, or by just browsing through products.

Like.com was missing a few simple things. We couldn’t adjust our search results to view products in ascending or descending price range; instead, the items most similar to your searched item appear first. And as we searched through product after product, we found ourselves wanting to bookmark our finds; placing them into a folder that we could return to later, but this isn’t yet possible.

We searched through Like.com’s jewelry, shoes and handbags, finding that jewelry had the least-accurate results. But we were pleased with handbags, after doing some tweaking and finding numerous satchels, like a $260 Monsac handbag shown with actress Angie Harmon.

The Like.com site is only in a testing phase and is still being fine-tuned, meaning improvements can be made quickly. This Web site won’t turn you into a celebrity, but it gives you the ability to see something you like in a photo and find it online quickly. We think shoppers and gift-buying friends alike will find Like.com useful.

Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com.

Corrections & Amplifications:

The Web site Like.com mostly displays items for sale that are similar to those shown in celebrity photos. This column implied that the site identified and offered for sale the actual items worn by model Kate Moss and actress Angie Harmon. The company says its site gave the impression that it was displaying the actual items rather than just similar items and will post a clarification.

Most of us know the frustrations associated with using someone else’s computer — whether while traveling for business without your own laptop, pausing in the computer lab at school or just fiddling around on our sister’s PC during a visit. Using someone else’s computer offers a temporary solution, but you’ll most likely find yourself hunting around the foreign PC for your favorite programs, grumbling under your breath about why a newer version of Microsoft Word isn’t installed and wondering why a 35-year-old still has teddy bears on her desktop background.

What if you could use another person’s computer with the settings, applications and data from your own PC? You would have your files and could use your applications to open and work on those files, along with the convenience of your personalized settings, favorites and desktop designs.

This week, we tested a new product from RingCube Technologies Inc. called MojoPac. This software program gives you a way to pack up your computer’s digital “mojo” and take it with you on any USB storage device, including a small thumb drive or even an iPod. You use the hardware, operating system and Internet connection of the host computer, but run everything else from your USB device.

A view of the computer screen before MojoPac takes over your host computer.

A few other products, including one called Migo, offer similar functionality. But, unlike Migo, MojoPac lets you carry around your own programs, not just data files.

MojoPac sounded too good to be true, but for the most part, it actually worked as promised. Privacy is a big plus for MojoPac, as your files remain on your thumb drive or iPod, and never transfer to the host PC’s hard disk. Similarly, your entire browsing history and all cookies remain on the portable device.

There is a catch, however: A few aspects of this program are a little too geeky for the average person, it is slow to perform some tasks, and it crashed one of our computers during a test. Also, it doesn’t support making Microsoft Office portable, unless you have a corporate or institutional license.

But the company claims it is hoping to make the geekier parts of MojoPac more user-friendly in its next software update, and is working on allowing average consumers to carry their copies of Office with them. MojoPac only works with Windows XP programs as of now.

Another limitation: the storage space available on a portable device. A small thumb drive is unlikely to hold many programs, or a lot of space-hogging data. A large-capacity iPod would be roomy, unless it is crammed with music and videos.

MojoPac can be downloaded from www.MojoPac.com using a free 30-day trial period. Before Nov. 16, MojoPac costs $30 with up to three additional licenses for $15 each; after this introductory period, the cost goes up to $50 and each of the three additional licenses is $25.

We tested MojoPac first by using one of the most common USB storage devices available: an Apple iPod, specifically the two-gigabyte nano. Your iPod must be formatted for manual use, which is easy enough to do in iTunes. The idea is to use the leftover space on any iPod, the part not occupied by music and other media, to store your portable programs and files.

But RingCube also suggests that you optimize, or speed up, the iPod for use with MojoPac. Though this adjustment only needs to be done one time, it’s a five-step process of digging through menus on your PC that most normal people would be too intimidated to open. We couldn’t even find our iPod listed to optimize it in one test.

After entering some data about ourselves on the MojoPac Web site, we downloaded a copy of MojoPac, making sure to save it onto our iPod rather than the computer’s hard drive.

A Data Copy feature walked us through a straightforward process of deciding what we could copy over to the MojoPac device; we simply check-marked files that we wanted to copy. The transferable data included browser settings for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, as well as common files and folders for My Pictures, My Music and My Videos. Files and folders that weren’t listed by default could also be transferred.

As we checked off the files that we wanted to copy to our MojoPac device, a small pie chart showed how much space was taken or still available for storage. Even without music, our iPod filled up fast, preventing it from holding our large My Music folder.

When we tried this with a two-gigabyte USB thumb drive, we also had to ditch any thoughts of carrying our music. But we were surprised when the program warned us that the 1.2 gigabytes of programs and files we planned to copy was a “HUGE” amount of data and could take a long time to transfer. Indeed, the copying process took 12 minutes.

Things were speedier on the iPod, which had been stripped of its normal music files for this test. In just five minutes, we copied just under two gigabytes of data onto our iPod nano. We entered our username and password for MojoPac and in a few seconds, the whole screen was taken over by a new desktop with the MojoPac “M” label. A special toolbar at the top of the screen read “Switch to Host”; when selected, we suddenly flashed back to our old desktop where the toolbar read “Switch to Mojo.”

The MojoPac view is meant to look and feel like a different computer from the normal look of the borrowed machine, and it does. Instead of the machine’s usual stuff, it held our own familiar data, including the My Pictures folder and Internet Explorer settings. And you can add new stuff to it without affecting the underlying computer. While in MojoPac view, we downloaded and installed the Firefox browser.

When you exit MojoPac and remove the thumb drive or iPod on which it resides, the borrowed computer returns to normal, without any of your own programs or files.

But there were a few downsides to MojoPac. Because space can be a problem if you have a lower-capacity USB drive, it would be helpful if the program offered a quick-glance view to show how much space you’ve used and how much remains.

Another issue sprouts up whenever you plug an iPod into a PC with iTunes installed because iTunes will automatically open. Therefore, to start MojoPac, you must dig into your My Computer folder, open the drive and open the MojoPac file. An automatic work-around would be much easier for most users.

At one point during testing, MojoPac crashed our computer. While it rebooted without a problem, this isn’t a good thing. In another instance, on a different host computer, MojoPac refused to quit. After 15 minutes of waiting for it to exit, we physically removed the thumb drive on which it was loaded. But that corrupted some files and made it work poorly thereafter.

Also, we found it annoying that the company bundled a program we didn’t want, a messaging application for gamers, placing it on our iPod.

If you have any security programs like Zone Alarm installed on your host PC to warn you whenever a program wants to go online, you’ll get pop-up warnings from the host, even when you are in MojoPac’s environment.

The core of this product is smart and quite useful, but it needs some work to be as simple and reliable as it should be.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com.

Two of the biggest phenomena in pop culture have been the “American Idol” TV show and the plethora of Web sites that depend on user-generated content, such as eBay, Craigslist.org and YouTube.com. People love to try out for “Idol,” and to vote for those who make it. And they love to submit entries to Web sites.

So, what if you could combine those two forms and create performance contests on the Web instead of on TV? That way, anyone could enter, or vote, or even create a contest, without the need for a TV network, judges or any other barriers.

This week, we had a fun time testing a Web site that does just that. The free site, called Bix.com, officially launched today. It hosts contests that include “American Idol”-style stuff like singing, but can range beyond that into comedy, photography, art, lip-synching or even writing.

Bix.com, a free new Web site, lets you enter a competition by choosing from a list of existing contests or by creating your own contest.

The Bix strategy is rather simple: You can either create a contest yourself or participate in an existing contest, and Bix members can vote for you using a thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon. All you need to view entries and vote is a computer connected to the Web. To enter the singing or comedy contests, only a Web camera and microphone are required — devices that are increasingly being built into new computers.

We fooled around with the Bix.com Web site, creating contests of our own, joining existing contests, voting for participants and easily emailing links for certain entertaining entries to our friends. Each process — signing up, creating a contest, entering a contest — only takes a minute. This means you can pay full attention to the site’s entertainment factor, and we think this will make users really enjoy using it.

Currently, the Bix Web site is ad-free, depending for revenue solely on corporate-sponsored contests, which run alongside contests users can start at no charge. These contests are created when a company pays Bix to use its site to host a competition, and the contest winner gets a cash prize paid by the sponsor — not Bix. (Normal contests needn’t carry a prize, and most don’t.) Bix says it will seek alternative revenue sources, including advertisements on its site and user-generated ringtones — yes, this could mean hearing yourself sing when your cellphone rings.

Some contestants were truly talented, while others definitely should keep their day jobs. The types of contests revealed some of the creativity that Bix is tapping, including a beauty contest for “Cutest Pet,” a photography contest for “Funniest Sign” and a comedy contest for the funniest 60-second act. Anyone can view the Bix contest entries, but only Bix users can vote or add comments about an entry.

Songs and lyrics are loaded onto the site for karaoke competitions.

For one of our favorite Bix examples, see: http://www.bix.com/entry/383. It’s an amateur rendition of the Martina McBride song “My Baby Loves Me,” done with plenty of heart and style.

Bix provides the tools for lip-synching and karaoke competitions: music and lyrics for about 2,100 songs are loaded on the site and can appear on-screen, karaoke-style, while you sing along. A built-in application automatically opens to record audio and/or video using Mac or Windows operating systems and their browsers — Mozilla FireFox, Internet Explorer and Safari.

We signed up easily by entering only our email address, a Bix user name and a password. The site offers simple options to enter or create a contest. If you choose to enter a contest a list is opened, revealing all existing contests (past contests also can be accessed). These were organized in a smart email-like format with a preview screen below so as to display thumbnail images of the entries for a selected contest.

Walt found and entered a photography contest called “Cars!” that was filled with 13 different images by simply choosing an Enter Contest option, uploading a photo of his favorite car, and adding a title and description of his photo. In a second, his image appeared alongside the others in the contest, where anyone could see it and other users could vote or comment on it. Now, images on the Bix Web site can’t be enlarged by selecting them, but Bix hopes to improve this.

Voting can be done by selecting an up or down thumb image near the contest’s description, and positive results are shown after you vote (each user is limited to one vote). Here, you can see the user names of those who vote positively for your entry. Your user profile, on another page, will show you a tally of the negative votes for contests that you’ve entered, but not the names of the users who gave you negative votes. We can understand that Bix wouldn’t want to reveal the negative voters by name so as to keep the peace on its site.

Katie also entered a contest called Lip-sync Idol, lip-synching to Celine Dion’s passionate song “I Drove All Night” using an iMac G5 with an Apple iSight camera on top. The software program within Bix automatically turned the iSight on and Katie could see the words and an image of her video recording as she went. She was able to play it back or rerecord it afterward before submitting it to Bix for the contest.

The problem with Web cameras is that even expert lip-synchers might look bad because of audio transmitting faster than visual movement. This happened at a few spots in Katie’s recording and in that of other users in the contest, making their lip movements look a beat behind the audio.

Creating our own contest was uncomplicated, too. We chose from a list of formats that included lip-synch, karaoke, dance, a cappella, comedy, art, photography, beauty, writing and other. Next, we chose whether to keep our contest private, by entering a limited list of email addresses, or to open it to the public. We then gave our contest a title (Scenic Photography) and a brief description before setting the start and end dates.

At any time, you can select your user name from the top right corner of the Bix.com site to see information about your profile, the contests you’ve entered and the contests you’ve started. You can also remove an entry when you don’t want it online anymore. Another option allows you to export your entry to your MySpace page or other Web site, so everyone can see your talent — not just those voting on Bix.com.

For now, winning a contest started by a regular user — not a corporation — just means earning satisfaction. But users who have created some contests already are giving away prizes of their own. Bix just announced a karaoke contest of its own with a $50,000 cash prize.

If you think you’re talented, or if you get a laugh just looking at those who think they are, you’ll enjoy Bix.com. It’s easy to get the hang of, and it has a lot of potential to expand. We think people of all ages with enjoy this user-friendly Web site.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com.

When it comes to smartphones that have a full keyboard and good email capability, Palm’s fast-selling Treo is the best. New devices are constantly being announced in hopes of becoming the “Treo killer.” Most of these challengers use Microsoft’s Windows Mobile software, formerly called Pocket PC, which was designed to evoke the Windows computer experience on a hand-held device.

None of these Microsoft-based devices has gained much traction, however. The most notable entry so far has been a hybrid gadget — a Treo that uses the Windows Mobile software, the 700w. But this model is mostly aimed at the computing staffs of big companies, who rigidly favor Microsoft products. For individual users, Palm still offers the Treo 650, which uses the Palm operating system and will soon be replaced by a newer Palm-based model capable of running on faster networks.

This week, we tested two of the latest Microsoft-based, would-be Treo killers: T-Mobile USA’s $400 MDA and Sprint Nextel Corp.’s $600 PPC-6700. (Both cost less when purchased with service plans.)

These new email phones have some very nice hardware features. But they suffer when compared with the Treo because of their Windows Mobile software, which often requires more clicks and greater menu navigation to get simple things done than the Palm-based Treo does.

Sprint PPC-6700 by Sprint Nextel Corp. $599.99. www.sprint.com.

The two devices are nearly identical. In fact, they’re really the same core device made by the same Asian manufacturer, HTC Corp. Sure, there are various small physical differences between the two, such as their different styluses and navigation buttons. But they both offer the same two striking features: a generous 2.8-inch color LCD screen that can switch automatically from portrait to landscape view; and a full QWERTY keyboard that slides out from behind this screen. Like the Treo, each offers Bluetooth short-range wireless networking. Unlike the Treo, they also offer Wi-Fi wireless networking.

The biggest difference is in their speeds over cellphone networks, and it’s a major distinction. Like the Windows-based Treo, and the forthcoming new Palm-based Treo, Sprint’s PPC-6700 works on an EV-DO network, a high-speed wireless broadband connection comparable with that of a home DSL line. T-Mobile’s MDA offers only EDGE, a drastically slower alternative that constantly reminded us that we were using a pokey mobile device, rather than a home computer.

The two devices have physically bigger screens than the Treos. But while their resolution — how much material they can display — is better than that of the Treo 700w, it’s actually less than on the Treo 650. The new contenders have much larger, roomier keyboards than the Treo does.

We tested most of the features in both devices without much trouble, synchronizing digital photos, Word documents, Internet Explorer Favorites and music files from a Dell desktop computer to each. Both have built-in 1.3-megapixel digital cameras, like that found on the Treo 700w, and the photos that we snapped around the office turned out surprisingly well. We sent them off in emails with a few simple steps.

We used each smartphone to place calls, and immediately noticed another deficiency compared with the Treo. Because the keyboards on these new models are typically hidden when the phones are held vertically, you are forced to tap soft keys on the screen to dial a phone number. With the Treo, the keyboard, which includes number keys for dialing, is always available.

The Sprint felt bulkier and more rectangular when held up to our ears compared with the T-Mobile MDA, which has more rounded-off edges. Their specs say that these two share roughly the same dimensions (about 4″ by 2″ by 1″), but the MDA’s tapered edges give it a better feel in your hand. The T-Mobile is also lighter than the Sprint, 5.29 compared with 6.1 ounces, respectively.

T-Mobile MDA by T-Mobile USA. $399.99. www.t-mobile.com

After sliding the full keyboard out, the screen view on each of the smartphones automatically switched to horizontal view for use with the keyboard. We preferred this view for Web browsing, as it offered a wider screenshot for each Web page and made it easy to type in new Web site addresses, using the keyboard.

We also tested email, which worked OK, though it was very slow on the T-Mobile device and we found the email software to be limited and clumsy compared with the Treo’s.

But it was difficult to use Windows Mobile on either device as we walked around or stood in a crowded subway. Many commands seemed to take multiple steps, and many of them required the use of the stylus, which was a pain to get out so often. By contrast, the Palm-based Treo has been engineered for minimum steps and one-handed use, with the stylus rarely required.

For instance, you can delete an email on the Palm-based Treo with just one keystroke. But, in Windows Mobile, you have to open a menu, and hit “Delete” — two keystrokes. Those extra motions really add up if you’re clearing out a lot of messages. And there are similar extra steps all over the interface.

T-Mobile’s MDA has two handy one-touch buttons at the top of its screen: one for mail and another for Internet Explorer. The Sprint didn’t have a direct access button for mail, and its Internet Explorer one-touch button was poorly positioned on the side, where we accidentally turned it on a few times — especially while sliding the keyboard back in.

Using the T-Mobile’s EDGE Internet access, it took our device a full 50 seconds to pull up the Journal’s home page, WSJ.com. The same page came up in its entirety using the Sprint PPC-6700’s EV-DO connection in only 25 seconds.

If you’re wowed by the larger screen, or need the roominess of the slide-out keyboard, these devices might appeal to you. But the T-Mobile MDA is slow; and the Sprint PPC-6700, while quite fast, is hampered by a bulky design and oddly placed navigational buttons. Both suffer from the extra steps, and frequent stylus use, dictated by their Windows software. On balance, neither of these devices offers the form and functionality of the Treo 650.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com

Doing school homework is often a task that incites groans, eye rolls and major frustration. And we’re just talking about parents. Kids and their parents, together, have long suffered through the anguish of trying to make sense of take-home assignments. Sometimes the student is confused, other times the parent is even more confused and in the worst cases both are lost.

This week, we tried a new Web-based learning service that aims to help with homework, marshaling a rich mix of video, audio, photos, text articles and step-by-step math instruction to make the job easier. It’s called Cosmeo, and it’s from the education division of Discovery Communications Inc., the big media company that owns the Discovery Channel, TLC and other cable TV networks.

Cosmeo (www.cosmeo.com), which requires a paid subscription, was created with input from teachers and students and works with actual curriculum standards from every state in the country, except Iowa, which doesn’t use statewide curriculum standards. It grew out of a service Discovery runs that streams educational videos to schools, and works on both Windows and Macintosh computers, and in all major Web browsers.

Though Cosmeo is heavy on videos, it offers much more, including encyclopedia articles, links to related material on the Internet, and what it calls Brain Games, like hieroglyphic translations and building a volcano. And most of the material comes from educational sources.

We tested Cosmeo over the past week, revisiting algebra lessons from our younger days, watching cells divide in a video about mitosis, reading about Michelangelo and looking at a portrait of English author Jane Austen. Though we ran into a few technical problems here and there, we found the service to be a useful and engaging learning tool that can help students study at their own pace, in the comfort of their own homes. What’s more, parents can learn how to help their kids.

Cosmeo covers an age range of kindergarten through 12th grade and material is broken down into four age brackets of kindergarten through second, third through fifth, sixth through eighth and ninth through 12th. Its subscription costs $9.95 a month or $99 a year after a free trial period of 30 days, and includes one parent account and four student accounts.

Cosmeo’s home page, which can be customized for each user’s preferences, is broken up into five clear sections, including a “Today in History” section that taught us interesting facts — such as the fact that on April 3, 1973, inventor Martin Cooper placed the first cellphone call.

A large search box dominates the center top part of the screen, and a horizontal bar below lets you browse by one of six subjects: science, math, social studies, English, health and art and music. After selecting any of these subject sections, a new screen with a large image in the center — and four menus surrounding it — appears. Those menus are labeled Browse Social Studies (for example) with a grade-specific search option, Top Social Studies Videos, Brain Games and Trusted Links.

The overall look of Cosmeo is very clean and uncluttered. Though it offers more than 30,000 videos, 15,000 quizzes and about 200 Brain Games, it never felt overwhelming.

We started in English and navigated to the Literature section. Icons at the top of the page showed us just how many videos, articles, pictures, Brain Games, events and trusted Internet links Cosmeo had on English Literature. If we wanted to narrow our search by grade, the four age sections were also listed.

We watched a video about the novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque, and occasionally switched to full-screen view. The best part about each video is that it is divided into sections, so you can skip to what’s relevant. A timeline of the chapters is displayed to the right of the viewing screen, and this shows you a brief summary of each chapter, and how long each chapter lasts.

Cosmeo: $9.95/month or $99/year. www.cosmeo.com

But the videos stuttered at times. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for Windows proved to be the most successful browser, with hardly any stuttering videos and an option for full-screen view. But while Discovery says that Cosmeo will work with other browsers, including Mozilla Firefox and Apple Computer’s Safari, both gave us stuttering problems. On occasion, in Safari, the videos quit in the middle. On two Windows computers, we had to use a work-around just to play videos using Firefox.

Fifty percent of the videos in Cosmeo come with related quizzes, identified by a “Quiz Me” section. A “Notes” section lets you take typed notes on whatever you’re studying, but we found that retrieving our saved notes for later use was a clumsy process that took too many steps.

If you find a particular section that you’d like to revisit, you can save it to a section called “My Favorites” with one click. Folders within this section help to group your materials together, and we easily created new folders just by typing in a label, such as “Jane Austen Book Report.”

Cosmeo can be especially helpful for solving math problems. It includes various sections, grouped by subject and age level, where you can input numbers from your homework problems. Instead of just spitting out answers, Cosmeo displays explanatory steps on how to get to those answers. We tried this with division and fractions, and liked the step-by-step problem solving instructions.

We had fun with the Brain Games section. Virtual Volcano instructed us to set pressure and gas levels before we pressed “Start Eruption” and watched lava spew out of our creation. All parts of the volcanic eruption — lava flows, pyroclastic flow, plume and lahar — were labeled with understandable definitions.

We read an article about chamber music from the Art and Music section, then selected “View Related Items” and saw four videos and four more articles listed.

Parents can set restrictions on what their children look at by listing keywords to block in the Parental Control Settings. Content types, like all videos, can be blocked, as can specific content. If the child tries to search for any of this blocked content, the parent’s account will note this attempt. To see how their child is progressing, parents can view a student’s history to know what they’re really studying.

Cosmeo allocates points for each activity to reward students, such as seven points for watching a video on mitosis and 10 points for playing a Brain Game. The student can exchange these points for virtual wallpaper, screensavers or simulators that will make the Cosmeo screen look a little cooler and more personalized.

Cosmeo is continually improving, and updates are all automatic because it’s Web-based. Though it probably won’t end every argument over homework, it could well allow parents to help their kids learn — while learning a little bit more themselves.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com.

Once the stuff of James Bond films, fingerprint-reading sensors have now gone mainstream as a way to log on to your computer, or on to Web sites you visit. In the consumer market, fingerprint recognition is sometimes sold as a better form of security, since prints are presumed to be harder to spoof or copy than passwords; and sometimes as a convenience, since it’s much easier to swipe your finger than to remember a bunch of passwords.

Even if they are used mainly as a convenience, fingerprint readers can contribute to security, because people using them are less inclined to adopt insecure methods for remembering passwords, like writing them on visible Post-it Notes, or using the same simple password again and again.

Still, fingerprint readers are relatively rare in consumer PCs, so we thought we’d try some out to see how easy and effective they are. We were curious about how simple it is to train a computer to recognize a fingerprint, how accurate the readers are, and how easy it is to use them instead of passwords.

We tested two laptops with built-in fingerprint readers — a high-end $2,149 ThinkPad Z60t from Lenovo Group Ltd., and Toshiba America Information Systems Inc.’s $1,899 Protege R200. We also tried Microsoft Corp.’s $40 Fingerprint Reader, which attaches to the USB port of any computer, desktop or laptop, running Windows XP.

All three of these can use your fingerprint for logging on to a computer, rather than typing your password each time, and each also functions likewise with Web sites that require user name and password identification.

Our conclusion is that these fingerprint readers were simple to set up and worked pretty well, but that some of the software that controls the process is confusing and could be a lot better. Fingerprint authentication isn’t perfectly secure. Nothing is. Some fingerprint readers have been fooled by plastic molds of fingerprints. But they sure are convenient.

Also, other types of biometric authentication are competing with fingerprints. While we were doing our tests, we got a look at one challenger, a gadget from Fujitsu that reads entire palms and the veins running through them. As your hand hovers palm-down over this device for a couple of seconds, special technology captures an X-ray-like image of your palm and its veins.

This technology is more advanced than fingerprint-recognition devices, as it won’t work unless it detects blood coursing through the veins in your hand. Also, Fujitsu says, it’s much more difficult to imitate another person’s internal structure, since it can’t be viewed by the naked eye, nor can it be lifted from a surface, like fingerprints. But it won’t be in consumer computers for years.

Microsoft’s Fingerprint Reader was straightforward. After loading its included software, we plugged it into our PC’s USB port. Its oval surface area was a perfect fit for a finger, making it the most comfortable to use, and its center glowed red once attached.

We followed a setup wizard to get started, selecting two fingers from a diagram of right and left hands. After selecting each — we used our right and left index fingers — we touched each correct finger onto the Reader four times to get an accurate scan. To use this recorded print as our password, we simply touched our finger to the Reader whenever opening a new browser screen that required password data. We had to type in our user names and passwords the first time, but after that the reader software allowed us to substitute a fingerprint swipe.

We tried various Web sites, including Trumba (the online calendar we use); the New York Times Web site; Evite.com, an invitation service; a cooking Web site called Epicurious.com; Yahoo.com; and Gmail.com. We couldn’t open Evite using Microsoft’s Fingerprint Reader, as it uses a Java technology that Microsoft explained wouldn’t work with the device.

When setting the Reader up with Gmail, we entered the wrong password for our account, and accidentally saved it with the fingerprint, so whenever we tried to use our fingerprint with the log-in page the wrong password was automatically entered. This was easily fixed by retyping the password within the device’s Log-On Manager.

This device works only on Internet Explorer 6.0 or above and the MSN 8.0 or 9.0 browser. If you ever should decide you no longer want to use the Fingerprint Reader, you can simply unplug it and go back to entering your passwords on required screens.

The Lenovo ThinkPad and Toshiba Protege both use barely noticeable fingerprint recognition devices that are built into the lower right edges of their keyboards. Each worked the same way — by dragging a finger over it, top to bottom, like petting an animal with one finger.

But we found the Lenovo software, Client Security Solutions, to be much too geeky. For one thing, it confused us with two options for controlling the start-up of the machine. One was the familiar Windows log-in process, and the other was a “power-up” log-in, which occurs before the Windows screen appears and doesn’t exist on most computers. But, it was possible to set up the Lenovo system in such a way that you were never given the opportunity for a different user to log in to Windows.

Also, an annoying screen offering fingerprint access to technical settings of the PC, something mainstream users would never use, would appear each time our ThinkPad was restarted, before it disappeared too quickly to read it.

Lenovo told us that we could use its software to replace other passwords on the computer with our fingerprint, including those on Web sites — like the Microsoft device. We walked through about seven steps in the ThinkPad’s detailed Client Security Setup Wizard to enable this feature, and then started training the laptop to remember our user names and passwords for Web sites. But this process took much longer than the others, and in the end we still weren’t successful in swiping our fingerprint in place of Web site user names and passwords.

The Toshiba Protege’s OmniPass Finger Print Software was much more user-friendly. A few explanatory menus walked us through how to replace our Windows log-in names and passwords with fingerprints, and replacing Web site passwords was just as intuitive. We simply typed in a Web site address — such as www.yahoo.com — and after entering our user name and password, selected a “Remember this password” option. A key icon appeared on the screen, which we dropped near the log-in data that we wanted to be remembered. The next time that site was opened, we simply swiped a finger instead of entering a password.

All three devices advise users not to rely on their fingerprint readers for absolute security, and instead, encourage them to create and use “secure” passwords — those that contain tricky combinations of numbers and letters — for very important password-protected data.

We were favorably surprised by how much time we saved by using our fingerprint, rather than typing passwords into various Web sites.

Fingerprint recognition is a smart solution for saving time and avoiding the memorization of long lists of passwords. Just make sure the system you choose is meant for average users, not engineers.

• Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com.