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For the lifelong learners among us, it's not always easy to find the right teacher. Whether hoping to brush up on their Spanish, learn how to swing dance, or prepare for the SAT, students have had to search far and wide -- and often with little success. TeachStreet features more than 25,000 Seattle-area teachers, trainers, tutors, instructors, coaches, and classes. Students can search for teachers across more than 500 subjects and filter the results according to map-based location, ratings from other students, teacher availability, promotional pricing, and more. For teachers, TeachStreet provides a simple yet powerful way to promote themselves online and manage their learning business.

"We have heard time and again from adult learners, and from parents looking for tutors and coaches for their children, how difficult it is to find relevant and up-to-date information to evaluate teachers. At the same time, teachers are craving easy-to-use tools to help market themselves on the Internet, manage their student rosters, and find more prospective students in their neighborhoods," said Dave Schappell, founder and CEO of TeachStreet. "One of our goals with TeachStreet is to use the latest online technologies to facilitate real-world connections and provide anyone who wants to either learn or teach a new skill with a rich, geographically targeted website that feature's a city's best teaching resources."

"As a guitar teacher trying to expand my student base, I think TeachStreet will be an invaluable resource. I've spent four years teaching guitar to students of all ages and that's where I want to focus my energy, not trying to keep abreast of new technologies," said Ryan Casperson, a guitar teacher based in Wallingford and early tester of the site. "In less than three minutes I was able to set up a full-featured online presence on TeachStreet and I now have a permanent address to send my students where they can get a true sense of my teaching style and how I work with students." [24x7]

Identify Your Photos with Seattle's TagCow
Seattle's TagCow promises to make that mmountain of photos you have stored in Flickr, iPhoto or EasyShare magically searchable!

The new photo labelling service uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk to outsource the task not to magic elves, but to humans, at the sweatshop rate of $1.20/hour accounting for speed. TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington earned 4 cents to properly tag a group of five photos.

Founders Michael Droz, Matt Nichols and Tim Wright, have seen their inventory grow from 5,000 imagws to more than 500,000 or about 1,000 images per minute since winning media attention. [24x7]