Tech Watch

Skype embraces Facebook – atleast they plan to

2010-10-01T03:45:00.001-07:00

New York Times reports that Facebook and Skype are in talks to integrate their services. Although none of their spokesman agreed to comment on this but a person who was briefed on this arrangement told NYT on the promise of anonymity that the partnership will be announced in next few weeks.

What exactly this integration would bring for users:
This integration would take place through Facebook Connect and under the partnership, people who use their Facebook credentials to log in to Skype will be able to see their Facebook friends on Skype. They will also be able to see their news feed and to sent text messages and call their friends’ landlines using Skype. In other words Skype users who have presence all over the world would be able to use Skype software to interact with their Facebook social.

Skype’s user base is mainly from business community, Marketing and Sales personnels, Software Engineers and Consultants etc. All of them should get ready to get their hands dirty with ‘Social Activities’ right from within their communication software like Skype.

Read Full Story at: New York Times

Dual-Screen Laptops?! Yes, They’re Real (and Coming Soon)

2009-08-28T09:46:00.001-07:00

The computer nerd in my really, really wants one of these.

Having your browser, iTunes, IM, TweetDeck, Word, Skype, Photoshop, video editing tools, folders, and more open at the same time…well, it just takes up a lot of screen real estate. On a 15.4″ laptop, you can only fit so much before your screen is piled with program after program.

gScreen, an Alaska-based notebook designer and manufacturer, aims to solve that problem, no matter where you are, with what can only be described as the PC version of a two-headed hydra: the dual-screen laptop.

Don’t believe us? Here are a few pictures that Gizmodo got its hands on

Each monitor slides, so that you can move the gScreen around compactly. Now that is awesome.

Here are the specs for this beast, listed on the gScreen website:
- 2 LED backlit display screens

- Windows VISTA/ WIN XP PRO (optional)

- Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 2.26-GHz

- 4 GB of RAM (2GB DDR2 SO-DIMM x 2)

- 320GB 7200-rpm HD

- NVIDIA® GeForce® 9800M GT with 512MB dedicated memory (or)

- NVIDIA® Quadro FX 1700M Graphics with 512MB dedicated memory

- 9-cell battery

- IEEE 1394 1 Graphics Card Output (15-pin, D-Sub) X 1, HDMI X 1 Mic-in X 1, Line-in x 1, Headphone X 1 PCI Express Card X 1 AC Power Adaptor Output: 19V DC, 90W Input: 100~240V AC, 50/60Hz universal Battery Pack Li-ion 9 cells

This laptop is clearly meant for professional designers, programmers, filmmakers, and others that regularly need two monitors to get work done. Two-screen set-ups just allow you to get more done (thus why I use a two-screen set-up). There are disadvantages though, like the power drain two screens will cause and the sheer weight, estimated at 12+ pounds. And, of course, the price may be a deal-breaker: around $3000.

Still, this thing could do wonders for the productivity of digital professionals everywhere. And you may not have to wait long to get your hands on one; the company hopes to have the gScreen on the market by Christmas.

What do you think? Would you buy one of these two-headed beasts? Let us know in the comments.

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A Look At Facebook’s Reach Worldwide

2009-08-28T09:44:00.001-07:00

Everyone knows that Facebook has become absolutely massive, but it’s easy to lose sight of just how big a number like 250 million is. Buzzpoint, a social media marketing firm based out of Los Angeles, has put together an impressive visualization that shows off just how large Facebook has grown. The company has estimated the current and past Facebook usage statistics using available data and plotted a number of graphs tracking its progress over the last three years. I’ve broken the image (which is quite massive on its own) into a few chunks below, and you can download the whole thing here.

Among the more interesting stats: as of July 15 2009, Facebook had 250 million active users, which would make it the fourth most popular country in the world. Facebook’s top two traffic contributors are the US (by a large margin) and the UK, but in third is Turkey, which didn’t even have a localized version until last year (though English is fairly common there).

In terms of Facebook users as a percentage of a nation’s population, small countries like Iceland and Norway lead the way, each of which has over 40% of their populations on the site. Of the larger nations, Canada is on top, with around 34.37% of its 33.6 million citizens using Facebook

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iPhone Unit Conversion App Makes $20,000 a Week

2009-08-28T09:40:00.003-07:00

Have you tried out Convert, one of the better iPhone unit conversion apps out there? If you have, you’re not alone. In the first two weeks the app has been in the App Store, it was downloaded around 40,000 times.

Since the price of the application is $0.99, it turns out the app has pulled at least $39,600 so far, or just under 3,000 dollars per day, and it’s still growing. It reached the #2 top paid app spot in the US App Store, jumping from about a 1,000 downloads on 13th of August to over 6,000 daily downloads on August 25th.

Of course, not all of the money goes to the developer, tap tap tap. Because of the 70/30 revenue split with Apple, the developer actually earned around 27,720 dollars in the first two weeks. Still, very impressive for a one dollar app.

John Casasanta, the developer behind Convert, is no stranger to making money in the App Store; he has posted some impressive numbers before for a GPS-based app called Where To? which directs you to the nearest points of interest. Convert, however, is a very general, all-purpose application that, unlike Where To?, might stay in the top 10 for quite a while. If it manages to keep growing, or at least retain its current download rate, Convert might be one of the biggest moneymakers in App Store history.

When it comes to the App Store as a whole, it’s become a serious business. Today’s numbers from AdMob’s report (PDF) suggest the App Store market size is $200 million per month, or $2.4 billion per year, and those numbers are nothing to be laughed at

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11 Million Facebook Users Flock to Virtual Farming Daily

2009-08-28T09:40:00.001-07:00

The rise of social gaming is happening more quietly than one might think given the statistics. Today we’re hearing about another potential milestone: Facebook application FarmVille claims to be the fastest growing social game in history, reaching an impressive 11 million daily users in a little over two months.

To put that in perspective, World of Warcraft is the largest massively multiplayer game that dominates MMO marketshare with at last report 11.5 million active subscribers. Its publisher Blizzard hasn’t revealed any new population statistics since the end of last year, but assures the press that its figures are still growing. It took WoW four years to reach that many subscribers after its launch in late 2004.

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Facebook 3.0 For iPhone Now Available On The App Store

2009-08-28T09:35:00.001-07:00

Nearly two weeks after submitting the app to Apple, Facebook’s totally revamped 3.0 application is finally live on the App Store, according to the app’s developer Joe Hewitt. You can download it now here. The store currently shows that the app is version 2.5, but if you click the Download button anyway you’ll get the new version.

The new application brings a slew of new features, making it what may be the most useful app on the App Store (be sure to read this post) for our full review. Among the additions are Events, which have frustratingly been omitted from previous versions. Now you’ll be able to look up where your Events are, and you can also respond to them and see which of your friends are attending (for anyone who has ever had to boot up the web version of the site just to look up an Event address, this is a big deal). You can also post video directly to the site if you have an iPhone 3GS — a feature that will likely see the number of videos on Facebook increase dramatically.

Smaller changes include a News Feed that more closely reflects the feed you’ll find on the main Facebook site, as well as the ability to “Like” items your friends have created.

One feature that users will be missing is Push Notifications, which we suspect will be rolled out in version 3.1, which Hewitt is already working on. There will also be support for landscape mode in the upcoming release, and we may also see support for the ability to watch Facebook videos from the phone (right now you can only upload them).

It’s worth noting that the 11 day wait since Facebook originally submitted the application was enough to raise Hewitt’s ire (and justifiably so), leading him to condemn the App Store approval process and call for its removal entirely. I couldn’t agree with him more.

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Lazyfeed Goes Live For Everyone

2009-08-26T17:32:00.001-07:00

We’ve been seeing a lot of projects and startups trying to speed up RSS feeds. Today, a service is launching that addresses some of the issues with a different user-interface. Lazyfeed, the realtime interest feed reader that launched last month in private beta at our Real-Time Crunchup, is opening up publicly today for anyone who wants to sign up.

Instead of signing up for a long list of blogs and news feeds, all you have to do on Lazyfeed is type in a topic and Lazyfeed will show you the most recent posts and articles with that tag from the one million blogs that it now indexes. (This number is up from 100,000 blogs at launch). Headlines and excerpts containing that tag appear in the main window, and if you want to follow that topic, you can save the tag in a column on the left. As you save more tags, your interests appear as a list, which reorder themselves according to the latest posts.

So instead of a list of blogs, you have a list of interests, and Lazyfeed goes out and discovers content for you around those interests. For any given tag you put unto the search bar at the top, it also supplies you with related tags just underneath that you can click on to explore further. If you don’t like a particular blog, you can remove it from your results. Another new feature since the private beta launch is that you can now share any post on Twitter, Facebook, or email.

I like not having to worry about programming my feed reader (that’s the lazy part), but I also see that Lazyfeed is missing some key blogs right now (cough, TechCrunch). Founder Ethan Gahng says that is just because the site is going through a database re-organization which wasn’t completed in time for launch, and that should fix it itself soon. The other big question how fast the index picks up new posts. He doesn’t use Pubsubhubub, like Google Reader now does, but instead uses some internal technology to speed up crawling and indexing. But if Pubsubhubbub is faster, he should use that instead. In the realtime Web, speed is everything.

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Google Maps Will Now Show You Traffic Conditions On The Back Roads

2009-08-26T17:31:00.001-07:00

Any one who commutes in major cities knows the value of back roads when it comes to avoiding traffic on the highways during peak rush hour times. Google Maps just added a nifty feature that will show you live traffic conditions on arterial roads (non-highway roads) in selected cities. Google Maps will also show traffic patterns on main highways as well, helping you see what the least-trafficked route is for your commute.

When you zoom-in on the city you’re interested in and click the “Traffic” button in the upper-right corner of the map, you’ll see the traffic conditions of both arterial roads and highways. The colors correspond to the speed of traffic green is little to no traffic, yellow is medium congestion, red is heavy congestion, and red/black is stop-and-go traffic.

Google says that this feature can also be accessed on Google Maps for Mobile, which is particularly useful when trying to figure out the best route on the go. Google also shed a little bit of light as to how they crowdsource traffic info via Google Maps on mobile phones. When you enable Google Maps with My Location, the phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you’re moving. When Google combines your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, they can get an idea of traffic live conditions. They continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers.

Google assures users that they only use anonymous speed and location information to calculate traffic conditions, and only do so when the user has opted to enable location services on his or her phone.

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Confirmed: Yahoo Acquires Arab Internet Portal Maktoob

2009-08-26T17:30:00.001-07:00

Yahoo has just officially acquired Maktoob, a very popular Arabic web portal that offers services including search, payments, social network, and auctions. Rumors of an aquisition have been building for months, and in the last hour they reached a head as news of an impending press conference broke. The price hasn’t been announced, but our sources say $85 million.

The MaktoobBusiness Twitter acccount notes that the deal will be unite “Yahoo’s 20 million users from the Arab world with Maktoob’s 16 million”, with Vice President Ahmed Nassef stating that it will bring “a sea change in the industry.”

Maktoob launched in the late 90’s as the first free Arabic Email service provider. Since then it has grown to encompass a variety of services, including payments, gaming, search, and auctions. According to comScore, Maktoob has seen very impressive growth over the last year, growing from 6 million unique visitors in June 2008 to 21.8 million a year later. Likewise, its page views have grown from 406 million to 1.1 billion over the same time frame.

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Nokia ‘Booklet 3G’ Netbook Details Coming In Early September

2009-08-24T21:53:00.001-07:00

Know what’s popular nowadays? Netbooks! Nokia is officially jumping on the netbook bullet train with the “Booklet 3G” — an Intel/Microsoft-based netbook that promises 12-hour battery life, a weight of 2.75 pounds, and apparently built-in GPS. The “3G” portion of the name indicates a wireless data connection as well.

Actual specs and details will be announced by Nokia on September 2nd, but it’s believed that the Booklet 3G will run Windows 7. The 12-hour battery life is interesting, too, as that’s a full four hours longer than most netbooks currently on the market. It’ll be interesting to see which Atom CPU is used in the machine to obtain that kind of longevity. It may be a slower but less power-hungry Z-series CPU since the 10-inch Booklet will have a higher-resolution screen (likely 1280×800 or 1366×768).

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Google Launches Video Chat for iGoogle

2009-08-23T22:31:00.001-07:00

In November 2008, Google added video chat to Gmail, allowing you to video chat with other Gmail users after downloading a small plugin. Now Google is extending its video ambitions, launching video chat for the iGoogle homepage.

What’s the advantage of having video chat on your personalized homepage? The main benefit is that you can now speak to friends who don’t use Gmail (although they still require a generic Google account). You’ll also need to download a plugin to make it work.

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Stupeflix: Powerful Movie Making From Your Browser

2009-08-22T01:33:00.001-07:00

Quick Pitch: Stupeflix is a web service that turns digital content (images, text, audio, videos) into awesome videos.

Genius Idea: Think of Stupeflix as an advanced way to mashup your videos, photos, and music and create a video collection or home movie that you can download or share on the web. Using the Stupeflix editor you can upload your content and music, drag and drop to organize content in and out of groups, add video effects, associate tracks with groups (or the whole movie), insert text overlays, and piece together your own movie.

The browser-based movie-making service isn’t exactly a plug-and-play application, but it isn’t overly complicated either, and it does provide a pretty impressive tool for combining your video, photos, and music in any fashion you desire. It’s a unique and sophisticated approach to turning digital content into story-telling entities that you can then share across the web or save for personal use. Advanced users can even use the XML editor to add their own parameters.

The site is also hoping to attract business users by giving companies the ability to broadcast on mobile devices, brand their own content, include call to actions, add interactivity, and leverage text-to-speech technology. They also have a powerful API that can turn feeds into libraries of videos, much like this impressive group of videos they created from Wikipedia content.

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Zoho Mail: Now With Offline and Mobile Support

2008-10-14T03:08:00.003-07:00

It’s tough being a competitor to Gmail. Google has been the first major company to offer virtually unlimited storage for e-mails, and the simplicity of the service, solid spam filtering and good integration with other Google services has made Gmail a favorite for many.

Zoho Mail has been in private beta stage so far and thus it is definitely not as widespread as Gmail, but it has always been a worthy competitor. It’s a slick, feature-rich client that tries to marry Gmail’s simplicity with the overall look and feel of a full featured desktop email client, such as Outlook. Today, they’ve reached an important milestone - Zoho Mail is coming out of private beta, and it has some new features to show off.

First,through Google Gears, Zoho Mail now supports offline mode. To access, it, you must have Google Gears installed in either IE or Firefox, and click on the “Setup Offline” link on the top. Zoho Mail will recognize your connection status and switch between online and offline mode seamlessly. It may not be a killer feature, but it’s useful, and the fact that Gmail has been dabbling with it for quite a while but the official offline mode is still not out there is in Zoho’s favor.

Another important feature is mobile support - oops, did I say mobile? I meant iPhone, since Zoho Mail currently only works with Apple’s phone, and support for other devices is “in the works.” Just login to zoho.com from your iPhone and you’ll find the mobile version of Zoho Mail right there.

These two features, along with some others, for example support for Gmail-style labels as well as Outlook-style folders, and integrated chat, make Zoho Mail an interesting competitor in the Web mail field and a great addition to the already very solid Zoho Office suite.

Courtesy: Mashable

Zoho Mail Gets Offline Support via Google Gears - Ahead of Gmail

2008-10-14T03:08:00.001-07:00

Innovative Web Office startup Zoho has beaten Google to the punch again, announcing offline support for the newly public Zoho Mail tonight. Ironically Zoho is using Google Gears to enable offline functionality in Zoho Mail - see the video below by the Google Developer team. Zoho also beat Google to offline support in online word processing, again using Gears, by launching that functionality in November 2007. Google followed up with offline support for Google Docs at the end of March 2008.

We wrote in July about speculation that Google will start rolling out offline support for both Gmail and Google Calendar through Google Gears within the next six weeks. Didn't happen.

However Yahoo Mail did come up with offline functionality in July - it gave offline access to all free and paid Yahoo Mail users through the Yahoo Zimbra Desktop. Earlier this week Yahoo announced further Zimbra integration, this time with its Calendar app.

So Google is well and truly behind the times with offline support for web mail. However the Google white coats are having a fine old time tinkering with mail stuff in their labs - tonight Google Labs announced Advanced IMAP Controls, which lets you "fine-tune your Gmail IMAP experience."

To be fair, Google probably isn't worried about Zoho coming out with offline functionality in its mail product before Gmail has. For one thing Google is so big it can afford to wait until it's good and ready, despite Gmail fans yearning for offline support! But also Google probably sees Zoho less as a competitor at this point (even though Zoho does compete directly against Google Apps) and more as an evangelist for its technology - such as Google Gears.

To access mail offline in Zoho Mail, you'll need Google Gears installed on your browser - at this point IE and Firefox are supported. Chrome and Safari support is coming. According to Zoho's blog, you can also download images and attachments in offline mode. Another cool feature is that Zoho Mail automatically detects your connectivity and switches to online/offline modes. The video is also available on Google Code blog.

Courtesy: TechCrunch

Publish Sweet Looking Blogs OnSugar (Video)

2008-10-14T03:07:00.001-07:00

OnSugar is a new blogging platform with a twist. The service has added several functions usually found on other social networking sites so that it feels like a blend of WordPress mixed with Twitter. For example, on the homepage you can view the public timeline which updates with posts from all blogs or just those you follow. You can also follow bloggers and their blogs and send them private messages (just like Direct Messages).

One of the most useful features is the drop down menu that allows you to jump from one of your blogs to another. The other menu item (see right image) displays all of the tasks that you can perform on the blog you’re currently visiting. For example, you can create a new post, edit drafts, change themes, widgets or pages. You can also change your site settings or invite other bloggers to guest blog on your site.

Speaking of themes, you can use existing themes or copy them and change them to make them your own. You can also create your own original theme from scratch if you want.

The Start Following link appears on all blogs and acts like the subscribe to RSS feed option that we see on all blogs these days.

When you create a new post you’re presented with a great deal of choices, which is another thing that makes this blogging platform different than most standard platforms. You can create many different types of blog posts. Besides the standard text post, you can also create polls, question and answer type quizzes, quotes, links and more. As for media, you can upload audio and video files or embed them.

The home page has a cool filtering system that lets you display whatever you want to see. For example, you can choose to see all new posts from all blogs or just the sites you subscribe to.
MP4 / Subscribe for Free!

You can select what kind of posts to view too, such as only posts with audio, video, polls, quizzes, links, etc. It’s a unique way to let users manage and control their blogs and those that they follow.
The service might appeal more to women because of its initial look and feel, but there seems to be a significant amount of men on the service already. The platform is different so we’ll have to see what shakes out when more traditional bloggers give it a try. Is it a good idea to mashup social media services with the blogging platform model? I think it is. WordPress and Blogger have made strides (ever so slowly) to give their users more social media tools and functions. Time will tell how much farther they will go to make their blogging platform more social.

Courtesy: TechCrunch

Zoho Mail: Now With Offline and Mobile Support

2008-10-14T03:01:00.001-07:00

Courtesy: Mashable

Yahoo Launches Web Analytics Beta

2008-10-14T03:00:00.001-07:00

Back in April, Yahoo acquired IndexTools, a provider of analytics software based in Hungary. Today, that service has re-emerged as Yahoo Web Analytics, and is being offered as a limited beta to customers of Yahoo Small Business – the company’s suite of tools for helping small businesses market and sell products online. Additionally, the tool will also be made available to select Yahoo advertisers.

As you might expect, Yahoo Web Analytics includes integration with other Yahoo products. For example, you can analyze the effectiveness of Yahoo search marketing campaigns and track how well individual products within your e-commerce shop are trending. The product will naturally be compared to Google Analytics, the free offering from Google that has similar integration with AdWords.

While it may be late to the party, Yahoo Web Analytics is apparently a big upgrade for Yahoo Small Business customers. Mashable contributor Sean Aune is a user of the service, and sent along the following screenshot as an example of what the service’s rather archaic reporting looks like today:

If nothing else, if you look at the screenshot below of the new service, it would seem that Yahoo Web Analytics has just received a long overdue upgrade:

Yahoo plans to roll out the service gradually to its Small Business Customers through the end of the year and expand the offering to other users in 2009.

Courtesy: Mashable

Make VoIP Phone Calls Over Email with Momail and Jajah

2008-10-14T02:56:00.001-07:00

JAJAH, a VoIP service provider that manages connections for social network users and mobile and non-mobile phones, has teamed up today with Momail, a free mobile mail operator, allowing users to make VoIP phone calls by simply sending an email.

All it takes for Momail users to implement this new option is to register with JAJAH under Momail’s “On Demand” feature page, located within a user’s member page. Once complete, you simply send an email to JAJAH with a phone number you intend to call. JAJAH will subsequently initiate a call to your handset, followed by a call to the intended party.

Momail alone is an interesting invention. Along with popular third-party webmail recognition and push mail for phones - which support the technology - Momail claims to compress data received by users by up to 99 percent its original size. For those operating on metered data plans or simply for phones that cannot consume large file sizes (or whose owners simply don’t have to patience for such transfers), this is handy indeed. Now with JAJAH’s VoIP feature on board, Momail is able to provide extra power with little or no extra investment on the user side.

Note:Momail is still in beta in some countries, including the United States. You’ll have to request a password in order to gain entry.

Courtesy: Mashable

Microsoft’s Next OS To Be Called “Windows 7″. Seriously.

2008-10-14T02:54:00.001-07:00

Microsoft has announced that the latest version of Windows, due in the next couple of years, will be called - drumroll please - Windows 7. It’s about time Microsoft adopted a naming system that might actually make some sense to users, but I can’t wait for hordes of customers to start asking if they somehow missed Windows 1 through 6.

Windows has had one of the most ridiculous naming schemes in the history of software. First there were logical (but ugly) version numbers, like the once commonplace “Windows 3.1″. Then with the release of the overhauled Windows 95 the company adopted a naming system based on the year of release, which it continued until Windows 98.

Windows Me (perhaps the worst operating system I’ve ever used), sacrificed the scheme for a chance to be clever (it stood for “me” and the millennium at the same time!) Next up we hit Windows XP, which has served most of us reasonably well since 2001. It sounds sort of cool, it’s catchy, and we have no idea what it means. Fine.

Finally we had Windows Vista, which seemed to stick with the naming convention of “something that sounds sort of cool but didn’t really mean anything”. It had been more than five years since the release of XP, so there was little chance of confusion.

Microsoft is now in a hurry to push out its next operating system after the generally dismal response to Vista. And so we’ve come to Windows 7, which is apparently tied to the build numbers and not the actual releases. The new naming scheme lends itself well to faster, more incremental releases similar to what we’ve seen from Apple (about once every 18 months), but it’s probably going to confuse everyone and couldn’t be more bland.

You can read more at the company’s blog post here.

Courtesy: TechCrunch

Chrome Coming to Android

2008-09-12T02:37:00.001-07:00

The browser-bearing world was atwitter yesterday with the announcement of Google’s Chrome browser. Just about overnight, they’ve managed to convince hordes of people that Chrome is the way to browse on your PC. Next step? They’re taking it mobile.

According to an interview with Google co-founder Sergey Brin, the two projects will start working together more closely now that both are approached 1.0 releases, with the Android browser adopting much of Chrome’s inner workings. He also expects the mobile browser to pick up a new name to indicate the relation to it’s bigger, full-blown browsin’ brother.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch

Mozilla Fights Back With New Firefox Benchmarks

2008-09-12T02:30:00.001-07:00

The dust hasn’t even settled on Chrome’s release and already Mozilla is feeling the pressure. The company today released a series of benchmarks showing Firefox 3.1 will be faster than anything Google can muster with Chrome.

Chrome is running V8, an open source Javascript engine, which Google claims, is faster than anything currently offered on the Web. And based on our tests of Chrome, we tend to agree.

But in the upcoming release of Firefox 3.1, which should be available by the end of the year, Mozilla will employ TraceMonkey, a new engine that according to one of its coders, Brendan Eich, will easily eclipse even the fastest instance of Chrome.

To prove it, Mozilla tested Firefox running on TraceMonkey and compared it to Google’s Chrome beta using its own benchmarking solution called SunSpider. According to the company, Chrome was 28 percent slower on Windows XP and 16 percent slower on Windows Vista.

Mozilla is quick to point out that TraceMonkey has only been in development for a few months and will only get better before it’s rolled out later this year, but the company has a vested interest in seeing Firefox come out on top in its benchmark testing, so all figures should probably be questioned, to say the least. And the same goes for Google’s five benchmarks.

For now, Chrome is the fastest browser in the market and anyone using both Firefox and Chrome will find that out quickly. But once Firefox 3.1 hits the Web, we’ll find out if Chrome has what it takes to stay on top after TraceMonkey becomes Mozilla’s engine of choice.

Courtesy: TechCrunch

Have The News Come To You With Alerts.com

2008-09-10T20:24:00.001-07:00

With Alerts.com service, instead of visiting multiple sites to stay up-to-date with the latest news and and information, you can have the news come to you. You can configure alerts that are relevant to your interests and then have them arrive in the method you choose: SMS, voice, email, IM, or on your desktop via an Adobe Air app.

Types of Alerts

After signing up for the Alerts.com service, you can choose from all sorts of pre-configured alerts. For example, the site offers alerts for things like news, weather, gas prices, flight info, price watches, CraigsList, sports scores, press releases, birthday reminders, horoscopes, Amber Alerts, and so much more.

However, what really appealed to me was that you had the option to configure your own personalized alerts which could be anything you need to remember to do. I'm also excited to see an RSS Feed Alert option, as well. With this alert, you can monitor feeds for keywords and receive messages immediately or on a scheduled basis via email or SMS.

Types of Alerts

Configuring Alerts

You can see an overview of the different alerts you subscribe to on your personalized homepage, a page which somewhat resembles iGoogle and its gadgets. There's also a handy "list view" which presents the alerts in a list so you can easily sort through them and turn them on or off as desired. This page also displays how many alerts have been sent out so far.

Editing an Alert

Business Model

Alerts.com is an ad-supported service. Specific advertising is inserted into the emails, texts, and voice messages sent out. The ads will be relevant to the type of alert requested by the user. This doesn't seem like a bad deal to get this sort of useful tool for free.

The platform is open and an API is currently available so that developers can create unique reminders, alerts, and notifications of their own.

The company is also working with a number of educational institutions around the U.S. to deliver alerts to the enrolled students. Currently, there are 8 million students receiving alerts from the Alerts.com.

You can sign up to start receiving your own alerts today, too. Just click here.

Courtesy: TechCrunch

MySchoolAlerts Keeps Faculty, Parents, and Students Connected in Emergencies

2008-09-10T02:54:00.001-07:00

Alerts.com has announced at DEMOfall 08 a free messaging and notification system called MySchoolAlerts that will allow schools to communicate instantly with teachers, parents and students.

This is a perfect solution for sharing information such as school closings due to inclement weather or enabling communication in the event of a campus security threat. Yes, every school has a phone number that parents and staff members can call to find out whether or not their school is open, but most of the time that information can be incorrect or the phone line busy or down. Enabling schools to send current news and alerts instantly to everyone connected to the school will be far more effective and truly appreciated by everyone.

How it works

MySchoolAlerts is free and there’s nothing to download or install for the school or parents. The school simply creates an account and the faculty members, parents and students just subscribe to the service. Everyone has the option to receive the messages any way they prefer because they can be delivered via e-mail, SMS, voice, widget or through a desktop application. Other types of alerts can be added as well, such as child safety alerts, severe weather warnings, gas price alerts and more.

Everysecond counts

Obviously, this messaging service will become invaluable in the event of campus security threats such as the tragic events that unfolded at schools like Columbine and more recently Virginia Tech. The horrific events were only intensified because school staff members and authorities had no way of communicating with parents or students in a timely manner. In situations like that, every second counts.

Schools are trying to remedy this problem by taking expensive and drastic measures such as providing laptops, cell phones and even iPhones to all students so they can communicate with them instantly. Some schools that have done this are Oklahoma Christian University and Abilene Christain University.

Conclusion

As a parent, I think this is a long overdue solution. I think every school needs to sign up and start communicating with teachers, parents and students in real time. The fact that it’s free and does not require any hardware or software should make this a no-brainer. This kind of solution can also work for other organizations that need to communicate with large numbers of people in a timely manner. Quite frankly, I will be very surprised if this service isn’t embraced immediately across the country by all schools.

Courtesy: Mashable

The OtherInbox Wants to be Your Mailman (Exclusive Invites!)

2008-09-10T02:45:00.001-07:00

OtherInbox is a unique new email service that just launched today. It wants to provide a way to manage all of the emails that you don’t really want going to your personal or business email accounts. For example, emails from online shopping vendors, newsletters, news updates, social networking messages and more.

Howdoes it work?
Instead of having all of these emails flooding your inbox, OtherInbox allows you to maintain unlimited email addresses at your own domain name, such as JohnDoe.otherinbox.com.

Thegood news is that you don’t have to create these email addresses ahead of time before you can use them. You can create them on the fly as needed. For example, you can create a new email address amazon@JohnDoe.otherinbox.com for Amazong emails and Facebook@JohnDoe.otherinbox.com for Facebook and so on for all other sites. OtherInbox then sorts everything coming back into the appropriate folders.

Ifanyone sells your email address then you will know exactly who was responsible and you can then Block that one email address so that you’ll never see their emails again. It’s quite handy.

WhatElse can You Do with It?
Besides creating an email address for all websites you shop at, you can also create addresses for events and functions that you attend such as the TechCrunch50@JohnDoe.Otherinbox.com or DemoFall2008@JohnDoe.Otherinbox.com. It’s also handy when it comes to tracking rebates, coupons and shipment tracking information. It’s a powerful new weapon against spammers as well.

Conclusion
Mostof us already own many “other” inboxes on services like Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail to handle these types of emails but OtherInbox can replace them all. It could become SpamCentral Station, if you will. The interface is intuitive and it does make managing your emails much easier.

Youcan find emails a lot quicker as well thanks to the folder system it uses. Yes, some of you are saying “why not just use bloody rules and filters to automatically archives emails according to the sender!” Well, true, rules and filters can do something like that but it still requires a great deal of work on your part that would never end.

Everytime you joined a new site or service you would have to create a new rule or filter to handle it. With the Otherinbox all you have to do is create a new email address on the fly and you’re done.

***INVITES***
Special invites only for Mashable Readers! The first 25 readers can claim their own OtherInbox right now!

Courtesy: Mashable

Need Google Apps on Your Desktop? Try GMDesk.

2008-09-09T08:58:00.001-07:00

A new service called GMDesk, according to a report from Cybernet, leverages Adobe AIR to provide Google Apps as desktop versions, with easy shortcut keys for toggling between the desktop and browser-based versions. In all, GMDesk supports Gmail, Google Calendar, Reader, Documents, Maps and Picasa through its service. Helpful for those that want immediate desktop access to their Google apps without having to open up a browser window.

Meanwhile, Google itself seems to be more focused on its Web-based and mobile efforts than rolling out desktop version for those apps that it hasn’t already created a desktop version. With more growth potential on a global scale available with an increased mobile presence, especially with Google Android and a majority of wireless providers on board for partnership deals, it looks like the mobile front is an ongoing point of effort for new offerings to consumers.

Google Launches Mapping Satellite

2008-09-08T19:48:00.001-07:00

GeoEye-1 will capture high-resolution earth images for exclusive use on Google Maps.

Google has expanded its reach into space with the successful launch Saturday of a new satellite that will provide the company with exclusive images for its maps.

After an 11:50 a.m. takeoff from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, the GeoEye-1 satellite relayed a downlink signal to a ground station in Norway, confirming that it had separated from its United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket and had begun to initialize its onboard systems.

The satellite launch was coordinated by terrain mapping company GeoEye. "Based upon the data we saw, the satellite is performing properly and ready to begin the next phase towards meeting its mission requirements," said Bill Schuster, GeoEye chief operating officer, in a statement.

GeoEye said the 4,310-pound satellite required calibration and check-out period before the company would sell its images.

Although GeoEye did not mention Google in any of its announcements regarding the satellite, the search engine giant's name appeared on the satellite and company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page attended the launch, according to reports.

GeoEye said it plans to sell the images to customers around the world, but a Google spokesperson said that Google has exclusive rights to the images for commercial maps.

"The imagery from GeoEye-1 adds to the quantity and quality of that currently provided by our IKONOS satellite, and together this magnificent constellation will enable us to meet world-wide customer demand," Matthew O'Connell, GeoEye CEO, said.

GeoEye-1 is part of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), NextView program, which aims to obtain timely and accurate commercial satellite imagery.

It will collect 0.41-meter ground resolution black and white images and 1.65-meter color images simultaneously. It can show objects as small as 16 inches. U.S. licensing restrictions limit commercial images to a half-meter ground resolution.

The satellite can capture the images from 423 miles above the Earth and travel about 4.5 miles per second.

General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems in Gilbert, Ariz., built the satellite, while ITT in Rochester, N.Y., developed the imaging system. ITT is building another imaging system for GeoEye-2, which is scheduled to launch in 2011.

GeoEye said it won a $500 million NextView contract four years ago, and it built and launched the satellite with no cost overruns.

Source: Information Week

KoffeePhoto Hits the Heights in Photo Storing Capabilities

2008-08-29T04:47:00.001-07:00

A free KoffeePhoto account puts your photo sharing concerns to rest

Looking for a safe place to store your photo haring images? KoffeePhoto has the security you seek. Want a handy desktop utility for organizing and sharing your photos? Or an easy method for ordering prints? You can get it all -- and more -- at KoffeePhoto.

Coffee, tea -- or KoffeePhoto?

KoffeePhoto is a photo-sharing site that was launched in late 2006 by KoffeeWare, a company that has provided online photo services for businesses since 2005. Unlike many other photo sharing sites, KoffeePhoto is software that you download to your desktop to organize your photo sharing images for storing.

At your leisure, you can organize your prized photos into albums using the software. When you're done, your albums are stored online on the KoffeePhoto network. Every album in your photo sharing collection gets its own web page for your visitors to view.

When you send an email notification to your contacts, the software automatically inserts the correct link to the album of your choice.

When the recipient opens the email, a full-screen slide show begins, complete with music. When the show is over, he or she can download and install the free KoffeePhoto software for easy access to your photos.

Your photos are safe on the KoffeePhoto network

If you're looking for a secure place to back up your photos, KoffeePhoto provides terrific security. What's more, you can easily access your secured collection whenever you wish. If your computer crashes, KoffeePhoto can retrieve your entire photo gallery quickly and easily.

While a free photo sharing account comes with plenty of features to suit your needs, a paid account gives you unlimited server storage space.

Microblogging made easy

Every photo you store on KoffeePhoto gets its own microblog. If you don't know what a microblog is, you're not alone. Basically, microblogging allows you and your viewers to comment and chat about photos. This feature makes photo sharing truly interactive and certainly much more fun.

User-friendly

KoffeePhoto is the ideal solution for easily organizing, backing up and sharing photos, both on your computer and on the Internet. The software is highly user-friendly.

You simply let it search your computer and create a list of your photos. Once the search is complete, go through your collection and delete, sort and organize your favorite photos as you wish to store them on the KoffeePhoto network. You can be certain your photos are protected from the elements as well as the ravages of time.

This system is at the apex of the popular photo storing and photo sharing frenzy. It's easy, convenient, user friendly, and safe. In your search for the right photo sharing option, be sure to check out KoffeePhoto.

Yahoo Shuts Down Mash, 0-4 On Social Networking

2008-08-29T01:16:00.001-07:00

First came 360, launched in 2005 as an early attempt to get Yahoo into social networking, was unceremoniously shut down earlier this year. In 2006 Yahoo was unable to close a transaction with Facebook, despite being willing to pay up to $1.62 billion. Nor could they pull the trigger on a $1 billion Bebo deal (Bebo went to AOL for $850 million). Now Yahoo has shut down Mash, which launched less than a year ago and is best known for sporting a Darth Vader playing guitar and eating a banana image when it was in private beta.

Today,Yahoo emailed users notice that Mash will be shutting down on September 29, 2008.

Fifthtime’s a charm they say (right?). Let’s hope the next grand strategy works out better than the first four.

Meanwhile,Yahoo Mash joins the deadpool.

Courtesy: TechCrunch

Zeep Mobile API Gives Site Owners Free SMS… With a Hitch

2008-08-29T01:15:00.001-07:00

So you run a website and really like the social software that enables your visitors to interact with things you produce. But you want to take that connection with the crowd to a more mobile position. Perhaps you’d like some sort of arrangement which allows interested parties to send and receive messages to and from your domain, and preferably something that costs you no financial investment to establish. Enter, Zeep Mobile.

What Zeep provides, in short, is an API. Pretty much any developer can implement the API, and do so freely and easily. With “no volume restrictions,” either. How it works is fairly simple.

Everything operates via a five-digit SMS code: 88147. This is used for messages sent out to users of websites and vice versa. The entry of a “website prefix” helps direct inbound communications. And Zeep is said to be able to connect with “all major carriers in the US,” so it’s bound to work for most who fancy the bridge it provides. The only outstanding concern is the cost to receive SMS messages. In the case of site owners, that’s mostly a non-issue. For site users, however, that’s a hurdle that some just won’t jump. Mobile phone users in international reaches may be the beneficiaries of a free-receive promise from their respective carriers, but here in the US, carriers tend to refuse any differentiation between the ins and the outs.

Zeep’sinfluence obviously can only stretch so far, so one will have to take a glass-half-full approach to this. Inasmuch as Zeep serves its first list of clients - website owners - there will be ample cheers for no-pay.

That “free” designation, mind you, has a bit of a condition attached to it. Yes, Zeep’s API is free to use, technically speaking. But that real-world use of the service will work hand-in-hand with something the company calls Zeep Media. That’s where advertisers enter the fold. Zeep states that developers utilizing the API will glean metadata pertaining to SMS-based interaction for the purpose of establishing “an accurate profile of each subscriber’s interests.” It explains to prospective advertisers that this ensures that spots are “always displayed to the right customers.” In other words, “highly targetable campaigns.”

Now,there’s nothing quite so conniving or deceptive about that. Targeting of that sort occurs in many scenarios today. But it is nonetheless good for websites and their creators or managers to keep this in mind when considering an SMS platform to infuse into their operations. I suspect a good portion of Zeep users won’t mind the ads much. Their presence, after all, is only going to increase with time. Still, it won’t taste good to everyone, so it is only appropriate to note.

Courtesy: Mashable

IE 8 Beta 2 ready for download

2008-08-27T21:29:00.001-07:00

By: Mary Jo Foley

Mozilla did its best to throw a spoiler into Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) 8 Beta 2 launch on Wednesday. But the new Ubiquity add-in for Firefox doesn’t sound all that different from what Microsoft is doing with the version of its browser due to ship in November.

Starting today, August 27, at 3 p.m. EST, Internet Explorer (IE) 8 Beta 2 became available for download by anyone who wants to give it a whirl.

As expected, there are a lot of new features that were not part of IE Beta 1 which are now available in IE 8 Beta 2. In Private browsing (”porn mode”) and In Private blocking are just two of the many new items that got added to the latest IE beta. Others include crash recovery (I’m installing just for that alone!), a “Diagnose Connection Problem” button, and Compatibility View (for sites that break when viewed in IE 8 — some examples of which are on the Redmond Pie enthusiast site).

(For a list of more of what’s new in Beta 2, check out this report.)

The most interesting — and potentially controversial — new features are those that fall into the Microsoft-designated category of “Reach Beyond the Page.” (That’s the terminology Microsoft is using in its IE 8 Beta 2 Reviewers’ Guide, a copy of which I had a chance to see this week.)

Here’swhat’s on the Reach list:

*Accelerators (the feature formerly known as “Activities” in Beta 1): Technology allowing users to perform tasks like finding a definition of a word, posting a blog entry, mapping an address or posting a blog entry) available on the page they are viewing, instead of on a new page

*Web slices: Brings the user’s favorite data (sports scores, weather reports, stock quotes, etc.) directly into the Favorites Bar. Changes and updates are retrieved and users are visually notified of the updated information status

*Visual search suggestions: In the Instant Search box, as users type a search term, they will receive real-time search suggestions from their chosen search provider, as well as results from the users’s own Favorites and browsing history.

* Suggested sites: These are recommendations about other, related sites that might be of interest. This feature must be enabled by the user; it’s not on by default.

The only one of these four categories that got an update between Betas 1 an 2 were Web slices. But it sounded from my conversation with the Softies that they were expecting a number of testers to look deeply and critically into the Visual search suggestions and suggested sites areas, as well, when putting IE 8 Beta 2 through its paces.

As Mozilla’s Ubiquity announcement demonstrates, Mozilla seems to be thinking the same way as Microsoft’s browser team. As another of my ZDNet colleagues, Ryan Stewart, put it: The Web’s page-based model has been slowly dying. When browsing, users increasingly want to perform specific tasks that often involve mashing up Web sites/destinations/content.

I’mcurious whether these new ways of discovering/promoting content will have any impact on how users search the Web. Will suggested sites or search terms make users any less likely to Google something?

And how will this new functionality impact online advertising? As Microsoft on Directions analyst Matt Rosoff noted, IE 8’s InPrivate blocking feature

“An InPrivate Session will, by default, also block all third-party content from domains that have appeared more than 10 times in your history. In practice, that means a lot of ads served by ad networks could be blocked. I think that’s a great step for privacy, but seems to contradict Microsoft’s own promises in the advertising realm–in particular, Microsoft Advertising has pushed this idea called engagement mapping, which relies on tracking users’ interaction with an advertising campaign over a few days or weeks. I’m not sure how Microsoft can square that circle.”

Do you like the concepts behind Accelerators, slices, visual search suggestions and suggested sites? What about Firefox’s Ubiquity? Do you see any advantages of Microsoft’s approach over Mozilla’s, or vice versa?

Firefox Mobile (Concept Video)

2008-08-27T01:29:00.001-07:00

Firefox is coming to mobile. The innovation, usability, and extensibility that has propelled Firefox to 200 million users is set to do the same for Firefox in a mobile setting.

User experience is the most important aspect of having a compelling mobile product. Every bit of interaction and pixel of presentation counts when typing is laborious and screen sizes are minuscule. Many of the standard interaction models, like menus, always-present chrome, and having a cursor, don’t necessarily make sense on mobile. It’s a wickedly exciting opportunity but there are myriad challenges to getting it right.

Firefox Mobile Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Source: MozillaLabs

Mozilla Labs: Introducing Snowl

2008-08-27T01:10:00.001-07:00

An Experiment with Messaging in the Browser Conversing (a.k.a. messaging) is a common online activity, and a number of desktop and web applications enable it. But with an increasing variety of protocols and providers, it’s getting harder and harder to keep track of all your conversations.
Could the web browser help you follow and participate in online discussions? Snowl is an experiment to answer that question. It’s a prototype Firefox extension that integrates messaging into the browser based on a few key ideas:

It doesn’t matter where messages originate. They’re alike, whether they come from traditional email servers, RSS/Atom feeds, web discussion forums, social networks, or other sources. Some messages are more important than others, and the best interface for actively reading important messages is different from the best one for casually browsing unimportant ones. A search-based interface for message retrieval is more powerful and easier to use than one that makes you organize your messages first to find them later. Browser functionality for navigating web content, like tabs, bookmarks, and history, also works well for navigating messages.

The Initial Prototype

The initial prototype supports two sources of messages: RSS/Atom feeds and Twitter. And it exposes two interfaces for reading them. First, a traditional three-pane “list” view, targeted to active reading of important messages:

Second, a “river of news” view, based on the concept popularized by Dave Winer, designed for casual browsing:

Roadmap

Our next step is to gather feedback on the prototype and the ideas behind it. We want to know if the concept has promise and is worth pursuing further. We’re particularly interested in feedback on how messaging might fit into the browsing experience and if there are other interfaces (or refinements to the two interfaces built into the prototype) that would make it easier for users to have online conversations.

We’re still considering what may come after that, but possible extensions to the Snowl prototype include:

support for additional message sources, e.g. Facebook, AIM, Google Talk, etc.;
an interface for writing and sending messages to enable true two-way conversations;an API to make it easier for developers to build new experimental interfaces, e.g. an instant message view.

Also, last week at the Firefox+ summit there were related discussions about the future of Thunderbird’s user experience, with many ideas that overlap the ideas embedded in Snowl. We expect that some of the Thunderbird ideas will influence Snowl’s future, and that lessons (and possibly code) from Snowl will influence Thunderbird’s future.

Get Snowl for Firefox

Getthe initial prototype: Snowl for Firefox.

Warning: the initial prototype is a primitive implementation with many bugs, and subsequent versions will include changes that break functionality and delete all your messages, making you start over from scratch.

Theprototype code is released under an MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license. Most icons are from the Silk icon set by famfamfam, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license. The OPML icon is from the OPML Icon Project, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 license.

GetInvolved

Let us know what you think by posting in the forum, reporting bugs, or conversing with us in the #labs channel on irc.mozilla.org. Or check out the source and submit your bug fixes and enhancements.

Source: MozillLab

Mozilla Announces Ubiquity for Universal Access

2008-08-27T00:22:00.001-07:00

Mozilla Labs announced today that it has released a new solution called Ubiquity, which will try to bring a disjointed Web together under the auspices of that one solution.

Ubiquity will try to “connect the Web with language to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.” More specifically, Ubiquity will try to get users to type what they want to do instead of what they’re trying to find in a search box, enable more mashups to increase the usability of different Web services, and extend browser functionality to make it a hub for online solutions.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

As part of its announcement, Mozilla Labs announced Ubiquity 0.1, which will demonstrate some of Ubiquity’s concepts and its potential. This first release focuses more on the platform itself, which the subsequent release will “explore interfaces that are closer to features that might make it into Firefox.”

Mozilla also said that Ubiquity 0.1 will allow “users to map and insert maps anywhere; translate on-page; search amazon, google, wikipedia, yahoo, youtube, etc.; digg and twitter; look up and insert yelp review; get the weather; syntax highlight any code you find; and a lot more.”

At this point, Ubiquity is obviously a crude version of what could possibly be, but it promises more than it currently offers. And by performing the kind of functions that are simply impossible today (Mozilla mentions the difficulty with which people can work together on mapping), Ubiquity could be the centerpiece of the Web’s evolution. At the very least, Mozilla hopes so.

Source: Mashable

4 Years Later, Google Suggest Finally Goes Primetime

2008-08-26T04:29:00.001-07:00

Over the next week, Google will finally be implementing Google Suggest, its auto-complete for searches, on its homepage at Google.com. The service allows users to see the most commonly searched phrases after entering only a few letters, helping users cut back on typing time and check for spelling errors. If you’d like to try the service out now (it isn’t currently activated for everyone) you can find it here.

According to the company’s blog post, the feature has been a long time coming, and has made its way across much of the Google empire already:

“The Google Suggest feature originally started as a 20% project in 2004, and has since expanded to Google Labs, Toolbar, Firefox search box, Maps and Web Search for select countries, the iPhone and BlackBerry, YouTube, and now Google.com.”

Similarsearch autocomplete can be found on a number of major competitors, including Yahoo and recently-launched (and much hyped Cuil).

Courtesy: Techcrunch

10 Tools to Get the Most Out of GTalk

2008-08-21T21:13:00.001-07:00

For those of us who are active Google Talk (GTalk) users, sometimes chatting is not enough. Luckily, there are tools to make your GTalk experience more interesting like VOIP, translations, and more. Here are 10 third party tools and special features that will help you get the most out of the service.

Which ones are your favorite? Know any more? Tell us in your comments.

Extended Talk

Extended Talk is a free addon for GTalk that brings in enhanced features such as making your chat windows transparent, changing font colors, message and typing areas, creating text filters, using smileys, and custom images. It also provides shortcuts to insert dates, time, IP address, email, etc. in your messages. Overall, the addon is non obstructive and fits quite well with the GTalk interface, while providing a few handy extra features.

Google Talk Shell

Google Talk Shell is another GTalk addon with some extra features that you might like. Firstly, it allows you to add several avatars and make them rotate in short intervals in your GTalk application. You can auto-hide the GTalk main window so that you have a large work area, or you can configure GTalk to always be on top of the desktop. You can also run several GTalk user names simultaneously using this addon. There is even an anti-boss hotkey to hide the GTalk window quickly.

Translation bots

Translation bots are described by Google as pieces of software that act as chat contacts and provide some fun or useful functionality. Whenever you need to translate any word or sentence from one language to another, you can send that as a message to one of the appropriate Google Chat translation bots. The bot then acts as a translator and replies to the translated version of your message. Of course you need to add the translation bot as your GTalk contact beforehand.

Currently there are 50 bots available in two language pairs. The names of the bots have been made of two letter abbreviations of languages, the English to French translation bot is ‘en2fr.’ To add the bots as contacts, you simple need to add the email of the specific bot in this format: name_of_the_bot@bot.talk.google.com. For example, for English to French bot, it’s ‘en2fr@bot.talk.google.com.’

Transliteration bots

Transliteration bots are somewhat similar to translation bots, but here they convert English sentences to scripts of various Indian languages like Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu. You can add the bots using their names ‘en2hi’.translit, ‘en2kn.translit,’ ‘en2ml.translit,’ ‘en2ta.translit,’ and ‘en2te.translit,’ ending with ‘@bot.talk.google.com’.

Chatback Badge

Chatback badge is a nice little tool from Google that you can use to chat with non-Google users. The badge can be put on your blog, website, or anywhere you can embed an html code, and it will display your online status along with a ‘Chat with me’ message in a nice chat bubble. You can create the chatback badge in different styles as well.

GTalk Sidebar

GTalk Sidebar is a convenient way of chatting with your GTalk contacts using the Firefox sidebar. Every chat window opens in a new tab in the sidebar itself. You can make the GTalk application pop out in a new window if you wish. Although GTalk Sidebar doesn’t provide any additional feature, it can be another nice alternative, just in case you don’t want to open a Gmail window on your browser and don’t have the desktop client installed. An alternative to this addon is to save the GTalk Gadget as your Firefox bookmark and set the bookmark to load in the sidebar.

GTalk Profile

GTalk Profile is an online service that you can use to find other GTalk users from across the globe. You can simply click anywhere on the world map provided at the GTalk Profile site to look for users in that area. You can also look for users using its search box.

Ping.fm

Ping.fm is not an exclusive GTalk application. What it does is update your status on as many as 21 of your social sites including Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Wordpress, Tumbler, Pownce, Blogger, Plurk, Xanga, Friendfeed, etc., and even Mashable, simultaneously. All you need to do is add Ping.fm as a contact in your GTalk application and send it to your status update as a chat message. You also need to create your account at Ping.fm and add your social profiles so that it can do the posting for you.

GTalk to VOIP

GTalk to VOIP offers a number of free and paid VOIP services that you can use with your IM tools including GTalk, Yahoo Messenger, and Live Messenger. These include incoming calls to your IM tools from any mobile, landline phones, or Web services; outgoing calls to SIP phones, Internet radio, video conferencing, offline messaging, IM interoperability, SMS service, etc. Payment can be completed through Paypal.

Inezha

Inezha allows you to use your Gtalk application as a feed reader. Simply send the RSS feed url to the Inezha bot on your GTalk and ask to be notified on all future updates. You can also access you online account at the Inezha site and add the feeds you want to subscribe to. There are also Firefox and Internet Explorer bookmarklets and widgets that you can add to your blog. Inezha also provides a social networking feature where you can add your friends and subscribe to their updates.

Courtsey: Mashable

Verisign’s Personal Identity Portal Is Half Way To Password Bliss

2008-08-21T04:47:00.001-07:00

Verisign’s new Personal Identity Portal (PIP from now on) isn’t the sexiest application out there to help you manage passwords. But it has Verisign’s strong reputation for security behind it, and it is a surprisingly easy way to manage website credentials.

PIPis a a single sign in solution that supports both OpenID (you are issued a Verisign OpenID) and direct sign in to a number of supported websites. If a site doesn’t support OpenID, login is handled by populating the username and password fields directly.

Read the Full article here

Konnects Official Launch: Filling the LinkedIn-Facebook Gap

2008-08-21T02:43:00.001-07:00

By: Kristen Nicole

Konnects is a social network entering the crowded realm of business social networking, seeking out those users that are caught in limbo between the likes of LinkedIn and Facebook. And while this space is getting more crowded by the day, I think Konnects has a good idea of what it’s targeting in terms of its solutions presented on its site, as well as its ongoing plan of action. Having privately tested its network for the past year, Konnects now boasts 350,000 users taking advantage of its online service upon its public launch, which aims to provide your “traditional” social networking tools in a manner suitable for business use. This goes for both individuals and companies alike.

Sowhat’s this gap between LinkedIn and Facebook that Konnects is trying to bridge? Konnects isn’t as restrictive as LinkedIn, and more business-oriented than Facebook. Instead of having a user profile that looks like a resume, Konnects understands that many recent grads and newcomers don’t have a decade of work experience and would benefit from having a place to discuss and showcase what their current life represents. The same goes for early-stage startups: what projects are they currently working on, and what issues are important to them? Such promotion occurs in features like blogs, photos, etc., which is more reminiscent of the features you’ll find on Facebook.

Even though Facebook lets you organize your friends into various groups now, the whole of Facebook isn’t designed solely for business networking purposes. This may not sound too different from other business networks that have emerged in the past year or so, but Konnects has a couple of other features that bring an interesting mix of Web-based tools into the business-networking realm. For instance, Konnects will not only recommend people you may want to connect with, but it’s also building a recommendation system that will deliver suggested groups, discussions and forums you may want to join, as well as user-generated content (such as blog entries) that you may be interested in viewing.

There are also user-generated groups that can be created as standalone entities, designed for use by companies and professional organizations that would like a place to network. This feature operates more like Ning than a group you can create on a site like Facebook, giving the network admin the capability of creating a walled garden if need be. Similar to Soceeo, end users can join and manage multiple groups from their centralized location.

Other upcoming features will be the inclusion of chat IM and VoIP integration, enabling users to connect with each other in multiple and direct ways. Konnects CEO and co-founder Jim Crabbe explains that all these integrated tools along with the recommendation engine are designed to factor in relevancy and time, so that users can “get to know each other when they meet in person, instead of having to deal with the nitty gritty details of building a relationship.” This means that Konnects is focused on providing as many tools for direct transactions as it can, when connecting its users with each other.

Create a Tour of Web Pages with Agglom

2008-08-18T20:53:00.001-07:00

Sharing web pages in a conversation shouldn't be as tricky as it is. Sometimes you're on the phone, or speaking to a group of people and there isn't a handy way to bring people along with you from page to page and then let them have easy access to those pages after the conversation is through.

Enter Agglom, a simple little service built by Italian developer Enrico Foschi. It's a Firefox plug-in that will make sharing a list of links far easier than it's been before.

How It Works

Agglom is a remarkably easy way to create a "slide show" of live links that you can share with other people. See the screencast demo we recorded below.
Forthose who prefer to read, there's a text description after the video.

After downloading the plug-in, you can click on the Agglom button at any time. It captures all the URLs from each tab in your browser. After making some admin decisions, including public/private or password protection, you receive one link that you can share with anyone else. They can then follow through the slide show along with you, access it later, get any changes made to it by RSS, leave comments and suggest additional links.

It's simple but looks quite useful.

Presentation Is Powerful

Earlier this month we wrote about five lightweight apps that are useful for web consultants and trainers. If we had known about Agglom then (we just discovered it today via Marjolein Hoekstra's blog CleverClogs) it would have made a great fit there as well.

The web is changing so fast and there's so much information available that providing accessible ways clearly show people what you're talking about is the best way to help friends, family and co-workers wrap their minds around the powerful new tools now available.

Agglom is simple - that's good. It also looks quite useful. That's a sweetspot for applications these days. Can you imagine using it? We can.

Courtesy ReadWriteWeb

Google Won’t Let Search Startups Grow Too Large

2008-08-18T11:56:00.001-07:00

Czech search engine, Seznam is on the block for $1 billion, according to reports, and Google may be in the hunt for that country’s most popular search engine. And while it wouldn’t surprise me if Google did acquire Seznam to shore up its international influence, it points to a key issue that shouldn’t be overlooked: Google is so powerful and so rich that the chances of a small search engine growing to challenge its prowess are becoming smaller with each passing day.

There are a variety of search engines in the wild that all offer something new or unique. Some think Quintura will be a major player in the search space one day, while others believe Wikia, Clusty, or even KartOO might have a shot at slaying the Google beast. Each offers something unique and something that many people may be looking for, but do they have the staying power or popularity to grow under Google’s nose like Baidu, and utterly command the search market in one space? I doubt it.

Google is simply too big and too powerful to be challenged by a small firm. That ’s not to say that it’s better than Wikia or even better than Quintura, but it does mean that Google simply won’t let these services get too big before it’s forced to react.

The search engine space is increasingly becoming a three-horse race in the United States and even fewer are finding footing overseas. According to the most recent numbers, Google now controls 70 percent of the US market and Yahoo and Microsoft continue to lose ground. All the while, smaller search engines like Wikia and Quintura are not even included in that discussion. That said, they’re still growing, albeit at a much slower rate than Google.

But that doesn’t matter much anymore. Years ago, search engines would start up and have a fighting chance at reigning supreme. But in today’s consolidated market, there’s no such chance. Instead, the idea of creating a search engine has followed the Web 2.0 mantra that venture capitalists love and egotists that want to rule a market don’t: Make your search engine grow to a level where people take notice, do something unique, and in no time, Google or Microsoft will acquire it to shore up their presence online.

Powerset is a prime example of that idea. Sure, it only lets you search Wikipedia right now, but what it did do was provide a highly-useful way of inputting queries and getting relevant results to be returned. And in the process, Microsoft saw something it liked and acquired it before it became a threat or before Google had the opportunity to do the same.

It might sound naive to say that no company will ever really challenge Google, but it may be true. The way I see it, Yahoo is the only company that’s even close right now and it’s in such disarray that it’s not a threat to Eric Schmidt and the rest of his cronies at all. Microsoft is probably the stiffest competition because it has the cash to compete, but let’s not forget that its market share is barely relevant — it has yet to even hit 10 percent.

But that’s also where the smaller search engines come in. Smaller search engines don’t need to play the same game Google and Microsoft do and tend to be more successful when they break the mold and create a real user experience. The Web is littered with the remains of search engines like Lycos, Altavista, and dare I say, AOL, that tried to do the same thing as Google and failed, so why shouldn’t startups try something new and give the big three some ideas?

After using the myriad search engines on the Web, it’s abundantly clear that some — most notably, Wikia and Clusty — have a chance at growing into a search powerhouse. But in today’s environment where both Google and Microsoft make billions each quarter and have all the money they need to stop small search engines from growing too large and threatening their dominance, that’s simply impossible.

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are probably here to stay for quite some time. And although I’d like to see a new company crop up just as much as the next person, the chances of another Baidu emerging are extremely small — Google or Microsoft would acquire it before that ever happens.

That said, it doesn’t mean innovation is dead and I fully expect Microsoft to lead the way in that regard. After all, if you’re trailing by such a wide margin, wouldn’t you want to try something new and hopefully coax more people to your service?

Courtesy of Mashable!

6 Online Email Aggregators that Do More Than Just Aggregate

2008-08-18T10:45:00.001-07:00

For most of us, Gmail can be the simple answer to aggregating all of our emails together in one place. But for those who are looking for something new with a bit more spice, there are a whole new breed of email aggregators that promise to redefine the way we look at and use our inboxes. Here are 6 online email aggregators that do more than just aggregate.

Zenbe

Zenbe, “designed to be the world’s best email experience,” is the coolest new kid on the block and might just emerge as the big guy soon enough. The advertisement-free service offers you an email program, startup page, calendar, files directory, task list, your Facebook updates, Twitter, a chat application, Delicious, and address book all in one place. While you might be getting many of these features in other email programs, the presentation and flawless execution is what make Zenbe a clear winner.

The calendar, startup page, file directory, and email come in tabs in the center of the page. There is a right-hand sidebar that executes the Twitter, Facebook, chat and to-do list applications. Zenbe can get your emails from other email services like Gmail, AOL, Yahoo, and MSN using POP. What I particularly like about Zenbe is the start-up page titled “ZenPage” that will definitely change the way we look at emails and start-up pages. You can have members at your ZenPage and chat with them live from your account.

Orgoo

Orgoo is similar to Zenbe but in a much simpler form. If you take away Zenbe’s ZenPage, Facebook, Twitter, and a few other features, you are left with Orgoo. The service provides you with an inbox and a chat application on the right-hand sidebar, and aggregates your SMS messages, but what is really striking about Orgoo is its video chat feature. Orgoo’s video chat allows you to use any webcam and start chatting from your account page.

Fuser

Fuser, as the name suggests, simply fuses all your email accounts, including AIM, AOL, Comcast, POP3, IMAP, Gmail, Hotmail, Live, Netscape, Outlook, Yahoo, and more, in one place. Not only that, you can also get and reply to your MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter messages from the Fuser inbox.

TopicR

TopicR is not really about aggregating your emails from all of your other email addresses, but experiencing a whole new way of using email while still retaining your old email addresses. I can bet some of the features in TopicR will make you say “wow.” With TopicR you can send private emails that can’t be forwarded or copied. It also acts a file upload service where you can upload a number of pictures or audio files that your recipients can see online so that their inboxes don’t get clogged. You can mix music and pictures in your attachments and create a slide show. You can also create an RSS feed of your email.

TopicRacts as a social networking platform where you can browse through the publicly shared content and connect with other readers. What I find particularly interesting is the Activity Stream, which in TopicR’s words is “the stream of people’s activities around your email topics and contents.” Talk about the next generation of email - this could be close.

Goowy

Goowy is for the Flash fans out there. It provides you a Flash based webtop that includes features like email, calendar, contact management, a startup page, IM, file storage, and more. You can add your Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail accounts into Goowy using POP3. There are plenty of customization options that you can choose from, including dozens of inbox skins.

Jubii

Jubii not only aggregates your different email accounts but acts as a smart service that adapts according to your usage patterns. For example, it sorts out your incoming emails into your private and public inboxes and highlights important senders. It provides a file storage center with a 10 GB space for the first 1 million beta users and 4 GB per user thereafter that you can use to store any type of files and share easily with your contacts.

Jubii also acts like a social networking platform where you can see who is online and connect with them in real time. Instead of emailing, you can choose to call your contacts on landline and mobile phones using the service. The following countries are supported currently for the online telephony service: US, Austria, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, and United Kingdom. Jubii currently allows you to call and talk your contacts for 30 minutes a day or 3 hours per month for free. Jubii also provides an RSS feed reader feature that you might want to check out.

Courtesy of Mashable

HitMeLater: A Snooze Button For Your Email

2008-08-15T11:33:00.001-07:00

HitMeLater is simple. Forward any email to 24@hitmelater.com and it will send it back to you 24 hours later, putting it on the top of your inbox pile. You can change the number of hours to anything you like, up to 1,000 hours ahead (3@hitmelater.com sends it back three hours later). Alternatively, put in a day (Wednesday@hitmelater sends it back the next Wednesday). If you send it something it doesn’t understand, HitMeLater sends back a polite email message saying “We’re not sure what you want.”

Google says AOL is a lemon, regretting $1 billion investment

2008-08-15T10:57:00.001-07:00

According to Google’s 10-Q filing, Google is regretting their $1 billion investment in AOL for 5% of the company. They have determined that AOL looks like a lemon, and they will never see any return on their investment.Basedon our review, we believe our investment in AOL may be impaired. After consideration of the [...]

Windows Live Wave 3: Coming to testers near you soon

2008-08-14T22:26:00.001-07:00

The leaks are picking up. Windows Live Wave 3 — the next version of Microsoft’s Windows Live software and services — is finally expected to move into broader beta testing in the coming weeks.

Microsoft is expected to refresh all of its core Windows Live services, plus the common installer, as part of Wave 3. There is a new version of Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Photo Gallery and more that are in the pipeline. Microsoft has hinted that it will be revamping Windows Live Spaces, its blogging/social-networking platform, in a major way as part of the Wave 3 release. In addition, all of the core Windows Live services are expected to get more profile-centric as part of the next wave.

Dell Updates Business Laptops For 'Digital Nomads'

2008-08-12T20:35:00.001-07:00

The PCs include a security subsystem to protect data and prevent unauthorized network access, and technology to extend battery life to as much as 19 hours.

By Antone Gonsalves

Dell on Tuesday introduced a new line of business notebooks that reflect the computer maker's shift from building systems that only meet the requirements of IT managers to products that also incorporate nonbusiness features requested by end users.

Under development for the last two years, the seven new Latitude notebooks include a security subsystem to protect data and prevent unauthorized network access. Other new proprietary technology extends battery life to as much as 19 hours, according to Dell, and provides immediate access to e-mail and attachments, calendar information, and the Web without having to boot up the whole system.

Dell executives introduced the new line, along with three Precision mobile workstations, during a San Francisco news conference. In developing the new products, Dell focused on what it called "digital nomads," businesspeople who prefer to take their laptops with them wherever they go.

What Dell hopes will be particularly appealing to travelers is the 12.1-inch Latitude E4200, which starts at 2.2 pounds; and the 13.3-inch E4300, which starts at 3.3 pounds. The ultraportable systems will be available in the "coming weeks." Pricing was not disclosed, but small, full-featured systems in general tend to sell at a premium.

For companies looking for a basic business notebook to reduce costs, Dell unveiled the 14.1-inch E5400, which starts at $839, and the 15.4-inch E5500, which starts at $869. The systems were available Tuesday.

For mainstream desktop replacements, often found in docking stations in corporate cubicles, Dell introduced the 14.1-inch E6400 and the 15.4-inch E6500, which start at $1,139 and $1,169, respectively. Both were also available as of Tuesday.

For fieldworkers in more rugged environments, such as construction sites or military operations, Dell unveiled the 14.l-inch semirugged E6400 ATG, which starts at $2,399. The system is expected to be available next week.

While the new systems introduce some attractive proprietary technology, the bigger innovation is the change in how Dell decides what goes in its new products. Dell is listening as much to the requests of people who use its customer-feedback site IdeaStorm as to corporate IT managers.

"That's one of the key differences of these new commercial notebooks," Richard Shim, analyst for IDC, told InformationWeek. "This is dramatically different for Dell. They're responding more to what the end user is saying, in addition to what the IT manager wants."

As a result, Dell is making the notebooks available in colors other than corporate black, such as "regatta blue," "regal red," and "quartz pink." In addition, the systems are available with embedded Webcams and microphones. "People are traveling more and want Webcams to video chat with families at night," Shim said. read more ...

Microsoft sees end of Windows era

2008-08-04T22:56:00.001-07:00

Microsoft has kicked off a research project to create software that will take over when it retires Windows.

Called Midori, the cut-down operating system is radically different to Microsoft's older programs.

It is centred on the internet and does away with the dependencies that tie Windows to a single PC.

It is seen as Microsoft's answer to rivals' use of "virtualisation" as a way to solve many of the problems of modern-day computing.

Tie breaking

Although Midori has been heard about before now, more details have now been published by Software Development Times after viewing internal Microsoft documents describing the technology.

Midori is believed to be under development because Windows is unlikely to be able to cope with the pace of change in future technology and the way people use it.

Windows worked well in an age when most people used one machine to do all their work. The operating system acted as the holder for the common elements Windows programs needed to call on.

"If you think about how an operating system is loaded," said Dave Austin, European director of products at Citrix, "it's loaded onto a hard disk physically located on that machine.

"The operating system is tied very tightly to that hardware," he said.

That, he said, created all kinds of dependencies that arose out of the collection of hardware in a particular machine.

NBC Launches On-Demand Olympic Coverage In HD

2008-08-04T21:26:00.001-07:00

NBChas launched its online video hub for the 2008 Olympics, which features free on-demand video for over 20 sports. In order to maximize quality, the videos are available as downloads (you can start watching before the download finishes) and will be in “up to HD” quality. Unfortunately, the video downloads will only be available on Windows machines running Windows Media Center - once again Mac users are left in the cold, likely because of DRM issues (and the fact that Lenovo and Microsoft are sponsors).

Whilethe Olympic ceremonies don’t kick off until August 8, NBC has already posted footage of Olympic trials. Once the games begin, NBC expects to have the footage available around 12 hours after each competition (which shouldn’t be too annoying given the time difference).

Microsoftis participating in the partnership, so access to the videos will be integrated into Media Center’s main panel. Users can also visit this TVTonic page, and the content will be available directly from NBCOlympics.com beginning next week. You can read more about the service at the TVTonic blog post here.

Create a Windows Live ID or Microsoft Passport ID with Your Non Hotmail or Windows Live E-mail Address

2008-08-01T03:01:00.001-07:00

How to register your e-mail address that is not a Hotmail or Windows Live e-mail address with Windows Live ID or Microsoft Passport ID. Doing this enables you to chat with friends on Live Messenger using your non Hotmail or Windows Live e-mail address.

This guide shows you how to register your e-mail address that is not a Hotmail or Windows Live e-mail address with Windows Live ID or Microsoft Passport ID. Doing this enables you to chat with friends on Live Messenger using your non Hotmail or Windows Live e-mail address.

Create Credentials

The first thing you need to do is sign your non Hotmail or Windows Live e-mail address up with Microsoft’s Passport Network so that e-mail address has the proper credentials.

Visit Microsoft’s Create Credentials website to start the process.

Follow the instructions on the Create Credentials page to sign up your non Hotmail or Windows Live e-mail address with Microsoft’s Passport Network.

Verify Your E-mail Address

It is very important that you verify your e-mail address after signing up with Microsoft’s Passport Network by clicking the link that is e-mailed to you shortly after you sign up.

20+ Video Tutorials for Open Source Applications

2008-07-31T05:02:00.001-07:00

There are tons of open source applications out there, from operating systems to word processors to graphics programs and more. But, it’s often hard to find manuals or other documentation beyond what the developers have written (which, while technically correct, doesn’t always cover the nuances of actually using the program). Here are more than 20 video tutorials to get you going with four of the most popular open source programs out there: Gimp, Linux, Open Office, and Nvu.

Whichtutorials are most helpful for you?

Gimp Video Tutorials

GimpTutorial: Pop Art - This tutorial shows how to take a regular photograph and turn it into a graphic piece of pop art.

The User Interface - This tutorial will give you a basic overview of Gimp’s user interface.

How to Change Hair Color - Ever wanted to try out a new hair color without actually dying your hair? Well, just use this Gimp tutorial to change your hair color in a photo.

Creating a Sketch Effect Using the Gimp - This tutorial goes over the basics of making a photo look like a hand-drawn sketch.

Transparent Glass Lettering - It’s great to know how to create transparent glass letters for website headers and banners, and to give your creations a more web 2.0 look.

Creating a Graduated Neutral Density Filter - Neutral density filters are a great tool for photography, and this tutorial will show you how to create the same effect in Gimp after you’ve taken the photo.

Full Flare Control with The Gimp - Flares can often be annoying in a photo, but sometimes they add that little extra something. This tutorial shows you how to take full control of flare creation.

Creating Water Drops - Adding water droplets to a leaf or a flower can be a cool effect in a photo, but is tricky to do. This tutorial explains exactly how to create realistic water droplets.

How to Create a Web 2.0 Logo Using the Gimp - Everyone needs a good web 2.0 logo, and this video will show you how.

Pr eparing an Image for the Web - This tutorial is the first in a series, and covers rotating, cropping, downscaling, pushing the colors, and sharpening an image.

LinuxVideo Tutorials

Using Multiple Workspaces in Puppy Linux - This tutorial shows how to configure Puppy Linux to have multiple workspaces.

Run Linux Under Windows - This tutorial shows how to run Linux or another operating system as a virtual system under your Windows operating system.

Install Ubuntu Linux 7.10 - This tutorial spells out exactly how to install Ubuntu Linux on your PC.

Backup Linux Mandriva 2008 - Learn how to back up your users and system configuration with this video tutorial.

(Very) Basic CD Burning Linux Mint Tutorial - Here’s a really basic tutorial on how to burn CDs using Linux Mint.

OpenOffice Video Tutorials

< br>OpenOfficeTutorial - This tutorial is very complete, and covers installing, configuring and using OpenOffice.

Hidden Star Wars Game - This tutorial shows you how to access the hidden Star Wars game in OpenOffice.

How to Create a PDF with Open Office - This video shows how to create a PDF file from an OpenOffice file.

Open Office on Ubuntu Linux - This tutorial shows how to use Open Office on an Ubuntu Linux platform.

NvuVideo Tutorials

Howto Modify a Website Template Using Nvu - This video tutorial shows how to customize a website template to meet your needs.

Installing Free Editor Nvu - This tutorial shows you how to get Nvu up and running on your computer.

Getting Started with Nvu - This video covers the basics of using Nvu for designing web pages.

Using Tables in Nvu - This tutorial shows how to create tables using Nvu.

Browzmi: A Social Browser in Your Browser

2008-07-29T21:15:00.001-07:00

Social bookmarking has become a pretty standard activity these days, with the likes of Mento, Delicious, Mister Wong, Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon offering numerous variations on this theme. Browzmi is taking a different approach from these services by focusing on real-time, collaborative web browsing and bookmarking, with chat being one of its main features. What is especially noteworthy is that Browzmi is not an extension, but basically a browser in a browser.

Browzmi was founded by Travis Parsons in 2006 and is currently being developed by a five person team. Browzmi has not taken any venture funding yet. Registration for Browzmi is open.

Surf With Friends

Browzmi allows you to surf the web with your friends. The core of Browzmi is made up of its bookmarking and sharing function, as well as the built-in IM. The chat function, as well as the real-time updates on the site, are enabled through an XMPP and Jabber back-end.

It's important to note right away that Browzmi is not a screen sharing application. While you can follow your friends around the web, you are not sharing the exact same experience with them and you don't see their mouse cursors moving around etc. Browzmi instead focuses on real-time sharing and discussion.

This concept, of course, is somewhat similar to that of Me.dium or Yoono. However, the interesting aspect of Browzmi is that it does not rely on extentions at all.

Just Like a 'Real' Browser

The Browzmi interface mimics a regular browser, with a location bar and search form at the top, as well as sidebars on the left and right. Thanks to this, new users should feel right at home when opening up the application. There are also back and forth buttons, as well as a home button that takes you back to the Browzmi 'Everyone' page.

Once you surf to a site, you can comment on a page, bookmark it, and make your opinions about it known by voting up or down on it. You can also 'clip' pictures from a site, making Browzmi a photo sharing application as well. All your actions on the site are saved in a stream that you and your friends can access and which looks somewhat like a stream in Friendfeed.

Sidebars

The sidebar on the left side of the screen ("My Stuff") is mostly reserved for seeing where your friends on Browzmi are right now. Thanks to the "Surf with Friends" feature, you can follow them around the web and chat with them. This sidebar is also where you can access your favorites (which basically function as bookmarks), see your activity stream, and see your friends' online status.

The right sidebar is called "Explore More" and it allows you to see where other users are on the service right now, as well as related content on Flickr, YouTube. Here, you can also see what other users who are not in your network have said about any given site.

Thanks to the XMPP back-end, all of your friends actions are being pushed to you instantaneously .

Privacy

When we first reviewed Me.dium, which offers a number of features similar to Browzmi, we were worried about the privacy implications of the service. Browzmi allows you to make your stream public or private, but any of your online activity through Browzmi does, of course, show on Browzmi and is available for viewing by your friends or (if you don't set the privacy features right) anybody. Given that users are probably quite aware that what they are doing is public - that is, after all, the whole point of the service - we are not too concerned about this, but it is still worth pointing out.

Coming Soon

Browzmi is currently working on adding number of additional features to the site, including allowing users to sign into the site with their AOL, Yahoo, or MSN credentials, which would allow everybody to chat with their IM friends right from Browzmi and also to invite them to surf the web with them. Integration with AOL's IM system will be announced in the next few weeks and the others should follow relatively soon after that.

Browzmi is also planning on allowing its users to comment on specific items on a site. This is something a few other bookmarking services already allow, but without allowing for real-time sharing.

The Browzmi team is also going to release an API in the future, which will allow developers to add widgets and customize the Browzmi experience.

Verdict

We were skeptical of Browzmi at first. Why, after all, would you need a browser within my browser? However, with the IM integration, its various RSS feeds, and straightforward surfing experience, Browzmi is actually a lot of fun to use. If you used it with Fluid or Mozilla's Prism, you could even make it your standard browser interface if you were so inclined. While that is probably not even Browzmi's intention, it does open up some interesting possibilities for the future.

In our tests, Browzmi worked very well and we didn't come across any bugs. For some sites, where Browzmi might be problematic, you can download a Firefox extension, but in our tests, we never needed it.

Browzmi, like most similar services based on social interactions, is going to get more useful as more users start joining and as your list of friends growths. In many ways, it is complementary to other services like Friendfeed, in that it gives you an option for real-time sharing and discussion, while you can also import most of your Browzmi actions to other services through Browzmi's RSS feeds.

Once Browzmi adds more IM services, we think that it can grow quite rapidly and organically, as there will be zero friction for new sign-ups.

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Free Mobile download, the most desirable 'thing'

2008-07-29T03:47:00.001-07:00

Ever thought that the money you spent to buy a hi-fi mobile phone is not being justified i.e. you are not getting anything out of what your phone offers. One possible reason is that we love to use FREE content, so here is the portal that offers thousands (yes thousands) of absolutely free software and games for your mobile phone including Nokia, LG, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, BlackBerry and many more.

Another exciting thing about this portal (apart from being absolutely free) is that it doesn’t even ask to signup i.e. no signup required to download. When you download for the first time, you are automatically signed up … cute :P

Microsoft Pays You For Using Its Search (If You Live In The US)

2008-05-21T08:56:00.001-07:00

Microsoft has a big announcement today, one that should show the world they’re capable of running a search business even without Yahoo: their Live Search CashBack program will enable you to use special savings “coupons” after you buy stuff you’ve found using Live Search.

The detailed explanation of how this works can be found on here; the lowdown is as follows: You search for deals using Live Search; when you find deals with a special coin shaped icon, it means you’ll receive a small amount of money after you’ve bought something. When your balance reaches $5, you can claim your cash.

If this sounds like those special customer cards your local store clerk has been bothering you with, you’re right. Personally, I don’t care for such deals, but I’m sure there are people who enjoy saving a buck here and there. However, there are several of problems with Microsoft’s cashback; after I list them all, many of you will find that the program simply isn’t for you.

First of all, according to the FAQ, you’re elligible for the program if you are a U.S. citizen or legal resident, and at least 18 years of age. Everyone else, forget about it. Secondly, Microsoft does not guarantee you’ll receive cashback bonuses if you use an alternative payment method when purchasing items, such as PayPal or Google Checkout.

On the merchant side of things, be aware that we’re not talking about cost-per-click advertising model; we’re talking about cost-per-acquisition, which means that the advertiser pays only when a customer clicks on the ad and actually completes a purchase. There are certain situations in which this works well, but we all know that AdWords are mainly CPC and that that’s one of the main reasons behind its success.

Will Microsoft lure more people into using Live Search? Definitely. But my guess is that they’ll only use it to find cheap deals, and use Google for general purpose search. Google is still the best global search engine, while the demographics Microsoft is aiming here is narrow in comparison: US-based surfers, older than 18, who like to shop online and are willing to switch from PayPal for certain payments. It’s a solid initiative, but it’s not enough to move from search engine number 3 to the second and first position anytime soon.

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Videophlow Makes YouTube a Group Experience

2008-04-24T05:51:00.001-07:00

Imagine: you’ve found the next hit video on the web. Having just laughed yourself to tears, you regain your composure long enough to send a link of the video to your best friend, expecting to be praised for your extraordinary sense of humor. Then you wait. Five minutes go by, and still nothing. Did they like it? Did they even watch it? Finally, your efforts are rewarded with a hollow “LOL”.

It’s happened to all of us. The internet does a great job when it comes to sharing media, but it removes the human element from the viewing experience.

Oortle is trying to change that. In late 2007 they launched a webapp called Photophlow, currently in private beta, which at its core is a group chat centered around photographs (though it includes a number of other features as well). Users can browse through a Flickr photo album, and everyone will see the same thing at the same time, allowing for real-time reactions and discussion.

Now, they’re taking the next step with Videophlow, which takes the same dynamic community experience and applies it to YouTube. Groups of friends watch the same videos simultaneously as they interact with chat, emoticons, and gestures - viewers can even throw virtual tomatoes at the screen, complete with an animated splat.

All users will see the same portion of a video at the same time, even if they skip to a different scene. And best of all, groups can seamlessly transition to new videos. This has the chance to be a big hit - I can easily imagine groups of friends swapping (and watching) their favorite videos during late night viewing marathons.

Oortle is showing Videophlow to the public for the first time this afternoon at the Web 2.0 Launchpad, and will be opening in private beta in two weeks. We’ll let you know when that happens, and will have at least 100 invites to give out when the time comes.

We should note that a very similar application is available from SeeToo, which allows for simultaneous viewing of video content from a user’s computer rather than YouTube.

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Facebook Chat Now Works For Everyone

2008-04-23T06:52:00.001-07:00

I’m not an avid Facebook user, but I have been checking it every now and then for the promised chat application, and as of today it seems to finally be available for everyone. And, although I have certain reservations about yet another web based chat application, I must say I love it.

The chat is integrated into Facebook well - all of its components are displayed in a minibar that’s always at the bottom of your screen. It’s practical, yet unobtrusive. My Facebook friends seem to have embraced it really well, since most of them have started chatting like crazy right away. The whole thing simply makes sense; you’re there to communicate with your friends anyway, so chat is the logical extension to Facebook’s functionality.

Options and features wise, Facebook chat doesn’t really offer all that much; the settings tab hides exactly four options: Show Mini-Feed Stories in Chat, Play Sound for New Messages, Keep Online Friends Open, and Show Only Names in Online Friends. The chat history is remembered even after you close the chat, and even after you log out and log back in. It would be nice if you could extract the entire log and save it somewhere as backup, though. I’d also like to see the standard, one click status updates: I’m busy, I’m AFK, etc. The Facebook folks are aware that features are scarce, and they promise more in the future.

All in all, Facebook chat is a great addition to the service. To paraphrase one of our commenters put, Facebook chat maybe won’t replace your other chat applications, but it’ll do just fine for chatting with people who you usually don’t chat with.

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Live Mesh - The Version You Can Understand

2008-04-23T03:14:00.001-07:00

I’ve been reading the coverage of Microsoft Live Mesh, Microsoft’s latest project uncovered at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, and I get the feeling that after all the buzzwords being thrown around, most people still won’t understand what the hell this thing is really about. So, I’ve decided to make it as simple as possible.

What - Live Mesh is a service that lets you synchronize your settings, files, feeds and applications on several computers.

What’s the big deal - there are already ways to synchronize stuff on the net. Foxmarks is a good example: you install it in Firefox on several computers, and your bookmarks sync seamlessly. Live Mesh, however, is a single platform that will make it easier for 3rd party app developers to do this. If Microsoft does this right, you’ll get used to using the Live Mesh for syncing all your devices, files as well as most or all of your applications.

Is this like a WebOS (Webdesktop, Webtop?) - yes, although everyone seems to be avoiding the term, this is a lot like all those WebOS apps you’ve seen. You get a virtual desktop with 5GB of storage and you can access it from anywhere. It’s integrated with Windows’ Remote Desktop, so it’s really simple to set up.

How will it look and feel in practice (we’re talking about the future here) - Let’s say that you and three other coworkers have a shared Mesh desktop. You fire it up, check out the log to see who changed what. Great, Mike added the graphics you needed. You add some notes to the graphics and drop them into the Mesh, but you share it only with your devices; they’re not ready to be seen by everyone just yet. On the way to work, you want to start some downloads on your computer at work, so you remotely connect to it through your iPhone. The rest of the trip you read your feeds; the ones you read at home are marked read so you can just keep reading where you left of.

To put it really simple: the promise of the Mesh is that you won’t have to care where you are or which device you’re using - your data will always be there. You’ll only have to care about which data you want to share with whom.

Which devices - Right now, we’re talking only about Windows XP and Vista computers; in the future, it will work with Mac, mobiles, etc.

Who built it - Microsoft’s CTO Ray Ozzie, and a team of about a hundred other engineers at Microsoft.

Here’s a couple of links for those who want to go in-depth. Mesh’s official home page and its accompanying blog might be of interest. A hands on preview of Mesh is here.

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Who Are The Biggest Users of Amazon Web Services? It’s Not Startups.

2008-04-23T02:05:00.001-07:00

Amazon loves to talk about its Web Services because it positions the company as a bold innovator bringing cloud computing to the unwashed masses and other companies still stuck in the land of legacy data centers. But it is coy when it comes to details about the actual business behind Amazon Web Services, which includes its S3 storage service, EC2 compute cloud, and SimpleDB online database.

During its fourth-quarter earnings call, Amazon offered up the tidbit that Amazon Web Services (AWS) now uses up more bandwidth than Amazon.com proper, but not much else. You could infer, however, that the business is not yet very large, accounting for less than $131 million of Amazon’s $5.7 billion in revenues that quarter. The revenues may be small, but they are no doubt growing very quickly.

So who are using these services? A high-ranking Amazon executive told me there are 60,000 different customers across the various Amazon Web Services, and most of them are not the startups that are normally associated with on-demand computing. Rather the biggest customers in both number and amount of computing resources consumed are divisions of banks, pharmaceuticals companies and other large corporations who try AWS once for a temporary project, and then get hooked.

That surprised me. These are the types of customers you wouldn’t expect to see running their data through a hosted service. But apparently the cost advantage of paying by the drink versus buying new hardware and staffing up to do a random data run is convincing them to trust more of their data with Amazon. It goes without saying that these are the types of companies who demand the highest security for their data. Banks and drug companies. And they have a lot of data to crunch.

You just hear more about the startups because many are increasingly putting their entire businesses on Amazon, and the economics of cloud computing really levels the playing field for them. They also tend to be more open about their data practices. But cloud computing is already going much deeper than the startup world, and gaining adherents in big IT organizations.

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Photobucket Plays Catch Up To Flickr, Public API Released

2008-04-23T02:02:00.001-07:00

Photobucket, acquired by Fox Interactive Media in May 2007 for $300 million, is releasing their API to the public today and will allow third party developers to build photo/video storage and visualization to their applications. Adobe, AOL, FotoFlexer, Intercasting, RockYou, Slide and Snapvine are being announced as launch partners. API documentation is available at developer.photobucket.com.

Previously the API was released only to signed business development partners, and had limited functionality. Functionality includes log in via OAuth, album creation and editing, content uploading, content sharing via email, search and metadata access (tags, titles, descriptions, etc.).

Photobucket is also promoting third party services on their API, at gallery.photobucket.com.

Flickr has had an API available since late 2005, with hundreds of third party applications built on the base service.

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Get Ready for Water-Powered Cell Phones

2008-04-23T01:47:00.001-07:00

"Samsung Electro-Mechanics has developed a micro-fuel cell and hydrogen generator that runs on water, writes the Chosun Ilbo. Oh Yong-soo, vice president of Samsung Electro-Mechanics' research centre, who said that when the handset is turned on, metal and water in the phone react to produce hydrogen gas. The gas is then supplied to the fuel cell where it reacts with oxygen in the air to generate power. Other fuel cells need methanol to produce hydrogen, while Samsung's needs only water. Since the micro-fuel cell can generate up to three watts of electricity, it could be used in mobile devices. The new fuel cell could power a handset for ten hours, twice as long as rechargeable batteries. Oh Yong-soo said water-powered handsets are expected to hit the market by 2010."

I've always been a bit of a skeptic. This is one of those "I'll believe it when I see it" stories. Think it'll really happen? When you're in the mall you can get a drink from the drinking fountain and charge your phone at the same time? Maybe in the summer when your power's getting low, you can just take a dip in the pool and poof! - you're all charged up! I wonder if eventually it can be used for laptops too. I'll be sure and update this story in 2010 and see where we're at.

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Microsoft Acquires Farecast For $115M

2008-04-21T03:36:00.001-07:00

Rumors about the acquisition of Farecast are accurate - in a very brief blog post CEO Hugh Crean says they’ve been acquired by Microsoft.

SeattlePI, which first broke the rumor last week, says the price tag was $115 million. While the two companies are an understandable fit given their proximity and partnership over MSN Travel, SeattlePI reports that Farecast entertained multiple offers before accepting Microsoft’s.

Farecast is an airfare pricing comparision tool that also uses a predictive algorithm to recommend when you buy your ticket. So the idea is to show the user not just who has the cheapest ticket, but whether or not waiting might make sense as well. The site has also guarantees tickets at its predicted prices for an extra charge. As of this past fall, it also began helping travelers determine the fairness of hotel pricing.

The deal follows the acquisition of competitor SideStep by Kayak in December.

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AT&T Mobile TV Launch Date and Price List Revealed

2008-04-18T01:21:00.001-07:00

"In our post last month containing live shots of AT&T’s MediaFLO on the LG Vu and Samsung Access. We also told you that the service would launch in May, but further details were under lock and key at the time. Thanks to an anonymous source inside AT&T, we now have all the details you need about the live television service we’ve all been waiting for. First and foremost, the service will launch on May 4 and will be rebranded as AT&T Mobile TV... That’s right people, real deal broadcast TV on your mobile with no buffering time... In terms of what you can expect all this to do to your battery life, Mobile TV will be roughly equivalent to an active voice call."

This is fantastic news! Hopefully now we will finally be able to see the HTC Foreseer (pictured above) finally crawl its way out of the great big Windows Mobile heaven in the sky. The chances of us actually seeing the HTC Foreseer again are pretty slim to none since AT&T has opted to use Qualcomm's MediaFLO technology to broadcast real-time television to their handset line-up instead of the European DVB-H standard which the HTC Foreseer utilized. All is not lost though, with HTC's big announcement coming up on May 6th there is still a chance we could see a MediaFLO Windows Mobile Smartphone or Pocket PC in our future!

For those itching to subscribe to AT&T's new MediaFLO service, it is scheduled to launch on May 4th, 2008. The current subscription price list is as follows:

Mobile TV Limited - $13/month: Includes four channels; Fox Mobile, CBS Mobile, NBC, and NBC News
Mobile TV Basic - $15/month: Includes 9 channels; Fox Mobile, CBS mobile, NBC, NBC News, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, CNN Mobile and ESPN
Mobile TV Plus - $30/month: Includes the nine channels listed above as well as an exclusive Sony Pictures channel

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Offline access to Google Docs

2008-04-11T06:18:00.001-07:00

Posted by Janani Ravi, Software Engineer

Our team has a real affinity for free-spirited types, and so we spend a lot of time thinking up ways to make Google Docs friendlier even to people on the go. If you're one of those, you already know how you can access your Google Docs from anywhere, how nice it is to avoid having to email yourself files or back up docs with a thumbdrive, and how easily you can collaborate with others.

Of course there was a teeny thing missing: you needed an Internet connection to make Google Docs work for you. Now, for documents, that's no longer true. As you'll read on the Google Docs blog, starting today and over the coming weeks we're rolling out offline editing access to word processing documents to Google Docs users. You no longer need an Internet connection when inspiration strikes. Whether you're working on an airplane or in a cafe, you can automatically access all your docs on your own computer.

To see how offline access works, watch this video:

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Apple Reveals iPhone SDK

2008-04-11T06:15:00.001-07:00

Today at a town-hall meeting at Apple's Infinite Loop campus in Cupertino, Steve Jobs showed off the iPhone software developer's kit for the first time. There has been a lot of speculation about what the kit would include, and what it specifically wouldn't. Now Steve Jobs says it will have the same APIs and Tools that Apple itself uses to develop iPhone apps.

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What Would a Combined Microsoft-Yahoo Look Like?

2008-02-01T18:14:00.001-08:00

Microsoft’s $31 a share offer for Yahoo is made possible by Yahoo’s slumping shares (Yahoo’sstock was trading at about $31 a year ago). While Yahoo has rejected Microsoft’s entreaties in the past, with Terry Semel stepping down as chairman of the board yesterday, things might be different this time. I ran some quick, back-of-the-envelope numbers to see what a combined Microsoft-Yahoo would look like financially, and how it would compare to Google.

* Microsoft figures are trailing four quarters and headcount is from June.

Those headcount numbers and operating expenses could be cut significantly. The real impact to Microsoft, though, is not visible in these numbers because Yahoo represents a new growth opportunity for Microsoft in advertising revenues and online services. During the last four quarters, Microsoft’s revenues for its online services (MSN, Windows Live, etc.) were $2.8 billion and it lost $949 million. So just combing Yahoo wih that business, you getrevenues of $9.8 billion, but Microsoft would still be showinga net loss for that business of $289 million.

[Source: TechCrunch]

UVLayer: Watch and Share Videos on AIR

2008-02-01T16:14:00.001-08:00

UVLayer is a new application that works on Adobe AIR. The service revolves around a video player and sharing tool, letting you search for clips across the web, and share them with friends with drag’n'drop capabilities. Once you’ve downloaded Adobe AIR and the UVLayer application, you can login and begin watching clips.

The videos available on UVLayer can be organized, pretty much however you’d like them to be. If you perform a search, than you’ll see all the videos from your query displayed in a box. You can watch any one of these, share it with friends, see related clips, leave a comment or see the activity going on around this clip. You can also remove it from the search query (which acts as a saved search) and create a “stack.”
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Stacks act as channels for these videos. You can name stacks, and add other clips you’d like to include in a particular stack. These collections can be shared with friends, as can individual videos and search queries. Sharing videos with Facebook is easy enough, as there’s an option to login to your Facebook account directly from UVLayer. Otherwise, sharing with other UVLayer friends is as simple as dragging a clip over your friend’s avatar, which displays (like a buddy list) on the righthand side of the UVLayer application.

One thing I found particularly buggy (or nonexistent) is the related videos option for clips you access through another related search. This greatly halts the search and discovery process for such an application as UVLayer. I also wonder how the adoption rate will be for UVLayer, as there is a two-step download process for new users, and little interaction for the application itself. If only looks could be everything! At least UVLayer recognizes the need for integration with other social networks, so hopefully the company will continue to build in this direction as it launches its service to the world.

[Source: Mashable]

Microhoo! What Does it Mean for Users?

2008-02-01T15:48:00.001-08:00

Presuming you've seen the news that Microsoft has moved to buy Yahoo! for $44 billion, the next logical question to ask concerns what this means for users and lovers of technology.

If its business analysis you're looking for, go read Paul Kedosky. Here at ReadWriteWeb we focus more on the cultural impact of innovation in technology. On that front, I think this acquisition could be very good news.

It's going to validate a lot of innovation at Yahoo! Many people, including Microsoft on the conference call early this morning about the news, are focusing on what this means for advertising and for search. Since when is Yahoo! particularly good at either of those things, though? Yahoo! has created a web presence with more traffic than almost anyone else on earth. That's what they are good at and the issue is that they haven't been able to make money off of it.

Yahoo! is great at content and online innovation, though. That's what Microsoft needs right now. Google is posing a threat to Microsoft not just because it is winning in advertising, where Microsoft is a relative beginner, but because Google is shifting the software world to online.

Microsoft is serious about innovation, they just haven't been doing much of it in house for awhile. The Live.com work and the Microsoft acquisitions in the health space indicate to me the company really is trying to do more than just catch up in search and advertising.

I think that this acquisition is going to mean a whole lot more energy put behind services like Flickr and Del.icio.us and innovative content sites like Yahoo! Sports and Finance. All of that will be good for Microsoft and it will be good for those of us who find those sites and services inspiring.

It's hard to know what the impact of layoffs will be, or if the Death Star culture of Microsoft will quash a lot of the Yahoo! spirit, but it's going to be a huge company and I'm hoping we will see some very cool things come out of it.

[Source: ReadWriteWeb]

Plaxo Pulse First to Use Google's Social Graph

2008-02-01T15:40:00.001-08:00

Although only announced hours ago, Plaxo's Pulse is already using the new Google Social Graph API. They got a head start due to a collaborative effort between their Chief Platform Architect, Joseph Smarr, and Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick. Now, the Plaxo public profile pages will serve as the flagship example of what this new API has to offer.

An Open Social Web

Plaxo's Pulse platform, mistakenly thought of by some as just another social network, is actually an attempt at an open version of the social web where sites inter-operate with each other. Currently Pulse supports integration with flickr, YouTube, digg, LiveJournal, Windows Live, del.icio.us, yelp, MySpace, webshots, last.fm, Pownce, xanga, tumblr, jaiku, twitter, smugmug, Yahoo 360, Picasa, and Amazon.

A great example of the type of interaction Pulse aims to achieve on their platform is the new two-way synchronization feature between Pulse and Twitter. A little over a week ago, Pulse quietly launched a "status" feature. Then a few days ago, they announced that this feature could now be used to synchronize with Twitter, two-way. If you set up your Pulse status to sync to Twitter, when you update your status in Pulse, it instantly updates in Twitter. You can also update in Twitter, and this will be synced back to Pulse. And if you have the Twitter Facebook app installed, it will update there, too.

Dynamic Public Profiles

With the launch of Google's Social Graph API, Pulse is now giving users the ability to create a unified public profile enriched by some or all of the aggregated content streams from the social web. Pulse uses the API to gather together your various URLs on the web to create a public identity that you can control. With this, you can manage your own data and content and determine how you want to present it to the world.

This is a new sort of public profile page. Instead of a being a static page, like the one you would have on MySpace, the page is constantly being updated by your stream of content that you create all over the web.

The public profiles are a completely opt-in feature. You decide for yourself what content and information is included. The resulting pages are tagged with microformats, so your profile page is readable by Google and other web sites.

Over the next few weeks, Plaxo promises to introduce even more in this area, as this is just the first release.

To get started setting up your Public Profile, Plaxo members can go to Pulse, then click on "My Profile" at the top. On the left-hand side, click on the "Public Profile" link to begin.

Google Releases Social Graph API

2008-02-01T14:45:00.000-08:00

Google today announced the release of a new API for graphing social net connections on the web at large. The Social Graph API is a way for developers of social applications to let users easily find data on their social connections across the open web. The information the API returns can be useful in helping users locate and add their friends when starting up at a new social application.

It was only a few weeks ago that Google announced that it had joined the DataPortability.org work group. It didn't take them very long to make good on the promise of contributing to the cause of data portability, though I suspect that Social Graph API has been under development at Google since before they joined DataPortability.org.

The Social Graph API uses the same algorithms at play in Google's search engine to discover how people are connected across the Internet. In fact, it only uses publicly available data -- if it's not on Google, the API won't be able to find it -- which Google says puts users in control of their own data since anything they don't like showing up, they can change at the source level.

The API works by searching for connections between people based on how people are linked on social networks and via publicly available profiles and pages -- i.e., if Marshall Kirkpatrick and I linked to each other on our personal blogs, or if we followed each other on Twitter, the Social Graph API might consider us friends because we have a strong connection. So, if I then sign up for a new social service, I can feed it links to my social presence elsewhere (like my blog or Twitter profile) and it will analyze those public connections and suggest to me that maybe I should be friends with Marshall on this new service because it looks like I'm friends with him elsewhere.

As more and more users are beginning to suffer the effects of "social networking fatigue," anything that helps automate and make easier the process of adding your existing connections to a new network is a useful tool. The Social Graph API could be an important part of the data portability movement in that it allows users to find and evaluate their public social connections and take control of that information.

Google has set up a Social Graph API group as well as provided developer documentation.

Meebo Turns Chat Rooms Into A Web Service

2008-01-31T09:57:00.001-08:00

Today, Web-based IM and chat room provider Meebo is releasing full-fledged APIs for its Meebo Rooms that will allow Websites to embed chat functionality in an automated fashion. Currently, Meebo Rooms can be embedded on sites or blogs manually by pasting in the appropriate code, which has already led to a proliferation of such widgets. There are more than 200,000 Meebo Rooms, attracting millions of visitors a month. (See our previous coverage here and here). Explains Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg:

Now, the servers of our partners can say, “I want to create a room.” It automates the creation process on a server-to-server basis. Also, we will be putting advertising into these rooms.

In addition to the APIs, the company is also announcing the Meebo Network, which will serve ads inside Meebo Rooms across the Web, splitting the revenues with the Websites hosting the rooms. Since each Meebo Room is formed around a particular interest, ads can be targeted. And to the extent that sites participating in the network have demographic data on their members, that can be used for ad targeting as well. Only Meebo Rooms created through the API will show ads, not the ones created manually.

The launch partners joining the Meebo Network are Piczo, Revision3, RockYou, Social Project, and Tagged. Revision3, for instance, will create a Meebo room on its site where fans can watch a synchronized loop of Web TV shows while chatting. Access to the full APIs and the ad network is by invitation only at this point. Social networks could use the new APIs to automatically add chat rooms to every group page. Rock bands or movie sites could add Meebo Rooms to their sites for visiting fans.

Comparisons can be made here to Userplane, a white-label chat service which was bought by AOL in 2006 and powers many of the chat rooms on MySpace. But there are subtle differences. Most notable is the fact that Meebo Rooms can spread anywhere on the Web. Anyone can grab the embed code and put it on their blog or MySpace page as I’ve done below. Notes Sternberg:

A user cannot take a room off of MySpace and throw it somewhere else. We have all our rooms networked. A user can take the CBS Jericho room, and throw it on their Wordpress blog. Our chat rooms are networked versus islands within Websites.
It is very hard to get a synchronous conversation going. You won’ get enough people on your MySpace page to have a conversation. But with Meebo Rooms, most of the traffic is coming from somewhere else. It solves the problem of the Web being so distributed.

The power of Meebo Rooms is that they let anyone create live conversations on their site by aggregating people with similar interests from other sites. In fact, it links people between sites. And that, hopes Sternberg, will give it enough scale to become an ad network of sorts. Meebo has raised $12.5 million from Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

SproutBuilder: Drag and Drop Widget Builder

2008-01-30T15:13:00.000-08:00

eBay Changes Fee Structure To Drive Growth

2008-01-30T14:02:00.001-08:00

eBay yesterday announced a major shake up in its fee structure in an attempt to revitalize their core auction business.

Amazon surpassed eBay in US traffic in December for the first time according to Nielsen, and growth rates on eBay have been either static or minimal over the last two to three years.

Under the changes, eBay will slash listing fees by up to 50%, but in turn will increase its commission on items that do sell. Extras such as including photos with listing will now be offered for free. eBay will also increase fees on specific items, including goods sold for less that $25 to 8.75%, a 67% increase according to AP.

An example of the new price structure:

selling a purse at auction for $25 would have cost the seller $1.91, including 60 cents for listing the item plus eBay’s commission of $1.31. Under the new structure, the seller would pay $2.74, including 55 cents to list the item plus a higher commission of $2.19.

Another AP report suggests that eBay sellers are not happy about the changes, with one eBay user saying that “It looks like what they are trying to do with the fees is make it more difficult and expensive to sell low-end items. The people that are selling low-end items are going to feel this fee increase the most.”

comScore stats show that eBay still retains a lead of Amazon (graph right) but the gap is closing. Amazon has continued to build a non-auction based alternative to eBay, complete with independent sellers and a used items marketplace that has seen solid growth at Amazon at a rate eBay simply hasn’t matched. With new leadership at eBay after the announcement of long term CEO Meg Whitman’s retirement this announcement will likely be the first of more to come as eBay looks to find growth from what is still one of the leading Ecommerce providers on the planet.

Yahoo’s OpenID Service Launches Public Beta

2008-01-30T14:01:00.001-08:00

Yahoo has launched a beta version of their OpenID provider initiative, which was announced earlier this month. Starting today, you can use your Yahoo credentials to login on a number of different sites, including Plaxo, Jyte, and Pibb.

I tried it out on Plaxo, and it’s definitely an improvement over previous integrations of OpenID. Versus needing to enter a URL such as username.myopenid.com before providing your username and password, you simply follow a “sign in with Yahoo ID” link, where you can enter your Yahoo credentials. Several pages of education on how exactly your Yahoo ID can be used to sign into other web sites follows, and from there you simply sign up for Plaxo and can then use your Yahoo credentials to sign in on future visits.

Now that I’ve seen it in action, I feel like Yahoo’s effort may be fairly effective in driving OpenID adoption. To mainstream users, OpenID is probably a completely foreign concept. On the other hand, seeing the Yahoo brand with no explicit mention of OpenID is a concept users should be able to grasp, and Yahoo has gone through great lengths to educate users throughout the sign-in process. Most everyone out there has a Yahoo ID, and given the choice of yet another username and password or using your existing Yahoo one, I think users may start to opt for the latter.

Kudos to Yahoo for getting this out quickly. Now we’ll see if they take the next step and start allowing users to sign into various Yahoo services with the OpenID provider of their choice.

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The New Browser War: Mobile Firefox vs. Opera Mini

2008-01-30T13:55:00.001-08:00

Last October, Mozilla announced that they were working on a mobile version of the Firefox browser. As it turns out, they were working on two versions: one designed for touchscreen devices like the iPhone and another for traditional phones. Now Mozilla has finally given us a glimpse of their designs by posting the plans, mockups, and details of these two upcoming mobile browsers on the Mozilla wiki.

Non-Touchscreen Firefox Mobile

The non-touchscreen browser introduces a virtual cursor that is controlled with the keyboard navigational keys. Using short presses (clicks) on the directional pad's left key will quickly navigate through clickable elements. Longer presses on the left key will begin smooth scrolling. When scrolling, after a set amount of time the page will gradually zoom out to give you a view of the entire layout which will allow for faster scrolling. When you stop pressing the directional pad button, the browser will gradually zoom back in on the element that the cursor is positioned over.

The right key of the directional pad will bring up a menu that provides access to navigation functionality, including items like the Address Bar, Refresh, Back, History, Bookmarks, Tabs, Bookmark This, and Quit.

Touchscreen Firefox Mobile

The touchscreen version of the Firefox mobile browser seems to borrow from Apple's mobile Safari browser with some familiar-looking buttons which include the back and forward navigation arrows, a bookmarks button, and a retractable address bar. The star-bookmarks button will show you a list of your bookmarks if you tap it once; tap it twice and you can bookmark the current page you are viewing.

However, this UI also includes some new features like Zoom In and Zoom Out buttons, which are on the bottom toolbar, as well as a tabs button that will display up to four tab previews displayed 2x2 on your screen for fast tab switching.

Weave Integration to Come?

Although not detailed in these specifications, many sites are speculating that these new mobile browsers will provide bookmark syncing through Weave, Mozilla's new project for data and metadata portability. This is likely since mobile syncing was one of the listed "Use Cases" in the Mozilla Labs forum on the project. With Weave, though, bookmark syncing could really be just the beginning. Weave could, in theory, also sync up browser settings like sessions and passwords from desktop to mobile to laptop and beyond.

Another big possibility is the development of extensions designed just for Mobile Firefox. This would be a break-out feature that could make Mobile Firefox unique in this space. However, no plans for this type of development have been announced yet.

The Mobile Firefox browser should arrive sometime in late 2008.

...But Opera Mini Already Does That

What's interesting about the Mobile Firefox announcement and surrounding hubbub is that Opera Mini today offers nearly the same features that Mozilla is still developing.

Most notably, Opera Mini 4 can already sync your mobile phone bookmarks with the bookmarks on your computer by using something called Opera Link. Although not as seamless as the possible Weave setup (perhaps), syncing bookmarks with Opera is fairly simple.

You click "Synchronize Opera" on the Start Page and then sign in with your Opera Account. Opera Mini will continue to synchronize your data until you log out.

Opera Link Photo via Opera.com

Opera Mini also has many useful navigation options, too. For example, pressing * # switches your screen to Landscape Mode, a setting that can be enabled as the default.

A virtual mouse is also provided: you can move the cursor towards what you want and it quickly snaps the view to the link or the content. When you first visit a web page, Opera Mini shows you an overview and suggest where to begin reading. Click once and you can zoom in on the content.

Before you click on a link, however, you can focus the cursor on the link to see where it's going to take you. You can then choose whether you want to open the new page with images turned off, a feature that can be turned on or off at any time.

Opera Mini also has several keyboard shortcuts. Power scrolling shortcuts (2, 4, 6, and 8 keys) let you quickly move around the web page and the 5 key zooms you in and out. Pressing 1 bring up the Context Menu where you can hit reload or switch to Mobile View. This unique Small Screen Rendering feature lets you fit any web page to your screen's width. Opera Mini 4 will adjust the page structure on the fly, so you can browse up and down without having to also deal with horizontal scrolling.

Blackberry users have built-in menus designed just for them and for Windows Mobile/Symbian users, there's an even more feature-rich Opera Mobile browser to use.

Why Firefox Might Win

Although Opera Mini is a great mobile browser with tons of features, back on the desktop, Firefox has more users. So, when it comes time to choose a mobile browser, the one that syncs with your desktop browser of choice is likely to win out. Plus, if add-ons are developed for Mobile Firefox, it has the possibility of becoming a killer mobile app.

Vicito News: Personalized News Aggregation Via IM

2008-01-30T13:47:00.001-08:00

Vicito News is a new personalized news aggregation service that operates over instant messenger using an IM robot. The service currently works with AIM, Google Talk, and Windows Live Messenger. Vicito is something akin to Google News alerts for IM -- you tell the service what to watch for, and it updates you at preset intervals via instant messenger when it finds new news matching your query.
Vicito would fall under the single stream aggregation category of news aggregators, in that it combines news from multiple sources about a specific topic into a single stream. You set up Vicito entirely through IM by telling the bot what keywords you want to track, how many stories you want maximum per update, and how frequently you want updates.

I told Vicito to track stories related to "baseball" and this afternoon I compared the results to those from SportsSpyder's MLB page. Not surprisingly, they were both dominated by news about the trade of Johan Santana -- baseball's top pitcher -- to the New York Mets. Somewhat surprisingly, though, I actually found Vicito's news to be more varied. Beyond Satana I was getting stories about Roger Clemens visits the Astros training camp, pitcher Andy Pettitte, and Major Leaue Baseball's umpire background check policy that were nowhere to be found amid the Santana noise (or were buried) on SportsSpyder.

Tracking "yankees" news on Vicito.

A lot of that might have to do with the source list. Vocito right now is drawing from 750 large and mainstream news sources that cover the gamut in terms of topic. SportsSpyder, on the other hand, is drawing from specialized sources that deal exclusively with baseball -- so certainly the overlap and number of reporters covering the same big story will be greater.

But the experience does highlight one major problem with single stream aggregators like these: there is a lot repetition. Because Vicito is just posting a river of news that matches your search query, you end up getting the same story from multiple source. Unlike with meme-style aggregators like Google News or Techmeme (or perhaps, more on topic, Ballbug), which group similar stories, Vicito's stream loses some appeal once you've seen the same story 5 times.

Nat Burke, founder of Vicito, is aware that eventually some sort of filtering will be necessary. "As we continue to grow our source volume, having something to weed out the noise will become essential," he told me. "What eventual form that takes is up in the air at this point."

Even with the noise problem, though, Vicito remains a useful service for getting breaking, topically filtered, news updates over IM. If instant messenger is your preferred method of communication, then you might find some utility in Vicito. Vicito is free to use, with a premium for-pay package that ups the limit on the number of news stories you can receive per update and how often.

MySpace opens doors to developers

2008-01-30T13:13:00.001-08:00

MySpace has about 200 million registered users

MySpace will open its doors to software developers allowing them to create games and media-sharing applications for the popular social network.

MySpace will formally launch its "Developer Platform" next Tuesday but is already allowing people to sign up.

The tools have been developed with Google and will allow programmers to create programs similar to those used by millions on rival site Facebook.

Facebook opened up its site to outside developers last year.

It has since had great success, with nearly 15,000 applications written for the site.

These include photo-sharing and music recommendation tools as well as games such as scrabble.

However, despite its popularity, Facebook still lags behind MySpace in terms of overall users.

MySpace has around 200 million registered users, compared to 63 million who use Facebook.

MySpace was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp for $580m in 2005.

Last October it announced that it would join OpenSocial, Google's platform designed to allow developers to build applications that will work on any website.

Other networks such as Bebo, LinkedIn and Orkut already use the tools.

The tools, available from 5 February, will allow developers to build applications that make use of MySpace member profile information and their connections with other users.

According to the new CTO of MySpace, Amit Kapur, developers will also be able to make money out of their applications.

"I will be focused on making a platform for developers to monetize and promote their applications," he told Reuters.

Google’s Departed Godfather of AdSense Joins the Tumri Project

2008-01-29T16:07:00.001-08:00

After Gokul Rajaram, the “Godfather of AdSense,” left Google at a seemingly inopportune time for the search company, no plans were indicated on Rajaram’s part as to what direction his new solo career would head. Today, however, we’ve learned that Rajaram is indeed sticking with his expertise in consumer and business ads, and has joined the board of directors at Tumri, a one-to-one online display marketing solution. Tumri works as a consolidated, one-stop-shop for brands to create their online campaigns to be delivered across platforms, media types, etc. It is one of several companies looking to provide a centralized service that does some of the heavy lifting for the brands that bcome their clients, extending certain projections and other data to form a targeted display ad campaign that will reach end users and consumers. Tumri has in fact spend quite some time building up its staff of notable veterans in the field, including Calvin Lui. From the looks of it, Rajaram is attracted to Tumri because of its technology, which is central to its service as a differentiating factor. Dubbed the AdPod, Tumri constructs a brand’s online ad campaign as a platform, combining existing creatives and marketing messages with offers and listings, turning it into a dynamic ad widget. Rajaram’s presence on Tumri’s board of directors helps solidify not only Tumri as a company, but dynamic ad widgets as an effective and scalable form of targeting advertisements. The way I see it, widgets incorporate reporting and an ability to change, which are primary reasons for why they are being experimented with so heavily at this time.

Digg Joins DataPortability, Will Support OpenID

2008-01-29T16:02:00.001-08:00

Digg has just announced that they have also joined the DataPortability Workgroup, adding to a laundry list of companies in the Web industry who have signed on to work together towards allowing you to own your data and take it with you to other sites.

In a blog post this morning, the company writes:

“Want to sync your Digg friends network with another service? We want to help you do that. Want to use your Digg activity to get recommendations from another web site? We’re working on that, too.”

Additionally, the post indicates that the company will soon support OpenID, though it’s unclear if that means you’ll be able to login to Digg using OpenID, or if they’ll simply join a long list of companies including Yahoo and AOL that are allowing you to use your credentials from their respective services to login on other sites.

All of this sounds good to me. As we now know, most of the main players are already in on DataPortability, including Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn. Mashable readers were fairly split in a recent poll where we asked whether DataPortability was all hype or the next big thing:

Welcome, Digg. Now let’s see what happens.

The killer Twitter-tracker just arrived and its name is Tweetmeme

2008-01-29T15:57:00.001-08:00

It had to happen sooner or later. We’ve had Technorati. We’ve had TechMeme. Now we have Tweetmeme, which will track what’s hot on micro-blogging platform Twitter. The business of tracking the online conversation just a got ~~shot in the arm~~ a big hit with the tech equivalent of crack cocaine.

Built by the makers Fav.or.it, a yet-to-launch blog commenting system, and based on an idea by Marjolein Hoekstra, Tweetmeme looks for new content and tracks who else is talking about it. It ranks the content based upon who and how much a particular item is being discussed. As anyone knows, the number of URLs which spread virally through Twitter each day must run into the millions, so tracking where that viral trail starts and gains momentum is going to be fascinating. It also categorizes the content into blogs / videos / images and audio. Sure there are other Twitter aggregators like Politweets (politics), TweeterBoard (conversation analytics) and many others.

But Tweetmeme has a few other features including a ‘river’ of new content and RSS feeds for the river (or categorized feeds for blogs / videos / images / audio). In addition Fav.or.it will integrate Tweetmeme into its API so you’ll be able to comment on blog posts through Tweetmeme. [For an explanation of how Fav.or.it will work see here and here].

The knockout punch is that Tweetmeme will Twitter the original person who first mentioned the item if it makes it onto Tweetmeme. This is going to be fun…

SmugMug’s Private Photos Aren’t Really Private

2008-01-28T07:53:00.001-08:00

Photo hosting site SmugMug apparently has a huge security hole which allows anyone to easily access other users’ photos which have been marked as “private,” reports Google Blogoscoped. What’s worse, the folks at SmugMug are aware of the issue, but claim this is intended behavior, separating the notions of “privacy” and “security.”

In a nutshell, the problem is this: if you set your photos as “private”, they can still be accessed simply by URL manipulation; for example, I randomly typed in this URL “http://www.smugmug.com/gallery/1021″ in my browser and got someone’s gallery that, perhaps, was not intended for the whole world to see. It is possible to prevent this behavior by setting a special password for your image/gallery, but how many people understand this?

Here’s an excerpt from SmugMug’s CEO Don MacAskill’s long conversation with Google Blogoscoped:

“…we view security and privacy as two separate, but related, issues. Security is like locking your front door (no-one can get in with out a key) and privacy is like closing your window drapes (no-one can look in from the outside, but you can tell people where you live and they can visit without a key).

At SmugMug, the feature you’re talking about, private galleries, falls under the privacy umbrella, not security. It’s intentionally designed so that you can “tell other people” about your photos (share a URL in an email, embed or hyperlink on your blog or message forum, etc) without having to share something like a password. Only people you’ve shared this URL with can find the gallery and/or photos in question.

The problem here, of course, is the fact that most people don’t care about semantics in cases such as this; if they set a photo to “private,” most of them probably expect that no one else can see this photo, period. A similar discussion arose recently when it was discovered that Google Reader shares your “shared” items with everyone in your Gmail account, but this is a far worse problem, because private photos are at stake. As usual, it will probably just take some media attention (such as this article) for the folks at SmugMug to get to their senses, but why does it always have to be so?

Blist: Making Spreadsheets Fun?

2008-01-28T07:51:00.001-08:00

The latest to tackle online database and spreadsheet creations: Blist. Launching today at DEMO, blist is a more flexible way in which to create those dreadful spreadsheets we all have to do for one reason or another. The company’s aim is to simplify the process by tailoring the application according to your needs, as opposed to your having to configure your data according to the existing parameters of a spreadsheet.

It does so by offering an array of templates that can be selected for a variety of purposes, from wedding guest lists to fantasy football stats. Data can be viewed in multiple formats, like tables, calendars or widgets. Incorporating multimedia items like photos or videos means that users can do with these spreadsheets whatever they like, for any purpose they see fit.

With an intuitive interface, the target user is the non-technical folks out there that don’t really like the complications of a spreadsheet. Blist spreadsheets are collaborative, web-based tools, so the social aspect of sharing data is built into this application. From the looks of it, blist’s offerings also extend to the construction of queries, meaning this tool has the potential for enabling non-technical users to create tables and perhaps even mashups.

There is a handful of applications out there that are taking on the challenge of creating an easy-to-use, web-based mashup tool that will translate into a high user adoption rate based on a simplified and intuitive process, like Strata. As web surfers find more ways in which to control and use their own information (or third-party information for their own purposes), mashup tools will become an increasingly integrated aspect of our every day use, so tools that help us towards this direction will become more valuable.

Print Screens Without the Paper: Iterasi

2008-01-28T07:49:00.001-08:00

Iterasi is a new company launching its service at DEMO today. The product of serial entrepreneur Pete Grillo, who sold his previous company WeSync to Palm in 2000, Iterasi is another way to organize your web. While the premise of the service is very straightforward, Iterasi pulls from so many schemas that we already have applied to the organization of the web that I’m having trouble figuring out the best way to describe how it all works in comparison to what we already have. But here goes:

Iterasi is a bookmarking tool that lets you take a snapshot of a website in its native format. That means that whether the site is dynamic or static, these web pages can be bookmarked, saved, searched, retrieved, shared, and tagged. This is handy for saving online receipts, submission/application forms, content and images, to name a few. Think of it as a web-based print screen function without the paper.

As with other bookmarking tools, Iterasi comes complete with a browser bookmark so you can amass websites as you surf the web. Similar to StumbleUpon, Iterasi will let you “notarize” your saved site, adding in tags, showing tags that others have applied to the same site, and providing your own title. These saved items will display in your Iterasi account as thumbnail images, similar to JigJak or Hyperigo.

But if Iterasi is anything like a bookmarking site, it’s main point of differentiation is the personalized ways in which you can organize all your bookmarks. Think of a glorified version of the browser sidebar that lets you place all your bookmarks into various folders. There’s also an option to set a timer for notarizing a webpage at a specified time. If you do this regularly, then you’ve got a time-lapsed glimpse at how a website changes over time, kinda like archive.org.

Now that we’ve taken a look at Iterasi’s main features and likened it to pieces of several existing tools out there, what can Iterasi be used for?

The searchability of Iterasi is very key to the overall value of this service, as this enables users to truly create their own web. Should this data be gathered as an aggregated look at web behavior, multiple things can be inferred, from shopping habits to new perspectives on web search, or a combination of several of these things. It could also be used in conjunction with other tools out there like Shoeboxed that collect your receipts to help you with your own budgeting.

Given the outlook for personalized web experiences, data portability, and a number of other customized tools for mashing up varied parts of your own Internet, Iterasi offers a compellingly simple look at the potential for the tailored web. Is this a better way to handle personal bookmarks than Clipmarks‘ social attempt at sharing items?

[Source: Mashable.com]

eBay Acquires Fraud Sciences For $169 Million

2008-01-28T07:42:00.001-08:00

eBay through Paypal has acquired fraud detection provider Fraud Sciences Ltd for $169 million.

Israel and Palo Alto based Fraud Sciences offers automated anti-fraud systems including SpotLight VFX and SpotLight T2T, merchant solutions the provide transaction verification with fraud prevention. In an October 2007 profile, Israelplug said that Fraud Sciences products “help online retailers verify the identity of buyers and accept orders that they would have seen as suspicious in the past - thus enabling them to increase their sales.”

eBay said the acquisition will assist them in significantly improving trust and safety across its sites in 2008. Fraud Sciences’ risk tools will be integrated with PayPal’s fraud management system.

Personnel from Fraud Sciences, including Yossi Barak, Fraud Sciences’ COO, and founders Shvat Shaked and Saar Wilf, will join PayPal’s technology and fraud management teams.

This acquisition is expected to be completed within 30 days.

Globally, Baidu Beats Microsoft in Search; Yandex Creeping Up On Ask

2008-01-27T10:35:00.001-08:00

While Google dominates the top slot in search both in the U.S. and worldwide, with a global search market share of 62 percent, there is still a lot of elbowing going on below, especially when you look beyond the U.S.

In a comScore ranking of the top-10 global search engines as measured by number of searches during the month of December, 2007, Yahoo comes in at a distant No. 2 with only 13 percent of global share. (Although, in the U.S., Yahoo actually gained a half-point of share in December, whereas Google dipped 0.2 percent).

The big surprise, though, is the strength of local search engines in countries that don’t use the Roman alphabet. No. 3 on the list is not Microsoft, but Chinese search engine Baidu (with 5 percent share, versus Microsoft’s 3 percent). No. 5 is Korea’s NHN Corporation, which operates the Naver portal and search engine. Creeping up on Ask’s No. 8 spot, is Russian search engine Yandex. And Alibaba (which may include Yahoo China) brings up the rear at No. 10.

Shouldn’t the best search technology win no matter what the language? These market share figures suggest that culture and marketing play a big role as well—unless, of course, you are Google.

Pay Per Play: Break Internet Style Rules, Make Lots of Money

2008-01-27T10:27:00.001-08:00

We’re solicited, on average, by about two or three different ad networks of varying types on a weekly basis here at Mashable. Some of them are great ideas, and some of them are downright stinkers. I’m not in the business side of things here at the blog, so I’m generally not privvy to where those conversations lead, so I can’t speak to exactly who does what in terms of sponsorship for this site. I do get to see most of the offers on the way in through the editorial mailbox, though, and one that’s slid past us a few times is an outfit called Pay Per Play.

Subject: Get paid for every visitor to your site

Body: This is a brand new program called Pay Per Play. It’s a bit like Google Adsense except that it’s a 5 second audio ad. Like Adsense, it’s totally free … just a small piece of code and you get paid for every visitor. No one has to click on anything. There is a time limit and also a limit to the number of people who will get to promote it. If it takes off, as I expect it to, someone is going to do well as a result.

Due to the stigma associated with autoplaying audio ads, I’ve been assured that we won’t be taking advantage of that program here at Mashable. I have to wonder, based on my own experience, whether or not that stigmas is deserved or not. Conventional wisdom says that one of the biggest screw-ups a webmaster can make is to throw an advertising program on their site that will autoplay an audio clip. Surfers will complain louder and quicker about autoplaying audio ads than if you were to change the algorithm on Digg.

The debate as to whether this is acceptable practice ranges to many different circles. MySpace and Digg have both been called out before in the comments and emails we’ve recieved here at Mashable for occasionally letting an advertisement slip by that has autoplaying advertisements. The podcasting world also goes back and forth on whether it is kosher to have your podcast or video episodes autoplay on pageload. On my own personal blog and video ventures over the years, I’ve been experimenting with the benefits and negatives of autoplaying for years, and have generally come to the conclusion that if I have audio or video that I want to showcase in a website, I will make it autoplay.

Back when Art and I were doing the RizWords podcast, it typically ran between forty five minutes to a little over an hour each daily episode. We found that the growth of the podcast was a bit slow in the beginning, in terms of both downloads and subscribers. We chatted over it and came to the conclusion that we should give autoplay a shot. Within weeks, our downloads shot predictably up, and our subscribes shot through the roof (and an unintended consequence occurred - a large portion of the long term podcast subscribers ended up being from China, Iran and the United Arab Emirates).

How did it affect our site viewership, though? Well, we monitored everything pretty closely before and after the switchover, and the bounce rate has only shifted unfavorably by 2%. Interestingly enough, the average length of visit went up substantially (by around six minutes or so). So what was my tradeoff for all the extra listens? Weeding out a few finicky visitors, and Tom Merritt and Molly Wood telling me I should change it to not autoplay on an episode of Buzz Out Loud.

Granted, there is a significant difference between an autoplaying advertisement, and a fifteen second autoplaying advertisement followed by a podcast full of relevant content, but having said that, the Pay Per Play concept isn’t so aesthetically repugnant as the design snobs among us might originally think. Certainly the thought of it is counter-intuitive at first, but aren’t most revolutionary new concepts that way?

WebMynd Could Change the Way You Bookmark Websites

2008-01-27T10:09:00.001-08:00

A new YCombinator startup called WebMynd launched today. It’s a Firefox add-on that records every website you visit and saves a virtual copy on your hard drive.

The service doesn’t save just an image of the page or the URL, but the full text site. That means you can also search those virtual pages later when you are looking for something.

Users can turn off recording at any time, and can delete saved pages that they don’t want to have around for any reason. To see saved pages, you click on an icon at the top of the browser and the local saved copies pop up, along with a search bar.

The idea is that, like Gmail, good search means you don’t have to spend a lot of time bookmarking and tagging websites to find them later. WebMynd records everything in the background, and a quick search will locate the page.

One thing I’d love to see added is a text box somewhere on the browser where you can type in tags to describe any page you are on, and to have that data saved along with the virtual page. The result could make searching easier down the road.

The basic add-on is free and keeps pages for a week. Users pay $10 for six months of history or $20 for a full year. After testing this I can tell it’s a service I’ll continue to use to quickly find sites I visited. Simple service, basic business model, and useful. Classic YCombinator stuff.

Facebook Apps On Any Website: Clever Move

2008-01-27T10:08:00.001-08:00

Facebook announced Friday a new JavaScript client library that will allow Facebook apps to be displayed on any website.

The client library allows users to make Facebook API calls from any web site and create Ajax Facebook applications on that website.

Wei Zhu from Facebook explains the benefits:

Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML. An application that uses this client library should be registered as an iframe type. This applies to either iframe Facebook apps that users access through the Facebook web site or apps that users access directly on the app’s own web sites. Almost all Facebook APIs are supported.

Nick O’Neil at All Facebook writes:

Want to build your own social gaming platform that resides on your own website but leverages the power of users’ Facebook relationships? Now you can! There had previously been applications that could leverage the Facebook API prior to the launch of the platform but there are some significant differences now versus before. The first significant difference is the broader access to Facebook’s core features that the platform provides.

I’m not sure anyone saw this move coming, but Facebook may have just changed the game again by essentially becoming an application host. It’s a clever move by Facebook in a year its competitors will get more serious about offering platforms themselves.

Google Releases Docs Uploader

2008-01-26T07:07:00.000-08:00

Google today released a simple Windows compatible utility to simplify the sometimes annoying task of importing multiple documents into Google Docs. Google released it to demonstrate some of the functionality within the Google Docs API (download the app here).

It was possible already to mass upload documents into Google Docs by way of email, but anyone who has tried that in the past has most likely run into the size limitations (500k, for most documents).

A cursory glance over the API showed me that there are a number of other applications that could be written on the platform, including document synchronization with MS Word or other stand-a-lone Office-style applications, or a Google Docs export utility (certainly in keeping with the principals of data portability!).

[screenshot credits: Google Operating System]

Google Releases Docs Uploader

2008-01-25T13:03:00.000-08:00

It was possible already to mass upload documents into Google Docs by way of email, but anyone who has tried that in the past has most likely run into the size limitations (500k, for most documents).

[screenshot credits: Google Operating System]

9 Facebook Applications To Make You Money

2008-01-25T12:58:00.001-08:00

Did you know you can sell things on your Facebook profile? Well, you can with the help of a couple handy applications. Whether it be your own music if you’re a musician, a shirt you designed, or old junk you have laying around, there’s probably an application out there that can help you earn some extra dough.

CafePress - Pretty much everyone has heard of CafePress, and with this Facebook app you can start selling whatever you have on your store via your profile.

e3buy Auction - Works with the e3buy auction site so you can add auctions to your profile as well as open a store.

eBay - From the best known of the online auction houses, highlight anything you’re selling on eBay to your friends on Facebook.

FlameTunes - Are you a musician? Want to sell your own music on your profile? This is the application for you.

Garage Sale - In association with Buy.com, Garage Sale allows you to sell your items to your friends, like that box of old books, your bike, etc.

Lemonade - Works just like it’s parent site, Lemonade.com. Pick items you like from a selection of sites, add the widget to your profile, make a commission on anything that sells.

Music Blaster - An application that works with BlastMyMusic. Promote small musical acts and earn a 5% commission on sales of their music.

My Merch Store - Create your products with Zazzle and then you can sell them on their website as well as via your Facebook profile.

Shopit - Got some spare CDs you need to dump? Regretting that HD DVD player you bought? Create a simple store and sell off your items to your friends via this store application.

[Source: Mashable.com]

Grouply Brings A Bit Of Facebook To Yahoo/Google Groups

2008-01-25T12:53:00.001-08:00

Grouply is a startup trying to improve the online “groups” systems (Yahoo/Google Groups) currently used by over 100 million registered users. Their first goal was to create a simple management tool for easily tracking updates across your groups on the two networks. You give Grouply your account credentials and they organize your accounts in a more convenient manner (see our earlier review). Their second goal, has been to bring those systems up to speed with the latest social networking enhancements.

The newly launched features are collectively called “Grouply Social” and include all the social networking features you’d expect. User profile pages show your interests, personal history, and contact information. The pages also support multimedia like most social networks, allowing users to share photos, videos, and “widgets” from sites like YouTube and Slide. Members can also befriend each other, with full privacy controls. You can decide who has access to your profile and what portions they can see, similar to Facebook.

The rest of the internet is clearly blowing past these older “groups” services when it comes to usability and engagement. Sites like Tangler, Wetpaint, and Klostu are creating whole new systems to bring online forums up to speed. As we’ve said before, Grouply is taking an evolutionary approach by absorbing users and data from existing systems and enhancing their functionality. Grouply recently raised over $1.3 million.

Wakerupper: Free Wake-up Calls from the Web

2008-01-25T12:47:00.001-08:00

Wakerupper is a nifty light-weight text-to-speech web app with a great name that will call any phone at a preset time. The site is currently in private beta, though its basic features are publicly available now (advanced features such as scheduling and a snooze function are only available to beta testers). I tested it out earlier this week and it never missed a call.

The way Wakerupper works is simple: you give it a phone number and a time and date to call, and optionally you give it a short message (under 140 characters). At the entered time, the app will call your phone and read back your message in a surprisingly non-computer-sounding voice. A cancellation code is emailed to you in case you want to call off your reminder.

As the name suggests, Wakerupper is ideal for things like wake-up calls and appointment reminders. But because most houses have alarm clocks, most hotels have wake-up call services, and most cell phones have a built in calendar app with a reminder function (and alarm clocks, as well, for that matter), I began to question the utility of the service.

However, while Wakerupper may not be necessary for its most practical applications, some of the more whimsical suggested use cases on the web site actually make a lot of sense. For example, "Escape from a boring date or meeting." Want a built-in escape hatch for a blind date? Schedule Wakerupper to call you around the time you should be midway through your entree -- by that time you'll know if you want to bail. Or how about, "Remind child or spouse to do chores." Now parents don't even have to lift a finger to nag their children in far off places.

The service is currently free to use, and an item in the site's FAQ suggests that Wakerupper might someday deliver advertisements along with wake-up calls.

[Source: ReadWriteWeb.com]

Facebook Applications Add Reviews and “Fans”

2008-01-25T12:33:00.001-08:00

Facebook has added a “reviews” feature to all Facebook applications, where you can rate an application on a scale of 1-5 stars and also write something about the app. Additionally, similar to the Pages set up by brands (such as this one for Mashable), you can now become a “fan” of an application.

Nick O’Neill of AllFacebook thinks that these changes will eventually lead to an improved directory for applications. He writes:

“I have a funny feeling that Facebook may eventually use these reviews as a method for displaying “highest rated applications.” This will make the application directory even more efficient for browsing.”

Personally, I’ve been using Clever Hippo (review here) to search for apps, as I like the various filters for sorting by popularity, most recently added, or percent active. However, what’s missing from Clever Hippo is the ability to rate apps, so if O’Neill is correct and Facebook eventually compiles this data in its directory, the need for third-party search tools might disappear.

On the other hand, I think becoming a “fan” of an application is overkill. By installing the application and actively using it, you’re already providing all the data Facebook should need to determine that people like it. By adding a “fans” feature, Facebook is giving application developers yet another reason to solicit their users in the ever growing popularity contest that is Facebook.

[Source: Mashable.com]

Mahalo Launches Multi-Profiles

2008-01-25T12:31:00.001-08:00

Source: Mashable.com

Typically, a new way to display iframed content wouldn’t get me very excited - it would actually probably get me rather annoyed. However, what human-powered search engine Mahalo has launched today is pretty clever, and I’m surprised I haven’t seen it on more sites (in fact, none come immediately to mind).

The new feature is called “multi-profiles” and adds tabs for your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Flickr accounts to your Mahalo profile. Click on one of those tabs and you can see a user’s full profiles on those respective services without navigating away from Mahalo. Thus, you can navigate between a user’s Mahalo profile information such as links and search results pages they’ve created, and then check out their other accounts if you want to learn more about them.

While Mahalo doesn’t generate any extra page views or search engine juice by doing this, they do keep people on the site longer, and in theory will create a better community by making it easier for users to get to know each other.

Smart feature, and I’d expect others to imitate it in the future.

Visualize Recent Edits to Google Maps

2008-01-25T12:24:00.001-08:00

Forget Orkut, Google’s best homegrown social product might just be Google Maps. Today the Maps team has released a “Recent Edits” feature that shows you the most recent updates people have made to locations in Google Maps. Basically, it’s a visualization of the feature that the company released in November that allows users to move their location on a map so it’s more accurate. Stylistically, this feature is similar to Twittervision, which shows you the most recent Tweets from around the globe in a mashup with Google Maps.

Although more of a “that’s cool” feature than something incredibly useful, the visualization does highlight the growing importance of social features in Google Maps. They’ve also recently released collaborative maps, community maps, and in Google Earth you can now see geo-tagged YouTube videos.

The efforts seem to be paying off. Last week, Hitwise published statistics showing that Google Maps is quickly catching up to MapQuest. A year ago, MapQuest was 5x more visited than Google Maps; in 2007, that lead narrowed to barely more than 2x.

Google Health Coming Soon?

2008-01-24T00:07:00.001-08:00

Spotted by Google Blogscoped is a login page for Google Health, Google’s entry into the online health records space. At the time of writing the site isn’t allowing logins, but it does include this text:

With Google Health, you can:

* Build online health profiles that belong to you

* Download medical records from doctors and pharmacies

* Get personalized health guidance and relevant news

* Find qualified doctors and connect to time-saving services

* Share selected information with family or caregivers

The other thing to note is the logo (we’ve included it in this post), it would appear that Google Health is going straight to Beta and not through Google Labs.

Google Health has been hampered by chronic fatigue syndrome in terms of its development, with the site being rumored to launch originally in May 2006. Microsoft even beat Google in the space, having launched its own online health product in October 2007.

MySpaceTV Signs the BBC

2008-01-24T00:03:00.001-08:00

MySpaceTV is officially going global, with a new deal with BBC. The deal is the first of its kind for MySpaceTV, and it solidifies the increasing value of MySpace’s online video hub, which News Corp. is beginning to leverage for a variety of purposes; promotional, distributive and otherwise. See the channel here. Under the deal, current and archived video content from the BBC Worldwide programs will be made available on MySpaceTV. And unlike some of the other distribution partnerships we’ve seen come through MySpaceTV, the BBC’s branded channel actually looks good. You’d almost forget it’s MySpace.

So the question looming here is; what took so long? MySpaceTV has been around for some time, and the BBC hasn’t been too shy about lending some of its content up for distribution across other video-sharing networks, including YouTube, and more recently Vuze. Even after launching, to the dismay of some, its own platform for watching BBC content online, the European network does recognize the benefits taking advantage of some existing distribution hubs out there, MySpace being one of them.

It seems to be working for Hulu, which also offers its own platform for distributive purposes. Will this model truly shut down other promising players like Joost, or will the distribution methods of sending older content to the media-sharing networks while keeping the new stuff as a premium, centralized option soon see its own demise?

My WeShow: Create Your Own Video Network

2008-01-24T00:01:00.001-08:00

WeShow started out as a human-powered video aggregator, with editors on board to find and share the best content out there when it comes to online video. As many of these types of services do, WeShow is now offering an option to let you create your own video aggregator, essentially making you the editor. Entire communities can be built from here, even allowing for your members to add videos to your community as well.

Called My WeShow, the service is pretty simple. It basically lets you create a centralized group for the video content you love, with the help of others. In function and implementation, My WeShow is in fact quite similar to Magnify, which also lets you create custom groups for sharing video content from across the web. My WeShow offers personalization options such as color templates, and an ad revenue-sharing model as well. AdSense ads placed on your network will get you a 50-50 split, so the more engaged you and your members are in your My WeShow community, the higher your earning potential rises.

What I’m not sure of, however, is if and how these communities will be leveraged for use on WeShow. As WeShow has taken somewhat of a Best Week Ever approach to promoting video content (and by that I simply mean that the team behind WeShow chooses what’s important), will these other communities within the WeShow network be needed at all for WeShow’s main service? I’m also wondering if integrated video communities in the form of an API is the next step for My WeShow.

The Danger of Free

2008-01-23T11:09:00.001-08:00

Everyone loves to get stuff for free. We line up to get a free drink, we sign up for free checking accounts, and we're happy to get a free gift with the purchase of our next car. We love free stuff, even though we all know and understand that free is an illusion. After that free drink, we pay for the next three. The bank is making money by investing what we put in that checking account. The car dealer can afford to give away a small gift because the profit on the car is large. But none of this seems to bother us - free things still have a certain allure. But is the concept of free taking us down a dangerous road?

Marketers long ago figured out the attractiveness of free. For decades companies have been playing tricks using free to lure naive customers.

But recently, our obsession with free has given rise to a new phenomenon - where the customer is never asked to pay.

How? Because the business makes their money on advertising. Marketers are happy to pay for access to customers, who in turn love not having to pay. So the web plays the glorious role of middle man.

Are we heading into dangerous territory? The paths that we are taking lead to confused customers at best; and monopolistic practices at worst. A culture where consumers think that increasingly more and more services should be free is not healthy.

Does Free Make Sense?

Most online consumer services today are free. That is, people pay nothing to use them and the services make money via advertising. The logic is that the more people who use the service, the more page views they generate and the more ads they are shown - so the happier the advertisers.

On the surface this makes sense. After all, newspaper advertising has generally worked this way as well. Well, not quite. Top-shelf papers like New York Times, are not free - you need to pay to get them.

The classic newspaper business is both a subscription service and advertising supported. Subscriptions provide a solid base, and grow if the publication is interesting. Ads are then sold door-to-door by a salesperson with a with a fat rolodex and phenomenal commissions.

But this classic model is no more. In the brave new world, subscription fees are gone and
the salespeople are replaced by CPM advertising engines. The problem is, things are just not that simple.

When the economy is bad (think 2008), then advertising is the first to be cut. Now if your sole revenue source is advertising, then your revenue gets hit hard. The traditional subscriber base, which helps companies navigate through the economic downturns, is just not there, because it is no longer cool to charge people for the service.

The second problem is, of course, Google. The whole beauty of online advertising is that it is trackable - ROI is easily measured.

Google's pay-per-click model (CPC) is far superior to the traditional impressions based (CPM) model. But how many other companies can mimic that? Can the New York Times sell CPC advertising? That remains to be seen. And Facebook is yet to prove itself in that game as well. Getting people to click on ads is still a rocket science on the web.

When Free is Dirty

While it is not clear that a lot of businesses in an economy can be supported only by advertising, we already know that free can be a powerful weapon in the hands of big companies. Consider this recent example: IBM used free to practically destroy the Java software tools market. One day, someone at IBM was likely sitting around and thinking about how to sell more of the company's Blade servers. In a single eureka moment he figured out that by giving away the integrated development environment (IDE), IBM could kill its competition, open all doors, and sell its most expensive product.

Eclipse and the surrounding set of tools for debugging, testing and profiling Java code are not great. But they are good enough because they are free. Companies could no longer justify paying for products from, for example, Borland and as a result, IBM's strategy worked beautifully. All of this was executed over the course of just a few years, under the mantra of open source, so practically no one could see IBM's ploy. The sad consequence of IBM's victory is a lack of innovation in the software tools space. After all, who wants to compete with free?

From Free to an Empire

Of course, IBM is not the only big company that discovered the power of free. The king of the web, Google has been expanding its sphere of influence using exactly the same strategy. In a stroke of brilliance, Google made their web's best search algorithm free to consumers, by supporting their search engine with advertising. Elegant and fair, we all get access to the world's information for free. Thanks!

The next move, is slightly less elegant, but still legitimate - GMail. Google wanted us to have better and simpler email.

The solution was to deliver it with advertising. It is strange to see ads next to our email, but we learned to ignore them just so that we can use the software. Fine.

But the next move - Google Office - is unfair. In its endless quest to organize the world's information,

Google is also looking to kill off its archrival Microsoft. Just like Microsoft is going after search, Google is after one of Microsoft's juiciest markets - Office. And to play, Google is giving it away for free. Well, almost. For consumers, Google's online office software is free, and for businesses, they have made the software so cheap that it is practically free (Google can't make enterprise tools completely free because companies would freak out).

The point is that Google can afford to give away everything for free because of its success with search. This is being done openly now and it is just plain wrong. It is a dangerous poker game, where Google can raise stakes because it has a hugepile of cash. What happened to fair competition and not being evil? This is an evil way to break into the market.

Of course, we all prefer the light Google Docs to Microsoft's heavy desktop software. This is not the point. The issue is that this kind of free is absurd. If Google wanted to break into eCommerce, it could afford to put Amazon out of the book business by giving away free books. How would we react to that?

Generation Free

Sadly, a lot of people would probably see free books from Google as a great thing. After all, as a society, we now expect information to be free, so it wouldn't be a leap to have free books as well. This is a misleading point of view, but it is spreading. We are raising a generation of kids who do not want to pay monthly subscriptions for anything. Give me stuff for free and stick some advertising on it.

This is also dangerous for another reason. Teens are growing up with not only a sense of expectation of free, but sense of entitlement to free. Of course my social network is free! But why? The phone is not free, television is not free, clothing, food, house - everything else is not free. Is this not a paradox?

Just a few decades ago, people had low expectations and worked hard to make living. They did not know free and never expected it. Now, the opposite trend is happening, with free becoming expected online. Will the new generation, the one that expects something for nothing, work as hard to maintain the high standards of living that we created?

Conclusion

The bottom line is there is no free lunch. When you go on vacation and see a sign that says Free Lunch you know that the timeshare sales pitch is going to accompany it. The free on the web is not free either. We are receiving the services in exchange for our time and attention, in exchange for the opportunity to be advertised to.

Yet, there is a lot complexity surrounding the issue. From the effectiveness of advertising to monopolistic market plays, free is making a lot of people nervous. The libraries are free because we pay taxes, but Microsoft Office is not free and probably should not be free.

Do you see this as an issue? This is an interesting topic and we would love to see the debate here on ReadWriteWeb! Sound off in the comments below.

Image credit: Top images from Reasoned Audacity.

Source: ReadWriteWeb.com

Sharpcast Launches SugarSync - Full Sync Between Web, PCs & Mobile

2008-01-23T11:02:00.001-08:00

Today Sharpcast is launching an invite-only private beta of it's much-anticipated Project Hummingbird product, with full public launch to follow this Spring. The product has been re-named SugarSync and with it you will be able to sync and backup your files and media across all of your computers, the web and mobile phone. Sharpcast CEO Gibu Thomas described this to me in an interview as "the holy grail".

ReadWriteWeb was given exclusive early access to the beta of SugarSync. As well as the first look, we have 1,500 beta invites for our readers (details at the end of this post).

At the end of 2006 ReadWriteWeb named Sharpcast as our Most Promising Web Company, because it was solving a big problem - syncing data across Web, desktop and other devices. At the time we wrote that "if Sharpcast can successfully roll out its Project Hummingbird in 2007 - which will sync all types of data - then it will be hitting a very sweet spot in the world of Internet-connected data." Well it's a bit late in arriving, but today we can finally check out if Sharpcast lives up to its promise.

SugarSync was built on a platform called Sharpcast Universal Synchronization Platform, which Sharpcast plans to make available to mobile phone operators and others. Sharpcast claims that SugarSync is "the only comprehensive synchronization service that offers real-time sync and backup of your data across all of your computers, the web and your phone." The SugarSync beta is, we're told, only a subset of what the platform will eventually do.

Sharpcast first made its name in 2006-07 as a sync manager for photos. That was always meant to be a proof of concept of the more extensive file sync functionality. With SugarSync, you download a desktop app to your computer(s), but you can also access it online at sugarsync.com and on your mobile at m.sugarsync.com.

Mobile access in general has been beefed up, with special mobile applications for different media types. In the beta, there is a downloadable gallery application for photos, enabling you to (for example) view and share your Picasa photos from your phone, or wirelessly sync camera phone photos back to your Vista gallery. Currently there are mobile apps available at m.sugarsync.com for Blackberry and Windows Smartphones; with J2ME, Symbian and Brew clients in development. Mobile apps for music and video syncing/streaming are coming soon too.

The private beta SugarSync is Windows-only at this point, but the Mac version is coming soon and will certainly be there on public launch. Linux will also eventually be supported.

Facebook Releases Open Source JavaScript Library

2008-01-23T10:59:00.001-08:00

Facebook has long been a big contributor to the open source movement, and releases a number of their in-house projects under open source licenses. They even provide a a mirror for popular open source endeavors, such as Mozilla and Apache. This week Facebook announced the release their first open source JavaScript library.

In September, Facebook released FBJS, which is a layer on top of JavaScript designed specifically for use with the Facebook platform. It lets developers use JavaScript in their Facebook applications, including things like AJAX and DOM manipulation. The problem with FBJS, though, was that it didn't play nice with outside JavaScript libraries, so for anything that it didn't support, developers were out of luck.

With that in mind, Facebook decided to internally develop a library for creating JavaScript animations in FBJS. "And then we thought: 'why stop there?' The library had very little Facebook-specific code, so we took some time to modularize it, and now we're open-sourcing it for everyone," said Facebook developer Marcel Laverdet.

Facebook is following in the steps of rival web giants Google and Yahoo!, who both have open sourced internal JavaScript libraries. While Facebook's release of the animation library is a far cry from the more complete libraries released by Yahoo! and Google, such as Yahoo!'s YUI or Google's Web Toolkit, it is a step in that direction. Releasing open source development libraries is a very smart thing to do, because it builds capital with developers and attracts developers to your platform. For Yahoo! and Google, their development libraries help to attract developers to their other APIs (such as Google Maps or Flickr). For Facebook, releasing libraries like Animation could help draw more developers toward their platform.

The Animation library is described as a way for developers to create "customizable animations using CSS and DOM manipulation." It is released under a modified BSD license.

Crunchies Winners Announced

2008-01-23T10:57:00.001-08:00

While the Crunchies award ceremony is in full swing at the historic Herbst Theater in downtown San Francisco, we've got the winners for you right here. Over 100,000 votes were cast, and many of the races were very tight, but in the end there can be only one winner (per category). So without further ado, the winners of the first annual Crunchies Awards are...

Best technology innovation / achievement

Best bootstrapped start-up

Best new gadget / device

Best business model

Best design

Best enterprise start-up

Best consumer start-up

Best mobile start-up

Best international start-up

Best user-generated content

Best video site

Best clean tech start-up

Best use of viral marketing

Best time sink site

Most likely to make the world a better place

Most likely to succeed

Best start-up founder

Mark Zuckerberg - Facebook

Image via the Guardian

Best start-up CEO

Toni Schneider - Auttomatic

Image via True Ventures

Best new start-up of 2007

Best overall

Be sure to watch the event streaming live via Mogulus. The Crunchies is a joint venture between TechCrunch, GigaOm, VentureBeat, and ReadWriteWeb.

Flock 1.1 Arrives in Two Weeks

2008-01-23T10:50:00.001-08:00

Flock, the Social Web Browser, has announced that the Flock 1.1 beta will launch in just two weeks. The browser, built on Firefox code, is designed for social interaction on the web, with features built into the browser just for this purpose. Flock chose last week's Macworld conference to show off the new version. With the upcoming release, several new features will be added, including Yahoo and Gmail support, Picassa integration, and a friend activity feed.

The integration of the popular webmail services from Yahoo and Gmail will allow users to share web pages, images, articles, and links with their friends using a click-to-compose function built right into the browser. By just clicking the email icon in the URL bar, Flock users can instantly share these items with their friends. When new mail arrives, the Flock Mail icon will light up to let users know to check their inbox. This is especially handy since webmail doesn't alert users of incoming mail the way that Outlook or other desktop clients do, forcing them to either keep checking it in a browser tab, using an add-on, or some sort of 3rd party notification software.

Image Credit: CNet Networks

As to why email was the next bigfeature to be included, Flock's CEO, Shawn Hardin, states that "Email is the single most frequently used communication application on the web, and is often overlooked as social activity."The new Picasa feature will let users of the popular photo-sharing service quickly upload pictures to Picasa from Flock. To share these photos, users can email them via web mail or just drag and drop them onto the Flock People sidebar, the same way that YouTube videos, flickr photos, Photobucket photos, and others are shared in version 1.0.

The Friend Activity feed is like Facebook's News Feed, expect that it tracks your friends recent activities across all of Flock’s supported services. The feed will inform users when their friends update their Flock profile or online status, upload new photos, and it even displays their Twitter updates.

The new version will be available for as a free download for Mac, PC and Linux in two weeks at www.Flock.com.