I came across Scottsdale, Arizona based Solomodels today. I’m writing about it because it has pictures of really attractive women on the site it is a textbook example of Ajax, search and social networking. It caters to models, photographers and agents. Founder Hoss Etemad wrote to me to describe the service, and I must say I found it immediately intriguing. Participants can create profiles… → Read More
It’s been just over a month since I wrote about the last Ajax home page, and I thought I’d get through February without writing about a new one. I was wrong. Fold.com has entered private beta. According to the site, “Fold is the Web 2.0 application.” I checked out the beta and Fold.com looks about as good as other Ajax home pages (an API to create third party widgets is in… → Read More
Microsoft continues to roll out new Live.com services today. In addition to Street-Side, Microsoft just took the protection off of its much anticipated Expo classified listing service. See my previous posts on Expo for additional information and screen shots. Expo is centered on the idea that people will trust others within a group, and so is allowing classifieds networks within groups. Users can… → Read More
Microsoft’s Live.com is launching a preview version of a new service called Street-Side today (link will be live around 12 PST today). Street-Side will augment the Live Local service and give street level views of the entire city. Searches can be made by address or business name, and you can “drive” around the city using the arrow keys. See the screen shot below for a visual. See… → Read More
Maxthon is in my view the best alternative to Internet Explorer. Firefox and Opera are doing a great job (both in product and buzz) but they just don’t catch up with Maxthon. Founded by the very young and brilliant Jeff Chen in 2003 in China (under MyIE name), Maxthon became very quickly popular in Asia (awarded last year in Red Herring Asia ) and all over the world. The big difference with… → Read More
Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo emailed Richard MacManus and me on Monday to give us a preview of what he calls “broad enhancement to our stats” that are being released later this morning. I’ve had a chance to review the new functionality (screen shot below) and I agree that these changes are both needed and useful. The key change is to give users more information on what items in… → Read More
After much anticipation and a period of being available to a private audience the team at Edgeio took the covers off of their creation tonight and launched to the general public. Edgeio takes listings (classifieds) from RSS-enabled sources and organizes them in a central location for users to be able to browse and search. The Edgeio ethos is that content belongs on the edges, and that is where the… → Read More
Google announced last week on their blog that they will begin to facilitate payments on Google Base in the near future. The blog post from Google pointed out that Google are already accepting payments on their video service as well as when users purchase software such as Google Earth and that this will be extended further in the near future. The latest updates to Google Base, which we have been… → Read More
Mix open instant messaging protocol Jabber with mobile phones and you get Mabber, a new product from a team based in Cologne, Germany. The team at Mabber were early adopters of the Jabber protocol and with the lower mobile data charges in their home country decided to develop an application that would allow mobile users to communicate with each other using the protocol, thus save on SMS costs. → Read More
Although there has been no official announcement yet Google have released the long awaited and long-rumored Google Pages (which has nothing to do with cloning Larry Page). Pages allows users to create a webpage using an AJAX interface that removes a lot of the ‘pain’ associated with creating pages with HTML and other desktop design applications. If you have some time on your hands and would… → Read More
Over the weekend I spoke to Martin Wells, the founder and CEO of a startup from Sydney, Australia called Tangler. I had a look at the application they have been developing for the last 18 months now which is an instant messaging and communication app that is based around a concept they call ‘instant grouping’. Instant grouping means that any number of people can take part in conversations… → Read More
Google recently indicated that they are taking blogs and measuring blog statistics very seriously with their acquisition of Measure Map. Measure Map had not yet made it into the hands of most bloggers and had been in a private beta at the time of acquisition. A new blog analytics tool that is similar in functionality to Measure Map is BlogBeat. The different with BlogBeat is that it is available… → Read More
Huntington Beach, California based Foldera‘s goal is to organize all of the chaos surrounding work based documents (email, calendar, office documents, instant messaging, etc). It is a very big idea. The company is in private beta right now, with a full launch on the way. Foldera’s approach to productivity is in direct conflict with the way we use applications like Outlook today (just… → Read More
At the Mashup Camp pre-conference dinner tonight there were a number of demos, all of which were interesting. A non-public service that stood out was flyspy, a search engine for airline tickets that will change the way we all travel. Purchasing flights purely based on price has been around for a while, but the consumer has never had the power to quickly and at a glance evaluate the cheapest days… → Read More
Since launching last year, Meebo the web-based instant messaging application has had phenomenal growth and great user adoption. This week they have announced a new set of features and upgrades to their application, the first since they announced their funding from Sequoia capital. The best of the new features are that you can now create an account with Meebo and have access to all your instant… → Read More
I am leaving tonight on a long overdue vacation. Nik Cubrilovic has accepted my my invitation to guest blog for TechCrunch in my absence over the next ten days. Nik is the founder of Omnidrive, a company I have written about here on TechCrunch, and also has his own popular blog at nik.com.au. He’s promised to keep things controversial, but he will not be writing about anything even remotely… → Read More
Pluck demo’d a new product called BlogBurst at our party last night. The service is live but Pluck has not pushed it out for publicity yet. BlogBurst is a service that takes topical content from pre-approved blogs and provides it to publishers (online newspapers, etc.) for republication. Blogs that apply and are accepted are categorized (TechCrunch would be “science and… → Read More
The Naked Conversations TechCrunch Party is now officially over (except for Stowe Boyd and Jason Roberts who are passed out on my couches). The pictures are here and here (tag: “techcrunch5″). Bonus: Check out Emily Chang’s video (at bottom of post) and John Furrier’s Podcast of the event. Thank you to everyone who came. My guess is that we had at least 400 people in the… → Read More
I’m pretty excited about the Naked Conversations TechCrunch Party tomorrow night starting at 7 pm. We’ve been working hard for weeks to get the event together and, thanks to our sponsors, this should be the best one so far. A huge tent is up in the back yard, food and drinks are on the way, and there will be plenty of people to help out with the event. Attendees have been limited due… → Read More
Campfire, the new 37 Signals product, launched yesterday. It is a dead simple way to create a robust, permanent (with URL) group chat. Key features include embedded images, permanent URL for chat, no client to download (chat is in the web page), and easy file sharing. I’m basically thinking of it as a real time wiki or an easy to use IRC product with enhanced features. They claim it takes 10… → Read More
Prague based Allpeers cofounder Matthew Gertner came by my house today to install the product and let me try it out. Allpeers is a Firefox extension that creates a simple, persistent buddy list in the browser. Initially, interaction with those buddies will be limited to discovering and sharing files – If you choose to, you can share any file on your network with one or more of your friends. → Read More
On Friday Rojo will be officially releasing Feedshare, a new way for blogs to promote themselves on other blogs. The service is available now to test. The idea is that a blog include a Google Adsense-type ad unit on the site (I’ve included this in the bottom left sidebar of TechCrunch). Two ads are served in the unit and there are vertical and horizontal ad units to choose from. For ever two… → Read More
Podbop launched today, and for music lovers it may be the most interesting mashup we’ve seen yet. They’ve combined concert events from eventful and mashed the data up with band sites that include downloadable music. The result? search for any city in the U.S. (hopefully this will soon expand to become a worldwide service) and get results (including RSS for future events) that include… → Read More
Microsoft Office Live went into beta today. The service was first revealed at a Microsoft event last fall – you can see my post about it here. This is not an online version of Microsoft Office. It is a set of online tools for businesses to help them have a web and email presence at a very low cost (starting at free with ad support). The core tools are a free non-microsoft domain name… → Read More
TextPayMe is coming out of beta on a SMS payment service (U.S. only) that allows anyone to send money to anyone else via cell phone. You simply sms the payment to another phone number. For example, to send $15.27 to a friend with mobile number (206) 555-1234, you would text “PAY 15.27 2065551234″ to SMS@TextPayMe.com. The service is currently free, and they are giving every new user $5… → Read More
Stickam will launch tomorrow, February 15. The service allows users to easily create video and audio files, and additional tools to easily post these files to a website with a code snippet. The media files are played on the destination website in Flash. Bunchball has similar technology for integration of flash games into blogs and other websties. Stickam is free, has no bandwidth restrictions and… → Read More
Google just announced that they have acquired Adaptive Path’s Measure Map (one of my most loved companies, more posts on them here). No word on price…my wild ass speculation is $5 – $10m. Measure Map has not raised outside capital, and seems to be more of a drain on Adaptive Path resources at this point than an asset – the service has lagged very badly over the last few… → Read More
I agree with Fred Wilson – email can be an important way to syndicate blog content. Fred has about 1 email subscriber for every 5 RSS subscribers. Until now Feedblitz was the only real choice to bloggers. I’ve chosen not to use it because of the heavy orange feedblitz branding included in emails. And while they’ve made improvements in their service, there are a number of features… → Read More
Assigning some sort of quality to real time search is necessary. Tracking incoming links to a particular post doesn’t work because, well, since this stuff is real time there is no time to track links. Memeorandum does track blog post links in near real time, but with a very small index of blogs. Tracking this across the entire blogosphere is much more difficult. Robert Scoble points out that… → Read More
Ning is announcing on their company blog that they will be releasing new suff on Wednesday. I’m looking forward to this, and I’m hoping that they make me eat my critical words on them. If the release includes features that I saw at their office a couple of weeks ago, I suspect I may. → Read More
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