Soonr, the company that lets you access desktop files and Skype from your mobile phone, has released a version for the Mac. Mike profiled Soonr in May and the lack of Mac support was his one complaint. The new version is integrated with Spotlight and can render Photoshop files from your desktop into jpg for viewing on your phone. Looks cool. → Read More
Ted Murphy, CEO of advertising firm Mindcomet, has launched a new service called PayPerPost.com. You guessed it, it’s a marketplace for companies to connect with bloggers who are willing to blog about a product – for a price. The companies can set guidelines for their requests such as whether a picture must be included and whether they will only pay for positive blog coverage. There… → Read More
Newsgator and Feedburner are the two most active companies in the RSS space right now. When either of these companies say anything, I pay close attention. Yesterday Newsgator founder and CTO Greg Reinacker (listen to an interview with Greg Reinacker and executives from other feed readers on TalkCrunch) posted something that everyone interested in the future of RSS should pay attention to – a… → Read More
Chinese search engine Baidu, with a market cap of about $3 billion, will be launching a blogging platform on July 13. Search Enging Journal reports (but without attribution) that Cynthia He, a spokeswoman for Baidu, said in a statement: “There’s a product named Baidu Space. I can’t describe the product or give a date, except that it will be very soon and we are very excited. But we’d like… → Read More
This is just ridiculous. Three year old CouchSurfing, a beloved service used by some 90,000 members, had multiple database crashes, critical parts of the software and data were irretrievably lost, and the backups weren’t performed properly. They are not rebuilding the service. They literally put themselves out of business. CouchSurfing allowed people to register their home and offer free… → Read More
The Downloadable Television space is heating up. PeerImpact, a service of New York based Wurld Media, announced today that it has signed deals with three major TV and movie studios to offer episodes of popular television programs for download through its peer-to-peer client. The company is adding titles from Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Bros. libraries to its offerings that already included… → Read More
Sites that allow users to post questions for other users are growing in popularity and Guruza looks like an especially interactive one. It was created by Rich Collins, Adam Thorsen and friends under the name One Room Software in Palo Alto. Here’s how it works. You ask a question and set a price you’ll pay for an answer that satisfies you. Users can scan the list of questions, leave… → Read More
Online shopping and analytics service Mpire announced its first two sponsored buying guides today, a home and garden catalogue sponsored by Zillow and a baby and toddlers guide sponsored by Judy’s Book. Mpire mines data from transactions on eBay, Craigslist, Yahoo and Overstock.com to display price trends and quantities of items searched for. The buying guides are sponsored, stylized… → Read More
Google Checkout launched early this morning and may significantly change the online shopping sector. The system offers low transaction costs for merchants and mediation between buyers and sellers online in exchange for access to what will be a huge amount of data about shopping and sales conversions. There doesn’t appear to be many benefits for buyers in the system. There are $10 discounts… → Read More
The Yahoo! IM team just released the 3.0 version of Yahoo! IM for Mac. Yahoo! Messenger for Mac was last updated in September, 2003. Its feature set is interesting, but it appears to lack two of the PC version’s most compelling qualities: VOIP and the growing library of plugins built on the recently released software development kit. It’s hard for me to imagine using any single IM… → Read More
ConnectBeam is a weeks-old startup looking to take social bookmarking into the enterprise sector. I love it when the cross-pollination between consumer services and business use starts with consumer practices and this is just one of many such developments recently. ConnectBeam makes tagging items into personal or shared archives simple, even in company intranets. It’s a straightforward use… → Read More
Zlango is a new Israeli startup (there is a lot of innovation going on there) that has created a very interesting new language and associated application that could change the SMS landscape (as well as, eventually, email and IM). Israel design firm Mantis is involved with the project. The language is based on icons, or pictures. Each icon has a specific meaning – a person pointing to himself… → Read More
Adobe launches the Flex 2 product line tomorrow along with Flash Player 9. Flex is a web web development environment used by programmers to build rich web applications that can make use of Flash and/or Ajax. The main advantage of Flex is that it makes developing Flash applications a lot easier, and easily combining it with Javascript to make full feature-rich web applications. Many development… → Read More
A UK developer who goes by “Tones” has created a Flock-specific extension that puts Meebo, and therefore Yahoo, AIM, Gtalk and MSN IM, directly into a sidebar in the Flock browser (the extension also works for Firefox). Since Flock and Meebo are two startups I use, this looked interesting. I’ve downloaded the extension and tried it out. It works as promised, although it requires… → Read More
ShopWiki, an incredibly innovative online shopping community, will announce today another step to expand their service’s offerings. The company will pay users $50 per video for the first 500 submitted product review videos selected for inclusion on the site – that’s $25k total. This site is nuts already and paying people to add video reviews is going to take it over the top in… → Read More
The human edited blog highlight site TopTenSources will announce tomorrow that they have acquired the social shopping site Style Feeder. I really like both these companies and am excited to see how the partnership develops. TopTenSources is lead by long time technologist Halley Suitt. The site is based on human editors selecting their favorite 10 blogs on a wide variety of topics, from food to… → Read More
Marc Canter’s much anticipated PeopleAggregator is starting to roll out, password protection is scheduled to be removed Wednesday around noon Pacific time. PeopleAggregator is the product of 3 years of self funded work by Canter to bridge the gap between all the online social networking services available and move the industry towards a standards-based place of collaboration. I took a look… → Read More
The Google Desktop team just announced that version 4 of the software has left beta status, so all you cynics about perpetual beta can give it a rest! This version only spent 6 weeks in beta. Maybe GMail is next, who knows? Today’s announcement included the expansion of Google Desktop into now 27 languages, the availability of a new drag and drop system for gadget (or widget) UI development… → Read More
Coupons by mobile phone service Cellfire goes nationwide for Cingular users today, with support for other carriers said to be on the way in the future. Oliver over at MobileCrunch reviews Cellfire and points out that tests in California saw coupons redeemed at a rate of almost 20%, with some surpassing that mark. That’s pretty incredible compared to paper coupon redemption rates. The number… → Read More
The airfare prediction Farecast launches its public beta today, enabling travelers to leverage more than 60 billion records of past airfare prices to predict whether prices will rise or fall over the next 7 days. The beta covers only flights departing from Seattle and Boston, but the company plans to roll out US-wide coverage through the end of this year. The company showed me around the site last… → Read More
Dabble DB, a Vancouver-based startup that has created an extremely useful and easy to use database application product, will announce a small (but undisclosed) series A round of financing on Tuesday. The round is being led by Canadian venture firm Ventures West. Paul Kedrosky, an advisor to Ventures West, has joined the Dabble DB board of directors. Dabble DB is a wonderful application that we… → Read More
Guba, a pioneer in the user-generated video content space, became a pioneer of another sort today, when Warner Brothers’ film and television content went on sale on Guba.com at 2 PM PST. Through its deal with Warner, Guba will initially sell almost 200 movie and television titles (quickly expanding shortly thereafter), ranging from new releases like “Good Night and Good Luck” to… → Read More
How do you make money by giving away free software? Automattic, the company that’s home to several key developers of the free open source blogging software WordPress (used by this blog and many more) has announced today a new service called the Automattic Support Network. It’s intended help large organizations and enterprise users leverage WordPress and the community around it. → Read More
The much anticipated Digg 3.0 launched this morning as promised. My first thoughts are – it’s beautiful, although it isn’t stable yet (search in particular seems to be breaking, although there are other small bugs too). The integration of Ajax to move between topics and betwen headline and new stories is really well done, and is by far my favorite feature. With regard to the new… → Read More
ZapZap is a new audio and video podcast directory service based in Japan, just launched this weekend. While podcast directories are launching fast and furious, this one is particularly nice. Ajax is used just right, digg-type voting is central, synch with iTunes or play on site. The aesthetic is attractive and there are English and Japanese sections of the site. ZapZap’s creator is an… → Read More
Palo Alto based Ning made a significant change to their application interface on Friday, removing the mandatory sidebar on applications and replacing it with a fully customizable javascript bar across the top of the page. I met with CEO Gina Bianchini a week ago to see the changes. Gina also gave me an update on how Ning is doing in general. Ning is a site that lets users create customized… → Read More
Tag metasearch engine Gada.be (TechCrunch posts describing the service are here) is getting a name change and a redesign at the Gnomedex conference in Seattle later this week (Chris Pirillo founded the company and also runs the conference). The new service will be called TagJag (and will be at TagJag.com). Like Gada.be, TagJag can be queried easily from a mobile device. Gada.be launched in October… → Read More
The online office suite Zoho launched a new presentation tool this week called Zoho Show, for use in creating and displaying remote presentations on the web. Zoho parent company Adventnet is a TechCrunch sponsor. Thumbstacks appears to be the primary rival faced by Zoho Show, and both have certain advantages and disadvantages. This newest offering is the 12th Zoho web based application, including… → Read More
San Francisco based GoodStorm will soon launch a new program called MeCommerce that will allow bloggers to insert product listings in a javascript and iframe box on their sites and keep 50% of the retail mark-up for themselves. Blog readers will be able to purchase books and CDs inside the box without leaving the blog page they are on. Blog publishers can populate their boxes by tag or with… → Read More
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