Netvibes quietly released an updated look and feel this evening. Read about the release on the Netvibes blog here and here. Key additions to the service include: Module search New web/blog /video search with results within netvibes Customization of look and feel MySpace module Netvibes says in their blog entry that the new release “will change the way you use and view the web” and includes user interface enhancements as well as a bunch of new modules. Putting the question of whether or not this update is as significant as the blog post suggests aside, Netvibes has certainly had a big impact on its users. They have collected over 5 million passionate users and $15 million in venture capital during its brief year of existence. Netvibes is one of the sites that has stuck with me as others come and go, and I visit it at least daily. I’ve created Netvibes modules for most of the web services I use and it has become the gateway to those services and sites. The site is fast, clean and contains to advertisements. Like Google search, the best thing about Netvibes is that it has no problem with me quickly leaving the site to take care of other business. And that’s why it’s earned my loyalty as a user. → Read More
, which gives weight to the idea that T-Mobile is not just growing, but completely reinventing itself. And that is good. Why, you ask, is it good that the anemic T-Mobile is going to be reborn? → Read More
Messagr is a “new presence-based search engine” that helps you find other skype users with similar interests to yourself. To participate you simply register yourself on messagr with your skype details and then add some tags that describe the topics you might like to chat about. For example if you wanted to discuss music with someone right now, you could search for the term music or click on the tag cloud to find those people that were online (which is determined by their skype presence) and interested in music. You can then initiate a call or a chat session via skype. [note: the tag cloud dynamically updates as members change their Skype presence which is a feature I really like] Of course there are similar services out there on the web such as Jyve which is more like Yahoo! Answers via Skype as opposed to a personal interest/tagged communication. Speaking with Joel Selvadurai last night, a 22 year old computer science graduate from Durham University in Newcastle, he told me that he built messagr in less than 3 months from concept to beta using java, jsp and the SkypeWeb presence service. “I am a single founder and am based in Marylebone in London. I am self funded and am looking for funding to take my idea further. I think there is great potential in this field of ‘presence search’. I shall be attending the Second Chance Tuesday event this coming Tuesday.” What I really like about messagr is the fact that Joel has taken his idea to market without funding and in such a short space of time. This seems to be a trend right now with opensource software and intellectual capital combining to make ideas a reality or at least a proof of concept that helps VC’s envisage the the idea as a functional web application. → Read More
Somehow, in the avalanche of new phones and accessories this week, we missed this dope new FM Transmitter for Sony-Ericsson phones. Seeing as how they’re aggressively going after the mobile music market, this little gadget makes perfect sense. It plugs into the bottom of your favorite SE phone and transmits your tunes to your car stereo. In addition, it turns your sound system into a full-on speakerphone, on the cheap. The 3.5mm headphone jack at the front means it works as a lapel remote, too. Neat! It works with current SE phones and will only set you back $45. Not a bad deal considering everything that it does. Music Phone FM Transmitter: Sony-Ericsson [Brando] → Read More
At first glance the iBag Turntable looked very cool, but that reaction wore off as soon as I realized that it doesn’t really use vinyl. What you really have here is a backpack that you can connect your iPod to. With four AA batteries you can also play your iPod through the backpack’s speakers. The backpack includes a FM radio, and retails for $60. I have yet to hear (or see) someone playing music through their backpack’s speakers. Here in San Francisco, we still use boom boxes on our shoulders for being obnoxious. iBag Turntable [shiny shiny] → Read More
Read these exciting stories before our planet is engulfed by the sun: The Elite Cuisine Multi-Function 3-in-1 Breakfast Center USB Roll-Up Keyboard High Tech Karaoke GPS Could Be Disabled By Solar Flares In 2011 Japanese Power Suit Makes You Super Human → Read More
LiveJournal just announced that they will soon begin offering sponsored communities with benefits to participating users and sponsored features provided by companies other than LiveJournal. The SixApart owned social networking site has slowly rolled these plans out over recent months but just made the official announcement tonight. Early feedback from users is decidedly negative. Update: Here’s the newest from the company on this, it appears that they backed down on much of the original plans. Sponsored communities will be groups sponsored by advertisers who are offering group members things like exclusive movie trailers, behind-the-scenes footage, travel advice, tips and tricks, special deals. It’s funny, I thought most of that was already freely available all over the internet. There is some potential here, and this is an increasingly common direction for social networks to move in, but it will be a difficult strategy to pull off in a compelling way. The second part of the plan seems much more viable. Sponsored features will be technical add-ons that LiveJournal hasn’t offered its users so far. The first will be an SMS integration service sponsored by Amp’dMobile. This make some sense and it will be good to see what kind of creative features are provided by partners. Two concerns that arise: the baby could get thrown out with the bath water in that users could be so upset at seeing their alternative to MySpace growing increasingly ad driven that they don’t care about the ad sponsored special features. LiveJournal offers paid accounts already and some users will undoubtedly feel that if they’ve paid for an account, they don’t want to see ads. The new sponsored SMS service, though, will be available only to paid members. That makes sense to cut down on abuse, but we’ll see how those users respond to both paying and seeing ads. With social networking sites becoming either a dime a dozen or worth a billion dollars, depending on how you look at it, there’s an interesting balance being sought between the need to profit and the need to keep allegedly fickle users happy. A second concern is that the sponsored features strategy seems to conflict with the spirit of open APIs. LiveJournal uses not the MetaWeblog API or the Blogger API, but one of its own. It’s been praised as good to work with, but not a lot of people apparently do. Is there some kind of artificial → Read More
Online photo sharing and printing service Shutterfly raised $87 million in an IPO today, closing up 3.7% at $15.55 per share. VentureBeat points out that the price climbed as high as $16.73 at one point in the day. Born in 1999, Shutterfly is a survivor of the last bubble and crash. Now it’s an interesting case for considering other possible valuations. It also gives us a chance to look at what a company with a successful IPO took to market. For comparison, Flickr is rumored to have been acquired by Yahoo! for $30 to $35 million. After J.P. Morgan, Piper Jaffray and Jefferies sold 5.8 million of Shutterfly’s 23.6 million shares, the company ended the day with a market value of more than $350 million. With about 200 employees it had just under a 34% net profit margin on about $84 million in revenue last year. The company has taken $67 million in VC backing to date. NetScape co-founder Jim Clark, and Shutterfly board chair, bought about 30% of the stock sold today. In a time when IPOs are among the least common liquidity events enjoyed by Web 2.0 startups, for a photosharing site to remain independent and go public is interesting relative to all the startups we profile here. Shutterfly is a company that has lots of overhead, faces price cuts from competitors and has no shortage of small startups seeking to edge into its market. It makes much of its revenue from shipping and faces questions around scalability. There’s some interesting analysis over at MrWaveTheory. While Shutterfly offers more than 150 print and DVD products, photo to print startups like OneTrueMedia, Tabblo and Scrapblog offer more sophisticated design capabilities, more viral online distribution and in some cases prominent media partners. Most photo sharing sites online now allow users to print or burn to DVD their archives, though few of them base their entire business model on printing as Shutterfly does. What does Shutterfly offer in user experience? A product that clearly appeals to mainstream users. Unlimited free storage. Good bulk uploaders for both Windows and Mac (though not Intel Mac). Public and private albums. Group collaboration on shared collections. Clean URLs, comments on photos, basic crop, border, red eye removal and color change effects. They’ve also got business solutions for resellers. Its primary competitor, HP’s SnapFish, offers much of the same feature set plus mobile upload by email. → Read More
After what seems an age since the last successful event, Second Chance Tuesday the investor, startup “dating agency” organsied by Judith Clegg and Michael Smith, is back and with a bang! After several lengthy discussions it was felt that it would be of greater value to the potential start-up community [attending] to initially hear from an experienced Entrepreneur and/or Venture Capitalist who had been there (raised money), seen it (built a successful business) and done it (sold it successfully) before every retires to the bar to exchange war stories and bend the ear of the nearest Angel. Well in the UK space there are very few people who fit this bill but one person certainly does and that is Saul Klein, “currently” VP ecommerce of Skype and Founder of Video Island. I had coffee with Saul the other day and the majority of that conversation will remain private but we both agreed on one thing that right now there is a lot of me-too investment opportunities in the UK space but very little that is unique or ground breaking.Some of the companies that Saul finds interesting today include Moo, Mind Candy and SpotRunner and as a successful Angel Investor himself it is worth hearing his views on why he likes these companies above the vast majority. So next week is: Second Chance Tuesdayat the Congress Centre, 28 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3LS. The date is October 3rd and it start at 6:30pm going on until 10pmregister on the Second Chance Tuesday site. Please note places are limited. I hope to see you there. Update: The evening was very well attended and although I turned up only to catch the end of Saul Klein’s presenation (due to traffic into London), I enjoyed meeting a whole host of friends and new faces. Thanks Judith and Mike for putting on a great event once again. I look forward to the next one. For the rest of the photo’s from the event Mike has kindly put them here on Flickr. → Read More
, Apple rolled out a second generation of the iPod Nano, bringing the high-end of their tiny player up to 8GB. It was widely assumed Creative would do the same, and today it has announced an 8GB version of their Zen V Plus, their direct Nano competitor. The Zen series is a very popular alternative to the iPod here in America, and the OLED screen looks fantastic. It’ll be available next month for S$429 ($270 US) in Singapore, and roll out to the States shortly thereafter, probably at the $249 price point, but don’t quote us on that. Zen V Plus [Creative] → Read More
I’m a bachelor. I have been now for 30 years. As such, I’ve learned to use my kitchen to best afford me single portions. I don’t shop at Costco, I don’t need a gallon of mayonnaise. This is the price I pay. Also, my kitchen is, not by coincidence, small. As such, I need to conserve space. That’s why I can’t believe I’ve never seen this device before. The Elite Cuisine Multi-Function 3-in-1 Breakfast Center is amazing. It makes your coffee. It toasts your bread. It keeps your breakfast hot as you get the finishing touches ready. This thing looks amazing, and is totally the kind of thing I get for Xmas. If I don’t have one of these under my tree, it will be a sad holiday indeed, as it’s only $34.99 from Target. Added bonus: try saying its full name without sounding like a late-night infomercial jackass. Joy! Elite Cuisine Multi-Fucntion 3-in-1 Breakfast Center [Target] → Read More
We don’t have much DAB here in the States. Thanks to our various satellite radio providers, iPods, cellphones and everything else giving us more music than we really need. Other continents have it though, so we’re showing off this neat USB DAB tuner. Plug it in, install the DAB software on your PC, and you’ve got your radio, wherever you go. You don’t even need that pesky WiFi or EVDO or anything, it’s all digital. Hopefully someday we’ll get DAB over here. Until then, you Brits can pick this up for £49.95 ($91 US). The included software even has preset record features, channel memory, and auto-scanning. Slick. PC DAB Radio [Gizoo.co.uk] → Read More
Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime, told ABC News today that he will be in New York on Nintendo Wii launch day and will hand out some of the first Wiis at a store. The store remains unnamed, but it’s rumored that he will be at Nintendo World Store in Rockefeller Center. Nintendo claims to feel more connected to its gamers than other console manufacturers, and this is a great way to show that connection. You won’t see Sony handing out $600 dollar systems at the Metreon. Nintendo is holding its ground stating that, they don’t believe gaming is all graphics and that the average gamer doesn’t have high definition equipment anyway. Whatever spin Nintendo puts on it, the bottom line is: Free Wiis! EDIT: You guys were right – he’s just “handing” them out. No free Wii Units for New Yorkers. Free Nintendo Wiis [gamespot] → Read More
I am often challenged to name the UK’s few globally known start-ups and quiet often I forget that WeeWorld, the creators of the popular WeeMee avatars, is a “global” example of a successful UK company. The others being Bebo, DropSend and Last.fm. Basically WeeWorld lets users create a cartoon character that can act as an avatar for them on instant messengers, blogs and social networking sites, as well as mobile devices. Users pay $2 to create a WeeMee, as well as paying for additional updates to their character via a mobile phone. To the right is my own “business” WeeMee.In May this year, WeeWorld received $15.5 million in a second round of funding from Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital, enabling it to grow its digital identity business internationally. CEO Celia Francis said the London-based firm would use the funds to expand its presence in the United States, support further advertising and sponsorship deals, and achieve what Ms. Francis jokingly referred to as “WeeWorld domination.” Well true to her word, WeeMee took another step towards global domination this week by forming a strategic partnership with AOL which allows the millions of AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) users across the UK, North America and Canada to create and communicate via their own personalised WeeMee. You can also use your WeeMee on MSN, Skype, Friends ReUnited and Excite. According to the WeeWorld Corporate website, “the company is not yet profitable” but 10 million users have already created WeeMees with 500,000 new users joining monthly. Celia Francis, CEO of WeeWorld said “Users easily create their unique WeeMee identity to use across all their digital communications channels – from instant messaging to email, blogging, VoIP, picture messaging and mobile IDs – and can search for other WeeMees worldwide, based on interests, looks, location, passions, enthusiasms and opinions.” I spoke with Celia about a month ago when news of this partnership was circulating. Although I had heard hints of it being AOL, I had actually hoped it was a leading social Network such Bebo, MySpace and/or Piczo which I think is certainly more “strategic” and of higher value, given that AOL is selling most of its European companies and seriously lagging behind the big three in the USA. We also spoke about two other strategic directions that I felt WeeWorld might look to develop. The first was supporting Microsoft’s meta-identity solution called CardSpace which will be part → Read More
We are totally glad we don’t work at HP. Not only is Dunn out the door, but yesterday and today, the embattled woman was forced forced to defend her company’s illegal actions to the House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce. And they’re grilling her good. At the heart of the conflict are allegations of Pretexting, a sneaky, not to mention illegal, way of getting private records. Investigators in the employ of HP used this method while trying to find a leak on the board of directors who was giving information to CNET reporters. A number of high-level HP employees have resigned and taken their Fifth Amendment right to not self-incriminate themselves. This means that either Dunn told these people what to do, or that they were working without Dunn’s knowledge. Dunn is saying that prior to all these shenanigans, she’d never heard the word “pretexting.” Either way, HP’s brass knew what it was doing, and they knew that it was illegal. The story hasn’t finish writing itself, however, so stay tuned. Dunn Grilled by Congress [C|Net] → Read More
Yahoo has released a new product called BBAuth just in time for its open HackDay today and tomorrow. It’s a mechanism for non-Yahoo applications to access Yahoo’s authentication mechanism and user data in a secure manner. Most mashups today do not access personal data because of the security issues (not to mention the fact that companies usually think of user data as proprietary). The classic mashup example is mixing Google or Yahoo maps with other data. But there are far fewer examples of mashups involving user data protected from the rest of the Internet via a sign-in procedure. BBAuth fixes that problem when it comes to accessing data locked up at Yahoo. Using the tools Yahoo provides, non-Yahoo applications can request a user to sign in to Yahoo and give permission for Yahoo user data to be sent to the non-Yahoo application. Yahoo’er Dan Theurer explains how it works in more detail, and points to two test applications he created. The first shows how it can be used to allow sign in via Yahoo credentials, and the second shows how you can access Yahoo photos data outside of Yahoo. There are two pieces to BBAuth. The first is a single sign on tool to authenticate the user. The second piece is a set of APIs to get into specific Yahoo services and interact with user data. For example, the Yahoo Photos API allows other applications to, among other things, upload photos, tag photos, and modify titles and descriptions. Yahoo is also opening up Yahoo Mail through BBAuth. Dave Winer says this is a “huge deal” and I agree. See what Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny says about BBAuth as well. It’s worth noting that Amazon is doing the same thing (but in a limited way) with it’s S3 storage product, and eBay is supposedly testing third party authentication for purposes of verifying (but not changing) user feedback ratings. → Read More
Here’s something that could be handy for on the go musicians. The USB roll-up keyboard features 49 keys, 128 instruments, 100 prerecorded rhythms. And you know, it also rolls up. There hasn’t been much use of the roll up keyboard. Some musicians are on the go all the time with Logic Pro 7 or Pro-Tools. Both those programs are heavily MIDI-based, and usually used by electronics musicians everywhere they go. With the new USB support you can have a MIDI controller everywhere you are. Since the keys don’t look push-sensitive you’re going to loose certain humanization features such as velocity, but you can always edit something like this in the program. The keyboard runs $46.00, so the onboard stuff probably sounds like crap. But with all the features a program like Logic Pro 7 has, you wouldn’t be using many of a keyboard’s onboard features anyway. USB Roll-Up Keyboard [the red ferret journal] → Read More
It was announced today that Intel has reached an agreement with Nokia to embed an HSDPA connectivity module on its Centrino Duo. Intel will handle all elements of production, from hardware implementation to software development. It’s an exciting time for mobility. Just five years ago, options like this were essentially science fiction and now we’re on the cusp of a legitimately wireless world. It really is about time that we shed the shackles of ethernet cables once and for all. Nokia and Intel Team for Wireless Broadband [Digital Trends News] → Read More
. Nothing fancy, but it’ll get you started. If you really want to use your Zune like a pro, you’ll need some add-ons, and Amazon is, of course, more than happy to sell them to you. They’re already featuring preorder pricing on a wide range of accessories, from wireless remotes (via WiFi?) to travel packs, and our first look at the round Zune Dock. A couple of secrets new things come out here, such as the very iPod-esque A/V Output Cable. It would seem that, like the current iPod, the Zune can play back video to your TV apparently through the headphone jack, as well. This is something we’ve been wondering about, but now we know for sure. Zune Accessories [Amazon] → Read More
IBM and Xing announced today that they have come together to release a new high tech karaoke controller that will allow users to take karaoke with them throughout Japanese restaurants and karaoke bars. The Kyoku NAVIs features a touch screen interface, allows users to search for songs in a simplified fashion and has wireless LAN for updates and streaming videos. The controller is also waterproof (for all that “water” you’re going to spill on it at the bar) and shock resistant. It looks as though you’ve got to connect the NAVIs to another karaoke system (screen and speakers) for it to work. This sort of takes the novelty out of going to a karaoke bar and doing embarrassing songs in front of all your friends and public alike. I know I vouched for the iPod Karaoke before, but that was designed for the comfort of your own home. The Kyoku NAVIs just seems a little bit ridiculous. But hey, we all saw “Lost In Translation,” maybe Japan does need something like this for karaoke lovers to carry around. Maybe. Either way, it feels as though IBM is running on empty here. There is also another model of the controller, the Kyoku NAVII, which features all the same things as the NAVIs, but can wirelessly order drinks and food to whichever restaurant it’s connected to. What? Japan must really be technologically advanced if we’re still doing the ol’ paper and writing thing over here. Xing’s Kyoku-NAVIs [ibm technology] → Read More
San Francisco, CA
