• From today you can download the the restaurant listings from the 2009 Michelin guide Europe for the iPhone. But given that it’s £5.99 I think I’ll stick to something like the Rummble app on my iPhone, or indeed Qype, for free. It’s also only in French.
• Berlin-based Plista has now gone public with its personalisation and recommendation network. It has an enhanced Firefox extension and the first stable version for Internet Explorer. They’ve also integrated Facebook Connect, allowing for the import of friends for following their activity across multiple domains. Plista now supports over 100 German and international Websites. It also has a native WordPress Plugin for blog visitors. Here’s our Plista review.
• UK-based Humyo.com has upgraded its online collaborative tool WorkSpace – its cloud storage solution aimed at small businesses – to include automatic synchronisation, making online collaboration and version control easier. Users will now be able to ensure the most recent version of a file is always available without relying on manual backup. The latest version of WorkSpace also includes a news feed of recent activities.
• The Next Web Rising Sun Startup Rally has 250 submissions at the moment and is looking for more from UK startups.
• US-based mobile media company Handmark has launched in the UK with a version of its Pocket Express java-based mobile news and information service, featuring a full on-device application store. The service will support local content in eight languages across Europe – English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Finnish, and Swedish. Pocket Express is a free alternative to something it describes as “the painful traditional mobile browsing experience” to access “news, information, and entertainment services into one, easy-to-use application”. The trouble is, mobile browsing has actually never been better on device like the iPhone and Android mobiles. I wonder when they’ll drop this out-dated model? They also have a “MobileCierge” team of 24/7 mobile personal assistants. Crazy… Then again, perhaps they’ll get traction among low-end java handsets?
• UK content management and software company Modera, says it “will invest £1.3 million” in research and development over the next two years into its ModeraNET2, a second generation web application development platform for its CMS and CRM products. Clients include Citizen Watches, Group 4 Securicor (GS4), Hong Kong Express Airline, Jamiroquai.com, Nissan and The Mama Group Plc. Since there is absolutely no way of verifying if this is true or not, let’s put this down to PR-guff and move on shall we? And Jamiroquai? Surely they should just do it on WordPress?
• In fact perhaps they should save some time and money and just go hire – or buy out – Michael Kowalski and his kitsite.com, which runs the London 2012 site. They found that the problem with most CMSs are that they are really configuration-heavy. So they are developing jitapp.comwhere you leave off doing any config for as long as you can, but where you still get some control over what updates can be made to your site. The model is pay-per-update where an “update” is defined as updating a single page as many times as you like in a 24 hour period. Or a fixed price plan if you’re a really heavy user. Check out the video demo:
Jit demo from Aanand Prasad on Vimeo.