December 2005

Riya, the celebrated facial recognition company that has allowed in a few lucky alpha testers over the last few months, was the subject of significant acquisition rumors a few weeks…

I recently wrote that the Ajax desktop space was getting crazy-crowded. That was before Google released their desktop widget API and favoor launched. And now we have a developer release…

Oodle a vertical search engine for classified ads, is set to add events as a category in the next week or so. Oodle’s current categories include For Sale, Cars, Housing,…

Google has just released a set of components called Libjingle that allow third party applications to interact with Google Talk. The components, which include some source code, are being released…

I’ve received dozens of follow up emails to a post I wrote last month called Companies I’d like to Profile (but don’t exist). Today I saw another one, from Joe…

Meebo confirmed the rumor that they have received funding from Sequoia Capital on their blog. Congratulations to everyone involved. No real details yet, but I’m hearing that the pre-money valuation…

If Google Music Search isn’t for you, check out MusicStrands, a young company that relaunched its site yesterday. The company is based in Corvallis, OR (where is that?) and Barcelona,…

It certainly isn’t the much anticipated Google Music Store, but today Google started to incorporate music information into normal google search results in the same way they incorporate movie and…

I just got back from back-to-back (to back) holiday parties and the rumors are flying that Meebo, which I wrote about a couple of days ago noting their stellar growth,…

I swore to myself that I wouldn’t write about Ajax desktops for a while (and held steady even though this launched), but today I’m breaking that promise, because Google just…

Whoa. Niall Kennedy nonchalantly wrote earlier today about Technorati’s version of Google Labs, called Technorati Kitchen. It’s where Technorati is putting it’s not-fully-baked beta products. There’s only one project there…

37 Signals’ announced a couple of new features yesterday and today for their popular (100,000 users claimed on home page) and useful Basecamp project management product. First, Basecamp now hosts…

Illinois-based Gritwire, a new Flash based RSS reader, launched today at the Syndicate Conference in San Francisco. These new Flash applications are always visually stunning, even if they are not…

FeedBurner is launching FeedFlare tonight – a group of web services that can be integrated by the publisher into her/his feed. FeedFlare is located under the “Optimize” tab within the…

Meetro, an interesting location-based instant messaging client that’s compatible with AOL, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo!, is now alpha testing a Mac version of their software. I profiled Meetro originally in…

Blog Network Watch has a list of the most popular blog networks, based on various metrics from Technorati, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. I’m happy to note that our very own…

John Battelle has the scoop – Alexa is making its dataI available on the Amazon.com Web Services platform, and it’s a really big deal. Amazon’s Alexa is opening up its…

Santa Clara based OpinMind has a neat service that polls the blogophere for its opinion on the topic of your choice. OpinMind claims to index 1.7 million blogs today. Type…

Meebo (original profile) is clearly going to be raising venture capital and/or be acquired in the very near future. I spoke with Founder Seth Sternberg yesterday about site growth and…

Over the weekend TagWorld, a young, self-funded startup in Santa Monica that’s all of a month old, launched a music product that is turning heads. TagWorld is targeting the MySpace…

Yahoo and Six Apart have partnered to pre-install Movable Type on Yahoo’s small business hosting. Yahoo’s hosting customers will now be offered Movable Type pre-installed. This should help Yahoo move…

TechCrunch turned six months old today – my first post was on June 11, 2005. It’s more fun than ever. Thank you to everyone who reads my blog. Knowing people…

Writely (profiled earlier) continues to lead the pack in online ajax word products. Writely has had great features from day 1: import and export into Word format, embedded images, a…

I just got off an instant message conversation with Joshua Schachter, the founder of Del.icio.us. I was asking him for any comment on the Yahoo acquisition rumors and he pointed…

I’m loving the ajax office solutions tonight. In addition to Jotspot Tracker, I’ve been playing around with Rallypoint, an online ajax word/wiki product. Rallypoint joins Writely, JotSpot Live, Zoho Writer…

Jotspot continues to roll out interesting, easy to use wiki products. I wrote about JotSpot Live back in September. This week they released JotSpot Tracker, a spreadsheet wiki that allows…

I recently spoke with one of the founders of Sponit, a new service that will be launching in the next month or so. Sponit, which is being created by three…

Yahoo Answers launched this morning. The service allows any Yahoo user to ask any question and get answers and advice from other Yahoo users. The community picks the “best” answer,…

I’m a big fan of FeedBurner and write about them often. I’m also a “pro” subscriber now and pay the $5/month for that service, which I think is more than…

Microsoft will relaunch Virtual Earth tomorrow under local.live.com, around 9 am PST. This is a continuation of Microsoft’s rebranding campaign to place online consumer services under the Live.com brand. Charlene…