January 2006

Santa Monica-based TagWorld, a MySpace competitor, launched an admirable music product last month. Tomorrow they launch video and an upgraded upload client (the uploader is PC only for now). As…

The online Learning Management System space is set to grow massively over the coming years as more and more education takes place on the web. Nuvvo launched a few days…

Reliable sources are reporting that SearchFox, which announced that it will be shutting down as of January 25, 2006, has sold its assets to Yahoo. At least some of the…

“News 2.0” sites are launching faster than I can keep up. Gather is the most recent. Gather is a social news site that allows user to submit content and generate…

I wrote about Jon Aquino’s YubNub back on June 13. It was just two days after I started the blog, and so not many people read that post. Lot’s of…

Podzinger, which I wrote about briefly last month along with two other services, officially launched a couple of days ago. Podzinger is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts In my post last…

Dogster, led by founder and CEO Ted Rheingold, turned two years old yesterday. The company is located in San Francisco. Dogster is a home page site just for dogs. You…

Microsoft has renamed its Fremont project to “Expo” and have put up a landing page, complete with a request for email once it launches. They have also included a screenshot:…

I’ve been watching three new web 2.0 classifieds sites – BlockRocker, rbloc and theadcloud. And for those of you who say I focus on silicon valley companies, I have a…

I am very pleased to announce a new TechCrunch Network blog – MobileCrunch. MobileCrunch is being written by long-time “mobile” blogger and entrepreneur, Oliver Starr. Oliver just left his current…

Yahoo’s recent acquisition binge is the topic of a Red Herring print article this week called “Hungry Hungry Yahoo”. Liz Gannes, who wrote the article, discusses Yahoo’s recent acquisitions and…

Teleflip isn’t new but I had not heard about it until Noah Kagan at Facebook pinged me tonight to tell me about it. It is an incredibly simple way to…

Last Saturday I wrote a post to give away a free pass to the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin this March. I asked interested people to leave a comment on…

I was talking with an entrepreneur earlier today about about milliondollarhomepage and what a simple, brilliant concept it is. It’s one of those things that will really only work once…

Richard Curry and Russell Limprecht just sent me near-simultaneous emails that they noticed Searchfox, a RSS reader with a small but dedicated group of users, is announcing on their site…

The rise of edge content continues – iNods, which launched today, is the most recent example. iNods aggregates blog and other edge review content and displays it in a centralized…

AOL announced the acquisition of media search engine Truveo today. My original profile of Truveo is here. Terms of the deal were not disclosed publicly, but this was not a…

Facial Recognition company Riya has marked the new year with a whopping $15 million second round venture raise from existing investor Bay Partners. This is exceptional news for Riya and…

Lucas Gonze’s Webjay has been acquired by Yahoo for an undisclosed amount, according to Kevin Burton and confirmed on the Yahoo Music Blog. Webjay is an interesting application that allows…

I’ve seen hundreds of new products launch over the last six months, and I think I have some pretty good advice for companies that want to improve their beta release.…

There is a report that Toshiba is developing software that will allow people to take a picture of the bar code label of many products, send it to a related…

This year’s Austin, Texas South by Southwest Interactive Festival is being held from March 10-14. The five-day event is followed by a great film and music festival, and it should…

Extratasty is a frivolous site, but it’s also useful if you are looking for a good drink recipe. Users submit drink recipes. Ingredients are tagged and searchable. Drink recipes are…

I’m not particularly condoning this site. However, pornography and gambling make up a significant percentage of Internet commerce, and it was only a matter of time before someone created a…

Airset, a newish collaborative calendar and contacts application that recently integrated nicely with the Skype API, announced integration with Verizon yesterday. You can now easily access most Airset calendar and…

I came across Israel-based dPolls today. It’s a very quick and easy way to create a well designed, Ajax-rich interactive poll that can be integrated directly into a website. The…

The Hamachi on-the-fly virtual private network product looks incredibly useful. The company is located in Vancouver, Canada. They released their 1.0 beta in December. I have not tested the software,…

Scott Lake’s Shopify, based in Ottawa, Canada, has been threatening to launch for some time now (the site still says it will launch in the Fall of 2005). It promises…

I never wrote about You Send It because I could never get it to work. Well, today I had my first positive You Send It experience, and so I’m writing…

I’m not sure if Retrievr has any commercial application, but it is a really beautiful piece of technology. Retrievr has a Flash sketch pad built into the site. Draw something…