موقع الأفلام العربيةوموقع الفيديو العربي المنوعهذا الموقع رائع حدا في الفيديو العربي ومقطاق بلوتوثزوره ولن تندم!
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Thursday, November 15, 2007
موقع أفلام AFLAM
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Photography Foundations for Art and Design, Fourth Edition
Best of the best !rapidshare.com download linkrar pdf zip# Publisher: Focal Press; 4 edition (June 7, 2007)# Language: English# ISBN-10: 0240520505# ISBN-13: 978-0240520506
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Sunday, November 11, 2007
Books4people
This site let you download the books for Free its Books4Peopletry it!
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Tuesday, November 6, 2007
M.C. Hammer’s DanceJam Opens Its Doors To A Select Few
DanceJam
, founded by M.C. Hammer, Geoffrey Arone and Anthony Young (Arone and Young come out of Flock), is opening its doors to a select few beta testers this afternoon. This is a company that I have personally invested in, so I won’t editorialize much here (I will be linking to other blogs and news sources who cover it, though).
The site, which has already had some mainstream news coverage, will be a place for users to upload videos of themselves dancing. Viewers can watch and rate the clips, and there will be a constant stream of “face-offs” between dancers to determine the top people in various dance types and locations.
In preparation for launch, the team has been traveling to various locations to film people dancing in casual settings. Much of this footage will be included as original content on the site. See the video below for some of it:
They are inviting a few people who’ve added their emails to the DanceJam home page. We are also giving away 100 invites right now - just email techcrunch@dancejam.com. The first 100 to email get in.
DanceJam has raised $1 million in angel funding from investors including Rustic Canyon, Ron Conway, Michael Arrington, Alex Algard, Michael Tanne, Geoff Ralston, Alex Welch and Ariel Poler.
Please see our About page for a full list of my conflicts.
Source : Digg here
Amazon S3 conquista l’Europa
Amazon S3, il servizio di storage online offerto da Amazon, ha oggi annunciato un’importante novità di cui potremo giovare tutti noi italiani. Da oggi infatti è disponibile un nuovo data center europeo che, per chi lo desideri, consentirà di archiviare i dati in una location geograficamente più vicina e quindi, si spera, anche più veloce.
I prezzi per la versione europea sono lievemente più alti ma nulla da strapparsi i capelli fortunatamente. Speriamo che la stessa cosa avvenga a breve anche per Amazon EC2.
Source : Digg here
Liveblogging Facebook Advertising Announcement (Social Ads + Beacon + Insights)
I am at Facebook’s social advertising announcement in New York City, where Mark Zuckerberg is about to take the stage and tell us all what we already think we know: Facebook is getting into the advertising business in a big way. Much of what will be announced today, such as projects code-named Beacon and Pandemic have already leaked out. We’ll see how much of that leaked information was correct, and what more there is to add. Facebook is certainly pulling out all the stops with this announcement, on the agenda later on is a panel with Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson and Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes that will be moderated by Charlie Rose (who charges a lot to do these things, or so I hear).
Facebook is announcing three things: Social Ads (ads targeted based on member profile data and spread virally), Beacon (messages in feeds), and Insight (marketing data that goes deep into social demographics and pyschographics which Facebook will provide to advertisers in an aggregated, anonymous way). These three things together make up Facebook Ads. Here are the press releases for Facebook Ads, Project Beacon, and its launch partners.
Zuckerberg just took the stage (keep in mind that he is addressing advertising executives and press in the audience). The following notes are in reverse-chronological order:
3:06 PM: “Everything you have seen here is launching tonight.” Launching with 40 partners [press release says 60] (including Blockbuster, CBS, Chase, The Coca-Cola Company, The New York Times, Sony Pictures, Verizon, Dove, and Zazzle). “This is something we have been working on for a long time. It is really good to share it with you guys.” [Zuckerberg walks off stage]
3:03: Insights. Aggregates profile data. “We look at the people your ads are reaching and break it down by age, gender, interests, and a whole lot more we are adding soon.” Says none of this will be personally identifiable. “We will be able to track how much people are talking about your brand in public forums across facebook. As you run ads on Facebook you will be able to see the exact mind share you are getting.”
2:57 PM: “Social Actions + Content = Social Ads.” They spread your message virally through the social graph. these ads will appear both in people’s feeds and as a personalized banner ad.
“Let’s talk about targeting. With Facebook you will be able to select exactly the audience you want to reach, and we will only show your ads to them. We know exactly what gender someone is, what activities they are interested in. their location, country, city or town, interests, gender,” work history, political views [Like what they’ve already done with Facebook Flyers].
2:52 PM: Social distribution, now here is where it gets interesting. When somebody engages with your page, that os spread virally through the network. When someone says they are a fan of your brand, that becomes a trusted referral. It goes right to their Mini feed. A strong trusted referral for your brand. You will be able to craft the types of social actions you want to spread across the social graph.
“We have created a product called Beacon that let’s you do this. Beacon will let users send information to their page, we confirm it, and share it on Facebook. One partner is eBay.” Can share listinsg from eBay on Facebook. So usres can share social actions from other websites and share them on Facebook. “This will be completely free.”
2:48: “the next hundred years will be different for advertising, and it starts today. As marketers pushing our information out is no longer enough. We are announcing anew advertising system, not about broadcasting messages, about getting into the conversations between people. 3 pieces: build pages for advertisers, a new kind of ad system to spread the messages virally, and gain insights.”
Advertisers can build their own Facebook pages and design them any way they like: “We have photos, videos, discussion boards, any Flash content you want to bring to your page, plus any application a third party developer has made.”
2:46 PM: Messages spread virally. All you need to do is get your friends to engage with it and add it to their profiles. Gives example of how causes are spread across Facebook. Support Breast Cancer, more than 2 million members.
2:44 PM: Zuckerberg is explaining the social graph. “Where Facebook really excels is in helping you keep up with all of your connections at the same time. It is making the cost of communication so low that information can be pushed out more efficiently than it ever could from a few big companies.”
2:43 PM: Z: “More than 80 applications have more than one millions users.”
2:37 PM EST: Zuckerberg: “Once every hundred years media changes. the last hundred years have been defined by the mass media. The way to advertise was to get into the mass media and push out your content. That was the last hundred years. In the next hundred years information won’t be just pushed out to people, it will be shared among the millions of connections people have. Advertising will change. You will need to get into these connections.
“People influence people. Nothing influences people more than are recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising.
“Have already passed 50 million users, doubling once every 6 months. only active users who have used facebook last 30 days. More than 25 million people are using Facebook every single day. Each person is viewing more than 40 pages a day, more than 65 billion page views a month.”
Notes:
Beacon Partners (Facebook advertising buttons that exist on other sites and when clicked are reflected in members’ feeds as a brand endorsements—how many of these brands would you bother to explicitly endorse to your Facebook friends, opr even identify with?):
eBay
Fandango
IAC brands (CollegeHumor, Busted Tees, iWon, Citysearch, Pronto.com, echomusic)
Travelocity
AllPosters.com
Blockbuster
Bluefly.com
CBS Interactive (CBSSports.com & Dotspotter)
ExpoTV
Gamefly
Hotwire
Joost
Kiva,
Kongregate
LiveJournal
Live Nation
Mercantila
National Basketball Association
NYTimes.com
Overstock.com
(RED)
Redlight
SeamlessWeb,
Sony Online Entertainment
Sony Pictures
STA Travel
The Knot
TripAdvisor
Travel Ticker
TypePad
viagogo
Vox
Yelp
WeddingChannel.com
Zappos.com.
The Main source : TechCrunch
Source : Digg here
Netvibes Wants To Tap Into Other Social Networks
Not wanting to be left behind, Netvibes is adding a slew of social-networking features and integration with other social networks to its widget start page. Netvibes already supports a variety of desktop widget platforms, has its own Universal Widget API, and is part of Google’s OpenSocial movement. It is now combining all of these efforts, Tariq Krim announced today at a conference in Berlin (TechCrunch UK’s Mike Butcher has the details). NetVibes widgets will work with OpenSocial, Facebook, and desktop widget platforms on the PC and Mac.
The next version of Netvibes, codenamed Ginger, will also add a feeds feature called Flow, and a Friends tab so that you can follow your friends’ feeds and widgets as well. Krim explains in an e-mail from Berlin:
We are introducing social features . . . [so you] can share and follow widgets from your
friends or have a private flow to keep up a netvibes history.We will extend netvibes widgets to run natively on opensocial and
facebook. (By the way we are part of opensocial but we will work with
everyone else)We will launch a private beta for our developers in couple weeks.
It’s a big step as we have work to rebuild everything. It like our
leopard
Here is our earlier Netvibes coverage. Here is a demo video of what Ginger will look like:
Loading information about netvibes…
cb_widget_report_widget(”cb_widget_1194372440″); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_0_1194372440″,”netvibes”);
Main Source: TechCrunch
Glide Crunch—Closing the Gap Between Online and Offline Spreadsheets
Web-based spreadsheets like Google’s are great for collaborating, but slow you down when it comes to clicking through cells quickly or creating really big spreadsheets. It doesn’t even have a search function other than what your browser can do on its own (try finding a name in a list of 500). Desktop-based spreadsheets like Microsoft’s Excel give you all the features and speed you want, but are not easy to share. (Yes, there is SharePoint, but most people resort to e-mailing the bulky files around, creating a version-control nightmare).
Tomorrow at noon, Transmedia, a New York City startup, will take a step towards bridging those online and offline worlds. It is adding a spreadsheet to its Glide service called Glide Crunch. (Good name!). So far, all of the apps on Glide—including a Word processor, presentation software, e-mail, calendar, contacts, and online photo, video, and music sharing—have been completely Web-based. But with Glide Crunch, the spreadsheet will operate as a local application on your desktop that is automatically synced to your Glide Webtop without you having to do anything special other than create a spreadsheet as you normally would.
Glide Crunch is not based on Adobe AIR or Google Gears, the two main platforms for creating offline, Web-like apps. Transmedia coded the application from scratch using C/C++. In contrast to something like Google Gears, Glide Crunch is not trying to download data into the browser. “We have left the browser,” says CEO Donald Leka. “The browser is limited. It can only hold so much data.” Google Spreadsheet, for instance, only supports 100,000 cells and up to 40 sheets, says Leka. Glide Crunch, in contrast, can support 16.7 million cells and an unlimited number of sheets in a single spreadsheet.
Glide Crunch also supports advanced formulas, pivot tables, various printing formats, and, yes, you can search within a spreadsheet. Leka is really going after Excel users with a powerful local spreadsheet that syncs automatically to the Web, where it is shareable with others. He thinks his new spreadsheet will meet the needs of 60 to 70 percent of the market. “Scientists and financial-modeling experts can continue to use Excel,” he allows. But Glide Crunch is robust enough for him to use to manage Transmedia’s P&L. “We use Glide for everything,” he says.
Glide, which is free for the first two gigabytes and $50 for 12 gigabytes, comes with all of the Web apps listed above and also works on the iPhone and other mobile devices. (it is great for showing PowerPoint slides on your iPhone, which you previously could not do). Later this month and next, Transmedia will be rolling out local versions of its other productivity apps, starting with Glide Write, then e-mail, and Glide Presenter. Glide may not have the user numbers of Google Docs (Glide has about 500,000 total users, 14 percent actually pay), but it is pushing the envelope in terms of functionality and in terns of fusing the Web and the desktop. The company’s revenues are closing in on $4 million a year, with no VC money. The $6.5 million it has raised has all been angel investors, including several ex-Wall Street analysts like Harold Vogel.
Here are some of the advanced functions and features Glide Crunch will support:
Function
Sin - sine function
Cos - cosine function
Tan - tangent function
Asin - arc sine function
Acos - arc cosine function
Atan - arc tangent function
Sinh - hyperbolic sine function
Cosh - hyperbolic cosine
Tanh - hyperbolic tangent function
Asinh - hyperbolic arc sine function
Acosh - hyperbolic arc tangent function
Atanh - hyperbolic arc tangent function
log2 - logarithm to the base 2
log10 - logarithm to the base 10
log - logarithm to the base 10
ln - logarithm to base e (2.71828…)
exp - e raised to the power of x
sqrt - square root of a value
sign - sign function -1 if x<0;>0
rint - round to nearest integer
abs - absolute value
if - if … then … else …
min - min of all arguments
max - max of all arguments
sum - sum of all arguments
avg - mean value of all arguments
and more…
Operator
and logical and
or logical or
x or logical xor
>= greater or equal
!= not equal
== Equal
> greater than
+ Addition
- Subtraction
* Multiplication
/ Division
^ raise x to the power of y
! factorial
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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Apple Working on Tablet?
One of Apple’s contract manufacturers, Asus, is working on a Mac tablet, according to the Crave blog. It is not clear if this is going to be a major product, when it will be available, or whether this is just a prototype for now.
I love the idea of a tablet computer, but the market has not been going crazy for Windows-based tablet PCs, which are pretty slick. It will remain a niche device, unless touch computing takes off. But touch computing is a compromise. It may work on small devices like iPods and iPhones. It is not clear you need it for larger machines.
God invented the keyboard for a reason. But all the graphic designers who use Macs will probably like it. Call it the iPod Large or the Biggie Touch. Just don’t call it a Newton.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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MarkMail: Search and Analyze Email Traffic
Jason Hunter of MarkLogic has unveiled a new application that allows you to search and analyze email traffic. The service is called MarkMail, and you can check out the Apache instance to see it at work.
The application is written using MochiKit and wrappers for Canvas and such.
Jason gave us detailed information on the goals:
As you’ll see with the chart on the home page, one of our goals with the site has been to focus heavily on analytics. We have lots of graphs and counts, and you’re able to use them to watch Apache’s historical growth and each individual project’s growth. Every query you write gets its own histogram chart.
Another goal has been interactivity. Every search result screen gives you lots of ways to refine your search (by sender, list, attachment type, etc). Plus we did a lot with keyboard shortcuts. You can hit “n” and “p” to move to the next and previous result and “j” and “k” to move up and down the thread view. There’s a lot of little things like this. Plus if your result message includes Office or PDF files they’re in-line interactive too.
http://apache.markmail.org/search/ext:ppt+axis
Another goal has been to focus on community. We could have launched MarkMail with 50,000,000 emails from many sources but I think it’s better to start with focus. In fact, I’ll be at ApacheCon and the Hackathon next week, along with my co-developer Ryan Grimm, looking for people’s suggestions and maybe on the spot adding in a few of them. There’s also potential to explore some fun one-off analytics, too.
As part of the focus on communities, we setup MarkMail so it recognizes that Apache itself consists of many communities. If you go to http://apache.markmail.org you search all Apache emails, but if you go to http://struts.markmail.org then you’re auto-limited to just Struts lists. Same for tomcat, spamassassin, httpd, and so on. You can always limit your search using “list:struts” in your query, but using the domain handles that a bit more elegantly.
Notes on using the site:
- Search using keywords as well as from:, subject:, extension:, and list: constraints
- The GUI doesn’t yet expose it, but you can negate any search item, like -subject:jira.
- You can sort results by date by adding order:date-forward or order:date-backward to your query
- Remember to use “n” and “p” keyboard shortcuts to navigate the search results
Digg here
Google Code Revamps with jQuery
We have revamped Google Code, the site which is the home to developers, and open source hosting. A ton of work went into cleaning up the UI integrating and unifying content, and simplifying.
The site uses jQuery for a lot of its work, and also eats a lot of dogfood. The video below goes through some of the high lights, but DeWitt Clinton said it well:
One of the most exciting things about the redesign is that everything you see here was built using technology and APIs that are available to everyone. The pages we’re serving don’t rely on any secret back-end tricks; the site is built on plain HTML, JavaScript and CSS, each using our public APIs. In fact, all of the techniques used on Google Code can be duplicated on your own site.
For example, the search results pages use a combination of the AJAX Search API and Custom Search Engines. The homepage gadgets use the AJAX Feed API and Google Reader feeds. The videos are powered by the YouTube API, the blogs by the Blogger API, the events powered by the Google Calendar API, the metrics by Google Analytics, the forums by Google Groups, etc., etc..
Stay tuned — over the upcoming weeks we’ll offer detailed articles and tutorials about how we built the various parts of Google Code using open technologies.
This is just the beginning of a slew of updates that we are making to the site. I can’t wait to roll out some of the items that really match our vision of what a developer community can really be!
Source: AjaxianDigg here
Meet Potential Lovers Over a Drink with CrazyBlindDate
Sex and spontaneity are the two magic ingredients for a new startup called CrazyBlindDate, which launches today in Boston, New York City, and San Francisco after beta testing in Austin, Texas for over a month.
The idea behind CrazyBlindDate is to bring the scheme of blind dating to the web. Sign up, answer some personal questions (age, height, body type, what type of date you’re looking for, etc.), and indicate the times and neighborhoods you are available to go on a quick date, even if its on very short notice. The site will then use its algorithm to match you up with someone in your area who is available during one of your time slots. Both single and double date arrangements can be made, and you can bring a friend, too, if you’re overly nervous about meeting strangers on your own.
CrazyBlindDate is a dating site that cuts straight to the chase. Don’t expect to spend endless amounts of time filling out personality quizzes or browsing the profiles of potential mates. You won’t have much of a clue about how they look until you see them in person (although you can try your best at determining how attractive they are in an very blurred copy of the portrait they have uploaded). This business strategy is a gamble - it has to be seen whether many singles will be comfortable meeting up total strangers before knowing any more than their basic vital stats. CEO Sam Yagan admits that CrazyBlindDate could either become a runaway success or a dud depending on how adventurous people turn out to be.
The company behind CrazyBlindDate, which is also responsible for the free dating site OkCupid, has designed their new venture with safety and privacy in mind. The site will only put you on dates in public places like bars and cafes, so you won’t find yourself in any particularly dangerous situations. While the site’s notification and confirmation system is cell phone-based, it won’t needlessly give your number to strangers. When the site finds a match for you, it will ask you via SMS whether you want to confirm. Once you and the other person commit yourself to a date, you will only be able to contact each other 30 minutes prior to the date by texting a dedicated CrazyBlindDate number (CUPID, or 28743) that will then route your messages appropriately.
In an attempt to prevent tardiness and no-shows, the website incorporates a feedback system that allows users to report bad dates. Blow off your date or drag your feet and it’ll go on your record. Also, the feedback your date gives about you will help CrazyBlindDate determine who they should pair you up with next, so the system isn’t completely random.
See our coverage of SpeedDate.com and WooMe to learn how these other companies are bringing another dating method, the speed date, online.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Source: TechCrunch
NY Times Headline Says It All: “More Readers Trading Newspapers for Web Sites”
Readership of newspapers has continued to decline in the United States as more readers turn to online sources for news, according to the NY Times. The Audit Bureau of Circulations figures show that newspaper readership dropped 3% compared with the year before.
Some newspapers fared better than others, with the US Today recording a 1% increase in circulation, along with the LA Times 0.5% and the Philadelphia Enquirer at 2.5%.
We’ve written about the decline in print media many times before. Most recently I noted that 2008 may well be the year we see big shut downs in magazines, and rightfully so: tech magazines in particular compete with online publications that print news when it happens, as opposed to 6-8 weeks later. However newspapers aren’t quite as doomed as some may suggest, with the World Association of Newspapers reporting that to February 2007 global newspaper circulation was up 9.95 percent over five years and 2.36 percent over twelve months.
The decline of print media isn’t an international story, it’s one that’s very much focused on the United States, and to a lesser extent the English speaking world. The problem today with print media in the United States is that it has yet to have undergone a massive market restructuring that has occurred in other countries. In Australia in the 1980s, early 1990’s the number of daily newspapers shrunk massively in a major round of market restructuring lead by News Corp. My native New South Wales (pop 6.8m) went from four local daily newspapers to two, excluding the national papers but published in Sydney The Australian (think USA Today) and The Australian Financial Review (think WSJ). Four of the six states in Australia (Queensland (pop 4.3m), Tasmania (not a lot), Western Australia (pop 2.2m) and South Australia (1.5m)) were left with only one local daily newspaper. Compare this to some similar US states; Massachusetts (6.4m pop) has 31 daily newspapers according to Newspaperlinks.com. Nevada (2.4m), with a similar population to Western Australia has 6 daily newspapers. The problem with newspapers isn’t the web alone, its excessive choice in a declining market. Newsprint has a future, but not in a cut throat marketplace that provides more choice than the market can consume.
Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/180489513/
Source : Digg here
Introducing The 2007 Crunchies
I am very happy to announce the first (of many, hopefully) annual Crunchies, a year-end startup competition and award ceremony/party that we are coordinating with three other blog networks - GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb and Venturebeat (click on the links to see their coverage).
More details will be coming soon, but the idea is to let the community decide who to nominate, and who wins, in a number of award categories. And the whole thing will be topped off with a big award ceremony and party in San Francisco. Who are the most compelling startups of the year? We’ll know soon.
There will be sponsors for this event (see the event page for details if you would like to participate). Big thanks to Sun Microsystems Business Analytics for stepping up to be the charter sponsor of the Crunchies.
On a side note, the four participating blogs will be sharing the decision making process and the economics of the event. This is what I love best about blogging - even though we all compete very hard, we recognize that there is a community around what we do, and sometimes it’s important that we band together as part of that community.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/180442939/
Source : Digg here
Saturday, November 3, 2007
Nicole Richie Is A Good Mother
Mommy-to-be Nicole Richie is stubbing out media reports claiming she was seen smoking while pregnant.
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Friday, November 2, 2007
USA Celebrity Blog
This Blog Talking About USA Celebrities, All Celebrity News!
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Wednesday, October 31, 2007
San Jose Earthquake Registers as a Magnitude 5.6
A California earthquake registering as a magnitude 5.6 rattled San Jose late Tuesday evening causing buildings to rattle and residents to run for shelter.The San Jose earthquake didn’t cause any major damage but had emergency crews on alert. The relatively minor quake was felt across the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Saturday, October 13, 2007
Saturday, October 6, 2007
رمضان كريم Ramadan Kareem
رمضان كريم لكل الناس والله يباركلنا في هذا الشهر الفضيل
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رمضان كريم Ramadan Kareem
رمضان كريم لكل الناس والله يباركلنا في هذا الشهر الفضيل
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Very Dangerous Cobra!!! (killing people! )
the video shows Cobra eating and killing people!! he is Free!
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Thursday, October 4, 2007
Telecom Incest: The Fon-BT Deal Sounds Screwy
On closer inspection, today’s deal between Fon and British Telecom sounds like it could be a costly one for Fon and its investors. GigaOm is suggesting that Fon may have agreed to pay $8 to $10 to BT for every one of its broadband customers who agrees to sign up and activate the Fon service. If that’s true, with three million broadband subs at BT, that represents a potential liability of as much as $30 million. (Update: Just got off the phone with Fon USA CEO Joanna Rees, who says she has been closely involved with the BT deal. She categorically denies that Fon is paying BT for subscribers: “I have never heard that,” she says).
Buying customers is never a good thing if you can avoid it. Fon might need to do another round of fund-raising to pay for this deal. The $35 million it’s raised so far from Google, Skype, Index Ventures, and Sequoia, among others, might not be enough, especially if it cuts more sweetheart deals with other telcos around the world.
But here’s the really screwy part: BT is also now an investor in Fon, according to founder Martin Varsavky. So at the same time that it is presumably putting money into Fon with one hand, BT is about to potentially extract millions of dollars out of Fon with the other. I say presumably because it is possible that BT did not even put any cash into Fon for its stake in the first place (terms were not disclosed). Often in these deals, as the price of admission, the telco demands not only cash from the startup but an equity stake as well. In the telecom world, some things are never free. (Update: Rees says BT did invest cash. So maybe the deal isn’t so screwy, after all.)
Source : Digg here
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Fuser: Manage All Your Email and Social Networking Messages in One Place
Another product that aims to simplify your digital lifestyle is launching today. Give Fuser access to your email and social networking accounts, and the website will organize all of the messages from those accounts in one place so you don’t have to bounce back and forth between multiple interfaces to handle them.
Fuser is still in beta and I ran into a few glitches while testing the site, but it certainly has promise. You can pull in accounts from any IMAP or POP email service and the social networks MySpace and Facebook. Once you have loaded your accounts, messages from all of them appear in one collective inbox. It’s impressive to see posts to my Facebook wall displayed like email messages next to my actual email messages.
Not only can you view messages from all of your accounts together, you can also reply to them as with a normal webmail client. If you want to reply to a Facebook wall post, you can hit reply and either leave a note on your friend’s wall or send them a Facebook message. It’s quite surprising how much of Facebook’s functionality Fuser has been able to extract out of that social network’s website.
Beyond organizing all of your messages in one place, Fuser plays around with the social network data to add a little functionality. You can view a “leaderboard” of your social network friends to see who communicates with you most frequently. Friends are ranked according to how many times they have sent you messages or posted on your wall, and you can view rankings according to certain time periods. Nothing terribly revolutionary, but their attempts demonstrate how it is still possible to mash up Facebook data from outside of the developer platform.
Fuser is free and supported by discreet AdSense advertisements. Check out Orgoo for another message aggregation service. Orgoo, which presented at TechCrunch40 last week, differs from Fuser by integrating instant messages, video conferences, and SMS messages instead of data from social networking accounts.
Terabitz To Expand Beyond Home Searches Today
Palo Alto-based Terabitz launched in July 2007 as a sort of Netvibes/Pageflakes for people searching for real estate.
A search on the site pulls up a basic Google map of the area and nothing else. But users can then drag in modules to add information - local foreclosures, recent sales, listed homes, schools, even fast food restaurants. Every module that is added by a user also adds the appropriate information to the map as well. It’s a very convenient way to get a feel for the neighborhood.
The original idea for the company came from seventeen year old Kamran Munshi, who is now a freshman at Yale. His father, Ashfaq, ran with the idea and raised $10 million in funding. The company has 32 employees (12 in the U.S., 30 in India).
Later today the company is launching a new feature - the ability to create a map with various modules included and then embed it on another website. So any site that wants to add a Google generated map that includes, say, local businesses and restaurants (a hotel, for example) can now do so easily. The tool is free, but will be branded with Terabitz.
Game On: A Real Alternative To iTunes
It may have taken Amazon a few years, but they got it right: their new music store is DRM free and songs, starting at $0.89/track, are cheaper than at Apple’s iTunes. The top 100 best-selling albums are priced no higher than $8.99.
Songs are delivered in MP3 format, meaning they’ll work on any music player, including the iPod. The store opens with 2 million songs from 80,000 artists represented by 20,000 labels. EMI is on board. The other major labels have no real choice at this point but to follow, and soon.
A software download is required to actually get songs to your hard drive, but it’s available for both Windows and Mac (with Linux coming). That’s good news - DRM requirements forced Amazon to make their movie download service work only with Windows machines.
Average quality is very high - 256 kbps, which is what iTunes uses for non-DRM songs as well.
GarageSeek Rates Mechanics, But Yelp Will Kill This Category Too
It seems like every time you turn around there’s another site out there trying to help you rate this, that, or the other thing. There’s Rapleaf (people), StreetAdvisor (neighborhood), YourStreet (neighborhood), SodaRatings (soda), and the list goes on. Now there’s a new one in private beta, GarageSeek, for rating mechanic’s garages in your area.
With GarageSeek users will be able to share their experiences with mechanics and rate them on several different metrics. When live, the site will provide a potentially very useful service, the ability to check reviews and avoid hiring a shoddy mechanic. However, while a complete database of real reviews is useful, a lot of review verticals don’t offer a real reason to contribute when they start and fragment reviews across multiple domain names users may not care to remember.
Yelp largely solved the chicken and egg problem that comes with user review services, even if they allegedly paid users for reviews to start. They raised over $16 million and generated traction on the service through having a system seeded with content, rewarding top users with over-the-top parties, and focusing on a service that a wide variety of people use frequently, restaurants. The other large people-driven review site, Insiderpages, had the advantage of $9 million in financing and starting back in 2004. Despite this, Insiderpages went through a slew of layoff and eventually sold off to CitySearch for $13 million.
Yelp is already in the auto repair category, and is poised to expose their audience to other review verticals as well. They’ve already moved into non-geographical service reviews such as media outlets. The one question these review verticals need to ask themselves is “Can niche vertical review sites survive up against one general review site, Yelp or otherwise”? My feeling is no.
Source : Digg here
Amazon MP3 Service
We posted about the Amazon Music Selection Ajax experience, and people seemed to like it apart from: a) Real player, b) The code.
Today Amazon launched their MP3 service, so this interface is going to get a lot more usage as you can grab 256kbs non-DRM songs for 89 cents a pop.
There is a downloadable client for transferring the songs. I wonder how the user experience will compare to iTunes and having the entire experience in a web browser shell, as apposed to be able to do most of the work on Amazon.com itself.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Microsoft Offers Works For Free
Microsoft has released the new version of Microsoft Works as a free, ad supported office package that will compete directly with Open Office and Google Docs & Spreadsheets.
The Works package offers word processing, spreadsheet and slide (powerpoint) functionality partially based on code from older versions of Microsoft Office.
The move by Microsoft to offer a free office suite comes as online office packages including Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Thinkfree Office and Zoho
continue to grow market share due to increased broadband penetration, online convenience and lower costs.
It was not disclosed whether the new version of Microsoft Works would sync with or support Microsoft’s online services under the Live brand. Whilst the version was said to be released July 27, it was not clear where it could be downloaded from or accessed.
Microsoft Works first launched as a Mac application in 1986.
StreetAdvisor Launches New Services
StreetAdvisor will today launch a range of new upgrades that will give homeowners, renters, and buyers a more complete picture of where they could live.
The new StreetAdvisor provides a real-life “insider” view that provides users the ability to learn and share vital details about where they live, including noise levels, traffic, neighbors, entertainment, and public services in a similar way to travel review sites. Recommendations and negative experiences about local businesses, entertainment and services will also be supported.
StreetAdvisor’s street based reviews have been expanded to include cities, states, and countries.
Upgraded guidebooks now include four broad categories with the ability to create additional topics in a similar fashion to a Wiki.
Other new features include a member recognition system, “local expert program” and StreetAdvisor Billboards, a service that offers the ability to secure exclusive “run-of-street” advertising opportunities on a per city basis.
The site is currently in public beta and offers coverage for the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.
Facebook Outage
Facebook is down, and has been so since at least 10 am PST. Anyone notice it down earlier than that? We’ve emailed the company for their comment.
Update: Facebook is now back up as at 11:30am PST
Update: Statement from Facebook:
This morning, we temporarily took down the Facebook site to fix a bug we identified earlier today. This was not the result of a security breach. Specifically, the bug caused some third party proxy servers to cache otherwise inaccessible content. The result was that an isolated group of users could see some pages that were not intended for them. The site has now been restored and we apologize for any inconvenience this may haveTangler’s Embedded Discussions
Australian startup Tangler has created a next generation forum product that allows real-time discussions to occur without page refreshes. Their forum product is both synchronous and asynchronous - meaning it competes as much with Meebo (web based chat) as it does with existing forum applications. Users can also easily embed rich media into the discussion
We first wrote about Tangler in February 2006, when it was deep in a development. They’ve been quietly working with beta partners for the last six months, and recently opened their doors to allow anyone to create a new forum. Last week, the 1,000th forum was created on Tangler.
Tangler forums are also decentralized. Any discussion/forum can easily be embedded in a third party website or websites. The discussion occurs simultaneously on all instances of the forum. See here for an example of an embedded forum.
Examples of startups using Tangler as their forum include Weewar, Particls and Omnidrive.
See our recent coverage of Meebo Rooms as well. It is interesting to see web chat and forums colliding towards the same end product.
IAC Up, Ask Down In Second Quarter
A strong second quarter by IAC saw a 78% increase in profits, mostly driven by assets sales and reduced costs. The positive headline results did not flow through to the struggling 4th ranked search engine Ask.com, which saw a
decline in revenues. The second quarter decline comes despite a $100 million Crispin, Porter + Bogusky advertising campaign that should be resulting in increased traffic and revenue to the site.
The exact amount of the decline was not disclosed.
FCC Fails To Mark Its Place In History
The FCC released the auction rules on the 700 MHz spectrum today. Google formally requested (and we supported) that the new bandwidth have four requirements: open applications, open devices, open services and open networks. Together these rules could quickly make the U.S. wireless space competitive with European and Asian markets that we have long trailed.
The auction rules include much of what Google requested, including open devices and open applications. But open services and open networks are out, meaning third parties may not get access to the networks at fair wholesale rates. Will we see a tidal wave of innovation in the space? It’s too early to tell. The FCC hedged its bets to keep AT&T, Verizon and other incumbents happy. New players like Google may or may not participate.
This is clearly a compromise decision. History will decide if the FCC commissioners made the right choices. Perhaps their feeble attempts to stand up to AT&T, Verizon and their army of lobbyists will have been enough to get the U.S. back in the race with the rest of the mobile world. Or perhaps not. Just for record keeping purposes, Kevin Martin (Chairman) and commissioners Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps are willing to fight for openness. Commissioners Deborah Taylor Tate and Robert McDowell, who are parroting much of the nonsense that AT&T spewed last week, are clearly lining up with the incumbents.
Google Licenses Gmail In Japan
Google has licensed Gmail to Japanese mobile operator KDDI Corp.
The email service will be branded by KDDI and work on the “auone.jp” domain. Google will provide the backend for the service and account holders will have the same functionality as provided by Gmail itself, including 2GB of storage.
The announcement continues a recent string of deals in Asia for Google as it attempts to build market share and presence in countries it does not dominate. More recently, Google has licensed search to a number of Chinese search portals.
KDDI is currently Japan’s second largest mobile operator behind NTT DoCoMo. Third ranked mobile operator Softbank owns Yahoo Japan, which according to Smart Money is not as strong in search, but leads Google in other services including email.
Action Engine Raises $20 Million
Mobile applications developer Action Engine has raised $20 million in new round led by Baker Capital.
Previous investors Northwest Venture Associates and The Spangler Group also participated in the round.
The company develops mobile device software that allows media companies and mobile operators to provide music, video and other content on mobiles. Action Engine’s ODP platform incorporates intelligent mobile advertising, support for mass market handsets and broad management capabilities that are claimed to “increase profitability, lower cost of ownership and drive brand-awareness.” Existing clients include MSNBC, TiVo, Sprint and Verizon.
Action Engine’s total funding to date is now $65 million. The company plans to use the funds to accelerate its sales, marketing and distribution efforts.
50 Cent Gets Down With YouTube
YouTube has announced a new music competition that will be judged by leading artists 50 Cent, Common and Polow da Don.
YouTube OntheRise Rap Edition is a follow up to last year’s YouTube Underground contest and seeks to discover the best rap and hip-hop artists in the United States.
Unsigned talent who aspire to be professional artists have until August 17 to submit their videos. The final winner will be announced September 7.
The winner will be awarded a trip to New York City to professionally record a single for G-Unit/Interscope Records, a $10,000 gift card from Guitar Center, and their video will be featured on the homepage of YouTube.
Further contest information is available here.
Are Terrorists Using Second Life To Plan Attacks?
OK, so sensationalistic headlines targeted at Second Life are so last week; from FBI related gambling bans to animal sex, we’ve seen a lot. Now there are allegations being printed by News Corp in Australia that suggest that the next major terrorist attack on a Western country could be being planned in Second Life, and yes, as can be seen in the picture to the right, 9/11 is being used as a reference point as well.
The report describes in detail various griefer operations as being terrorist attacks and goes on to say that:
On the darker side, there are also weapons armouries in SL where people can get access to guns, including automatic weapons and AK47s. Searches of the SL website show there are three jihadi terrorists registered and two elite jihadist terrorist groups.
The fear factor is so thick, it can’t be easily paraphrased
With the game taking such a sinister turn, terrorism experts are warning that SL attacks have ramifications for the real world. Just as September 11 terrorists practised flying planes on simulators in preparation for their deadly assault on US buildings, law enforcement agencies believe some of those behind the Second Life attacks are home-grown Australian jihadists who are rehearsing for strikes against real targets. Terrorist organisations al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiah traditionally sent potential jihadists to train in military camps in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Southeast Asia. But due to increased surveillance and intelligence-gathering, they are swapping some military training to online camps to evade detection and avoid prosecution.
The terrorists must get broadband in their caves now.
Rohan Gunaratna, author of Inside al-Qaeda, says it is a new phenomena that, until now, has not been openly discussed outside the intelligence community….”They are rehearsing their operations in Second Life because they don’t have the opportunity to rehearse in the real world”
Be alert, but not alarmed
“Community representatives are relied on to report suspicious or inappropriate behaviour to the owners or the SL authorities, just as in the real world.”
Retrevo’s “Snapshot” Graphs Products By Price And Features
Retrevo, one of a number of automated, aggregate review sites we previously covered, is releasing an alpha version of a new product comparison feature called “Product Snapshot”. The feature helps find the greatest “bang for your buck” by visually displaying how a product’s price and features stack up against others in its category. CEO Vipin Jain will demo the feature at tomorrow’s Stanford Summit. The feature will go public at the end of September.
“Product Snapshot” maps a product’s place on a price/feature graph relative to other products in the category. The mapping of the product is based on a statistical analysis of a number of major features and prices drawn from across the web. Products with fewer features for their price fall at the bottom left of the chart, while products with high prices and many features are placed toward the upper right. For example, this search for a Samsung LN-S4696D shows where the LCD TV places relative to other mid-range TVs.
The snapshot also includes links to products with better features, similar products, and cheaper products. These features will be released at the end of September when the full feature is pushed live.
Retrevo distinguishes itself by focusing on consumer electronics and finding a great deal of auxiliary material on products. Searches return PDF product manuals, aggregate user ratings, product previews, written reviews, forums & blogs, and shopping links. The data is pulled from thousands of sites including those of manufacturers and retailers. Retrevo’s depth of information makes it best suited for initial product research instead of quick price comparisons.
While Rome Burned, Amp’d Used Venture Capital On Porn
You just know that this is going to end in a Hollywood movie.
Matt Marshall at Venture Beat has the scoop on what the Amp’d team were spending part of their $360 million in venture capital on: porn.
According to the asset list from the Apm’d fire sale, the company acquired at least 100 porn DVDs; least that’s the number listed for the auction (we’d presume additional DVD’s were probably taken home).
As Matt put it so well “We’re still wondering how venture investors such as Redpoint (which lost $25 million in this) and Highland (which lost $50 million) could have let this happen.”
Amp’d declared bankruptcy June 2 owing $100 million.
Full coverage of the Amp’d meltdown on TechCrunch here.
UPDATE: A correction printed at Venture Beat notes that these might not have been DVD’s, but some sort of X rated content Amp’d produced, they look like DVD’s and certainly we are unwilling to repeat the names of them here to prove the point. Aside from the still very valid questions about how Amp’d blew $360million in funding and ran up $100million in debt, there are now some interesting questions as to why a company primarily marketing to teens was producing X-Rated content.
More Information On That Secretive Twitter Financing
When Twitter announced a round of financing last week they mentioned most of the investors - an A list crowd that includes Union Square Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Marc Andreessen, Dick Costolo, Ron Conway, and Naval Ravikant. But they didn’t disclose the amount raised, even though it is customary to do so. We sniffed around and heard that the the company held a special meeting with their new investors and specifically asked them not to disclose the amount raised. We heard that it was a small round, between $1 - $5 million, but frankly I suspected it would be on the low end of that range.
Other startups, notably Technorati, have also tried to keep venture rounds quiet. But inevitably they leak because so many of the limited partners who invest in these funds must disclose information to the SEC. That hasn’t happened yet with Twitter, but the numbers are leaking. As best as we can tell, the company raised a $5 million round, on a $20 million pre-money valuation.
NowPublic Gets $10.6 Million For Crowd Sourced News
“Crowd sourced” news network NowPublic.com has closed a $10.6 milion series A round of financing led by Rho Ventures with seed investors Brightspark and the Working Opportunity Fund participating.
Crowd sourcing is part of the widely expanding “citizen journalism” category, which encompasses all the new ways non-professionals can participate in the news reporting process. Examples range from commenting, voting on stories, to full out blogging. News commentator Jeff Jarvis has written extensively on the subject. NowPublic is a website that provides these tools to the public so they can report on what is going on around them. Many other news startups also incorporate these tools in different ways, such as NewsVine, OutsideIn, Digg, CitizenBay, recently Topix, and the now defunct Backfence.
On the spectrum of citizen journalism, NowPublic is considered a “crowd sourced” news network since stories rely on many bits of contributed content instead of a small group of users.
On NowPublic, anyone can sign up for the site and start contributing to stories in the usual categories (politics, culture, entertainment, …) or even local news. Users can write their own stories and upload their own photos (mobile), or simply submit a story from somewhere else on the web. Each of the submissions ranked in the category based on the number of votes they get. Editors can also come in and adjust the rankings based on breaking news and spamming.
Traction is one of the hardest things to build in community based startups. Citizen journalism startup Bayosphere was shut down after it couldn’t attract enough contributors. However, NowPublic reports to have over 118,000 members from over 140 countries and 3,800 cities. The site does over 1 million uniques per month. They have a hardcore audience of about 15 - 20,000 exceptionally active contributors that put up anywhere from 2 to 5 stories each month.
NowPublic seems to work best in times of crisis where it can serve as a hub for reports from people on the ground. During Hurricane Katrina, the site received over 2,000 people writing and posting about what was going on. NowPublic also reportedly broke news in the Virginia Tech shooting, the grounding of an Alaskan ferry, a bombing drill gone wrong in New Jersey and a murder in Vancouver.
The ability to be places where news media aren’t always present has led to a partnership with the Associated Press. AP has started purchasing stories and photos from the site based on the submitters asking price. NowPublic can cover areas AP’s 4,000 staff members aren’t and will be particularly focused on hurricane prone parts of the country as hurricane season approaches. While they are currently not taking any portion of the proceeds, in the future NowPublic plans on taking 25% cut. They have 7 to 10 other major partnerships lined up as well.
The Vancouver-based company was originally started in 2005.
Cisco and Click.tv?
I picked up a juicy rumor this weekend that Cisco may have acquired Click.tv, a video annotation and deep tagging service that launched in 2006 and then shut down last month. When Click.tv closed down last month they said in an email to users “While I regret this shutdown, I am very excited by the reason behind it. You’ll be seeing Click.TV technology very soon doing *much* bigger and better things.” This
certainly suggested a complete relaunch or an acquisition.
Was it Cisco? Maybe. They’ve been making some interesting plays in the web space, with acquisitions of Five Across, Tribe and WebEx. Five Across and Tribe are both in the social networking space. I’m not sure how Click.tv would fit into those plans. So for now I’m going to label this as possible but not more. I’m digging for additional sources.
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