YahooLocal adopts microformats

Upcoming.org's Andy Baio discusses a better way of browsing.

More about microformats.

Netvibes - Personal Homepage


Netvibes, a project started in France by Florant Fremont, is the latest web-app based on the idea of personalized homepages and like some others (like Start and Google’s personal homepage), it is powered by some nicely developed Ajax. Their goal: The aim of it is to provide a place on the internet where you can set just the content you like, a super easy way of building your personnalized homepage, available anywhere, anytime. No registration is needed, however if you want to access your page from another computer you’ll be able to do it by registering with your email address and a password.

Addtional links:
Netvibes development blog
Netvibes API documentation
Netvibes Ecosystem (official list of modules, feeds, iCal files, and tabs)

Yahoo gives One.org a Web 2.0 upgrade.

As part of an employee volunteer program, Yahoo has upgraded the Web site of a prominent charity. Read here.

eBay dives into Web 2.0

eBay, arguably the original Web 2.0 company, is latching onto the newfangled 2.0 stuff. It has announced eBay Wiki, with service hosted by JotSpot. It's intended to allow members to offer their own expertise on any eBay topic they know about, and for people to find answers to questions that eBay itself may not have anticipated. That's on top of eBay Blogs, also announced today, that let members create their own blogs to promote their business or indulge their collectible passion. They're both naturals for a site that has rightly prided itself on enabling a community to be formed around commerce.

Riya supersizes plan: will become a "visual" search engine

Riya, the Silicon Valley photo recognition start-up, is expanding its ambition: It wants to become a full-fledged "visual" search engine.

The move was signaled today by chief executive Munjal Shah, who told us in a phone call that he has radically transformed the company in recent days to go after this new goal. It will take about three months to crawl the entire Web, collect images and then process them to identify their various qualities so that they are searchable, he said.

More here.

Video start-up One True Media lands $5 million from Kleiner Perkins

One True Media is a new Silicon Valley start-up (Redwood City) that is offering video creation tools, and wants to be the next video-sharing company. There are dozens of competitors, so this is a long shot.

Yahoo Hack Day

Yahoo has had a a couple of regional “Hack Days”, which are day long events where engineers stop everything they are doing and just build stuff that they think is cool. The idea was first popularized by Jot last year, and a number of companies have picked up on the idea as a great way to stoke innovation and creativity in a semi-organized way. The goal? Take something from idea to prototype in 24 hours.

Today at noon, however, Yahoo got serious about Hack Days by making it Yahoo-wide. Every Yahoo engineer is invited to participate, and other employees are joining in as well. Anyone with an idea is encouraged to gather a team up and spend a day coding. Tomorrow (Friday) at noon, the hacking stops and everyone will get together to review what’s been built.

The effort is being led out of Bradley Horowitz’s product strategy group, with Chad Dickerson and Caterina Fake organizing the event.

(Article from TechCrunch)

Where 2.0 Conference: June 13-14

Everything Happens Somewhere. Be there when it happens here. The Where 2.0 Conference brings together the people, projects, and issues leading the charge into the location based technological frontier.