Yahoo To KickStart Social Networking Efforts

Yahoo is reported to be working on a new social networking service that matches college students to employers.

Yahoo Kickstart give users profile pages which are focused on the user’s resume, LinkedIn style, as opposed to a Facebook or MySpace profile. Corporations and wannabe employers are then provided with groups that users can join, but with a catch: to join a group you need an invite via a former student who works at that company.

Microsoft Looking for it's iPhone

With continued rumors of Microsoft possibly buying out Research In Motion, the company that makes BlackBerries, the company’s stock price has reached an all-time high of $85.Micro

Web 2.0 Summit: October 17-19, 2007; San Francisco, CA

Only the Web 2.0 Summit (formerly named Web 2.0 Conference) brings the intelligence, innovation, and leadership of the Internet industry together in one place at one time. The Summit is known for its interactive format, stressing audience interaction and participation.

Eight Best (Or Most Interesting) Web 2.0 Definitions and Explanations

Why does Web 2.0 – a complex, subtle, yet practical topic – need so much explanation? That question was addressed by social computing and Web 2.0 expert Dion Hinchcliffe in an end-of-year round up that he compiled all the way back in December 2005. To this day it makes a very handy starting-point for anyone seeking to get themselves up to speed.

Eurekster is a pioneer and leader in Social Search and Vertical Search technologies that harness the knowledge and behavior of online communities to increase search relevance and value for site visitors, site publishers and advertisers. Eurekster created the Swicki platform which allows web publishers to build community-driven social search engines, called "swickis" that aggregate information on particular topics from any site of their choice for use on their websites.

ProfileBuilder: Manage Your Profile, Not Accounts

With a plethora of social networks for everyone from knitters to dog lovers, managing our increasing number of long tail profiles is a huge pain. The problem of managing a fragmented identity has been attacked two ways: creating a new master account (OpenID), aggregating identity through search (Spock, Wink), or aggregating management of all your accounts on one site.

ProfileBuilder link

The Next Email

Why Twitter will change the way business communicates (again).

France Telecom confirms talks with Apple on iPhone

France Telecom confirmed on Friday that it is in talks with Apple Inc over marketing the latter's iPhone but said there is no deal yet.

France's Jooce Enters WebOS Space

Jooce is a Flash-based web operating system and sharing platform. They are targeting the millions of people who use "cybercafes" to conduct their Internet affairs instead of a regular desktop or laptop. The Jooce product is aiming to provide these virtual vagabonds with a web-based desktop to manage their IM, email, storage, media and widgets in a secure and protected way. They also provide virtual nomads with an online desktop that they can share with friends to swap files like pictures, documents, audio and video.

The Times of Your Life


Never forget another special memory. circaVie allows you to easily create multimedia timelines all about your life. Special events, noteworthy achievements, relationships, memorable vacations, interests and hobbies, celebrations, announcements … you name it. If it’s about life, it’s circaVie.

Web 2.0 for Moms and Dads

Websites that cater to families tend to be very community-oriented, and deliberately family-friendly without being overly "girly" (which can be a problem for dad-oriented sites). Care is made to ensure a positive experience for the user, and not just in using the app or website, but also in interacting with other people who use the same tools.

Watch It When You Want

The age of TV-on-demand is finally dawning in Australia as new digital recording technologies hand unprecedented levels of control back to viewers.

New Video Chat Channel

TokBox is a new site that allows you to set up a video chat channel in seconds. The controls are simple - set volume, mute or kill camera. If the person is not there, you can leave a video message. That’s all there is to it

Box

Box.net was originally founded in 2005 as a college business project with a vision of connecting people, devices and networks. Launched officially in March of 2006, Box.net currently provides secure online file storage and sharing functionality to over 900,000 registered users, serving files to millions of people around the world. Box.net's unique platform allows personal and commercial content to be accessible, sharable, and storable in any format from anywhere. Box.net is currently based in Palo Alto, CA.

Fring

Israeli-based VOIP start-up Fring has closed an estimated $12 million second round, led by US VC fund North Bridge Venture Partners. VenFin and previous investors Pitango, Veritas and Yossi Vardi also participated. If the investment estimate is accurate, it would be one of the larger rounds for a VOIP company.

Fring is a mobile application for Windows and Symbian phones that uses VOIP to make cheap/free mobile calls and instant message. Unlike Jajah, but like Truphone, Fring sends calls and chats over Wi-Fi internet access or your 3G or GPRS Internet data plan. Like Skype, users are charged a nominal fee to call standard phone lines. However, calls made to other internet phones are free. Fring connects to standard phones, other SIP based VOIP clients, and chat applications (Skype, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Google Talk, and even Twitter).

Scrybe Closes Series A

Scrybe, the online/offline calendar and organizer, has closed their series A round of financing from Adobe Systems Incorporated and LMKR.

Scrybe is a Flash-based organizational and productivity tool that works both online and offline. It consists of multiple calendar management, to do lists, web clip bookmarklet, contact list (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail or Outlook importing), and the system operates offline by caching your changes and then uploading when the system reconnects. Zimbra and Google Gears provide similar online/offline products.

The driving principle behind the application is usability. Scrybe’s main selling point is that the application retains the context of the data that you’re working with by “zooming” instead of flipping to the data. One example is the calendar. The cells of the calendar expand and contract as you edit a week, day, or hour more closely while still showing the details of the surrounding days. See the extended video below for more details.

Amie Street Closes Series A Financing Led By Amazon.com

Social music marketplace Amie Street has closed a Series A round of financing led by Amazon.com, along with some new partnerships and a site redesign. The amount of Amazon’s investment and the terms are not disclosed.

Overview:

AmieStreet is a music download service, where any artist can upload their music for download. Users then go to the site and purchase songs, with the starting price set at free. When downloads pick up, the price starts to rise, all the way up to $0.98. If a song gets to $0.30 or so, you know it’s popular. Artists keep 70% of revenues as long as they have made at least $10. Additionally, artists are not required to sell their music exclusively through Amie Street and can remove it at any time.

On the user end, users can search, browse and listen to music for free (via streaming). Users who have purchased a song can recommend it to their friends using a limited number of RECs that they’ve received (users get one per dollar they add to their account). Once recommended, users will get account credit if the price of the song increases, giving them an incentive to find and recommend good music.

Sun Extends UltraSparc Reach

Sun Microsystems is getting into the business of selling microprocessors--again.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company plans to announce its new UltraSparc T2 microprocessor, along with plans for servers based on the chip. Sun plans to insert the UltraSparc T2, an eight-core, 64-thread microprocessor, into servers that will hit the market in the second half of the year.

The Slideshow Is Dead

An email arrived yesterday from the guys at Animoto proclaiming that their application, which launches to the public on August 14th, would lead to the "end of slideshows." Those are rather sensational words, but after taking a look at their app, they might just be right -- at least in terms of what's hot among the social networking set. Read the article here.

Facebook How To

What is Facebook and why should you use it?

Open standards may let social networks, virtual worlds intersect

The millions of people who use social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace and the millions who stalk the streets of virtual worlds like Second Life inhabit what are essentially two different neighborhoods in cyberspace.

Free Phone Calls...for Life?

Tech media and blogs were buzzing recently over the launch of ooma, a Palo Alto start-up that’s promising free phone calling, once you buy the $400 ooma box. In this interview with the Mercury News, CEO Andrew Frame explains how ooma works. And he answers questions about the cost of the box (they actually could have charged more, he says), the state of the Internet calling industry, ooma’s security and whether now is the right time to be launching a landline phone service. Frame also takes us on a tour of the start-up’s Palo Alto offices, where engineers design and work on the company’s devices.

Download MP4

Orbious is a privately held software company founded in Australia in early 2006 to develop innovative products based on natural language processing. In late 2006, Orbious identified document disclosure as a possible growth market and significant Research and Development was conducted to investigate alternative software based approaches to this problem. The resultant software, DocTracker, was completed earlier this month and beta testing has subsequently begun. As a result of our Research and Development, we have begun working on related software applications focusing around Copyright Infringement.

Turn Your Phone Into a GPS



Are you lost and need to find where you are and how to get to your destination?
You don't have a map? If you have a cell phone, then you're in luck. Read on road warrior.

Here's the buzz on Buzzword

Word processing in the browser has always been "convenient," but rarely has it been called "full-featured," or even "beautiful."

But the web apps status quo is set to change with the arrival of Buzzword, an office-caliber document editor with a visually rich user interface. Buzzword beats current Ajax-based offerings like Google Docs and Zoho Writer in both usability and aesthetic impact. And in a few months, when a desktop version is released, Buzzword will pose a serious challenge to Microsoft Word, the current king of document editing on the desktop. Read the rest of the article here.

Check out the demo below via YouTube

Comscore's Latest Numbers: Worldwide Social-Networking Growth

Statistics house ComScore released some numbers on Tuesday pertaining to how quickly a handful of popular social-networking sites are growing worldwide, and which ones dominate in which regions of the globe.

Moblog

Moblog is a blend of the wordsmobile and weblog. A mobile weblog, or Moblog, consists of content posted to the Internet from a mobile or portable device, such as a cellular phone or PDA. Moblogs generally involve technology which allows publishing from a mobile device.

Living With Technology: Web 2.0 design

Web 2.0 design means "cliche" to many. Designers aching to fit into the current aesthetic are overusing rounded corners and pastel colors on new sites. But at its core, Web 2.0 design is about building services that are clean, simple, fast, and interactive. Designers who get this are making sites that are leagues ahead of those from the previous generation.