[Web 2.0] At Web 2.0, Pascal Josselin, CEO, showed me a demo of the revamped Yoono. Today, the beta is officially launching and you can test it for yourself. Like the previous version, Yoono’s toolbar suggest similar sites while you are browsing the web and enables you to meet new friends interested in the same topic. The coolest new feature is the access to most of your social networking sites in one place (Facebook, Friendfeed, Flickr, Last.fm, Piczo and Twitter). You can update your profiles from there and receive your friends updates in a well designed user interface, constantly visible in a left navigation bar integrated in your browser. This will save me a lot of time! Yoono toolbar allows also to post text and photos directly to a blog.

The Yoono chat offers also some nice features: the ability to drag and drop photos directly from the web and include them in a live chat session, bring together AIM, GTalk, MSN and Yahoo! For the moment you can upload photos only in Flickr, but Pascal told me that they plan to add more photo sites, if so, this could become a better service than Oosah, (also launched during Web 2.0).

[Web 2.0] I attended partly this morning the session on “How Web 2.0 is changing the moods, Metrics and Monetization” moderated by Rafe Needleman (CNet). No details yet, as I had to run to my meetings with some great start ups that are preparing some new cool products. However, I will write about them in the upcoming days after playing with their products a little.

[Web 2.0] For those who are not familiar with Simulscribe (soon to be renamed PhoneTag), it is a service that you can setup to intercept your mobile phone voicemails and have it send it to you, translated in text via SMS or email. When using email, the message comes with an attached audio file containing the original message. Previously, email notifications came from a mailbox@my.simulscribe.com address with a subject like “SimulScribe from (xxx) xxx-xxxx” that was not really actionable.

With the contact list integration, the system will search for the caller’s number in your contact list, find the matching contact name and/or the company name and send you a message as follow:

From: contact-email (contact name)
Subject: SimulScribe from contact phone number
Translated message: message

Now, you can take action by replying via email directly to your contact address or by calling back, knowing who it is who called you. The system is also smart enough to use the contact name text information when translating the message. In the past, it was difficult to guess how names were spelled, especially if they are foreign names. Everything happens in the back-end and should be instantly available to all users, on all phones – that’s smart. 

[Web 2.0] The Profy platform - in closed alpha since January 2008 - is announcing its beta launch at Web 2.0. According to the press release (I did not try the alpha), the blogging process – news reading, writing and publishing, managing comments, communication with readers and other bloggers - is made easier with the Ajax based Profy tools. In addition, Profy provides a more social blogging experience by allowing users to find people with the same interests, share ideas and discover new sources of information. I will meet the Profy team today at their booth to get more information about this new publishing tool.

Dan Khasis, Cto, Oosah

[Web 2.0] Today, Oosah was launched (and we published about it), so tonight they are celebrating at the Sir Francis Hotel, in San Francisco. I finally met the CTO, Dan Khasis, who told me that he is pretty happy with the launch: They got good feedback and some good traffic.

Demonstration driven by Steve Repetty (Chairman and CTO)

[Web 2.0] Zude.com is a social networking service that let one create content a little like MySpace, except that its more recent architecture allows it to be more flexible and receive more “modules”. Zude announced today that it will feature shopping, ringtones and widgets, thanks to a partnership with Shopit, Myxer and Widgetbox. The strong point of Zude is that users can build their pages by simple drag & drops.

The application that interested us is SocialMix. It than can pull data from Facebook, Bebo and other high-profile social networks into Zude.com. The SocialMix widgets can display the photos of all your friends, comments and much more! Integrating information from all these networks into a Zude gives Zude a shot to become a “personal social network portal”… come back to this site to learn more. Can they pull this off? I don’t know, but the technical fundations are very interesting.

[Web 2.0] I am attending this session because I was thinking that I may learn one thing or two about Blog marketing from fellow bloggers. Were present: Nick Gonzalez (Techcrunch), Eric Eldon (Venture Beat) and Trisha Okubo who is presenting her work process as a Fashion Blogger. I am relieved to see that we do all the (right) things, according in her must-do list to produce a good Blog.

(I might update this post later, I'm taking notes with my phone right now)

Web 2.0 I just got to the moscone center for my first meeting at the Web 2.0 conference. I met with Raju Vegesna from Zoho to talk about their recent announcements. The lobby is deserted as you can see in the photo and the sessions are not so well attended. Tomorrow will be better as the showfloor will open, and I am sure the crowd 2.0 will be there.

Photo: the party was so packed that the crowd spread outside the pub

[Web 2.0] The party held at Kate o’Brien pub was a nice kickoff for the Web 2.0 conference! I got there early, so I got the opportunity to chat with Eileen Gittins the CEO of Blurb (picture below). It is interesting to know that Eileen is a photographer and she started Blurb because she could not find an affordable book publishing service that delivered well printed photo books in small quantities, so she created her own! She continue to test herself any new service or feature that Blurb launches, to make sure that Blurb customers will get what they really need. Blurb launched its Facebook app Blurb GroupBook at Web 2.0, read more in the full post.

[Web 2.0] Today, Oosah, a new media files management site is launching at Web 2.0 conference. I got a demo from Mike Duggan, COO, and Dan Khasis, co-founder and CTO. I already published about a similar service that was launched at DEMO: Joggle. Joogle is still not available to the public. I like Oosah because it saves us time: you know how painful it is to spend time uploading media files on the web, so having a good interface that allows users to do it easily only once for a bunch of websites (e.g. Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube), that’s great! It is compatible with PC, Mac and Internet enabled mobile phones.

You can try it, it’s free (up to 2 GB of storage).

[Web 2.0] Intel Mash Maker allows users to create client-side mashups while they are browsing the web. It was in closed alpha for some time and it has now some new features: support for Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3, widgets and visualization features, support for open extensible API.

Rob Ennals the lead architect and Jeff Klaus the Marketing Director of Intel Mash Maker gave me a demo. It is pretty easy to build Mash-ups on the fly, mixing a map with your regular Facebook page for example, so you can see your friends photos with their current location (see picture), or you can mix Craiglist’s classified for housing and Yelp’s restaurant listing, to make sure that you will have access to good food in your future neighborhood (picture after the jump). This is a very cool application.

You have to download the plug-in from the Intel Mash Maker website to play with it, and you can see how it works on the video: click here to view it in another window.

Continue Reading"Intel unveils Mash Maker beta at Web 2.0"

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[Web 2.0] I discovered Blist at DEMO 08 in January when it was launched, and I immediately liked the ease of use and the graphic design of this Free Social Database Service. Today, Blist is launching new support for international characters, such as accent marks in French or non-English letters in Norwegian as well non-Roman languages such as Japanese Kanji or Hindi, and even non-alphabetic languages such as Mandarin Chinese.

Blists lets users create private or collaborative databases for anything from contact lists, personal finance, items collections to professional activities, such as project management sheets, campaign tracking to status reports and more. Click the video below to see a demo.