Story posted on: June 24, 2008

We already published about Cellspin when they launched at DEMO 08 in January.
This service enables users to create and publish media content on their favorite websites. Since the launch, they added MySpace, Twitter, and Pownce to their list that included Facebook, Blogger, YouTube, Picasa, Flickr, Live Journal, Live Spaces and eBay. Today, Cellspin is adding support for Palm OS to its mobile publishing software.
I like applications that allow me to manage my favorite social networking and blogging websites from one place, because it makes my everyday life easier. Cellspin still needs to create a better design for their UI (user interface), this one is really bad looking. I already told them at DEMO and they will work on it, but, as any well-respected tech start up, they want to make sure that the features are working first.
Cellspin is available worldwide at www.cellspin.net and at www.cellspin.net/phones you can check the list of the 300 mobile phone models compatible.
Story posted on: June 12, 2008
It’s official, Firefox 3 will be available on June 17th. During our test of the beta, we saw that overall performance and memory usage were much better than version 2. Now, we hope that our favorite plug-ins will be available on the same day!
Story posted on: May 08, 2008

MySpace data can now be shared (by users) with other partners (Yahoo, Ebay, Twitter… more to come) so that user profiles, photos, music and videos can be accessed by other services. This mainly allows a better integration into other services, the other alternative being using widgets which, by nature, aren’t so friendly to integration. The information will flow in real-time, which means that updates on MySpace will propagate to other services. Finally, MySpace account owners can decide to share or stop sharing the data at anytime. This is a global launch for all localized versions of MySpace.
Story posted on: May 04, 2008
[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).
Story posted on: April 29, 2008

Today, Wigix is launching its online stock market platform for goods, aiming to replace the eBay auction model. The Wigix system is based on the bid/ask model used by NASDAQ and most of the other financial stock markets. Sellers offer any price for their items and buyers can pay the proposed price or offer another one. This new type of online trading will help to eliminate some problems related to e-auctions such as shilling and sniping.
Features include: the absence of listing fees, all trades occur immediately (unlike eBay), sales data tracking enabling users to get accurate market prices.
As a real Web 2.0 application, Wigix provide some social networking and community features: blogging, friends list, sharing, Facebook data access, inventory tracking... In addition, users can become category experts and get a share of their category sales, they can also become SKU owners: any user can add a new item which is not yet registered in the Wigix database, making them the “owner’ of this item’s SKU, they receive a share of all future sales of this specific item. Finally! User generated content that is not for free!
I played shortly with the application: it is very easy to use, you can start right away to add items to your inventory, and search for goods and prices. It seems less painful than eBay to sell your old gadgets quickly and find new ones… The community needs to grow, Wigix is just launching.
Story posted on: April 23, 2008


[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.
Story posted on: April 22, 2008

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.
Continue Reading"Oosah party at Web 2"
Story posted on: April 22, 2008

[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).
Story posted on: April 22, 2008

[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"
Story posted on: April 20, 2008
[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.
Story posted on: April 17, 2008

We know that India is very attractive to the Social Networking moguls since 44% of Indian online traffic uses the Internet just for social networking (according to JuxtConsult, April 2007 survey). Today, MySpace has decided to go head to head with Google whose Orkut, the most popular social networking site in India, has a 64% market share there.
According to Compete, in 2007, MySpace growth was negative by -1% and Facebook traffic increased by 77%. We can easily understand why MySpace is looking for new areas of growth and India is the best place to try it. India is also one of the largest film producer in the world with Bollywood, which gives MySpace an edge.
Getting ahead of the competition by leveraging the recent partnership agreements with the entertainment industry is an obvious strategy for MySpace: read the interview of Chris DeWolfe by Laura Locke on Wired.
Continue Reading"Official: MySpace in India Launched"
Story posted on: April 17, 2008

AT&T is working on a web browser (currently for Windows) called Pogo which is in private beta. One of the highlights is that tabbed browsing will be replaced by “snapshots”. Bookmarks and history are also handled with fancy graphics and a lot of eye-candy.
However, it is reportedly a resource hog and while it would makes the CPU and Graphics vendors happy, it’s not clear if it create a truly better user experience. Time will tell, but this is not anew struggle. For years, people have tried to go beyond the 2D interface and after a decade, we’ve got to Vista and OS X animated icons… that’s not so far. The folks at Ars Technica have an in-depth review. Here’s a say that my friends will recognize: “if you can’t make it good, make it shiny”, hopefully Pogo will turn out good and shiny ;)
Story posted on: April 15, 2008

[Web 2.0] Blurb, is a cool online creative book publishing service that lets you create your own book and sell it. Today, Blurb launched Blurb GroupBook, a FaceBook application that allows users to create real books collectively.
How it works (see pictures in the full article)
- Install Blurb GroupBook from the Facebook Applications Directory
- Create a GroupBook project
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- Invite friends to contribute photos to the book. Once they accept the invitation they can upload and view photos, and make comments
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- As the book producer, you review the photos and select the ones you like
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- When ready, import the photos and create the book with Blurb BookSmart (easy download from the website)
Launched last year, Blurb has released today an updated beta version of BookSmart (1.9.4) and has recently been nominated for a 2008 Webby Award in the Services category.
Continue Reading"Blurb GroupBook: Make a Book with your Friends on Facebook"
Story posted on: April 03, 2008
160Mbps is a peak theoretical number of course, but still, it should be significantly faster that any consumer connection when it comes out. At the moment, only Mineapolis and St-paul residents can benefit from a 50 Mbps offer that could eventually reach 160Mbps. It doesn’t come for cheap ($150 per month), but I guess that there is a good niche of customers who would sign up.
It always bugs me to see that we’re in @#$^ Silicon Valley and that I am stuck with a 6Mbps DSL connection and a 16Mbps cable one.