According to a Research from the US Department of Agriculture, 60% of farmers nationwide lose money each year while 17,000 family farms go out of business, "The Grapes of Wrath" are not that obsolete after all. In an effort to support local farming, Heather Hilleren founded Local Dirt in 2005, a Saas (Software as a Service) platform that connects sellers and buyers of locally-grown produce and animal products. While individual can use the LocalDirt website for free to search local sellers by type, kind of product and mileage range, larger farms, farmer's cooperatives and distributors pay an annual subscription fee ranging from $360 to $720. In addition to subscriptions, Local Dirt will soon introduce fee-based value-added services for sellers and fee-based matching services for haulers with unused truck capacity.

HackAlert is a SaaS application that aims to prevent legitimate website from being hacked and used as a Malware source via code injection. Code Injection is a hacking technique that consists in exploiting a weakness in the processing by introducing ("injecting") malicious code in place of data. A simple example is to add Javascript code into a blog comment, for example.

HackAlert is said to becapable of monitoring, detecting and blocking such attempts and notify the website owner so that precautions or counter-measures can be taken. HackAlert is delivered as a cloud-based service, so websites can easily initiate the scanning. The service can also scale with the subscriber needs. HackAlert also claims to be able to detect (quickly) that a website has been blacklisted by Google. Because HackAlert is based on behaviors instead of signatures, it should be able to detect a threat that has not yet been identified.

HackAlert is available as a free on-demand service from http://hackalert.armorize.com.

[DEMOFall 09] CallSpark! Is changing our old and boring calling experience by transforming it into interactive experiences with real-time data pulled from the social and business cloud. Waow! Accessing content from social networks, location-based search and reviews before during and after calls, my social networking fatigue is getting back to me… Who knew that event phone calls would get the social web noise? However, according to Chris Shipley, “CallSpark is doing for phone calls what Google did for Web sites, by enabling people to quickly find accurate information in the context of a phone call,”.

Well, I am curious to hear how it works and make sure that this extra noise in my phone conversations can bring some value. Stay tuned, CallSpark! will demo on Wednesday at 12.19 pm, check our live on live.ubergizmo.com.

Store, and available for other platforms, including Blackberry, Android, and PalmPre, at m.callspark.com. Full specifications after the jump in the complete article

Vringo and Marvel partnered to create mobile video ringtones based on the famous library of Super Heroes. Today, they launched a storefront and web-based editing platform http://vringo.marvel.com where fans can buy movie clips or create their own using Marvels' archives. Users need to have video-ready phones to view and send the Marvel movies, and they need Vringo-application compatible phones to turn the clips into video ringtones. Now you can be viewed as Wolverine, for example, when you call your friend using VringoForward technology. The first clip is free and additional clips will be charged $1.99 at http://vringo.marvel.com . The Vringo app is available for BlackBerry Bold, Symbian, Windows Mobile and J2ME devices.

Yahoo has just turned on the new design of m.yahoo.com. Besides the new eye-candy, Yahoo is also making sure that whatever you do on Yahoo on PC translates and syncs to the mobile version. It should go both ways too. The best version seems to be the iPhone one, and you can try it at http://m.yahoo.com

DeviceVM is literally putting search at the forefront of the upcoming version of Splashtop, the quick boot Linux-based OS that is embedded in millions of PCs. In the new home screen, users will find a search box right on the main screen, making the search function one click closer. The update should appear in new computers in September. It is up to each PC maker to decide if existing users will get an update.

We think that calling it "Instant Search" (that's the official feature name) is a bit overkill as the search itself is not any faster, but what's interesting is that Yahoo is the default search engine for the U.S (Baidu and Yandex are used for China and Russia). Given that Splashtop ships in millions of PCs every month, we wonder if this will have a visible impact on Yahoo's business. (Note that it is possible for users to select a different search engine in the settings). In the future, more Yahoo services could be embedded in SplashTop...

By Hubert Nguyen and Eliane Fiolet

You're probably blind if you have not seen the news that Google is launching Google Chrome OS next year. The product will be based on Linux (what else?) and will focus on speed, simplicity and security. Basically, Google will boot on Linux and launch its Chrome web browser.

Besides the fact that if any other company was doing this and call it an Operating System everybody would laugh, let's look at a few things.

• What's the value proposition from Google?
• What are their advantages for success?
• Who are they targeting?
• Can they "kill" Windows and Mac OS?
• What is the likely outcome?

Value Proposition

Fundamentally, Google says that it can get users to the web faster and use less resources (understand cheaper computers) in the process. From there, "applications" are just regular web sites that you and us already use today (GMail, Google Docs, and non-Google sites). The one-liner would be "everything in the cloud".

Despite all the buzz, this is not really a new value proposition: most Linux-based Netbooks already do that. They require less memory, boot faster than Windows and use less memory and storage. You can also run Chrome or Firefox on them. Even Windows CE in a Netbook and a good web browser could achieve that goal.

We published about the new travel search site that only focus on deals and sales when it launched a few weeks ago. Yesterday, Voyij added numerous European destinations to its offering. For those of you who did not decide yet what to do for your summer vacation, this site could be super useful and save you some money too.

Opera's goal is to enable users to share content, on every device, to every device. Opera Unite is a web server integrated in your web browser. By doing so, Opera allows its users to share files (an Opera account is required).

Opera has demonstrated how to share media files like photos (it takes a few clicks). Again, that's file sharing. The next demo is about sharing notes. Your friends finds your shared items via your Opera ID, that's why it is required. The next demo streams music over the web. You can make your music private or public (beware of the legal ramifications).

There were a lot of interesting things at Google IO, Google's developer conference held in San Francisco over the past two days. There was something for everyone, from SEO basics to new Widget products to the geeky Google Wave that aims to be a "new" way to communicate.

Google knows that it needs a very strong developer community to be successful outside of search, email and maps. Providing a lot of free stuff, including T-Mobile G1 phones after the keynote (we passed) and APIs is a huge step. Google also showed how one can build a business using its free tools.

No matter how people are raving about the new stuff, some will succeed and many will fail. What's important is the developer enthusiasm - it was great. It feels like the early days of game development when there was something cool at every event. For those who were unable to attend, the keynote video is embedded below. To view more sessions go the Google IO official site videos should arrive soon.

The Skyfire team has been working on polishing its web browser before the 1.0 milestone that just launched now. From the version 0.9, Skyfire has improved the user interface (the zoom+scroll in particular), search and even power consumption. Windows Mobile (5+6) and Symbian users can download the version 1.0 at get.skyfitre.com today. Blackberry users will have to wait as the Blackberry version is still in closed beta.

If you are not familiar with Skyfire, it is a mobile browser where web pages are pulled by a desktop PC in a central server location. The PC runs flash, silverlight and other heavy plug-in, then compresses the image and sends it to your phone. It is like a "remote desktop" in some ways. Check our previous article or go to Skyfire's website.

Related: Skyfire offers VGA support

[Where 2.0] Yesterday, Waze unveiled its free real time driver-generated maps application for the United States. Waze launched a private alpha program for its mobile application, that collects driver-generated data to provide accurate real time information about road conditions, traffic, street closures and more. Installed on drivers' smartphones, Waze automatically communicate GPS point anonymously as they drive, collecting driving speed to determine traffic and road conditions. Drivers can update the maps and report road problems in one click (see picture).

The application is already widely used in Israel by 80,000 commuters who created the entire navigable map from scratch within less than a year. Waze has launched an alpha version of its mobile application in San Francisco, Chicago and Boston and you can sign up at www.waze.com. There are plans to open it to the general public in the coming months, and it will soon be accessible to developers via APIs as well.

Dash Express tried to build a specific two-way connected hardware to create this kind of drivers network that updates maps in real time, and they did not make it, it is obviously easier and faster to only develop the software for existing wirelessly connected mobile devices.

The GMail labs folks have cooked up a new automatic translation feature: if you receive an email that's not in your language, Google will propose an automated translation.

We're all aware that computer translations aren't accurate, but it is a still better than nothing, especially if you don't speak (and/or read) a language at all.

If it is your intention to communicate with someone through this automated translation, we recommend to use simple language that can be easily translated by a computer (they typically aren't very good with context or slang, but do well with word-for-word and simple stuff). Here's how to make it work:

Simply enable "Message Translation" from the Labs tab under Settings, and when you receive an email in a language other than your own, Gmail will help you translate it into a language you can understand. In one click.

Another day, another iPhone app... Gypsii is a social networking app that leverages the iPhone's GPS capabilities, allowing users to create and share their travel diary on the go with geotagged content. Through GyPSii CONNECT, social addicts can access other social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and share their status, newly created places and friends there as well.

The application has launched today on Apple app store and it is already available on other phones from Samsung, LG, Nokia and Blackberry, it can be downloaded at www.gypsii.com/m. The application is available in English and Chinese. Check out the video to see how it works, there are plans to add other languages shortly.