Yahoo Mail Out of Beta; New Features

The new Yahoo Mail interface went into public beta in September 2006, although Yahoo was testing it long before that. Tonight Yahoo takes the “beta” label off of the product and makes it the default interface for all new Yahoo mail accounts.

Yahoo mail already has an integrated RSS reader and instant messaging. They also recently announced unlimited storage for all mail users.

They are also releasing a few new features.

Shortcuts: Mail now has a number of intelligent shortcuts. Things like addresses, places, dates, contact information, etc. are underlined with blue dots. Click on the link and see a mashup with maps (for addresses), travel guides (for places), calendar (for dates), etc. New services are being added regularly.

SMS/Text Messaging: Yahoo wants you to use their mail application whenever you contact your friends, however you contact them. In addition to emailing or instant messaging clients, you can now send them a text message from the mail interface. Their responses also come in directly to Yahoo Mail. It currently works for U.S., India, Philippines and Canadian mobile numbers.

Is Yahoo Mail a better webmail application than GMail? In our comparisons GMail always comes out on top, although the main reason is tagging of messages and the fact that GMail gives free forwarding and POP access to the account. Yahoo still charges $20/year for forwarding or POP access. For users who still like their desktop mail clients, POP access is an important feature. Yahoo says they are considering making it a free option, but they have a lot of paying mail customers. If they make too many features free, they jeopardize that revenue stream. Offering unlimited free storage really pushed the limits, so I don’t expect them to move more features from paid to free any time soon.

The new interface is the final realization of Yahoo’s 2004 acquisition of Ajax pioneer Oddpost. The new mail product is based largely on ideas first launched by Oddpost in 2002.

Startups aren’t just sitting around as the big guys upgrade their webmail apps, though. Our favorite product in this space is Orgoo, which launches this fall and lets users pull in mail and IM accounts from any number of providers. Foldera is another promising product in this space (I was previously on their board of directors, but I do not own any stock in the company).

NoSo - Backlash Against Our “Always On” Culture

“Meet no friends, attend no events and make no connections.”

NoSo, short for No Social, is more of an art project and cultural backlash than an actual startup. You join, get a user number (everything is anonymous) and then create and/or join “NoSo’s,” which are held wherever the organizer chooses to have it: parks, cafes, street corners and other public places.

Other users come, but people “meet without meeting.” Users arrive alone, unplugged and aren’t allowed talk to anyone, presumably taking comfort in the fact that other NoSo users are there sharing their experience. “Allow the NoSo experience to envelope you,” the site suggests. The video on the home page of the site describes the other details. A sample event is here.

It’s an obvious play on Flash Mobs, although, of course, without publicity.

This also appears to be a semi-serious endeavor.. The NoSo founders (Artists Christina Ray and Kurt Bigenho) were interviewed by 10ZenMonkeys:

We invite people to take a break from their every day experiences carrying around laptops and cellphones, and give them the chance to just disengage from the noise, the social network, the constant communication that’s going on around us all the time. We let them just experience the absence of that — the feeling of being without all those distractions. And a NoSo could happen in a number of different places. It could happen on a street corner, or in a cafe, or in an installation in a gallery setting.

ContraStream To Join Social Music Sites

If you are into the social music scene, bookmark ContraStream, a new music discovery engine, and go back to it on September 3 when they launch.

The site promises to help users find good music quickly. Artists upload indie music and others vote on it Digg-fashion to push the good stuff to the top of the site. It is at least somewhat similar to iJigg, which also lets users vote, Digg-like, on music.

ContraStream will leverage the user-generated voting data to create let users search/browse popular music. Each artist and album also gets its own dedicated page on the site.

In an effort to “keep the music indie,” users are encouraged to flag music that is “too mainstream.”

See more at Scopetech.

Digg Gets A Major Makeover

Changes to the Digg template and feature set discussed by Kevin Rose August 22 are now live.

The biggest change with the new look Digg is the inclusion of video on the front page. Other changes include tweaks to page and story summary layouts, streamlined navigation, and more customization options.

Stories are now able to be buried in one click as opposed to the previous two click procedure. Story submission has also been streamlined.

First impressions: I’m not sure yet. Drop down menus have replaced the previous tree style content directory at the top of the page, and the overall look feels a little more feminine; the strong colors used in the old Digg template have been replaced by lighter, nearly pastel colors at places. The inclusion of videos on the front page seemingly interrupts the flow of Digg stories as you scroll down the page.

Digg’s Daniel Burka writes that the changes have been made following consultation with Digg users, so perhaps the new look will be well received and I’m being a little bit too picky. Comments on a number of Digg threads covering the changes seem to be running at around 50/50 for and against.

Update: a tip from Aidan Henry via Skype: the story pages have more advertising, with the previous Leaderboard now having a 300×250 rectangle ad below right of it above the fold. Both spots were showing animated ads when I was viewing them, which suffice to say is rather annoying from a user perspective.

Digg Gets A Major Makeover

Changes to the Digg template and feature set discussed by Kevin Rose August 22 are now live.

The biggest change with the new look Digg is the inclusion of video on the front page. Other changes include tweaks to page and story summary layouts, streamlined navigation, and more customization options.

Stories are now able to be buried in one click as opposed to the previous two click procedure. Story submission has also been streamlined.

First impressions: I’m not sure yet. Drop down menus have replaced the previous tree style content directory at the top of the page, and the overall look feels a little more feminine; the strong colors used in the old Digg template have been replaced by lighter, nearly pastel colors at places. The inclusion of videos on the front page seemingly interrupts the flow of Digg stories as you scroll down the page.

Digg’s Daniel Burka writes that the changes have been made following consultation with Digg users, so perhaps the new look will be well received and I’m being a little bit too picky. Comments on a number of Digg threads covering the changes seem to be running at around 50/50 for and against.

Update: a tip from Aidan Henry via Skype: the story pages have more advertising, with the previous Leaderboard now having a 300×250 rectangle ad below right of it above the fold. Both spots were showing animated ads when I was viewing them, which suffice to say is rather annoying from a user perspective.

Adobe Hires Co-Inventor of Image Resizer Technology

The day before yesterday I showed the above video (it has now been viewed nearly 100,000 times), which shows some jaw dropping examples of next generation image manipulation, and said “I want this in PhotoShop immediately.” Well, that may be happening sooner rather than later. Co-inventor Shai Avidan has now joined Adobe and will work out of their Newtown, MA office. More info on Shai is here.

The Tech Industry Wants You To Support The Fight For Fair Use

Listen very carefully to the copyright statement in this clip. Thinking about discussing last weekend’s game with family and friends? The NFL clearly states that viewers cannot talk about the game to anyone without permission

Insane statements like this, and others, are the target of a FTC complaint by the Computer & Communications Industry Association, a group backed by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Oracle and a range of other leading tech firms (full list here). The complaint argues that statements made by groups such as the NFL are illegal and deceptive, as ultimately viewers have rights under the US Constitution by way of Fair Use.

The CCIA isn’t stopping at a FTC complaint alone: they want your support in backing consumer rights to fair use. A new site, Defend Fair Use, has been launched and comes complete with copyright abuse examples and a petition that can be signed in support on the CCIA’s case before the FTC.

For those not familiar with the term, Fair Use is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders*, or in laymen’s terms it allows anyone to use a clip, extract, or part thereof of copyrighted material in our own works, for example quoting a book in a blog post, displaying a snippet of a presidential debate in a video etc. The concept of Fair Use is based on free speech rights provided by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Commonwealth equivalent of Fair Use is Fair Dealing.

There are any number of causes floating around the tech industry. The more left wing inclined may support movements including Creative Commons; many of these movements tend to be anti-copyright. The fight for Fair Use is not one that is anti-copyright; fair use does not disown copyright nor seek to overthrow it and replace it with some sort of Utopian socialist vision of a free for all where content creators would no longer be able to own their works. Fair Use is about allowing, as the name suggests, fair use of copyrighted materials in a free and open society, be that by the press or by content creators such as bloggers and others. It’s a noble cause, if only because the alternative is absurd. Would we want to live in a society where you would need permission to discuss a football game due to copyright restrictions?

Those interested in signing the petition can do so here.

(in part via Ars)

*Wikipedia

The Tech Industry Wants You To Support The Fight For Fair Use

Listen very carefully to the copyright statement in this clip. Thinking about discussing last weekend’s game with family and friends? The NFL clearly states that viewers cannot talk about the game to anyone without permission

Insane statements like this, and others, are the target of a FTC complaint by the Computer & Communications Industry Association, a group backed by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Oracle and a range of other leading tech firms (full list here). The complaint argues that statements made by groups such as the NFL are illegal and deceptive, as ultimately viewers have rights under the US Constitution by way of Fair Use.

The CCIA isn’t stopping at a FTC complaint alone: they want your support in backing consumer rights to fair use. A new site, Defend Fair Use, has been launched and comes complete with copyright abuse examples and a petition that can be signed in support on the CCIA’s case before the FTC.

For those not familiar with the term, Fair Use is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders*, or in laymen’s terms it allows anyone to use a clip, extract, or part thereof of copyrighted material in our own works, for example quoting a book in a blog post, displaying a snippet of a presidential debate in a video etc. The concept of Fair Use is based on free speech rights provided by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Commonwealth equivalent of Fair Use is Fair Dealing.

There are any number of causes floating around the tech industry. The more left wing inclined may support movements including Creative Commons; many of these movements tend to be anti-copyright. The fight for Fair Use is not one that is anti-copyright; fair use does not disown copyright nor seek to overthrow it and replace it with some sort of Utopian socialist vision of a free for all where content creators would no longer be able to own their works. Fair Use is about allowing, as the name suggests, fair use of copyrighted materials in a free and open society, be that by the press or by content creators such as bloggers and others. It’s a noble cause, if only because the alternative is absurd. Would we want to live in a society where you would need permission to discuss a football game due to copyright restrictions?

Those interested in signing the petition can do so here.

(in part via Ars)

*Wikipedia

Own Your Own English Soccer Team: MyFootballClub

UK based MyFootballClub is aiming to take the power of collaborative social membership to the world of English soccer by purchasing a professional English soccer team using user contributions.

The site launched in April and had over $500,000 in contributions within its first 24 hours.

The legal side is fairly simple. Contributors become members of the MyFootballClub Trust for £35 ($69). £27.50 goes towards purchasing a soccer club, buying new players and other club expenditure with the remaining £7.50 going towards administration. The Trust will acquire a soccer club only on the basis that the purchase provides a controlling stake (51%+) of the club and where the club is either debt free or has a manageable level of debt.

Members are then said to have “an equal say in team selection, player transfers and the running of the club.”

MyFootballClub aims to buy a mid-tier English soccer club with an aim of building the club into a future Premier Division side.

At the time of writing MyFootballClub had over 53,000 members and had taken more than £1.375 million ($2.73 million) in member subscriptions. The site is currently in negotiations with four prospective acquisition targets.

Windows Users Caused Skype Outage

,Skype has finally explained the reasons behind the 36+ hour outage of their popular P2P VOIP service last week: Windows Users.

According to Skype the outage was caused by “a massive restart of our user’s computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine software update” which The Register points out was Microsoft’s monthly patch Tuesday. Patch Tuesday is the time of the month Windows users receive security updates that often result in widespread reboots by Thursday.

Skype said that whilst their peer-to-peer network has an inbuilt ability to self-heal, the event “revealed a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly.”

See our previous Skype coverage, including the Skype outage here.

Helium Marketplace: Make Money Writing Online

Helium is a directory of user generated articles. Anyone can submit an article to any of 24 different categories (arts, autos, politics, etc.). Articles can be submitted directly to channels, entered into contests, or as part of a debate. Since Helium’s launch last October the site has gotten over 69,000 writers and accumulated over 400,000 articles on 60,000 topics.

Over the past couple of months they’ve been running a pilot program for new “Marketplace” service that connects authors and publishers. Today, they’re officially launching the service. Using “Marketplace”, publishers can list bounties for articles they want written. Authors then submit their stories following the publisher’s writing guidelines and compete for the bounty. Publishers can select any of the articles as the winner, although Helium’s peer review ratings help rank the list. Payments per article range from $20 to over $100, with 20% transaction fee going to Helium.

For the pilot they have 14 publishers listing about 10 bounties a piece. In September they expect to have over 1000 publishers on the system.

Bet On Anything And Everything With BluBet

BluBet lets you and your friends bet on anything, while avoiding the rather controversial use of real money in online gambling. On BluBet, players will be able to place bets on anything from Brittany’s sex life, to Facebook outgrowing MySpace. The site is launching out of a quiet beta and is backed with $225,000 from Jawed Karim (Co-Founder of YouTube), Kevin Hartz (Co-Founder of Xoom), Joe Greenstein (Co-Founder and CEO of Flixster) and Keith Rabois (Former PayPal & LinkedIn Executive and Current Slide Executive).

You start off with 30,000 BluBucks, their fake currency. Bets are based on topics (technology, politics, business), much like a news site. Anyone can post a bet, which consists of a question, a pot, and an ante.

Bets are broken into two types of categories, polls and challenges. Polls base the outcome of the bet on the most popular response. Challenges base the winners on the outcome of some real world event (e.g who wins a football game). Every bet is live for a set period of time, with challenges needing the person initiating the bet to list the final outcome. You get 1,000 extra BluBucks for posting a bet and winners split the pots amongst themselves. Your winnings rank you on a leader board and are tracked in your personal profile. If you go bust, it’s marked on your record and you restart with 10,000 BluBucks.

Fraudulent bets, where users rally to affect the outcome, are naturally a concern. However, they’ve implemented a system where players rate how good a bet was after the bet closes. The rating for the individual bet is added to a users overall rating, hopefully making crooks with low ratings easy to avoid. Otherwise it’s a case of “Caveat Emptor” with spending your virtual dollars.

The founders see it as a simple way of creating a predictive market, although that’s not their goal. Even though free systems don’t motivate users with enough of an upside to be consistently accurate in aggregate, some free systems have discovered very successful individuals. Money-free PicksPal was able to beat the Vegas spread for sports, but probably serves as a proxy for a lot of the real sports gambling happening offline. Social stock picking startups are another category trying to create a predictive market based off of their users. Social Picks, MarketWatch, and the Motley Fool CAPS service are some of the sites taking this on without real money. Covestor is another social stock site that ties investments to your real account.

Zyb, The Mobile Social Network

Michael Arrington

16 comments »

The idea of taking an address book application and turning it into a social network isn’t new - Plaxo just did it two weeks ago.

Now ZYB, a Danish startup, is using the mobile phone contact list as the center of the network, and the company doesn’t have the emotional baggage that still lingers with Plaxo and makes many users hesitant to trust them (I, for one, forgave them long ago).

Zyb first launched in mid 2006 as a service to back up your mobile phone. Through a relatively painless process, users can auto-sync their contacts and calendar to ZYB’s servers. It’s useful in the event of a lost phone, but the web interface is actually much easier to use to enter new contact and calendar information, too. The service, which is free, has about 200,000 active users (mostly in Europe).

ZYB, realizing that people add most or all of their close friends, co-workers and family as mobile phone contacts, has now built a social network to leverage those connections. You can add anyone on your contact list as a friend, which sends a request to them to add you as well. Users have standard profile pages to add photos, comments, etc. And they can also text/sms in status updates which appear on their profile, and friends can choose to subscribe to those status updates via text as well (very Twitter-like).

ZYB is free to users, although the company says they will eventually add premium services like Outlook-sync for an additional fee.

The basic ZYB service is difficult to use on U.S. mobile phones, although the setup takes only a minute on European phones. U.S. residents can still sign up and use the service, though (as I have done) and simply add contacts manually.

The company is headquartered in Copenhagen, and has a development office with most of its 20 employees in Cambridge. They raised €3 million in funding from Nordic Venture Partners in late 2006.

Finally, Twitter Adds Search

It’s a seemingly trivial feature, but Twitter’s lack of a search function led me and others to use Google or other search engines to try to figure out someone’s Twitter page. Today they’ve added that feature and allow search via name or other profile information (location, bio, and url).

It seems that Twitter has become much more stable since the launch of competitors like Pownce, Jaiku, Yappd and others. And now we’re getting new feature releases too. The wonders of competition.

How Grey Is Your Valley: Making Money From Open Source

Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg has spoken out against a number of open source projects for profiteering from their code.

The two examples Mullenweg cites are the open source forum platform Vanilla, which recently started including links in their code as a means to cover server and administration costs, and Pligg, which is currently on the market.

The post from Mullenweg follows an earlier crackdown in July against the inclusion of sponsored themes (themes that included paid text links) from the WordPress directories.

Given this crackdown on making revenue from an open source platform, the question then becomes: where is the line. How grey is your valley?

It’s important when considering the question to look at the different ways owners of open source platforms such as WordPress make money. Mullenweg was a co-founder of the Wordpress open source platform community. Today, as well as maintaining a chief role with the WordPress open source community, Mullenweg is the founder, and according to their website “Chief BBQ Taste Tester” of Automattic. Automattic’s business model relies on two key products: Wordpress.com and Akismet.

Wordpress.com relies entirely on the code base of the WordPress open source community. It is free to use for most, but they charge the top tier of users. On the whole it’s probably not a highly profitable business, yet none the less there is revenue. Without the Wordpress code there is nothing.

Akismet is a service that relies on the failure of the WordPress code to be able to natively deal with comment spam. The service is free for personal use and a paid service for everyone else. As the co-founder and essentially the head of the WordPress open source movement, Mullenweg leads the initiatives by WordPress to combat comment spam. On the other hand as the head of Automattic he runs a company that profits from those very failings. The question then becomes: can one profit from the failings of an open source product whilst still leading that very code’s development?

I’m not suggesting that anything Mullenweg does is wrong; indeed for someone still very young he deserves much admiration for all he has achieved. Revenue from open source is much broader than the occasional sponsored link, something that Mullenweg continues to rally against. It was not that long ago that Mullenweg was sprung for including in excess of 150,000 spam pages on Wordpress.org; it was an honest mistake but as they say, people who live in glass houses…

The question really is whether there is an acceptable line for advertising and conflicts of interest. Everyone is entitled to receive compensation for effort, including Mullenweg. I just remain unconvinced that those offering the odd paid link on a WordPress template is any different or worse than Mullenweg, who not only stuffs links to his own blog in every standard install of WordPress, but also runs a company that benefits from open source software, and at that the continued failures of that software to code serious issues.

Disclosure: Text Link Ads is a sponsor of this site. I also maintain a Text Link Ads account. Although the TLA crew may appreciate this post, I wasn’t asked to write it.

VideoEgg And Lots Of Others Call B.S. On YouTube

VideoEgg’s overlay advertising system has been in the market for a year and is driving “significant” revenue for the company. it’s so successful, in fact, that they recently launched a Facebook advertising network based on the same technology.

The idea is to use a Flash overlay advertisement with some basic information and graphics that takes up a small part of the viewable video area. Users click the ad and get a more in depth video ad. It’s less intrusive than a pre or post roll ad, and has far better performance than ads placed around a video. It’s likely to become the standard way ads are placed on video, even potentially on normal television as the thirty second ad spot continues to decline.

Given VideoEgg’s success with the unit it’s no surprise that YouTube has adopted the same format with their advertising. But it is surprising that YouTube failed to give even a passing mention to the company that invented the unit. VideoEgg also claims to have a patent application on this - something YouTube will certainly have to deal with down the road.

Nick Carr points out that much of the early press on YouTube was written by people who failed to do their homework. Carr trashes a CNET article that he says was basically an ad for YouTube. CNET subsequently changed the title of their article but there is still no mention of VideoEgg’s invention of the unit

Meanwhile, VideoEgg seems to be handling the situation well and taking advantage of the publicity. They added the graphic above to their home page, and are talking to press about their product. Suddenly, everyone is interested.

Ok, Ok. All Of You (even YouTube) Invented Video Overlay Ads “First”

When I wrote a post earlier today suggesting that YouTube was not the first to use a Flash overlay advertisement for online video, I didn’t realize I’d be getting so many emails and comments disputing exactly who first invented the unit.

VideoEgg has certainly been doing this for a year or so. In a comment to that post, though, an (unconfirmed) ex-YouTuber says the idea was “discussed long ago inside the company” and follows up with:

All other video sharing websites that came out around the time YouTube emerged were still using Quicktime or Windows Media. YouTube might as well accuse VideoEgg of stealing the idea of using a Flash video player.

Next up was Adbrite founder Philip Kaplan, who emailed me to say that Adbrite has had their own overlay product for nearly a year. He also pointed out that I wrote about it. The ad unit is less sophisticated, but it is certainly a Flash video overlay ad unit.

And finally, Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire sent me a long email saying they’ve been doing this as far back as October 2005. He also says the ad units are not particularly popular with advertisers:

I caught your post on VideoEgg taking credit for video overlays as an ad format vis a vis the latest YouTube ad product introduction.

To reinforce this point, while I don’t want to claim “invention”, we were certainly very well ahead of the market when we introduced video overlay ads back in October of 2005, just as YouTube was getting their first pirated episodes of The Sopranos on their site. At the Web 2.0 conference that fall, Brightcove debuted our beta service and as part of that both demo’d and discussed how we wanted to changing video and television advertising with new formats that could engage the user in a non-intrusive manner while creating opt-in ‘takeover sponsorship’ units that a marketer would be excited about. We demo’d overlay ads from Coca Cola running in a MTV Networks channel that we were just launching with them. The New York Times covered this debut.

We subsequently demo’d and introduced these formats again at AdTech in New York that fall, and if you speak with any number of a major content owner brand partners, it has been part of our platform since then, along with a wide range of other innovations in video ad formats, policies and targetting mechanisms.

Interestingly, despite having been 18+ months “ahead of the market”, to our disappointment, there has been extremely limited uptake by the advertising community around these formats. There are a lot of factors behind this limited uptake, including:

- the advertising community buying video have been very focused on leveraging existing creative and buying patterns in the online video space
- most content publishers and media owners have been focused on getting the ‘basics’ up and running, and also responding to the RFPs from marketers and advertisers, which are almost 100% focused on basic short-form video commercials
- for premium brands and content, the basic pre-roll and companion banners are yielding extremely attractive CPMs and there is little evidence that :15 ads have any negative impact on end-user viewership behavior — in fact, our own metrics show that sites that run without any ads, and then introduce :15 pre-rolls and banners achieve identical usage and performance (e.g. no drop-off in users because of ads) on their content.

Nonetheless, we remain very bullish about ‘composite’ video advertising formats that combine overlays and unique and non-intrusive calls to action with deeper interactive marketing experiences. We’ve been pushing this for years and only now are starting to see the publishers and media owners that we work with begin to take an interest in these formats. I believe this is because we’re now entering a phase where content companies are looking at ways to maximize yield and revenue within their content, and they are introducing more mid and long-form content which require, by economic necessity, a different suite of formats to deliver a good user experience.

So where does that leave us? Maybe none of these startups did - Om says it all goes back to old school television. We’ll see if VideoEgg’s patent filing is unique enough to be issued. But they’ve already said they won’t be using it offensively to stop others from doing this. The market will sort it all out.

cartoon credit: the amazing Hugh MacLeod

Wikipedia Edits Cause Australian Political Scandal

The Australian Prime Minister’s Office have been caught editing Wikipedia, the latest in a growing line of Wikiscanner entrapments.

Staff from the Office of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PMC) edited Wikipedia entries that were damaging to the Goverment, including pages covering the Children Overboard Affair and Mandatory Detention. Other edits included deleting the nickname of “Captain Smirk” from the Wikipedia biography of Australian Treasurer Peter Costello, and a range of bizarre edits, including the addition of the line “Poo bum dicky wee wee” to a Wikipedia article on Bubishi, a book related to Martial Arts.

Australia faces a Federal Election by November this year, and the edits have become major news locally. Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd accused the Prime Minister of directing public servants to change history to suit the Government and that the behavior was “odd.” Notably though, Rudd admitted that his own staff might have edited Wikipedia “for factual changes.” The truth I guess is in the eyes of the beholder.

The Australian press also discovered that staff from the Australian Department of Defence were the most active Wikipeda editors among Australian Government Departments, having made over 5000 Wikipedia edits. DOD edits included changes to pages ranging from the 9/11 Truth Movement, the Australian Defence Force Academy and the Vietnam War-era Pentagon Papers. A Defence spokesman said that the Department would move to ban access to Wikipeda for all staff.

Could The GPhone Be Nigh?

Todays completely unsubstantiated rumor comes from Rediff News, a usually well respected source of news based in India. Rediff is reporting that the Google Phone is set to be launched in 2 weeks time! The GPhone is said to simultaneously launch in both Europe and the United States, with the only thing standing in Google’s way being US regulatory approval.

The report goes on to claim that Google is believed to be in talks with a number of Indian telcos.

If speculation is any guidance, the certainty of there being some sort of Google mobile device in development is a given. The Register reported in March that a European Google executive confirmed the existence of the GPhone and other reports go back to 2006; Om Malik reporting in December that a Google phone was being developed for release in 2008. Engadget posted alleged pictures of the GPhone in January 07 (see pic) with notes claiming that the device was a button-less touchscreen phone that came with GPS built-in for pinpoint navigation around Google Maps. ZDNet wrote that the phone was said to be 3G with built in Wifi and was designed by Samsung. The Register again reported in early August that the GPhone would include 3G, Wifi and GPS, and that UK mobile operator Orange was in talks with Google to carry the device.

Google has continued to deny rumors of the phones existence, but has taken a more public interest lately in the mobile phone sector, confirming that it was likely to bid for a slice of the soon to be released 700mhz spectrum in the United States. Google as a mobile phone operator would make a lot more sense if Google were also preparing a GPhone that was automatically fine tuned to work with Google’s variety of applicable services, including Gmail, Maps and Google Docs.

Any Google phone will also be immediately compared to Apple’s iPhone. Whilst the iPhone provides an attractive package, it has so far only taken a small marketshare in the US cellular market, and is yet to have been released anywhere else in the world. A 3G (and therefore quicker) internet focused GPhone with a broad release worldwide could well present a strong competitor to Apple.

Intuit Shuts Down Zipingo. Yelp Winning This Space Through Attrition

Zipingo, the small business review site launched by Intuit in late 2005, shut down yesterday.

When it launched, Zipingo competed with a slew of other startups that were targeting local business reviews. Of the three that we mentioned - Yelp, Judy’s Book and Insider Pages - only one, Yelp, remains in it’s original form. Judy’s Book changed its model to focus on coupons and deals, and Insider Pages sold for little more than the capital it originally raised to CitySearch.

The message above is all that remains of Zipingo. Without coming right out and saying it, the reason they’ve shut it down is that no one was apparently using it. Comscore wan’t tracking them at all (see Yelp v. Insider pages below).

Other startups, of course, are joing this space all the time. Google and Yahoo will take their pound of flesh, but upstarts like AskPoodle are giving it a shot as well.

Zipingo joins the TechCrunch DeadPool.

Dapper to Launch Instant Facebook AppMaker

This Tuesday, Israel-based Dapper will launch the private beta of Facebook AppMaker, a new tool that the company claims will provide people with a dead simple way to create new Facebook applications.

At its core, Dapper allows users to create API’s called “Dapps” by selecting data from Websites, RSS/XML feeds, Google Gadgets, and more. Each “Dapp” is an XML which can be manipulated in any number of ways. The company released a tool to create Netvibes modules in late 2006.

Dapper’s Facebook AppMaker lets these Dapps be transformed into full-blown Facebook applications. This includes functionalities such as remote search and retrieval, remote login, and multi-page apps. A Facebook Developer account is a prerequisite to the AppMaker process itself.

The test app I created was an effortless process: I created a Dapp, entered it in the AppMaker wizard, entered the appropriate Facebook’s API/Secret keys, saved and installed. While creating a Dapp was not a sophisticated process on Dapper’s side, it certainly could be more intuitive. I found the Facebook side of the process to require a higher degree of technological aptitude.

Dapper is debuting the AppMaker with an Answers.com application that features three applets: Word of the Day, Today in History, and Do You Have the Answers? Another already available app is Go2Web20’s. Expect an additional application to be launched in the next couple of days with a “high-profile” media player.

Headed by Eran Shir (CEO) and Jon Aizen (CTO), Dapper employs a team of 15 and is in the midst of setting-up an office in San Francisco. In 2006, the company secured a $1.2M funding round from Accel Partners. The company first launched in August 2006 and we covered them as part of a roundup post along with Yahoo Pipes, Teqlo, Proto and OpenKapow in March 2007.

Sign-up for beta access by emailing techcrunch@dapper.net.

All New Bloglines Launches in Beta

Bloglines, the grandfather of web based RSS readers, launched a new beta site this evening at beta.bloglines.com. Like everyone else these days, the most notable new feature is an Ajax customizable home page where users can drag and reorder feeds for a quick view.

Bloglines now has three viewing options - quick view (the new Ajax drag and drop view in the image to the left), three pane “Outlook-like” view and the classic full view with two panes. The site is also trying to manage unread feeds more intelligently, a common user complaint in the past.

The company says more changes are coming. Options for saving, sending and sharing stories, tools for building link blogs, managing blog rolls, etc. are all on the way. In the meantime, the classic bloglines site will remain available at bloglines.com. Feeds remain synced between the two sites.

Product iterations come very slowly at Bloglines, which was acquired by Ask.com in early 2005. The last major news from them was the integration of blog search over a year ago. Meanwhile, Google Reader has quickly grabbed the attention of the early adopter crowd, and is by far the most popular feed reader used by our readers according to Feedburner stats.

Richard MacManus has a much longer review of the product at Read/Write Web.

VideoEgg And Lots Of Others Call B.S. On YouTube

VideoEgg’s overlay advertising system has been in the market for a year and is driving “significant” revenue for the company. it’s so successful, in fact, that they recently launched a Facebook advertising network based on the same technology.

The idea is to use a Flash overlay advertisement with some basic information and graphics that takes up a small part of the viewable video area. Users click the ad and get a more in depth video ad. It’s less intrusive than a pre or post roll ad, and has far better performance than ads placed around a video. It’s likely to become the standard way ads are placed on video, even potentially on normal television as the thirty second ad spot continues to decline.

Given VideoEgg’s success with the unit it’s no surprise that YouTube has adopted the same format with their advertising. But it is surprising that YouTube failed to give even a passing mention to the company that invented the unit. VideoEgg also claims to have a patent application on this - something YouTube will certainly have to deal with down the road.

Nick Carr points out that much of the early press on YouTube was written by people who failed to do their homework. Carr trashes a CNET article that he says was basically an ad for YouTube. CNET subsequently changed the title of their article but there is still no mention of VideoEgg’s invention of the unit

Meanwhile, VideoEgg seems to be handling the situation well and taking advantage of the publicity. They added the graphic above to their home page, and are talking to press about their product. Suddenly, everyone is interested.

http://www.techcrunch.com/

TwitKu: Single Interface For Twitter And Jaiku

TwitKu is a new site that is sort of a Meebo (web instant messaging) for the Twitter and Jaiku “presence blogging” services.

The site brings your Twitter and Jaiku accounts onto one screen and adds a posting interface that allows you to post just to one of the services, or to both. The benefit for many people that use both services religiously is obvious. Very simple and very useful for some people.

Both Twitter and Jaiku have APIs, making this possible (or at least manageable). Clones/similar products like Pownce and the new Yappd don’t have APIs. When and if those services release them, I’d expect TwitKu to quickly add those services as well. And that would save those of us who want to use all of the services but refuse to choose a lot of time.

And since Twitter and Jaiku are all about presence and status updates of friends, there’s no reason not to add Facebook status right away, too.

TripAdvisor Acquires Facebook App Where I’ve Been For $3 Million

We have now confirmed that this deal has not happened and is in the discussion stage only. Inside Facebook pulled the trigger on their post a little too soon.

TripAdvisor has acquired Facebook Application “Where I’ve Been” for a reported $3 million.

Where I’ve Been allows users to share where they have been in the world from their Facebook profiles and has approximately 2.3 million users.

Inside Facebook notes that the $3 million purchase price values Where I’ve Been users at around $1.30 each.

The purchase is the first major seven figure acquisition for a dedicated Facebook only application. Where I’ve Been was recently included on the TechCrunch interns list of favorite Facebook apps.

Wiki Jacking

Following the decision in January by Wikipedia to strip SEO benefits from outgoing links by adding the link-nofollow tag (see our coverage of how the rule doesn’t apply to certain third party wiki links) the once rampant gaming of Wikipedia has all but disappeared. SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin posted during the week on a new technique being used that instead of building Google juice to a particular site, aims to knock others off the top positions on Google by promoting the position of Wikipedia pages to the top of each specific Google search query. I’m not quite sure exactly what color hat the method may be (and Rand asks the same question), but it is clever.