Odeo (Formerly SonicMountain) Acquires FireAnt

If you know who FireAnt is, you either love podcasts or you’re a long time reader of this blog. The company built up a cult following in 2005 and 2006 as the podcast directory and player, and competed head on with Evan Williams’ Odeo for mindshare and users.

FireAnt’s assets were acquired by Odeo for $400,000, they companies will announce today. Not the old Odeo, but Sonic Mountain, which renamed itself Odeo after acquiring it earlier this year. For less than $2 million, Sonic Mountain has now put two of the more well know podcasting brands together under one roof.

The acquired assets include FireAnt’s technology, particularly their desktop media player for Windows and Mac, as well as FireAnt’s database of feeds and metadata. Founder Josh Kinberg joins Odeo to lead product development and integration of the Odeo and FireAnt technology.

Everything will be branded Odeo from here on out, so take a good look at that screenshot. If you are a FireAnt user, it will be changing significantly soon.

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.

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.

Netflix Quietly Rolls Out Social Networking Features

We caught wind this morning of some new social features on the Netflix website. Members can now navigate to a “Community” section, which replaces an older “Friends” page.

According to the Netflix Community Blog, the company unveiled the new community section on July 30th and has been tweaking it significantly over the last couple of weeks. There are a number of community features so far:

1. Latest reviews stream that continually loads movie reviews in real time as people post them to Netflix
2. “Members’ Top 10 Lists” widget that displays user-generated movie lists based on what Netflix thinks you will like
3. “Unique in…” area that shows the movies that are uniquely popular in your hometown
4. Selection of strangers on Netflix who share your interests or are most “similar to you”
5. List of your friends’ recent activities with Netflix (what movies they have requested, whether they have been returned, etc.)
6. “Friends’ Quiz” that generates simple questions to test you about your Netflix friends’ movie-renting behavior
7. Friends’ Love/Hated area that shows the movies your friends loved or hated (pretty self-explanatory)

If you are a Netflix user, check out these new features and let us know what you think in the comments. The Netflix developers are also open to feedback, so head over to their blog as well to give them your two cents.

In light of our recent coverage of social networking platforms, Netflix appears to be implementing features that support the notion of niche social networking.

These developments also put Netflix in more direct competition with companies like Flixster that provide social networks for movie fans.

Thanks for the tip Joel Simkhai.

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Posted in Company & Product Profiles |

MySpace, A Place For (prescription painkillers a

DOPOD - C800

DOPOD - C800 This 168 grams phone has a Lithium-Ion battery type, which allows you a talk time of 300 minutes and stand by time of 200 hours. It has added features like voice dial, voice mail, call conferencing, specific caller tones, mp3 capability, A2DP for stereo sound output through Bluetooth, quad band, vibration mode, 65k colour TFT touchscreen with resolution of 240 x 320 pixels, Bluetooth, Infrared, USB connector, GPRS, EDGE, Wi-Fi, MMS, EMS, SMS, handsfree speaker, flight mode, handwriting recognition, pocket outlook, office suite and internet explorer. It also has a 128MB ROM and 64MB RAM, microSD card slot, pda enabled, Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 for Pocket PC, 195 Mhz TI OMAP 850 processor, 2MP camera with features like auto focus, 8 shooting modes, 8 scenery modes and video recording. It comes with an inbuilt sliding QWERTY Keyboard. Price Rs. :- 39,000

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SAMSUNG - SGH-E690 This 83 grams clamshell phone has a Lithium-Ion battery type, which allows you talk time of 360 minutes and stand by time of 250 hours. It has added features like 65k colour TFT internal display with resolution of 128 x 160 pixels and 65k colour external display with resolution of 96 x 96 pixels, voice dial, voice mail, call conferencing, triband, flight mode, vibration mode, predictive text input, polyphonic ringtones, music player (mp3, AAC and AAC+), fm radio, alarm clock, calendar,inbuilt dictaphone, handsfree speaker, MMS, EMS, SMS, EDGE, GPRS, Bluetooth, USB Connector and is WAP enabled. It has a VGA camera with features like 4x digital zoom, photo effects, multi shot, self timer, mosaic shot, image quality adjuster and video recording. It also has an inbuilt memory of 16MB, microSD card slot and sales package consists of 256MB microSD card. View More Price Rs. :- 8,079 User Rating : 10.00 Perfect

SAMSUNG - SGH-P310 This 73.6 grams phone has a Lithium-Ion battery type, which allows you talk time of 240 minutes and stand by time of 242 hours. It has added features like 262k colour TFT display with resolution of 320 x 240 pixels, voice mail, call conferencing, triband, flight mode, vibration mode, predictive text input, polyphonic ringtones, music player (mp3, AAC and AAC+), alarm clock, stopwatch, calendar, document viewer, inbuilt dictaphone, handsfree speaker, MMS, EMS, SMS, EDGE, GPRS, Bluetooth, Infrared and is WAP enabled. It has a 2MP camera with features like 4x digital zoom, flash, photo effects, multi shot, mosaic shot, image quality adjuster and video recording. It also is pda enabled and has an inbuilt memory of 80MB and a microSD card slot. It comes with a Leather Case with inbuilt secondary battery. View More Price Rs. :- 18,999 User Rating : 4.00 Mediocre

MOTOROLA - W375 This 88 grams clamshell phone has a lithium-ion battery type, which allows you talk time of 450 minutes and standby time of 250 hours. It has a 65k colour TFT internal display with resolution of 128 x 160 pixels and a mono external display. It also has features like VGA camera with 4x digital zoom, polyphonic ringtones, predictive text input, vibration mode, triband, mp3 capability, fm radio, MMS, EMS, SMS, GPRS, USB Connector, WAP, handsfree speaker, calculator, calendar, currency converter, alarm, clock and ringtone composer. View More Price Rs. :- 5,490

MOTOROLA - L7i This 96 grams phone has a Lithium-ion battery type, which allows you talk time of 315 minutes and stand by time of 345 hours. It has added features like inbuilt dictaphone, handsfree speaker, voice dial, voice mail, call conferencing, specific caller tones, vibration mode, quad band, predictive text input, bluetooth enabled, SMS messaging, picture messaging, inbuilt games, polyphonic ringtones, EDGE, GPRS, MMS and is WAP 1.2 enabled. It has a microSD card slot, inbuilt VGA camera with 4x digital zoom and video recording feature. Its sales package consists of 128 MB microSD card, USB connectivity cable and headset. Price Rs. :- 8,200

MOTOROLA - RIZR Z3 This 115 grams slider phone has a Lithium-ion battery type, which allows you talk time of 400 minutes and standby time of 350 hours. It has added features like voice dial, call conferencing, specific caller tones, quad band, 2MP camera with 8x digital zoom, photo light and video recording, email client, calendar, calculator, flight mode, inbuilt dictaphone, handsfree speaker, vibration mode, predictive text input, PTT, SMS, EMS, MMS, EDGE, GPRS, Bluetooth, Infrared, USB Connector and is WAP enabled. It comes with 262k colour TFT display with resolution of 176 x 220 pixels and also has features like mp3 capability, polyphonic ringtones, pda enabled, inbuilt memory of 20MB and a microSD card slot. Price Rs. :- 13,138