Diigo to Launch Website Slideshow Feature Next Week

Website annotation tool Diigo will officially announce its new WebSlides feature next week.

The new widget is an embeddable player that presents feeds or bookmarks as live web pages in an interactive slideshow format, complete with full page content including links, comments, and ads. The widget can be sent to friends and colleagues or placed on websites, blogs, and social networks. A bit of good news for publishers: every slide view will actually register a page view for the content owner.

WebSlides also enables Diigo users to highlight important sections and annotate pages on the fly with sticky notes. Users can also bookmark, tag, share, and clip content from the pages in WebSlides for future reference in their own Diigo online folders.

To set up a WebSlides presentation, you simply enter a feed or list of bookmarks, add background music or voice narration, and click “Play”.

There is a lot of competition in the website annotation space, but Diigo’s WebSlides is the first slideshow widget to preserve total page content. Combined with Diigo’s research capabilities, WebSlides makes for a great product. The company will be presenting in the TechCrunch40 demo pit next week.

Our previous coverage of Diigo is here.

Zoho’s Business Suite Taking on Google Apps

Zoho has been a busy company. Over the past two years they’ve launched 12 applications along with 4 utilities, nearly all with APIs. Last October Zoho tied these programs together for individuals with a single sign-on feature. Today they’re releasing a similar bundling for businesses that takes on Google’s own business productivity suite.

The new release is called Zoho Business, and will bring multiple Zoho applications under a single roof along with an administration console to manage users, domains, and groups. Zoho business will feature multiple user accounts with varying security levels, single sign-on across all Zoho applications, domain name control, remote backup, telephone support, and a variety of other features to be announced.

The suite will will come in a Free and Pro version, mirroring Google’s offer. However, Zoho is expected to price their suite around $40/user/year, $10 less than Google Apps. Zoho’s offering will also consist of more applications than SMBs get with Google Apps, which consists of calendaring, email, Docs & Spreadsheets, Page Creator, and Start Page. Zoho will include all 12 of their collaboration programs (chat, email, planner, wiki, crm, project manager, etc.).

Zoho has yet to finalize the service differences between the free and paid version. It is currently available in private beta, will go into public beta next month, and exit public beta during the first quarter for next year. You can apply for the beta here.

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.