SOMEWHAT FRANK

Amazon MP3 vs. iTunes, Microsoft Facebook Investing?, Widget Timeline, CSS & Photoshop Tips & YouTube Adsense

Photo of the Week: The San Diego, California Harbor taken during DEMOfall 2007 earlier this week.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 09.30.2007

HumanFlipbook.com

Have you ever given a stick figure life with a flipbook? Erbert & Gerbert's has put its own spin on a flipbook by creating what they are calling the first ever human flipbook. It is posted at humanflipbook.com. It's a very artistic and clever way to passively promote the Midwest-based sub and club sandwich shop.

Music Shake: Create Music & Ringtones

Music Shake, a Korean born startup, captivated the audience at TechCrunch40 last week in San Francisco. Music Shake makes is easy to create music with its easy to use application. I gave Music Shake a whirl last night to if creating a song was as easy as it looked on the stage of TechCrunch40. 

Mixx: A Social News Remix

Mixx launched last week to offer up a social news site for the mainstream to explore. Founded by Chris McGill, formerly of Yahoo and USA Today, Mixx aims to offer a place for large publishing companies to get into the social media space. Mixx enables users to contribute and discover stories, video and photos as they blend their own mix of the Web.

New Upcoming Web 2.0 & Tech Conferences

It has truly been an action packed 2007 web/tech conference season thus far. I previously listed a number of conferences to attend in 2007 but since January a number of new ones have popped up. I wanted to highlight few additional conferences as they are approaching  and you might want to get your tickets booked today.

Try This: Q & A-Style Recommendations

Looking for a recommendation? Try This leverages user contributed questions and answers to offer recommendations. Try This reminds me of a cross between Digg and Yahoo Answers as it offers community recommendations by leveraging a question and answer format.

FeedHub Personalized Feed Creator

Having problems getting through all of your feeds in your reading list? Keeping up with the latest news from all the various publications can sometimes be as difficult as keeping up with your email where "email bankruptcy" runs rampant. FeedHub, a product of Pittsburgh-based mSpoke, has launched its personalized feed and recommendation product at the 2007 DEMOfall Conference. I was part of the FeedHub private beta program. FeedHub creates a personalized RSS feed from you reading list and intelligently displays the most relevant post.

YourTrumanShow Video Widget Launches

YourTrumanShow, the personal video diaries startup, has just launched, VideoMap, video discovery widget at the DEMO Conference in San Diego, California. Catering to artists and online personalities, YourTrumanShow, looks to cultivate discovery within its network by exposing its interesting video linking feature to other social network and the Web via VideoMap.

coComment Version Two

coComment, a Geneva, Switzerland based startup, first surfaced in early 2006 as a way to track all of your blogosphere conversations and in its initial form as just side project experiment. coComment is back and this time they are a serious company looking to help organize, track, share and fuel conversations online. coComment has launched version 2 which offers a number of commenting options and most noticeably is a lot more social.

Yahoo Buys Zimbra, Google vs. Facebook, More Social Digg, Google Sharing Stuff, Zink and Zync, TechCrunch40 & Me Meme

Photo of the Week: I spotted this interesting business model marketing strategy at the TechCrunch40 conference - which was the biggest story this week.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbit: 09.23.2007

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Video Chat

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, sat down with TechCrunch co-editor Mike Arrington at the TechCrunch40 conference for a fireside chat. Mark talks about opening up the Facebook platform and announced the FBFUND is a $10 million grant fund from Facebook aimed at helping application developers. The grants range from $25K to $250K and Facebook takes no equity or debt.

MeeVee Personalized TV Via Amazon

MeeVee, a Silicon Valley-based personalized TV startup, has recently announced a partnership with Amazon to offer TV content via their Unboxed Video Previewer widget. The MeeVee product offers a personalized TV listings and video content. With its sites set on being the a personalized Joost-like product without having to install any software MeeVee will now be leveraging Amazon's widget distribution channel. Amazon widgets can be found at: http://widgets.amazon.com.

Xobni Social Email Management Plugin

My email continues to overflow as I receive large amounts in several email accounts. I have written about email management a few times before so needless to say I was very excited to witness the private beta launch of Xobni at TechCrunch40. Xobni is more that just "inbox" spelled backwards as it offers a Microsoft Outlook plugin that helps to attack the email management problem and in doing so exposes the social network behind email. I installed Xobni and was quite impressed with its capabilities.

Picking TechCrunch40 Winners

The TechCrunch40 conference has come and gone with Mint ultimately came out the biggest winner (aside from TechCrunch itself, of course) scoring the $50K award for best demo at the event. Below I give some of my thoughts on a number of the TechCrunch40 companies at the conference.

Congratulations to the TechCrunch team for pulling off its first conference. I am sure it learned some lessons from the conference and will improve upon all of its shortcomings with its next attempt. I just wonder if the next conference will be called TechCrunch Infinity?

Metaplace Web Virtual World Launches

Metaplace, a company founded by San Diego-based Areae, has just launched a virtual world at TechCrunch40 that can be embedded on the Web via a flash-based client widget. Dubbed Second Life on the Web, Metaplace leverages open standards to enable players to develop worlds that can be accessed anywhere from the Web to mobile networks. Every world is indexed, tagged and rated by users on the Metaplace portal, so virtual worlds in the Metaplace network can be easily linked together.