Photo of the Week: Happy Memorial Day! Have a cupcake. Photo credit: Megan.
Photo of the Week: Happy Memorial Day! Have a cupcake. Photo credit: Megan.
Posted at 10:06 PM in Acquisition, Facebook, Google, Health, Health 2.0, Health and wellness, Microsoft, Science, Social Media, Somewhat Frank, SomewhatFrank, SomewhatFrank.com, Web 2.0, Weekly Tidbits, Yahoo | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: AOL, Bebo, Facebook, FriendFeed, Google Health, Microsoft, NASA, Public, Rails, Ruby on Rails, Technology, Yahoo
Posted at 02:56 PM in Acquisition, Business, Chicago, DEMO, InterActiveCorp, Microsoft, Social Media, Social Networking, Social News, Somewhat Frank, SomewhatFrank, SomewhatFrank.com, TECH cocktail, TECHcocktail, Technologies, Technology, Web 2.0, Web/Tech, Weekly Tidbits, Yahoo | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Acquisitions, AOL, Danger, DEMO, Google, M&A, mergers, Micro-Hoo, Microsoft, Semantic Web, Sidekick, Social Networks, Starbucks, T-Mobile, TECH cocktail, WiFi, Yahoo, Zimbra
Photo of the Week: This week I spent time at the DEMO08 conference in Palm Desert, California and I snapped this shot from my hotel room balcony.
Posted at 10:46 PM in Advertising, DEMO, DEMO08, Facebook, Internet, Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft, Nick O'Neill, OpenSocial, Social Graph, Social Media, Social Networking, Somewhat Frank, SomewhatFrank, SomewhatFrank.com, Technologies, Technology, Web 2.0, Web/Tech, Weekly Tidbits, Yahoo | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: DEMO, DEMO08, Event, Facebook, Microsoft, OpenSocial, Social API, Social Graph, Startups, Technology, Web 2.0, Web/Tech, Yahoo
Photo of the Week: With Halloween right around the corner this photo seemed appropriate.
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 10.28.2007
Posted at 09:31 PM in Facebook, Microsoft, Small Business, Somewhat Frank, SomewhatFrank, SomewhatFrank.com, Startup, StumbleUpon, Technologies, Technology, Web 2.0, Web/Tech, Weekly Tidbits | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Adobe, APML, Bootstrapping, Buzzword, Creative Commons, Facebook, File Sharing, Microsoft, ProQuo, Startups, StumbleUpon
Photo of the Week: These colorful orbs were all over the SF MOMA on Wednesday evening as MySpace.com held an event to celebrate their invasion of San Francisco with the opening of an office in the area.
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbit: 10.21.2007
Posted at 03:05 AM in Apple, Business, Facebook, Flickr, Funding, Google, iPhone, Microsoft, San Francisco, Social Media, Social Networking, Somewhat Frank, SomewhatFrank, SomewhatFrank.com, Startup, Technologies, Technology, Tumblr, VC, Web 2.0, Web/Tech, Weekly Tidbits, Widget Summit | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Amazon, Conference, Facebook, Google, gPhone, Porn 2.0, Social Porn, Startups, Summit, Tumblr, VC, Web 2.0, Widget Summit, YouPorn
Email management is something I have written about several times. Most recently, I highlighted Xobni which has helped organize and expose some of the hidden social aspects of email. However, Xobni does not file or read your mail for you. SimplyFile, an Outlook utility by TechHit, helps to organize and file your email in one click.
Posted at 03:01 AM in Business, email, Microsoft, Office 2.0, Personalization, Personalized, Recommendation Engine, Recommendations, SimplyFile, Somewhat Frank, SomewhatFrank, SomewhatFrank.com, Startup, Technologies, Technology, Twitter, Web 2.0, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)
Tags: Email, Management, Overload, SimplyFile
Photo of the Week: The San Diego, California Harbor taken during DEMOfall 2007 earlier this week.
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 09.30.2007
Posted at 03:50 PM in DEMOfall, Facebook, Microsoft, Social Media, Social Networking, Somewhat Frank, SomewhatFrank, SomewhatFrank.com, Technologies, Technology, Video, Web 2.0, Web/Tech, Weekly Tidbits, YouTube | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: $100 Laptop, Amazon MP3, CSS, DEMOfall 2007, Diigo, Facebook, iTunes, Microsoft, Photoshop, Social networks, Somewhat Frank, Widgets
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.
Posted at 10:13 PM in email, Microsoft, Office 2.0, San Francisco, Social Media, Social Networking, Somewhat Frank, SomewhatFrank, SomewhatFrank.com, Startup, techcrunch20, TechCrunch40, Technologies, Technology, Tool, Video, Web 2.0, Web/Tech, Xobni | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)
Photo of the Week: This photo was taken by, one of my skinnyCorp friends, Harper Reed as he captured some fresh Threadless designs.
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 08.26.2007
Posted at 11:05 AM in Attention, attention data, attention profile, Business, Community, CommunityNext, Conferences, Microsoft, MSN, NYTimes, Personal Homepage, Personalization, Personalized, Playboy, PlayboyU, Search, Social Media, Somewhat Frank, SomewhatFrank, SomewhatFrank.com, Tafiti, Technologies, Technology, Trends, Video, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Culture, Web/Tech, Weekly Tidbits, Widgets, Yahoo, YouTube | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 06.03.07
Internet Video vs DVRs Advertising & Measuring Online Video
Nielsens release of commercial data has led to quite a bit of discussion in the advertising industry about what counts as a commercial worth paying for. Mark Cuban weighs in.
The New Portals: It’s the Bread, Not the Peanut Butter
David Sacks writes about web portals and where they are going.
Google Takes Desktop Feed Readers Head On
Google is announcing a new technology called Google Gears. The technology enables web applications to work both online and offline. One of the first applications of Google Gears that I have seen is its integration with Google Reader.
Startup Search: tracking the web startup ecosystem
Niall Kennedy unveiled a product he hinted at a few weeks ago while talking with him in SF. The new site tracks the startup ecosystem. It's a directory and analytics tool called Startup Search. Startup Search tracks Web startups, their products, key employees,
investment firms, and investment partners. Startup Search also tracks
the success of each product since it was first introduced to the world,
using publicly available metrics pulled into a single page. It is a
research tool, a discovery engine, and a fact-filled directory of the Web startup world.
Comparison of Yahoo Pipes to Microsoft's PopFly
Jay Neely compares Yahoo Pipes to Microsoft’s PopFly and also does an early analysis of Google’s Mashup Editor.
Userplane Launches Revenue Sharing Program
Web messaging services company Userplane has launched a new
revenue-sharing program that brings monetization to online instant
messaging and web chat.
Attention! Particls Launches Advanced Alerts Platform
Particls launched out of private beta this week. It serves as a proportioning alert filter that notifies the user via news ticker, pop-up alerts and mobile SMS messaging prioritized according to user needs. CEO Chris Saad calls it: "an attention management engine."
Jason Calacanis’ Human-Powered Search Mahalo Launches
Jason Calacanis’ ’Project X,’ Mahalo (meaning ‘thank you’ in Hawaii), has launched and it’s a human-powered search engine that’s to Google like what Citizendium is to Wikipedia.
Amp'd, another MVNO bites the dust
As a result of our rapid growth, Amp'd's back-end infrastructure was
unable to keep up with customer demand. Amp'd has burned $360 million
and is filing for bankruptcy.
Sketch your Dream House
Floorplanner take the best of Web 2.0 and bring it to home design. It
is a wonderful application with professional tools and rich visual
interface that allow users to sketch their own dream home and share
their designs easily. Users are able to embed their designs on other
sites or blogs.
Google Launches a Directions API
Google launched a Directions API that will allow third-party sites to offer directions directly on their site.
Posted at 02:38 PM in Aggregator, Attention, attention data, attention profile, Beta, Business, Feed Reader, Feeds, Floorplanner, Google, Google Gears, Internet, Jason Calacanis, Mahalo, Mashup, Microsoft, Particls, Personal Homepage, Personalization, Personalized, Pipes, Research, Resource, RSS, Somewhat Frank, SomewhatFrank, SomewhatFrank.com, Startup, TECH cocktail, TECHcocktail, Technologies, Technology, Userplane, Web 2.0, Web/Tech, Weekly Tidbits, Yahoo | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Web 2.0, Weekly Tidbits
Photo of the Week: This photo was taken by Brian Solis of a video camera recording Sarah Meyers interviewing someone at the May 2007 Girls in Tech in SF.
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 05.20.07
Watch TV Stations From Your Web Browser
More and more services are popping enabling users to watch full screen videos right from a web browser. They kind of all have a similar television look & feel. It even looks like some of them inspired by Joost style.
Google Launches Universal Search
Google announced yesterday its new search system intended to bring together all of Google’s broad assortment of searches into format that should be more convenient for users. Google’s vision is to ultimately search across all of googles content and to
Did Microsoft go lose it head over aQuantive?
Just how wacky was Microsoft’s $6 billion bid for aQuantive? GigaOm tries to illustrate it in this article.
Who Will Be America's First TechPresident?
This challenge to all candidates was made on the TechPresident site earlier this week.
Windows Live Gallery partners program
Companies and brands may partner with Microsoft to highlight their Windows Live Gadget offerings for preferred inclusion in the Live.com personal homepage, Windows Live Spaces sidebar, and the Windows Vista sidebar.
TECH cocktail Takes On the Capitol City
Bub.blicio.us reports on the night that was a TECH cocktail in DC.
Google's Defensible Trump Card?
Google is betting the farm on personalization.
Feed Crier climbs into bed with IMified
By becoming part of IMified, Feed Crier will be able to offer more features to our users. Maybe reblogging alerts directly to your blog from your IM client. Or subscribing to alerts from sources other than feeds (think Google Calendar, To Do list reminder, etc.).
Enterprise RSS - 3 Major Vendors Show The Way
Forrester has just released a new report on Enterprise RSS. Specifically it tackles the issue of information overload in the corporate environment, now that RSS feeds are an important source of information in the workplace.
MyBlogLog to Rebrand and Make Significant Changes
MyBloglog is really only known amongst the first adoptors and blogosphere but it appears Yahoo will soon be positioning it for the mainstream.
Posted at 08:38 PM in Advertising, Business, Community, Enterprise RSS, Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, FeedCrier, Feeds, Gadgets, Google, homepage, iGoogle, Microsoft, MyBlogLog, Personal Homepage, Personalization, Personalized, RSS, Search, Somewhat Frank, SomewhatFrank, SomewhatFrank.com, TECH cocktail, TECHcocktail, techcocktaildc1, Technologies, Technology, TechPresident, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Culture, Web/Tech, Weekly Tidbits, Widgets, Yahoo | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Photo of the Week: This was the view from Sweet View on Derby Day at Wrigley Field in Chicago, Illinois.
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 05.06.07
Microsoft to Buy Yahoo? Nope.
Stung by the loss of Internet advertising firm DoubleClick to Google
last month, Microsoft has intensified its pursuit of a deal with
Yahoo!, asking the company to re-enter formal negotiations, The Post
has learned. Opps, false alarm.
Breaking:
Yahoo To Shut Down Yahoo Photos In Favor Of Flickr
The Yahoo Photos service will
be shut down in favor of the newer and more social Flickr, which they
acquired in March of 2005. Peanut butter clean-up?
YouTube
Makes Some Members Content Partners
Participating user-partners will be treated as other content partners
and will have the ability to control the monetization of the videos
they create. Once they’ve selected a video to be monetized, we’ll place
advertising adjacent to their content and share the revenue with the
content producer.
Small is The
New Big
Now that Web 2.0 is growing up, scale no longer matters. GigaOm
explains how even tiny businesses—like transcription services—can go
global.
eBay
widgets
What a fantastic and easy way to promote your auctions or Ebay fund
raisers on your blog! The set-up for this widget is very simple to
figure out. There are no technical hurdles for newbies to worry about.
The
(Re)Birth of Mobile Banking
While the upcoming iPhone launch is capturing the lion’s share of
attention in the Wireless industry, the re-introduction of Mobile
Banking has been at the core of a movement to make a cell phone your
next wallet.
Calacanis’
latest, Project X, Kokua?
Jason Calacanis, co-founder of Weblogs Inc., and now an
entrepreneur-in-action at Sequoia Capital is working on a new company
called, Project X. Valleywag published some details about the company
earlier this week, that has the apparent backing of Mark Cuban. I am
hoping Mark also buys the Chicago Cubs at seasons end.
Most
Profitable Web 2.0 Business: Conferences
The tech conference
business continues to amaze me. They are true champion revenue
generators of the web 2.0 area.
Rebrand
& New Features: Google IG To Relaunch as iGoogle
Google’s
personalized home page, Google IG, has been rebranded as iGoogle and
launched at igoogle.com.
Twittering more than blogging
I sent 1,327 text messages last month, many of which were related to
twitter so I have to say that I did not write anywhere near 1,327 blog
posts in the same time. Marshall Kirkpatrick explains how he is has
been twittering a lot more than blogging as well.
Posted at 11:57 PM in Baseball, Blogging, Blogosphere, Business, Chicago, Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, GigaOm, homepage, Jason Calacanis, Microsoft, Personal Homepage, Personalization, Personalized, Somewhat Frank, SomewhatFrank, SomewhatFrank.com, Technologies, Technology, Trends, Twitter, VC, Web 2.0, Web/Tech, Weblogs, Weekly Tidbits, Widgets, Yahoo, YouTube | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Photo of the Week: Keyboard infestation could happen to anyone of us. Thanks to bhollar for capturing the moment on film.
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 04.29.07
Newsvine Relaunches... Announcing Evergreen
Mike Davidson proudly announced the first major overhaul of Newsvine since launching a little more than a year ago. It is now a personalized news page that you can customize to your liking.
The Tech Industry Is On Fire
Nick O'Neill explains how tech companies are banking these days, as one
company after another have come out with record
breaking profits.
Q&A With Google Personalization Gurus Sep Kamvar & Marissa Mayer
Search Engine Land offers up some interesting Q&A about personalization at Google.
Podcast: Taking Ajax offline
Offline
web applications are a hot topic, but often misunderstood. Dojo offers
an offline toolkit among others...this podcast talks through these
developments.
Warm Up To a Protected Advertising Climate
FeedBurner announced AdClimate, a new feature of the formidable FeedBurner ad server for blogs and RSS feeds. AdClimate gives marketers and advertisers the power to suppress their ads from being served into content they might deem questionable.
Firefox Extension: Smart Digg Button
The
Smart Digg Button extension for Firefox places a button in your status
bar. It uses the newly released Digg API to determine if the web page
you are currently viewing has been submitted to Digg.
(Text) Size is Everything When It Comes To Startpages
Kent
Newsome give some interesting perspective on the problems he sees with
text size controls on personalized startpage products. He believes
these applications need to give users a way to permanently set the text
size, preferably at the module level. He understands that you can
change text size at the browser level, but that makes every other page
look too big.
GreenDimes Reduces Snail Mail Spam
Everyone hates junk mail. Even though you tend to get more male enhancement solicitings in your spam email, real junk mail is actually harmful to the environment and keeps your counter-tops wonderfully messy. To keep it out of your mailbox, GreenDimes ($36 per year) will help reduce the amount if snail mail spam that comes your way.
DoMyStuff.com - Find People to Complete Your Chores
DoMyStuff.com is the solution to all of the chores you need to get done, but can never seem to find the time to do them. You post what you need to get done, and others post bids on how much they’re willing to do the job for.
Adobe Takes Flex Open Source
Adobe Systems announced this week that they will be open sourcing their
Adobe Flex framework so developers can access their source code to
enhance its ability to create Rich Internet applications.
The Filter Automates Playlists
606Tech examines The Filter, a service that automatically creates playlists for you to put on your computer, iPod or Nokia mobile phone. This recommendation system works similar to Pandora, FineTune and MyStrands.
Posted at 02:12 PM in Apple, Business, Digg, FeedBurner, Feeds, Google, Microsoft, Personal Homepage, Personalization, Personalized, Q&A, Recommendation Engine, Social Media, Somewhat Frank, SomewhatFrank, SomewhatFrank.com, Spam, Startup, Technologies, Technology, Trends, Web 2.0, Web/Tech, Weekly Tidbits | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Weekly Tidbits
The days of desktop office productivity software are numbered as solid web-based products have began to emerge. ThinkFree, a San Jose-based company, offers a fairly robust web-based Microsoft Office compatible
application suite. ThinkFree Office Online is easy to use as it leverages users’ familiarity
with Microsoft Office to offer a product made up of ThinkFree Write (word processing), ThinkFree
Calc (spreadsheet), and (ThinkFree Show) presentation software. You
no longer need to rely on Microsoft Office to produce documents,
spreadsheets and presentations. Currently, the product is offered solely for
online use; however, I had a chance to chat with ThinkFree Director of Marketing, Jonathan Crow last week at the Under the
Radar: Office 2.0 event and he mentioned that users will soon be able to
upgrade to a premium offering which includes offline use.
ThinkFree provides 1 GB of storage and presents a
dashboard called “My Office” which offers a place for managing the suite. Each
application offers quick edit mode and power edit mode for more complex
formatting. With ThinkFree documents, spreadsheets and presentations can be
started from scratch or uploaded directly. Items can be tagged and placed in
folders for organization. ThinkFree also offers some interesting publishing options
which enable any document to be shared publicly and accessible via a URL. For
example, I uploaded a test document and published it here. The ThinkFree community can view, comment and rate public documents. ThinkFree
DocExchange uses the community information to surfaces the most popular public
documents, coolest documents and most blogged documents.
For companies looking for an enterprise solution, ThinkFree
has a Server Edition that makes it possible to run ThinkFree on a company server. To find out more about ThinkFree be sure to check out the ThinkFree blog.
Bottom-line: ThinkFree offers an online productivity suite which is very comparable to Microsoft Office.
Posted at 10:36 AM in Business, Internet, Microsoft, Office 2.0, Social Media, Somewhat Frank, SomewhatFrank, SomewhatFrank.com, Startup, Tags, Technologies, Technology, ThinkFree, Web 2.0, Web Development, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)
Tags: Microsoft Office, Office, ThinkFree, Web, Web 2.0, Web/Tech
Photo of the week: With the 79th Academy Awards tonight I felt this photo title Over Hollywood Sign by Jorge Mir offered a good point of perspective.
Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 02.25.07
Hollywood Disrupted By Social Media?
An opinion piece in the LA Times, titled “The Movie Magic is Gone”, explains how Hollywood is losing its place as the epicenter of cultural products and how movies are losing their relevance as the "barometers of the American psyche". Personally, social media has definitely pulled me away from more and more television and movies the last couple of years.
BitTorrent.com Launches Video Store
BitTorrent Inc, the popular peer-to-peer file sharing software, has released the final details of their long awaited video store. The store itself will go live this Monday, and will offer movie rentals at $2.99 - $3.99, and “download to own” TV shows.
It’s G-Day: Google Launches Apps Premier
Google has Microsoft squarely in its cross-hairs as it launched Google Apps Premier, its subscription package of premium, hosted business applications in direct competition with Microsoft. It does not surprise me. Interestingly, this past week I also heard a radio advertisement for "Breakfast with Google," an event setup to showcase Google @ Work for government organizations.
How does OpenID work?
Good question, this video post offers some perspective on just how OpenID works as explained by Simon Willison. Also Digg announced this past week that they are going OpenID.
How Many Founders Does A Startup Need?
Brad Feld looked at number of founders in successful Internet businesses. The average is 2.09 founders and Brad discusses this number and gives his input.
Netvibes2Go, Pretty Good Actually
GigaOm takes a look at Netvibes mobile experience and reports back on it. Basically, Netvibes setup is easy: create a tab in Netvibes called “Mobile,” and drop in some of these modules.
The State of the Web-based RSS Reader Market
FeedBurner released a great look into the feed market and Read/Write Web took it a step-further by examining the web-based feed reader market. The article also pulls in some numbers from another feed-based business called Pheedo.
Next Net: 25 startups to watch
Business 2.0 has once again listed 25 startups to watch in 2007. Here are last years 25 hottest startups.
Posted at 09:24 PM in BitTorrent, Business, Feed Reader, FeedBurner, Feeds, Film, Google, Google Apps, Government, homepage, Identity, Internet, Media 2.0, Microsoft, Mobile, Mobile/Wireless, Movies, Netvibes, Office 2.0, OpenID, Personal Homepage, Personalization, Personalized, Pheedo, RSS, Social Media, Somewhat Frank, SomewhatFrank, SomewhatFrank.com, Startup, Syndication, Technologies, Technology, VC, Video, Web 2.0, Web/Tech, Weblogs, Weekly Tidbits, Widgets | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: FeedBurner, Feeds, Hollywood, Netvibes, Social, Social Media