SOMEWHAT FRANK

Apple MobileMe Syncs Everything For A Fee

The release of the new 3G iPhone and the launch of the Application Store secured the spotlight last week but there was another release which caught my attention. Apple launched MobileMe to replace the .Mac service which has been around for awhile. Though the .Mac migration may have had a few hiccups, the new MobileMe service offers users who pay just $99 per year an Apple run exchange for keeping contacts, calendar events and email synced to a PC or Mac computer and iPhone or Touch. The release positions Apple into a new space as a supplier of personal enterprise computing solutions. Apple takes on "free" email providers by locking up new me.com users to an account on a yearly subscription. Will this change the "free" email standard?

ikordo Helps You Organize Meetings

I hate long meetings when I feel that something could be solved with a simpler method like AIM, email, a text message or a phone conversation. When a meeting is needed, coordinating meetings can be as time consuming as the actual meeting itself. If you have a personal assistant you probably do not have to worry about this but if you do not then you probably feel my pain. ikordo, created by UK-based Volutio, offers a product that help facilitate organizing the meeting for you by putting into an organized system that leverages various communication streams to lock down your meeting times.

The Mitchell (Steroids) Report Posted Online

I am an avid baseball fan and former collegiate baseball player. During my time growing up playing the game the professional baseball player pay scale increased dramatically, raising the stakes for anyone playing the game from tee-ball to the pros.  Watching Major League Baseball through the years, many players transformed in front of my eyes from lanky ballplayer of the 1980's to bulky players of the 1990's and beyond. With all the controversy swirling around steroids in baseball, Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig appointed former a former Senate majority leader and federal prosecutor, George J. Mitchell to conduct an investigation on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in the sport.

With the investigation now completed the results creatively title, The Mitchell Report were released. The report calls out a number of respected and previously thought to be 'clean' baseball players as steroid users. It is now available online for you to read and cherish for yourself.

Docstoc Publicly Launches: Upload Docs Now!

Docstoc, the Beverly Hill-based document hub startup, has officially launching to the public today. Docstoc leverages the power of user generated content to enable users to upload just about any document type (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe Illustrator or PDF) and display it on any website as a Flash include.

Propertize Helps Landlords Manage Property

Real estate can be a profitable investment. However, many are turned off by the idea of being a landlord and having to manage a number of properties at one time. Managing property can sometimes be complicated and time consuming. Propertize, a Chicago-based startup, aims to help make it easier by offering an online property management suite.

SimplyFile Your Outlook Email Inbox

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.

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.

Docstoc Launches Pro Documents Hub

Have you ever needed a particular type of document like a contract of lease but did not know where to start? If so, you might have looked to order templates online or purchase them at an office supply store. Docstoc, a Los Angeles-based startup, might be able to help as it just launched at TechCrunch40 to offer a repository for user contributed documents.

Diigo Previews Easy Webslides

Diigo, a Reno-based startup, has developed WebSlides. WebSlides is a beta product that creates a browser-based player that displays live Web pages with integrated annotation, sticky notes, and highlights as a portable and interactive slideshow.

Vyew: Save & Widgetize Collaborative Work Sessions

Vyew, a Berkeley, California browser-based collaboration and conferencing platform start-up, offers a feature-rich virtual workspace for collaboration. Originally launched as SimMeeting, in September 2004, Vyew was renamed in October 2005 to and has continued to improve its web conferencing tools and first-of-its-kind asynchronous collaboration capabilities.

Vyew recently launched out of Beta and today introduced version 2.5 which improves the tools and Vyewbook functionalities which help to organize and share your collaboration sessions. Interestingly, Vyew has created "Vyewlets" which are read-only widgetized versions of a VyewBook. They can embedded outside of Vyew on blog posts, Web sites, social networks, and any online page.

Vyew is currently offered for free with light advertising served within the application. If the ads bug you and you want a business version subscription prices starting as low as $6.95 per month.  For additional information on Vyew, check out one of the fine Vyew demos.

Bottom-line: Vyew for a free to low-cost online virtual collaboration suite with group collaboration capabilities and widgetized sharing capabilities.

StumbleUpon & Hitwise Acquired, Netvibes Universe Launches, Web 2.0 Expo Wrap-up, AOL India & Education 2.0

Photo of the Week: I snapped this photo of the West Wing while celebrating Earth Day 2007 on the White House grounds.

eBay Acquires StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon was acquired by eBay for between $40 to $75 million but it seems Google Google tried to rain on their parade with a toolbar update.

Hitwise Acquired by Experian for $240 Million
All of those great charts that Hitwise so freely provide us, have paid off big time for the web intelligence company. Information services provider Experian has announced their cash purchase of Hitwise for $240 million.

Netvibes Launches Universe: Customized Public Pages
Netvibes launched Universe, allowing users to create highly customized versions of Netvibes and publish them for public access. Netvibes has created 100 or so branded versions for the launch - users will be able to create these soon. Netvibes hosted a huge launch party this past Monday in San Francisco.

What Every Video Aggregator Site Needs
Here are a few things that every Video Aggregator website needs in order to stay afloat in this ever-crowding market.

AOL Launching Next Week In India
AOL President and COO Ron Grant is going to be in India next week for the launch of AOL’s India portal.

Google Feed API
Google Reader finally has its first official API. Any developer in the world can request the entire history of a web feed from Google's geo-distributed server cloud in a normalized response for inclusion in their websites or products.

Web 2.0 Expo: All Things Widgets
The Web 2.0 Expo included two sessions on widgets. Also, offline web apps could be the next big thing after seeing an Apollo demo, by Kevin Lynch of Adobe.

Web 2.0 takes On Colleges And Universities: Education 2.0
In the shift from an intellectual economy of push, to one of pull, the evolving participatory media are making their impact felt . It is no longer enough to pump out information like gasoline and expect authentic learning to take place - the new generation.

FreshBooks For Web Invoices & More

What are some good invoicing applications to use? A friend of mine recently asked me this very question and I surprisingly drew a blank. So I made it my mission to seek out an anwser. FreshBooks, a Toronto-based startup, offers an online invoicing and time tracking application that nicely fits the bill. 

I do not consider invoicing systems the least bit moving but I was pleasantly surprised with FreshBooks as it offers some design elements that resemble a 37signals product. With FreshBooks a company can customize the layout of the application and all of the invoices and reports. I have included a screen-shot to the left of sample invoice I created (click it to enlarge). Interestingly, FreshBooks recently integrated with the 37signals project management product Basecamp to offer a super small business mashup and API.

Aside from its design elements, Basecamp integration and invoice customizations, FreshBooks' billing options caught my attention as you can send bills via email or by ground mail with return envelopes directly from FreshBooks. FreshBooks also offers storage for documents and the ability to create reports. 

Bottom-line: FreshBooks offers a free online application for managing your small business invoices and time-sheets.

ThinkFree Unleashes 3 New Offerings

ThinkFree, an online office production suite I recently reviewed, has released three new features which include an API to the ThinkFree Viewer, a WordPress Plugin and instant upload to ThinkFree DocExchange. We will take a look at these new options a little more closely below.

ThinkFree Viewer API  - Now you can with the release of the ThinkFree Viewer API. The API will enable developers to integrate the ThinkFree Viewer into any product to display an array of file types on any system regardless of the OS and software installed. Below is an example of the ThinkFree Viewer in action. What would you mashup with it?

ThinkFree Viewer WordPress Plugin - WordPress users can now rejoice at the fact that you can add ThinkFree documents into their blog posts and readers can view them directly from the browser without the need of office software. You can find the ThinkFree Viewer WordPress plugin here.

Instant ThinkFree Doc Upload - Looking to position itself as the "Flickr of Office 2.o" ThinkFree file uploads will soon be directly uploaded to the ThinkFree DocExchange, a publicly accessible area, where users can view, comment and rate documents from the ThinkFree community.

ThinkFree offers a great online office suite and its constant improvements like these that should keep its users happy and ahead of the pack of Office 2.0 options.

ThinkFree For Office Apps Online

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.

Office 2.0, Mobile RSS, SplashCast, Yahoo Widgets & Netvibes Updated, New TechCrunch CEO & Web Launch Strategy

Photo of the Week: The trees are blooming faster than web 2.0 startups these days. I snapped this photo, titled Flowering with my camera phone, while at the AOL Mountain View, California office this past week.

Somewhat Frank Weekly Tidbits: 03.25.07

Under the Radar Office 2.0 Winners
I had a chance to drop into the Under the Radar Office 2.0 event at Microsoft's Mountain View, California office on Friday (March 23, 2007) that showcased a number of startups in various business related software categories. This article announces the top picks in each category.

SplashCast: Channel Yourself Across the Web
SplashCast, my favorite video player widget, has made some changes which make it easier to place videos to be syndicated via RSS, in an embedded player and a number of others.

How To Market Your Web App
Read/Write Web examines the horrible peak-then-slump scenario the is common in the web 2.0 era and often happens after Digg, TechCrunch, Read/Write Web, Somewhat Frank or other popular blogs spotlight a site.

Newspapers are dead...
Robert Scoble explains why newspapers are dead. I don't feel that newspapers are totally dead, as The Washington Post and a few other newspaper-based companies have been quick to adapt to the changes in the media landscape. However, the rest of pack had better realize that they need to change NOW.

Welcome To TechCrunch, Heather
TechCrunch and the Crunch Network has hired its first CEO by luring Heather Harde away from Fox Interactive Media to join the team. I had a chance to hang out with Mike Arrington this past week and he was pretty happy to have Heather on board.

SideStep and EveryClick Team Travel Searches, Charity Donations
SideStep.com just announced a partnership with EveryClick.com, a UK based search engine with social responsibility, giving 50% of gross revenues to charities. It reminds me of GoodSearch - BRAVO!

Yahoo! Launches Widgets 4.0
Yahoo! relaunched its previously named Yahoo Widget Engine with a faster, lighter, and sleeker 4.0 version.

Netvibes Launches New Version
Netvibes, the personalized homepage product, officially released its new version called the "Coriander Edition". 

Looking back at three years of Web 2.0 investing
Jeff Clavier, an established entrepreneur, offers up a glance of his impressive portfolio publicly for the first time. Thanks Jeff!

RSS on the Go: A look at Web-Based Mobile Aggregators
Want to read your feeds on the go? There are a few choices for those of us who want the same feeds accessible in both big and small formats at the same time, without requiring the download of a dedicated application on any platform. AOL also offers a mobile feed reader that was not mentioned but is an easy way to check some feeds on the go as well.

Weaving The Web To Your Taste
Hossein Eslambolchi's service will scour the web for the media you want and feeds you recommended items.

Basecamp, activeCollab, and Goplan compared
With the mention of the Goplan launch last week, I think it is appropriate to now point out this solid comparison of its competitors.

Fresh Reader - Pushing the Feed
Profy reports on a new RSS feed reader called Fresh Reader a Web based, server type RSS feed reader that runs exceptionally fast. Fresh Reader is designed for either personal or corporate use, and allows for social bookmarking, mobile support, Intranet use and many other features.

Top 40+ FeedBurner sites aggregated
Frantic Industries has manually aggregated a list of the top 40-plus sites based on FeedBurner subscriber metrics.