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Today Mozilla is launching a new organization to develop Internet mail and communications software. It will use the open source email desktop client Thunderbird as a base - the product, code and brand. Technically this will be a Mozilla Foundation subsidiary - and it is very similar to Mozilla's Firefox effort. Just as Firefox aims to give choice in the browser space, this new initiative will try and advance email and communications technology. As with Firefox, the aim is to create a robust developer ecosystem to .......
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Google has officially launched the missing piece in Googleâs online office suite: Presently, a presentation product that competes directly with Microsoft PowerPoint. Weâve know itâs been coming for a long time, the PowerPoint competitor was first rumored in February then confirmed by Google CEO Eric Schmidt in April . More recently Google integrated PowerPoint viewing functionality into Gmail . and last week we posted on reports that it would be launched âwithin days.â I didnât know it at the time, but the official launch is TechCrunch 40 but the site is live now. First impressions: it depends on what you ...
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Barry Diller's Interactive Corp. announced tonight that it is taking majority share of Eugene, Oregon based GarageGames , a company that shepherds independent online game developers to market. IAC will place GarageGames at the center of an innovative project called InstantAction.com - due for release early next year. InstantAction will include a fund to publish games and will begin accepting applications from developers on Tuesday. This according to the Wall St. Journal , who reported first on the move. The price IAC has paid isn't being disclosed. Independent game lovers can take heart, the company tells us that IAC has ...
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As the party goes on in downtown San Francisco, a quick wrap up of the first day of the TechCrunch 40 Conference. We live blogged the whole event, and added some great pictures as well. Iâll clean up the typos tomorrowâ¦or the day after. TechCrunch 40 Session 1: Search and Discovery. The first session in front of a crowd of around 1,000 people, all wielding laptops and cameraâs can be daunting, and despite the odd hiccup the first startups did a great job. CastTV was our pick from the 5, however ultimately itâs up to the expert panel to decide ...
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You might not have known it, but for a while now, Yahoo! has had its own social network up and running. It’s true. It’s called Yahoo! 360, and it’s, well, not all that good. Thus it’s not very popular. Thus the general non-social impression the public has had about the company.
Yahoo! wants to change that. So it’s launched Mash, a site that promises, not unlike all other creations of its kind (the social networking kind, that is), to bring a lot of different information together into one place and display that information in a somewhat coherent fashion.
Mash is currently being kept in limited, beta-testing mode, available only to those who’ve received invites (unfortunately, I have not received one such
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There is so little positive news from China these days and this is particularly true with regard to Web news. Censorship, hacking, prostitution issues and a host of other maladies seem to be plaguing China and its Internet. Just today it was reported that a man dropped dead in a Chinese cyber café after playing some online game for three days straight. According to the news a 30 year old man evidently died of exhaustion, but the particular game was not mentioned. .....
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SpiralFrog, a website which for months has been shrouded behind a beta tag, has now officially emerged as a venue on the Web for free music (audio and video) downloads, supported by advertising. The company has struck revenue-sharing deals with various members of the music industry, the largest partnership being one made with Universal Music Group, “the world’s largest record company” and the only major label in SpiralFrog’s list of clients to date. Thus far, the website has secured roughly 800,000 tracks and 3,500 music videos for distribution to users, and “expects to have more than 2 million tracks over the next several months,” said the chairman and founder of SpiralFrog, Joe Mohen, according to an Associated Press report.......
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Today, it was announced that Yahoo! has decided to purchase Zimbra for $350 million in cash.
Zimbra's product line includes AJAX-based e-mail, a calendar, contact management features, as well as additional mashups available through add-ons called Zimlets. With the acquisition of the open source office suite, Yahoo! has now stated that it can "leverage the strengths of Yahoo!'s advertising platform and Yahoo!'s content network and tightly integrate it into Zimbra using mlets...
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The explosive growth of video on the internet has brought with it an increasing strain on servers and the need for more storage space.
With video iPods, PSPs, iPhones and many other mobile devices offering video playback, it has become necessary to offer videos in multiple different formats which takes up more space and eats up more bandwidth requirements.
To provide a solution for this growing dilemma, RipCode has been hard at work for the past 18 months developing an appliance-based video transcoding
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Today the New York Times announced that its TimesSelect Web service will no longer be a paid subscription. This move signals further migration by traditional media into Web 2.0 form. Now most of the Web site will be freely available to readers in what appears to be a move to gain more readers. The TimesSelect service will shut down on Wednesday after two years of paid subscriptions that brought world class content to subscribers. This is great news for me and other bloggers as the NYT is a very good source for news and interesting stories..........
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An unconfirmed report has BuddyTV being acquired by Comcast. Weâve got requests for confirmation in with BuddyTV and are waiting for a response. Seattle based BuddyTV is a television focused content network with a team of dedicated entertainment writers producing content that is complemented by users. The company took $2.8 million from Gemstar-TV Guide in July . Comcast previously acquired Fandango , an online movie ticket selling company that also ran a entertainment guide called Fancast . If confirmed, itâs an interesting buy that fits more in the blogging acquisition space, placing the deal alongside the acquisitions of Weblogs Inc ...
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Following my post on types of Social Networking sites , I saw a NYT article about sites targeting older people . Two days after that, Techrunch posted an article about massive layoffs at Eons , one of the Baby Boomer sites mentioned in the NYT article. Eons was trying to preserve some of the $32m they've raised. I am over 50, so I looked at Eons when it was announced and promptly left. I donât think it was just lousy execution at Eons, although that was certainly a factor. The idea of targeting by age is just not smart marketing. ...
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Captchas are well known for keeping automated spammers out and letting humans in. However, ReCaptcha is a rather clever service using them to help digitize books scanned into the Internet Archive as well. Itâs a project from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. The Internet Archive is home to over 200,000 scanned copies of classic books. Some of them are gorgeously crafted, like this childrenâs book, but fancy styling can make it difficult for computers to translate the books into an indexable digital text. Much like a Mechanical Turk application, ReCaptcha uses humans to translate images of scanned ...
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We just covered the news on TechCrunch France . The iPhone will be launched in France with Orange at the price of 300 euros. It will be on the market the 29th of November and announced on the 24th of September during the Apple Expo in Paris . There wonât be any unlimited data plan and against all rumours it wonât have 3G capabilities. Here is a first picture of the iPhone provided by Orange with a French menu (operated in roaming mode though). Crunchgear has more Apple is likely to announce the iPhone for the UK market on Tuesday ...
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Rex Hammock calls for folks to rally around "conversational media" as a term for all that social media/user generated content/word of mouth marketing/etc. and I'm honored by his suggestion (my writings on the topic are here and here and here). He also offers a critique of the first ever Conversational Marketing Summit, noting that it was not very well covered by the Web 2 crowd (nary a mention on Techmeme). He aptly notes that perhaps the folks who attended were not, well, part of that world, and to that insight I can only concur: Most marketers are not entrepreneurs obsessed with the Valley, they are business people obsesssed with succeeding at their jobs. The CM Summit, from the feedback we've gotten so far, really helped them in that pursuit.....
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