Web PR worker Steve Rubel has a great post at his Micro Persuasion blog detailing how he adapted Gmail to serve as his ideal start page for nearly anything he needs to get done. Lots of stuff is built into Gmail by default—like web or mail search and RSS web clips—but Rubel goes into detail on using Google Talk to update IM-friendly social services, Labs tools like Quick Links and the new gadgets to access his calendar, documents, and vital services, and start his writing in an auto-saving Gmail box, to be mailed to other writing apps. It's a neat...
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Yahoo Glue, a new search results page design that the company has been testing in India, is rolling out to the US market this evening. You can view it at glue.yahoo.com, although Yahoo says it is rolling out in stages, so sit tight if you don’t see it. It’s also a little different than the Indian version, and includes a number of resources beyond simple search results. On a typical query, content from Wikipedia, Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo Answers, blog search results (from Google) and YouTube videos are shown. For the US, Yahoo is starting with a limited set of...
A team of ex-Googlers, with backing from Y Combinator, the Friendfeed founders and others, have created what might be both the ugliest and most useful group productivity app we’ve seen. Etherpad, a new product from Appjet, launches this morning, and you must try it out. It’s comparable to Google Docs or a wiki, but it’s far more useful. You start off by creating a new workspace. You type basic text on numbered lines at will. Then invite someone else in and have them type as well. Each user’s edits are highlighted a different color. Changes are made in absolute...
If you don’t know what being RickRolled is, go look it up because you don’t want to be the last person to figure it out. YouTube even RickRolled its own users as an April Fools joke. Anyway, tonight I get a call on my mobile phone. And it’s that damn song. Apparently it’s some new startup called Twilio, and according to a Facebook message it was initiated by Dave McClure, who is probably advising them. Congratulations Dave, you’ve found a unique way of bugging me. Hope there’s more to the business than that. Did you get my text message...
Jeff Bonforte never met an API he didn’t like. The CEO of Xobni, a startup that makes an outlook plug-in that makes your e-mail smarter, has been busy getting his team of engineers to integrate every possible API they can think of into the service. Xobni already added LinkedIn last June. Today it is adding integrations with Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Skype, and Hoovers. Data from all of these services appears in the Xobni sidebar in Outllook. Let’s take them one by one. Xobni has been working on its Yahoo Mail integration since last April. Now in the sidebar, users...
Sequoia-backed visual search engine SearchMe finally got approval on their iPhone application - it appears to have been sitting at Apple waiting for approval for over two months. Well, it was worth the wait. Like Google’s voice recognition app, it’s a much better search experience than the default Google search built into the iPhone browser. The app gives you a visual preview of all search results, which is a noticeably better way of searching on a small screen with a small virtual keyboard. It isn’t in the app store yet directory yet, but you can download it here. As...
There it was, this morning, creeping up in the Google Hot Trends ranking: the LG Incite. AT&T announced that the smart phone, which runs on its 3G networks and is equipped with Windows Mobile 6.1, is available in stores and online. And so the masses began to prognosticate. They wondered on Gizmodo whether the phone could be an iPhone killer. On Engadget, they compared it with other smart phones and debated how it would stack up. And on one phone site, they just posted photos of LG phones, presumably for the purpose of inspiring drooling. How did we get...
Twitter is down. Super down. The status blog is silent on the issue, although the error message untruthfully says the site is down for database maintenance. If it was maintenance, it would be noted on the status blog. This is maintenance in the same way open heart surgery after a heart attack is maintenance. We’ll know soon enough what happened. But for now it’s just nice to remember the good ‘ol days when we celebrated entire days going by without Twitter going down. The site has been far too stable lately, and I was beginning to get suspicious. Crunch Network:...
Glam Media has launched its application platform, called Glam Apps Atako, to the public. The platform was originally unveiled in July, and has remained in private beta until now. Each application allows bloggers and site owners to quickly implement new functionality into their sites, with available options for syndicating content, adding rich media, and enhancing posts with comments and polls. At launch available apps include Sphere, BuzzFeed, Meebo, PollDaddy, PicApp, JS-Kit, and Kwanzoo, along with a video delivery widget developed in-house called GlamTV. Glam has also built the platform with monetization in mind, offering an integrated monetization system with...
Philippines-based media company ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corporation has paid $5 million for a 5% stake in Multiply, the media-centric social network with a userbase primarily composed of adults. The investment pegs Multiply’s valuation at $100 million, which is within range (though on the lower end) of our social network valuations based on past deals. ABS-CBN also has the right to purchase up to 10% of Multiply within the next two years. Multiply has a significant presence in the Philippines, with around 3 million users. ABS-CBN plans to capitalize on its investment through advertising, and by eventually offering a mobile version...
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Boing Boing has just launched their latest blog Offworld, edited by Brandon Boyer, which focuses on the world gaming culture. Boing Boing Offworld is a hub for gaming culture that cultivates the joy of discovery, sense of wonder, and celebration of innovation that all of us, and you, thrive on. Offworld will mix no-nonsense game reviews with profiles of designers, game industry news with level-headed thinkpieces, HOWTOs with actual games you can play. And of course, community! Gaming is a social phenomena. This is a blog post from Laughing Squid For more content like this, subscribe to the RSS...
Forget the printed books and cluttered sites like this one, you can now pick your new baby’s name in style. Two year old Jackson Fish Market’s newest site is What A Lovely Name. Peruse and click on descriptive tags and see names that reflect those traits. For example, English, Elegant, Intelligent and Wise yields twenty-six boy names: You can also see what any individual name means: Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware....
Some of the most useful set of apps on the iPhone are the restaurant apps that tell you what is to eat nearby. There’s UrbanSpoon, Yelp, and LocalEats, among others. But once you find a restaurant, you still have to call to make a reservation. Now, you no longer have to use up those minutes. Online reservation service OpenTable released an iPhone app today that lets you not only find nearby restaurants, but book a table as well. You don’t have to call and wait on hold. The app uses OpenTable’s online reservation system to book and confirm a...
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware....
There's gold in them there PCs -- not to mention silver, copper, aluminum and other valuable recyclables. "We view this waste as a valuable resource, and recycling it is a far better use of it," said Wes Muir, director of communications at Waste Communication Recycle America, which is handling Sony and LG's recycling programs. That fact, not a desire to save the planet, is pushing the tech industry toward "greener" manufacturing and recycling practices. It could mean that there's an environmental silver lining to the mounting economic crisis: Tough times are forcing companies to resort to recycling as a...
Google’s voice recognition search application for the iPhone, originally set for launch on Friday, will likely go live sometime Monday, we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the situation. Google was under the impression that the application would be live on the App Store on Friday (obviously, since they pushed all significant press attention to it). Sometime Friday they found out Apple wouldn’t be pushing it, despite the fact that Google submitted it for review earlier in the week and got a thumbs up for Friday. One source says they’ve had little direct contact with Apple during the review,...
October was a good month for Twitter. All those election Tweets brought a 25 percent increase in U.S. visitors from the month before, to 1.45 million unique visitors, according to comScore. (Worldwide, the number was 5.6 million in September). Since January, Twitter has experienced a 16-fold growth in the U.S. And that is just visitors to Twitter.com. These numbers don’t count all the people who send and read Tweets from other Websites, desktop apps, or their mobile phones. Twitter is having its hockey stick moment in terms of its growth just shooting up. Last week it may have delivered...
