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Another Beta Down: Doorbell's Sales CRM Is Now Commercially Available

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:55:12 +0000

Doorbell, the first product from Candian startup Smibs, is now commercially available after over a year of private and public beta testing. The service is "sales software for non-sales people" meant to help small businesses complete sales tasks without having to assign dedicated personnel to the role, and competes with other CRM services like Highrise. The service has changed pretty significantly since we first covered it last June. The most obvious change is a complete UI redesign, which ditches the drab colors in favor of something much sleeker and more intuitive. Founder Peter Urban says that the site has a strong emphasis on using AJAX to decrease load times and increase efficiency, and has adopted more of a webtop control panel. The site has also added a new feature that allows you to 'attach' Emails to certain contacts by including a special Doorbell address in your mail client's BCC field, and will be adding more social features, like the ability to monitor your contacts' Twitter conversations, in the near future.

My Secret Circle: A Secure Social Network for Tween Girls, Me

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:39:36 +0000

So this seems like a good enough idea. It's called MySecretCircle and it's basically it's a closed social network for girls. You and your buds buy a USB key that acts as your login. It autoruns under Windows and OS X and brings up a photo and journal sharing system that only allows certain people access to your daughter's personal info. In theory and in practice this is great. It ensures your tween doesn't connect with creeps like me. Kids can only connect with friends that have their private key - no one else exists in the site except for Sabrina Circle, the Tom of this candy-pink MySpace.

Pandora (And Other Internet Radio) Has Officially Been Saved

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:31:36 +0000

After two years of uncertainty, Pandora's future has finally been secured. For those not familiar with what was going on, basically the streaming rates for Internet radio were in danger of being raised to levels that would have made it very hard for companies like Pandora to stay afloat. But a resolution has been reached between webcasters, artists, and record labels, Pandora CTO Tom Conrad tells us. "Pandora is finally on safe ground with a long-term agreement for survivable royalty rates," Conrad says.

Someone Needs To Stop Tripping Over The Power Cord At Rackspace

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:23:18 +0000

As much of the web seemed to notice this morning, several sites running on Rackspace's servers went down. Yes, again. For the second time in 8 days, a power outage interrupted service at one of its data centers. And again it was the Dallas center that was effected. This time however, Rackspace was able to get things up and running fairly quickly, and more importantly, communicated well through its blog and Twitter throughout the downtime. Still, it raises the question, why do power outages keep taking down a service that so many rely on? They have backups in place, so what's going on?

Kazaa Still Kicking, To Bring HD Video To The Pre?

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:56:24 +0000

Seriously, we're just as surprised as you are. Not only is Kazaa somehow still in business, they're also trying anything they can to set themselves apart from all the other digital music retailers you'd rather use instead of them. Now the property of Brilliant Digital Entertainment, Kazaa is setting its sights on bringing HD movie downloads to the masses (well, the masses that use Kazaa), and the Pre is where they've decided to make their stand.

Google Apps Standard Edition Findable Again

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:27:23 +0000

Last night we reported that Google had stripped all references and links to the free version of Google Apps from the landing page for the product. New users had just one option - to sign up for the Premier version and pay pay $50 per user per year after a 14 day free trial. Google responded, saying “In experimenting with a number of different landing page layouts, the link to Standard Edition was inadvertently dropped from one of the variations. We are in the process of restoring it and you should see it soon. We have no intention of eliminating Google Apps Standard Edition, and are sorry for the confusion.” Translation: they are trying to get more users to pay by making the Standard version harder to find. In that they succeeded brilliantly, but were obviously a little overzealous in hiding it. Google just emailed to say that a link to the Standard version has been added back to the landing page. And they reiterate that they have no plans to kill the product, they'll just make users play a version of Where's Waldo to find it. (Ok, they didn't really say that last part about Waldo).

Feedburner Founder/CEO Dick Costolo To Leave Google

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:58:35 +0000

It's always hard to hold onto those pesky entrepreneurs after you acquire their company - the best ones always get restless and bail. Feedburner cofounder and CEO Dick Costolo will be leaving Google within the week, we've confirmed. Costolo and his team, based in Chicago, joined Google two years ago when Feedburner was acquired for $100 million. Like some other Feedburner employees he has moved on to other projects within Google. He currently reports to Neal Mohan, an exec in the Ads group, as the group product manager for social ads. Costolo has no plans for his next job/startup. But something tells me that in a few months we'll be hearing about his next venture. He turned $8 million in venture capital into a $100 million payday. More than a few venture capitalists will be taking him to lunch at their first opportunity.

Goodbye, Printed Blog

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:53:46 +0000

Remember the Printed Blog? It was a newspaper - on actual glossy paper - that would syndicate posts from the Interwebs. Josh Karp founded it six months ago and he ran through 16 issues and 80,000 copies - all on his own dime. And now it's dead. The paper was published and distributed in Chicago and raised quite a bit of breathless prose from folks like the NYT and BusinessWeek. As far as I know we appeared in the magazine/paper once or twice, which was nice to know.

Grab Some Lunch And Watch MJ's Funeral!

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:13:02 +0000

In case you haven't gotten enough of the non-stop coverage of Michael Jackson since his death last week, grab some lunch and watch his funeral, which is starting right now at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. You can watch it on TV, or on pretty much any video site on the Web. CNN.com is covering it live with the same Facebook chat integration it used for Obama's Inauguration. You can see everyone's comments on the side, or just your friends. I wonder which one will generate more Facebook status updates (the Obama CNN-Facebook Inauguration generated 1.5 million). Right now five of the top ten top trending topics on Twitter search have to do with MJ ("MJ's," "MJ Memorial," "Staples Center," "RIP MJ," and "#michaeljackson").

You Put Your Aardvark In My Twitter (Bonus: Interview With Founders)

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:45:05 +0000

Yesterday we sat down with two of Aardvark's founders, Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz, to get an update on the company and learn about today's integration of Aardvark into Twitter. Aardvark is a question an answer service with a twist. Instead of services like Yahoo Answers where the anonymous masses try to answer your questions (resulting in mostly spam), Aardvark sends questions to your social graph via email, SMS, instant messaging, etc. Your friends answer your questions (restaurant suggestions, things to do in Paris, whatever). Most questions are answered within 5 minutes. Last week the service opened up for Facebook users. Today they integrate with Twitter. For now, the integration only includes asking questions - if you add @vark to the end, Aardvark picks it up and adds it to your account. In future versions, they may try to integrate responses from Twitter directly into Aardvark as well. I spoke with Max and Damon at length about the Twitter integration as well as the service in general now that it has been tested by beta users for the last few months. The video and transcript (provided by SimulScribe, it's not perfect but they are fast) are below:

Google Finally Peels The Beta Label Off Gmail, Docs, Calendar, and GTalk

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:52:04 +0000

The beta days are over at Google, at least for some of its most popular applications. As we predicted two months ago, Google is finally taking the beta label off of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and GTalk today. And it is about time. For instance, Gmail, which launched five years ago and is by far Google's most popular non-search app, is already older than many startups. Gmail is now one of the leading email services and can no longer hide under the cover of a beta label. Over the past year in the U.S. alone, according to comScore, Gmail has grown 48 percent to 36 million unique visitors, quickly gaining on AOL Mail (40 million uniques, down down 6 percent) and Windows Live Hotmail (46 million uniques, down 1 percent) to grab the No. 2 spot after still-safe Yahoo Mail (98 million uniques, up 13 percent). Worldwide, Gmail had 146 million visitors in May, about half of Yahoo Mail's and Hotmail's numbers, and about three times bigger than AOL Mail.

GSM Palm Pre Hitting O2 and Movistar In Europe

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:45:01 +0000

We're all quite excited here to find out that O2 and Movistar will get the Palm Pre in GSM form, opening the phone up to unlocking, hacking, and all sorts of molestation. UK, Ireland and Germany will get the phone on O2 and Spain will get it from Movistar. When, you ask? Christmas. That's right: by the time Palm pinches off the GSM Pre Apple will have probably released iPod Touches with cameras and the HTC Hero, an Android phone that I wouldn't kick out of bed for eating crackers, will be dancing on the Sprint Pre's grave. It's like Palm wants to fail.

Match.com Acquires People Media For $80M In Cash

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:14:28 +0000

Online dating service and IAC property Match.com is getting into the highly-targeted subscription dating game with the acquisition of People Media, which it is taking off the hands of publicly traded PE firm American Capital and a host of other investors for $80 million in cash. The deal includes the purchase of about 27 targeted dating sites with a combined 255,000 paying subscribers, including BlackPeopleMeet.com, BBPeopleMeet.com, LDSPlanet.com, SingleParentMeet.com and SeniorPeopleMeet.com. People Media, founded in 2002, had $11.6 million of EBITDA in 2008 and quotes Jupiter Research as saying the combined revenues of the targeted dating service business are expected to reach $1.2 billion worldwide this year.

Mozilla Aims To Centralize All Open Web Tools In One Directory

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:27:19 +0000

Mozilla says there's no central index for tools built to help web developers do their jobs (and/or hobby projects) better, so it set out to build one of its own. Located at tools.mozilla.com and dubbed the Open Web Tools Directory, the organization is taking a swing at building the most extensive and comprehensible index of tools that modern-day web developers can use. The first thing you'll notice when you visit the website is the unorthodox - and relatively confusing - design, as you can tell from the screenshot above. Explains Ben Galbraith on behalf of the Developer Tools team on the Mozilla Labs blog: (after the jump)

China Blocks Access To Twitter, Facebook After Riots

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:41:12 +0000

Following last weekend's deadly riots in its western region of Xinjiang, China's central government has taken all the usual steps to block citizens from accessing foreign web services: aside from crippling Internet service in general, the authorities have blocked Twitter, removed unapproved references to the violence from search engines and has now apparently moved to bar its citizens from accessing Facebook from most parts of Mainland China just now. Two weeks ago, the government had already blocked just about every Google service, including communication tools like Gmail, Google Apps and Google Talk.

Hear That? It's The Sound Of Your New Hearing Aid, The iPhone

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:03:09 +0000

Back in 2007, Amy Tenderich wrote about the need for Apple to share its renowned industrial design and user-friendliness with the medical device community. Her plea wasn't necessarily for Apple to get involved in the field, but rather for it to help device manufacturers innovate and produce devices that people might actually want to use. As it turns out, Apple may be be joining the fray anyway: the iPhone, with its App Store and recently-added support for third party peripherals, may soon become an extremely powerful medical tool. We've still got a ways to go before we start seeing glucose monitors and blood pressure pumps pop up with iPhone support, but some health and disability-related apps are already beginning to emerge. One of the first is a new application called soundAMP (iTunes Link), a hearing aid application that was just released on the App Store, and is available for $9.99.

Finally, A Decent Website To Browse Android Apps: AndroLib

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 10:32:49 +0000

Ever tried finding applications for the Android platform on the web rather than from your handset? Don't even consider using the regular web version of Android Market - Google's official app directory - on your computer's browser: it has no search (irony much?), no categories, no community involvement like comments, ratings and reviews, and it's only available in English for now. In other words: it sucks. As a reporter lacking an Android-powered phone but with a great interest in the platform, it sucks even more. Sometimes I need to know which applications in a certain category are available for Android, what people are saying about them, what versions a certain app is at, and so on. Until now, I used Cyrket for that, a third-party directory that provides me with most of the functionality I need for doing a bit of research about Android apps. But the website is slow, regularly returns errors and doesn't provide a decent filter between paid and free apps, so the experience was usually below par.

Push Gmail Comes To The iPhone — Through An App (If It's Accepted)

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:59:07 +0000

You'd think on a phone that can do as many cool things as the iPhone, push email through one of the world's most popular email services, Gmail, would be one of them. But for some reason, Google and Apple haven't turned on the functionality for Gmail accounts on the iPhone. Sure, you can get push email through MobileMe, Yahoo Mail or Exchange, but basic Gmail users are basically out of luck. Until now, maybe. Let me be clear, I'm still not certain that this app will even be approved for the App Store. But if it is, it's pretty awesome. It's called GPush; it's a very simple app that uses the new Push Notifications in the iPhone 3.0 software to ping your iPhone every time a new message comes in. Yes, not only is it push Gmail, it gives you Gmail with notifications. While you might think that could be annoying, it actually works quite well.

Palm Pre To Hit Europe By Christmas With Telefónica

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:24:53 +0000

There were a few leaks and rumors about this last week, but now it's been officially confirmed that the Palm Pre will launch exclusively with mobile network Telefónica, initially in four major European markets. Spain, United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany will get the device first - which will be a GSM version - on the O2 and Movistar networks, just before the winter holidays. Pricing has not been announced. This is something of a coup since, at least in the UK, Telefónica-owned O2 already has the iPhone deal, thus making it the sole arbiter of two of the hottest phones right now. OK, the Pre maybe isn't as hot as it was pre-launch, but it remains to be seen how European mobile obsessives will react to the handset.

Think About it. Do You Really Want An HD Camera In Your Phone?

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:20:15 +0000

There's some buzz right now about the iPhone 3GS and other phones being capable of 720p recording, or perhaps even 1080p if they use the newest sensors. Wow! The future is here! 720p video built right into your phone! But here's the thing: would you rather have HD video recording implemented very badly, as it must be with the limitations of mobile phones, or would you rather not have it at all and have capacity for more battery life or RAM? Because there's no way that video is going to be watchable, except as a low-bandwidth stream, and if that's your idea of 720p