One vital part that can easily be overlooked in the startup environment is business intelligence. The problem usually isn't with acquiring critical data, but rather in making sense of trends and other signals buried in that data. That is where Bob Moore and Jake Stein of RJMetrics have been focusing for the past year, developing effective and affordable solutions for their internet startup customers, helping them see trends, create timely reports, and interact more effectively with their investors and employees.

The Idea

Jake and Bob spent an hour with Bernard and I yesterday answering our questions about how their business works. In a nutshell, they realized that the traditional way of creating the kind of charts and reports that investors and CEOs like to see can be very time-consuming to create. And often those reports are only accurate for the time period around when they are made. Six months down the road, all that work often has to be done again.

Their solution is deceptively simple: Why not take all the experience they have with creating BI in a particular industry (web startups, in this case) and develop a process to quickly turn a startups' carefully-hoarded data into accurate, timely, and dynamically-created charts at a reasonable price?

The Product

The logistics of making this solution happen is, of course, fairly challenging and required a lot of back-end development to really bring all the elements together and make it easy for their customers to get started generating reports. Briefly, the process involves RJMetrics pulling key data from the customer's database, flattening and re-optimizing the dataset for reporting queries, and then presenting the customer with their own dashboard upon which they can create and share charts that are generated directly off of their own company data. Of course, this all has to happen in a secure environment and free of potentially incriminating personally identifiable information.

However, it appears that the RJMetrics team have carefully considered these ramifications and have built a system that is not only trustworthy but also capable of polling the startup's database at a pre-set interval and allowing all the data going back to the very first day to be available for reporting. The mental image I got when they were describing it to me was like a stock history chart on Yahoo! Finance.

The Dashboard

The most critical piece of the puzzle, the part that pulls everything together for RJMetrics is their charting tool. Called the dashboard, it is similar to a widget-based canvas like Netvibes or iGoogle, but specifically for business charts. The dashboard allows you to quickly create charts, arrange them on a page, and save those views for later. You can also quickly generate snapshots of any chart to embed on a blog or other web page, and different roles can be defined to view only the data that is most relevant for them.

Finally, the dashboard has a couple of other tricks up its sleeve. First, since the chart objects each make their own secure connection to the RJMetrics data store, there is a process where, say, an investor can put together a dashboard with charts pulling from a number of different data silos and putting them together on the same page. Also, RJMetrics is actively working on pulling data from public APIs such as Google Analytics to display alongside business metrics.

Our Take

The idea is compelling - why employ a full-time metrics employee when you can depend on RJMetrics to give you the tools to quickly build the charts you need to present to your investors, or potential clients, or even other employees, and at a great price? Of course, this solution isn't for every company. RJMetrics is carefully selecting (for now) those companies they know best: web-based startups. There are plenty of very powerful (and very expensive) tools that bigger companies can leverage to get the same sort of business intelligence. But if you are a web entrepreneur and are looking for something like this, You might just want to give RJMetrics a call.

The Idea

Like many of us, the Creately team wondered why all the tools out there for creating business flowcharts either fell in to one of two extremes: simple, almost generic programs like Visio or Dia that are frustrating to use, or extremely pricey and complex applications that include templates that employ logic but are really only designed for specific vertical markets. Add to this the fact that all of these tools were stand-alone, in other words, they were used by one person at a time to create files that were often only readable by another copy of the same application.

The Platform

Creately combines several technologies to overcome the traditional shortcomings of these types of products. First, it is built on a web platform which means that only a relatively modern browser and network connection is required to use the application. Loads of stock templates are already available and getting started is easy. Second, the objects used in creating diagrams often are imbued with logic, allowing objects that are connected together to evaluate their surroundings. For example, a diagram of a simple computer network can tell the user if adding that additional server will exceed the total bandwidth of the network.

Finally, Creately allows teams to collaborate quickly and dynamically on creating and refining charts, allowing other users to be invited in to review, comment on, and update a diagram in a matter of minutes without having to go through the process of saving a copy of a file, attempting to email it, making sure the recipient has the same program, and waiting for a reply.

Charanjit sums this up the Creately goal succinctly when he says:

"We want to offer users an easy to use visual platform that will have the richness of specialized tools without the clutter, complexity and price tag that comes with them - for the networked generation."

Our Take

We found Creately fun to use and definitely easier and more logical than other diagramming tools we have used in the past. Every part of the user interface has been carefully considered to optimize your time creating the chart, not dealing with getting arrows exactly lined up and other annoyances. Creately sports a wide range of object sets from simple flowchart types to a variety of attractive clipart sets. Also, collaboration was easy. There is a sidebar that can be used to invite other people to collaborate, and revision history is always available.

200 Free Beta Invites

Last but not least, Charan came through for ReadWriteWeb readers by offering 200 invites to use Creately free of charge! So please, take Creately for a spin and give them your feedback. Also, be sure to check the Creately blog, where they are constantly announcing new projects, like their recent URL shortener for sharing charts you have created!

To get started with Bubble Tweet, you don't have to register. Just enter a Twitter account name and record or upload a short video. That's it! You will get a custom Bubble Tweet URL that will show you your recording overlaid on the specified Twitter account. A count is kept for how many visits each Bubble Tweet URL gets. Plus, you can create up to three Bubble Tweet videos a day.

Although at first blush this may seem like a cute little toy that you may try once and then forget about (and in fact, it seems most of the folks who have recorded a video have indeed done that), we think that at the very least it adds a face behind the Twitter account. How many times have you visited someone's Twitter and wondered, is that a person or an ad agency or a robot behind that login? Now you have 30 seconds to shine for your viewer. With a bit of creativity, you could use this free service to answer a weekly question, do a quick movie review, spin in place, or even use it to get people to visit your comedy tour like Dane Cook.

Kevin has taken his bubble-video technology and applied it to a number of different online activities, such as electronic greeting cards (Bubble Joy), enhancing any web site (Bubble Comment), and answering questions (Bubble Guru). In real entrepreneurial form, Kevin isn't sitting still with his goal to get the web wired up with short-form videos.

He's even made a StumbleUpon-style random BubbleTweet page where you can just sit back and watch the bubbles one after another. Good stuff.

The Google gadget called What's Popular came to our attention thanks to Steve Rubel's blog Micro Persusion. His take is that it has the potential to rival Digg. While we think that might be a bit ambitious, we definitely think the gadget is a lot of fun.

Using the What's Popular gadget is simple. Just visit its gallery page, click on the 'add' button and you are done. Once you visit your iGoogle page, you'll find it running and already bristling with popular stories and links. By default, What's Popular finds trending content on Google sites like News, YouTube, and Reader. You can also submit links to it for consideration.

Voting on stories is just as easily. Pagination is automatic, so you just scroll down the list, clicking on stories you want to read and voting stuff up or down as you please. More stories appear as you scroll so there's effectively no bottom. The widget keeps track of all the items you voted on (making voting another form of bookmarking) and also all the URLs you submitted along with how popular they have become. If you maximize the widget, more options are revealed, like the ability to sort by story, image or video, and by date or popularity.

That's about it. Quick to load, endless supply of interesting links, ability to vote - ok, it does sound a little like Digg. However, there's a key component missing: commentary. Your opinion can only be made with your vote (and, I guess, the 'report abuse' button). There's no way of providing any additional web resources, opinions, or, well, anything. Plus, it's hard for us to see how a widget that is competing for screen real-estate with a stock ticker and a twitter client will take down a community site like Digg.

StumbleUpon, on the other hand, may want to watch this one carefully.

All that is going to end, at least for the next little while, as we have just found the GM script that does everything (and we mean everything). It's the innocently named, Troy's Twitter Script (created by Troy Thompson) that we first noticed written up over on TechRaga.

After installing the script and visiting Twitter, we found so many useful tweaks to almost every Twitter view that it was almost overwhelming. Here's what it does broken down into three main functionalities:

• Enhancement: Links in tweets are automatically expanded and replaced with the target page title if available. Media like YouTube videos and Twitpic images are included in-line. Hashtags are converted to Twitter search links. Auto-pagination is enabled as you get to the bottom of the current page. The 'definitions' area is hidden. Last but not least, replies are included underneath the latest tweet, indented and smaller (great for those of you still using the default "include all @replies" in your settings!)
• Functionality: Hovering over a tweet shows default actions like star (save), reply, and retweet. Long URLs are automatically shortened if the tweet you are typing in exceeds the length limit. Twitter names get autocomplete launched by typing an @ in a tweet. Twitter bio text gets inserted into following/followers list.
• New Hotness: A new search field added to Twitter sidebar. Any searches performed from sidebar get saved and added to the sidebar (removable). A tiny smilie face is added to the Twitter icon of those people who are following you. When viewing a specific Twitter user, their social graph is inserted in the bio area. Notes can be added to any user's Twitter page. Local time is added if the user's time zone is in their profile. Map to user's location is inserted if location or geo coordinates are in their profile. Finally, the most awesome addition: Groups support in your followers/following tabs, you can add people to groups that show up in the Twitter sidebar.

Troy's Twitter script, in our opinion, is crazy awesome. If you find yourself in a memory crunch and prefer not to use a standalone Twitter application, and use Firefox, this script is a must-have. In fact, it's too bad that Greasemonkey scripts really only work well in Firefox, because it sure would be great to have all these features in every browser out there. To that end, you can try using Greasemetal (covered here) for Chrome, or GreaseKit for Safari on Mac OSX.

Update: There's a modified version of Troy's script that adds a link in the user profile to the Mailana user analysis app, Top Twitter Friends. This feature should be rolled into the main script in the next version.

You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Rick Turoczy, Sean Ammirati, Lidija Davis and Phil Glockner.

Limited to the Internet Explorer 6 web browser, for now, Google Toolbar Labs debuts with two toolbar variations with different goals. One toolbar includes enhanced location detection and the other optimizes the toolbar for the Chinese character set.

Both toolbars are based on the standard IE Google toolbar and support the different standard features like Google Rank, toolbar buttons and more. But what they offer in addition is interesting:

• Google Toolbar with My Location: This toolbar includes an advanced feature that can determine the general area the computer is in by IP address. It then uses this information in its enhanced Google search by area feature. If you are using a laptop with Internet Explorer already, this feature can come in handy by letting you quickly search the local area for the resource you need, even if you don't know exactly where you are.
• Google Simplified Chinese Toolbar: This toolbar is pretty clearly geared toward Chinese IE users. It features a space-optimized layout better suited to the Chinese language and features a new sidebar mode for managing bookmarks. It also has built-in buttons for translating foreign-language web pages in to Chinese.

Google Labs promises that these are just the beginning for this new offshoot of their now widespread domain of Google properties. We hope so, because honestly we don't spend a whole lot of time in Internet Explorer any more, and it would be interesting to see if a new killer app toolbar came out for a different browser like Firefox.

Replying to comments by email isn't that new as there are a lot of other comment systems that support it. In fact, there is at least one plugin for stand-alone WordPress blogs that enable this ability as well. But, the key to new features appearing on WordPress.com's free hosting site has always been rigorous usability and load testing first, then a full roll-out of the feature.

The way reply-by-email comment support will work is pretty straightforward. After enabling support for emailing comments, and then turning on the 'Enable sending comment replies via email' option (both found on the Settings > Discussion page), you are set. The next time you get a comment, you will be notified by email, and you can respond simply by replying to the email with your text above the original comment.

Today, the website wizards behind Digg have revealed a new technology called MXHR, or Multi-Part XML HTTP Requests, as a method for optimizing delivery of Digg's complex AJAX-enhanced site. The implementation of MXHR is an addition to Digg's User Interface Library, called DUI.Stream. While still in a fairly rough early stage, Digg believes that MXHR will eventually give it a huge boost in un-cached page rendering efficiency.

There's a couple of problems that Digg has with using traditional optimization techniques. First, the site violates the first rule in a big way, since it uses multiple HTTP connection requests in order to render all parts of the page. Dialog boxes, comments, user icons and more all have to be delivered quickly and with equal priority, and multiple requests was the only way to go until recently.

Second, it can't rely on too much caching to help speed page load times. Digg is a discussion board as much as it is a news site, so caching is a huge problem. Active stories can sometimes have hundreds of new threaded comments being created every minute, and caching would cause huge discrepancies on how much of the conversation each client would actually see from moment to moment.

These issues are what MXHR is designed to optimize. Utilizing DUI.Stream to open only one HTTP connection between server and client, the separate 'page objects' such as dialog boxes, CSS and more can be bundled and sent through the same open connection. By eliminating, in some cases, hundreds of separate HTTP connection requests for a page render, it can approach the rendering speed of a fully-cached page. Plus, this allows the server to control the order in which each page element will be built. This will result in the page appearing almost instantaneously for the user with the the hidden framework being backfilled as needed.

Digg provides two examples of the DUI.Stream library in action, the first being an un-cached text demo, and the second an un-cached image demo. While the first example isn't too amazing, from what we saw the new library performs on par with traditional rendering, the second example with icons is stupidly faster. It's absolutely no contest that MXHR is the clear winner there.

Code is provided in the post for you developer-types out there to play around with along with a GitHub repository of examples. Digg is looking for feedback and suggestions on how to improve on this so please go take a look! We can't wait to see this tech get deployed so that we can have all the bells and whistles of Web 2.0 architecture plus all the speed of a well-optimized site.

Luckily, I was invited to talk with CEO, Gary Griffiths, of LiteScape Technologies, and Director of Product Marketing, Henry 'Hank' Nothhaft Jr. (Twitter), developers of the 3deep product. For the next hour, I was able to get a really good idea about their innovative new product. And although it isn't out in beta to play with yet, it is definitely worth learning about.

LiteScape has its roots in building software infrastructure for programmable digital PBX and VoIP telephones. If you have ever worked in a call center, you know that a lot of power has been imbued into these innocuous little devices, from keeping track of the activity of the phone's user, providing detailed metrics on every aspect of a call, to intelligently assisting the user with call routing and and conferencing. If you think of a call center as a living being, the PBX would be its nervous system, informing every other part of the organization with instant knowledge on how the business is doing. That sort of deep, real-time knowledge is valuable.

The idea with 3deep started simply. What if the beneficial aspects of this PBX technology could be applied to the fast-growing ecosystem of smart mobile phones? In a business environment, you might want your team to know vital information - like where you are, if you are busy, who you are meeting with this afternoon - and be able to share that without having to constantly be updating info in your Smartphone all the time. It's already there anyway, whether on a call, calendar, contact list or GPS. It is almost like your phone is waiting for an application to tie that information together and share it (or as much of it as you care to) with your team.

The platform is based on two key technologies, what they call a presence platform (essentially a technology to passively ascertain status, availability, and location) together with a mobile address book which sends and receives that information with other team members. The mobile phone platforms that will be supported at launch are Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Android and, of course, the iPhone.

Features of the 3deep platform will include active sharing of location, calendar (either free/busy or full), and phone state (on the phone or idle). Groups will control how much information is shared with group members. Also, the 'active sharing' hours can be set so that, say after work, you are not disturbed or giving your location away.

An example of how this synergistic platform can be utilized comes from Gary in which he describes a recent situation where he had to contact the companies VP of advertising with a high-priority issue. The VP was on the phone when Gary looked him up in 3deep, so he told the software to let him know the moment the VP was off the phone. Within minutes, the two were in contact and the issue was handled. Such alerts can be set not only for free status, but also for GPS location, for example, if you wanted to meet a coworker on a work site and wanted to be alerted when they arrived.

What really gives this technology huge potential, though, is that it is being developed for deployment on all the major Smartphone platforms simultaneously. Gary and Henry said all their key foundational technologies are working on each of the supported phones, with some exceptions on the iPhone which places strict limits on what can be running in the background. However, using the software on an iPhone works the same way as on other Smartphones.

3deep is still in private alpha, so unfortunately we can't give you a beta code or technical preview yet. But, we were assured we would be contacted once the beta began so that we can invite people to help test it. In the meantime, there is a contact form you can fill out for more information.

TreatmentSearch

There are a plethora of medical sites that help you figure out based on symptom what sort of ailment you might be suffering from. Put in your symptoms, browse the results, make a guess. In fact, Healthline has such a search engine as well: SymptomSearch. But how do you get more information if you already know what's causing the symptoms? What if your doctor is suggestion a course of treatment and you want a second opinion? This is where the new search tool TreatmentSearch is handy. Using sematic search technology, TreatmentSearch takes your diagnosis and finds resources such as treatment costs and specialists. According to West Shell III, Chairman and CEO of Healthline Networks:

"When you are diagnosed with a health condition, you want to know your options, find a treatment and a specialist that are right for you, and understand the associated cost implications. Healthline semantic search technology enables us to get inside not just the consumer's health inquiry, but also all the relevant associations."

DocSearch

Also announced today is DocSearch, a comprehensive searchable database of 1.3 million doctors nationwide that can quickly supply useful results starting with a zip code and symptom, or alternatively just by specialty. Searches can be refined by distance, name, hospital affiliation, experience, and even spoken languages. Up to twenty doctors can be compared side-by-side to find the just the right specialist.

Healthline is taking advantage of new technologies such as recent advances in semantic search in order to improve the experience visitors have when using the site to help them with every stage of medical care, from diagnosis, finding a doctor, costs of treatment and pharmaceutical advice. Of course, Healthline is also a business, and to that end it has partnered with quite a few other networks and portal sites to provide search, content and advertising as well.

Picnik is, at heart, a very robust Adobe Flash-based web application that supports hundreds of Photoshop-style filters, effects, and adjustments. Getting started is free and registration is optional, but many of the advanced tools are only available after upgrading to a pro account ($24.95/year). Even though the tool can be used directly from Picnik's site, one of its strengths is the sheer number of embedded partnerships it has forged with other social networks like MySpace, Flickr, and Facebook. This allows Picnik to be invoked directly and returns your retouched photo to the site you are on.

Twitgoo is a new competitor from Photobucket aiming to unseat the crown of the current Twitter photo-sharing site, TwitPic. It is a fairly unique service, trying very hard in a chameleon-like way to look very much like Twitter once you log in (using your Twitter username and password, or Twitter OAuth in the case of the Picnik partnership). The powers you grant Twitgoo go farther than just sending a tweet about a new photo. As we stated above, it can (if instructed) also update your Twitter background and user icon directly.

Finally, photos that are modified in Picnic and pushed to Twitter appear to come from Picnic on 'from' line below the tweet. This is a smart move on Picnik's part, they are all about trying to become the de facto standard for web-based photo retouching, and this will raise their profile more. Having used Picnik with Flickr for close to a year now, we can assure you that it is a very easy and fun editor to use, and the results it generates are spectacular. Give it a try, and tweet your results!

Feedly is not that easy to describe in just a few words. Part feed reader (integrates with Google Reader), part social network aggregator (grabs conversations from FriendFeed, Twitter, and RSS feeds), part search utility (simultaneously searching your feeds, FriendFeed, YouTube and other sources for results), and part application (it's a Firefox plugin), what can be said for sure is that it is completely awesome. And it seems like every month, a new cool feature is slipstreamed into Feedly's framework that makes it even more useful or interesting.

Most recently, Feedly has been working on enhancing the functionality of Feedly Mini (which we cover here) to go beyond being a convenient place to share the page you are currently reading. Previously, the occasional mysterious topic result would appear if you were on a page relating to, say, politics or movies. Now, that feature has been expanded and refined to work on any search query on certain sites, like Google or Amazon. Feedly quickly brings up a weighted result list of discussions and links, along with a link to the originating sites. The search that is performed is done on the client, and no search data is being sent back to Feedly, Google Reader or any other service. The new feature, just like Feedly mini itself, can be turned off in Feedly options as well.

Overall, the new search feature is nicely implemented and we think it will come in very useful. We do have one small wish though, to cover those corner cases where you might be searching for something, say an article on Wikipedia or a product on eBay that you want to share with your friends on Twitter or Friendfeed.. in those cases, we want both the functions of Feedly Mini on the same page - search and share buttons. But for the moment we can't figure out how to turn that on. It either does one or the other, depending on what site you are on.

The quick way to submit a question is to use the widget you can find here. But there are plenty of other resources available if you are interested in learning more about the Summit of the Americas, starting with the America.gov Townhall page or the Howcast Townhall page. The America.gov site in this case links to the Howcast site, which pulls together all the links, how-to videos, and forum posts about this summit, with additional media on their branded YouTube page. The videos and other US State Department media are located on their own YouTube page, and finally there is not one but two professional sites covering Summit of the Americas activities in general.

We have covered how Obama's administration has harnessed YouTube in the past, and it looks like they are taking advantage of that channel again, linking to the Howcast Townhall site directly from the official White House blog. It definitely appears as if they are sincere about leveraging the technological infrastructure that is out there in order to drive engagement for events like these. With any luck, that is what is going to happen, as the issues discussed may lead to lasting decisions about how the democratic nations of the Americas combine to combat these global issues.

Sitelinks can be seen as a slow encroachment of Google into a function that is traditionally part of the experience of visiting a site. Depending on how a site is structured, a business might not appreciate customers being pushed directly to a page below the front page. It could be seen as taking away from the customer's average time on site (a commonly measured site statistic) as well as potentially confusing if a company's offerings are complex and require some explanation.

To this end, Google has made available settings in its suite of Google Webmaster Tools that allow domain holders, once registered, to block specific sitelinks from being listed in Google search results. It does appear that the block is only temporary (90 days) and for specific pages - which means webmasters are going to have a headache dealing with it if they have a lot of potential sitelink pages to block. In any case, Google has written about how to block sitelinks here.

Widget Wishlist

The Widget Wishlist is a section of Netvibes Labs that accepts suggestions for new widgets and allows other Labs users to vote on the wishes they think have the most potential. After voting (with or without a comment), there is a button to move to another wish at random. The wishlist page also maintains a list of the top ten most popular wishes, and how many people have voted them up and down. Finally, there is an input box to make up to three 160-character wishes (per day according to the Netvibes blog).

Projects

• Theme Designer: This is a GUI-based tool that lets you choose the colors and background image for your private Netvibes page, and it generates and applies the XML theme automatically. Easy.
• Tag Cloud: This tool analyzes the content on your Netvibes page and generates a tag cloud. From this cloud you can click on words that interest you and a search will be made for widgets that use the specified keyword. One click gets that widget on your page. Easy.
• Spring Cleaning: This is especially good for those folks who have had a lot of feed widgets on their Netvibes page, and need help weeding out the old stuff. Feeds are placed in one of four categories: Never read, 30 days, 6 months, and 1 year. Then, with a couple of clicks, you can archive the feeds you no longer read. Easy.

Summary

So there's a lot of easy already happening here. The initial Netvibes Labs tools are fairly simple and straightforward, the most complex tool being the theme designer (which actually has a bug we found - we couldn't add a background image using Firefox). But we're guessing that's how these labs tools will probably be developed; precise, simple tools to address a certain issue or need in the Netvibes community. So far, we like what we are seeing.

We have written about Twitter courting revenue models like ExecTweets and suggested friends. However, it has kept its real monetization plans under wraps, content to move slowly, until now. It looks like the first applications to be highlighted as paying sponsors are Twitterrific, Tweetdeck and Stocktwits. We haven't seen any new changes to the business side of Twitter to indicate how advertisers would go about promoting their product on the site yet, but we're sure it is just a matter of time.

Update: It looks like we jumped the gun a bit: the official Twitter account just sent this tweet: "None of the promos currently running in the sidebar are sponsored (it just says that because of a bug that's being fixed right now)."

You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Rick Turoczy, Sean Ammirati, Lidija Davis and Phil Glockner.

Today, Smule announced the latest and most ambitious of their iPhone/iPod Touch-based instrument apps, Leaf Trombone: World Stage. Leaf Trombone improves upon the shortcomings of Ocarina in a number of areas (like adding tutorials), and throws in a very ambitious online judgment area called World Stage.

Leaf Trombone

The way Leaf Trombone is controlled is quite different from Ocarina. Instead of a recorder-like set of holes to cover, you are presented with a slider (a leaf) on the right and an octave controller on the left. Tick-marks along the leaf indicate major notes. Playing is as simple as tapping or sliding along the leaf to produce a sound. Holding one of the two triangles will, of course, shift the notes up or down an octave. There is also a setting to turn on breath control, in case you want to emulate a real trombone a little more closely.

The instrument encourages you to produce a real melody. To that end there is a tutorial mode you can engage to watch a rendition of any of the songs from the game library or new compositions from other Leaf Trombone contributors. Both while watching or playing a song, a Dance Dance Revolution-style scrolling display of leaves indicates the notes to be played for the upcoming 10 seconds or so. By dutifully following the leaves as they touch the tick marks, songs can quickly be mastered.

World Stage

After some practice, you may want to conduct a performance on the World Stage. This is a special mode where the software connects to the Smule game server and lets you play for a panel of 3 judges. Before you can do that, though, you first have to judge a performance or two. After registration, you indicate your willingness to judge and the server assigns you plus two other judges to a performance. During the performance, you can choose an animated emoticon to indicate how you think the solo is going. You can also type in a short message either during or after the performance. Once it is finished, you assign a numerical rating and you will get leaves which allow you to then perform.

Once you have some leaves, you can choose a song and play a song to be judged. Your performance will be rated, and then stored under the World Stage ID that you created, and assigned a star rating. As more people find and rate your solo, the number of stars that you get may go up or down. Also, as you perform more songs that are rated highly, your overall ranking on the global ladder will rise.

Finally, there are a number of unlockable achievements you can work toward both for performing and judging that should keep you challenged for many hours to get them all.

Minor Quibbles

There are a couple of minor points we can't help but touch on. First, we unfortunately have to agree with Techcrunch and wonder why the trombone is the only instrument sound that's offered. It would be nice to be able to choose a different instrument sound perhaps, to make our recitals unique. Second, we think the slider could support more advanced polyphony, perhaps limited to two or three notes maximum, in order for people who have already mastered the single-note songs to still find a challenge on the World Stage.

Overall, Leaf Trombone: World Stage (iTunes link) hits all the right notes in terms of an instrument application that is fun, easy to pick up and with incentives to keep playing with the challenging World Stage. The graphics are unique without being distracting, and the World Stage area has a great 3D globe that indicates where other judges and performers are in the world. Listening to other performances and judging went very smoothly. Especially for the introductory price of a single dollar, we can easily recommend this fun application.

Some results of the study? Men visit more sites and stay online longer, use social networks as much or more than women and are more likely to access the Internet from a mobile device.

From the report:

• eMarketer estimates there are 95.9 million males online in 2009, or 48.2% of the Internet population, compared with 103.2 million females.
• Although the US Internet population will continue to grow, by 2013 males will make up just 47.9% of the online population, and at 105.9 million users will still be the minority.

Men spent, on average, 4.4 hours longer online than women. They are also overall less likely to be 'put off' by something they find online, and are more tolerant of advertising and branding than women. Finally, fewer men in the study said they have 'never' been online, only 15% of males compared to 20% of females.

The report covers a lot more information in-depth, but the summary already hints at key differences between how men and women approach Internet use and how long they are willing to remain engaged before choosing a different activity.

Although we had a hard time swallowing that men are an overlooked minority of Internet users, upon further reflection it does seem like a lot of marketing analysis goes toward finding the motivations of other online groups. Even in our coverage at ReadWriteWeb, we have talked about women and multitasking, and how age plays a role in Internet use, but not much specifically about men.

Well.. OK, that's not entirely true. We did cover this study by browser maker Opera last year. But it looks like the results of that study just serve to reinforce the findings of the eMarketer report.

Besides offering the source code under the MIT open source license, a main differentiator between Concrete5 (or C5) and other CMS platforms is the way that pages are built and modified. Concrete5 brings a clickable, context menu-driven model to constructing pages of content, keeping the hierarchical content tree tucked away behind the scenes, but still allowing the use of either short CMS-style or longer SEO-optimized URLs. On the administration side, the platform supports full granular user and group permissions for different contributor roles. Version tracking is built-in as well as a template system, automatic theme installation, Google Analytics support, and package-based deployment for solution providers.

I spent an hour or so using the C5 demo to get familiar with how the system works. In practical use, C5 felt a lot like an easy-to-use website creator married with a full CMS platform on the back-end, making content and layout changes easy and quick, but allowing a lot of customization under the hood if required. The demo has a number of different page types pre-configured, such as an image slideshow, embedded video, and an interactive form. I was also able on my demo page to insert a headline feed from RWW with only a couple of clicks.

Being mostly familiar with WordPress, it definitely is a conceptual shift to work with a CMS that isn't inherently journal-based, but it makes a lot of sense if the site you are designing is going to be built around highlighting a product or service rather than a blog. Overall, C5 seems to be stable, powerful and easy to use. It certainly was not hard to get started with, especially given the fact that it is free and installs easily in a hosting provider's environment with these basic requirements: PHP 5.1.x, Python 2.2, and MySQL 4.1 or higher. They also offer installation support or a one-time fee as well as full hosting for $15/month.

We have recently covered eBay's troubled coexistence with Skype, noting that the two businesses didn't share very much common ground, with codebase integration lagging and other troubles as well. So the question was not so much if a spin-off or sell-off would happen, but when. And for now, it looks like that time is early next year.

The fact that eBay and Skype make strange bedfellows does not mean Skype doesn't have a business model. On the contrary, the business generated revenues of $551 million in 2008, which is a 44% increase year-over-year and represents a 21% profit margin for them. The press releases also states a projected revenue of $1 billion in 2011, twice as much as in 2008.

With promising sales, high adoption rates and an openness to new platforms such as their iPhone app, its not hard to think that Skype will have a booming IPO, and will remove the albatross status from eBay, which can return to its core strengths of online payments and e-commerce.