One of the great challenges of starting up a new business is being good at everything the business demands: Marketing, investor relations, inside sales, development, operations, IT, project management, the list goes on. Most startups don’t get the luxury of being able to grow their staff quickly and must carefully choose who comes on-board. The…
Creately Combines Chart Smarts with Collaboration (200 Invites)
Last week I was able to catch up with Charanjit Singh (@charanjit on Twitter), one of the three co-founders of the start-up Cinergix, creators of the collaborative diagram creation platform called Creately. Charanjit, along with co-founders Nick Foster and Chandika Jayasundara, have spent the past eight months developing a unique and powerful…
Give Your Twitter Page More Personality with Bubble Tweet
As far as we can tell, Kevin Sherman (BubbleGuru on Twitter) must have loved Pop-Up Video back in the 90’s, because he has no less than five different video-in-a-bubble services that you can try out. His highest-profile service, Bubble Tweet, starts with a simple redirect URL that takes you to someone’s Twitter page. Almost immediately, a small…
The iGoogle Meme Generator
There are thousands of Google gadgets you can add to your iGoogle pages, from email checkers, games, even (wow, over 70) Twitter clients. The framework for these gadgets is flexible, allowing most of them to work not only in iGoogle but also on your PC using Google Desktop and in Gmail as a labs plugin. So when we write about a particular gadget…
WordPress.com Turns On Comment Reply-By-Email Support
WordPress, on their official blog, made a short announcement that Wordpress.com blog owners could now enable reply by email support for comments made to their blog. With a couple of simple configuration changes, blog owners can get the convenience of being able to directly reply to new comments via their preferred email address instead of through…
Digg Demos Optimized Datastreams
Any good webmaster knows the cardinal rules of website optimization. Yahoo! wrote them all up years ago on its Developer Network site. And the more of these rules you can adhere to, the faster your site will load for your visitors. But, more and more often as sites turn to using asynchronous technologies like AJAX to make their sites more…
3deep Makes Your Smartphone a Personal Assistant
As a technology news writer, you get pretty good at sizing up the potential of a new project or product pretty quickly. It is easy to get a little jaded, quickly cubby-holing something new just because it acts like something already out there. I admit to doing just that when I first visited the 3deep web site.
Luckily, I was invited to talk with…
Healthline Launches Treatment Search Tool
Healthline, a leading provider of intelligent health information services, today announced two additions to its stable of medical search tools: TreatmentSearch, the first treatment search application for the web, and DocSearch, a recommendation tool for recommending specialists based semantic parsing of symptom or health condition information…
Tweeting Picnik Photos Now Simple with Twitgoo
Web photo retouching service Picnik just announced a new partnership with Photobucket-based Twitter photo sharing service Twitgoo on its blog. The alliance will allow Picnik users to quickly share their retouched images on Twitter for free. In addition, twittering Picnik users can also apply the image as their Twitter background or update their…
Feedly Mini Learns How to Search
The social news utility Feedly announced on its blog that it just added the ability to perform a supplemental search on content it knows about on any of a number of different sites like Google, Yahoo!, eBay, Wikipedia, Amazon and more. Results from this parallel search appear in Feedly Mini, an unobtrusive pop-up notification area in the…
Howcast Hosts 5th Summit of the Americas (Updated)
How-to video site Howcast collaborated with the US Department of State to develop a media-rich web site for the Fifth Summit of the Americas, a strategic meeting between diplomats and world leaders from the western hemisphere, including President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The pressing issues headlining this summit will be…
Google Gets Mini-Sitelinks
Google announced a new, smaller version of their sitelinks search feature on their official Webmaster Blog today. The new mini-sitelinks will appear on more than just the top search result, and will occupy a maximum of one line and four links per result. Sitelinks were originally added by Google to help people jump to more specific portions of…
Ads Come to Twitter (Updated)
The day we all knew was coming has arrived. Twitter just added a subtle phrase to the right-hand side of every user’s home page. That text? Sponsored definition. What that tells us is that Twitter has decided to start charging for companies to promote in the definition area that they added just a few weeks ago. The change was first noticed by…
Smule Completes the Band with Leaf Trombone
iPhone musical application developer Smule made a name for itself when it released its Zelda-inspired Ocarina software last year to great fanfare. Boasting a simple (yet surprisingly difficult to master) interface consisting of 4 note pads (simulated finger holes), the software combined multi-touch and breath detection to make the iPhone into a…
Report: Men Spend More Time Online, Put Up With More Ads
Market research firm eMarketer released a new report today that examines how men behave differently than women online. Despite being a minority both in US population and online, men are still a large and often (according to the report) ‘overlooked’ segment of Internet users. The report stresses that gender informs online behavior more than other…
Concrete Releases Open-Source CMS to General Availability
Concrete CMS today announced the general availability of its easy-to-use open source CMS product, Concrete5. The new release builds on Concrete’s foundation offering of a CMS that is as easy to configure as a blog, with the flexibility of a full web development platform. Improvements in Concrete5 include an updated file manager, embedded Picnik…
eBay Lays Groundwork for Skype IPO in 2010
Online auction giant eBay, rumored to be shopping around for a buyer for its 2005 acquisition of voice-over-IP phone service Skype, announced in a press release today that it has now decided to prep the ground for a 2010 Skype IPO launch. The announcement also says that this is one of several outcomes considered for Skype when eBay president John…
Qik Makes Choppy Live Announcement: Qik Roam
Today, streaming-video startup Qik announced a new global service called Qik Roam with Irish Deputy Prime Minister (or Tánaiste) Mary Coughlan and Irish telecom company Cubic Telecom CEO Pat Phelan on hand to kick it off. The service sounds pretty interesting – leveraging Cubic Telecom’s mobile SIM technology MAXRoam to allow cell phone users to…
Fox News Says Facebook Will Ruin Your Grades
Ohio State University doctoral student and researcher Aryn Karpinski announced a study today indicating that students who use Facebook also have lower GPA scores and study less. The study got picked up by traditional news media sites like UPI and Fox News. A lot of the media reports (including Fox News’) opportunistically called Facebook the…
Wikipedians to Vote on Site-Wide Creative Commons
The Creative Commons Blog today announced that the Wikipedia community is holding a vote to move to using Creative Commons for its primary content license. The license being discussed is CC BY-SA or Attribution-ShareAlike. Although Wikipedia is already covered by the Gnu Free Documentation License (or GFDL), which is similar (and was the best…