coComment Tracks Your Reputation Across the Commentsphere

coComment is launching a number of new features this morning to attempt to further establish itself amidst a growing number of competitors that want to track your online conversations and reputation. The service, which both powers commenting features for some 20,000 websites and tracks conversations across 270,000 more, is introducing comment ranking, allowing users [...]

Exclusive: fring Enriches Mobile IM Client With fringAdd-ons

First of all, if you think the name fringAdd-ons is a bit clumsy, you’re right. We didn’t make it up: that’s the official name for add-on applications that can be integrated with the already quite powerful mobile IM/VoIP client fring. If you aren’t familiar with fring, suffice to say that it’s the instant communication swiss [...]

First Look: Digg’s Recommendation Engine

Digg’s long awaited recommendation engine is now live for some users, which luckily includes me. It’s time to take a look at what this new feature brings to the individual user as well as Digg community as a whole. The reason I’m dividing these two categories is the fact that recommendation engines of any kind [...]
AdCamo, the online advertising platform for Web page backgrounds, has added yet another unique ad format to its mix: the cursor.

Why Did NBC Censor SNL on the Web?

As I noted (to much derision from the peanut gallery) back in August, Tina Fey bears a striking resemblance to Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin

Google Maps: Now Officially Gorgeous

Remember when we told you about Google’s new satellite, GeoEye-1, which should bring highest resolution commercial imagery available to Google Maps? Below, you can see the first image that the satellite captured. GeoEye-1 captures images at .41 meters in black and white and 1

Into the Future With Philips: First Stop, Your Living Room

Our roving cub reporter Scott Merrill is live in Amsterdam at the Philips Research labs. His first report is on the HomeLab. Watch CrunchGear for the Surface-like Shop Lab interface. The HomeLab at the Philips research center is a model home built to test and monitor real-world response to prototype technology. Thirty cameras and microphones record [...]

All The TC50 Diggs, Feeds, Tweets, and Blog Posts You Can Handle

I know where I am going to be checking to see what people are saying about TechCrunch50 this week. The TechCrunch50 Aggregator. It is a site developed by leaked screenshot showing a redesigned AOL homepage that included integration with third party email services (Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail), personalized bookmarks

Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld Commercial #2: I Remain Confused

I'm starting to feel bad for Microsoft PR, who've been tasked with defending these Microsoft ads featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld. I just didn't connect with the first

Google Talk Comes to the iPhone…And It’s Kinda Useless

Fanfare: Google Talk is now available for the iPhone. It features a snazzy interface (is it possible to create a shoddy interface for the iPhone?) and almost everything you can do on the desktop client: create a quicklist of favorite users, search, and manage multiple conversations at the same time. There’s one problem, though, which [...]
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<h1>YadaHome is Your Virtual “Fridge” Start Page (The Startup Review)</h1>
<p>Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details <a href=

</article>
<article>
<h1>YadaHome is Your Virtual “Fridge” Start Page (The Startup Review)</h1>
<p>Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details <a href=

here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: Silverlight technology warranted an install to watch the summer games in Beijing at NBCOlympics.com. And another big crowd felt different, thinking, among other things, that the use of Adobe Flash would na

Google Starts Shopping in Korea; Buys Blog Platform Maker TNC

According to TNC’s founder Chang Kim, Google has acquired the company, described by Kim herself as “a company that develops a cool blogging platform that’s favorited by the nation’s A-list bloggers.”

Google hasn’t been too keen on acquiring companies in Asia so far, and this is their first acquisition of a Korean company

WSJ’s Emo Social Network Not a Bad Idea

The Wall Street Journal rolled out their long awaited new look over the weekend, and I actually had a chance to take a look at it yesterday due to all the AIG/Lehman brothers mess as I tried to get a handle on how many stomach ulcers I should develop this we

Is a Social Media Friend Really a Friend?

Would you trust a social media friend with your money? Your home? Your significant other? Your children? Your life? Your answer to those questions will determine whether or not you feel that friends, as used in social media, are friends like you had in school or if they’re better labeled as something else.

The social media friend is the key ingredient that makes digital media

Eurolanguages Searches for Schools in Detail (The Startup Review)

Company Name

Eurolanguages

20-Word Description

Eurolanguages is the simplest way to find, compare and confirm language schools and courses all over Europe.

CEO’s Pitch

Until today, finding a place on a European language course was tedious and time consuming, and searching online wasnR

Google Maps Introduces Walking Directions and Street View for Mobile Users

If the infusion of walking directions in Google Maps interests you, and you don’t mind the privacy concerns voiced about Google’s Street View, and you happen to have a Web-enabled mobile phone on hand, you may be glad to know Job hunting is only the first step in the process of getting a new job, but how do you prepare for the interview that will land you the new career you desire?

The Web is filled with tools to help you figure out how to prepare for and give that perfect interview that recruiters are looking for. Here are nine tools for successful j

YouTube is the Ultimate Sharing Site and Google Needs to Capitalize on That

Sometimes, you don’t have to think of new improvements and features for your web service; your users do it for you. Such is the case with YouTube, which - while purely a video sharing site - is being used for sharing all kinds of data by the users, simply because they find it synonymous with sharing.

What do I mean by “all kinds of data”? First, music. Ever seen a mu

Mashable Monthly Exhibitor Hall - Show Us What You’ve Got

Mashable Monthly is back for September, but with a twist. We’re offering an Exhibitor Hall, which means you have a chance to show us what you’ve got. Opportunities are still available and priced right for every company, including startups! (For a fancy breakdown of what’s included, email karen [at] mashable [dot] com). You’ll not only have exposure at the event, but al

Is Google Buying Valve? Doesn’t Sound Like a Bad Move

This is completely at unconfirmed rumor stage, so take it with a big chunk of salt, but Inquirer claims it has “well placed sources” that claim that Google’s acquisition of Valve is imminent.

It doesn’t sound like a very logical acquisition for Google, but ValveR

Make VoIP Phone Calls Over Email with Momail and Jajah

JAJAH, a VoIP service provider that manages connections for social network users and mobile and non-mobile phones, has teamed up today with Momail, a free mobile mail operator, allowing users to make Vo

Game Sales or Ads: Developers Need to Choose

We live in a world where we are surrounded almost nonstop from the time we wake up until the time we go to sleep by advertising. From the magazines we read to the searches we do on the Web, advertising permeates it all.

With the software we use on a daily basis, it has been a common practice for some developers to offer up ad-supported versions of their software so users could use the

Greenbox Keeps a Constant Eye on Home Energy Use (The Startup Review)

Company Name:

Greenbox

20-word Description:

Greenbox Technology is creating an interactive energy management platform that enables households to save money and reduce their carbon footprint.

CEO’s Pitch:

Greenbox founders tackle the challenge of global warming by designing an intuitive, infor

MySpace and HP Team Up to Allow Site-Wide Photo Printing

MySpace has partnered with Hewlett-Packard (HP) to bring print-on-demand capability to the popular social network. That’s right. Those embarrassing photos of you Xeroxing your rear end at the office Christmas party aren’t just on your receptionist’s MySp

Get All Your Social Network Messages and Emails with NutShellMail

Facebook Trumps Most Photo Sharing Sites With 10 Billion Photos

Sometimes I forget how big the Internet is, and then something reminds me just how flabbergastingly, enormously huge the damn thing is. This time it’s Facebook, whose software engineer Doug Beaver announced that it now hosts a total of 10 billion photos. And

AmieStreet Gets a Fresh Look for Music Discovery and Eyes More Investment

AmieStreet has revamped its site design to focus more on music discovery, including launching a new media player with social features. The company, which allows artists to upload their own music and prices it based on customer demand, also announced that is currently raising another round of financing - its Series B. AmieStreet received

Evan Williams Gives Day After Notes On TechCrunch50 Companies

Twitter cofounder Evan Williams (pictured right, with Tim O'Reilly) will certainly be invited back as an expert panelist at next year's TechCrunch50 conference. in addition to taking a half day to judge nine of the launching startups, he wrote a Gesture. The $4.99 application lets you turn any photo you take on the iPhone into a really cool artwork-type image. Easily pointilize the photo,

New Media and Local News

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about localized news online over the last few months. I’ve tried to come at writing a post on the topic about ten different ways and wound up scrapping it each time. Presumably, if you’re reading this, a post I’ve written on the topic has finally passed muster. What’s finally [...]

Plurkmania Brings You All The Plurk Stats You Can Eat

When I initially wrote about Plurk, I noted that while it was a great service, I don’t see it gaining too much traction because of its similarity to Twitter which seems to be in that comfy spot where no one really wants to switch to another service, whichever novelties it may bring. Fast forward one [...]

The “Crisis” In Venture Capital

There were no venture-backed IPOs in the second quarter, and M&A deals are down. The last time there were no VC-backed IPOs in a quarter was in 1978. The liquidity drought for venture-backed startups is so bleak that the National Venture Capital Association is calling it a “crisis.” Last quarter there [...]

How Do You Like The New Last.fm?

This is not new for folks who’ve been invited into Last.fm beta, but the bulk of users haven’t seen the new look, which is likely to become the default look soon. I like it; for some reason, it reminds me of Digg; everything got flattened, the design is a lot cleaner and a bit more [...]

WordPress Launches Mobile Blogging App for iPhone

Though it is late to the scene relative to its competitor, TypePad, WordPress has now unveiled its own application for iPhone and iPod touch users for mobile management of blogs built upon its platform. And while it is somewhat generic-looking in presentation — SearchCamp is designed to be an affordable and fun way for small businesses and marketers to learn about how to market their b

Digg Dialogg Kicks Off at Democratic National Convention

Digg on Monday announced that it has launched a new program called Digg Dialogg, which will identify a guest interview and let the Digg community submit questions in text or video that the same community will Digg up or down. Based on the number of Diggs, the most popular questions will be posed to the guests.

Digg said that its featured gu

Oosah’s iPhone App Extends Storage to Whopping 1TB

Oosah’s free virtual storage service is releasing its new iPhone application today, turning your iPhone and iPod Touch into a mobile desktop of sorts. The benefit of having access to your documents and files is that an application such as Oosah effectively extends the storage capacity of your mobile device.

Oosah already had limit

MicasaStyle is Photo-Tagging Fun for Interior Designers and Home Owners

MicasaStyle is a social network for home owners and interior design aficionados who like to share information about their personal taste. Emerging from its beta test period this week, the idea behind MicasaStyle is to create a space that inspires others when it’s time to decorate their homes, along the same lines as other networks

Meet Top Social Media Experts for One-On-One in Boulder, CO

The second Aloha Social Media Summit, October 6-7 in Boulder, Colorado, will bring together entrepreneurs, marketers, and executives for a two-day hands on social networking and web 2.0 training course coordinated by Andy Beal and Dave Taylor. At the Aloha Social Media Summit, explore opp

20 Tools to Follow the Democratic and Republican National Conventions

In the United States, the Democratic and Republican National Conventions are upon us and the presidential race is moving into full gear. There are a number of websites devoted to helping you follow news from each of these events, your presidential candidate of choice, and more. You can even follow it all from the comfort of Facebook. Here are 20 resources to help you keep track of the 2008 poli

Last Chance to Nominate a Startup to Get Funded in the VenCorps Mashable Showdown

This week is your last chance to join and nominate startups for the Mashable Showdown on VenCorps. VenCorps is a private alpha community of entrepreneurs, investors and service providers focused on discovering, funding and growing startups.

This is the first time our readers get to pick a startup to get funded. During th

The WOA story emerges as better outcomes sought for SOA

Over the summer the enterprise IT blogosphere was swept up in the conversation around the concepts that many are calling Web-Oriented Architecture, or WOA. A different way to think about service-oriented architecture, WOA extolls a different but related set of technologies, in particular how to apply them in specific ways to connect our systems together into the solutions we need to take on our da

MySpace Closes App Profile Forums Due to Spam Overload

Rhonda from MySpace says the network has had a spam infestation in its application profiles. S

Like Soft Porn? Try FriendFeed Now!

Chances are if you’re reading this, it’s probably a little late to watch the action unfold live, but if you are in fact up at the wee hours of the morning this Saturday, you could be in for a treat. By treat, I mean finding embarrassing and possibly titilating videos favorited by your contacts on FriendFeed.<

Like The Old Facebook Design? Tough Luck, You’re Screwed

We’ve known it for quite some time now: Facebook’s new design will soon be Facebook’s only design, although many users aren’t particularly happy about it. Now, we have a precise time frame: Facebook would begin transitioning all users over to the new design this week. This afternoon, confirmation from the social network that the process has begun, with the rollout “to be complete within the next few weeks.”

Perhaps most interesting in the news are the numbers. According to Fa

MVP – “India’s YCombinator” – Announces 7 New Startup Investments

YCombinator, an early stage investment firm that has provided seed funding for the likes of Reddit, Scribd, and Justin.tv (among many others) has been widely praised in the US for helping get new Internet ventures off-the-ground on the cheap, with typical investments ranging from $15,000-$20,000.

The concept has inspired numerou

RSSMixer makes Mashups Easier

Recently launched RSS Mixer wants to make mixing and mashing up all of your RSS feeds as easy as possible. They’ve spent the last year devloping a service that they hope will allow even the least technically savvy user be able to create their own mashups wit

Google Goes into Orbit: Timeshare Satellite GeoEye-1 Launched

As we noted late last month, Google affixed its name to the GeoEye Inc’s GeoEye-1 satellite, in order that the Web giant get dibs on some high-resolution imagery produced of our little planet in orbit. Well, today marked the blastoff sequence, followed by a successful launch.

According to the AP, it started fi

Wikia Green: A Community for Environmental Issues

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has unveiled a new community for sharing knowledge about environmental topics: Wikia Green. It is hosted on his for-profit wiki hosting service Wikia, and it currently has over 600 articles.

In an Amazee may be the thing to give you the value-add you crave. Rather than offer you a place to play board games or chat with friends, Amazee is built to serve one purpose: getting stuff done.

Through collaboration with friends and strange

Top 10 Tools for Soccer Moms and Weekend Warriors

Whether you’re a soccer mom or a dad who enjoys playing pick-up basketball games at the YMCA, there are a variety of online tools that can help you and your team. Here are the top 10 services for soccer moms and weekend warriors that allow you to manage your team’s schedule, notify players of news, upload and share player photos and statistics, and much more.

Many of these

So, What Was Google Up To in the Past 10 Years?

The best way to have people obsessing about your birthday is to never tell anyone the exact date. That’s what Google’s been doing; we pretty much know that big G’s 10th anniversary is in September, but the exact time is unknown.

And, while some have written about it almost a month ago, only now Google is officially “celebrating” its birthday by releasing a

35+ Online Shopping Cart Solutions for Your Business

With the shape of the economy and ever changing gas prices, online shopping may end up growing even faster than some have predicted. If your business hasn’t added an online shopping cart yet, why not? The technology has been around for years now, and there are solutions for just about every skill level: you can do it yourself, outsource the work, pay companies for hosting, or even turn a

RSS Usage is Much Higher than 11%

I just caught the writeup Steve Rubel did on a recent Forrester report on consumer adoption of RSS. Steve (based off the Forrester repor

Google.org Donates $14 Million To Prevent The Next Pandemic

Remember Google.org, the philantropic arm of Google? They’re still here and trying their best to spend that billion they started with.

This time, they’ve donated 14 million dollars in various grants to partners in Southeast Asia and Africa

Lala’s New Business Model May Be Good, But I Don’t Like It

Lala started out as a CD-swapping service, which didn’t really work all that well. Now, they’ve switched to a completely new business model, which can best be described as a cross between Pandora and iTunes. You can buy albums, that’s the standard part of any online music shop. You can also stream all of the songs from Lala

Take a Walk With Google Maps

Google added walking directions to its Google Maps product today. The walking directions ignore one-way streets and Google Maps tries to give pedestrians the most direct and flat route possible. As Google itself acknowledge

Can You Guess Which Facebook App Is Making A Million Dollars A Month? I Can.

Facebook is a famously difficult place to make money. Despite the popularity of the social network, most ads go for pennies per thousand impressions (CPMs). Even Social Media, a Facebook ad network that is able to get effective CPMs of about 50 cents, has only paid out a little more than $8 million [...]

What We Need Is A Digital Bill Of Rights

As the Democrats and Republicans gather at their national conventions, it is time to really think about a comprehensive national technology policy for the Internet Age. Many laws and policies governing the Internet and digital property are inadequate attempts to transplant rules from a different era. The problems that arise are not just [...]

Microsoft Invests In Silverlight Streamer Move Networks

Microsoft making a strategic investment in Move Networks, which helps deliver Web video for Silverlight-powered sites. Technically, the investment will be a follow-on to the $46 million C round Move announced last April. But it involves an undisclosed amount of new money With the Olympics over (NBC’s video was all Silverlight, although not powered [...]

Tweetrush Shows Twitter Usage Far Below What We Expected

Ireland based Tweetrush, a new analytics service around Twitter, launched a few minutes ago. For now it’s fairly straightforward - it shows aggregate Twitter usage by all users, and you can drill down to the per user level as well. Total Twitter usage according to TweetRush is approximately 850,000 messages per day, which is far less [...]

FriendFeed Beta Testing New Design, Adds Grouped Friends And Photos

FriendFeed, the popular social activity aggregator, has written a blog post announcing a new redesign of the site that is currently in public beta. You can check out the site at http://beta.friendfeed.com/. Among the highlights of the new design are Friend Lists, which allow users to separate their friends into separate groups (much as they [...]

4 Years Later, Google Suggest Finally Goes Primetime

Over the next week, Google will finally be implementing Google Suggest, its auto-complete for searches, on its homepage at Google.com. The service allows users to see the most commonly searched phrases after entering only a few letters, helping users cut back on typing time and check for spelling errors. If you’d like to [...]

TC50: TrueCar May Keep Car Dealers More Honest

TrueCar joins GoodGuide in helping consumers obtain more information about the products they buy - information that sellers don't necessarily want them to have.

Big Fish Games Raises $83.3 Million For Casual Game Distribution

Big Fish Games, an online portal for both online and downloadable computer games, has closed an $83.3 million funding round led by Balderton Capital, General Catalyst Partners, and Salmon River Capital. Big Fish

Go28Days: A Site I Guarantee I’ll Never Use

Ok listen up if you are part of the population that has to deal with monthly fertility cycles. Newly launched Go28Days may be the thing for you if you are really trying hard to get pregnant, or really trying hard not to get pregnant. Like a bunch of oth

Tipit Lets You Transfer Money Over Twitter. Sort of.

Tipit, a startup that lets users tip website owners for their content, has launched integration with Twitter. Users can now ‘Tweet’ their tips to websites and Twitter users, even those without an account. There isn’t any kind of installation required: users simply tweet a message in the format “d tipit TARGET AMOUNT MESSAGE” [...]

Judge Protects YouTube’s Source Code, Throws Users To The Wolves

The ongoing Google/YouTube-Viacom litigation has now officially spilled over to users with a court order requiring Google to turn over massive amounts of user data to Viacom. If the data is actually released, the consequences could be far more serious than the 2006 AOL Search debacle. Louis L. Stanton, the senior judge on the United [...]

Identi.ca: The Force Is Strong With This One (But is no Jedi, Yet)

First there was Twitter. Then there came a host of other services that tried their hands at status microblogging, the most of which fell by the wayside as Twitter gained dominance. Then came FriendFeed, and some folks realized that this short style of blogging, conversing and status-updating was pretty fun. Then people remembered Utterz, and [...]

SpeedDate: Another Facebook App Bites The Dust

The most recent victim of the Facebook vs. annoying application war is SpeedDate. SpeedDate, an application from the company of the same name, has disappeared from the application list, and the link to the application leads back to the Facebook homepage. SpeedDate is a web-based speed dating service that also offers a Meebo [...]

BT Has Acquired Ribbit For $55 Million To Build GrandCentral Competitor, Say Ribbit Execs To Friends

This is a strange story. Rumors circulated today that Silicon Valley based startup Ribbit was acquired by British Telecom, and VentureBeat ran with the story. The company later denied the rumors, but wouldn’t comment on whether or not merger discussions were occurring or not. The strange part is this - while Ribbit executives are denying the [...]

Gosh, How Many Diggs Does It Take To Get To The Home Page, Anyway?

Back in June 2005 when I first wrote about Digg (six days after starting TechCrunch), it took just 15 diggs and a story was automatically sent to the home page of the then small and innocent site (there are lots of old screen shots of Digg in that post). Today it takes an average of [...]

Graspr Raises $2.5 Million, Shifts Into Syndication Mode

You could say we were less than enthused when writing about the launch of Graspr last September. The nascent instructional video site captured our attention because it was led by an ex-Yahoo VP, but it didn’t really do anything to stand out from the crowd. It turns out we weren’t the only ones to notice the [...]

Odeo Giving It Another Go

Odeo, a podcast directory founded in 2005 by Evan Williams of Blogger and Twitter fame that was acquired by SonicMountain over a year ago, has relaunched with a completely new design and slew of features. The biggest addition to the site is video. Odeo now features millions of syndicated audio and video episodes aggregated from [...]

It’s Time To Rise And Take Back Control of the Internet

At the most basic level, the discussion about net neutrality, copyright on the internet, the constant cries of the music/film industry how they’re losing money because of piracy - all of these issues are about control. It’s simple: whoever owns some goods that can easily be replicated on the Internet wants to exert the biggest [...]

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Remember All Those SEO Tips You Read? They Are Wrong

Web 2.0 Invites for July 1st, 2008

Ex-Googlers’ Video Platform Ooyala Launches Powerful Analytics Software