Yahoo Responds By Searching YouTube For Music Videos.

November 6th, 2009 by admin No comments »

Yahoovideo

Last week Google launched the Music Onebox — a special new music search product that lets users stream songs in their entirety for free. Today, Yahoo Video is answering by improving its music video search offering. When you search for a song or artists, Yahoo will extract music videos of the most popular songs and albums for that artists or band. It appears that most of the songs are pulled from YouTube, Last.fm and other music sites.

So a search for U2 on Yahoo Video will show a list of the band’s albums, such as The Joshua Tree, and the music videos for popular songs, such as “Beautiful Day.” When you click on an album, you’ll see the music videos for all of the songs on the album. If you click on an album or song, it will show videos for the album or song in an overlay page.

Yahoo also recently made a similar upgrade to its image search, when it rolled out a travel image refiner.

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Ning Reaches 37 Million Users, Launches Developer Appathon

November 6th, 2009 by admin No comments »

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Tonight at a Ning’s developer event in Palo Alto, newly appointed COO Jason Rosenthal announced that Ning has reached 37 million registered users, as well as 1.6 million Ning networks created. The company also says that it grows another million users every couple weeks. Out of the 1.6 million Ning networks, 20% of the active networks are running at least one Ning application — reaching more then 9 million people.

According to Ning, on average, each network installs more then two Ning applications. Since the Ning application directory launched, there have been over 100 applications created and submitted.

Ning has also brought partners TokBox and Box.net on stage as well, to talk about how they have used the developer platform to integrate their products into Ning.

Chief Product Officer Diego Doval also talked about some of the future plans of Ning, including analytics for Ning apps, as well as launching a payment service so that developers can sell their applications to users.

Ning has also launched the Ning Appathon contest, to encourage developers to build on the newly launched Ning Developer platform. The best original application will win $5,000. Prizes for second and third place can be found on the Appathon site.

Juding the Appathon competition are Marc Andreessen, Chris Anderson and Robert Scoble. The competiton ends on November 12, at 10pm PST.

General Information
Website ning.com
Blog blog.ning.com
Twitter @ning
Category: Network/Hosting
Phone: 650-561-7100
Email: info@ning.com
Employees: 125
Founded: 10/04
Description: Social network platform

Office:
Palo Alto, USA
285 Hamilton St.
Fourth Floor
Palo Alto, CA, 94301
USA

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Flipswap Offering up “Free” Motorola Droid

November 6th, 2009 by admin No comments »

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Love fancy new phones but hate paying money for things? Flipswap wants to help with its new “iDon’t Pay for Droid” promotion. The company is giving away money toward the purchase of a new Motorola Droid: You can swap your current iPhone for up to $350, buy a Droid, and show your proof of purchase, and you’ll get an extra $25.

Okay, it’s not exactly a free phone (not even close, really), but who can blame the company for riding the Droid wave?

Interested parties can get the Droid bonus between now (well, tomorrow, when the Droid goes on sale) and November 30th by entering the promo code “getdroid” into the Flipswap site. More info is available at Flipswap’s Droid site.

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Google offers Commerce Search solution

November 6th, 2009 by admin No comments »

Google, who tends to always be timely with new products, has released a new search product for commerce sites just in time for the holiday shopping season. Google Commerce Search allows websites to offer product search without having to host the feature themselves. Since the service is hosted in the cloud, commerce sites do not have to worry about capacity or infrastructure as a result of customers looking for products.

Probably the biggest testament to the new service is that it uses the same Google technology that people have come to rely on. Google Commerce Search even includes a built-in spellchecker so if a consumer is unsure how to spell what they are looking for they will be offered suggestions. Products can be sorted by category, price, brand or any other attribute. Administrators can even highlight special products or connect related ones to make them easier for shoppers to find. Pricing for Google Commerce Search is based on the number of products or items in your data feed and the number of search queries on a website each year.

Google has done their homework: 71% of online shoppers use keyword searches to find products. Any Google product manager reading that would have to think there is a place for Google in helping to fulfill that need for customers and commerce sites. You have to admit that Google knows search. Sometimes it is best to leave it to the experts.

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Apple Intros “World’s First” Multi-Touch Mouse

November 6th, 2009 by admin No comments »

Alongside refreshes to the its Macbook and Mac Mini lines, Apple today made yet another attempt to get the whole mouse thing right, with the Magic Mouse. The latest Mac mouse follows the not especially well received Mighty Mouse and its much-hated predecessor, the single button Round USB “hockey puck” mouse. According to Apple, the new Magic Mouse is “the world’s first multi-touch mouse.”

magicmousegestures

The mouse doesn’t feature physical buttons, instead relying on touch, taps, and swipes. As Apple puts it, “the mouse itself is the button.” Users can scroll and flip through Web pages and photos, and can click or double-click anywhere on the mouse’s surface. The mouse also utilizes laser-tracking for increased efficiency without the need of a mousepad.

The Magic Mouse is Bluetooth-enabled and is customizable via Apple System Preferences. Users must have Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later and the Wireless Mouse Software Update 1.0.

The new mouse ships with new versions of the iMac or can be purchased separately for $69 from the Apple Store. It’s available now.

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Microsoft starts fresh with first major MSN redesign in over a decade

November 6th, 2009 by admin 1 comment »

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The first MSN redesign in over ten years is fresh and easier on the eyes. It features white background, half the links, Bing integration, and social feeds from Twitter, Facebook, and Windows Live.

Microsoft unveiled a preview of a redesigned MSN homepage Tuesday. The software maker said it revamped MSN to be the “best homepage on the web,” providing easy access to Bing search, favorite social networks, more relevant local content, and the latest news and entertainment information from trusted sources.

The new MSN starts out with a tweaked logo that combines round, elegant typeface with a signature multi-colored butterfly. Layout-wise, there’s a large Bing search box sitting atop the homepage, but it’s not just a box – Bing is deeply integrated as the core search service throughout the home page, via key areas such as shopping, travel and local, and as a way of highlighting hot topics, trends or people.

Below the search box sit horizontally aligned navigation links that provide access to the top five information areas: news, entertainment, sports, money, and lifestyle. Microsoft hailed premium content partners like MSNBC, FOX Sports, Hearst, Rodale, Meredith, and Mayo Clinic, in addition to bloggers and social media sites.

Silverlight-streamed video is embedded inline from more than 300 sources including Hulu, National Geographic and FOX Entertainment Group.

butterflylogo_web

White background, half the number of links as the old MSN page, a larger spacing, and crisp images all result in less clutter. A senior MSN director Lisa Gurry acknowledged that the team listened to customers’ suggestions:

More than half of people online start their sessions on sites like MSN and they told us they want simplicity – yet still want the latest information and their favorite services delivered together.

Erik Jorgensen, Microsoft’s corporate vice president, said that “now is the time to clean up the mess on the web,” adding that Microsoft’s deep involvement in search, media experiences, and technical innovation all helped create integrated MSN experience. For instance, the righthand column provides the latest social feeds from your Facebook, Twitter, and Windows Live accounts.

Simply sign in via Facebook Connect, Twitter, and Windows Live and MSN pulls your Twitter timeline and updates from your Facebook or Windows Live friends. You can also update your Facebook and Windows Live status or send a tweet without leaving MSN. The new MSN Local Edition taps the Bing technology to discover your IP address in order to collect local news and information, map with traffic, detailed weather, and other local services tailored for your location.

As many as 100 million people in the US visit MSN.com each month, Microsoft said (more than 600 million worldwide). The new design will gradually roll out beginning Thursday until it’s widely available by the New Year’s timeframe.

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Google opens up Wave federation

November 5th, 2009 by admin No comments »

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Google just opened the Google Wave developer sandbox for federation. Developers can now begin prototyping tools against WaveSandbox.com. Google tested earlier versions of Wave with a small number of developers on the Wave sandbox and this server will now become the platform for testing interoperability between different Wave servers. Google also released a how-to document that explains how to set up a Java-based Wave server over the weekend. More details about how to implement the Wave Federation Protocol can be found here.

Running Wave on Your Own Server

Developers who want to run their own Wave server can find all the necessary information for setting up a Wave Federation Prototype Server in these documents. The server is written in Java and should run on Windows, OSX and Linux-based machines. In the documentation, the Wave team explains how to run the server as an extension to the open source OpenFire XMPP server, though any XEP-00114 compatible XMPP server should be able to talk to the Wave server.

The Google Wave team points out that this is not even close to the final implementation of the Wave protocol and that things will inevitably change. The team also asks developers to contribute to the development of the Wave prototype server.




As we pointed out last week, the federation protocol is an integral part of Google’s plans for Wave. If Google wants Wave to compete with email, it will have to create a distributed network of providers and this is a first step in that direction.

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Mozilla: Firefox 3.6 won’t be late

October 31st, 2009 by admin No comments »

Mozilla may have released the first beta of Firefox 3.6 nearly two months late, but the organization believes the final version still will arrive on schedule before the end of the year.

Mozilla Firefox 3.6

The Mozilla wiki page on version 3.6, code-named Namoroka, listed early September for the scheduled release of the first beta, but it actually arrived October 30. Despite that, Mike Shaver, vice president of engineering, said Mozilla wants to release the browser before the holidays and is sticking by the overall schedule for the open source Web browser.

“We’re still looking at a release candidate in November and (final) release in December at this point,” Shaver said in a Tuesday interview.

That means Mozilla has a compressed schedule for producing the final version, but Shaver said coders are working hard. “We’re not going to coast into it,” he said. “We’re going to continue shipping beta updates aggressively.”

Those involved in open source projects, with different motivations and pressures than those in the traditional proprietary software industry, sometimes have an attitude of “we’ll ship it when it’s done.” Mozilla, though, recognizes that time matters even for an open-source project.

“We’ve always been more quality-driven than time-driven,” Shaver said. “But we understand timing in the market matters to our users and our competitiveness.”

This article was first published as a blog post on CNET News.

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