Share2me - Social sharing done easier

By Vivek | January 31st, 2007 at 11:52 pm ET     1 Comment »    

Share2me launching at DEMO wants to make it way easier and fun to share information on web. Share2me idea is pretty straight forward. Import contacts into your Share2me account from your address books located on Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook…., install Share2me IE/Firefox button, and you are ready to share the web with your contacts.

For any webpage you share through Share2me, your friends on the other end receive an email or IM with the URL of the webpage you sent or in case you sent Youtube video, link to the Share2me site where they can view the video. Share2me also works with social networks and currently you can post information directly to your MySpace profile. All the information you send gets added to your Share2me account so that you can reference it at anytime.

Kaboodle, Google Toolbar, and plain email are just some of the other options you have, but none them are a comprehensive enough solution to be suggested for full-time use. Consider the case of Send-to-Gmail context menu button that you get as part of the toolbar install - You can’t send emails using your Google Apps account. Only Gmail account will work. In case of Kaboodle, they want to get you to their site. Personally I don’t want to add another site to my daily list.

What I would like to see is the ability to select multiple images from a webpage without text and send them over IM networks that enable file transfers like GTalk/YahooIM. Also it would prove to be much more useful to the ability to annotate around selected text/images/videos instead of sending just the webpage.

With an initial round of funding from Blue Chip Venture Company and Illinois Ventures, Nextumi(parent company of Share2me) is looking to target more towards the MySpace and Facebook crowd. As part of future plans Share2me is developing mobile based sharing application and expanding its social networking site coverage. Personally I would still like to see a clearer picture of the application pack lineage towards the target market.

Links:
Share2me

Google Revenues - further up and higher

By Vivek | January 31st, 2007 at 04:45 pm ET         

Few highlights from the last quarter for Google-

Revenue - Revenues for 4th quarter - $3.21 billion. Revenue Increased by 67% compared to the fourth quarter of 2005 and by 19% compared to the third quarter of 2006.
Cash - As of December 31, 2006, cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities were $11.2 billion.
People - Google employed 10,674 full-time employees as of December 31, 2006, up from 9,378 full time employees as of September 30, 2006

Fring launches Wi-Fi connectivity

By Vivek | January 31st, 2007 at 04:12 pm ET         

Fring has  finally launched its new release that enables connectivity over the Wi-Fi networks. Also comes as part of the new release is support for Symbian 9 devices. Fring device list now looks pretty impressive that includes Nokia 6630, 6680, 6681, 6682, N70, N72, N80, N80i, N90.  Application is in preview phase for Nokia N71, N73, N75, N91, N92, N93, E60, E61 and E70, where features may operate partially.

With 3G, Wi-Fi, and GPRS connectivity all covered, Fring team is working on some really interesting features to watch-out for.

Related:
Fring WiFi on Nokia screenshots

Links:
Fring

Nuvoiz readies softphone for enterprise

By Vivek | January 31st, 2007 at 02:59 pm ET         

Bringing softphone based VoIP to corporates has never really gotten off the ground due to the obvious lack of a standards-based application that gives IT teams ease of management. Unofficially Skype gets the most traffic mainly from SMBs while larger companies are looking for block out Skype for obvious lack of management controls. Mountain View, CA based Nuvoiz(simply put — New Voice) will be looking to fill this important gap in the enterprise VoIP when it launches its comprehensive Enterprise Softphone System at DEMO. With $3 million in funding from Yozan Inc. of Japan, and more than a year under development, Nuvoiz does sound prepared for the target market.

Features IT departments will love – Integration with PBX systems, SIP and XMPP compliance making it easier to integration with other services, NAT and firewall traversal with Nuvoiz VoIP Network Controller, tools for management at the back-end, and integration with company LDAP. Nuvoiz is planning ahead times in terms of platforms it will support. Initial planned support include softphone for Windows XP/2K as well as Windows Mobile 5.0 and 2003 with development for Symbian client underway. From mobile standpoint, Nuvoiz is targeting dual mode handsets which will enable wider coverage of service. Nuvoiz has also developed a smart way in which it will work with regular telecom infrastructure. Companies can enable Nuvoiz to use the office phone extensions on the softphone located on either the PC or on mobile. So any call people receive, they will be able to access it from any of the 3 locations – phone, PC, mobile. Alternatively the softphone can be assigned a separate phone extension and can be configured to ring in case the call on the regular phone goes unanswered. And in case a user with Windows Mobile based phone is out of office, but has access to WiFi, he/she can still make calls to his/her colleagues on their office network due to the superior Nuvoiz NAT and firewall traversal technology.

According to Jim Koh, CEO Nuvoiz, they have already signed up 6 corporate customers for the service in US and Japan. Nuvoiz also has some other interesting products they are working on like the Fast Access Point Handover for Mobile VoIP over Wi-Fi. Should be an interesting company to watch out for when all Skype is doing is making noise about enterprise VoIP without any concrete solution at hand.

Links:
Nuvoiz

Vizu’s market research polls get $2.9 million

By Vivek | January 31st, 2007 at 12:07 pm ET         

Vizu, provider market research through web polls network, has raised $2.9 million in the Series B round of funding. The funding round was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson who contributed $1.5 million. Vizu has been aggressively building up its premier service Vizu Answers which enables market research through web polls distributed around the Vizu site network. As a publisher or blogger you can sign up for the service, run a site characterization polls, and than Vizu will start running contextual polls on your site. Pay rates work on CPM basis, minimum for which can be set by you as a publisher for the various poll zones on your site. Haven’t come across any numbers for how much people are really earning from the service.

As the Vizu service catches up, we will for sure miss the Web0.0 quiz. Who is in the photo: George Bush, Osama, Bill Gates………

Links:
Vizu Answers