Jangl on Tagged, Six Apart soon

By Vivek | March 30th, 2007 at 12:38 am ET     4 Comments »    

Jangl is on the roll. The anonymous calling service provider that had launched an upgraded widget couple of days back is now partnering with one of the bigger social networking sites Tagged.com and also with blogging tools provider Six Apart. Both the partnerships are supposed to go live with 2-4 weeks timeframe. What this means to users is the ability to easily embed Jangl widget onto their profile page at Tagged or on their blog at Vox/LiveJournal/.. Jangl had already done the big partnership with Match.com, which was right around the time it received $7 million in Series B round of funding.

One thing that I missed the other day while reviewing the new widget was that signing up for he Jangl service doesn’t result in another voicemail box for you to check, which is the case with Jaxtr Okay even Jaxtr has that set to optional. Guess i never saw that. Anyway, in case you don’t choose to take the call, the calling party can leave a message that ends up on your regular voicemail box. To complete the privacy loop, all the while your personal greeting is never delivered to the caller. Personally I just hate checking another mailbox or voicemail, and this feature from Jangl doesn’t want me do that either. In fact Jangl with voice-text widget from Callwave is the best widget-based calling combination you can get. I am already done with the change! Check StartupSquad.com right column for the widget.

Links:
Jangl

WiPeer - serverless p2p

By Vivek | March 29th, 2007 at 11:53 pm ET         

Yesterday I came across WiPeer that enables peer-to-peer wireless networking without the server piece. Interesting idea, but something that is not new. IBM Thinkpads already come pre-installed with such a tool that lets Thinkpad users join p2p communities. However WiPeer goes a step further in the automation of such p2p capabilities. You can create or join p2p networks from any windows machines while choosing between wireless (WiFi) and Ethernet. Just download the app, and join the p2p session. Overall good is that you have privacy while sharing files or collaborating since nothing passes through a central server. Or at the very minimum you can share files easily between your machines without the need to route them through 3rd party servers.

Links:
WiPeer

Yourminis API is live

By Vivek | March 29th, 2007 at 10:36 pm ET     5 Comments »    

Yourminis has finally gone live the launch of its API about which I had written earlier this month. You can get started quickly through the Developers tab at Yourminis.com. Once finished, developers will be able to promote their widgets onto “labs” area where Yourminis uses can try them out.

Yourminis also jumping onto the widget analytics scene by enabling developers to analyze usage. Metrics provided will be similar to what most of us have got used to now - number of impressions/views, comparison of new vs. return viewers, average number of views per viewer, number of views per domain and the number of views per country. Google had added support for widget analytics via Google Analytics sometime back, while widget syndication platforms Clearspring, Musestorm, and Widgetbox also have analytics support. Rest of the homepage services - Netvibes, Pageflakes, Protopage, and Webwag are missing out on the important functionality that developers very well need.

Links:
Yourminis API
StartupSquad.com widget at Yourminis

Image from Yourminis.com

Live Earth takes on Google Maps. Real serious this time around

By Vivek | March 29th, 2007 at 10:10 pm ET     8 Comments »    

Microsoft’s Live Earth team went through a major feature upgrade today with the addition of 3.8 terabytes worth imagery data. And the end result is just amazing. Switching to bird’s eye view almost takes you live to the location. Live Earth team will be making the official announcement soon about which all cities are covered as part of the upgrade. NYC, Chicago, Seattle all seem to there.Chicago, Ventura County California, Broomfield Colorodo, Pinellas Florida, Charleston South Carolina  are the places covered in  US.

Does this explain for Google’s rumored buyout of Vutool?

Links:
Live Earth’s enhanced bird’s eye view

Breaking: Yandex acquires Russian professional networking site Moikrug

By Vivek | March 29th, 2007 at 05:44 pm ET         

StartupSquad has learned from a recent tipoff that Yandex, the leading search engine in Russia with some 5m daily visitors, acquired Moikrug or MyCircle, the largest social networking site for Russian-speaking professionals in other words LinkedIn for Russia. The rumored acquisition price is up to US$ 5m including cash and Yandex stock options. Moikrug is said to have some 100k registered users. Yandex recently reported revenues of $ 72m in 2006 (of which 80% is from search ads).

The above acquisition seems to be in reaction to Xing’s recent acquisition of eConozco that I had written just couple of days back.