Jobcoin - widget distributed applied to job ads

By Vivek | March 29th, 2007 at 11:13 am ET         

Jobcoin, which has been around for few months now, today officially launched its widget based service that enables display of job ads on blogs and sites. Much like any other widget based service, Jobcoin is sourcing job ads data from Indeed.com and displaying relevant jobs in the widget. As expected Jobcoin pays the blog/site owners when their visitors apply to these jobs. Jobcoin is also working on setting up a FeedBurner FeedFlare to get relevant Jobcoin job listings onto publishers RSS feeds. Currently the startup is targeting lows to highs of blogosphere with premium Jobcoin service being available for sites with more than 5 million page views per month.

This service is similar to Jobamatic service launched by Simply Hired earlier this year. As I had indicated in Jobamatic’s case, the relevancy and control over which ads can be displayed is more important than just displaying the ads and rev-sharing. Right now the site is down for maintenance. Would check the job relevancy once it is backup.

Links:
Jobcoin

Fring also dials SIP

By Vivek | March 29th, 2007 at 10:26 am ET         

Mobile VoIP startups are striking out one line item after another from their todo list to get onto as many handsets as possible. Couple of weeks back it was Barablu that had enabled support for IP phones. Now Fring users also have access to the same functionality and can get connected to their SIP accounts. And this is possible even from non-SIP enabled handsets. So off you go hooking up your Nokia with GizmoProject to call landlines, GSM, and SIP phones via Fring.

Tahiti - Microsoft goes for consumer desktop sharing

By Vivek | March 29th, 2007 at 08:41 am ET     2 Comments »    

As I had noted few months back, Microsoft and other major conferencing service providers are missing out on the consumer side of desktop sharing. Well as it seems right now, Microsoft is moving in quickly to fill up the space with a new desktop sharing and collaboration product codenamed “Tahiti”.

I did a quick install of the product to check out the features just few minutes back. From the initial impressions Tahiti seems to be taking on WebDialogs Unyte and WebEx Yahoo IM Plugin, by providing similar functionality of being able to invite your buddies from Windows Live Messenger or just sending them invites via email. Microsoft has added few other smart features including the ability to control which applications you want to share with the participants of a sessions,  manage handouts, and eject attendees. If you are heavily into desktop sharing like me, Tahiti Desktop bar comes in a very handy in an unobtrusive way. 

Since the service is targeted at small teams and Windows Live Messenger users, I expect it to be free, but no confirmation on that right now.

Links:
Microsoft Tahiti

flipMail = more mobile email

By Vivek | March 29th, 2007 at 01:29 am ET         

Teleflip has begun beta testing for its email to mobile service flipMail. flipMail gets your email to your mobile without the need for mobile Internet connectivity, or need to install any application. So how do you really get the messages? Only option left is via text messages. Checking at the current pricing, a decent text messaging plans can range from $10/month(Cingular gives 200 txt msgs) to $25/month(Cingular gives 3000 txt msgs). Although flipMail service is free, I think that is lot of money for a service with limited capabilities.

Related:
Flurry’s mobile email service gets funded
Berggi offers unlimited email+messaging for cheap

Links:
Teleflip

LeapTag delivers best of both worlds - Search+Personalization

By Vivek | March 29th, 2007 at 12:54 am ET         

Spent the last hour trying out the tag based personalized search engine from LeapTag. And I think I am pretty impressed. Building on search results from Google, Yahoo,  Technorati and more, LeapTag has delivered a product that even the search king Google does not offer.

To start with LeapTag you need to define your tags and related keywords. From there on LeapTag magic starts. The personalized engine looks at your tags/keywords, analyzes them, and brings back relevant results from news and blogs, websites and books all in a single view. No more do you need to take your keyword to 10 different search engines to get your results. Define your tags once and your result set keeps on getting updated with results from Google Search, Google Blog Search, Google News, Yahoo News, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Finance, Technorati,….. Now that is what we expected Google to deliver for sometime now. Google has made progress in getting Local Search integrated with Keyword Search on mobile phones, and also launched Custom Search Engine, but being able to search across all the major sources from one interface is what we needed. Never bother, LeapTag has that covered.

Actually LeapTag does not seem to emphasize on the above capability too much and wants to project its dynamic tagging and contextual capabilities. While browsing you can easily add new sites to your existing tags to add context to your tags. LeapTag also lets you refine your results by removing, hating, loving the results to fine tune the personalization engine according to your interests. Besides this LeapTag would also incorporate sharing and collaboration capabilities into the product which would work great for research teams.

Right now LeapTag is under Private Beta, and launching sometime soon. Till then fill in their beta access form and wait for an invitation.

Links:
LeapTag