FeedDemon 2.5 goes live

By Vivek | May 31st, 2007 at 10:58 pm ET         

Upgrade season seems to be on for RSS and content publishing tools. Yesterday Microsoft had launched a much improved version of Live Writer. In-line spell check and support for tables takes care of issues around writing posts. Today Newsgator/Feeddemon launched release 2.5 of the desktop based feed reader making the feed reading process way faster. Among all the new  features, couple of the new ones I life the most - Prefetching of unread items for offline reading, and embedded videos now display in newspapers. Get your download from here.

Besides the FeedDemon part, NewsGator Desktop Beta 3 is also now available.

Grooveshark partnership#3 = Magnatune

By Vivek | May 31st, 2007 at 10:22 pm ET     2 Comments »    

We were one of the first blogs of discover Grooveshark more than 2 months back. Since that time, the Florida based anti-DRM startup has covered quite a bit of ground that includes launch of private beta and signing up music labels. Grooveshark has been especially quickly in building it’s music repository after having done deals with 3 music labels in 3 months. Latest on the scene is Magnatune, which is considered to be as “the first Internet-era record label”. Grooveshark earlier had done partnerships with London-based V2 Music Group and classical music label, Naxos.

Without any doubt, there is a long way to go and tough competition to overcome for the startup especially when the market already has very confusing music options. Also EMI on iTunes and potentially on Amazon does not help matters. Still the kind of publicity Grooveshark is getting for it’s anti-DRM stance is amazing and can win it quite a few user signups. Checkout the following links - from Digg, from Flickr

Related:
Exclusive: rVibe to launch legal p2p music sharing without DRM

Links:
Grooveshark

Hispanic blog network launches Feedtwister; Do we even need it?

By Vivek | May 31st, 2007 at 09:50 pm ET     2 Comments »    

Got email from #2 hispanic blog network InicioGlobal that they have launched a new feed-mashup service - Feedtwister. Nothing to do with the original story - InicioGlobal claims to have 3 million monthly unique visitors. Coming back to Feedtwister.com, the service allows you to mix up to 50 feeds to generate a new list, with the info you want. All feed formats are supported and you can create as many lists as you want. Embed codes come standard. While the intentions of the development team might be good, I am not exactly sure what problem does a service like Feedtwister solve. I mean while there are quite a few slick options available to mashup feeds, why in the whole world would one use a arcane looking service. 

ReviewBasics - Collaboration on the Document

By Vivek | May 31st, 2007 at 03:11 pm ET     2 Comments »    

Don’t we already have enough options to collaborate online? ReviewBasics thinks not. The NY based startup has come out with it’s own twist on collaboration targeted at Designers, photographers, writers, consultants, analysts… practically anyone who wants to comment, annotate, add shapes onto images and documents. In other words they want to take ”paper-based content review process and bring it online”.

The strength in ReviewBasics offering is that it enables review of pretty much all the standard file types including Word, PDF, PowerPoint, Images, Zip Archives, and Flash Video. As compared to that, most of the existing online office apps individually allow commenting on documents. This includes - EditGrid, Coventi, Preezo, Google Docs,….Besides that Octopz and Vyew are couple of other startups offering similar feature set. Given the competition, I don’t see much of a shelf life for an otherwise well developed solution.

Links:
ReviewBasics

StandoutJobs gets $1.5M; Gizmoz gets $6.3M

By Vivek | May 31st, 2007 at 01:18 pm ET     3 Comments »    

StandoutJobs: Garage Ventures seems to have a thing for job sites. MapleLeaf2.0 is reporting that GV has invested in the Series A round for Canada based startup - StandoutJobs. StandoutJobs has raised total of $1.5 million in it’s initial round. Not much details are available about StandoutJobs except for that it will be a video job classifieds platform. Somehow video classifieds seems to be en vogue. iMoondo is another startup trying to videofy classifieds. GV is also an investor in job search site SimplyHired.

Gizmoz: As I had written couple of months back, 3D avatar creation service Gizmoz has given out details about it’s Series A round of funding. The startup has raised $6.3M in Series A led by Benchmark Capital with Columbia Capital. The Israel based startup faces competition from the likes of recently launched service Voki from OddCast.