Yahoo!Mail also ready for iPhone bash

By Vivek | June 28th, 2007 at 03:33 pm ET     6 Comments »    

While Google is trying to show is all set and ready to deliver email and services on iPhone starting tomorrow, Yahoo is not sitting back idle either. I think earlier in the year at Macworld there was a partnership done that aimed to being Yahoo products to iPhone. While I haven’t hear about that in a while, my Yahoo contact just informed me that things are on track as to their iPhone plans. According to the source, few of the Yahoo’s products will be featured on the iPhone, including Yahoo! Mail and the new Yahoo! oneSearch. Let’s see what the “featured” part means tomorrow.

In the meantime, the feature set for Yahoo! Mail on iPhone will deliver the rich experience web experience including ability to view photo attachments, search their email inbox, full synchronization and address book integration to help drive usage of the iPhone. As for the Yahoo! oneSearch would tend towards instant answers and local results.

Freshbooks API: Let the invoicing mashups roll

By Vivek | June 28th, 2007 at 03:00 pm ET         

After getting over 185K customers after just over 3 years of going live, Canada based startup Freshbooks has opened up it’s platform to get into the mashup business or to be more precise get the invoicing app widgetized.

I will cut down on the technical details of the API and instead let’s look into the agenda of Freshbooks API. To start with the much need integrations customers/developers enable import/export of data from existing applications, like QuickBooks. Besides that Freshbooks is expecting that SaaS, ISPs, and other subscription-based service providers would use it’s professional quality invoicing and accounts receivable system instead of building in house or custom solutions. And lastly and the most expected outcome - enable existing customers to improve the workflow through desktop and web widgets.

Now, let’s see how quickly the first widget hits the block.

Links:
Developer Community at Freshbooks

Social networking for footballers via Takkle

By Vivek | June 28th, 2007 at 02:29 pm ET         

While building niche social networking platforms, partnerships can be fundamental part of the growing big process. Sports social net working site Takkle seems to be understand this fact real well. The new partnership forged by Takkle is with  MSL Sports, which organizes combines for high school football players across the country is just another one they have done in recent months. Takkle had earlier partnered with Sports Illustrated and launched Battle on Takkle competition sponsored by P&G?s Tampax brand and MET-Rx.

Since I am not too deep into sports, the information I have on MSL is that it runs a nationally recognized scouting and recruiting service serving both universities, athletes and media organizations. The service part aside, at the end of day what MSL Sports has among things is a compiled performance data on high school football players from across the country that it delivers to coaches, scouts, and college recruiters. So, besides the obvious fact the Takkle will provide it’s social networking platform to MSL, participants in an MSL combine will be able to log onto Takkle prior to the event and scout their competition and make use of the collected data.

Besides that, during its events, MSL will film and photograph players? performances, enabling sports fans to log onto Takkle and check out the top videos, photos, and stats online. And not to forget, college football coaches and scouts will be able to log onto Takkle and track the progress of some of the best high school football players in the nation.

Didn’t I ask for something similar when I had written about the funding announcement for Takkle? Feels good to see everything in action.

Links:
Takkle

Next Week: Mobio to deliver Digg, Twitter, Kaboodle mobile widgets

By Vivek | June 28th, 2007 at 01:22 pm ET     2 Comments »    

While iPhone might try to steal all the thunder it can by putting the widget like interface on the touch screen, there are plenty of mobile widget options for rest of us. And to add to that, next week Mobio will be launching new mobile, social media widgets to attract Twitter, Digg and Kaboodle fans. Mobio’s already offers a collection of over 50 Web service mash-ups that I have written about earlier, but not many were geared towards the social side of things. Should be an interesting experiment.

As for the actual functionality, the Twitter widget enable you with the obvious, Digg users will be able to view top stories on the go via Mobio, and Kaboodle users would get to discover and recommend new things and create customized shopping and wish lists from their mobile phones.

Besides the above said upcoming launch, Mobio has also released a new widget designed to let users search for, organize and read their favorite blogs and news sites through a streamlined, customizable mobile interface called My RSS. Users simply click on the headline to see a brief description or they can view the story in its entirety, complete with images right on their handsets. On the whole, Mobio seems to be giving some heat to Widsets from Nokia.

Okay, I know that the Mobio announcement will be lost in all the noise in the mobile space starting tomorrow, but this would be something that Apple won’t do for us. They might very well just partner with AT&T, Music mafia, and Google to do the rev share thingy and forget that it is a mobile phone they are supposed to sell in the first place.

Trackvia takes on DabbleDB in Online database space

By Vivek | June 27th, 2007 at 03:04 pm ET     3 Comments »    

Denver based Trackvia has kept such a low profile all along that I had almost missed out on the app had it not been for PEHub reporting on the funding news. Earlier this year, Flywheel Ventures Invests invested an undisclosed amount of funding in the startup that delivers MS Access like database functionality online. While Trackvia is not the first in the space that includes DabbleDB, Caspio Bridge, eUnifyDB, Smartsheet, and in some aspects CogHead, and WuFoo, I seem to like the feature-set and responsiveness of the platform.

To get started started, you can import one of your existing spreadsheets into the online app. Once your data is, you can search, sort, filter, map, remove duplicates through it all. Creating a new database is pretty simple where you can pick the type of fields according to your data requirements, just you might do while creating a table in a database. Big difference this time around is that you get free data backups, ability to add attachments to records, automated history and change-tracking, ability to fine-tune user permissions, and drop-down fields making addition of new records way easier. You can also setup automated distribution of reports via email in excel and HTML format, as you might have done with one of the enterprise class reporting software. And not to forget, no diskspace or tablespace issues to worry about .

While the app is pretty responsive and has more than enough features to manage the task at hand, but it doesn’t hurt to ask for more. One thing i would like to have for sure is the ability to get embed code for web forms based on the database created inside Trackvia, just as we can do in WuFoo. Or maybe a partnership between WuFoo and Trackvia can deliver the needful. Besides that, a JavaScript based sorting on the database columns would save quite a bit of time and server calls. Also the pricing is a bit too high at $29/month for the first user.

Links:
Trackvia