Dwanda Relaunches; NotaFake Free Watermarks; Keegy; Ratebo; MyLifeBrand’s social aggregator

By Vivek | July 27th, 2007 at 02:53 pm ET         

Dwanda Relaunches: European handmade product marketplace Dwanda now sports a new look. Changes include new shop profiles layouts, and shop categories for sellers, pinboard, lists, trends, improved search, and bunch of other features for the users. Dwanda, which competes with Etsy in US, had raised angel funding earlier this year.

NotaFake.com: Put simply, it is a web based image watermarking service. Now don’t we already have quite a few of those? Yeah, but this one is free. For other free choices, vFlyer offers a similar service among many other things.

Keegy: This startups is offering a hybrid application web mashup that, through the user of robots which monitor the anonymous interactions of the users on the web, generates your personal edition. The app compiles information and news available on the net and adds some fuzzy Artificial Intelligence that learns by following your navigation. Competitors include thoof.com and tailrank.com.

Ratebo.com: The startup claims to offer the fastest and easiest way to rate the places you shop, dine and visit. It can even help you find a doctor, lawyer, school or next company to work for. I think those are one too many promises from a small startup.

MyLifeBrand: This startup is offering a social network aggregation app that can let you auto-log in and access your favorite social networks from one site. You can import, manage and message your friends across all social networks. Besides that, the startup is also taking aim at Ning and KickApps by enabling companies to create a completely branded no cost community which includes the full navigation of their site and revenue generation. Bigger picture - Have a single browser for both external and internal communities and eventually services which are all interconnected on the platform. Would digg deeper into this one later.

TrustedOpinion delivers a small smart mashup with Netflix

By Vivek | July 26th, 2007 at 10:21 pm ET         

Recommendations gold diggers got a big morale booster with the buyout of music recommendation leader Last.fm by CBS couple of months back. Palo Alto, CA based startup TrustedOpinion is looking to ride high on this recommendations wave. The startup did an initial release of it’s app earlier this year that enables users to recommend movies to their friends. While the movie space might not as big as music in terms of titles and shelf life, TrustedOpinion is not planning to limit itself to it either. Since the next set of big changes have few months to showup on the site, the startup is launching a mashup with Netflix service today that removes a bit of friction from our daily life and also adds value to the platform itself.

The mashup basically takes a hit at the whole movie search and add to your queue process. With the mashup, the silly old cycle of searching for movie at one site(like IMDB) and adding it to your queue at Netflix is gone forever. Instead you get the movie recommendations at TrustedOpinion, and if your think one of the movie is worth the 2 hours you need to spend, you can very easily add it to your Netflix queue from right there itself by clicking on the Netflix logo/button next to the details of the movie. Things can’t get more hassle free than that. Now don’t expect the same from IMDB, since they are an Amazon shop and most likely do mashups that can add value to the retailer’s coffers.

Even otherwise, TrustedOpinion has taken a unique approach to the whole recommendation visualization where recommendations of your friends are weighted according to the degrees of separation to finally used to compute the recommended score. This is something worth trying out.

Links:
TrustedOpinion

The days of mobile email addiction; Are you IN?

By Vivek | July 26th, 2007 at 02:44 pm ET         

For my past year in blogging and reading through thousands of feed posts, one conclusion that has come up quite often is - Email is Dead. The message spread quite effectively by wiki software providers and likes has never really take roots.

Instead after all these years, I don’t see any googlish force being capable enough to move email to the gallows even when 94% or so of all the email is spam. To add to that more and more people are getting addicted to email on their mobile phones. To prove the extent of email addiction on mobile phones AOL, in partnership with Opinion Research Corporation, conducted online survey that shows some interesting trends. Just to quote the survey output -

According to the survey, the average email user checks mail about five times a day, and 59 percent of those with portable devices are using them to check email every time a new message arrives.
Forty-three percent of email users with portable devices say they keep the device nearby when they are sleeping to listen for incoming mail.
With or without portable devices, 15 percent of Americans describe themselves as ?addicted to email,? and many are even planning their vacations with email access in mind.
About four in ten email users say it is ?very? or ?somewhat? important to them to think about email accessibility when they are planning a vacation, and eighty-three percent of email users admit to checking their mail once a day while actually on vacation.

Long Live Email!

[via]

TimeBridge connects to GCal; Can we get Zimbra please?

By Vivek | July 26th, 2007 at 01:56 pm ET     4 Comments »    

TimeBridge is finally learning that the new way of life in the world of calendars is online, and not Outlook Express. Agreed that there are way more users on Outlook as compared to Google Calendar or 30boxes or Zimbra, but if you are targeting the web users, millions of people hooked to Outlook can’t be the ones to give the max traction. And it seems TimeBridge has also got this message right and launched the new version of it’s app that allows you to integrate with Google instead of Outlook.

So, now you can “use your Gmail address book to invite people, see your calendar events in the TimeBridge scheduler and share your availability with others.” I think that is going to be a real good reason for quite a few users to join the service.

As for me, I will have to wait till TimeBridge gets to Zimbra. As an aside, for those of you struggling to find a good Zimbra partner to host your email for cheap, you should try out SimplyMail Solutions.

Jangl reaches out to 20 million more users

By Vivek | July 26th, 2007 at 10:57 am ET         

Today Jangl is announcing four new big deals that will deliver the service to over 20 million profiles. The new partners for the anonymous calling service include-

Various: This is the company which publishes FriendFinder and its more than 20 online communities, with more than 100 million members worldwide (Jangl is initially serving its North American properties)

Justin.tv: The broadcast your life service that has gathered it’s own niche fan following.

Fubar: formerly known as Cherrytap, an online community described as ?the first online bar and happy hour?

Revision3: The TV network from the Digg.com co-founder that creates, produces its own original entertainment and content

Jangl had earlier partnered with Tagged.com, Match.com, and SixApart and is also there on the Facebook scene. How the traction has been quite low on the FB side of things.