Hi5 Acquired PixVerse To Enhance Real-Time User Interaction

hi5 Networks, one of the world’s largest social networks, announced its acquisition of PixVerse, Inc., an innovative provider of rich, real-time interactions within social networks. Built on its breakthrough Flash™-based, no-download virtual world platform, PixVerse developed the popular and highly interactive Pix Chat and Pix Wall applications, which run on hi5 and other social networking services through platform integration.

“PixVerse has great technology that delivers a very immersive end user experience,” said Ramu Yalamanchi, CEO of hi5. “Communicating with friends is one of the primary benefits of hi5, and this technology and team enables hi5 to deliver a much richer, more visual medium of interaction for users of our network.”

Founded in 2007, PixVerse was backed by Venrock, a premier venture capital firm. The company was an early adopter of Google App Engine™, which enables developers to build their web apps on the same infrastructure that powers Google's own applications. With a mission to enable virtual worlds on the web, PixVerse was a pioneer in developing end user applications on top of the leading social network platforms.

“When we set out to build our applications, we were immediately drawn to the hi5 platform,” said Charles Ying, co-founder of PixVerse. “Access to the social graph enabled us to leverage hi5’s 80 million users to drive our growth. And the fact that hi5 is part of OpenSocial, rather than a proprietary platform, meant our work was extensible and reusable.”

PixVerse is one of thousands of third-party software developers that have written applications to run on top of the hi5 Platform since its launch in April 2008. Ranging from enhanced friend interactions to games, applications on hi5 provide a popular way of extending the social networking experience and enhancing end user engagement. Every day, hundreds of thousands of hi5 users install applications on the hi5 Platform, with over 50% hi5’s daily users interacting with at least one application. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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Reddit Goes Open Source

Reddit today announced that they're open sourcing reddit. 'Open-source' means that the code behind reddit is available to the public for download. Developer can download the source code and play around that.

Reddit is unique in the social news scene and has a huge community of developers.  Reddit expects that the developer can help them in improving the site and their technology. Every library, tool and platform reddit uses is now open to all. Until now, the only portion of reddit that wasn't freely available is reddit itself. Finally they are giving back to the community.

In no particular order, here's a quick list of the open source products that reddit is built and runs upon:

Debian, lighttpd, HAProxy, PostgreSQL, Slony-I, various python libraries, Psychopg, pylons, Solr, Tomcat, Ganglia, Mercurial, Git, gettext (translation), daemontools, and memcached.

The reddit development site is located here: http://code.reddit.com

Here you can download the code, participate in the forum, and help maintain the documentation wiki.

All reddit code is licensed under the Common Public Attribution License, which is basically the Mozilla license with a handful of changes. Specifically, the CPAL stipulates that when running reddit's code publicly, any changes to the code must be made available publicly and the site must make clear that it is running reddit code.

There are a few portions of the code that reddit is keeping with them which is mostly related to anti-cheating/spam protection.

Alexis, answering the question of what exactly he does here, has made a cute video:

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Search Results via RSS Is Now Available On Techmeme

Techmeme recently introduced search feature which returns items that have appeared as full headlines on Techmeme, in reverse chronological order. Headlines appearing only in "Discussion" are excluded.

Yesterday they announced that the Techmeme Search now provides results through RSS. You can now subscribe to search results in iGoogle, Netvibes, or your favorite RSS reader. Developers can hook up other kinds of applications to Techmeme Search as well.

Wherever background information on a name or topic in technology can provide useful context, Techmeme Search can help.

Obtaining the RSS feed URL: On any results page, simply click the RSS button in the browser's location bar, usually an orange or blue square icon like the one above, but tinier. In Safari, the icon simply contains the letters "RSS". A feed URL link also appears at the bottom of any results page. Look (again) for an orange RSS icon. Subscribing involves copying this URL to your aggregator of choice.

"About" vs. "any mention": Remember that Techmeme Search runs in either of two overall modes. Suppose you're searching for "eBay". In the default mode, it tries to find results about eBay by searching only the title and first few sentences for "eBay" (example results). To get results that mention eBay anywhere in the post, uncheck "Search title & summary only" (example result). The associated RSS feeds for these two alternatives preserve this searching behavior.

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The Unofficial Google Unix Shell : Goosh

Goosh is website provides Unix like command line interface for google search. Website is created by Stefan Grothkopp. This google-interface behaves similar to a unix-shell. You type commands and the results are shown on this page. It displays only first four results.

You can see the various commands by executing ‘help’ command as shown in below image.

Below is a result of command executed as “smashingfeeds”

I tried few commands which are working fine with this. For example command like “clear” will clear the shell screen. There are something interesting as well as funny with Goosh. When you type below numbers, results are strange.

1 - open http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0_(number) or open http://www.cdnow.com/

2 - open http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2

3 - open http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-0/

4 - open http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/

When i entered 1, first time it displays “open http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0_(number)” and next time it showed me “open http://www.cdnow.com/”

This is confusing.

Well, you can check out some of the interesting comments on Slashdot.

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Engadget Launches in Poland

America’s leading gadget and technology site Engadget, has today launched in Poland at http://pl.engadget.com as part of AOL’s global expansion. The Poland launch signals the next phase of increasing the brand’s global presence, with plans to launch into other European countries in the future.

Engadget Poland joins http://www.aol.pl and http://www.winamp.pl as AOL continues to grow it’s Polish language offering, which currently has over 1.9 million UVs in Poland. Engadget Poland will feature content and topics with local and international flavor and focus on subjects including product release rumours, product reviews and articles written by and for technology and gadget enthusiasts. A growing team of local editors will be responsible for creating engaging and up-to-date content for the Polish audience.

Engadget is a blog with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics.

More details on this announcement is available here.

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Your Week: Reddit-Powered Television News

Reddit, a social new service site, today announced about it's partnership with PBS (public broadcasting here in the USA) about YourWeek.

YourWeek is a weekly television news program powered by users. Material for the show will come from hot stories on the reddit front page every week. Meta discussions about that content and the show itself will all take place at yourweek.reddit. The pilot (and hopefully all the future shows) will be available online.

Whereas traditional television new stories end once the show airs, YourWeek -- like reddit -- will just be the beginning. Throughout the week you'll be able to share your thoughts on yourweek.reddit and followup with content you think was missed or corrections that should be made.

About YourWeek

YOUR WEEK is the beta version of a planned interactive public television and internet show from WETA Washington, D.C., and funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It's hosted by Michelle Cottle and Rich Lowry and powered by Reddit. YOUR WEEK covers politics, arts, international, science, tech, social, sports, and pop culture. The Web feeds the show, the show feeds the Web, and anyone who wishes can get involved at any time to view, vote, rate, tag, comment, contribute, and learn.

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AOL Launches ParentDish.com

AOL announced the launch of a new parenting destination, ParentDish.com, which is part of AOL Living. AOL’s site features a mix of videos, blog posts and celebrity contributors who provide informative, accessible, focused and personal content written with a “personal touch” for families with kids of all ages and issues they face today. ParentDish is supported by AOL’s advertising network, Platform-A, which will offer both display advertising as well as content-targeted links provided by Quigo.

At launch, ParentDish.com will feature regular blog posts from parenting expert Rachel Campos-Duffy, as well as parenting news, health news, polls and photo galleries. The site will be a hybrid blog format that has the power of resources and depth of content from AOL Living, and also features community elements and regular updates, such as a blog. In addition, through AOL’s relationship with Warner Bros. Television Group, ParentDish will also feature promotional content from MomLogic.com, the studio’s online parenting destination.

"We are thrilled to bring ParentDish to consumers and expand AOL Living’s role in the parenting category," said Stephanie Dolgins, Senior Vice President, AOL Women’s & Lifestyle Programming. "Our goal is to help parents feel connected to each other and provide a reliable and trustworthy source for parenting information. ParentDish will also give advertisers a forum to reach parents, and the opportunity to develop campaigns for them surrounding exclusive content.”

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File Sharing Goes Live on Pownce

Pownce announced the new feature of sharing files to the public. You can now share your personal files with your friends, fans, and the Pownce community at large.

Pownce now provide more control over who can download audio files that you share with the public. You can access these new settings by going to your settings when logged in to your account.

In addition, Pownce has increased the base file size limit for all Powncers from 10MB to 100MB! For the Pro members, file size limit has been increased to 250MB for free.

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Federated Media Received $50 Million Minority Investment From Oak Investment Partners

Federated Media Publishing (FM) today announced that it has received a $50 million minority investment from Oak Investment Partners, a multi-stage venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, CA. Founded in 2005, FM represents more than 125 conversational media entrepreneurs who run more than 150 of the world’s most respected websites, blogs, and social networking applications. The company became profitable in the third quarter of 2007.

“Federated Media has a proven, profitable business model with some of the industry’s most knowledgeable people at the helm,” said Fred Harman, general partner at Oak, who will be joining the FM board of directors. “The company has shown clear leadership in the emerging conversational media ecosystem. FM represents some of the best publisher and advertiser content on the Web, and with productive industry relationships, the company is poised to do amazing things going forward.”

With expertise in custom, integrated conversational marketing campaigns, FM has developed deep and long-term relationships with leading brand marketers and advertising agencies. Over the last three years, the company has expanded beyond its technology roots into verticals including parenting, business & marketing, media & entertainment, video gaming, graphics arts, automotive and more.

"We've been an early and avid supporter of Federated's model," said Casey Jones, vice president of marketing at Dell. "We look forward to continuing our work with the company as it expands its business."

FM’s full portfolio of digital media brands includes web favorites such as Boing Boing, Ars Technica, Ask A Ninja, Digg, Dooce, Confessions of a Pioneer Woman and NOTCOT, as well as social networking applications including Graffiti Wall (in Facebook, Hi5, MySpace and other social networks), Watercooler (in Facebook, Bebo and others) and many more. FM is expanding its portfolio and has just this year brought on diverse sites such as Silicon Alley Insider, Destructoid and Buzzine. FM also manages sponsorship programs for a roster of events such as the twice-annual Conversational Marketing Summit and Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival.

“FM and Oak are a great match,” said Chris Albinson, co-founder and managing director of Panorama Capital, an early investor and board member at FM. “Oak will add great value to FM’s board, and we look forward to working with Fred and his team."

FM generates revenue for its partner sites and event organizers through integrated sponsorships, advertising and other marketing services for global brands and their advertising agencies. Recent examples of premium brand-building programs include BMW's 1-Series drawing contest, which invited Facebook members to custom paint BMW models using Graffiti's digital illustrating tools, and the co-publishing and promotion partnership with American Express around their OPEN Forum blog for small business owners.

“We’re proud to bring Oak on board as major investor,” said John Battelle, founder and CEO of Federated Media. “The Oak team understands the media business and has relationships within the media and Internet industries that will benefit FM with insights from Silicon Valley as well as Madison Avenue. Oak gets it, and we couldn’t have picked a better partner.”

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AOL Launches in Taiwan to Address The Increasingly Sophisticated Needs Of Taiwan’s Internet Users

AOL, a global Web services company, today announced the beta launch of a dedicated Web destination serving Taiwan, http://www.aol.tw. The new site, designed and created specifically to address the increasingly sophisticated needs of Taiwan’s Internet users, combines AOL’s suite of communications products – including free e-mail and instant messaging – with industry-leading safety features, and localized content in Chinese.  AOL will continue to add new content and features over the coming months.

AOL is developing a series of partnerships with some of the most compelling creators of content in the region, including udn.com (United Daily News) and Phoenix New Media.  AOL will also draw upon its worldwide distribution partnership with HP to deliver a co-branded local language portal and search solution for HP users in Taiwan.

“People in Taiwan are among the world’s most sophisticated Internet users,” said Maneesh Dhir, Executive Vice President, AOL International.  “Our goal is to deliver an experience that leverages the depth of our product and content offerings, tailored to the individual interests of online users in Taiwan.”

“The launch of AOL.tw is just the beginning of an ongoing effort to provide consumers in Taiwan with the services and content they want,” said Norman Koo, VP and General Manager for Greater China.  “Our industry-leading products and programming combined with our content partnerships will provide a unique experience for consumers and advertisers, as well as an international, regional and local mix of news, finance and entertainment information.”

AOL.tw offers a wealth of free content and services, including:

• E-mail: AOL's e-mail service with industry-leading spam blocking, powerful virus protection and unlimited storage.
• AIM: The full integration of AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) with AOL’s e-mail product, which lets users send e-mails, chat, share pictures, videos and files all from one Web page.
• Content: Channels featuring relevant News, Entertainment and Finance.
  • Regional and local information from partnerships with udn.com (United Daily News), Phoenix New Media and others.
  • Technology channel featuring news and commentary from chinese.engadget.com.
  • Global news, entertainment and finance feeds, creating an interactive experience on the AOL Taiwan portal. 
• Search: AOL Search includes Web and image search powered by Google, and is enhanced by AOL for the specific nature of the Chinese language.  
• Video Search: Powered by the world's leading video search engine, Truveo.com, the video search channel on AOL.tw lets users quickly search and browse through more than one hundred million videos from thousands of sources across the Web.  Specifically for Taiwan, Truveo.com offers tw.truveo.com, which features popular, high-quality video of regional interest and allows users to search and discover videos in Chinese.
• Toolbar: AOL Toolbar allows easy access to AOL services from anywhere on the Web so users can preview their e-mail inbox, share favorite links and pages with buddies, and more.

In addition to the AOL Taiwan portal launching today, AOL will in the coming weeks deliver an AOL/HP co-branded portal for users of HP desktop and notebook PC’s in Taiwan.

As part of its international growth plans, AOL has now launched 18 portals and plans to expand to 30 countries by the end of 2008.  In addition, AOL teamed up with HP last September to include localized versions of the AOL.com portal and other AOL services as the default setting on HP computers shipped in the United States and around the world.

via

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AOL Launches Technology Network

AOL today announced the launch of the AOL Technology Network, which includes Engadget, Switched, TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog), DownloadSquad, Engadget Mobile and Engadget HD. This will be the second largest technology news and information publisher online.* Comprised of some of the fastest growing tech blogs**, the Technology Network will provide users with a complete resource to gather information about the latest technology news and products, and will let advertisers seamlessly integrate ad campaigns across these sites.

In addition to the launch, Engadget, http://www.engadget.com, and Switched, http://www.switched.com, also unveiled a new design today. Each site will have a more streamlined look and feel. Switched, now powered by Engadget, will serve as the network’s central hub.  All the sites in the network will feature tabs at the top linking to the other AOL Technology Network sites, making it easy for users to navigate across them.

“By creating the AOL Technology Network, we’re bringing together some of the Web’s most powerful and fastest-growing tech blogs to create a technology publishing powerhouse,” said Marty Moe, Senior Vice President, AOL Money & Finance and Weblogs. “The new network, coupled with the redesign of Switched and Engadget, reflects our ongoing commitment to creating the most compelling destinations for consumers on the Web.”

“One of our top priorities at Platform-A is to make it easier for advertisers to leverage the power of digital media, and the AOL Technology Network helps us achieve this goal," said Lynda Clarizio, President, Platform-A. “Combining these great technology information sites into one network lets us offer marketers the ability to more easily buy across these sites and reach some of the savviest and most engaged consumers online.”

Visitors will be able to access network sites directly from their existing domain names or through a link on AOL.com that will take users to the network.

* comScore Media Metrix, February 2008
* * comScore media Metrix, February 2008 (based on year-over-year growth)

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Facebook Launches Facebook Chat

Facebook announced that this week, they are going to roll out new service called Facebook Chat. Facebook Chat is a new way for users to communicate with their friends in real-time. Facebook will show users which of their friends are online when they are, so that they do not need to create or maintain a separate buddy list.

Users also do not have to worry about any additional installation or set up. Facebook Chat works directly in the browser. Just as other features on Facebook have allowed friends to communicate more efficiently than before. Facebook Chat will make it easier to connect instantly.

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Wordpress 2.5, “Brecker” Is Released

Matt announced the release of wordpress version 2.5 yesterday.

"The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages."

More details on user features and developer features is available here.

Read this upgrade note before upgrading to wordpress2.5.

You can download from here.

Wordpress 2.5 Sneak peek and screen cast.

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Reddit river : A Mobile Version Of Reddit

Reddit river is a mobile version of reddit.com. It is 3 times as light (in size) and it automatically discovers mobile versions of stories posted on reddit.

For example, a link to The Washington Post would get rewritten to printable version of the same article! Save your money by saving the MegaBytes you browse from your mobile device!

This site is developed by Peteris Krumins and it was done in Python programming language (reddit.com is also written in this language). The basic idea of the project was to make a lightweight version of reddit which would keep track of stories on the front page and the most popular subreddits.

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ZOHO Introduced Zoho Invoice, An Online Invoice Generation & Tracking Application

Zoho today rolled out a new addition to the Zoho Suite - Zoho Invoice. This new application joins other business applications from Zoho like Zoho CRM, Zoho Projects, Zoho Meeting, Zoho People, Zoho Creator & Zoho DB.

Zoho Invoice is an online invoice generation and tracking application. It lets you create, send and track Invoices & Estimates.

Zoho Invoice has following main features :

• Create and send branded invoices, quotes or estimates.
• Automate repeated invoicing through recurring invoices.
• Track outstanding invoices and customer payments. Accept payment online.
• Send overdue reminders, acknowledge payment receipts.
• Expand your business overseas, with support for multi-currency.
• Data security and backup. SSL encryption of data on transit.
• Powerful reports to see how your business is doing.

To create an invoice, first you add customers, define items (products or services) and then create invoices. Once you create an invoice, you have options to Email, Print or Export your invoice as a PDF.

You can define Recurring Profiles (Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly or Yearly) and let Zoho Invoice automatically send invoices to your customers. You can also define late fees, tax, discounts etc for the invoices you create.

Inside the application, you can also setup a ‘Payment Gateway’ (through PayPal, currently) which lets you accept payments directly from your customers once the invoice is emailed out.

The Settings section lets you first define your Company Details, Logo, Currency (it supports multiple currencies) and Tax info. This module has a Templates section which lets you customize the layout, look and feel of your invoices. You have the option to choose from a set of pre-defined templates or you can create your own. You can also define/customize email notifications settings as well for sending customized messages to your customers.

The reporting module provides different reports on the data based on Sales, Customers, Payments, Tax etc.

Being a finance app, security is an important aspect. By default, Zoho Invoice comes with SSL support even for free users.

Integration:

Zoho Invoice currently has an integration into Zoho Projects. If you are working on a project and want to invoice your client, you can do so by creating an invoice and choosing the option to ‘Create Invoice from Zoho Project’. Going forward, this application will also be closely integrated with Zoho CRM and other Zoho Apps.

Pricing:

The pricing is simple & affordable. It is based on the number of invoices you create. It obviously comes with a free version that lets you create upto 5 invoices per month and it has several packages ranging upto the ‘Elite’ package that lets you create upto 1500 invoices/month for $35/Month. More information on the pricing is available here.

Zoho Invoice is a nice addition to Zoho's Business Application set which addresses the business needs of SMBs.

Check this online demo for more details. No registration is required.

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MyBlogLog Released Two New Widgets to Embed The Latest Updates From 'New with Me' Into Your Site

Today MyBlogLog released two new widgets that make it easy to embed the latest updates from New with Me into your site as either a sidebar on your main template or mega, in-page widget which is designed to sit in the body section of your About Me page.

The idea is that as you publish stuff across the web, MyBlogLog busily pulls this stuff  in and serves it up to your readers. Your site remains fresh and even if you have been too busy to post anything your New with Me widget will take care of letting your readers know what else you've been up to. For an example of the in page widget in action, check out my About Me page.

The New with Me option is perfect for your blog's About Me page or sidebar where you can let people know what you've been up to. You also have the option to publish your New with My Neighborhood updates on their own or together in a tab so you can show off what your MyBlogLog contacts are up to as well.

MyBlogLog provides you fine-grained control over which services you want to see on your New with Me badge. If you've listed it in your Services tab, it will give you a checkbox to include or exclude updates from that service. You may want to just share your last.fm tracks and delicious bookmarks but are not keen on putting in every last tweet or all your blog comments - the choice is yours.

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Mixx Puts Breaking News In To Social Media

The Mixx announced “Breaking News” category today. When a big story hits, any of the Super Mixxers can tag it as “Breaking.” You’ll find these stories on the right-hand side of both the “Popular” and “News” categories. You can also subscribe to “Breaking News” on YourMixx. If nothing appears in these spaces, don’t panic! Mixx is not broken; it’s just a slow news day.

Here’s how it works:

• Only Super Mixxers can tag a story as “Breaking.” If you haven’t achieved Super Mixxer status, just keep Mixxing: add great content, vote and comment—you’ll get there! (For more info, check out the Super Mixxer FAQ.)
• It takes two to Mixx a Breaking News story. Two Super Mixxers, that is.
• Only a limited number of stories can be in the Breaking News category at any one time, and only for a limited time.
• Once a Breaking News story gets enough votes, it will move over to “Popular,” and to any other category with which it was tagged (entertainment, politics, science, etc.).
• Right now, only text stories can be marked as “Breaking,” but you will find this capability for photos and videos soon.

If there is breaking news on a day, the Mixxer who submitted in the highest vote-getting bit of breaking news will get a brand new award: the News Hound award . You can check the Mixx Lounge daily to see who the News Hound with the biggest scoop was!

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Slide.com Is Banned by Turkish Government

The Turkish government has accused Slide of "harboring pictures and articles that are considered to be insulting to Ataturk," founder of the republic. The Turkish government has banned the slide.com. People in Turkey are