Yet another social network launched publicly today, but this one called Change.org caught my eye for a couple of reasons. Firstly it"s for a great cause - enabling people to form communities around social issues like global warming and Net Neutrality. But it"s also a very well designed site that makes excellent use of "web 2.0" technologies.

The first thing that you notice when you visit the homepage of Change.org is the tagcloud, which draws attention to the top issues in the network. The tagcloud constantly updates, but as of writing "Empower Women" and "Recycle" were the top tags. To get a feel for the site I clicked on "Stop Global Warming", a hot topic currently (pun intended)...

As of writing there are 60 people who want to effect the change of stopping global warming - a number which will certainly increase a lot as Change.org gathers momentum. There are a good number of tools available for people to discuss and effect this change - community blog, comments on "Why Do You Support this Change?", videos, photos, Message Boards, "giving networks", lists of related nonprofits, "Actions" (e.g. "Carpool at Least Once a Week"), and even a mapping component. But as with all social networks, it"s the people who are the center of the site.

Clicking through to one user (and note you need to be signed in to do that) displays their profile and the causes they support. There is also an option to "Send a friend request". I presume the idea is that you find people supporting similar causes to you - and that"s how the networking occurs. In the case of Change.org though, there is a higher purpose than simply chatting online to new friends. You"re also supporting social causes - a.k.a. "changes" in the lingo of this site. What"s more, clicking through on user profiles allows you to discover new social causes to support. It"s certainly a neat idea all round and very nicely implemented in terms of web design and use of "web 2.0" techniques.

The founder of Change.org is Ben Rattray from San Francisco, who told me in an email that they"ve signed up "several dozen of the largest nonprofits in the world – including Amnesty International, Oxfam, and Greenpeace". So the site is already well supported. Ben said the aim of the site is to enable people to collectively advance change on a variety of issuues. So they built a platform that connects people, whatever their interest, and enables them "to exchange information, share ideas, and collectively act to address the issues they care about." He also noted that Change.org connects people to existing nonprofits - essentially to create a social network around each nonprofit (more than 1 million in total). Ben thinks this will allow people "to participate in these organizations in a way never before possible – by posting ideas and suggestions, engaging in direct dialogue, and organizing communities of donors, volunteer opportunities, etc."

Overall, I"m impressed by the goals of Change.org and also the implementation. This is almost a textbook example of how web 2.0 technologies can be deployed on a website. Go check it out...

French startup Zlio.com, a service that enables any Internet user to start a virtual store, has just launched in the US and also has plans for a UK version. It"s a free template-based system and you select the products you want to sell from a list of pre-approved merchants. There are 75 merchants in France, 25 in US. At this time you can"t sell your own products, but that functionality is being worked on. Example shops include a Woody Allen shop and a kids sports store. Note that we first mentioned Zlio back in September, in our Top Web Apps in France article.

The competition

More than 35,000 shops have been opened in the last 5 months in France and Zlio is hoping for similar success in the US. Right now they have competition in the form of MyPickList, a slick widget-based online shopping app. Loomia is similar. Also there is aStore from Amazon (only amazon products) and Shoplinc from Chitika (for people who already have a website). CafePress.com is kind of in this market too, although their focus is on customizable goods and services.

What I like about Zlio is its straightforward positioning, which they"ve only recently changed. Zlio.com originally opened in November 2005 in France as a "recommendation service". Their positioning at that point was: "Recommend your favorites products to your friends and make money". Zlio CEO Jeremie Berrebi told me they got "thousands of subscribers" but it was very difficult to manage and maintain - users would recommend once, 2 times, 3 times, but after seeing that they only made a few Euros, a lot of users didn"t want to use the service anymore.

So in September 2006 Zlio totally changed its market positioning - now Zlio is a service that "allows any internet user to create his own online shop even if they have nothing to sell."

Usability

Zlio has a nice wizard-type sign-up process. It took me just a few minutes to sign up, select a template, and "open" my store. The control panel for adding products is slick and easy to use. My one complaint is that I couldn"t see any way to add bulk products, or a whole category. I had to individually add each product, which is time consuming. It would be great if I could tell Zlio to add "all microsoft office products" or "all Apple iPod products"; even better if I could say "add any Apple iPod product that has at least 4GB of memory" etc.

There are also some useful promotional tools, such as creating a video to show on "Zlio TV" and a widget to display on your blog. There"s also an area called "boosting tools", which includes a wizard to help you copy your store into your blog.

Business Model

Zlio has two business models: CPA & CPC (in France). For the US launch, it is CPA only for now - but CPC will be introduced in the US soon. The CPA model means that when someone buys a product through a shop, the shop owner makes money via a commission (they are paid through PayPal). The company is based in France, but half the team is in Israel and they are planning to open a US office in the coming months.

Conclusion

All in all, it"s a nicely designed app and very well positioned in the market. It kind of reminds of Swickis, which are custom search engines. Having a niche custom online shop will be an attractive (and possibly profitable) proposition for a lot of people. It nicely plays into the need for specialized and focused online properties, which are increasingly the success stories on the Web. In other words, if I am a Woody Allen fan then what better way to shop for his products than on a dedicated Woody Allen shop? So I like what Zlio enables and I"ll be watching to see how much uptake it gets. Also I need to work on that R/WW shop! :-)

TVTonic is billing itself as "The Internet Channel". There are plenty of companies muscling into that market currently (the Amazon/TiVO partnership being the latest example), but TVTonic seems more focused on being a subscription service for video podcasts. Essentially they are trying to become a TV station for user-generated or "amateur" content (and a bit of professional content); as opposed to the Apples and Amazons of this world, who want to put professional video content online.

TVTonic is also positioning itself closely with the new Media Center capabilities of Windows Vista PCs, which I think is a very smart move. There are lots of consumers, and I have to admit I"m one of them, who haven"t yet gotten to grips with subscribing to Internet TV shows. TVTonic wants to make it easy for you to subscribe to video content on the Web. Note that the app runs inside an Internet Explorer Web Browser (no other browsers are supported).

Image credit: WebTVHub

So what specifically is TVTonic? Essentially it is aggregating content from across the Web into television-like channels. It says it has 300 channels and examples are the Diggnation video podcasts (part of the TechTonic channel) and RocketBoom. They also have "exclusive" video channels such as Looney Tunes. TVTonic"s aim is to help take those kinds of Internet video shows from the home office into the living room. What"s more, TVTonic can be navigated with a remote - from the user"s couch - either via their Media Center PC or Xbox 360 console.

Video content can play "up to HD-quality", and promises not to freeze up with buffering and rendering. You can either watch the videos online or offline. But of course you need to have plenty of space in your hard drive, and a decent broadband plan, to utilize TVTonic properly.

What I like about TVTonic is that it makes video podcasts on the Web more accessible to normal people - which is not only good for the users, but gives video podcast shows like Rocketboom a better chance for success. TVTonic can take any RSS 2.0 video feed from the web and put it into its channels. And although I"m still in set-up mode with it on my PC, this review by WebTVHub says that the UI is indeed as simple and easy to use as promised.

Let us know of any other Internet video subscription service you know of, but for now TVTonic looks to be a great choice (especially for Vista users) for those of us wanting to explore Internet TV more.

The oddly-named 1dawg is the latest of hundreds of hopefuls to ride the online video wave. 1dawg"s differentiating factor is that it provides a free video conversion service to a variety of mobile devices. It"s a seemingly minor thing to do, but in the current era mobile devices often use incompatible media formats - and so this really does scratch a decent itch for consumers. As 1dawg"s Adam Fichman explained in an email sent round to media folks:

"Each portable media device, like an iPod or PSP, accepts a very limited number of file extensions, if even more than just one [...] What our company does is provide the means for a video in an incompatible format to be available for whatever media device the user wants to transfer it to."

The devices supported currently include video iPod, Sony Playstation Portable, Creative Zen, Zune, Video Cell Phone and a basic Windows/Mac/Linux compatible file format. A few of those use MPEG-4, so mobile devices are not quite as incompatible as it first appears.

Other than the file conversions, 1dawg is your typical video sharing site - very similar to YouTube. I doubt the file conversions alone will be enough to get the network effects going - it"s more a "feature" than a business, as web 2.0 critics are wont to say. Still, it"s a neat value add for the site and one I"d like to see YouTube and others employ.

Note that there are plenty of file conversion services around, but not many are part of an online video service. If you know of other sites that already offer a file conversion feature, tell us in the comments.

While YouTube and online video is all the rage currently, I often wonder if there"s anything on these video websites other than mentos-coke explosions and bad singing. Don"t get me wrong, I enjoy YouTube as much as the next person - but I am also a bit artsy-fartsy, so I like to see artistic stuff being done on the Web too. One such project is Stray Cinema, which describes itself as "an open source film project".

Stray Cinema invites people to create short films, based on raw footage that was filmed in London on a digital camera. The idea is that participants download the footage and edit parts of it into their own 2 minute film. Links to free editing software is provided - e.g. Avid, Windows Movie Maker, Video Edit Magic and Wax. The films are then uploaded onto YouTube and embedded into the Stray Cinema website.

Stray Cinema is also contacting independent musicians and bands, via social networking sites like MySpace, to incorporate their music into the process.

Once there are 30 film submissions on the website, the community of Stray Cinema users will vote for their favourite films. The top 5 films will be screened in London alongside the directors cut. There will be VJ"s at the event, mixing film footage to live music. Also there will be a live audiovisual webcast, live web-chat, vodcasting and blogging. The date for the event is yet to be determined.

Stray Cinema is aiming to be an annual event, repeating the process with raw footage filmed in a different city each year. All of this is being run by 7 people and there are 479 registered users. OK so it"s not a trendy startup with millions of users, but to my mind it"s excellent use of Web technologies. Check it out if you"re interested in film and how web 2.0 technologies can be used to create and promote independent film-making.

Written by Gang Lu and Richard MacManus

EditGrid, the main product of HongKong-based company Team and Concepts (TnC) Ltd., is a leading Web 2.0 online spreadsheet service that focuses on online collaboration and interoperability. Having had 1 year of development and 9 months of public beta with 18 beta releases, yesterday EditGrid officially announced its subscription service and removed the beta tag from its site. We spoke with TnC"s founder and Chairman, David Lee, a brilliant young man who was recently nominated by BusinessWeek as one of Asia"s Best Entrepreneurs under 25. Also in this post we outline EditGrid"s main features and discuss why it"s better than Google Spreadsheets.

The online spreadsheet market is crowded and the big players include Google Spreadsheets (as part of Google Docs & Spreadsheets), Zoho Sheet (as part of the Zoho Office Suite -- disclosure, Zoho is a R/WW sponsor), WikiCalc (a part of SocialText), ThinkFree Calc (as part of Thinkfree Office). But EditGrid is the only standalone online spreadsheet offering.

Features and comparison with Google Spreadsheets

EditGrid boasts real-time-update (RTU), allowing users to see changes immediately when someone is editing the same spreadsheet, and extensive collaboration features. It has a feature called Remote data, which fetches data from the web (e.g. stock information and foreign exchange data) and puts it into a spreadsheet. Also EditGrid has many more functions available than Google Spreadsheet - EditGrid has over 500 functions (like SUM () etc), whereas Google Spreadsheet has 230+; at least according to this EditGrid comparison of EditGrid to Goog Spreadsheets and MS Excel 2003.

David Lee told us that although they are not the full solution to Web Office, in terms of offering a suite of products, they think that EditGrid is a better standalone spreadsheet product than its competition. However we think partnerships and integration into other products is going to be key to their success.

We were particularly impressed by the toolbox and charts (see the screenshot below). The document-sharing, live chats, etc., are also very impressive. There are really too many features to list here, but check out the full product tour if interested. Also EditGrid"s development team maintains a very informative changelog and future plan. 

EditGrid intergrated into other products

With its agile architecture that facilitates integration and embedding into enterprise application platforms, strong data manipulation and distribution capabilities and high usability, EditGrid is ideal for integrating into existing platforms. Right now EditGrid is integrated into start pages Netvibes, Pageflakes and Google Personalized Homepage. It is also integrated into Salesforce AppExchange and several SaaS products and platforms. [Ed: there is also going to be announcement early next week of another Web Office vendor using EditGrid - stay tuned to R/WW for that news]

Some other facts and figures... With its EditGrid Localization Project, EditGrid has been translated into 9 languages by its users. It has 15,000+ registered personal users from 30+ countries, 200+ trial organizations and 4,500+ trial organization users have created +23,000 spreadsheets.

David Lee told us that personal users can still enjoy free service, but they have a new subscription service that allows organizations to utilize EditGrid - which has added security, administration and customization features. It is $5 per user per month, and academic and non-profit organizations get a 50% discount.

Conclusion

It"s great to see innovative Web Office technology coming out of Asia and taking on the big guns in the US. EditGrid is indeed an excellent standalone product, in many respects better than Google Spreadsheets. If it successfully partners with existing platforms (e.g. start pages and Salesforce), then it stands a good chance of competing with the Office Suite offerings of Google, Zoho, ThinkFree et al. In a sense, EditGrid takes the "best-of-breed" theory of Web apps even further - by creating a specialist Web Office app that is best in class, but also requires partnerships with other vendors to be truly successful.

click image to view full-size screenshot

Last month we reported that automated text-to-voice service Talkr was put up for sale, by founder Chris Brooks. Well Talkr has just been acquired - by a company who found out it was for sale via Read/WriteWeb! The buyer is LiveOnTheNet, a Huntsville-based digital media company which is developing a new social networking VoIP product. They decided to buy Talkr because of its synergies with their new product.

The sale price is not large, just $25k up-front plus a $25k earn out for a 100% buy-out of Talkr. The low price (by industry standards) probably indicates that Talkr was more of a "feature" than a business, long term. We discussed in our previous post about how Talkr struggled to get a revenue stream going, a common affliction of "web 2.0" startups. And Chris admitted to me after the sale: "I"ve come away from this experience with a new respect for the importance of focusing first and foremost on revenue generation!"

But still it"s interesting to see how LiveOnTheNet will implement the Talkr technology. LiveOnTheNet has been doing streaming webcasts since 1996, according to its History page. For example they produced the webcast of the 1996 Democratic National Convention and they were the first official webcaster for the Cannes Film Festival.

I spoke to LiveOnTheNet CEO Roger Schneider and asked him about the deal. He firstly told me how blogs played a role in the decision:

"For the record, we did indeed learn about Talkr via your blog… and positive mentions of Chris and Talkr in other blogs also helped us reach our decision to buy."

Robbie told me that over the past 10 years, LiveOnTheNet has "generated close to $50 million in online revenue, and over $20 million in the last 3 years." So it is a thriving and growing online business.

How will Talkr be integrated into a new product?

So how will LiveOnTheNet use Talkr? Robbie told me they"ll be integrating Talkr into their new "embedded conference call technology". It"s basically a VoIP product that runs in the browser via Java (so it requires no downloaded software, apart from the latest version of Java). They"re calling this an "embedded softphone" and it will support live, spontaneous voice chats among lots of callers. 

Right now the service is not released, but Robbie said that it will extend on Talkr"s current functionality. He explained:

"...bloggers can sign up for the existing Talkr services and do automatic podcasts of their content, for example. And very soon, they’ll be able to place a new “Talkr” on their blog and conduct conference calls with their audience on topics of interest. Or even just let the audience talk amongst themselves about the blog’s content.

Also, a group of Web 2.0 blogs can all place a Talkr on each of their blogs, all pointed to a common conference, and all the audiences can share a single conversation on Web 2.0 topics.

These conference calls can be password protected (optional) and other things, of course."

As well as blogs, the service can be used on social networks like MySpace and YouTube. Future functionality will include the ability to mash-up the softphone with webcams, Meebo, Flickr, etc.

Getting the elusive revenue stream...

The new softphone-Talkr service will be supported by audio advertising, "with a simple pre-roll audio clip inserted as each person enters a conference call." That advertising revenue will be shared with bloggers.

Which brings us back to the main issue plaguing web 2.0 entrepreneurs today. If Chris was unable to achieve an audio advertising revenue stream from Talkr, how will it be different for LiveOnTheNet? Robbie told me:

"… a vital step for attracting advertising, as we’ve seen in the past, is getting a critical mass of viewership (“when you get to 30K uniques, we’d be glad to place some ads”). So, we’ll be tackling this with 2 products instead of just one and hopefully, giving bloggers an exciting new way to interact with their audience and fellow bloggers."

However these revenue expectations appear to depend on how the big Internet companies move forward with the nascent audio advertising industry. In particular, Google"s announcement in December that they are expanding from text-only internet ads to audio ads. LiveOnTheNet sees this move by Google as an indicator that audio advertising will become a viable business model in the near future.

Summary

Overall, it seems like a win-win for both Chris Brooks of Talkr and the buyer LiveOnTheNet. While it was by no means a YouTube-like lottery win for Chris (he probably only covered his time and cost expenses with the sale price), at least he got a reasonable payment for all his work on Talkr. And I"ll be watching closely how LiveOnTheNet goes about trying to create a revenue stream from their new softphone-Talkr product. How do you think they"ll go?

In October 2005 I reviewed a potentially disruptive search engine called ePrécis, from Syntactica. Unfortunately it got shut down by Google (they "nearly put us out of business", said Syntactica President Henry Neils). But there was some heavy duty linguistic theory behind ePrécis and the good news is that now Syntactica is back with a new product, which looks equally promising.

iReader is a browser extension (for both IE and Firefox, and on PC or Mac) that lets you preview the content of a link, before you click on it. It"s similar to the web previews products we reviewed back in January - Browster, Cooliris, Snap, and Sphere. Our conclusion in that post was that previews are good, if implemented correctly - because previews can save us a lot of time over the long run.

iReader (full name: iReader 2.0 Web Previewer) is probably the most sophisticated previews products we"ve seen on the market yet, because it doesn"t just preview a webpage like Snap, or relevant links like Sphere. iReader actually studies the semantics of the content behind each link, and pops up a preview of that content in the form of a short list. The best way to illustrate this is to show you an example. Here is what happens when I hovered over a link in an earlier R/WW post:

As you can see, the preview is useful because it gives me a bullet point list of (hopefully) the main content in the webpage behind the link. This is called an “intelligent summary” by the company.

However there are some rough edges to the app. Sometimes the preview content doesn"t seem relevant, as in this example (also from R/WW):

The link previewed there was about Talkr, yet the pop-up displayed content about AOL (which was a whole other post). Perhaps this was pop-up lag, but I did notice some funny results elsewhere too. Another slight criticism is that the pop-ups tend to drive you crazy after a while. Every time your mouse passes over a link, up comes the preview pop-up. That"s distracting when you"re browsing the Web. But it is a beta product, so you"d expect some rough edges.

However when it comes down to it, there"s something about iReader that is attractive. In the press release which will go out later today, it states that iReader "is based on linguistic technology the company has been developing for several years." And indeed, creating an on-the-fly pop-up summary of the content behind a link - in an easily digestable list - is a clever thing. So give it a bit of time. And for those interested in the technical explanation:

"The technology behind iReader 2.0 is Syntactica Web Services, which can be embedded into a number of computer programs that process English language text – including, for example, those for search output, search indexing, or book indexing.

The iReader 2.0 technology works by quickly digesting archived information of a web page and providing the essential meaning, or sense, of the text on that page. The technology can also be integrated into Internet search engines to produce relevant abstracts of text information in real-time. “In short,” said CEO Neils, “this technology quickly compresses massive amounts of electronic English text into meaningful short abstracts along with a reference index.”

What"s more, the iReader 2.0 “macro” is being offered on an Open Source basis for developers.

I think this is promising product, albeit possibly too much of a distraction when browsing. But check it out for yourself and let us know what you think.

Disclosure: Central Desktop is a current sponsor.

Today Web Office company Central Desktop announced a new online spreadsheets feature, via a collaboration with HongKong-based company Team and Concepts (TnC) Ltd and its EditGrid product. You may remember we profiled EditGrid last week and touted it as "better than Google Spreadsheets". We said in that post that EditGrid is a feature-packed app that is best in class, but that it required partnerships with other vendors to be truly successful. Already it"s integrated into start pages Netvibes, Pageflakes and Google Personalized Homepage, plus Salesforce AppExchange and several SaaS products and platforms. Now Central Desktop has integrated EditGrid too.

I spoke with Central Desktop CEO Isaac Garcia to find out more about the partnership. Central Desktop is a collaboration platform, similar to 37Signal"s Basecamp. It"s focus is on small-to-medium businesses, as an alternative to complex, traditional groupware products such as Microsoft SharePoint and Lotus Notes. Central Desktop has what Isaac referred to as a "team level focus" and its features include collaborative document editing, Web and audio conferencing, discussion threads and versioned file tracking. The addition of EditGrid means that users can also now collaborate on spreadsheets, in real-time within the Central Desktop environment.

What I especially like about this announcement is that it"s a great example of how two small "web 2.0" companies can partner in order to grow. We spoke last month about the partnership between Zoho (a Web Office suite -- n.b. also a R/WW sponsor) and Omnidrive (online storage provider). I"m sure there are other examples, but in this world of best-of-breed web apps it makes total sense for small web companies to partner. It fits with the general Web culture of "small pieces loosely joined" and is also an effective way for the small companies to compete with giants like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. The bigcos have the advantage of being able to connect all of their various properties together, so one way for small companies to try and combat that is to join forces. I hope we see a lot more partnerships between small web companies, because it"s good for the Web ecosystem to have many successful small companies competing adequately with the big guns.

To investigate that theme further, I asked Issac what advantages Central Desktop / EditGrid combo has over, say, Google Spreadsheets. Isaac said that EditGrid gives them real-time technology and that it"s essentially an extension of Excel. He said that its use in Central Desktop means it"s being used in the context of a fixed workspace, which gives it an advantage over Google Spreadsheet (which is being used - ironically perhaps, given what I just wrote - in isolation to other Google apps).

Written by Jay Fortner and edited by Richard MacManus

We’ve all been there. You’re in a rush, you need to find a parking spot - and there"s nothing available! Well, how about finding a parking spot on your mobile phone; or maybe even reserving a spot from home via your browser? This kind of Web-based car parking solution is in its infancy, but we think this solution is going to change the way people park their cars - especially when in a rush!

So far, the early leaders in this space are the UK based Findacarpark.com, parkatmyhouse.com, peasy.com, the highly touted spotscout.com, and the Chicago-based ParkWhiz.com (although ParkWhiz has yet to fully launch their service).

Can these services disrupt the parking industry?

As a resident of a downtown metropolis, agonizing over parking spots is a re-occurring theme. I would find tremendous value in being able to secure and reserve parking, rather than driving around the block hoping for an open spot to appear. Additionally, I see great value in aggregating the costs of parking from various lots in similar areas, providing more transparency in the industry - especially if someone is relatively new to a city. Why park at one lot if you knew you could save a couple of bucks parking across the street? This could force parking lot owners to compete more smartly over parkers, providing lower prices to consumers. 

Another potential marketplace is that property owners could cash in and provide an easy online shop to rent their space for parking. This would be extremely lucrative to those who lived near stadiums and highly traffiked landmarks.

So yes, online or mobile parking solutions could be very disruptive to the existing parking industry.

Monetization

These services aim to take a small percentage of the parking marketplace and/or provide targeted advertising through the mobile phone and web browser. Also I think that layering in sponsored events and activities with searches, could be very powerful - if they can better target me by my previous search history. In addition, I expect these online parking services to be mashed in to e-vite services and event 2.0 sites, as an added-value tool - like we commonly see with Google Maps. For example I’d love to get a classified listing on Craigslist, and click a link to see a Google Map and nearby parking in that area.

SpotScout process

Potential pitfalls

Enforcement: As with any service that allows user-generated content, it is easily prone to gaming and fraud. I suspect that the feedback and comments features that have made eBay so successful, is also necessary on online parking sites - to maintain the integrity of transactions. Those with long histories of ethical transactions should get promoted to the top of search results for a given area, and power users need to be supported so that they continue to frequently offer parking inventory.

Use of mobile phone: If I’m in a rush, do I have time to type in coordinates on my mobile phone? Would it be too distracting to try and find the address to a parking spot and drive at the same time? Long-term to get around this pitfall, we may need these services to be integrated into the navigation systems in cars.

Where is the true value?

Does the value lie in the market, or the aggregation of information? I’ve been tossing back and forth for a while on this question. I think the true value that will make this service viral is empowering every home in a high traffic area to have the potential to make money. By matching up parking spots with consumers and making it easier for them to make reservations in areas where it seems impossible to find a spot, this is where the hidden value lies in this market. What do you think?

Can GYM enter this space?

If GYM (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) doesn’t enter this space by developing their own solutions, then they will probably enter through acquisition. So in the US at least, ParkWhiz and Spotscout have to move fast - because my local search would be enhanced significantly if I knew where to park too!

One of the mobile Web companies in Charles Knight"s 55 Piece Mobile Search Tool Kit was a beta product called Text2store. Charles categorized it as a Mobile Shopping Engine, alongside a similar service called Slifter. Text2store enables mobile users to sign up for shopping coupons and offers from their local shops. The service is officially launching this coming Monday, in Chicago. Text2store has been in "limited beta" since late November/Early December and they have a small number of Chicago companies signed up currently. Several other businesses in other states have also signed up.

How does it work? Unfortunately I couldn"t test it out myself (as it"s a US service), but on the Text2store blog they describe the process: firstly sign up on the home page with your cell phone number and valid e-mail address, then within 2-30 seconds you will get a text message with a confirmation code on your cell phone. Then you follow the 3-step process outlined on the homepage, beginning with inputting data about products and services you"re interested in:

The service is free for consumers. There is no upfront cost for merchants, who pay only for customers. Text2store is calling this "cost per text (CPT)" and it means that merchants "only pay for on-the-go consumers who we send (sms) text message or e-mail coupon/promotions to." They also have a cost-per-click model for website referrals.

The concern for consumers when receiving shopping deals by phone has to be spamming. Text2store however claims that it employs ‘User Controlled Technology’, meaning the user can control all aspects of receiving promotions/coupons. Users can set how often they get a sales deal, which day(s) of the week and even at what time. The company also has an editorial process, whereby they check all coupons/promotions (within 24 hours) before they are released to subscribers.

Conclusion

As of now, the Text2store website is still a little clunky and I wasn"t able to test out the mobile side of it (any Chicago natives care to test it out and comment?). But the service itself is promising. Of course, shopping promotions being delivered via mobile phone is kind of the holy grail of personalized shopping - for both shoppers and vendors. Because ideally users will receive only relevant messages, that are localized to where they live and personalized to their tastes.

According to a Yankee Group study, 42% of mobile customers are open to mobile advertising if it is relevant, if they asked for it or if they will get coupons or free services; and the U.S Mobile advertising revenue is projected to jump to $150 Million in 2006 from $45 Million in 2005. Yankee Group also predicts that Mobile ad sales could total $2 billion, or nearly 1% of U.S ad sales, by 2010 and 5% by 2015.

So it"s a potentially huge market and Text2store is wanting to grab a decent slice of it. They"re not alone of course - Slifter and Cellfire are two similar startups, and it"s safe to assume that the mobile carriers and Internet bigcos are also gunning for the mobile shopping market.

To finish, here are a couple of screenshots from the merchant"s perspective:

Written by Jay Fortner and edited by Richard MacManus

Widgets are becoming increasingly important in sharing and displaying content over the web. Recently we chatted with two companies, Pickle and Cellblock, that provide photo and video widgets. Each service allows multi-user contributions to their widgets - forget user-generated content, these are user-generated widgets!

The widgets can be placed nearly anywhere on the web - blogs, social networks, etc. You can send photos and videos to your widget, directly from your computer or mobile phone - sharing your media with the world instantly. The kind of functionality these services offer is really taking viral media to another level; and what’s more both Pickle and Cellblock have launched some pretty important features in the past 24 hours.

Pickle

Pickle has re-packaged several of their features, creating a widget media player that will operate on MySpace. It works by streaming photo and video content from users desktops or mobile phones.

"We"ve taken some of the capabilities that have been available with Pickle for a while, and recombined [them] to put some of those features more front and center", John Funge, CEO of Pickle, told Read/WriteWeb.

These features include:

• the ability to share content from a cell phone or computer desktop to a "channel";
• each channel displays photos and videos back to back;
• one-click full screen player opens directly from the widget (unlike YouTube, which re-directs you back to their site)

Users can contribute content to a Pickle channel in several ways, depending on the privacy levels determined by the channel"s owner. Users can click the "add to contribute" button found on the player, which opens up an upload page; or they can email their content.

Cellblock

Cellblock has been developing a multifaceted application for the sharing of media content. They recently released an embeddable widget, which has an offline desktop component as well. Their experience building social network Gloto, where users enjoyed real-time collaboration, encouraged Eric Conn (co-founder of Cellblock) and his team to create a specialized tool that enables real-time collaboration in widgets too. Cellblock’s widgets include:

• desktop component, allowing inclusion of media direct from users computers;
• inclusion of media from a broad range of devices (PDAs, cameras, mobile phones, etc);
• the ability to create a cellblock from your mobile phone;
• a Skype Cellblock plugin

Cellblock"s drag-and-drop function was just released yesterday, and should make for very easy additions to users Cellblock widgets.

Conclusion

As the world of social networking has exploded in popularity over the past year or two, the viral nature of the Internet has taken hold of the world. YouTube took one huge aspect of social networking and made it portable, by allowing users to embed videos on other sites. Photobucket took another aspect of social networking and enabled users to import images from one huge site to another. Cellblock and Pickle are bringing the viral nature of media to another level, by making it instant and collaborative as well as portable and mobile.

While this week"s poll is about Google"s Web Office bid, we mustn"t forget that a few small Web Office vendors have been in this space longer than Google and have built up a loyal and strong user base. One such company is ThinkFree, which I"ve profiled before on ZDNet. Today ThinkFree announced they"d reached 250,000 registered users. These users are made up of small and medium business owners and their staffs, university professors, teachers, entrepreneurs, parents, bloggers and students.

What"s more, ThinkFree users come from more than 200 countries, including Mauritania, Anguilla, and Saint Kitts and Nevis. The greatest number of users come from five regions: the United States, South Korea, Brazil, the United Kingdom and Canada.

Here are some monthly statistics released by ThinkFree:

• Accounts for 228,000 unique page views
• Stores over 654,000 files totaling 189 GB of data
• Accounts for just under 100,000 unique visitors, of which over half stay longer than 10 minutes and roughly one quarter return day after day
• Shares 2,000 documents
• Uploads or creates 60,000-80,000 new files

While 25k pales into comparison with Microsoft Office registered users (which would run into the tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions - anyone have an actual figure for this?), it demonstrates that small Web Office vendors like ThinkFree and Zoho can run a successful "niche" business by taking a small slice of the total office software user base. Zoho recently noted this in a blog post, saying that "our business plan is not based on us beating Microsoft or Google, it is based on serving customers well enough to earn a profitable share of the market."

ThinkFree markets its office suite as the one with best Microsoft Office compatibility - and I presume they include Google Apps in that assessment. It is also mainly a Java-based solution, rather than Ajax which Zoho and Google predominantly use. ThinkFree Online includes three applications – ThinkFree Write for word processing, ThinkFree Calc for spreadsheet management and ThinkFree Show for creating presentations. It offers 1GB of free file storage as part of its service. In May last year I interviewed ThinkFree CEO TJ Kang. At that stage TJ made a special point of noting ThinkFree"s MS compatibility:

"ThinkFree prides itself on having more functionality than the other Web Office players, but TJ told me it isn’t a case of features for features sake. Rather, ThinkFree’s main reason for having so much functionality is to be compatible with Microsoft Office. He said if they didn’t have that level of compatibility, then MS Office users "wouldn’t make the move". One of ThinkFree’s goals is to ween MS Office users off the desktop and onto the Web."

And indeed I concluded that the primary benefit of ThinkFree was its close compatibility to Microsoft Office functionality - with the web-based functionality, such as collaboration, that it offers on top of that being the differentiator to MS.

Revision3, the online TV network founded last year by Digg"s Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, David Prager of TechTV, and others, has announced a new underground music show on Revision3. The show is called XLR8R TV (pronounced "accelerator" TV) and is being produced by XLR8R magazine, a San Francisco music publication since 1993. The magazine and website XLR8R covers hip-hop, indie and electronic music - as well as related trends in style, art, fashion, and technology.

Revision3 told Read/WriteWeb that the sector of Internet television is really heating up, and so they expect their new underground music show to attract a niche audience that will be attractive to online advertisers.

Revision3 told us that their competitors aren"t taking the time to figure out what audiences want or expect from on-demand programming - or worse, they just expect the users to create their own content. Revision3 thinks that a show that costs very little to produce, that leverages a known brand in the underground music community, has never been done before. Their target audience is the tech-savvy, young and smart demographic – not dissimilar to digg"s audience (although probably less geeky and with more females).

The show itself will be made up of three segments, anchored by a host who narrates from a location relevant to the content of the show. It will focus on emerging artists and music and will cover genres such as hip-hop, indie rock and electronic music.

XLR8R TV will be released on the 1st of every month and each episode will be approximately 15-20 minutes long. Also on the 15th of each month Revision3 will create a special Videos edition of XLR8R TV, which will be about 15 minutes long. These will feature three independent music videos, in a variety of genres, introduced by the host with background information about how the video was created. The host is the appropriately named XLR8R magazine editor Vivian Host.

The first episode will be up on Revision3"s website sometime on Tue 27th PST.

UPDATE: The first edition is now live.

One of the missing ingredients in Google"s growing Web Office suite is a CRM component. While there is little sign yet of Google providing CRM, a small startup called Etelos has done just that. Etelos has launched a new product called CRMforGoogle, which is a web-based CRM tool that integrates very nicely with Google’s personalized home page.

Essentially CRMforGoogle is a package of Etelos produced "Google Personalized Homepage" gadgets, which all have CRM functionality. Etelos has cleverly packaged all their gadgets up into an actual product. In fact, if you look at this screenshot, you"d think it was a Google product!

Etelos has launched CRMforGoogle today as a limited Beta release. Features include customizable modules, contact management, task management, the ability to automate client follow up, share schedules and manage projects, and more - all within Google’s Personalized Homepage.

The initial Beta period is by invitation only - you can request an account at their website. Post-beta, CRMforGoogle will made available in three versions: Personal, Professional and Enterprise. The Personal edition will be free and the Professional and Enterprise editions will have a monthly subscription. The Enterprise edition will be more customizable and will allow businesses to use their own hosting environment - and integrate other software.

CRMforGoogle also says it offers "limited integration" with Google Calendar and Google Spreadsheets. Further integration with those, as well as GMail and Google Docs is on their agenda.

Conclusion

I have to say, it"s a very smart move to integrate closely with Google"s start page - and associate themselves with Google"s Office apps. If they can get away with it! I see a couple of potential issues for Etelos - one is the name of their product, which features the word "Google" in it. It"ll be interesting to see if Google lawyers have anything to say about that. The second potential issue is whether Google lets Etelos market their product so closely with their own start page and office products. Etelos is walking a fine line here, but I applaud them for what looks like a very smart marketing move - at the very least.

There"s been lots of talk recently about desktop/web platforms. Last week we mentioned more News Reader desktop apps powered by Microsoft"s WPF platform, and of course this week Adobe has featured twice on R/WW due to its unveiling of Apollo. We"ve also profiled smaller companies in the past - e.g. Laszlo and Morfik. The latter company, Morfik, has mostly been flying under the radar for the past year, but their 100% Ajax platform is getting set for its 1.0 release at the end of March. I caught up with the team recently to see what they"ve got under the hood....

The last time I profiled Morfik, in April 2006, I noted that their goal is to push the edges of what can run on current browsers. They"re doing this by creating a platform on which developers can develop complex and highly functional Ajax applications. Morfik then, is designed to take advantage of the browser rendering engine to its fullest potential.

Ajax-ifying Salesforce.com

One of Morfik"s more intriguing lab experiments currently is the transformation of the Salesforce.com interface into a purely Ajax one. AjaxSalesforce was described to me as a demonstration of "what a Salesforce.com experience could truly be like, if state-of-the-art Ajax technology is used". Created with Morfik AppsBuilder, the app aims to create a UI that mimics the functionality of a desktop CRM system - but using 100% Ajax.

What is Morfik exactly?

In a nutshell, Morfik allows developers to use high-level programming languages (which give the developer more power - e.g. BASIC, C#, Pascal) to create web apps. It does this by converting apps from high level language INTO Ajax code. For example, says Morfik, all the rich internet apps in their labs were written in a high level language, then translated into Javascript. So essentially you can develop web apps not needing to know Javascript, or even what Ajax is.

You can also create web services using Morfik. In our discussion, I noticed that Adobe"s Flex was being mentioned a lot as a point of comparison. In the case of web services, the Morfik developers told me their platform offers "everything in one box" - that developers can use external things, unlike with Flex.

Another feature of Morfik is that it can create "unplugged" web apps, meaning offline functionality. They"ve built real world examples (some which can"t be mentioned publicly yet) that can run unplugged, with access to a central or local database - all via the web browser! Yes, offline web browsing and well before Firefox 3 has delivered similar functionality.

One real world example I can quote is a French investment house, which is using Morfik technology to allow their salesforce to go out into the field and collect data on their laptops, in the browser but offline - then when they come back to the office, everything is synced up automatically.

Another prototype is a desktop version of Gmail, which has the ability to check email offline:

Morfik"s platform is still in development, but their 1.0 version is due for release sometime in March - it"s currently in the last beta process. For developers reading this, I encourage you to go test it out, because this is a leading edge web development toolset. The pricing: an express license is free for non-commercial apps, and they also offer a "professional license" which has no deployment or ongoing cost and can run anywhere/everywhere in a business.

Competition

So how does Morfik stack up to its competition? This can get complicated for non-developers like me, but the crux of it is that Morfik uses 100% Ajax and renders in the native browser. Whereas all the other platforms use non-native browser plug-ins (like Flash) or render outside the browser. Adobe"s Apollo and Laszlo both largely output in Flash (a browser plug-in) and Microsoft"s WPF renders outside the browser.

So Morfik thinks there"s nothing on the market comparable to their platform. Possibly their main threat though is whatever Google might be cooking up. The Google Web Toolkit is a similar tool to Morfik, in that it enables developers to create sophisticated Ajax applications using Java. There was even a rumor swirling around in May last year that Google partnered with Morfik, or licensed technology from it. Morfik is tight-lipped about GWT, as they are apparently still under NDA obligations. However, they told me that "despite Google"s technology claims, Google does not use GWT for any of its on-line services". 

It"s unclear to me what the relationship is between Google and Morfik, but we can speculate on the reasons why Google doesn"t use GWT internally on its own apps. There could be some legal issue constraining GWT usage, making it risky for high stake services such as GMail or Google Maps. Or it may be that GWT is not as good as Google says it is. Certainly Morfik is adament that their technology is far more sophisticated and complete than GWT. I"m not qualified to comment on that, but it is true that Morfik has been working on their platform for a long time - since 1999 - and so they may well have an advantage over Google in this domain.

Future of Ajax

Now I"m no developer, so I"m expecting the programmers in R/WW"s readership to jump into the comments and give us their views (which in my experience, are usually forthright and sans mincing of words!). Morfik itself claims its platform is the future of how you develop Ajax apps. According to them, the Morfik platform gives you a framework for building controls - and not just fancy visual effects. They say it allows you to create the "best effects possible in the browser" and that there"s "no limitation on what you can do with ajax, but there hadn"t been a system to take advantage of that before."

Let us know what you think in the comments.

Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus

FeedBlendr is a web service that lets you remix your feeds. It has just launched the public beta of its second version. At first glance FeedBlendr does not appear to have a lot of bells and whistles, but it is an interesting and intelligent service that lets you easily remix many kinds of RSS feeds. And after closer examination, we can see that developer Beau Lebens has put a lot of love into the site - and actually there are bells and whistles after all. Let"s take a look...

FeedBlendr features

The basic idea behind the service is really simple - it"s a pipe that takes one or more RSS feeds (or OMPL file) and outputs a single feed. For example, if you are into gadgets, you might combine Engadget, Gizmodo and CrunchGear like this:

The service allows you to combine RSS feeds with Atom feeds and it also produces the output in both formats. Here is the resulting gadget blogs feed in RSS 2.0 format. The items (posts) are merged together and ordered by date. This is the basic function that you would expect, but FeedBlendr also innovates with a set of additional convenience features.

Firstly there is a set of buttons that lets you subscribe to your output feeds via your favorite news reader. But the next feature is really convenient. You get two URLs that let you view the feed either in the browser (WYSIWYG format), or on your mobile device. Here is the browser version of our gadgets feed:

You can also get an instant OPML file of the input feeds. This OPML can then be reused by FeedBlendr for more remixing. For developers, there is a piece of JavaScript that can be inserted into any document and then restyled using CSS.

FeedBlendr for developers

There is much more that you can do with FeedBlendr, if you are a developer. This version of FeedBlendr offers four handy features. First is the simple ability to blend feeds using REST. To create a blend, you simply query http://FeedBlendr.com and pass the title, list of URLs or OPML file. This feature is conceptually similar to digg this! or post to del.icio.us.

The next feature lets developers link to the blend from any web site. There is a snippet of code that needs to be added to the site to accomplish this. You can also customize the look of the blend. However if you need more fine-grained control over the blend, you can use the JSON API. 

Finally, you can also create and fetch blends using the FeedBlendr API. This is mostly handy for backend/server side software.

Ideas for blends

It is natural to ask just what sort of things can be done with FeedBlendr. Despite its simplicity, it can be used to create a range of interesting remixes. For example, you can remix a feed of new movie and dvd releases from different sources, producing a single movie feed. You can also use FeedBlendr to mix different media. Here is a feed that combines items tagged "universe" from del.icio.us and flickr.

The website contains a whole page of tips on how to use the service. Here are some that looked fun to me:

• Make your own radio or tv station, by mixing together your favorite podcasts or videos.
• Blend events from multiple Google calendars;
• Combine feeds from 43places.com, 43things.com, 43people.com and AllConsuming.net to get an "all-about-you" feed.

Finally, for those of you who love ego surfing, use Google Blogsearch to get news for each variant of your name - e.g. alex iskold or alexiskold - and then blend them all together for one healthy ego massage.

Beyond blending

FeedBlendr is a well thought out service, but surely what we are seeing today is just the beginning. Other feed operations make sense. For example filtering feeds, by only letting through items that have certain keywords. Back in November, Richard profiled several such RSS services - including FeedRinse and BlastFeed. Another thing to do with feeds is sorting. Items can be ranked using a pluggable criteria - in the simple case, keywords; in a more complex case, a user"s tastes.

There is a general set of operations that make sense to perform on feeds. Certainly blending, filtering and sorting operations are part of that set. It also makes sense to have a version of the blend that throws out duplicate entries, based on a supplied item identify. Please add other useful operations in the comments.

Conclusion

Once we think about remixing of feeds, we notice the similarity with Yahoo! Pipes and other remixing services. Yahoo! Pipes also helps you create new feeds, using the operations that we discussed. However, it is a generic tool and does not have many of the little handy things that FeedBlendr does. These differences aside, both FeedBlendr and Yahoo! pipes contribute to the growing trend of letting users remix the web.

And the remixing trend, in turn, is part of the increasing segmentation and personalization of content. To let users pick, choose and combine existing information across different web sites, blogs, podcasts, pictures and video -- is powerful, because it helps people focus their attention on what is important to them. So widgets, pipes and blenders likely signal the onset of the Attention Economy.

Give FeedBlendr a try - and share with us the mixes that you make.

Red Herring is reporting that AOL founders Steve Case and Ted Leonsis have invested $5.5-million, as a second round investment, into widget syndication platform Clearspring. Alex profiled ClearSpring back in November and other widget platforms we"ve covered before on Read/WriteWeb include Snipperoo, Widgetbox, Fox"s SpringWidgets and MuseStorm.

In a recent post, VC Brad Feld says there are 23 "widget management systems" and he suggests that most of them are heading for a disappointing end. He also notes that many existing web services companies are "widgetizing" their services:

"As an investor, I’ve looked at and decided not to invest in “widget management systems.”  However, all of the companies I’ve invested in that provide web services to publishers (including NewsGator, FeedBurner, Lijit, ClickCaster, and Me.dium) are “widgetizing” their services.  FeedBurner is an obvious platform in my universe for this (given their broad relationship with over 350,000 publishers) as they have demonstrated with their integration of Headline Animator with Stats, SpringWidgets, and Lijit Search."

Also there are the widget activities of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and indeed AOL itself. So it"s clear that widgets are quickly becoming as common on the Web as RSS and (in time) HTML. But it"s still early enough in the game that the likes of ClearSpring and Snipperoo can carve out a hefty niche, much like RSS feed management a few years ago - where Feedburner, Newsgator and a couple of others came out trumps.

Brad"s right that Feedburner has a great platform from which to supply widgets to consumers, so they may eventually have pole position here. But I"d like to think there"s plenty of room for ClearSpring and a couple of other widget platforms to differentiate themselves - e.g. Feedburner"s BuzzBoost is a great add-on widget service, but ClearSpring appears to offer a lot more functionality at present. What do you think of the widget platforms market?

Written by Josh Catone of mockriot and edited by Richard MacManus

Television is big business. No, let"s not understate it: television is very big business. The global broadcast and cable television industry generates billions of dollars worldwide annually from subscription, equipment, advertising, and service fees; and is dominated by huge media conglomerates like General Electric, Viacom, News Corp., and Disney. The new kid on the block is Internet Protocol TV (IPTV), which sends television signals over the Internet - and the early forecasts are bright. Research firm iSupply predicts that IPTV will be a $26 billion industry in 2010, while Gartner says that 3 years from now IPTV will have the attention of 48 million pairs of eyeballs.

This post looks at 3 new IPTV startups (plus a couple of "sort of IPTV" websites) that have been gaining steam over the past few months. Analysts and pundits view these companies as competitors to the cable industry, far more so than video sharing sites like YouTube.

Joost

Joost, which is currently in closed beta and was initially known as The Venice Project, is the big new kid on the block. They got the most media coverage of all the startups profiled here (26,527 mentions on Technorati -- none of the other sites here crack 1,000) and they have deep pockets by virtue of their founders, Kazaa and Skype creators Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom.

Joost is a software product that uses peer-to-peer streaming technology to deliver data in encrypted packets, which are then cached the way your browser caches web content. The cached content is then sent along to other users. Joost differs from traditional TV in that its content is all "on demand", meaning you can download and watch video whenever you want - not only when its "on."

Content

While the content on the Joost network right now isn"t very extensive, content is one area where the product should excel. Friis and Zennstrom are aggressively pursuing content distribution deals with major media companies. In February, they announced a partnership with Viacom that will put content from MTV Networks, BET, and Paramount Pictures on Joost.

Currently, Joost"s content is strong - but limited. Joost boasts 23 channels, including a lot of commercial content - although each channel only seems to have a handful of programs. They have a number of music channels, some dedicated to specific artists, such as, "Green Day," "Red Hot Chili Peppers," "The Diddy Channel," "Atlantic Street," and "Warner Bros. Records." These channels show mostly music videos, documentaries, and live performances. "Fifth Gear" is a channel on automobiles and shows short clips about expensive cars, while "Saturday Morning" shows old cartoons (mainly "Rocky and Bullwinkle") and the "World"s Strongest Man" channel shows clips of events from the Met-RX World"s Strongest Man competition.

The channels that held my attention longest were probably "National Geographic" - which showed full documentaries from the National Geographic cable channel - and "IndieFlix Premiere Hits", which showed full length independent films.

Features/UI

The user interface of Joost is non-traditional. When you start up Joost, it opens full screen. Controls appear when you hover your mouse over any edge of the screen. On the right edge is a button that allows you to open up the channel guide, on the left is a button for "My Joost" - which accesses your widgets (more on them below). On the bottom of the screen are video controls.

The video controls are fairly standard: play, pause, skip to next/last program, and volume controls. You can also change channels, or skip ahead to a specific program (not just the next or last), and get info about a program or channel -- not unlike the controls found on digital cable and satellite services. The video control bar also includes a search box, that allows you to search by keyword for specific programs, or programs on a certain subject (although this is fairly limited, with such a small program catalog).

Joost"s channel browser is easy to use. You scroll through channels with up and down arrows, and you can get a list of specific programs prior to committing - so you can select a specific program to download.

Joost also has a fairly extensive preferences screen, allowing you to fine tune the user interface by changing things - like the delay before the toolbars reappear when you hover your mouse near the edge of the screen, and whether or not you start in full-screen mode.

Widgets

Widgets are something that only Joost has and really sets them apart from the other IPTV providers. Widgets are extensions that add extra, non-television functionality to the Joost program. Right now, Joost"s selection of widgets are: Notice Board (news about Joost), Instant Message (chat with Jabber or Gmail users from within Joost), Rate (rate programs), Channel Chat (chat with other users watching the program), News Ticker (an RSS reader that you can use to track outside feeds), and Clock (uh, it tells the time). The widgets are all very easy to use and work well.

Widgets are a very smart addition to Joost. They offer a social aspect to Joost that other startups don"t have, allowing users to interact with the content and each other. Further, they minimize the time you are forced to leave Joost in order to get things done.

Babelgum

Joost may be the biggest fish in the pond, but Babel Gum is a very able-bodied competitor. Founded by Italian billionaire Silvio Scaglia (of FastWeb fame), Babelgum is another on demand IPTV software program that looks and feels remarkably like Joost. While they haven"t gotten nearly as much press as Joost, they have offices in 4 countries, and they don"t seem worried about Joost. "When I started work on this a year and a half ago I was afraid we"d end up with five [competing IPTV services]," founder Scaglia told the Financial Times in January. "The fact it"s still two probably gives us a good lead." Babelgum is currently operating in closed beta mode.

Content

Content on Babelgum right now is extremely limited. There are only 9 channels available to users. These are mostly made up of amateur or independent content. Amongst others, there is a News channel that shows news from the Associated Press, a Cartoons channel (which has some pretty neat indie cartoon shorts), a Blogs channels that shows episodes of Rocketboom, and a Trailer channel that shows movie trailers.

Babelgum is trying to entice content owners with a pitch on their site. They call Babelgum "an ideal platform for content owners to serve directly the Long Tail of viewers’ interests not addressed by today’s broadcasting television networks." They don"t charge anything to distribute content and promise payment of US$5 for each 1000 unique views, of any clip put on their network. This seems like it might be a good deal for amateur content producers, but it likely won"t attract the mainstream media companies (which I"m not sure Babelgum is really trying to do anyway).

Features/UI

Babelgum"s interface is very much like Joost"s. Video controls are on the left side, but can be moved any way. The standard volume, play, pause, forward and back are there, but unlike with Joost there is no way to scroll through channels and find the program you want before switching. You also can"t rewind programs the way you can in Joost (perhaps the content on Babelgum isn"t being cached?). Rather disappointingly, Babelgum only comes in two sizes : full screen, and not full screen. While in not full screen mode, you can"t resize the window.

The channel browser in Babelgum is easy enough to use. You access it by pressing the "TV" button along the bottom of the screen, or on the video control bar. The browser lists channels in grid format by default, or in a scrollable one-per-page view. This is easy enough when there are only 9 channels, but when there are more, I am not sure how well this format will scale. You can, however, create custom lists of your favorite channels -- rather useless at the moment, but could be helpful if there are ever hundreds of channels. In rather annoying fashion, clicking on a channel doesn"t do anything -- you have to click the green "play" button to load up the channel, or click "more info" to get a listing of programs and description of the channel. Babelgum"s channel browser is more visually pleasing than Joost"s, however, and the channel and program descriptions are far more complete.

Babelgum doesn"t really offer any more features to speak of. There is a button on each program page allowing you to save it to a "Video" section (sort of a favorites lists), which is something like TiVo for IPTV. But since everything is on demand, this may have limited usefulness. You can also rate programs from the channel browser.

Zattoo

Swiss startup Zattoo is taking a different tack towards IPTV than either Joost or Babelgum. Currently only available to users in Switzerland, Zattoo is a software product that streams actual broadcast and cable television networks, rather than operating an on demand service. Though Zattoo is only available in Switzerland, they are based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.

Content is where Zattoo really excels, offering over 40 channels to its Swiss users. They plan to expand into other countries as they sign content distribution deals with media companies that allow them to do so. The channels they offer are mainstream broadcast and cable stations - such as BBC World, CNN International, Canale 5, Viva, and Italia 1. Many of the channels are in German, French, and Italian, making them rather hard to understand for a unilingual American like myself (though I did enjoy watching episodes of "The Nanny" in German and "Step by Step" in Italian), but the quality of the programming on these channels is top notch.

The interface of Zattoo is very simple and more traditional, looking a lot more like a Windows or Mac program than the others. Because Zattoo is streaming actual TV stations, there is no need for video controls. Zattoo"s interface is adorned with just volume and screen size controls. The channel browser loads on the side of the application and is, like the rest of the app, very simple and easy to use; it can be hidden with a click. 

Since Zattoo is showing real streaming TV, it would be a very welcome addition if they added a channel guide showing what was on, and when.

ChooseAndWatch and Free Tube

ChooseAndWatch and FreeTube are nothing like the three programs previewed above, but nonetheless they warrant a brief mention in the conversation. They are sites that aggregate streaming video channels from around the web, from a mixture of mainstream TV channels like ESPN, ABC, Al Jazeera, and the BBC; to more amateur, independent networks. FreeTube claims to have 324 channels, while ChooseAndWatch boasts "more than 250." However, due to using ActiveX controls to launch the video applets, and a mish mash of formats (i.e. some channels use QuickTime while others use Windows Media Player) the sites both suffer from browser incompatibilities and channels that just plain don"t work. From a content selection standpoint, however, if legal these sites beat Joost, Babelgum, and Zattoo hands down. A word of caution: both websites offer adult content areas.

Conclusion

It"s too early to say who will come out on top in the IPTV battle. From a strictly technological standpoint, Joost"s offering is the best out there right now. But Babelgum offers a solid product as well, so it will ultimately come down to content. 

Zattoo currently leads the game on content, but being only available in Switzerland will obviously keep them from growing very fast. Also being a strictly live streaming service (not on demand), Zattoo may not be compelling enough to divorce people from their TVs. 

The IPTV marketplace is heating up and these early startups have so far impressed. That all three software startups profiled above are finalists for the Red Herring 100 Europe 2007 award is proof enough of that.

Written by David Lenehan and edited by Richard MacManus

Segala is a specialist in web accessibility, mobile testing, mobile web testing and certification. Based in Dublin and privately owned, Segala provides a range of services to help you better understand what problems your website and mobile applications might have in terms of accessibility. Let"s take a look at their services...

Content Labels and Search Thresher

Segala is at the forefront of promoting Content Labels, which are RDF-based files that contain metadata about trust. Segala developed Search Thresher, a Firefox plug-in for examining Content Labels in search results. It only works on your Google results and only a handful of sites use Content Labels, but Search Thresher is really just a stopgap to demonstrate how Content Labels might actually work if widely adopted. If Content Labels are adopted, Segala hopes to become a major player in verifying these - which would be a very lucrative business. Segala helped to create the original charter and is co-author of the final report with ICRA. 

Content Labels are now moving onto a full recommendation track within the W3C, so it is a promising technology. Content Labels will be proposed as a replacement for PICS, a W3C spec which enables labels (metadata) to be associated with Internet content.

Here is a screenshot of Search Thresher in action:

The image above shows how results from Google look with the SearchThresher plug-in installed. There are only a dozen or so sites out there with content labels at the moment.

Accessibility Testing

In addition to pushing Content Labels and the issue of trust, Segala also provides a range of accessibility services. For US $690 Segala will carry out a benchmark evaluation report, which involves testing your website across different browsers and platforms. They will then advise you on what adjustments you need to make to your site in order to comply with regulations and policies such as the DDA in the UK and Section 508 in the US. You can also get a full compliance audit from Segala, which will help ensure your site conforms to WCAG.

Segala also tests your mobile applications and mobile websites. They will be able to provide you with a W3C mobileOK Trustmark certificate when they become available later in 2007. 

This accessibility testing all revolves around trust. By displaying the Segala-Certified Trustmark on your website, you are giving a clear sign that your site is independently verified for accessibility. According to Segala, browsers and search engines that can detect the trustmark are able to highlight your site in search results - thus improving user trust and potential ranking for your site. However I"m not sure what, if any, major search engines will actually improve your "site ranking" based on this trustmark - but maybe I"m wrong.

Agencies, developers, usability consultant, and product owners can join Segala"s certified partner programme so they can offer their own clients accessibility products and services, including the Segala Accessibility Trustmark.

Conclusion

Web accessibility is an important issue for developers and webmasters to consider. With more and more people accessing the internet through mobiles devices, screen readers and raft of new browsers, websites that are not accessible are losing out on potential users, clients, and customers. 

Last year the UN conducted a survey of 100 regularly used websites across 20 different countries, called "The United Nations Global Audit of Web Accessibility" - a grand title indeed. They set out to determine how accessible these sites were for people with disabilities. Unfortunately the results were not so grand: only 3 websites out of the 100 chosen were confirmed to have the basic standards of accessibility. 

From a legal point of view, there is also something to consider for larger companies. Take for example the National Federation for the Blind, which last year filed a suit against Target.com, citing several issues - including the fact that the site requires the use of a mouse to make purchases.

Segala is a profitable company with a healthy balance sheet. They provide a very useful service for website owners who have not focused their attention on accessibility in the past, but who want to make up for lost ground. In their drive for Content Label adoption, Segala wants to be the VeriSign of this business and become an authority on site certification. 

As for any developers out there, I would love to hear your comments on how important you think the issue of web accessibility is?

MyStrands, a music discovery and social networking site that covers the PC, mobile and physical worlds (see our profile in January), has released an interesting new recommendations feature. It uses the MyStrands Public APIs (called OpenStrands) to link their social music recommendations to Wikipedia information. Essentially it"s a mashup of MyStrands music recommendations with artist information from Wikipedia. It"s not a huge feature, but it"s a neat example of the innovation that is happening with music and the Web.

Music discovery and recommendation systems is a growing segment. I still like Pandora, where (as Alex Iskold wrote about in January) music is measured in terms of its "genetic" make up. But there are many other startups doing music recommendations. The Music 2.0 Directory lists the following companies in this segment:

• SoundFlavor
• MusicIP
• Owl Multimedia
• Elbo.ws
• The Hype Machine
• SeeqPod Music
• Upto11
• 9ViBe
• Jamendo
• Goombah
• iLike
• Last.fm
• ChartU
• Mog
• MyStrands
• Qloud
• U.[lik]
• herkesdinlesin

If you"ve used any of the above services, let us know in the comments. I"d like to check out a few of these and see how their recommendations stack up.

Written by Sramana Mitra and edited by Richard MacManus

I have written a few framework articles recently, defining Web 3.0 and Enterprise 3.0. I also wrote a piece towards the end of 2005, called What is this Sea Change? In this article, I am going to start coverage on a very interesting company called Rearden Commerce, which touches upon many of the concepts we’ve discussed in the 3 pieces referred above. (I recommend you read the framework pieces first, before reading the rest of this story.)

Rearden is a services marketplace that consolidates various service providers (Travel, Dining, Conferencing, Shipping, etc.), and offers it to the employees of an Enterprise. It is a very well funded company, with $100 Million investment, and was featured in Business 2.0"s 25 startups to watch list at the end of 2006. Rearden Commerce"s business model is subscriptions and it currently has over 200 customers.

An Example

Let me explain this to you by using a scenario. The tool that an employee uses is called the Rearden Personal Assistant, which is a web app that helps users find and manage all the services available to them via Rearden"s network.

Let’s say, for example, that I am an employee of Pfizer and that Pfizer is a client of Rearden (which it is). Rearden has a network of 135,000 service providers, many of whom have negotiated preferred rates with Reardon. In addition, in some cases Pfizer has negotiated its own preferred rates - and the Rearden system can be configured to use those rates as well.

So say that I am planning to go to a conference next month in New York. [Context]

I start my travel planning - airline, hotels, limo to/from JFK. I also plan where I want to eat, what shows I want to see, etc. When I log into the Rearden “Personal Concierge” system, it knows my profile and the human resource policies of Pfizer for me (e.g. I am not allowed to travel First or Business Class).

Airport parking

The company has certain negotiated preferred rates with 5 mid-town hotels. If I need to ship packages during my trip, I have to use Fedex - the preferred rates for that are in the system. I have to also make arrangements for 3 online meetings while I am there, and Pfizer has preferred rates set up with Webex. [Policy Propagation]

My “Personal Concierge” also knows that I like Jazz and Blues, so it recommends clubs where I can go to listen to my favorite bands. [Personalization]

It also gives me restaurant reviews from Zagat in the neighborhood where I will be, and which are consistent with my food preferences. It provides relevant Google Maps and Rewards Network discount coupons. [Content]

Restaurants

How it works

All of this is powered by a SaaS platform from Rearden Commerce, architected with the philosophy of User-Centric Computing. It provides Identity-based, User-centric personalization. It uses native web services and a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and provides a mashed up user experience that is extremely CONTEXTUAL.

If you recollect the Web 3.0 model, Rearden already has an excellent Context, Personalization, Commerce, and Content integration. I haven’t checked their Vertical Search capabilities yet, but it should be a natural extension of their offering.

What it lacks, however, is Community. I would like to also coordinate plans with my cousin in Manhattan, and a couple of friends, as well as meet some Swing dancers, so that we can all go dancing together. All of this should automatically get logged into my calendar, my PDA, etc.

Now, if you recollect the Enterprise 3.0 model, Rearden certainly hits the spot on both SaaS and the Extended Enterprise trends.

Finally, in the Sea Change piece, I discussed the possibilities for B->B->C Contextual Advertising. Rearden Commerce is well-positioned to draw upon its platform and extend it to include an Advertising Management System.

Conclusion

Bottom line, I really like what I see in this company - and it has a lot of possibilities. It also aligns with the still fairly open opportunity of leveraging the SME markets and pulling them into relevant consolidated marketplaces. By providing, say, restaurants with a consolidated contextual market channel through Rearden, it can also start tapping into the marketing budgets of these restaurants.

All in all, Reardon demonstrates that Context is a really powerful organizing principle!

Sramana Mitra is an Entrepreneur, Founder CEO of 3 companies, Strategy Consultant to 50+ companies, and Author of a popular technology business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy.

ShoppingPath.com is launching the beta version of its shopping comparison service. A preview of the ShoppingPath technology is located (for some reason) at the domain www.CrispyShop.com. What caught my eye was its unique, ipod-like, product comparison UI. It"s a mix of Ajax and Flash and is quite interesting... maybe even compelling. Here is a screenshot, taken from a TV example:

How this works is that you scroll along either the blue dotted line (representing price) or the bottom line (showing product images), until you find a product you like that fits your budget. The scrolling is very reminiscent of using the scroll wheel on your iPod - it"s the same kind of interface theory of being able to scroll through hundreds of options easily.

During the scrolling, you see details of the product - e.g. the Pioneer one in the screenshot above - and there are many ways to filter your search by feature, via tabs at the top and drop-down boxes to the left. One good example is sorting by "Diagonal Size" (I assume the tabs are different for each product type). It displays something like this:

The green dots signify TVs available with larger screen sizes for a lower price.

After you"ve chosen a suitable product, it displays more details and popularity measures:

There is plenty of data available if needed: product reviews, ratings, pricing details, etc.

Conclusion

There"s a lot going on in the interface, but it all seems to work very smoothly. The green dots were probably the only thing that needed explanation when I tested it. Note that the product also uses the Yahoo Shopping API.

Right now ShoppingPath is hoping to be a meta shopping engine, pointing users to retailer websites to complete purchases. It"s not clear to me what the business model is, other than contextual ads. Certainly this kind of technology would be superb at Amazon.com, so long term an acquisition of the technology could be the play. Or maybe white labelling it to various retail websites.

At the end of January we wrote about a new service called Imagini Friends, which is a social network that calculates your "VisualDNA" and uses it to find other people that match. At the time, it reminded me of the personality tests you find in magazines like Vogue. Well it looks like Imagini has recently gotten a surge in popularity, thanks to a huge digging (Saul Klein pointed this out). The power of digg can be seen in the Alexa chart:

At the time of our review in January, I thought the most promising application for Imagini would be advertising and marketing - because of the demographic and consumer preferences data that it can obtain. As such, there are privacy implications for people who participate in this "social network". Some of the digg readers picked up on this, e.g. darkspire archly commented:

"Of course it doesn"t work, the responses appear to be canned, ie tied to specific images or groups of images. I did it two or three times as quite a few of the images overlap and yet not a single one of the profiles was even remotely close to my personality type. The primary flaw here seems to be the canned responses and too narrow of a scope. If you look at personality tests like Myers-Briggs they have similar questions with different wording or different choices to get a better feel for your response rather than just one to one correlations. Of course this isn"t designed to be accurate it"s designed to sell crap."

Still, it"ll be interesting to see if Imagini Friends can maintain the momentum that a big digging has given them. Mike Arrington noted the other day that a Techcrunch review can send a spike of traffic to an app, but "then most of the people never come back". It would be a similar story with digg. Already the Alexa chart shows a dip after the (I presume) digg-generated spike. It"ll be interesting to check back in a couple of weeks...

Related: original Read/WriteWeb review of Imagini Friends

In Read/WriteWeb"s interview with Matt Cutts of Google today, on the topic of next-generation search, the very last question I asked him was how Google is going about indexing video. It"s a big question, because with YouTube and other online video sites seemingly taking over the Web (as far as consumer content goes), video search is a key issue going forward. blinkx, which in its press release claims to be "the largest video search engine on the Web", today released a set of Video SEO (search engine optimization) guidelines and a community wiki. blinkx’s goal is to provide a forum for discussions around best practices, via the wiki, as well as recommendations on how advertisers and content owners can maximize their results for video content.

blinkx"s whitepaper covers the following topics:

• Cleaning and conversion of metadata
• Optimizing titles, description and filenames
• Leveraging sitemaps
• Utilizing Media RSS
• Content Management
• Where to submit
• What to Avoid

There is certainly a lot of useful info here on how blinkx and other search engines rank video content. I especially liked this high level view of the video search industry:

A little more about blinkx: according to the press release today, blinkx has indexed more than 7,000,000 hours of audio, video, viral and TV content, and made it "fully searchable and available on demand." Does that make them the biggest video search engine in the world though? I don"t actually know - anyone care to comment?

Spanning Sync v1.0, an application that provides two-way synchronization between Google Calendar and Apple iCal, has launched after seven months of development - including a four-month beta period. As The Unofficial Apple Weblog noted, Spanning Sync also syncs between multiple Macs and Google Calendar accounts, with iSync-compatible devices like iPods and mobile phones (iPhone too when it"s released), and with Google Apps for Your Domain (Google"s hosting service).

It is an Apple-only application, so many people (myself included) can"t use it. But it"s an excellent example of two trends which we"re tracking closely here on R/WW:

1) offline/online sync functionality

Spanning Sync founder Charlie Wood told me:

"I believe in a hybrid future where desktop/mobile applications serve as front-ends to hosted applications and work even when a network connection or the hosted application itself is unavailable. Such hybrid applications will be powered by transparent synchronization, which is a hard but not impossible problem."

It"ll be interesting to see whether the big companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft, et al) will offer more sync functionality over time. At the moment it"s innovative startups like Spanning Sync, Morfik and Sharpcast - and some big companies too, like Adobe - which are leading the way.

2) Integration between web companies, in this case two biggies - Google and Apple

I second the MacUser blog, which comments: "...[I] think it’s great to see Mac and Google apps integrating so well. Hopefully in the future, Apple and Google will follo