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EasyPost, a new service launched in Canada, allows users to send Snail Mail to any address as long as it is in Canada.

All a user has to do is provide a valid Canadian Address and fill in the content for the letter. The letters are posted by the end of each working day. At the moment the service is pretty bare bones and does not even have a sign up process, which means you cant save frequently used addresses or use other such features which needs to customized for each user. They are also promising other features like photos to be printed and sent out with the letters. In case you enter in-correct address and your letter returns to EasyPost, they will discard it without opening it, but you wont get a refund for this. For a limited time the service is free to use.

Postful is a similar service that allows you to send snail mail via email. To use postful you need to send an email to quickletter@postful.com with an email address in the subject line. Unlike EasyPost, Postful allows you to send photos and draft rich text letters. It also provides developers with an API and users could also create a permanent email account like dad@postful.com for frequently used addresses.

Remote Control Mail on the other hand does exactly the same thing backwards i.e it allows you to access your snail mail on email. I think that these two halves should be integrated into one comprehensive offering.

Fox Interactive Media is taking the battle with Youtube to the edge. After announcing a joint venture with NBC to share and distribute NBC programming they are now launching a new section within MySpace Video that will feature premium content from a host of media and news outlets.

The new section that will be launched in the coming months will include “branded channels” from news outlets including National Geographic, The New York Times, Reuters, and lifestyle outlets including Animation Show, The Daily Reel, Expert Village, Flow, FOX’s IGN Entertainment, LX.TV, Octane TV, Kush TV, Ripe TV, Studio411, VBS.tv (from the makers of Vice Magazine), and Young Hollywood.

Jeff Berman, the General Manager of Video and SVP of Public Affairs at MySpace commented by saying:

The upcoming branded channel launch continues the growing momentum of MySpace Video. We’re empowering our partners to customize their own video channels and use them as hubs to create a niche experience for users. Today’s announcement is a sign of things to come for MySpace Video.

Although MySpace Video still trails Youtube by a huge margin, but MySpace is taking measures to ensure that this lead is not widened. Youtube is also facing competition from Joost, a new IPTV startup from the founders of Kazaa and Skype, that has launched in beta mode earlier this month.

On related note MySpace recently acquired Photobucket a photo and video sharing service for around $250 million.

Dave Troy, the founder of twittervision, a service that lets you visualize twitter stream has now launched a new service called Flickrvision that does the same thing to Flickr photos.

If you dont know by now, twittervision is a twitter visualization service that takes your twitter userid and password and allows you to view who are posting on twitter right now, where they are located by moving Google Maps to that location, and also displays what they are saying. You could also add your twits to twittervision by setting your location on the service and can also make posts on twitter right from your twittervision page. Mine is here.

Flickrvision shows you realtime, geolocated Flickr photos. The map zooms to the location from where the photo is uploaded or taken. You could move the mouse over the photo to zoom the image.

Dave has also launched an API for twittervision, and I am sure he will do the same for flickrvision. This would enable others to create applications focusing on whats going on in a specific city like Aachen. So people would know who’s uploading photos in their city or what he is doing. Dave might also get his hands dirty with a service like Upcomingvision to let us visualize the upcoming events and so on.

[via]

Meebo, a web based IM service, has launched a new feature called Meebo Rooms that allows users to create their own chat rooms.

Users could create chat rooms and invite upto 80 friends to the room. The rooms could be customized and themed and could also be embedded into other websites. Once a chat room is created you can invite others to the room, they will receive a URL, clicking which will immediately let them join the room even if they are not a Meebo user. In case you are a Meebo user, you could add the chat room to your buddy list and click on it to join the room whenever you want.

Users can also embed media into the chat rooms. If any user sends a link of a youtube video or Flickr photo it automatically gets embedded into the room for others to see or view. Yahoo was the first one to release this feature when they announced the Zync plugin for Yahoo Messenger. Google soon followed suit and also allowed users to share and view videos and photos in their Google Talk client.

In addition to the feature release Meebo has also made a good progress on the business development end. They have signed up alot of partners including Blip.tv, Capitol Music Group’s Capitol Records and Virgin Records, CNET, College Humor, Flixster, GameTrailers.com, Jive Records, NBC Universal, Pop Sugar, Popular Mechanics, RockYou, Veoh, Us Weekly’s Us TV, and VIBE Magazine. All these partners get to launch their own branded chat rooms on Meebo. Check out this room from CNet as an example.

Meebo has also beefed up advertisement and just in case you want to enjoy a cool video on the chat room with your friends, beware that a 15-30 seconds ad could start playing every once in a while.

Joost is also making use of this form of advertising and is serving pre-roll advertisements in between the videos. The ads could not be skipped and are displayed randomly so you can not predict when one shows up. Google on the other hand is still unable to offer pre-roll advertisement on Youtube, something for which it has received a lot of slack as well.

Meebo has raised $12.5 million to-date in two funding rounds from Sequoia Capital and DFJ. The company is based in Silicon Valley and has 16 employees.

[via]

Imified, a service that lets you blog, make notes and do other things via an IM interface, has announced the acquisition of FeedCrier, an IM based service that alerts you about a new post on the blogs to which you have subscribed.

Imified will integrate the service into its existing IM based productivity tools and will re-brand it as “Imified Alerts“. Users will also be able to receive notifications on their phones provided if they are IM enabled and via Imified widgets.

Imified is compatible with AIM, MSN and GTalk/Jabber while the Yahoo Messenger integration is in the works. Imified will also be focusing on sending presence based alerts to mobile phones, an area that twitter currently dominates.

ZapTxt and Anothr (see review here) are similar services to FeedCrier whereas Sabifoo does the opposite i.e sends IM messages via feeds. Although both Imified and FeedCrier have discussed the acquisition on their blogs, the terms of the deals have not been disclosed. Imified was launched in February this year and is completely self funded at the moment.

[via Mashable and StartupSquad]

CeBase, a new service that launched to general public last week, wants to be a web based database management system for small and medium sized businesses.

Cebase allows users to create database applications like Contact Lists, ToDo Lists or whatever with just a few mouse clicks without writing a single line of code. After creating a database application you could analyze your data and display it using different filters and could also sort the data according to a certain data field.

CeBase also allows users to export their data to Microsoft Excel, PDF or a CSV (Comma separated) File. They could certainly add to this feature by creating an API and allowing users to access data from other applications as well. RSS feeds for the data tables would also be handy for tables that are changed often.

CeBase also allows data relationships with other tables, projects and fields. Data could also be grouped according to the criteria provided via a simple Grouping wizard. In a nutshell CeBase is a Web based Database Management System, which could be used to create database applications on the web in a similar way as you are accustomed of creating them on your desktop with Microsoft Access.

Users can also share their applications with anyone they want, and could set access privileges allow others to help build and modify the application or just view it as a spectator.

CogHead is trying to bring the same drag and drop application creation to CRM applications. Other similar services include Dabble DB, Zoho Creator and Wya Works. A quick start guide to let you quickly build database applications using CeBase is here.