Facebook and Social Startups Meme.

Netvibes has announced the release of Netvibes Universe, which are highly customized and branded start pages. For the release Netvibes has partnered with more than a 100 content publishers, including CNN Money, Newsweek and many artists like Ben Harper, Moby, Deftones, Mandy More and others, to create custom official Universes. These pages would be frequently refreshed as soon as new content is created and could be added to personal Netvibes page.

Netvibes will allow users to create personal Universe in about six weeks, whereby every user will be able to build his own personal page using the content and widgets that he wants and could share it with the world as well by making it public. Every user will also be having a private page containing his personal subscriptions and other such things and a public page, which he could share with the world.

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Google has finally officially announced the launch of Presentation Application to go together with Google Docs and Spreadsheets. The announcement was made by Google CEO Eric Schimdt at the Web2.0 Expo (update: watch video below). The presentation service that will likely come online by the name of “Google Presently” is a result of acquisition of Tonic Systems, a San Francisco based company.

The newly acquired service will launch sometimes this summer and will allow small business users to create, share and collaborate on presentations. We also expect it to seamlessly integrate with Gmail, Google Calendar,GTalk and other Google services. I would also like to see this integrated with existing web based photo editors to edit and use web photos in presentations on the fly.

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Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google-the world’s most popular and widely used advertising system, has announced that a new system called Claim Your Content is “very close to be turned on“. Schmidt made these comments in a one on one interview with John Seigenthaler, a former reporter with NBC’s Nightly News, at the National Association of Broadcasters Conference last night.

Google previously promised such a technology by the start of 2007, but later reports surfaced that it has decided to discard in-house development and will instead by using the content filtering technology provided by Audible Magic, which currently has MySpace as its major client.

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Xing, the European LinkedIn that is based in Germany, has reached 2 million users.

The milestone is in part due to the recent acquisition of eConozco, the Spanish social network for business professionals. Xing has also seen steady growth and high level of member activity and currently has 50 million connections between the members of the network.

Xing generated €6.4 million in revenues in 2006 and completed a successful IPO last fall raising between €35.6 million and €63.7 million from the sale of 2.18 million shares, divesting 40% of the company. Xing is using the proceeds from the IPO to fuel global expansion and aim to connect U.S. and Europe to create a truly global business network.

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Tellme Networks has announced the launch of a new service that enables users to find business information on the go. The service is plain vanilla 411, but allows users to access information through voice, SMS, or Web (TellMe client required).

Users could request information by responding to voice prompts and Tellme returns business listings based on the users location. Dial 1-800-555-TELL to use the service. TellMe also provides detailed maps of the location. TellMe was recently acquired by Microsoft to enter the Free411 market. The price tag was rumored to be around $800 million. Tellme claims to answer 80% of the automated 411 calls in the U.S., serving 40 million users each month.

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Amazon founder and CEO in his keynote at Web2.0 Expo has disclosed some astounding facts about the Amazon S3-web services storage platform. According to Bezos S3 now stores 5 billion objects, served 920 million S3 requests on its peak day with 16,607 requests in its peak second. Bezos termed this computing platform as “Web Scale Computing“.

This is astounding take up given the fact that the service was launched just thirteen months back and had just 800 million stored objects in July 2006. Clearly Amazon is trying to do with storage in general what Photobucket is doing with photos, and VideoEgg with Videos, i.e to become an infrastructure for existing destinations.

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VideoEgg, one of the leading video solution provider that has also built an enviable video ad network, announced a strategic investment round from WPP, one of the world´s leading communications services groups. The details of the investment were not disclosed.

VideoEgg initially started as a video editing and publishing service. The VideoEgg Publisher allowed users to easily capture, edit and publish videos anywhere on the web, across any social network. Thus removing the complexity of video formats, editing softwares and players. VideoEgg is powering the video hosting/streaming for dozens of other websites, including Bebo, AOL, Dogster and many others. Rather than create yet another video destination site, VideoEgg lets any website owner integrate video into their site for free – providing the hosting, transcoding, editing seamlessly. In a way VideoEgg adopted the same approach to video that Photobucket adopted for photos, i.e to become a back end storage space for other social networks and online communities. Since this space is usually hidden away from geeks and rarely comes to light, we ought to see very little competition in companies trying to do backend jobs. However the success of Photobucket proves the point that the online photo and video game will be won by a company that works with existing destination sites rather than building competitive new destinations.

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Microsoft has announced the launch of Microsoft Silverlight, which is basically a re-branding of their WPF/E technology (Windows Presentation Framework Everywhere), at the 2007 National Association of Broadcasters Conference (NAB2007). This is a classic tit for tat situation with Adobe launching Adobe Media Player and Microsoft fighting back with Silverlight in a single day. Microsoft is marketing Silverlight as a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for creating rich interactive applications (RIA) for the web, in short you can call it Microsoft Flash.

To make the launch ceremonious Microsoft announced that companies like Akamai Technologies Inc., Brightcove Inc., Eyeblaster Inc., Limelight Networks, Major League Baseball and Netflix Inc are already on board.

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Google’s ambition of “making the world’s ads servable across all forms of digital media” took giant leap forward with the announcement of a deal with Clear Channel Communications, the largest U.S. radio station owner. The Ad giant will now be able to serve 30 seconds ads across Clear Channel’s 675 radio stations.

Google will serve the ads on Clear Channel’s network using its Audio Adsense technology that is a result of integration of Adsense and dMarc broadcasting, a radio ad serving company that Google acquired for $102 million in January last year. The ads could be targeted according to audiences, times and geographies.

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Adobe has announced the launch of Adobe Media Player, a desktop app that will enable users to vide high quality video, irrespective of being online or offline. The media player achieves this functionality due to the fact that it is built on top of Apollo, a cross platform and open standards framework that leverages Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Flash CS3 Professional, Adobe Flash Media Server 2, and Adobe Media Encoder. The media player also allows content owners to distribute, track and monetize their videos. Users will also be able to create media channels via RSS, and stream and download videos.

The most important strategic ploy here is to use the media player to foster and nourish the Apollo ecosystem. The media player will no doubt bring the capabilities and potential of Apollo to light and will show developers what this framework is truly capable of.

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