Google has recently updated its RSS Reader product to enhance the user experience and make itself compatible with on growing business needs. The array of introduced updates includes friends worldwide, tagging with note, alphabetical ordering and the last-crawl date. Google Readers now support international sharing through its new ‘Friends Everywhere’ update. The new tagging system allows you to add a tag while adding a note so that people who use lots of tags could easily manage their subscriptions.
Archive for September, 2008
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A financial bulletin board powered by Twitter and Tumblr, StockTwits, has finished the angel round of funding. The investors of the StockTwits include Howard Lindzon the Wallstrip founder and Roger Ehrenberg. Both of them are also investing in the site’s parent company Silicon Alley Media. NYC based Betaworks is also involved in the round.
The site actually speed reads twitter for messages which are tagged with stock symbols such as $. e.g. $GOOG is used for Google.
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There is always a problem a problem when it comes to making lunch orders for employees; keeping in mind what they want to eat, how much should it cost, etc. It becomes impossible to memorise every individual order and a need for some robot o do this task is felt. Well you can’t have a machine but there is definitely a place online to make this easy.
Lunch Prodigy is a portal that makes ordering lunch hassle free and lets everyone choose what exactly they want via their computers. And it’s not just letting its users order food, Lunch Prodigy let’s you order stationery and other products one needs in the office.
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Almost a month Bebo launched their IM service which didn’t get that much attention and appreciation due to various reasons. Now the IM service appears to be dead. If any service is not doing good, what should the owners do? Try to make it better, as simple as that, but in this case the service seems to be down without any prior notification. Furthermore there is still no word from Bebo regarding the shut down. Such act is not going to please users. Interesting thing with Bebo is that most of its traffic is not local and comes from other places.
After the service is down, the buddy list contacts have disappeared and they look something like this:
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Imagekind’s founder Kelly Smith raises $1.7 Million in initial round of financing to initiate his new project PressPlane, a marketplace for buying and selling products and service. Smith after selling his former project ‘Imagekind’ (an online marketplace for original and reprinted artwork) to CafePress would be working on his new startup by practicing experiences and skills, he learned from the development of Imagekind. The round was led by Second Avenue Partners along with other angel investors MTV President Mika Salmi, Expedia founder Rich Barton, and Erik Blachford, former Expedia CEO.
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Russia’s investment group, Digital Sky Technologies(DSK) has acquired an additional 15% stake in Mail.ru for $300 million from Tiger global Management. With this development, DSK now has a total of 50.6% majority stake in Mail.ru. Now the later is valued $2 billion as a result of the new deal. Being one of the Russia’s largest websites, Mail.ru has 14.7 million unique visitors per month.
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Who says that shutting down services like Muxtape etc would prevent the developers out there from coming up with something more? Music always finds a way to the ears of its lovers and MixTube is the best alternative that music lovers have. A chance to create their own playlist or browse and listen to the many already been created.
MixTube lets users upload YouTube videos by simply adding its URL to your playlist. The other option asks of simply adding the username registered at YouTube and MixTube will fetch the entire video list from the persons account to create your own playlist. Dumb? Intelligent? I say it’s making things easy, if you know of friends who are fans of a couple of bands, have an awesome collection and are registered at YouTube, just hit in their username and the rest is up to MixTube.
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LetsEat allows you to create the website for your restaurant with few clicks. If you are running a restaurant and wants to share it with the rest of the world but issues like hosting, designing and updating takes crap out of you than try LetsEat. Its an awesome free service that provides a wholesome collection of quality themes to make your site appealing and unique. The site also offers a free hosting platform and you can get started by creating your account, No fees and no graphics tools to suffocate your work.
LetsEat is stunningly simple and provides array of productive features that helps you build an eloquent and complete site for your eating place. Owners can create customize menus, post daily/weekly specials (let customers know about it through the site’s RSS system), post restaurant’s reviews of newspapers and magazines. The site also serves as a good marketing platform and you can create your own printable and customizable coupons to allure customers. The recently added LetsEat. at Mobile Edition will be a boon to busy commuters. The mobile edition lets customers place their order when they are on move with an easily accessible online menu that gives an idea about the availability of your favourite appetite.
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Google has recently launched Book Search, letting users to read books online. If you want to embed any book from Book Search to your website, you can do it using a widget. The latest widget is already in use by online catalogs and social book sites such as WorldCat and weRead. There are three Google Books APIs available that lets users access over a million books. The widget is functional and its code is available.
Following is the code of the widget:
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MixMatchMusic is a platform (created by musicians) where an online community of musicians look to find people with which to collaborate and share their music. Through this site, people who want to make music, can share their product with the users. The tools available on the web service make it easier for sharing your music and also generates a buzz about your tracks so that other users having the same genre-interest get to know and can check it out.
The good thing here though, is that if you’re able to create a good song, you can sell it through the site. This should churn up the young blood in musicians, and look forward to making some dough along with their passion. I suppose labels and producers also keep an eye out for sites like these, in search of finding fresh talent. As we all know one such streaming-video (YouTube) site, having users record their songs, has caught attention from producers and in-turn labels also. Though it’s a wait-and-see whether this site can compete with the big guns of finding new artists, such as MySpace.
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