It has been over a year since Startup Meme has been covering news and reviewing startups on the Web. The experience has been wonderful and the blog has steadily made progress over time and continues to grow. We thank out sponsors and take this as an opportunity to welcome our new partner, Sales Plus Consultants. We look forward to building a healthy partnership over time.
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Undertakers we have another one coming your way as Riya breaths its last. The facial recognition service has finally given up after surviving the worst part of the economic crisis and will shut down on August 21. The service had been around since 2005 and made recognizing friends in photos easy. Riya did have its high times when it looked forward to a deal shaping up with Google, but it never really happened. Sad to report this but if you are its user, you wont be seeing it around after a week.
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FriendFeed had earlier launched themes to make FriendFeed better looking (the duck hunter). I guess that wasn’t enough so the team decided to let its users practice their own creativity and make their own. Select Custom theme, upload a background you would love to have (as ugly as you want to get), modify color combinations and there you have it. You might consider that theme to be the best piece of art or might be knocked in to senses by a friend who says it’s crap not so nice and needs to changed. Jokes apart, the idea to let users create their own themes always sounds good and might just have its users all excited.
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It’s good that you acknowledge your sponsors and partners but when you step ahead and have them all over your place it just appears a bit too odd. Dictionary.com has done something similar, making sure its current sponsor Cheer is shown all over the page. Just to mention, Cheer is a washing detergent. Now I know how difficult it is to earn bucks in these times but going on a all out onslaught of an ad appears and sounds a going way too far. The other point here is that Dictionary.com doesn’t look awful as many have stated, it is actually much easier to find the text box.
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Twitter continues to innovate and improve its search and to do so it will higher the most polished people. Presently it has boosted its search team by hiring Doug Cook, who will replace Abdur Chowdhury. Cook has vast experience at Yahoo where he was VP engineering and was more recently working at AbleGrape. With the vast possibilities waiting to be tapped with Twitter’s real time search, I bet Cook can lend his expertise in the field to make most of the microblogging platform.
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With all the trouble and anxiety it had caused with its launch date, Microsoft has at last given the final date for the Zune HD launch; September 15. Microsoft will offer two models, the 16GB Black Zune for $219.99 and the $289.99 32GB Zune HD Platinum with radio, web browsing, HD video output and touch screen. What makes Zune HD stand better than an iPod is its inclusion of WiFi streaming, Radio and a few other features. But I guess the coming of Radio makes it even more useful and might have more users grabbing the devices. The advance sales have already begun at Amazon and once the devices are in stores, there will be more colors to choose from. Lets see how it fares in the market that is more or less dominated by Apple.
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BubbleShare the online photo sharing site is all set for a burial as it plans to go offline on November 15, 2009. The service was pretty interesting to use, with its zoom feature being quite popular but some things have to go. The site founded by Albert Lai was sold to Kaboose Inc in 2007 for a healthy $2.5 Million with an added $750,000. No particular reason why it has been shut down but I guess the plunge in traffic is one reason; the analytics don’t show steadiness and its all rise and fall.
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An easy to use Twitter management tool, Tweepi heads our way. It assists us with managing the countless Twitter users, the number which continues to grow exponentially. There is always a need for such tools to make the twitter experience easier and Tweepi might just fit in as a favorite service for many.
The site is easy to use with no hassle of going through bulk of text. It initially offers us with tools to clear up the twitter mess such as spammers right away and resources (‘geeky follow’ that helps us filter out topics/people of our interest) that would stop us from wasting time uselessly with them. Geeky flush is delightful treat for us when we feel neglected and insulted when not reciprocated by the other users, this tool removes( flushes) such users right away. To avoid being flushed and to efficiently respond to all users following us Tweepi offers us the ‘Reciprocate’ feature which just by a click of a button responds to all requests that are pending. Tweeples that were once an active member of our account but are dormant and irresponsive need to be sorted out, this tedious task is made easy by the ‘Geeky Cleanup’ tool
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YouTube has come of age, growing into the leading online video portal to being the second most popular search engine, following its parent company Google, when it comes to search queries. The video portal has revamped its appearance quite a lot a sit moved its search box a bit away from the center, where it’s usually found. The new version is less old school, making sure that the search box is more prominent. I guess it has fully realized that no matter how good it is with video, search is as vital a part to it. To be honest the new page looks much better without all the grey it used to have in the masthead. While this might appear quite a little update, but it will have major affect on how each user uses the site, I am pointing at the greater number of search requests on the site with a ore prominent search box.
