MyNetscape relaunched yesterday as a customizable Ajax start page, which is verbatim as the popular Netvibes. This is yet another attempt to keep up with the fast moving world of startups, where cool new products and services are being launched every now and then. Previously the Netscape.com portal was transformed into a Digg clone.
This is an entrenched battleground with Netvibes, Pageflakes, Live.com, Google Personalized Home Page, My Yahoo etc competing against each other.
AuctionAds is a new widget service for site owners looking to monetize their content. All you have to do is to place the embed code in your site and add descriptive tags relevant to your content. The AuctionAds widget will then retrieve the relevant eBay auctions and display them on your site.
The AuctionAds service is yet another step towards everything embracing widgets. Its yet to be seen how AuctionAds compare to Google Ads in terms of monetization for site owners.
Google Abandoned Google Answers in late 2006, after experimenting with it for 4 years. But now, some researchers from the Google Answers team have started their own service, Unclue.
The model is similar to the failed google service with minute differences like payments by paypal instead of credit card, support of Spanish and German Languages alongwith English.
Mpire which launched initially in November 2006, has launched Shopwave, a service that lets you shop visually using a Flash based tool.
The User Interface is clean and simple with a rich feature set. The feature that i liked the most is the ability to visualize the price trends of your desired items in recent days. This way users could make informed decision on buying immediately or holding on for a few more days.
Other features include mashup of Amazon and Epinions to provide user reviews on site along with coupons and deals, plugin support for IE7 and Firefox, Digg like voting on popular deals and the ability to describe your item visually in case you don’t know exactly what you are looking for.
Visual shopping is an exciting space and we are beginning to see startups like Browse Goods, Riya´s Like.com and theFind.com targeting this market.
Geni, which could rightfully be called a Social Network for the family has raised $10 million in their second round of financing from Charles River Ventures at a post money valuation of $100 million, which is a staggering amount considering the fact that the service is just a few weeks old. George Zachary from CRV will be joining the Geni Board. Geni initially raised $1.5 million from the Founder’s Fund.
Geni currently boosts 100,000 registered users with 2 million family nodes.
AddThis is a new widget service that was launched in October 2006. With so many bookmarking services popping up these days, something like this was imminent. By Creating an account on AddThis blog and site owners could generate a simple, free button that could be placed at the end of posts (see sample button at the end of this post). Readers can then bookmark the post on Digg, StumbleUpon, Google Bookmarks, Technorati, Reddit and the likes with a single click on the button. The service also provides with statistics including content that your readers bookmarked the most, over various periods of time.
AddThis claims that they have served 100+ million buttons to-date, with 2 million buttons being served daily.
Octopart is a vertical search engine that lets electronics buyers find great deals by aggregating product data provided by Allied Electronics, Digi-Key, mouser and Newark InOne. Octopart is YCombinator backed and was started by two physics grad students who got tired of searching for identical electronic parts in lots of different catalogs.
Octopart already supports advanced search features like wildcard searches, phrase and boolean matching. Results include price comparisons, specs of the parts in pdf fromat along with images.
Red Herring is reporting that widget service ClearSpring has raised $5.5 Million in a second round of Investment, which brings the total amount raised so far to $7.5 million. The round was led by Novak Biddle Venture Partners and ZG Ventures. AOL founders Steve Case, Mark Jung and Ted Leonsis also participated in the investment. Jung who served as the COO of Fox Interactive, and was deeply involved with MySpace affairs, will take on the Chairmanship of ClearSpring´s Board.
ClearSpring would be battling with Snipperoo, Widgetbox, Fox´s SpringWidgets and Muse Storm in the entrenched widget space. ClearSpring will widgitize the content from providers like RockYou and serve it on social networks like MySpace.
