TechWinter

Startups just launched this week are:

Crowdstorm is a UK based social shopping startup now in public beta with many unique features such as Wikifying and RSS’ing most content on the site.

As well a new hosted content management service called Terapad, they recently launched and it looks like someone took the open-source Drupal content management system, injected it with an amount of steroids only Arnold himself could appreciate and released it on us the very fortunate public. This service has everything and its pretty slick and easy to navigate. The learning curve for me was about 30seconds. Although it is worth mentioning that they use of jargon in their Administrative screens e.g. blogroll. If you are not a blogger what does blogroll mean to you?

Moving on - some services that are business-focused

LinkedIn an online professional networking site, has recently announced support for Microformats, don’t even ask me about Microformats as its hard to decide the best place to start when explaining it. Simply they make the web better by making information/data move more smoothly (not a technical definition obviously). You can check out my category Microformats if you want to know more.

Veotag is video service that’s claim to fame is its deep tagging technology. Deep tagging of video content is the de jour of online Video because it allows for Search engines to look inside video content for discrete pieces of video, rather than having to watch an entire episode for possibly 30seconds of information. They quietly launched a few months ago and I am mentioning them now because unlike their consumer focused brethren YouTube et al, they are focusing on businesses not just consumers. They already have several high profile sales to businesses and organisations in the US and in UK they have the University of Scotland as a client. Their business service is two-fold, either self-hosted or as a web service. Pierra Francesca has done a nice little video demo of their offering and Guy Kawasaki posted about them as well.

Have you heard news? Intuit and Google have announced their partnership. This makes lots of sense for their customers. I would love to be able to manage my contacts (with Mapping software), buy Adwords, and sell online through a single slick interface, just not necessarily using Google products and services. This is a step in the right direction and I just hope they partner with more than Google maybe Local.Live.com as they would be my preference for location searches

Stupid is In! What I found amusing this week.

Blufr is a cool little site that makes true and false statements about history, science, geography and other topics. Some statements are true and some are false, that’s why they call it Blufr. If you correctly guess which you win points. Sound dumb? Well it is, at least I think so, feel free to disagree.

Dogster a recently VC funded social networking startup that focuses on your you guessed it ‘dogs’. What started out as a parody on Friendster has gone legit. They are now helping dogs socialize and meet over coffee and biscuits everywhere. I love under-dog.

Events that happened this week were the

TechWinter’s Blogger/Web2.0 Mixer No.2 which was a great success doubling in size from last time. This time there were startups everywhere, investors, blogger’s, PR,and marketing professionals,etcetera all them interested in the Web. When it ended everyone left with smiles and asking to be informed about future events.

d.construct went off without a hitch last Saturday. Everything I have heard or read points to a successful event. Congrats to them for doing it so well and a such a great price, I heard it was about £70. A great price even for a one day event.

Beers & Innovation is a regular event that NMK organizes focusing on a specific topic each time for which a guest speaker is brought in it is only later that the craziness starts and last night was no different. This time RSS was the topic

General News

BT has just partnered with Adam Curry to bring you the plainly named BTPodShow. Boring name but the jury is still out whether it will be a hit. With Adam Curry’s reputation the show will definitely have a shot a success.

Dave Winer has been at it again. Inventing stuff he is behind such technologies as: blogs and RSS. Now he has started a new way of reading RSS called Fwicki. Although a nice feature it is hardly new I use GreatNews News Watch feature and it acts much the same way.

Microsoft recently announced Zune the fabled and much gossiped about ipod killer, is now a fact. There are lots of posts and articles out there but basically it boils down to these key features:

• 30GB digital media
• wireless technology
• a built-in FM tuner
• a bright, 3-inch screen

As well Wireless Zune-to-Zune sharing will allow consumers to share full-length tracks of select songs, homemade recordings, playlists or pictures with friends between Zune devices. Listen to the full track of any song you receive up to three times over three days. If you like a song you hear and want to buy it, you can flag it right on your device and easily purchase it from the Zune Marketplace. Sounds like a good service at least on paper. Lets see how Microsoft does in reality once the service is available.

As well Yahoo! has finally released their new and improved fat, bloated and slow Ajaxy webmail service. Good luck to them as it is no where near as clean and simple as Gmail, and if you don’t believe me just read the comments on popular blogs.

Another minor security release for Firefox and Thunderbird as even more security issues are found. It just seems like every other day there are more and more. I read somewhere there have been more critical security problems with FF than IE. I am not sure if this is true or even how they measured that, was it this year this release, this month. Do you know? Comment and fill me in.

Flock the browser that is commonly referred to as the user friendly version of Firefox recently admitted on ZDnet that they leapt before they should have last year by releasing Flock before it was ready and further compounded their mistake by not listening enough to their users early on. Arone who was interviewed for the article by ZDnet admitted “Before we had visionary ideas and lofty ambitions, but revolutions without focus are bedlam.

Well that’s about it for this week.

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Have a great week.