Skype (previous profile) released a new beta version – 1.4.0.45 – of their client today.

There are a bunch of new features (all are listed below), but there is one that really interesting feature that in my opinion changes the whole VOIP game. Skype now has a true call forwarding feature, allowing you to forward Skype calls to any normal phone, even when you are offline Skype.

I hadn’t picked up on this until I read a great Skype blog called Jan in Malaysia a few minutes ago. Call forwarding in an of itself is not new for Skype – Jyve has had a call forwarding feature in their Skype add-on for some time.

However, with Jyve, you had to be logged in to Skype for calls to forward. It was a necessary limitation (out of Jyve’s control), but when I’m logged into Skype I don’t need calls forwarded. It’s when I’m logged out and away from my computer that I want this.

So when I saw this I got pretty excited. But it is not clear from the Skype download page or their FAQs whether or not you had to be logged in for call forwarding to work.

So I tested it. Jan and I each called eachother when we were logged off, and Skype dutifully forwarded the calls to our cell phones. Perfect!

Under advanced settings, you can actually set three separate forwarding numbers, and each will ring in the order you set. When you are offline, a special icon appears letting people know they can call you and it will forward to a normal phone.

Here are all of the new features:

What are the new Skype features [in Skype for Windows 1.4 Beta]?

1.Call Forwarding – You can set your Skype client to forward to 1 or multiple PSTN numbers simultaneously, or to another Skype name.

2.Peronalise Skype – You can choose from a wide selection of sounds, ringtones and pictures to customize your Skype experience!

3.Improved Search and Add a Contact functions — cleaner, more intuitive features and layout… and smarter results!

4.Friendlier Getting Started & Import Contact Wizards & visual setup guides & dynamic tooltips — make getting started even easier!

5.One-click calls from any website with Outlook and IE toolbars

6.Improved Voice Quality

7.New Skype sounds!

Company: Writely
Launched: August 2005
Location: California

Overview:

Imagine Word, but as an ajax browser application that was free. And allowed tagging of documents. And you could set reader permissions for each document you create and allow others to edit the document, or just read it. That’s what Writely is.

Brian Benzinger at Solution Watch pointed it out to me this evening during a long Google Talk chat. It is a very functional word processor with most of the bells and whistles you’d expect – a range of fonts and styles, embedded images (up to 2 megs each), spell checker, etc. It has a fantastic wysiwyg editor. It also has an option to upload and/or save in Word format.

So the Writely guys and gals built the core feature set with an ajax UI, and then they went a step further and added some cool web 2.0 stuff. In addition to naming a document, you can allow others to edit it, or allow them read-only status. Documents can also be tagged for easy searches later – a nice touch. Writely is also completely free during its beta stage.

In many ways, this is a wiki with a nice wysiwyg front end (I keep thinking of wikiwyg), plus the ability to set permissions.

However, it is also more than that

Writely is a highly specialized niche application built with ajax. Ajax allows this (and other applications) to act very much like desktop apps. Stuff like this must get Microsoft’s attention…How long will it be before a full suite of platform-independent ajax-enabled office applications becomes available? If all you need is a browser to open and edit these documents, the huge network effect enjoyed by Microsoft Office could simply vanish.

For more information on Writely, see their blog here and Shadows in Motion.

The Onion reports today (yeah, the Onion ) that Google will soon be launching “Google Purge”. Google Purge will, apparently, be an effort to destroy all information that Google is otherwise unable to index. I’m a big fan of the Onion, and they really nailed it this time.

From the article:

The new project, dubbed Google Purge, will join such popular services as Google Images, Google News, and Google Maps, which catalogs the entire surface of the Earth using high-resolution satellites.

As a part of Purge’s first phase, executives will destroy all copyrighted materials that cannot be searched by Google.

And later:

“Book burning is just the beginning,” said Google co-founder Larry Page. “This fall, we’ll unveil Google Sound, which will record and index all the noise on Earth. Is your baby sleeping soundly? Does your high-school sweetheart still talk about you? Google will have the answers.”

Page added: “And thanks to Google Purge, anything our global microphone network can’t pick up will be silenced by noise-cancellation machines in low-Earth orbit.”

As a part of Phase One operations, Google executives will permanently erase the hard drive of any computer that is not already indexed by the Google Desktop Search.

“We believe that Google Desktop Search is the best way to unlock the information hidden on your hard drive,” Schmidt said. “If you haven’t given it a try, now’s the time. In one week, the deleting begins.”

And the best for last:

The company’s new directive may explain its…buildup of a vast army of laser-equipped robots.

Via GMSV

Company: Ojos
Launched: Pre-Alpha
Status: Angels include Peter Rip and John Malley
Location: Palo Alto

Overview

Ojos hasn’t launched yet, and may even change it’s name. But a bit of buzz has started about them already, stoked by a post by Rob Hof at Businessweek and followed by Ho John Lee.

The company’s founders include Burak Gokturk, a Stanford Ph.D. who holds 15 patents in facial recognition (according to Rob Hof) (other team members below), which gives us some idea of what they are up to. The idea behind Ojos is that they will take the photos stored on your hard drive and apply face and text recognition technologies to guess who and what is included in a photo. Tag one photo including a person, and Ojos can automatically tag all other pictures that include that person with the same tags. It sounds simple, but the the technology needed to do this is not.

The way I am thinking of this is that Ojos solves the long tail problem with my thousands of unnamed, untagged photos. Sure, I put the occasional picture up on flickr and buzznet and go to the trouble of tagging them, but the vast majority are simply filed away on my hard drive under a general topic and month the picture was taken. This could fix that.

One of the co-founders, Munjal Shah, has started a blog and has posted occasionally on Ojos with additional information.

Ojos has also hired Tara Hunt, who I’ve been bugging daily for an invite to the alpha (no luck yet).

She did send me a very small screen shot of some pictures that have been processed with Ojos – see image to left. I’m pretty sure she gave me permission to post this. The image includes pictures of Tara over the years, identified and organized by Ojos. It recognized her even through hair color changes.

Tara has also posted a few hints about Ojos.

If you’d like to get in line for the beta, send an email to “beta at ojos-inc.com”. I’m looking forward to trying this out.

Team

Munjal Shah
Burak Gokturk
Azhar Khan
Tara Hunt
Ben Lee
Kuang-chih Lee
Vincent Vanhoucke
Dan Chiao
Danny Yang
Neelesh Vaikhary
Sandeep Gain
Sowmya Karnad
Ginto Mathew
Piyush Partani
Nikhil Pal Singh
Nitin Agarwal
Vineet Bhardwaj
Drago Anguelov

Company: Gahbunga
Launched: August 29 2005
Status: Weblogs Work Company
Location: Dallas, TX

Gahbunga launched today. It was created by the guys at Weblogs Work (profile) and is at least as interesting as Consumating, another Texas dating startup (I think these two companies should work together).

The idea? It’s “hot or not” for your cell phone. You take a picture of someone (hopefully with their permission). It’s sent to your friends and, if you desire, to the entire Gahabunga community (talk about pressure). They rate the person’s intellect, personality and overall charisma physical hotness.

You get the opinions of your friends and the Gahbunga community in moments. Your level of insecurity determines your next move, I guess.

See the site:

For example, you are on a blind date and you are on the fence about the guy: First, take a quick phone-photo of your date and send it to Gahbunga. Gahbunga will then send the photo to your friends and if you choose, to other members of the Gahbunga community. Gahbunga will then ask your friends and community members to ‘rate’ your date. The results will be sent to your phone within an hour. The rest is up to you!

Yes, people will be offended. But this is an interesting experiment. Right? I dunno. It’s late and I’m going to bed. Can’t wait to see the comments on this one.

Company: Attensa
Launched: June 2005
Employees: 8
Status: Funded by SmartForest Ventures and 2nd Avenue Partners
Location: Portland, OR

Overview

Attensa is a world class RSS reader that is attacking the multi-platform syncronization problem (I’ll explain that) and is also looking very seriously at the attention issue from a unique perspective (a good thing).

Attensa launched their first product at Gnomedex in June – an Outlook based reader that is lightning fast and has been getting rave reviews (Jeff Nolan). It’s also free, for now.

Attensa for Outlook

Attensa for Outlook supports enclosures, and so will automatically download things like podcasts and videocasts. Since it syncs with outlook, all content will be available for you to read when you are offline. This is a key feature for people who travel and aren’t online constantly, but want to be able to catch up on their feeds.

Attensa for Outlook is just the beginning, however. I spoke with Scott Niesen, Attensa’s Marketing Director, this evening and heard about their future product plans.

Web-Based and Mobile Readers

In a “couple of weeks” Attensa will be launching a private beta of their web-based RSS reader. It will fully syncronize your feeds with their outlook product. It will also fully syncronize at the post level, meaning if you’ve read a post on one product, it will not show up as unread in the other product. This is a key product feature and possible because Attensa’s engine runs at the server level for both products. Duplicate posts are a huge problem for power RSS users, and Attensa is making a serious attempt to solve this.

I’ll be included in the beta testing and Scott tells me that I can blog freely on the product, including screen shots. More on this when the product is soft-launched.

Later this year Attensa will roll out a mobile reader as well, rounding out the product set nicely.

Pricing

For now, all products are free. Attensa has been polling users to create an appropriate long-term pricing plan. Their current plan is to keep the web product free, and eventually charge a one time fee of $20 for the Outlook client. If a user want to use both products and syncronize feeds, Attensa will charge a yearly subscription fee of about $20 (but you won’t be charged for the Outlook client). $20 a year for this kind of high end product seems pretty reasonable to me.

No word from Attensa yet on their pricing plans for the mobile product, but I assume it would be rolled in with the subscription plan.

Attention

Attensa is looking at the Attention issue very carefully. About half of my call with Scott was spent discussing their plans in this area.

They have a unique perspective on the opportunity. For a full discussion, see co-founder Eric Hayes post on his personal blog. Basically, Attensa will (with your opt-in permission) aggregate information about your reading habits to make your feed reading more efficient (something needs to be done to make it possible to mow through hundreds and hundreds of feeds every day) .

Their idea? Watch what you read, what you click on, how long you spend reading something, what you ignore (just as important), and prioritze feeds and posts according to what they think you’ll want to read first. They’ll also suggest new feeds based on what you seem to be liking. I, for one, am more than happy to give up a little privacy if I get efficiency and good recommendations in return.

Team

Craig Barnes: Co-Founder, CEO
Eric Hayes: Co-Founder, Vice President of Research and Development
Tim Brown: Co-Founder, Chief Technology Officer
Guy Field – CFO
Scott Niesen, Director of Marketing
Link

Additional Reading

Craig’s Lemonade, Mike McBride, RJ Martino, Michael Fraase,

Pandora just stopped playing music. I went to their site and saw this message:

We apologize for the inconvenience…

After a successful preview period, Pandora will be open to the public starting very soon. We’re updating our systems to support the full public version.

Please check back tomorrow… and enjoy the music!

By the time I wake up tomorrow I expect Pandora will be fully live.

We posted a profile of Pandora here, and wrote about their upcoming launch here. Glad to see them finally go live, sad to have to start paying. Robert Scoble continues to love Pandora too. They passed his “seven-day” test and he’s still using it. Steve Gillmor, you are going to lose that bet with Robert and me.

Web 2.0 This Week
August 21 – 27

I spent most of this week in Palo Alto working on Archimedes Ventures projects. I was able to post about most of the companies I met at Bar Camp (with one notable exception, which is to come). Lots of interesting Web 2.0 news to report from the week as well.

Richard MacManus continues to lead the small but growing group of blogs defining Web 2.0 thinking. Our respective weekly summaries are very different and rarely overlap. Reading his blog is necessary to getting an overall picture of what’s going on. I read every word he writes, and it is time well spent (I actually also subscribe to his delicious links).

There are a few other blogs that I have recently added to my reader and that I highly recommend. The Mobile Technology Weblog, written by Oliver Starr, is an extremely popular blog that touches on many new technologies affecting the Web 2.0 space. Check it out.

I also recommend Horse Pig Cow, written by Tara Hunt (who recently moved to San Francisco to work at a new Web 2.0 company called Ojos) and Amber Mac, a blog written by Amber MacArthur in Toronto. If anyone is interested in getting my entire opml file for my RSS reader, just send me a note and I’ll send you the link.

Here’s this week’s summary:

1. TechCrunch Profiles This Week

The Personal Bee, Measure Map, Hula, Google Talk, TooDou, Kahuna (update), Pandora (update), Flock, The Big Moo, Raw Sugar, WeblogsWork, unblokt

2. 10 Steps to a Hugely Successful Web 2.0 Company

“Charlie”, an analyst for Union Square Ventures (Fred Wilson’s firm), wrote a post with the above title, giving good advice on starting a successful Web 2.0 company. Advice includes such wisdoms as ” Launch. Now. Tomorrow. Every day.”, “” Solve the smallest possible problem”, and “Get a responsive and chatty audience using the product.”

Good stuff.

3. Adam Marsh on Microformats

For those of you new to the idea of microformats, I recommend reading Adam’s essay on the subject. He lists some of the more popular efforts in the area, and also opines on the value of disaggregating “content” from applications.

My focus here is on the economic value of stuff about stuff, and one example of that is that as a user on the internet, a lot of value is resident in the data about you, or the data that you create. If microformats help to separate this data from applications, it becomes easier to put it and its value under the control of the user, where I think it belongs.

4. Brad Feld wraps up his Term Sheet series

Brad Feld has been posting on aspects of venture capital term sheets for the last few months. He completed the series last week and linked to previous posts on the subject. It’s a total of 20 posts and in my opinion, they should pdf it and sell it. Bookmark this link for future use.

5. More On Venture Capital

Jeff Clavier gave one of the better presentations at Bar Camp last weekend. Sound advice on the venture capital process from someone who’s been in the business for years. See his post here and download his presentation here.

If you are a young Web 2.0 company who needs solid advice, try to work with Jeff. He only works with 4-5 companies at a time, and they tend to be winners.

6. Blogging in China

If you are interested in China (we are), you’ll want to read this Business Week interview with Hu Zhiguang (See Stephen Baker as well). He is the founder of Blogcn, one of the leading blog service providers in China. Chilling stuff:

Q: But, as you say, the political environment in China means there’s a lot that people can’t express in their blogs.

A: Sometimes there are people who write about Taiwanese independence and the Falun Gong.

Q: And what happens when they try to do that?

A: We set up keywords for our programs, like “Falun Gong,” and when you type in those keywords, you cannot post them. It just shows up as stars. Everybody has that.

Q: People can avoid using those words, though.

A: The problem exists, but it’s not a big one. We can immediately fix it, and it’s not a problem. Maybe there are some words that aren’t in the keywords, but if they’re published, they don’t fit the content. Then the Internet police will call us, and we will delete it within 24 hours. If it lasts on the site too long, then maybe it will make some trouble. Maybe I will have to go to the police station.

Q: How often have you had to do that?

A: That has never happened. The phone calls seldom happen -– only four or five times in two years. We have a specialist who takes care of this. These people [who post the forbidden things] are not real bloggers. They know it will be deleted.

Q: There has been a lot of talk in the past few months about the Chinese government requiring bloggers who don’t use sites like yours to register their real names and contacts if they want to keep on blogging. How difficult is it for Blogcn users to set up their blogs?

A: To set up a blog you have to give your password, e-mail address, blogger name, and choose a template. It’s very easy. We don’t need their phone number, their address, their ID number. [The environment] is much better than before. Step by step, it’s getting more open.

7. 9Rules Blog Network

Two of my favorite bloggers joined Paul Scrivens’ 9Rules Network last week. Looks like 9Rules is aggresively expanding beyond their core topic of web design. A complete list of their current blogs is at the bottom of this page. Congratulations to Richard and Brian.

8. New Blogging Study from Jupiter Research

Jupiter Research published a report detailing the average consumer of blogs. See eweek, Steve Rubel and MarketingLoop for summaries of the report. In general, those of us into blogs and related stuff are male, rich and young. Since rich and young are subjective, I can safely say that I am at least one of the three. From Steve (summarizing from eweek):

* “The average consumer of blogs, RSS/XML feeds and Podcasts is male, earns big bucks and, in the case of podcasts, is a youngster�?

* “In a June survey of some 4,000 Internet users, Jupiter found that over the past year, only 11 percent had read a blog monthly or more frequently. While that’s a small percentage, it does show healthy growth; in 2004, for example, only 6 percent of those surveyed regularly read blogs.”

* “Those who are hooked into Podcasts are an even smaller group, with only 7 percent of those surveyed having downloaded or listened to a Podcast regularly in the past year. RSS or XML feed junkies are the most elite group, with only 3 percent of respondents reporting that they regularly receive information through these channels”

* “Of RSS/XML users surveyed, 89 percent said they regularly buy stuff online. Of regular blog consumers surveyed, 77 percent purchase goods and services online, while 69 percent of Podcast aficionados regularly buy online. That compares with 62 percent of the total online population who do so.”

* “At this point, 30 percent of companies with $50 million or more in annual revenue have deployed RSS feeds, according to the report, while another 28 percent have indicated they intend to offer RSS feeds this year.”

9. Geek Blogging Pronounced Dead

Duncan Riley at Blog Herald writes a loooong post titled “The demise of the geek bloggers“. Robert Scoble and Steve Rubel pitch in their thoughts as well.

10. The Web 2.0 Drinking Game

Justinsomnia writes about a Web 2.0 drinking game:

When someone says…

* Web 2.0 – take a drink
* Long Tail – finish your drink
* Open Source Stack – take a shot
* Monetizing – take a drink
* Productizing – take a drink
* Business Models (plural) – take a shot
* Ruby on Rails – everyone trade drinks
* Ajax/AJAX – pour out half your drink (for your homies)

Sometimes blog (and any other) writing day after day is hard. The creative juices stop flowing. You have something interesting to talk about, but the words just don’t flow.

Tris Hussey reads (real books) to blog better. Others take the weekend off (I don’t remember where I read this). I just sit in front of my computer and listen to Pandora until I start rocking again (no, I don’t work for Pandora but I am in love with them).

Today I read a post by Jon Aquino (a favorite blog of mine) saw something that may also also help – unblokt. It’s also just really, really fun.

Unblokt is a collaborative writing experiment created by Sean O’Hagan that anyone can participate it. The Help page says this:

-a collaborative experiment in novel-writing
-a random sentence and its successor are displayed
-write a new sentence which fits in between
-at the beginning, don’t worry too much about connectedness
-near the middle, start trying to bring sentences together
-at the end, try hard to weave everything tightly
-here’s a place to praise, complain, and wonder: google group

I’ve been writing on unblokt all morning. I’m determined to make it as weird as possible.

Weblogs Work, based in Dallas, Texas, is a web 2.0 consultancy, incubator and overall cool group of people. I’m finding that I spend more and more time talking with these guys about new ideas, and we are linking to eachother so often that people are starting to talk.

Weblogs Work designs, builds and promotes new applications, and will also assist third parties in application building if there is a fit. Existing and future applications include things like eflURL (our profile), Gahbunga, Frankenfeed, EgorRSS, and EgorOPML. Many or all of these will be profiled on TechCrunch in the near future.

Brian Oberkirch (who has a really excellent personal blog called Like It Matters) is the CEO. He is a former literature professor, college baseball player, and marketing executive, turned entrepreneur. The company is 50% marketing/PR guys like Brian and 50% tech/coder guys like Scott Ryan (26 total employees/contractors).

M Ventures (I like going to this site just to listen to the cool background music) funds and guides Weblogs Work. Alexander Muse is the main guy at M Ventures, and keeps his blog here (another must-read).

Company: Raw Sugar
Launched: June 2005
Location: Palo Alto, CA

Overview

Raw Sugar is somewhat similar to Rollyo, which we profiled yesterday. Raw Sugar basically combines del.icio.us type social bookmarking, with search (of your and other’s bookmarks, along with google results).

Social Bookmarking

You can save a URI found in Raw Sugar Search results, or use a bookmarklet to save any browsed page (support at this time for firefox and explorer only). You can also add a description and tags. Your tags are saved on your user page with a unique URI. This page is also customizable with images, pictures, etc.

For instance, taking someone at random, here is Frank, who is apparently just about to complete a world class bellyflop and likes, among other things, kung fu (if his tags are indicative of his interests). He also likes the Ramones, which is one of my favorite bands (reminds me that I need to create a Ramones station on Pandora).

Search

Raw Sugar offers a nice search service that leverages tagged pages and presents them in search results (keyword and tagged based results look to be mixed, which seems right). They also have a “refine” option after your first search, which further narrows the results set (something Technorati really needs to add).

Given that Del.icio.us recently added search, Raw Sugar may have a long hill to climb.

Overall, it’s a useful service that could use a little jazzing (and ajaxing) up of its user interface. The Raw Sugar blog can be found here.

Team

Ofer Ben-Shachar, CEO and Co-Founder
Frank Smadja, VP Engineering
Monica Laurence, VP Marketing

Additional Reading

BillSaysThis (regarding RSS feed functionality, I looked but can’t find it), Hatch.org, Businessweek, Guy Tavor,

Company: Rollyo
Launched: in private beta
Location: San Francisco

Note: Due to a misunderstanding, I posted a profile of Rollyo while the company was in private beta and did not want any publicity (the misunderstanding was that I didn’t know this when I posted). They have requested that I remove the post for now, and I am complying. Nothing heavy, I just received a very polite email request from a very smart employee of the company. In my opinion, all this controversy just adds more buzz and is ultimately good for the company. And I also understand that Rollyo would like to keep things a little quiet for now as they work through the beta. I look forward to re-posting when the time is right. In the meantime, I’m going to keep testing the site. Good things are going on over there. Check it out (by requesting a beta invite).

Seth Godin is my favorite business writer right now.

In fact, as I look around, my desk is littered with copies of his books – Purple Cow (my favorite), All Marketers are Liars, and Unleashing the Ideavirus.

Read these books and learn about how to build and market products that will excite your customers. See here for a short interview with Seth by Brian Oberkirch.

I haven’t had the opportunity to meet Seth in person yet, but I sure hope to. I’ll probably act like a teenage girl meeting some cool pop band, and not know what to say. Maybe I’ll get a picture with him. That would be cool.

His books are crisply written and to the point. And his points are good. One of my favorite quotes, from Purple Cow, is:

If someone in your organization is charged with creating a Purple Cow, leave them alone! Don’t use internal reviews and usability testing to figure out if the new product is as good as what you’ve got now. Instead, pick the right maverick and get out of the way.

As I mentioned in a recent weekly summary (see no. 6), Seth’s new book, The Big Moo, is coming out and he’s eating his own dogfood in promoting it. Seth has started selling batches of 50 galley copies to people if they promise to “sneeze” the book to other influential people. I purchased 50 copies, and am now offering them to TechCrunch readers.

By the way, the book is another winner. It’s a collaborative effort – Seth has brought in 33 “of the world’s smartest business thinkers” to write the book. I started it last night and have almost finished it. I am learning to not be boring. I am trying to be fearless. I am going to risk it all (more on this later…edgeio).

I am giving these books away. The first 10 comments to this post get a free copy. I’ll even pay the shipping if you are in the US or Canada. If you are somewhere else, I’ll ask for $5 in shipping. Dave Wheeler did the same thing and got an overwhelming response.

I’ll send another batch to the first 10 people who post about the book and trackback here. Same rules apply on shipping.

If you comment, I already have your email address. If you trackback, make sure you send you email me at editor@techcrunch.com along with the post URL. Once I have the 20 complete, I’ll send out a mass email to get your shipping address.

Good luck to those of you who use slow RSS readers.

Company: Flock
Launched: in private beta
Status: Funded/Incubated by Bessemer Venture Partners
Location: Palo Alto

Overview

Flock is a new browser, built on top of firefox. It is a functional browser with excellent features (including firefox features like tabbed browsing, etc.). What really makes is stand out are two additional features they’ve added to build social networking directly into the browsing experience: social bookmarking and a wysiwyg blog writing tool.

Flock was originally called Round Two and raised money (reportedly around $1 million) from Bessemer Venture Partners. For more on the fundraising and early reports, see Om Malik and SiliconBeat.

We got our first look at Flock at Bar Camp last weekend – Andy Smith and Chris Messina gave a great demo. Our beta invitation came that weekend as well.

Flock should be launching publicly sometime in September. They have windows, mac and linux versions of their browser already.

Social Bookmarking

Flock has integrated del.icio.us-type features right into the browser. When you are on a page you would like to bookmark, simply press a “+” button on the top left of the toolbar and the page is automatically included in your bookmark area (called your “breadcrumbs”). You can also tag bookmarks, of course.

Additional features include your “watchlist” (people who’s bookmarks you would like to monitor), and “groups” (basically, defined groups of flockers linking to this category).

Breadcrumbs, Watchlists and Groups all have RSS feeds (of course).

Blogging Tool

This is pure magic. We’ve tested most blogging tools out there, including qumana (the best in our opinion – profiled here and here), blogjet (Jeff Clavier likes this one) and others. All of these requre a download and allow offline drafting and wysiwyg functionality.

I have to say I think Flock blows them all away. I’m dying to show a screen shot, but Flock has asked it’s beta testers not to (so ignore the very, very small screen shot above). To show this right now would be pushing the limits of their trust, so I won’t.

But it rocks. Setup was very easy (I tested it with my personal blog). It has functionality for editing posts (even posts not created with Flock), quick toggle between preview and viewing the actual code, and, the best feature in my opinion, the ability to simply drag flickr photos direclty into the post and manipulate them. They also allow quick and easy technorati tagging. Wow. I mean, really, wow. This stuff is not trivial to build. The ajax funtionality is stunning.

Team

Bart Decrem is Flock’s CEO and co-founder. The rest of the team includes:

• Andy Smith
• Anthony Young
• Chris Messina
• Daryl Houston
• Geoffrey Arone
• Ian McKellar
• Robin Slomkowski

Link

Additional Reading

Roland Tanglao has an exellent early review. Also see: Greg Yardley, SolutionWatch, Micha Hernandez, Will Pate, InternetWeek, IOError

Pandora’s founder, Tim Westergren, sent an email out to all beta testers announcing that Pandora will go live next week, and extending the free trial period for beta testers to September 28. Pandora has had an overwhelmingly positive blogger response to their beta. I assume the general launch will be well received as well.

Our previous profile on Pandora on August 20, 2005 is here. The text of the email is below:

Hello,

I first want to say thanks very much for participating in our friends & family preview. It has been a very exciting and gratifying few weeks for all us here at Pandora. Since we launched the beta site last month, we’ve seen tremendous interest in the service – one user even went so far as to call Pandora ‘the best reason for the web to exist’. Most importantly, you’ve given us a ton of great feedback on how we can improve the service. Thanks for all your time and effort.

We’re launching the site to the general public next week. Based on your feedback, this new version will include a ’station history’ feature which allows users to see what’s played and go back and rate a song or buy it on iTunes/Amazon after it has played. We’ve also made it easier to share stations and have made some improvements to the user interface. You’ve also contributed to a long list of great ideas going forward which we can’t wait to add.

To thank you for participating in the preview, you will be able to use Pandora for free through September 28th. To log in, use your username, which is your email address, and password. (New users will be able to use Pandora for free for a short period, then can subscribe to the service for $36 for one year of unlimited use).

Thanks again for your help and encouragement! I sincerely hope you’ll stay with us as we start this exciting new phase for the company.

Cheers.

Tim Westergren
Founder
Pandora Media
(formerly Savage Beast Technologies, Inc.)

Company: Kahuna (Hotmail Ajax Beta)
Status: in private beta
Location: Mountain View, CA
Previous Profile: August 16, 2005

Kahuna – Extreme Marketing

I am a little bit annoyed right now. Sometimes people get a little too cute. Microsoft’s Kahuna may be falling into that category.

I’m pretty excited about Kahuna because I love ajax and this is going to be one cool ajax application. It looks like (and should be) the new version of Hotmail will act very much like a desktop application. I like that. I want to try it out, and blog about it. And although I don’t always get an invitation to participate in a beta, I usually don’t have to waste a lot of time getting to an answer.

Kahuna is offering beta invites, but require you to read through team member blogs to find out the answers to questions. If you find the answer, you get another hint. Here’s a recent post by Imran Qureshi, the Kahuna Program Manager:

The mail team wants to invite a few more beta testers into the mail beta, but simply adding people is just too easy… so we put together a small treasure hunt:

One of our team members made a post about the origin of the product’s code name, locate his space for your next hint.

WTF? This is stupid. This is not time well spent. This does nothing to build a brand or make me a loyal user. It suceeds only in pissing me off. I’d much rather use this time either testing Kahuna (and most likely writing amazing things about it), or testing something else (there are lots of other profiles on my to-do list).

So, do you guys agree and consider it kind of lame to waste our time like this? Or am I wrong and this treasure hunt is an example of hip, cool, edgey and/or extreme marketing (marketing 2.0)?

I am now done with this particular gripe.

Kahuna Update

Back to Kahuna, Imran has posted additional screen shots and information on the service. He had a previous post where he stated 2 of his top 5 reasons for liking Kahuna.

Today he posted reasons 3 and 4 (leaving us in suspense for #5), along with a new screen shot of Kahuna (see to left):

3. Keyboard shortcuts to read mail
I’m sure the power users will love this. Use “[“ and “]” to navigate the message list and read your messages without using the mouse at all. Combine these with the preview pane and the delete key shortcut to delete messages and you can cruise through your inbox in no time flat. To read a message, click Enter to open a message in a larger view and click Esc to return to your message list. Also, “control [" and "control ]” will allow you to move between mail folders.

4. Change message encoding as you read
Do you get a lot of mails in a variety languages? If the mail itself does not specify the encoding Hotmail calculates the encoding by analyzing the message. You can choose the correct encoding if mail beta’s automatic choice was wrong so your messages look right regardless of the sending language or encoding.

It really does look like Kahuna will be user friendly and fast. Looking forward to future posts on this.

There’s been blog chatter all day about Google Talk. I didn’t write about it because I couldn’t use it (it hadn’t launched yet) and I certainly wasn’t “breaking” the story.

Not only that, it seems to me that Skype already has a quite nice and functional application to do this type of thing. And the fact that Google Talk had a wikipedia page up even before it launched made me sort of think things had gotten a little out of hand.

But I couldn’t resist, of course. The second the client was available for download I jumped to the site and took the plunge.

Google Talk works and it looks and sounds cool. It’s now the 15th IM client on my desktop – MSN, meetro, Yahoo, Skype, Gizmo, AIM, …

You don’t have to download Google’s software to use the service. You can use any Jabber/XMPP client. Cnet puts it well:

One advantage to Google Talk could be its ability to connect with users of competing services. Google Talk is based on the Jabber open-source standard, which allows consumers to connect with other messaging systems that work with Jabber, such as Apple Computer’s iChat, GAIM, Adium, Trillian Pro and Psi.

Google Talk has a nice interface, works quickly and is generally a great product.

Here’s the key features:

• built to interoperate with other services
• good voice quality
• text IM works

Here’s what it lacks:

• client only works for Windows (see mac options here)
• no group chat
• no video
• no renaming of contacts
• no “skype out, skype in, voicemail, etc.”
• good integration with gmail

So try it out and feel free to add us (techcrunch is our username).

Keith Teare, my partner at Archimedes Ventures, is thinking that Google is very obviously dripping out features and products that Microsoft is including in Vista. He wrote to me, using Google Talk:

keith.teare: “It’s almost as if Google is implementing the features Microsoft has announced for Longhorn – Sidebar; voice calls inside IM, RSS integration – but doing it ahead of Microsoft, by about 12 months.

A Google layer between Users and the OS.

Rendering the OS a commodity

It reminds me of a post I did on my weblog about 18 months ago”

I agree with Keith 100% on this one (a first).

Additional Reading:

DownloadSquad (very nice review), Dwight Silverman, Scott Kingery, GMSV, Erick Schonfeld, Ben Barren (I love this blog – guess why), Om Malik

We just heard about a new online calendar application called Hula that’s ajax-based. It hasn’t launched and we can’t find the website for it, but some bloggers are linking to a couple of flash movies that show it in action.

This reminds us of Apple’s iCal. The power of Ajax to make web apps work like desktop apps is awesome.

I just hope it’s cheaper than Trumba, which is charging $40/year.

• First Movie
• Second Movie

Update: Thanks to Ross in the comments area, we now have a link to Hula. “Hula is a calendar and mail server whose goal is to be fun and easy to use, while scaling effortlessly from small groups to large organizations with thousands of members. Hula is an open source project led by Novell.”

I just heard a very juicy rumor (some stuff already on Technorati about this) that Adaptive Path is coming out with a very cool new Ajax application called Measure Map. The site is taking registration requests now.

People who are participating in the alpha are drooling. It’s apparently a blog analytics tool that crushes everything else out there. I also heard a few other things about it but am sworn to secrecy. I’m looking forward to seeing this first hand.

Company: The Personal Bee
Blog: Here
Launched: Unknown. Presented at Bar Camp
Location: Menlo Park, CA

There’s something I’ve been griping about for a long time (most recently to Adam Marsh on the first evening of Bar Camp): I read hundreds of feeds every day (320 as of today), and it takes frickin forever to go through it all. There is a better way to find good content in a massive number of posts from hundreds of feeds than clicking on each feed and screening it yourself. And I know what it is.

My idea? Automate the process, and return the results visually. A Tag Cloud is a perfect way to do this. Imagine if all of your unread feeds were scanned, keywords and/or tags were analyzed, and a tag cloud was created where you could see words with font size and boldness determined by how prominent they were in the posts. That way, you could just click on what you want to read, and ignore the fluff.

This appears to be what The Personal Bee (note: this site is down quite often) is experimenting with. Created by Nicholas Chim as a side project from his day job, Personal Bee has this to say about itself:

The Personal Bee is a “discovery engine” that helps you discover information from a collection of RSS feeds. In contrast, client-based RSS readers and web-based RSS aggregators merely catalog your RSS feeds. These tools are adequate if you subscribe to fewer than 5-10 news sources per topic of interest. Compared to RSS search engines, the Bee captures the latest “buzz words” in a topic area without requiring you to pre-specify search terms.

Adam Marsh tells me that Nicholas presented at Bar Camp, although I was not present at the session (thanks for passing this on Adam). I wish I was there. Personal Bee has a number of public feeds (see Web 2.0 for instance), and you can also register and create your own private or public feeds.

As you can see from the screenshot, a tag cloud is placed prominently in the left sidebar. Things like “Feedster 500″ and “Pandora” are big – things I want to click on right away. When I do click on a word in the tag cloud, the relevant content is pulled.

Bloglines, Pluck, Rojo, Attensa, NewsGator, and others: Please note this application, and listen to your power users. There is a better way to show new data, and it is so easy to implement.

I’ll be playing around with this application a lot in the near future.