Syndication is undoubtedly the heartbeat of the web 2.0 movement. A feed reader, the most common solution to consuming synidcated content, saves the user time by monitoring countless sites and sources and providing near real-time updates to one location.

There are a number of different types of readers: web-based, desktop, Outlook based, etc… This post is focused solely on web-based feed readers. I’ve included the big guys plus some up and coming readers with outstanding features and/or performance like News Alloy, Gritwire, Attensa and FeedLounge.

All the web-based feed readers reviewed are free except for FeedLounge, which charges $5 per month.

The Web-based Feed Readers

I examined nine web-based feed readers (for previous reviews of each of these, see the TechCrunch Index):

• Attensa Online
• Bloglines
• FeedLounge
• Google Reader
• Gritwire
• News Alloy
• NewsGator Online
• Pluck Web Edition
• Rojo

I did not evaluate MyYahoo, the most widely used web-based reader, or similar products like Live.com, Google IG and Netvibes because these are more virtual desktop applications or portals with RSS reading built in. Heavy RSS users need a more industrial strength application like the ones I have listed above. I believe MyYahoo is a great option for a quick read of your feeds or for on the go feed readers viewing the Internet via cell phone or handheld device, but this service does not have the feature set for a heavy information consumer.

Researching these nine readers further underscores the extremely competitive atmosphere surrounding this industry’s development. On a feature-set basis only, two companies stood out: Rojo and Bloglines.

Google Reader and FeedLounge won my subjective feed-load test, which determines how well the application pulls up a particular feed. The test consisted of loading five feeds and taking the average of the load times and rating the reader on a five-point scale. Interestingly, FeedLounge is the only premium service of the group at $5 a month. Aside from the exceptional performance rating, I wonder what else sets FeedLounge apart from its free competitors. However, many users are religious about readers with a three pane display that FeedLounge, Attensa and Gritwire all offer.

Web 2.0 Features

Rojo, a San Francisco-based company which was reviewed previously on TechCrunch, has the most prominent web 2.0 swagger. News Alloy offers a close second though with itís tagging, rating and other content repositioning (i.e. add to Digg, add to del.icio.us).

User Ratings: Several of the readers offer rating systems, but I think Rojo’s “Mojo” is the most appealing. Mojo, a term reflecting user-generated reviews, mirrors a feature on the popular social news aggregator digg. After entering an item in the feed you can Mojo it to boost its relevance. NewsGator Online also offers a user generated content feature called “Latest Buzz,” which determines and displays the number of people linking to items in NewsGator. News Alloy employs a rating system similar to Rojo that tallies the number of times someone rates an item.

Tagging: Rojo generates a tag cloud from user-generated tags. Google Reader offers the same feature under a different name, “labels.” It seems FeedLounge uses tagging as the sole search and discovery mechanism. News Alloy also allows tagging of posts.

Social Aspects: Rojo and Gritwire feature “contacts,” which adds a social aspect to the reader, allowing a user to share information within a network of contacts.

Feed Discovery & Recommendations: Pluck, a Texas-based social media company, built a feature called FeedFinder into its Web Edition, which improves feed discovery. Rojo recommendations feeds in the top right corner of the layout while you browse.

Up and Coming Readers

Attensa, a Portland-based company, offers a reader that has a very professional and clean interface. While lacking many features the rest of the pack has, it pulls feeds up very quickly. In talking with Matthew Bookspan, Attensa’s Director of Product, I learned Attensa will be launching a new and improved version of the web-based reader that should fare better on the comparison chart. Additionally, Attensa will soon offer a mobile-enabled view of its reader, rendering nicely in handheld devices or cell phones.

Gritwire, a company based just north of Chicago, boasts a Flash-based feed reader that performs very well and offers integrated social networking features similar to Rojo. Gritwire uses a contact-list approach that allows you to share feeds among friends. I spoke with Ian Carswell, Gritwire’s co-founder and COO, who said Gritwire has more web 2.0 features in store, and I am curious to see them in action.

News Alloy, offers an Ajax driven reader with lots of power user bells and whistles. Though it underperformed in the subjective feed-load test Mike reviewed it previously on TechCrunch and found it to be extremely fast in other operations.

Feature Comparison Chart

The chart summarizes the research conducted in comparing these readers. I was not able to speak with every company directly so I may have missed some details. Consider this chart a living document to be updated if additional information becomes available. Also, I have left a number of competitors off this chart – there are so many web-based readers and I had to limit research to what I consider the main players in the field.

Summary

If you are looking purely for performance, Google Reader and FeedLounge are the fastest in our tests. Bloglines and Rojo are the best choice if you are looking for a feature rich application (and Rojo blows Bloglines away on “web 2.0″ type features).

None, however, yet approach the speed and agility of the best desktop based readers like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon.

Editor’s Note: Frank Gruber, who writes the excellent blog Somewhat Frank, accepted our offer to write this research piece on TechCrunch. Thank you, Frank.

Update: March 31, 2006 (updates to chart)

Amazon have been beta testing their web search platform and we have managed to get a hold of some screenshots as well as some information about it. Alexa is giving users and developers access to their crawler in order to build their own search engines. From the website:

The Alexa Web Search Platform provides public access to the vast web crawl collected by Alexa Internet. Users can search and process billions of documents — even create their own search engines — using Alexa’s search and publication tools. Alexa provides compute and storage resources that allow users to quickly process and store large amounts of web data. Users can view the results of their processes interactively, transfer the results to their home machine, or publish them as a new web service.

It seems that users will be able to create any type of search engine, indexing particular types of data or a single or set of particular sites. This service seems to be very powerfull and ambitious, how well it works has not yet been determined. There is a form on the site to register for the beta, but we know that there are only a very small number of users at the moment so your chances of getting in soon are small.

SixApart’s Typepad is about to announce Widgets for bloggers. And this is about to simplify the life of million of bloggers who until now had more or less to deal with placing html code in their template to customize and enrich their blogs with third party features.

First this has nothing to do with Yahoo/Apple desktop Widgets. Typepad will offer users a much easier and seamless way to add side features (feedburner, technorati, Pandora favorites songs,…) to your blog without the necessity to go the service’s website (say Pandora) and do the usual copy/paste of the html code to include the mentioned feature. Those features are usually placed in side bars or Typelist. This was particularly not friendly for non-versed bloggers and we believe this will make 3rd party blog features much more popular.

Typepad offers a library of widgets (screenshot above) including for now 32 items to choose from in 6 categories (Games/ JobSearch / Music / Photos videos / Publishing / Search). You can subscribe this XML feed to be alerted on new items coming up. If you have a Typepad account all you have to do is click on a widget, edit the title, choose the placement and then publish it to your blog. No code, no mess, no margin for mistakes. For some reason at the moment I am writing this post some widgets have not been activated yet but it should be coming soon.

“…it is far easier to install a widget on TypePad than on any other blogging service. TypePad bloggers simply choose a widget from the TypePad Widget Directory . The blogger configures the widget at the builder’s site and then clicks once to post it to their TypePad blog. After the user previews the widget on their TypePad blog, they can confirm their selection and the widget will appear on their blog”

I tried the feature (you can see an example of integration of Sphere blog search on my Typepad Blog ) and it works quite well, you can easily relocate or remove widgets, and I believe it will save me some time from now on. However savvy bloggers who like to play with html snippets to customize their own widgets (for example to resize or remove some text) will probably go old-school and will still do it manually.

But the true novelty is that (at last!) Typepad decided to open their APIs for the community to build new widgets and enlarge the choice of services and items that will be available to Typepad blog users. The how-to is explained here.

Good ideas never come alone. Wordpress released a few days ago also SiderBar widgets as well as APIs for developers to build new items which is quite discussed. The easiness of integration in a blog is comparable to Typepad. One thing I liked there, is the possibility in a nice Ajax interface to edit your own text and place it in the side bar. The widget catalog (recent comments/ feed/ Flickr / Delicious and others) is not huge yet, but it sure will be soon. More here and there.

Blog platforms are making it easier for users to offer their readers nice looking and interesting blogs and this is good news. This should put a new quality standard in the blog plateforms industry.

Update: The Obopay website is now live, although you cannot register and use the service until April.

Palo Alto based Obopay is set to launch sometime Thursday (the site is currently password protected). This is the newest product in the very active mobile payments space (see PayPal Mobile and TextPayMe as well).

A few more details about Obopay have come out since Matt Marshall posted a teaser two weeks ago. Obopay will rely on a java client on the phone instead of sms or text message payments like PayPal Mobile and TextPayMe. While this provides for a richer and more secure interface, Obopay will be of use only to people who have phones that support java:

The first 25 phones that we are porting to cut across 2 of the major carriers (i.e. Cingular and T-Mobile) and one major MVNO that we are in trials with. Five different handset manufacturers are represented in this group (i.e. Nokia, Motorola, Kyocera, Samsung and Sony Ericsson) including the three largest manufacturers. In our porting effort we are targeting all of the handsets that are currently offered by the big 4 carriers that are targeted at our end-user group.

The service itself will allow for person to person payments between phones. Obopay says that “users can send money to almost any mobile handset”, which may imply a text message (or email?) for unsupported phones – I just don’t know how that will work yet. Users will also be issued a debit card attached to the account for real world payments, including ATM withdrawls.

As to fees, the information I have now is “The transaction costs just pennies”. I’ll update as I receive more information.

AllofMP3 has released a beta of its latest desktop music library and download tool allTunes. Although the name is an obvious play on iTunes, those farmiliar with AllOFMP3 will know that they are infamous for extremely cheap, high quality and quasi-legal music downloads on the web. allTunes is a windows desktop or smartphone interface to the AllOFMP3 library, allowing users to find and download high quality music easily.

The model is simple, download the application, signup for an account, find music (amongst the 40,000 albums they have) click and download. The price is 2c per megabyte downloaded, which works out to be around $1-1.50 per album, much better than the $0.99c a song at iTunes. The reason the prices are so low is because AllOFMP3 and allTunes operate in Russia, where they claim they are complying with local copyright law and paying royalties back to artists and labels. The legality of the service is questionable, but they have been in operation for years now with no seeming threat to their existance.

The catalog is very broad, I was able to find some rare international music that I hadn’t heard for years, as well as all the usual classics. The preview feature is just awesome, it allows you to listen to a low-quality version of each song from within the player – not just a snippet but the full song (as long as you have credit in your account). I have actually been listening to music all evening just with the preview player – the quality is bearable. For sophisticated audiophiles, allTunes allows you to download your songs in a variety of codes and bitrates, from almost-lossless through to 64kbps MP3.

AllOFMP3 has been a service I have constantly used for years now, and allTunes has made it even better. I am certain these guys get a lot of business, I hope that instead of being shut down it forces the record labels to re-think their pricing strategies.

As promised, AjaxLaunch has released a new Ajax product one week after AjaxWrite. This week, they’ve released AjaxSketch, a drawing program that is designed to replace desktop applications like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape.

The functionality seems to be there on a basic level, but the performance is not. The AjaxSketch servers can’t handle the load from current traffic. I can overlook flaws in half baked products, but this smells more like its quarter-baked at best. I hope next week’s product is a little sexier.

Meanwhile, AjaxLaunch also announced that over 500,000 documents have been created with AjaxWrite in the last week.

People who love music seems to either be Pandora folks or Last.fm folks, and the two groups often disagree (see, for example, the comments to this post).

Quite frankly, the two services each do different things very well, although there is some overlap. Pandora is great for discovering new music based on what you like. Last.fm is also good at music discovery, but you can’t stream music directly from their site.

Where last.fm really shines, though, is in tagging and discussing music with friends. Because of the social aspects of Last.fm, a lot of people like storing and tagging their favorite music there.

Well, for those hard core users of both services, Real-ity.com has created something of a mashup (you will need a last.fm account to use this) – a clone of the Pandora player running on their server, with a script to submit any track directly to your last.fm account for later tagging, etc. The site will auto-determine the song and artist, although users can edit that information before submitting to Last.fm.

It’s rough, but it works. And it shows the power of users in the new web to manipulate services to do things that the owners may never have contemplated.

Three month old Zillow, which gives people an indication of home values in specific locations based on publicly available comparables, will be having some competiton in the near future.

The new site is called Real Estate ABC (which is owned Internet Brands).

The Zillow competitor is in beta on a hidden URL: www1.realestateabc.com/home-values/. I have no idea if they’ll leave it up, but as of right now it’s live.

The name isn’t as cool and the design isn’t a fluid as Zillow, but it may be better in some ways. For instance, Real Estate ABC allows users to adjust property values for a particular property with an Ajax slider. Adjustable property factors include Interior, Exterior, Lot Size, View, Privacy/Noise and Local Market Conditions.

Users can also refine property values by adding or removing comparables directly on the results page. In fact, Real Estate ABC gives significant detail on comparables, including distance from a specific address. Real Estate ABC also provides a mashup with Google maps, although they do not use satellite images like Zillow.

Zillow is perhaps one of the most popular recent mashup to launch. If anything, Real Estate ABC shows that if a mashup site is going to try to make a go at creating a real business, they need to build in proprietary features that are not easily duplicated before the competition arrives.

Goowy is slowly rolling out its new web instant messaging and online storage services to users. I showed screen shots (provided by Goowy) earlier this month, and have now had a chance to use the features directly. My overall impression: Goowy is turning into a very nice Flash-based desktop replacement, but has some issues to work out on performance.

Instant messaging compatibility is good (think Meebo – which I’ve written about here). You can use MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AOL accounts or talk to other Goowy users directly. Setup was easy, and it worked flawlessly. A number of emoticons are supported. My only complaint is that the first message you send to anyone says “(Sent using goowy web messenger. Check it out at http://www.goowy.com )” which is annoying.

Goowy IM does not yet support group chat, although CEO Alex Bard says that is coming. Another nice feature is the ability to pull a chat window out of the browser window and into its own resized window on the desktop, to look and feel more like a standard IM client.

Online storage (see image at end) is a very nice feature add as well. They haven’t built this themselves. Instead they are using the box.net API on the back end. Goowy is giving every user 1 GB of free storage, with 5 GB for $5/month coming soon. Given the new pricing benchmarks set by Amazon recently, I expect these prices to come down over time. Goowy storage has a straightforward uploading tool, and files can be tagged and set to private, public or shared.

The only issue I saw with the storage feature was on performance – it was very slow. This is understandable given that the product is still in very early private alpha and I would expect speed to increase dramatically prior to public launch. Box.net needs to add support for a client based uploader too, at the earliest possible date.

Goowy is backed by Mark Cuban (as is Box.net) and other investors. Traffic continues to rise steadily and they seem to have a very loyal user base based on comments left on this blog from previous writeups. It’s way too early to say what Goowy’s fate will be, but I am encouraged to see them (as well as Netvibes) begin to distance themselves from the pack.

Business Week is reporting that Facebook has turned down a $750 million acquisition offer and is looking for $2 billion. The blogosphere is buzzing about the news.

The source of the information is an executive(s) at Facebook, which as a private company is fairly free to say just about whatever it likes with regard to acquisitions. And what they are doing is clearly playing Business Week to get the word out that they are very much for sale.

And I believe Carlo at Techdirt nailed it when he draws comparisons to the way Skype handled its PR prior to its acquisition by ebay: rumors, rumors and more rumors about very high acquisition prices, almost to see how much analysts and journalists could stomach before saying “ok, that’s just ridiculous”. For Skype, the price was $4.1 billion. For Facebook, they’re just seeing how people react to a $2 billion price tag.

The price, by the way, is high but not ridiculous yet. MySpace was sold for acquired by Fox for half a billion dollars last year and has grown significantly since then. Many people are now saying that Fox negotiated a very good deal for itself. And while Facebook is no where near the size of Myspace, it’s no wimp, either. 85%+ of all college students use it, and they are now moving aggresively into the high school market.

A note on alexa rankings for Facebook: Unless you are a member you cannot view content on the site, making the network much more valuable for members but much less likely to get the massive page views and search engine juice that Myspace sites can generate. It’s not a very fair comparison. The simple fact that just about every college student in the U.S. uses it suggests that it has massive value, perhaps even greater than Myspace in the long run.

Google and Microsoft both have new search interfaces in beta.

Google is testing a new “green bars” interface to the left of search results, allowing easy linking to search results for the web, images, groups, froogle and local. The green bar is an indication of what appears to be a result count.

Microsoft, through Live.com, is beta testing a new search interface that includes RSS feeds for each search, a much different image search (lots of results thumbnailed) and an “infinite scroll bar” that continues to refresh as you scroll down through results. I’ve written about the new Live.com search here.

Live.com is usable by anyone who visits the site; the new Google search is available only to random users. However, Google Blogoscoped (as well as Digg and Download Squad) have instructions that show how anyone can see the new Google results. Based on this, I’ve had a chance to test Google’s new search interface as well.

In my opinion, both are lacking but for very different reasons. After testing each, Google’s new interface doesn’t seem to actually do much of anything, and Live.com, while inspired, is very poor in actual performance, mostly speed.

Google first. The quick links have been moved from the top of search to the left sidebar. The green bars do communicate total results information, but that’s it. For the majority of searches, the number of results is not important to deciding whether or not to click on the link. All in all, this is a feature that didn’t need to be released outside of internal testing before being scrapped or quietly incorporated. Furthermore, it makes no sense that Google would not incorporate blog search results into the sidebar along with froogle, images, news, etc.

Live.com is a different matter. The image search is excellent in that a very large number of results appear on the screen at one time. There are also more search results than on MSN search, and each search has a RSS feeds that can be added to your Live.com home page with a single click. Finally, the infinite scroll bar is a great way to save clicks to further results pages for deeper searches. But, Live.com has unacceptably slow loading times for searches, and the infinite scroll bar is extremely slow as well. So slow it is effectively unusable.

All in all, Live.com’s effort is much more creative and head turning than what Google seems to be testing. Others might argue, of course, that Google’s clean interface has served them (and us) very well over the years and needs little, if any, tweaks at this time. As Live.com becomes more responsive and faster, it will be interesting to see if people drift away from Google Search and over to Live.com. Either way, Microsoft finds itself in a difficult position – Google controls over 40% of the U.S. search market v. about 15% for Microsoft.

Wikia, formerly called Wikicities, announced a $4 million Series A round today. The financing was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Omidyar Network, and had participation from angel investors Dan Gillmor, Reid Hoffman, Joichi Ito, and Mitch Kapor. David Cowan of Bessemer also wrote about this on his personal blog.

Wikia is a for profit venture by Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia. It hosts topic based wikis on a number of subjects, and anyone can add new ones.

Current traffic for Wikia is fairly non-existent, although Jimmy Wale’s wikipedia is one of the most highly trafficked sites on the web and I’m sure that the investors are assuming that he’ll be able to drive a similar level of user loyalty. Fighting against that will be the less-compelling subject matter and the fact that this is a for-profit company.

I’d love to see an overhaul of the wikipedia and wikia writing interface, however. They have plenty of great examples to borrow from.

Plaxo CEO Ben Golub wrote a public apology on their corporate blog for their past actions in encouraging “acquaintance spam”. I have to say that I never actually thought this would happen. I’m surprised and happy to see this.

Heck, I might even join the service to show my support. And I mean that without any trace of sarcasm whatsoever (really). Here’s the meat of the apology:

Plaxo has been taking its lumps across the blogosphere the past couple of days. Most of which, frankly, we deserve…To everyone who hated getting Plaxo update messages, felt we were generating acquaintance spam, or otherwise were harmed by the service, I personally apologize on behalf of all of the people at Plaxo. I know we have a long way to go to earn your trust, and can only ask that you judge us by our actions going forward.

Thank you, Plaxo. Consider me a supporter from here on out.

I’ve been testing out a new (in beta) Ajax Job site called Jobby this evening. Unlike other web 2.0 job sites like Indeed and Simply Hired (which aggregate job listings from around the web), Jobby takes information directly from job seekers, and then focuses on helping recruiters filter through job qualifications fast via tagging and tag filtering. The results are quite stunning and I can easily see other services (not necessarily in the job space) copying some of these features (Ajaxian says its “combines a solid combination of interface and functionality”).

For a job seeker, you input basic information about yourself and you have the option of uploading a resume (a nice touch would be to allow a pointer to resume sites, like Linkedin). You then add tags about your qualifications and availability. I added “techcrunch” and “web 2.0″ – for some reason I couldn’t add a tag “blogging”. For qualification tags, you also set your level of knowledge to “newbie”, “skilled” or “advanced”. The interface is exceptional and you don’t have to do more than click a couple of times on a tag cloud to set up tags. You’ll have to try it to fully understand how it works.

Job seekers also have the ability to post a summary of their qualifications directly to another website.

For recruiters, searching is very easy and filter based. Tags are shown and the recruiter simply checks the tag and level of experience desired, along with geographic information and availability. Each additional filter narrows the result set of candidates. A RSS feed is available for each search, so recruiters can keep on top of new candidates.

There’s a problem with Jobby. There are so many job sites out there that it will be very hard for them to get traction, and there is no real virality to the service.

However, the ability for recruiters to set, at virtually no time cost, highly specific filtered searches for exactly the candidate they are looking for means they will likely use it. And if recruiters start using it, expect job seekers to flow there as well.

Anyone building a new web company with search features should take a look and consider, cough, copying their interface. It’s really exceptional.

Switzerland based CoComment has developed a cult-like following just a few weeks after its launch. Founders Nicolas Dengler and Marco Chong, as well as investor Jan Reinhart, visited silicon valley last week to talk to potential partners, San Hill Road investors and, well, at least one blogger.

CoComment allows users to track comments they’ve left on blogs in one centralized place. In effect, CoComment keeps a blog of your distributed comments. They now boast up to 100,000 daily visitors to the site – again, after just a few weeks of being live. For more on cocomment, see my earlier reviews here and here in February.

The company is a project funded by Swisscom Innovations, and all of the founding team originally worked at Swisscom.

Nicolas, Marco and Jan talked about some of the upcoming features they will be launching as well. They have received some recent criticism because users can only track comments from blog posts that they have actually commented on, and only comments left by other cocomment users are shown. New competitor Co.mments, which I wrote about here, goes a step further and allows users to track all comments on any blog post by simply clicking a bookmarket. CoComment says they’ll have similar features very soon. CoComment has other features in the pipeline as well, which will be announced soon.

Savannah, Georgia based Evoca’s new service to record and publish voice recordings has a number of features that allow it to stand out from the “click, record” crowd. I have been in contact with founders Muren Sharpe and Diego Orjuela since December, and tonight they gave me a complete overview of the service.

This young space is already crowded – competitors include Odeo, Springdoo, YackPack, Waxmail and others (of these, Odeo clearly has the branding lead). I can see each of these companies struggling to find the right business model, feature mix and consumer messaging. Evoca has a strong case for getting it at least mostly right.

And just to get it out of the way – what I consider to be the killer feature to pull ahead of the crowd, and of course what none of these companies have yet, are even simple tools to edit, enhance and otherwise manipulate a recording. This would be a sort of online and stripped down version of open source audacity.

Evoca’s core features include a very easy way to record a sound file via a computer microphone or from calling into a phone number (Odeo also has a call in recording feature). With Evoca, however, you can also upload a sound file, or even record a skype call directly. As a Mac user I have very few options for recording Skype calls (even Audio Hijacker doesn’t yet properly record Skype calls on the new Intel Macs, and as far as I can tell this is the first product to allow this). PC users have other options for recording Skype, including hotrecorder and Outlook-based Skylook.

Evoca’s Skype recording feature is (for now) limited to one hour recordings and requires a premium account, which costs $5 per month.

Once a recording is created or uploaded, users have the ability to add tags, an image and a description, put it into an album and set it up as a public/shared/private file. Groups with multiple users can also be created. If the files are public, an RSS feed is available. Since others can comment on each file as well, Evoca has basically created a podcasting blog for each user. Add editing tools as I mention above, and they have a very nice platform.

Files can be accessed via a flash player on Evoca, or downloaded as MP3.

There are other useful features as well, such as human transcriptions of sound files for $.80 per minute, and full search functionality of sound files. Sound search uses speech recognition to recognize search terms in sound files, and is provided by Podscope. Finally, users can set a price for others to listen to a file, and proceeds will be sent out monthly via check.

Evoca is clearly an ambitious project. The main issue is whether or not they can get and stay ahead of Odeo and become the brand people think of when they want to record and share audio files online. More from Saul, Ouriel and Pete.

Episode 3 of TalkCrunch is up. We invited in two key Amazon S3 team members, Adam Selipsky (VP of Product Management and Developer Relations for Amazon Web Services) and Dave Barth (Product Manager for S3), to talk about Amazon’s exciting new Grid Storage web service.

As I wrote previously, S3 provides a terrific opportunity for startups with great ideas for a storage user interface to avoid building a back end storage infrastructure. Amazon is offering extremely low pricing and a very dependable infrastructure. For some people, S3 will allow them to launch a service that they otherwise couldn’t have built.

Nik Cubrilovic, the CEO of startup Omnidrive, was co-host of the show (as was Keith Teare) and we tried to convince him, unsuccesfully, to switch to S3 for the back-end of his storage.

Talkcrunch continues to do well after its first three shows. It is currently included in the iTunes “new and notable” section and is on of the top 20 technology podcasts (as of right now it is #12).

The success of a service can sometimes be measured according to the business activity it is generating around it (think of accessories for Ipod or recently SkyLook). Skype’s success is giving many ideas to imaginative entrepreneurs (the Skype-conomy).

Switzerland based Sky-Click is a an interesting idea released by Ads-Click that already launched a white label adwords/adsense-like plateform (used by Wanadoo ISP in Europe) as well as a pay-per-call ad format.

Sky-Click is a 100% web-based solution to set up your call center, built on Skype API and very easy to implement and use. The service does not require any particular hardware investment and can be easily integrated in a web site (e-commerce for example). All you have to do is downloading Skype client on the call-center collaborators’ computer. On the end-user side all you have to do is press the “call” button that will initiate a call (or a video call) to the call-center.

This call-center has all the important features you could expect from a professional solution: time management, availability of collaborators, call dispatching, waiting background music, feedback management (below a few exclusive screenshots)…

It has been designed for any kind of corporations whether big or not. Although I am not sure big guys will be first to rush on that solution , I believe that Sky-Click is quite fine for medium and small size businesses searching to reduce operational costs without compromising on customer care policy.

Of course calls are free for end users and for corporations service is much cheaper than any solution available on the market: about 10 USD/ months / collaborator.

Sky-Click can also be used for other purposes like remote training or sales force management.

Pascal Rossini (CEO) and Cyril Lamblard (COO) informed us that Sky-Click should open in a few weeks and in the meantime you can subscribe to their temporary homepage to be alerted on the launch or even write to info (at) sky-click.com.

Early stage Super-Investor Josh Kopelman writes that his half.com co-founder Sunny Balijepalli is preparing to launch a new startup called Cuts.com. There sure is a lot of movement in the video space these days. I’m looking forward to seeing what this is – there are next to no details on the site currently. Sign up for the beta on the home page.

Oliver at MobileCrunch has a great writeup on Orb, the free alternative to the $250 Slingbox from Sling Media. Orb allows you to stream live tv, video, audio and pictures from a base computer to any web connected device.

Oliver put Orb through a very high stress test – by streaming the movie Underworld Revolution from his home PC at 36,000 feet using Conexion by Boeing on his way back from a recent trip to Korea. Everything went very well, he said.

Personally I’d just like to have 100 GB of storage on my phone, but given that is currently a non existent product, streaming via Orb may be a good and free way to go.